The Coffin Dancer by Jeffery Deaver Read Free Book Online Page A

plates himself. He’d planned on abandoning it sooner or later and could finish the job without the vehicle. He decided to leave it now. He covered the boxy Dodge with a blue Wolf car tarp, slipped his k-bar knife into the tires, flattening them, to make it look like the van had been there for months. He left the garage through the elevator to the building.
    Outside, he slipped into the crowd. But there were police everywhere. His skin started to crawl. It felt wormy, moist. He stepped up to a phone booth and pretended to make a call, lowered his head to the metal plate of the phone, felt the sweat prickle on his forehead, under his arms. Thinking, They’re everywhere. Looking for him, looking at him. From cars. From the street.
    From windows ...
    The memory came back again ...
    The face in the window.
    He took a deep breath.
    The face in the window ...
    It had happened recently. Stephen’d been hired for a hit in Washington, D.C. The job was to kill a congressional aide selling classified military arms information to—Stephen assumed—a competitor of the man who’d hired Stephen. The aide had been understandably paranoid and kept a safe house in Alexandria, Virginia. Stephen had learned where it was and finally managed to get close enough for a pistol shot—although it would be a tricky one.
    One chance, one shot ...
    Stephen had waited for four hours, and when the victim arrived and darted toward his town house Stephen had managed to fire a single shot. Hit him, he believed, but the man had fallen out of sight in a courtyard.
    Listen to me, boy. You listening?
    Sir, yessir.
    You track down every wounded target and finish the job. You follow the blood spoor to hell and back, you have to.
    Well—
    No well about it. You confirm every kill. You understand me? This’s not an option.
    Yessir.
    Stephen had climbed over the brick wall into the man’s courtyard. He found the aide’s body sprawled on the cobblestones, beside a goat-head fountain. The shot had been fatal after all.
    But something odd had happened. Something that sent a shiver through him and very few things in life had ever made him shiver. Maybe it was just a fluke, the way the aide had fallen or the way the bullet hit him. But it appeared that someone had carefully untucked the victim’s bloody shirt and pulled it up to see the tiny entrance wound above the man’s sternum.
    Stephen had spun around, looking for whoever had done this. But, no, there was no one nearby.
    Or so he thought at first.
    Then Stephen happened to look across the courtyard. There was an old carriage house, its windows smeared and dirty, lit from behind with failing sunset light. In one of those windows he saw—or imagined he saw—a face looking out at him. He couldn’t see the man—or woman—clearly. But whoever it was didn’t seem particularly scared. They hadn’t ducked or tried to run.
    A witness, you left a witness, Soldier!
    Sir, I will eliminate the possibility of identification immediately, sir.
    But when he kicked in the door of the carriage house he found it was empty.
    Evacuate, Soldier ...
    The face in the window ...
    Stephen had stood in the empty building, overlooking the courtyard of the aide’s town house, lit with bold western sunlight, and turned around and around in slow, manic circles.
    Who was it? What had he been doing? Or was it just Stephen’s imagination? The way his stepfather used to see snipers in the hawk nests of West Virginia oak trees.
    The face in the window had gazed at him the way his stepfather would look at him sometimes, studying him, inspecting. Stephen, remembering what young Stephen had often thought: Did I fuck up? Did I do good? What’s he thinking about me?
    Finally he couldn’t wait any longer and he’d headed back to his hotel in Washington.
    Stephen had been shot at and beaten and stabbed. But nothing had shaken him as much as that incident in Alexandria. He’d never once been troubled by the faces of his victims, dead or