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  “Refrigerator shopping, eh?” The man walked from around the front counter toward Chuck. The man had to have been in his later sixties—he had short white hair and a white beard that touched his chest. The T-shirt that hadn’t been doing enough to cover the man’s backside a few moments earlier stretched over the guy’s big belly. The name of the business, Earl’s Appliance and Repair, was printed on his shirt pocket. With each step the man took, a big ring of keys jingled on his hip.

  He stood before Chuck. “The name’s Earl.” He reached for a handshake. “New in town?”

  Chuck shook his hand. “Just today.”

  “Could be why I don’t recognize you, then. I know damn near everyone in this little town. Been here all my life. So, what brought you to Calvert?”

  “Some dead chick’s minivan.” Chuck pulled the pistol from his waistline and planted the butt of the gun into the man’s forehead. The guy stumbled backward. Chuck advanced and delivered another pair of blows as the old man fell back into a pair of washer-and-dryer combos. Chuck continued to pummel the store owner until he stopped moving. The white hair on the guy’s head and face was soaked in red and pink. Stomping his boots into the man’s face for good measure, Chuck was satisfied with the beating. He crouched over the man and strangled the last bits of fight, and life, from him.

  “And now some dead guy’s vehicle is going to take me right the hell out of here,” he said.

  He didn’t receive a response.

  Chuck quickly went through the back of the store to ensure that they were the only ones inside. With the building clear, he went to the man and dragged his body behind the front counter and out of view of anyone trying to get a glimpse into the store. Chuck scooped up a rag that had been on the washing machine the man had been working on and wiped up some of the visible blood on the appliances and floor.

  On the way to the back door, Chuck pulled the ring of keys from the guy’s hip. The only car keys he saw belonged to an old Chevy or GM. He recognized the separate door and ignition keys right away by their oval and rectangular heads. Out back of the store, he scanned the couple of vehicles in the rear lot. A two-toned blue-and-white late seventies or early eighties Chevy pickup caught his eye. With no older GM vehicles in sight, he knew it had to be the store owner’s. Chuck walked to it and stuck the key in the door. The lock turned, and he hopped up inside. The other key fired the ignition, and Chuck pointed the truck toward the back parking lot exit.

  Once out on the open road with the little town in his rearview mirror, Chuck said aloud what he’d committed to memory. “The Iron Mug in Waco. Ask for Jerry.”

  Chapter 5

  “I’m just pulling up to the house now,” I said. Our two-story white Colonial with the big tree in front came into view. The rain had been on and off since I’d left the office. Thankfully, it was currently off, and the chances of me getting the dogs outside were better than zero. Porkchop and Bacon, our bulldogs, didn’t much care to be out in the rain.

  “You’re just getting a bag together and going?” Karen asked.

  “Yeah. Tammy has Beth and me booked to fly out just before one o’clock. We’re supposed to land in Houston at, like, a quarter after three.” I pulled into the driveway and stopped in front of the garage.

  “All right. I have a couple meetings this afternoon but call or message me when you get there.”

  “I will, babe.”

  “Let the pigs out to do their business,” she said.

  “Planned on it.”

  “The Pigs” was how Karen referred to our dogs, and the name was fairly accurate considering their appearance, sounds, smells, and slobberyness.

  “And try to be safe. Remember what happened the last time you were in Texas,” Karen said.

  “I’m not really sure the state was responsible for me getting stabbed in the face, but yeah, I got it. Be safe.”

  “Tell Beth to message me.”

  “About?”

  “I want to see what she thinks about Davis.”

  “Who the hell is Davis?” I asked.

  “You know who he is. From Love on the Beach.”

  “Ugh,” I groaned. For two nights a week, an hour at a crack, Karen was glued to the television for what was quite possibly the dumbest TV program ever conceived. The premise of the show revolved around a bunch of drunk twentysomethings who were all living together on a beach and searching for “love.” There was a lot of crying by both men and women, drummed-up drama, and professions of never-ending love. As much as I attempted to tune it out for the duration of time that it tainted my seventy-inch television each week, enough of the show had leaked into my brain that I pretty much knew every character and current storyline. I knew the guy that she was talking about. He was an idiot.

