Death Club Page 3

  He didn’t know how long he was at the bar, the drinks kept flowing, and men kept yelling in his ears. He didn’t spot the man in a corner of the bar who had been on his tail ever since he left the desert. He didn’t notice the man who shoved in next to him, till he felt a tap on his shoulder and looked in the coldest blue eyes he had seen.

  The man jerked his head and walked out of the bar. Descadeo followed him blindly, some instinct in him telling him it was prudent to do so. A drunk grabbed his shoulder and asked him to stay. Descadeo shook him off and walked out in the night and breathed deeply.

  It was two am, and the bar had officially closed at eleven pm, but the party inside had continued. Descadeo buttoned his coat, followed the man around the corner, and into the shadows behind his car.

  ‘You know who I am?’ the man asked him.

  Descadeo narrowed his eyes and took the man in. He was big, as big as the hitter, but he didn’t think he had seen him before. Wait, was he from the club? ‘Death Club?’ he guessed.

  The man nodded. ‘You were told about the rules. You didn’t take long to break them.’

  ‘What rules, man? I won, the fight is over. I don’t care no more about any rules.’

  ‘Rules are for a reason. They protect the club’ the man’s voice lowered to a whisper and his shoulders hunched.

  Descadeo’s mind cleared swiftly. This dude was dangerous. He wasn’t here to issue a warning. He was here to–

  He struck without warning, a crippling blow aimed at the man’s neck.

  Privalov read the signs in the hitter’s eyes and body long before the blow sailed out. He ducked easily and caught Descadeo’s arm in a lock and twisted it and broke it. It was a move that he had deployed thousands of times, using the opponent’s momentum and body weight to his advantage.

  Descadeo opened his mouth to yell. Privalov choked it off with a blow to his throat. Privalov lost his iron control for a few seconds and grabbed the hitter by the neck and squeezed with his large hands. Descadeo flailed, but Privalov evaded his hands easily and a knee to the hitter’s groin subdued him.

  He squeezed till the hitter almost lost consciousness and just when Descadeo’s eyes were fluttering, he let go. The hitter slumped against his car, wheezing, gasping, and clutching at his throat.

  Privalov watched him for a moment and then sank his blade into the Colombian’s neck.

  He moved out of the way of the arterial spray and when the hitter was dead, dragged his body to a pick-up truck and dumped it in the rear. Descadeo was big, but Privalov moved him easily. Strength wasn’t only about size. It was about training and practice and mechanics of muscle and tendon. He covered the body with a tarp, secured the ends, and eased out of the parking lot.

  The blood would be discovered, as would be the bags. The cops would think it was some kind of gang or revenge killing. There was nothing to lead them back to Privalov.

  Privalov hummed in the night as he drove out of Portland and back to the desert, where a grave was being dug for Descadeo.

  Once the hitter was buried, Privalov would turn his attention to his second problem.

  The second problem had been driving to Portland, taking the same route the hitter had, and had entered the outskirts of the city, searching for an empty bar or a diner, when Descadeo had started his drunken spree.

  Dinner, then a clean hotel room, was on Zeb’s agenda. He had left Garav in Burns after giving a formal statement, and had left his number with the sheriff. He didn’t expect to be called; there wasn’t anything more he could add to the investigation.

  Sure, he would keep an eye out for any news, maybe even give a call to Garav in a few days. Just out of interest, he told himself as he backed into a parking lot, stretched, and headed inside a diner.

  ‘Juice, orange juice,’ he told the weary server. ‘Nope, juice. Not coffee.’

  She came back with his drink and took his order. The diner was nearly empty, just the way he liked it. Less noise, more space, more quiet. He demolished his eggs and salad and only when he’d finished he realized he had gone without food all day.

  He sat back in his chair and sipped his drink slowly, taking in the other patrons, and watching the outside world through the windows. There was a couple in the corner, talking softly, and laughing. A girl, a child, was asleep on the woman’s shoulder and her blonde hair stirred whenever mommy spoke.

