Say Goodbye Page 13

  Again, Kowalski had taught him well, guiding him to buy the best tech for the best price. Printing his boss’s fake plates had been one of his first jobs when he’d joined up with Kowalski’s crew. Now he could do it for himself practically in his sleep.

  But first he had to actually get some sleep. He’d thought he was mostly recovered from getting shot, but taking the stairs up to that roof and down again had left him fatigued.

  “Johnny!” a trembly voice called out.

  DJ bit back a curse. Damn meddling woman. He wished he’d bought a house farther out in the country. That woman next door was the nosiest gossip.

  He glanced at her over the fence between their properties. “Mrs. Ellis.”

  Minnie Ellis was about seventy-five years old and resembled a prune. She was a pain in his ass, but she made amazing pies and she liked to bake for him, so he made nice.

  “It’s been a while since we’ve seen you,” she said, concerned. “I was worried.”

  He’d been away for more than a month, courtesy of Mercy Callahan’s friends. “I had a family thing. I’m so sorry. I should have told you. But everything’s fine now.”

  Like hell he would have told her anything.

  “Your grass is getting high,” she noted. “You want my grandson to mow it for you?”

  “Maybe when I go out of town again.” Mrs. Ellis thought he was a traveling electronics salesman and that the boxes she’d seen him bringing into his house were filled with inventory.

  In reality, the boxes in his basement were filled with vacuum-packed weed, none from Eden. DJ had learned to diversify. He rented the house next door and a third house in the next neighborhood, both converted into grow houses. Tons of dirt covered the old 1970s linoleum and he’d added another set of fuses on both houses to carry the current for the grow lamps inside.

  He grew a lot more pot this way than Eden ever had, and the profits belonged solely to him. But he’d still earned only a pittance compared to what Pastor controlled in Eden’s offshore bank accounts. And a good chunk of the revenue he earned from the grow houses was due back to the man who’d given him a start-up loan.

  Kowalski had taught DJ more than Pastor ever had. DJ usually spent time in Eden during the week, venturing down the mountain to tend his plants the rest of the time. He’d learned to pad the estimates for how long his trips would take so that he could spend more time away from the compound than was required. He’d started out taking only the weekends, but was able to sell Pastor on the need for more time to sell Eden’s illegal products—the drugs they’d grown since he’d arrived at the compound when he was four years old.

  He’d argued that allowing him more time away enabled Pastor to continue sending just one person from the compound each week, which kept their secrets safer.

  He also shopped for supplies and sold Eden’s completely legit handmade goods, claiming that he had to travel far away to keep from raising any suspicion. In reality, he shopped and sold the legit stuff wherever the hell he wanted, used cash, and no one was the wiser. But his precautions—and the money he brought in—made Pastor happy and in return, Pastor would eventually make him very rich.

  Until then, he cared for his plants, turned the harvest over to Kowalski, and deposited his cut of the proceeds into a bank account of his own.

  “You look tired, dear,” Mrs. Ellis said. “I’ve got chicken soup that will fix what ails you.”

  “Thank you, but I’ve got dinner plans.” Pizza sounded amazing. “You have a good evening.”

  “Thank you, dear.” The top of her head disappeared abruptly as she climbed down from whatever stool she’d gotten up on to see over the fence. She was only four foot nine. Still, he didn’t want her angry with him. She was the de facto neighborhood watch queen, and had he known that, he would have bought a house literally anywhere else.

  “Wait!” Her head reappeared. “There’s been someone in your house for the past few weeks. He said he was your friend and was watering your plants. He had a key and nothing seemed amiss when I checked, so I didn’t make a fuss.” Her lip curled in a pout. “I could have watered your plants. You didn’t have to ask someone else.”

  DJ knew that Kowalski had been in and out of his place. Since Kowalski was his direct boss, it was his right. In a way it was Kowalski’s house, since he’d footed the start-up costs.

  “He’s my cousin, ma’am. Family.” He shrugged. “You know how it is.” He waited for her to climb down from the step stool, then jolted when her words sank in. “Hold on a moment. What do you mean, when you ‘checked’?”