  “You mean the dipshit with the frosted tips that was crying into his pillow the other night?” I asked.

  “He’s going to be the bad guy this season,” she said.

  I squinted and rubbed my temple. “Yeah, he seemed like a real badass.”

  Karen laughed. “He kind of looks like Beth’s ex.”

  He actually did look like Beth’s ex, Scott. “I’ll tell her to message you about it.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll let you get to work. Just be safe.”

  “You already said that.”

  “Sometimes I feel like I need to tell you more than once.”

  “Safe. Understood,” I said.

  “Love you, bye,” she said.

  “Love you too.” I clicked off from the call, left the car, and fetched the mail from the mailbox out front.

  “Hank,” I heard.

  I looked over my shoulder to see Pat Bilson, my neighbor across the street, tossing me a wave. With his mower up on stands in the garage, I imagined he’d been wrenching on it. He started down his driveway toward the street, with me on the other side of it.

  “Half day or something?” he asked as he walked up.

  “I wish. I need to get inside, pack up, and get my ass over to the airport.”

  “Damn. I was hoping you could give me a hand with something quick.”

  “What’s quick?” I asked.

  “I just need another set of hands for literally like a minute,” Pat said. “Maybe less.”

  “A minute I can spare,” I said.

  I left the mail in the box and followed Pat across the street to his garage. He spoke as he walked. “Appreciate the help. I just finished up doing the fluids on the mower and need to try to finish this up and get over to the Bailey’s Crossroad store. We’ve got a demo day going on, and I want to sit in on it.”

  I nodded. Pat owned a couple of outdoor outfitter stores with a few additional stores under construction. The places were huge, and every time we spoke, he seemed to be eying more areas for expansion. I imagined that he was doing rather well from them.

  We stepped into his garage, where his mower, up on car jacks over some cardboard, waited for us.

  “I just need you to either lift the box up onto the back of the mower while I feed the bolts in or you to feed the bolts while I lift the box. It doesn’t weigh anything, just big and awkward.”

  “I’ll lift,” I said.

  Pat gave me left-and-right and up-and-down instructions as he fed the bolts into the back of the mower.

  “Appreciate it, Hank. I just picked up the bagger box from the classifieds. Going to make my life a hell of a lot easier. Mow and all the leaves and trimmings on the ground go into the box. Bag it up and out on the curb. Done deal. With the kids grown and out of the house, I found out how much of a bitch raking actually is.”

  I chuckled and looked over at my yard covered in sopping-wet brown and orange leaves. “Addressing my yard was the original plan for this weekend. Guess it’ll have to wait.”

  “You said you were heading out of town. Work? Going after someone?” he asked.

  Pat had been over for enough backyard cookouts and beers on the porch to know what I did for a living and what was invol
ved. He’d tipped the scale from simply neighbor across the street to actual friend sometime back. Karen and Pat’s wife, Sonja, had become fast friends, so on top of the cookouts and beers, there were dinners and miscellaneous other wife-organized functions mixed in.

  “Yeah. The guy we’re after made the bureau’s top ten list. Escaped convict.”

  “No shit? How the hell did he get out?”

  “He was out on a road crew, killed a couple guards, and fled.”

  “Damn,” he said.

  “Seems he made his way into Texas and has been leaving a trail of bodies behind him.” I didn’t need to be vague or sugarcoat things with Pat.

  He shook his head and mumbled a couple of profanities. He asked what was wrong with some people, albeit with more colorful words. I didn’t have an answer for him.

  “You know when you first told me that you tracked down serial killers for a living for the FBI, I thought you were joking,” Pat said. “Hard to believe that people capable of that kind of stuff are out there, you know?”