  Spend a day in Portland and then make my way home. No hurry. There’s no mission. Will take my time. See some country, Zeb thought as he idly watched the couple. The woman’s free hand was gripped in the man’s hands, his thumb caressing her wrist. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled back and even across the distance, Zeb could make out a tat on the inside of the man’s forearm.

  Dead man had Special Forces tat.

  Not my problem. Garav will investigate it. Maybe he’ll call in the State Troopers. They’ll be better equipped, he silently argued with himself.

  Since when did you turn your back on a fellow operative?

  He may not be an operative. Hundreds of men and women wear that emblem. Not all of them are Special Forces. Heck, many of them aren’t even in the Army.

  He could be an operative. You don’t know.

  I can’t get involved in every random death.

  Zeb’s eyes were drawn to the couple when the woman laughed suddenly and her companion joined in. The man stretched in his chair and the motion brought his tattoo into clear view. Zeb recognized it immediately. It was that of the 82nd Airborne.

  The server returned to an empty table and spotted a generous tip next to the plate. She looked around the diner, to thank her customer, and her eyes rested on the couple.

  ‘He left suddenly,’ the woman read her glance. ‘He paid, didn’t he? I saw him pull out some bills.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. He was very generous.’

  Zeb brought up the GPS screen when he was on black top and punched in the coordinates.

  To Dalton.

  Chapter 5

  Zeb reached Dalton after five hours of driving non-stop, passing the occasional truck on the lonely roads, his lights cutting twin beams as they vanquished darkness. He reached a hotel at three am and his tires crunched on gravel as he entered the parking lot. A yawning clerk tossed a key to him and got him to sign the register. Technology and plastic door-entry cards hadn’t reached the establishment yet.

  The room was clean, the linen was freshly laundered and the bathroom was surprisingly big and as clean as the room. Zeb didn’t have many requirements from a hotel; he was okay if it didn’t have white linen service. He didn’t mind small rooms. He didn’t care if it came along with a swimming pool and a gym. Cleanliness was important.

  He hit the bed half an hour after reaching the town and slept for a straight six hours. The sun was streaming through his window when he woke up and drew back the curtains and had his first look at the town.

  It didn’t seem any different to thousands of small towns across the country. His hotel was on a square, next to a community bank, and further away were retail establishments. A bigger town square around which the community revolved, was a few minutes away from his hotel.

  Zeb freshened up and while he was having breakfast in the hotel’s restaurant, fired up his screen and connected it to Werner, a supercomputer housed in their office in New York. A long time back, Werner had been a highly sophisticated artificial intelligence software program that Broker and he had purchased off a couple of university students. The program was now housed in the computer and its name got transferred to the machine.

  Werner was at the heart of their intelligence operations. It analyzed geo-political developments around the world, took in economic data, monitored seemingly random developments such as a Chinese nuclear submarine heading out of its berth, and came back with analyses.

  It talked to several secretive supercomputers in law enforcement across the country and to many others in the world. It had access to thousands of databases and millions of records; if an
event or a person existed in some networked computer somewhere, Werner could get it.

  Zeb was less proficient at working with Werner than the twins and Broker, but he got by. He asked Werner to send him all information on Dalton, which the supercomputer obliged, before he had dug into his eggs.

  About two thousand people in the town, he read swiftly, retail, and some industries outside the town, were the primary sources of employment. A football player from the middle school had gone on to play for the Oregon Ducks at the university. The town had other similar claims to fame.

  The server, a young woman in her twenties, came to him and refreshed his juice without his asking. He thanked her and got a thousand megawatt smile in return. A town where everyone knows everyone else, is protective of its community and wary of strangers, he mused and sipped appreciatively. It was cold and fresh, just the way he liked it.

  He asked Werner to get Mike Klattenbach’s file; it was classified, but that was no problem for Werner. It displayed pages on Zeb’s screen and settled back while the human perused the files.

