The Inner Circle (Man of Wax Trilogy) Read online

  By that point Carver and I had returned to the Corolla. Ronny kept us in the loop the entire time, informing us that currently the target was headed north on Collins Avenue. Carver pulled up a map of our current location on his phone and directed me on a shortcut to catch up with them.

  “We don’t have our guns,” I said.

  Carver stared down at his phone. “We’ll be fine.”

  There was a silence.

  I asked, “Just what the fuck happened in there anyhow?”

  Carver didn’t look like he was going to answer at first. He just sat there, staring at his phone. Something was different about his face, about his entire body language. I’d been working with Carver for two years now and we had been paired up many times tracking a new target. I’d begun to get a good sense of Carver’s moods, and his different kinds of silences. But this was a new silence.

  “Well?” I prompted.

  He blinked and looked out his window and took a deep breath. “The guy just ... flipped out. He’s a loose cannon. That transvestite went up to him, barely said a word, and he just hit her. Smacked her right in the face, then kneed her in the groin. I know it’s hard to believe, but I think Simon’s already broken this one. I think”—he swallowed—“I think we might have another Christian Kane on our hands.”

  There was another silence.

  Then, in our earpieces, Ronny muttered, “Jesus Christ.”

  Carver, nodding slowly, staring back down at the map on his phone, said, “Exactly.”

  • • •

  FIVE MINUTES LATER, the rain still drizzling, Ronny said, “He just pulled into a hotel parking lot.”

  “What hotel?” Carver asked.

  “The Beachside. We’re going up to the second entrance to park.”

  Carver closed the map on his phone and called the Kid, putting him again on speakerphone. He said, “Find out everything you can about the Beachside Hotel. That looks to be our target’s next location.”

  “You think the girl’s in there?”

  “Possibly. Has the page changed?”

  “Nope. I keep checking it every thirty seconds but it’s still the same. Wish I didn’t have to, though. I feel like a fucking perv with this thing on my screen.”

  “You’ve seen worse.”

  “Don’t remind me.”

  “Listen,” Carver said, “find out everything you can about the place and get back to me. But do it fast.”

  He clicked off just as we passed the hotel’s first entrance, the same one the Racist had used.

  Compared to the rest of the hotels along Collins Avenue, the Beachside wasn’t overly impressive. The building was mostly white stucco, no more than twenty stories high. The parking lot was moderately full.

  “Ronny,” I said, “we’re pulling into the second entrance now.”

  Ronny said, “Take the first left and come the whole way back.”

  I parked the Corolla two spaces away from the SUV. Carver and I got out and hurried over and climbed into the SUV’s backseat.

  Ronny had our guns and handed them back to us. “What’s the plan?”

  “The plan,” Carver said, hefting his Glock 30, “is we take him as soon as possible. But first he has to get his room number. Once he has that, we’re set.”

  “And, um—” Ronny paused, clearly not sure how to continue. He sat there in the driver’s seat, a large man with a full beard who had once been a trucker hauling food orders for restaurants across the country. His St. Christopher’s medallion hung limp from the rearview mirror. “And what about the girl?”

  “At this moment,” Carver said, making sure to look at each of us in the eye, “the girl is the main objective.”

  We were silent, waiting for him to say more.

  He didn’t. Instead he pulled out his phone and dialed the Kid, put him on speakerphone.

  “Any info on this place yet?”

  “It’s been like twenty seconds.”

  “Any info?”

  “No.”

  “Then forget it. We’re headed in now.” He disconnected and shoved the phone in his pocket. He checked the Glock’s magazine, reinserted it, racked the slide, reached for the door handle. Looked back at us and said, “Let’s do this.”

  8

  Yes, it was true—he had lost his cool. Mason would be the first to admit it. That fucking thing had come up to him in the bar, placed a hand on his arm, and started talking to him, asking what he was doing later, if maybe Mason would like to come back to its place. So what was Mason supposed to do, standing there with a he/she/it touching his arm? Probably not clock it in the face and then knee it in the crotch—where it used to have a dick, or maybe still did—but that’s what happened.