  “I looked in your windows, silly boy. How else was I to check? I don’t have a key.”

  And she never would. DJ managed a smile. “Thank you, ma’am. It’s a relief to know I have good neighbors.”

  “Who should have a key,” the old woman pushed.

  “I’ll try to remember.” Over my dead body. Because if she did have a key, she’d snoop, she’d report, and his dead body would be all that was left of him when Kowalski found out.

  He rounded the house, unlocking the front door with one of only two keys to exist.

  “She’s a peach,” Kowalski said sarcastically from his seat in front of the television. Middle-aged, white, and nondescript, he’d been the gang’s local front man for quite some time. His appearance was wholly unremarkable, and he had a masterful ability to blend in to any crowd. “I don’t know how you’ve managed not to kill her.”

  Schooling his expression against the surprise of finding Kowalski here—and why hadn’t Mrs. Ellis warned him about that?—DJ closed the door and twisted the dead bolts. “It’s a constant trial,” he said dryly. “Where’s your car?”

  “Not your concern,” Kowalski said mildly.

  DJ wanted to swear. Kowalski was exactly like Pastor—both wore a mask to hide any annoyance they might feel. The trouble was that the annoyance could become explosive rage in the blink of an eye without warning.

  Kowalski was more dangerous than Pastor, though. Pastor didn’t have any other muscle now that Ephraim was dead. The old man had no one to take DJ out. Kowalski, however, carried a gun wherever he went. DJ thought the man even slept with it. And DJ knew full well that Kowalski would have no qualms about snuffing him out like a candle. There were plenty of other guys out there who’d jump at the opportunity to make the kind of cash Kowalski offered.

  Like DJ’s predecessor, who now lived at the bottom of a lake outside Oroville. Dumping him there had been DJ’s first test of loyalty. The threat of joining the dead man was always present.

  So DJ bit his tongue, stowing his irritation at seeing Kowalski sprawled on his sofa. “I wasn’t expecting you,” he said instead. “I don’t have any food to offer you.”

  Kowalski tipped the foot he rested on the coffee table, motioning to a pizza box. “I saved you a slice.”

  Sitting in the chair adjacent to the sofa, DJ dumped his backpack and the guitar case on the floor and pulled the box to him. “Thanks, but I’ll need more than a slice. I’m starving.”

  Kowalski tilted his head, making no secret of the fact that he was assessing DJ’s physical condition. There was nothing sexual about his perusal. It was one hundred percent business with Kowalski. He was assessing the strength and fitness of one of his many minions.

  DJ was getting tired of being a minion. “Well?” he asked around a mouthful of pizza. “What’s the verdict?”

  “You look like shit,” Kowalski said baldly. “You should have called me when you got shot.”

  “I did,” DJ said, sounding petulant. “I told you I’d be laid up for a while.”

  Kowalski’s brows lowered in a warning frown. “I meant right after you’d gotten yourself shot. Not days later, once that ‘healer’ of yours had gotten you in her clutches.”

  “I wasn’t thinking straight,” DJ admitted.

  Because
revealing the existence of Sister Coleen had been a mistake. DJ hadn’t given her name, but he’d called her their “healer” when he’d phoned Kowalski to tell him that he’d been shot. He hadn’t wanted Kowalski to know he was hurt—weakest member of the pack gets eaten first—but he’d had no choice. When he’d regained consciousness, he’d been on a pallet in the back of the box truck, bumping over the mountain roads, surrounded by packing crates, alone and burning with fever from his wounds. He’d been with it enough to know this might be his only opportunity to talk to Kowalski without Pastor or one of the others overhearing.

  But the fever had loosened his tongue, giving Kowalski glimpses into the community that the man hadn’t had before. Because Eden itself was a liability and DJ wasn’t about to give the Chicos any ammunition against him. He needed them to stay out of Eden, because that fifty million was his, goddammit. He wasn’t going to share it.