  Klattenbach had served in the 1st Special Forces Group, out of Joint Base Lewis-McChord, and had toured Iraq, Afghanistan, and Philippines. Good operative. Calm under pressure, were frequent commendations in his file. He was a Bronze Star Medal awardee and had several other awards and ribbons.

  There was one particular mission in Iraq during which Klattenbach had rescued three injured soldiers. He had hauled them from underneath their vehicle which had been wrecked by an IED, and had carried them to safety. While hostile gunfire was raining on him.

  That alone should get him another medal. Maybe a Silver Star. Zeb scanned the rest of his file but saw nothing about any more awards. He had received glowing praise for his bravery during that tour. No awards, however.

  He made a mental note to check with his contacts in the Army and carried on reading the file. Originally from Portland, Klattenbach joined the Army when he was twenty one, married his girlfriend, Cherie, at twenty-five, and had one daughter, Morgan when he turned twenty-eight. Klattenbach separated from his wife when he turned thirty-one, but he continued to support his family. Didn’t divorce. Was reconciliation on the way? Zeb skimmed through the file but didn’t find any such reference and continued reading.

  Cherie and Morgan Klattenbach moved to Dalton, after the family split up, the mom having found a job as a teacher in the town’s middle school. They had lived in Dalton, ever since.

  That was nine years ago. Klattenbach would be forty years old, Zeb figured, and went back to the file to look up Cherie’s age. She’s thirty-eight, Morgan’s twelve.

  When did he leave the Army? A year after splitting up, the file told him. He would be thirty-two then. What did he do after leaving the military? Klattenbach worked as a security consultant for a retail organization in Charlotte. That retailer went bust and the former Special Forces operative then worked in the hospitality industry for a chain of nightclubs.

  Zeb looked up from the screen for a moment and stared out, unseeing. Glorified bouncer? Economy wasn’t good then, jobs were scarce, and things were hard for a vet. He went back to the file, but it trailed off after his last job, which was well over five years ago.

  Zeb got Werner to widen the search and to bring up his bank accounts. Werner didn’t pick up any trail on the job front; it was as if Klattenbach had disappeared from regular employment after the nightclub gig. His bank account provided interesting reading.

  Regular payments into checking and savings account during his Army days. Equally regular payments out, to his wife’s account. The inward and outward flow stuttered once he left the military. The payments to his wife became infrequent, but larger. He was making bigger payments to compensate for his irregularity. The payments dried up once he lost the nightclub job.

  Both his accounts had small sums of money and showed small withdrawals. No big ticket payments to anyone, not even to his wife. There was less than a hundred dollars left in his accounts according to Werner’s report. He emptied his accounts, took out close to a thousand dollars in total. A week before he died. Was killed, he corrected himself, not died.

  The restaurant was busy, tables emptying, new customers coming in, servers rushing about. Soft voices and the occasional laugh broke out. Cutlery clinked and the smell of coffee filled the air. No one came near Zeb’s table, not even the server. People seemed to give it a wide berth, sensing something in his posture, and in the faraway look in his eyes.

  Zeb stirred finally and went back to his screen. Can you look up his wife’s accounts? He asked Werner. Werner did the electronic equivalent of rolling its eyes. Could it? It sure could. It wasn’t a supercomputer for nothing.

  Cherie Klattenbach’s details didn’t take long to read. She had initially rented her home when they had moved to Dalton, but three years later, had bought a three-bedroom house. She taught science to the seventh and eighth grade students, and was popular, going by her students’ posts on the school’s social media page.

  The home’s purchase intrigued Zeb and he turned to her financial details. They showed a family of modest means, living well within a teacher’s salary. The incoming payments from the separated husband went into a 529 Plan, there were small outgoings towards living expenses. The payments to medical insurance rose dramatically six years ago and Zeb made a mental note to follow that up.

  He was nearing the end of the financial transactions when the last entry stumped him. It was an inward payment of half a million dollars. Zeb stared at the number, looked up and away, and returned to the screen. The figure remained the same. Half a million dollars from a Cuthbert and Bros, LLC. Paid recently.