  That was something Mason, at that moment, needed to have happen.

  What he didn’t need was Simon calling him once he’d left the bar, once he’d gotten in the car and started it up. He didn’t need Simon’s fucking voice berating him for acting like an asshole in public.

  “I mean, goddamn it, Mason, do you want your family to suffer?” Simon had never sounded this worked up, this agitated. “Do you want me to go to Gloria and little Anthony and tear their fingernails off? Do you want me to break their fingers, their hands, and just work my way up their arms? Is that what you want?”

  Mason hadn’t responded as he sat there in the car, listening to the rain, to his own thoughts.

  Simon sighed. “Okay, I get it, Mason. You’re tough. Nobody messes with you. But that’s the thing I don’t think you quite understand yet. Nobody messing with you? That’s the way it used to be. Now you have no choice. Got it? Unless you really do want your wife and son to die. Is that what you want, Mason? Say it is and I’ll make sure it happens right now. I’ll even let you listen.”

  Mason closed his eyes. “No.”

  “What was that? I’m sorry, Mason, I don’t think I heard you.”

  “No,” Mason repeated, this time with more emphasis.

  “Now that’s more like it,” Simon said. “So have you decided about that ... other thing we discussed?”

  Mason said, “What other thing?” Knowing very well what Simon meant.

  But of course Simon didn’t answer him. He just gave Mason directions, to a hotel farther up Miami Beach. He told him go inside and introduce himself as William Simmons. He told him to accept the key given to him and go up to his room, and that once he got there ... well, now that was going to be the interesting part, wasn’t it?

  So that Friday evening, about a quarter past two in the morning, Mason Coulter entered the Beachside Hotel. He stepped out from under the light rain to find a marble-tiled lobby with potted plants everywhere. A restaurant called The Cove sat to his right. It was closed, completely dark. A gift shop called The Sand Castle sat to his left. It too was closed, also completely dark.

  A man stood behind the check-in counter. He was the only person in the lobby. He was about Mason’s age, roughly forty, and wore horn-rimmed glasses. For some reason the glasses didn’t look right on him, this pale man with a mop of brown hair staring down at a computer screen. The incongruousness of the glasses reminded Mason of his own glasses, the ones he’d been told to wear. He had never worn glasses a day in his life, and the feel of them on his nose and around his ears was very uncomfortable.

  Mason walked up to the counter, taking his time as he went. He remembered what Simon had told him, about the choice he would have to make, and he figured the longer he took to check in, the more of a reprieve he had.

  The man looked up at him, smiled a fake smile. His nametag said KEVIN.

  “Welcome to the Beachside Hotel, sir,” the clerk said, his voice almost as fake as his smile. “How can I help you?”

  “I have a room reserved for me.”

  “Of course, sir,” Kevin said, typing something onto a keyboard. “What’s the name?”

  “William Simmons,” Mason said, and at once, like a slap, he realized the importance of that name, why Simon had used it amon
g a million others.

  The former preacher William Simmons. Colonel William Simmons. The man who, in 1915, helped organize the new society of the original Klan.

  Simon’s little inside joke.

  “Thank you, sir,” Kevin said, his focus on the computer screen, typing again. It was the only noise, that incessant clicking of the keys.

  Something didn’t feel right.

  Of course, many things didn’t feel right to Mason, not in the past forty-eight hours, but at that moment, standing in the lobby of the Beachside Hotel, with just him and Kevin, something felt wrong.

  He looked to his right, at the glass doors he had just used to enter and the side parking lot beyond. Then to his left, at an identical pair of glass doors leading to the parking lot on the other side of the building. Nothing moved in either direction.

  “Busy night?”

  “Yes,” Kevin said, nodding as he typed, “it’s been very busy indeed.”