  At least his satellite phone couldn’t be tracked, so Kowalski still didn’t know where the community was hiding. That sat phone had saved him, though. If he hadn’t informed Kowalski of his injury and probable recovery time, he would have been declared AWOL and shot on sight when he resurfaced.

  Which could be why Kowalski sat in his living room right now, he realized, a shiver running down his back. Of all the people in his life, only Kowalski truly scared him.

  “No, you weren’t thinking straight,” Kowalski agreed, his tone still mild. “I’ll forgive it this time, but only because you regularly reported in.”

  I’ll forgive it this time. The words stung even as they relieved DJ. He didn’t want to be beholden to anyone for anything, but he was in with Kowalski up to his eyeballs.

  Regular reporting was nonnegotiable, and for this reason, the sat phone was a godsend. Pastor only knew about the cell phones, which operated off Wi-Fi generated by Eden’s satellite dish. The sat phone, which connected directly to an orbiting satellite, had become DJ’s only link to the outside world, because Pastor couldn’t be allowed online for any reason right now. There was too much media coverage of Mercy and Gideon. So far they weren’t mentioning Eden, but Ephraim had murdered too many people for the Feds to completely hide his killing spree from the general public. Mercy and Gideon had been news for weeks.

  DJ closed the now-empty pizza box and frowned. He must have been tired because, like Mrs. Ellis’s words, Kowalski’s had just sunk in.

  “How did you know what Mrs. Ellis said to me? We were in the backyard.”

  Kowalski hit a few buttons on the TV remote, bringing up a camera feed. Of the rooms of this house, his backyard, and the basement—which was empty of the boxes he’d left there.

  That the pot was gone—and with it, his cut—was infuriating, but not all that surprising. That Kowalski had cameras was a greater concern.

  “How long have the cameras been here?” DJ asked.

  “I had them installed before you bought the place.” Kowalski cranked up the volume on one of the frames, picking up Mrs. Ellis’s voice from the backyard. “I get audio, too. This mic is mounted on Mrs. Ellis’s side of the fence. She worries me.”

  “If I kill her, the cops will come snooping,” DJ said, anticipating Kowalski’s next order.

  “Find a way so that they don’t snoop. She’s seventy-five, for fuck’s sake. Make it look like she died in her sleep.”

  “I can do that.”

  “Have you done it before?” Kowalski pressed.

  “Yes. Once.” To his own father, as a matter of fact.

  No one in Eden had questioned his father’s death, when they should have. Waylon Belmont had died in his own bed, two days after returning to Eden with a sobbing, repentant Rhoda, along with the remains of a young man whom he’d claimed was Gideon Reynolds.

  Gideon had deserved to die. He’d murdered Edward McPhearson, who was not a good man. Actually a really bad man, but Gideon had killed him.

  Waylon had also deserved to die, and DJ hadn’t even known the full extent of his father’s betrayal. Now that he did, he wished he could kill Waylon all over again.

  Or, at least, that he’d made his father’s death more painful.

  “How did you do it before?” Kowalski asked, yanking DJ from the pain of the memory.

  “Pillow. Looked like a heart attack.” He smiled, picturing the look on Waylon’s face as he’d struggled to breathe. Mine was the last face he saw. That Waylon knew who had killed him had been important to DJ then.

  That Mrs. Ellis would know who killed her wasn’t important at all. He hadn’t killed anyone so up close and personal in a while, but he imagined it’d be like riding a bike.

  Kowalski dug in his pocket, producing a syringe and a small vial, placing them on the coffee table. “If you’re gonna do it that way, go with the injection. MEs can detect pillow smothering. This’ll make it look like a heart attack because it will be a heart attack.” He pressed the TV remote again and a different set of camera feeds appeared.

  Mrs. Ellis was sitting in an easy chair, speaking on a phone with an honest-to-God cord. “He’s weird,” she was saying. “So antisocial. Never smiles, never talks to me unless I talk first.” She paused, listening, winding the curly cord around one finger. “Well, he’s handsome enough, I guess. Gives me the willies, though.” She shuddered. “He’s only here part of the time. I wonder what he gets up to when he’s not here.” Another pause. “Of course I asked! He says he’s a traveling salesman. I bet a lot of serial killers say that.” Her face hardened with resolve. “There is something odd about that man and I’m going to find out what.”

