Point of Contact

Jack quickly inspected a couple DVD player boxes on the open pallet but didn’t find anything other than DVD players. He could take the time to break into the front offices or make a more thorough inspection, but his gut told him he’d come up empty. It was safer and probably more useful to just get the hell out and back home, and send the photos and fingerprints to Gavin.

He checked the exit one last time to make sure he wasn’t being followed, then crossed over to the east side of the building, opposite the way he came in, and put his crashed van a few hundred yards behind him as fast as he could with his run-limp before he activated his Uber app.

51

Jack spotted a nearly full dumpster on a construction site and hobbled over to it. He climbed up onto it and found what he was looking for — a rag and an empty cardboard box. He used the rag to wipe the blood off his hand and tossed the rag into the box, folded up the lid, and stuffed the box under a piece of gypsum board. Jack went to the other side of the dumpster and shoved the wrench into a length of PVC pipe, then stuck a piece of insulation in after it and buried it under some trash, along with the Dalfan catalog. In a perfect world he would have destroyed the evidence that could put him in jail for life — or worse — but he was out of time and his options were few.

He abandoned the dumpster and crossed the street, checking his Uber app. The blue dot rumbling toward him was scheduled to arrive in three minutes. He double-checked himself to make sure there wasn’t any more blood on him or any other hint that he’d left four dead bodies in a warehouse just down the street. Bad enough that he looked like a half-drowned homeless man. No point in adding a serial-killer accent to the ensemble.

The bodily inventory reminded him that he’d been damn lucky tonight. Except for the sore arm where the bat had grazed him, he was relatively unscathed. Those hundreds of hours of backbreaking, muscle-cramping combat training drilled into him by Clark and Ding had kicked in as soon as he shut out the fear and the noise and let the fight happen. In fact, it was the combat training that allowed him to shut it all out.

Like Clark always said, the game is won on the practice field, before the game even starts.

The fight itself was savage and quick, like most fights are — not like in the movies, where the hero takes a dozen haymaker punches to the face and just keeps going. In real life, Rocky would’ve been in a coma after his big fight and never made it to the sequel, let alone another bout.

But there was still luck involved. All of his training and preparation couldn’t overcome the million things that can go wrong in something as unstructured as close-quarters combat. A wild punch, a slippery patch of oil, a bat swung a second earlier. Anything and everything could have gone wrong. In real fights it usually did. But tonight it all went his way. Next time he might not be as lucky.

And sure as hell, there would be a next time. This was the life he chose. Duty, honor, country.

Come what may.

* * *

The Kia’s windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the downpour. Daniel Lim, the Uber driver — a long-haired college junior studying logistics, he told Jack, with glasses as thick as the windshield — cursed the water-blurred red lights in the windshield. A traffic jam from hell.

“Stupid drivers! Just a little rain!” He pounded the horn.

The blaring horn shot through Jack like an electric shock. The Tylenol he’d chewed had taken some of the edge off his headache, but not all of it. He needed the kid to calm down.

“I heard on the radio last night a cyclone had formed in the Java Sea. Is that what’s causing this?”

“Cyclone one, very low level. No worries for us! Lah,” Daniel said. “Just a big storm. Lots of rain.”

“And the rain is causing all the traffic?”

“Maybe. More like nervous. If the storm gets too big, big problems. Lots of flooding.” He pushed his glasses back up on his nose and hit the horn again, cursing.

Jack knew the Uber driver was paid only based on the destination, not time spent in the car like a regular taxi. It’s one of the reasons the gig-service was so popular.

“Look, Daniel. I know it’s taking us a long time to get to my place. I’ll pay you double for your trouble. So don’t worry about anything, okay?”

The driver whipped around, a big smile on his thick lips. “Okay! Thanks! It helps a lot.” He looked at Jack again. “You sure you okay?”

Jack could only imagine what he looked like, soaked to the bone, unshaven, and roughed up. He pointed at the windshield. “Better keep your eyes on the road.”

“Yeah, you’re right.”

They crawled along for a few more minutes. Jack used the time to send Gavin an encrypted text message, along with photos and fingerprints of the men he’d just killed.