  But the thing was, the hotel didn’t feel like it had been very busy. There were cars in the parking lot, sure, a lot of cars, but that sense of other people being in one closely confined space at the same time was missing.

  Or at least Mason just couldn’t feel it.

  Kevin held up a black plastic keycard, still flashing that fake smile. “You’ll be in room three-thirty-nine. It’s on the third floor.”

  Mason took the key without a word. He saw, just as he took the proffered card, that his hand was trembling. His stomach was churning too, like he had eaten something his stomach disagreed with, but the truth was he hadn’t eaten anything in the last twelve hours.

  “Have a great stay, sir,” Kevin said.

  Mason turned away, his stomach still doing somersaults. His gaze swept the empty lobby—the potted plants, the couches and chairs, the overlarge fake sand castle in the corner—before stopping on the one pair of glass entrance doors. There were people out there, the first signs of life in this place besides Kevin and himself.

  The glass doors slid apart. Three men walked in.

  “Um, Mason?” Kevin said behind him.

  Mason instantly froze. He slowly started to turn back to the check-in counter—thinking, How does he know my name?—when the Uzi in the clerk’s hands stopped him.

  Kevin said, “You might want to duck.”

  And then started shooting.

  9

  The first thing we saw when we entered the lobby was the Racist. He was just standing there, a plastic keycard in his hand, watching as the glass doors parted in front of us. Then the clerk behind the counter said something, and the Racist glanced back.

  Just as the man brought up an Uzi submachine gun.

  Carver said, “Shit,” and immediately grabbed for his gun. Ian and I grabbed our guns too, and then we were diving for cover right as the clerk opened fire—Carver toward the right, me and Ian toward the left. I fell to the floor behind a couch. I waited a moment, flat on the ground, before jumping back up.

  The things I noticed in the half second before I started shooting: the Racist on the floor, his hands covering his head; the clerk gritting his teeth as the Uzi in his hands kicked with each shot.

  Then that half-second was over and I opened fire. I was aiming for the clerk, right at his head. Three shots later he went down.

  “Carver!” I could almost see him on the peripheral, a dark shape wedged in behind a small jungle of potted plants.

  “I’m okay,” he said. The fake leaves rustled and he emerged, his gun in his hands, slowly approaching the desk.

  Without even knowing it, I was moving too, keeping the Sig aimed right at the spot where the clerk had been standing. Ian got up from where he had taken cover and followed.

  On the floor the Racist slowly moved. He raised his head, squinting up at us.

  Carver approached him. He reached down and tore the glasses off the Racist’s face, snapped them in two.

  “Hey,” the Racist said in a strangled voice.

  “What room is she in?”

  “Huh?”

  Before Carver could repeat his question, the doors to the restaurant burst open and two men appeared. They too had Uzis and immediately started firing.

  Carver sprinted toward the check-in counter and dove over it just as a spray of bullets tore up the tiled floor in his wake.

  Ian and I dove back toward the closest pillars to take cover.

  The two men split up as they fired, one heading my direction, the other heading toward the counter. Both managed to shield themselves with the pillars near the restaurant as Ian and I both stepped back out and returned fire.

  Out on the floor, the Racist once more lay flat with his hands over his head.

  At once Carver appeared behind the counter, the Uzi in hand. He opened up, his finger on the trigger, the gun spitting out nonstop rounds, taking off chips of the marble pillars the men were hiding behind.

  Both Ian and I saw this as an opportunity.

  We started firing too, stepping around our pillars, moving closer.

  The men didn’t know which way to fire.

  They panicked.

  As if on cue they started backpedaling toward the restaurant, their only form of retreat. They moved back-to-back and continued firing, but it did them no good.

  Our bullets took them down almost at once.

  Again, silence.

  Carver vaulted over the counter. He nodded at me and Ian and the three of us made a quick circuit of the lobby, checking the restaurant and gift shop and anywhere else someone might be hiding with a semi-automatic weapon. Once we established the place was clear—at least for the time being—Carver approached the Racist, who once again had his head raised, looking around to make sure all was safe.

