The Killing Kind Read Online Free Page A

slicked down such that even at the angle of his head, gravity held no sway over it.
    At the sound of Engelmann’s footfalls, the man in the chair raised one finger—his hands until then both curled around the edges of the armrests—and the barber, a slight man with gray hair, gray eyes, and a lined, gray face, disappeared without a word.
    “I kinda figured you’d be taller,” said the man, his gruff, coarse tone confirming him as the one who’d called Engelmann two nights ago.
    The man’s statement was a joke—with a hot towel draped over his eyes, he could no more see Engelmann than could Engelmann see him. But Engelmann did not laugh.
    “Someday,” said Engelmann, “you’ll have to tell me how you obtained the number of a burner phone I’d not used until that very night.”
    “No, I don’t think I will. Sit down.”
    Engelmann did not sit down.
    The man shrugged. It was a token act of defiance, nothing more. Engelmann had come when called. He may be one of the most gifted contract killers in the world, but in this room, at this moment, Engelmann was more house cat than lion.
    “We have a job for you,” the man said from within his wet folds. “A pest in need of exterminating.”
    “And what, pray tell, is this pest’s name?”
    “I wish to hell I knew,” said the man, “but if I did, I wouldn’t have had to call you. ”
    “Ah. I see. I trust, then, that you’ve no idea where I might find him, or even what he looks like.”
    The man bristled. “Not specifically, no.”
    “Then perhaps we should begin with what he’s done to so offend.”
    The man gestured vaguely toward the oak vanity behind him. “Check the left-hand drawer.”
    Engelmann did. Inside was a manila envelope with a string-and-button enclosure, fat with documents. Engelmann unwound the string and lifted the flap. Not documents, he discovered—or at least not mostly.
    Mostly, they were pictures.
    Some were glossy black-and-white eight-by-tens. Some were color copies of police reports, blown up so large the images had pixelated, and the typeset words around them were five times their normal size. On the back of each was a location and a date, scrawled in a tight, controlled script. The dates stretched back as far as three years. The most recent was just two days ago—the day Engelmann received the phone call summoning him here.
    Each photo was of a murder scene.
    No. Not just a murder scene. A hit. Cold. Calculating. Professional.
    Engelmann thumbed through them, transfixed. Some of them, like San Francisco in October of 2010, or Wichita this January past, were precision long-range kills— needle-threading sniper shots from what had to be twelve hundred meters away. Some of them, like Green Bay or Montreal, were close and messy—the former a stabbing that took place past security in an airport, and the latter a garrote at the opera during a Place des Arts performance of Gounod’s Faust . Of the close kills, it was the former that impressed Engelmann the most. Smuggling a weapon past security, while not impossible, poses some degree of difficulty—but to then commit murder and vanish undetected is quite a feat indeed. Which clearly this man had done, for if his visage had been captured by security cameras, the Council would have doubtless obtained the footage. They had, after all, tracked Engelmann without difficulty.
    “You believe this all to be the work of one man?” Engelmann asked.
    “I do.”
“Magnificent,” he muttered.
    “You sound surprised.”
    “Most in my profession have a preferred method, something tried and true from which they never deviate. Whoever did these is proficient in a variety of techniques. Few in the world can claim such skill. Even fewer can make good on such claims.”
    “You can,” said the man, steel creeping into his voice. Despite himself, Engelmann drew a worried breath, wondering for a moment if this had all been some elaborate setup to lure him here. But then, from beneath his