  I did know, and Pat didn’t know the half of the stuff I’d seen.

  “Well, I hope you catch up to him before he hurts anyone else,” Pat said.

  “That’s the plan.” I glanced at my watch. “And speaking of, I should probably get to it.”

  “All right. Watch your ass and all that. Pop over for a beer or two when you get back.”

  “Will do,” I said.

  I left Pat in his garage, grabbed the mail from the box, and headed for my front door. Our place was bigger than Karen and I needed, but when we bought, we had plans of bringing a child into our home via adoption. After going through the process and actually being approved as a candidate home, we waited. And waited. When we started, we knew the process and knew that the wait could be years, but the reality didn’t set in until we passed year number two. I was inching up on my midforties, and Karen and I were both starting to feel a little older. As we waited, Karen had gotten another promotion within the DEA, and with the promotion came greater responsibility and more hours.

  Our original plan was for one of us to stop working and be a stay-at-home parent when a child came into our home. With Karen making damn near double what I did, which was already a pretty solid income, it didn’t make sense financially for her to quit her job. That was going to leave me being a stay-at-home parent, and while I would have been perfectly fine with that, I knew deep down that Karen really wanted it to be her. Another year passed, and we got another year older. We talked about it—being the old parents. About never seeing what our son or daughter turned out to be as they grew older. Sure, we would have been around for their high school and college graduation. More than likely, for his or her wedding. Possibly for grandkids as babies. It would have gotten iffy after that. We talked some more. Countless times, for hours and hours. At the tail end of last summer, we decided to remove ourselves from the adoption family pool. We’d simply missed our window. As much as she’d tried to put on a strong face, I knew that Karen took it hard. It took us a while to fully accept it and get past the decision.

  I stepped up onto the porch, pulled the screen door open, and unlocked the dead bolt for the front door. As I stepped inside, the screen door, on a spring, clacked closed at my back. The sound didn’t wake Porkchop or Bacon, who were both dead asleep on the couch. Porkchop, we’d gotten as a pup and had for a couple of years. About six months prior, we’d rescued Bacon, who we were told was five. Karen had seen him at a dog adoption fair that a shelter was running at the local mall. She’d noticed a bulldog sitting there as she was shopping and went over to give him a pet. It was then that she saw his name was Bacon. Since we had a bulldog named Porkchop, she took it as fate. A few other families had been in the running to adopt him, but I thought the scales tipped in our favor since we owned a bulldog who also had a pig-inspired name. We welcomed him into our home a few days later, and he and Porkchop were two peas in a pod.

  I swung the front door closed as I stepped into the living room. Neither dog moved a muscle. They just continued to snore.

  “Some guard dogs.” The sound of my voice did nothing to wake them from their naps. My eyes went from one dog to the other. Porkchop had a stream of slobber running down the couch pillow beneath his head. Bacon had his rear end on the pillows on the opposite side.

  “Yuck,” I mumbled and made a mental note to wash everything. Twice.

  “Fire,” I yelled.

  Nothing but snoring.

  “Supper!”

  Porkchop, sleeping with his feet in the air, about did a flip off the couch, crashed onto the floor, and righted himself after shaking his head. Bacon barked, jumped off the couch, and ran straight to the kitchen. He didn’t even look at me as he passed. I shook my head as Porkchop lumbered over to me with his fat butt waggling and his tongue hanging from his mouth.

  “Hopefully, if someone ever breaks in, they come through the kitchen and yell ‘supper’ as they do,” I said.

  I reached down, petted Porkchop, and waved for him to come on to the kitchen. Bacon sat at his dish, waiting patiently.

  “It’s not actually time to eat.” I petted him too.

  Porkchop pulled up to his dish beside his brother’s, and the pair of them gave me their best puppy-dog eyes.

  “Geez,” I said. “I’m not your mom. I don’t fall for that.”

  They continued.

  Bacon bumped my pant leg with his nose, urging me to give up the supper that I’d woken him for.