  “Where is she?” Carver repeated.

  “Please,” the Racist said. “I don’t know what’s happening. I just—”

  “What room did Simon tell you to go to?”

  And like that, a kind of understanding filled the Racist’s face. He was in the process of standing up, getting first to his knees, then placing one foot on the ground. This was where he stopped, looking like a man about to propose to the love of his life.

  “What ... what did you say?”

  Carver leveled the barrel of his gun right at the man’s face. “What room?”

  For the longest moment the Racist didn’t say anything. Then, his voice trembling, “Room three-thirty-nine. Third floor.” His gaze skipped around at our faces. “Who are you people?”

  10

  After a sudden volley of gunfire in the lobby of a hotel in Miami Beach, you’d expect there to be some people around. Employees, guests, a random vagrant—anyone to poke their heads out from doors, to maybe scream out loud at the insanity of it all. But there were no doors opening partway to reveal frightened faces. No screams or even murmurs floating down the hallway. Nothing.

  The Racist climbed to his feet. Both Ian and I kept our guns on him. The man stood there, clearly confused.

  “What the fuck is going on here?”

  “We’re here to help you,” Carver said. “Now go with them. They’re going to take you to safety.”

  “But what about Gloria and Anthony? What’s gonna happen to them? What about—”

  “They’re already dead. I’m sorry to be the one to tell you that, but this is how Simon works. You never even had a chance to save them in the first place.”

  Ian and I maintained close proximity to the Racist. He didn’t look at us. Instead he glared back at Carver, anger and fury in his eyes.

  A soft noise suddenly filled the silence. A noise that was almost impossible to hear over the ringing in my ears. But it was a noise I recognized, a noise I understood, and I wasn’t surprised at all when the Racist glanced down at the right front pocket of his jeans, at the bulge of a cell phone there.

  “Give me that,” Carver said. He held out his hand. Kept it there, his palm up, until the Racist slowly pulled the black phone from his pocket and placed it in Carver’s
hand. Carver answered, “Go ahead, Simon.” A pause, then a small grin. Carver said, “Yeah, fuck you too,” and dropped the phone to the floor where he stomped on it once, twice, three times.

  Maybe a minute had passed since the initial shootout. The astringent odor of burnt cordite was still thick in the air. The ringing in my ears had begun to fade. And still no one had entered the lobby.

  “Now,” Carver said to the Racist, “go with them.”

  “But—” the Racist started to say, then glanced at Ian and me, saw the guns in our hands.

  “Let’s go,” I said.

  For some reason I expected more protest from this man. I expected some real trouble, especially after what had happened earlier at The Spur. A loose cannon, Carver had said about our latest target, how we might have another Christian Kane on our hands, and he was right. So right now, I figured this man was at the end of his rope and was apt to do anything unreasonable.

  But he glanced once again around the lobby, at the plaster and the bits of foam from the couches and chairs. At the two dead bodies lying near the restaurant.

  And without a word he started walking.

  Heading right toward the lobby exit.

  Ian pulled out a plastic zip tie. “Do us a favor and let us put these on you.”

  The Racist stopped walking, stared directly down at the black plastic binding. “For what?”

  I said, “For our safety.”

  The man shook his head. “No. No fucking way I’m letting you touch me with that fucking stuff.”

  Carver was behind the Racist an instant later. Kicking the back of his knees, forcing him to the floor. Carver grabbed the man’s arm, yanked it behind his back, then did the same to his other arm.

  The whole process took less than five seconds.

  The Racist fought this of course, kicking and rocking his body, trying to get Carver off of him. But at the moment Carver had the advantage, his knee right in the small of the Racist’s back, grasping both of the Racist’s wrists together so Ian could bend down and wrap the plastic zip ties around them, squeeze them tight.