  Fucking hell. Several things occurred to DJ, in no particular order:

  Kowalski had cameras inside the woman’s house. He’ll know when I’ve killed her.

  This is a damn test.

  Mrs. Ellis is talking about me. And it was dark outside her window, but the sun hadn’t set yet. It was barely one in the afternoon.

  “Wait.” DJ held up a hand. “Is this prerecorded video?”

  Kowalski hit the pause button and the screen froze. “It is. This conversation happened last night. She was peeking in your windows this morning.”

  “What about whoever she was talking to? That phone she’s using is ancient. It won’t have caller ID.”

  “She has a cordless phone in the kitchen. It will.”

  “What about the cameras? Once she’s dead, her family will be all over the house. They’ll see the cameras.”

  “They’re the size of a pencil eraser. You’re good with your hands. Cover them up.”

  “Fine.” DJ waved at the syringe and vial. “You knew you were going to tell me to kill her.”

  “Yep. You really should have had the cameras installed the first time she pushed you for information. Little old ladies often get ignored, but they are fonts of knowledge. All it takes is her telling the wrong person that you’re weird and antisocial and people will start to wonder.”

  The man spoke truth. “I’ll do it today, but I’m going to eat first. She won’t go to sleep for a while yet.” He pulled his own cell phone out. “Want some more pizza?”

  Kowalski stood, stretching until bones creaked and joints popped. “No, I have to get going. My son has a recital after school. He’s amazing, but I have to sit through the rest of those little brats and it makes me cranky. So I’ll be looking for good news tomorrow.”

  He walked to the door to the basement, turning back to look at DJ. “By the way, where are the fifteen kilos of coke I gave you to distribute? I reviewed the accounts this week and realized that money never came in.”

  Shit. He should have known this was coming. “This is my first time out of the compound since I got shot.”

  “So you have it with you?”

  DJ knew exactly where it was. It was stored in a box labeled Smithy Tools in the cave farthest from the main entrance. “No. It would have raised questions if I’d
hauled it out.” The truth was that he hadn’t been able to lift the boxes that had been stacked atop it. His arm was still useless. He’d barely managed to get his rifle off that rooftop this morning.

  Kowalski’s smile thinned. “Figure out how to ‘haul it out.’ That’s my money. I’ve been very patient during your recovery. In the meantime, I want a full report on the old lady. I also want to see a hearse outside her house, taking her body straight to a funeral home.”

  Translation: Make it look like a natural death or else.

  DJ nodded tightly. “What about my pot? I couldn’t help but notice my basement is empty.”

  “I ‘hauled it out’ the day you called me to tell me you were out of commission for a few weeks. I’ve been tending the plants in your grow houses, too. They’re ready for harvest.”

  Translation: Get busy or else.

  He disappeared into the stairwell to the basement and a moment later, DJ heard the muffled sound of a door closing. His house had a walkout basement, and that was the way Kowalski generally came and went. It let out on the side of the house opposite Mrs. Ellis, so she wouldn’t see him.

  DJ rubbed his temples. Food, then sleep. He also needed to make a few new license plates and signs for the truck. He figured he’d been caught on surveillance at the office building that morning. His own face wasn’t as important as the identifiers on the vehicle he was using.

  Mercy and Gideon had likely described him to law enforcement, and if they hadn’t, Amos Terrill had. But nobody knew where Eden was, so he’d been safe there. Would be again once Mercy and Gideon were dead.

  His vehicle was another story, though. That was more easily tracked. If they were able to identify his vehicle through street and toll cameras, he wouldn’t be safe anywhere.

  Still, Kowalski was the more immediate threat. He’d be pissed off if he found out that DJ’s face and fingerprints were known to the FBI. He’d decide that DJ’s usefulness was over and . . . well, that would be bad. So he wouldn’t get caught. It was that simple.