  “Fine. You two can have a couple treats, but that’s it.” I grabbed biscuits from the jar on the counter, tossed them each one, then slid open the patio door so they could go out back.

  With the dogs out, I headed up the stairwell for the second floor. After passing our spare bedrooms—one set up for guests, one an office, and the third a craft room for my wife—I turned in to the master and started putting a bag together.

  Chapter 6

  We landed in Houston a few minutes early, got our rental car, and headed for the Houston field office. My phone’s navigation had predicted a half-hour drive, but it was a solid forty-five minutes with traffic. Around four thirty, we neared the big green glass building with the odd cutouts of the number and plus sign. I’d been to a few of the Texas field and regional offices, but Houston wasn’t one of them.

  “What’s up with this place?” Beth poked her chin at the building as we approached.

  “Looks pretty cool if you ask me.” I dipped my head for a better look. The building, a big eight-story rectangle, was encased in green glass. The design of the building featured voids in the shape of what kids would call a hashtag or adults would call a pound sign. Two other voids, at the corners, were shaped like plus signs. I’d never seen anything like it. “I imagine the glass reflects the sun. Keeps the building cool.”

  “It’s different,” Beth said. “That’s for sure. Almost looks unfinished or still under construction.”

  She was right. It did.

  We rolled up to the security gate, and Beth, who was driving, lowered her window for the guard.

  “Ma’am,” the guard said.

  “Agents Beth Harper and Hank Rawlings from the Manassas, Virginia, office. We’re here to see Agent Eli Spear in Serial Crimes.”

  I passed Beth my credentials, and with hers, she passed them to the guard.

  He scanned both of our IDs and passed them back. “You’ll want to park just up ahead off to the left and stop at the front desk in the lobby. They’ll be able to page who you need.”

  “Thanks,” Beth said.

  “Thank you,” I said across the car.

  The gate rose, and we passed into the fenced-in parking lot. Beth and I left the car and made our way up the long sidewalk toward the building’s covered entrance. Inside the lobby, the green-glass theme continued with more of the same exterior glass affixed to the interior walls. We walked to the circular front desk.

  “Agents Harper and Rawlings here for an Agent Spear in Serial Crime
s,” Beth said.

  “I’ll let him know that you’re here. One moment.”

  The woman, looking about forty and wearing a beaded necklace that had to have weighed ten pounds, made the call. I put my back to the desk and looked around the lobby. A small seating area sat to the left. The elevator bank sat dead ahead, and to my right was a wall with an FBI insignia and an armed guard standing there like a statue.

  “He’ll be right down,” the receptionist said at my back.

  I looked over my shoulder and gave her a smile and a nod. Five minutes passed, and a few people came and went from the elevators. The last guy to leave the elevators, dressed in a suit and about average size and build, walked straight to Beth and me—he had to be Agent Spear. He pushed his black-framed glasses up his nose then outstretched his hand.

  “Rawlings and Harper,” he said. “Eli Spear.”

  We went through our handshakes and introductions.

  “It looks like we have something a little north that’s spilling over from Louisiana,” he said. “And it looks like the guy made the list.”

  “So it would seem,” Beth said.

  “Well, I’ve been briefed on it, but it’s probably going to be better for you guys to get what happened up there from the horse’s mouth. A pair of my agents, McManus and Alper, were on scene this morning. They just got back a little bit ago. The guys should be able to get you up to speed pretty quickly.”

  “Perfect,” I said.

  Agent Spear waved for Beth and me to follow him, and we rode the elevator up to the sixth floor and found the building’s serial crimes office. The interior of the office looked like any other of the serial crimes units that we’d been in nationwide. Rows of desks packed the center of the room like a bullpen. Offices wrapped the bullpen’s perimeter. The view out the windows was of the freeway and a five-story office building with the name of a nationwide bank at the top. Spear parked Beth and me in a meeting room and went to fetch the agents.