  Just yesterday. A few hours after Garav identified the body as Klattenbach’s. He mulled over possibilities, but nothing made sense. He asked Werner to come up with some ideas, on how the wife could have received the money. Werner didn’t have anything useful, either.

  He gave up and got the supercomputer to find out Klattenbach’s time of death. Werner found out. The autopsy results weren’t in, yet. Maybe you should ask the sheriff, Werner suggested helpfully.

  Trouble came to Zeb before he could go to the sheriff.

  Zeb had been aware of the three men for a while; they had been talking loudly, laughing uproariously at coarse jokes, and ignored the looks they got from other customers. An elderly man rose from his seat and requested them to be polite. One of them, a red-haired man, swore at the old man and told him to mind his own business. Loudly.

  For a moment silence fell in the restaurant and heads turned toward the restaurant manager who hurried to the men and spoke softly. They behaved for a while and then reverted to their unruly selves. Zeb put them out of his mind and turned back to his screen. He was reading another report on Cherie Klattenbach when he felt another silence in the room and looked up to see the three men in front of him.

  Red Hair is the leader. Beard and Skinny defer to him. Knives and forks on my table if I have to use them as a weapon. Back’s to the wall, no one can come up from behind. Too many people in the room, to use my Glock. Not safe. The thinking and assessment was automatic, hard-wired into him from years of experience. He kept silent waiting for the men to speak. It’s their ball.

  ‘You the dude who found Cherie’s husband?’ Red Hair cocked a surly eyebrow at him.

  Cherie, not Mrs. Klattenbach. A familiar cold anger started growing in Zeb’s stomach at the insolence in the man’s voice, at the lack of respect for the dead man’s wife. He took a deep breath and calmed himself. No reason to get bothered. It’s a small town. Everyone knows the other.

  Red Hair noticed the breath he had drawn and mistook it. ‘Dude, no need to be nervous. We’re just asking. Aren’t we, Billy?’ Billy, the bearded man, nodded and kept chewing his gum.

  ‘Yeah, I found the body.’

  ‘Mighty convenient of you, to be hanging out right there. No one goes there. It’s not like there’s an amusement park out there, is there, Billy?’

 
‘Nope, there sure ain’t.’

  Zeb didn’t reply for several moments, letting the silence build. The manager looked in his direction, a question on his face. Zeb shook his head imperceptibly.

  ‘We asked you a question, dude. It’s polite to answer. Don’t be scared. Not yet, anyway.’ Red Hair twisted his lips in a grin and got chuckles from his friends. It was their town. It was fun to corral a stranger and mock him.

  ‘You guys need to practice on your comedy act. Now, can you leave?’

  The grin froze on Red Hair’s face as his brain processed Zeb’s words and his eyes grew small and mean as their import sank into him.

  ‘Look–’

  Zeb had enough. He rose swiftly, came around his table and took a step in Red Hair’s direction. Red Hair, shocked at the speed and smoothness of his movement, was startled. Zeb wedged his foot against Red Hair’s heel and got closer to the man. Red Hair moved back, lost his balance, and fell, flailing wildly.

  ‘When you arise, you will be polite. You will apologize and walk out of this restaurant. If I see you again, I will break your legs. If you approach me in the night, I will break your arms. Do you understand?’

  Red Hair’s eyes went wide in shock at Zeb’s words, at the manner in which they were delivered, at the change in Zeb’s demeanor. His mouth opened, but no words came out. There were three of them, the stranger was alone, however, there was something in the stranger’s cold eyes, something about him. His friends helped him get to his feet and when he faced Zeb, the insolence was gone.

  ‘Sorry, buddy,’ he mumbled, his eyes not meeting Zeb’s. He turned away, mustering all his dignity, and walked away with his friends.

  Calm returned to the restaurants, laughter resumed, and servers bustled about. Zeb’s server came to his table, carrying a jug, and topped his glass without a word. She left a note on his table and didn’t wait for him to open it.