Ash Reckoning Read online

  “We’re not your servants, or bellhops,” Carpenter said.

  The billionaire gave him a sharp look, but kept his thoughts to himself. Carpenter indicated the breakfast nook which had a desktop computer setup and waiting.

  “But Kurt enjoys cooking so you won’t have to order in,” Carpenter said.

  “The PC was password protected, but nothing we couldn’t handle,” Kurt said. “It’s booted up and ready for you.”

  Still looking annoyed, Steinberg sat behind the computer and went to work. Carpenter and Kurt watched him. They’d already searched the hard drive, but hadn’t found anything useful. Their employer had a better idea of what to look for.

  He spent the better part of an hour conducting search after search, looking at every single directory and file. Steinberg even searched by dates.

  “This is not what I asked for, Carpenter,” Steinberg said. “There’s not a single work file on this damned machine.”

  “It’s what he pulled out of storage,” he replied.

  Steinberg thought about that for a moment. “I bet he needed it to access the hard drive he removed from his work computer.” He gave Carpenter a cool look. “I did specifically state that I wanted his work hard drive, not his home computer.”

  “Why is the hard drive so important?” Carpenter asked. “Is it something we can just destroy, or do you actually need the files inside it?”

  “Destroying it would work, but I need to know the files are actually on it first,” he said. “If you just destroy the drive, I’ll never know if we got the right hard drive.”

  Walking to the wet bar, Steinberg poured himself a glass of bourbon over a single ice cube. He swirled the whiskey around a moment before taking a sip.

  “As for why those files are so important…” he said, trailing off as he stared off into his own thoughts. “Wexler doesn’t know it, but he was the insurance guy in both the Pacific Runner’s sinking and my wife’s life insurance policy.”

  “Pacific Runner?” Kurt asked.

  “It’s a job I did right after leaving the service,” Carpenter said. “It was before you and Eddie got out and joined me.”

  “The Pacific Runner was a twelve thousand TEU container ship owned by my wife’s company,” Steinberg said. “The company her father built, and left to her shortly after we married.” He took another sip, as if to remove a bad taste from his mouth. Then he grimaced and shrugged. “I worked for her father, where I met Mary. She fell in love and I went along with it. You can’t blame me. She was the sole heir to a billion-dollar shipping company.

  “After the old man died of a heart attack, Mary took over the family company. Just like dear old dad, she micromanaged everything. Hell, she micromanaged me! Anyway, she didn’t inherit her father’s business sense, so the company began to suffer. I tried to help, but as her fortunes waned, Mary began blaming others for her troubles, including me.” Steinberg said. “I hired Carpenter when she informed me she intended to file for divorce, as soon as she returned from her upcoming trip to China.”

  “He hired me to sink the ship,” Carpenter said. “With her on it. And to make it look like an accident. I did.”

  Steinberg saluted him with his empty glass and then refilled it before continuing.

  “The Pacific Runner had a one hundred million-dollar insurance policy and, thanks to Carpenter, the ship sank so fast and so far out at sea that no one’s been able to find it. So they wrote it down as accidental sinking. And I collected.”

  “You mean your late wife’s company collected,” Kurt replied.

  “The fool didn’t have a will, and she was an only child,” he said. “I was her only heir. So I claimed it all. Then I created Steinberg Holdings with that settlement and the rest is history. Oh and the ten million dollar life insurance I had on her helped, too.”

  He looked haunted for a second, sipping his whiskey.

  “Actually, it’s the life insurance policy that I’m worried about,” Steinberg said. “I got the policy after hiring Carpenter, because I wasn’t a hundred percent sure I would inherit her fortune. She did have a few ne’er do well cousins. I might have panicked a little, and hired someone close to Wexler to, uh, fix the problem for me.”

  “Fix?” Carpenter asked.

  “As in, file a report supposedly from Wexler that cleared me of any suspicion, and authorizing payment of the life insurance policy,” he said. “If Wexler ever figures it out, then he’ll realize I had Mary murdered by sinking the ship. I’ll lose everything.”

  “And go to prison,” Kurt added, making Steinberg scowl at him.

  “Yes, there’s that, too.” Steinberg set his empty glass down. “And that is why we have to find Wexler, get that hard drive, and kill him. He’s been a thorn in my side for over five years. It ends here in Dallas, do you hear me?” He held Carpenter’s eyes. “How do we find him?”

  Carpenter returned a cruel smile. “Mr. Wexler has a girlfriend.”

  Chapter 24

  The Beer Shack opened at eleven o’clock every morning, except Sunday. Jim Bob took the Lord’s day off like a good Christian. Ash entered just past one, finding Jim Bob behind the bar and Desmond nursing a beer while they spoke.

  “Who’s tending the store?”

  Desmond grinned. “I take lunch at one, since some folks like to pawn shit off during their lunch hour,” he said. “Besides, I have a great boss.”

  Ash patted him on the shoulder and sat. Jim Bob quickly served up a beer and scotch without anyone uttering a word.

  “Maybe I’m too predictable,” Ash said. He took a sip of beer, and then looked around. “Where’s Chloe?”

  Jim Bob harrumphed and scowled. “That kid makes me crazy sometimes. Last night she asked for the day off. Right out of the blue. I said no, of course. So what does she do? She starts whining about how much she works. Never a day off. Work, work, work, work, work, she says.”

  “What did you say?” Desmond asked.

  “I told her how it is. This is a family business. Employees get days off. Family works.”

  “How’d that go?” Ash asked.

  He rolled his eyes. “Not so well. The runt brightened up. She said, Cool, that means I get a percentage of the profits?”

  “What happened then?” Ask prompted him when Jim Bob just stared off into space a long moment.

  “I gave my employee today off,” he said with a pained grin.

  “Well played, sir,” Desmond said, lifting his beer in salute.

  Ash shook his head. “I’m going to miss you jokers.”

  “What? Are you going somewhere?” Jim Bob asked.

  He explained how Deanna was applying for a job in Savannah. If she got it, then they’d be moving to Georgia.

  “Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Jim Bob said. “I mean, it’s Georgia.”

  “What’s wrong with Georgia?”

  “Besides a state income tax? Well, how about it’s hot and muggy.”

  “Texas is not hot and muggy?”

  “No. We’re just hot.”

  Desmond broke up laughing.

  “Like I said, I’m going to miss you jokers.”

  A man entered. Ash’s breath caught. The newcomer wore a black suit and tie. Ash’s hand started moving toward his back, to the pistol concealed there, when he realized the other man wasn’t one of his foes.

  His mind filled with his problems. Men in black after him with deadly intent. Some mystery about his old work hard drives. And Deanna. He hated lying to her, but he didn’t want her caught up in that kind of trouble. Ash was determined to protect her.

  It’s for her own good, no matter how she feels about it.

  Deanna was still afraid to go out at night after the carjacker incident. Being a target of killers would melt her mind. Yeah, she had to be protected.

  The best way to protect her is to figure this all out and put an end to those guys.

  His old work hard drive was out at the farm. He just needed to find a desktop to hook i
t up. Ash glanced at Desmond. The pawn shop owner probably had a lot of old desktops for sale, cheap.

  “It’s getting cloudy,” Desmond said. “Is it going to rain?”

  Jim Bob and Desmond started discussing the weather, but Ash froze. Cloudy? Cloud? Then he remembered.

  He’d had his work computer setup to automatically back up every file to the cloud! The backup was to his personal account. An account he hadn’t accessed in over five years. Was it still active?

  Ash pulled out his phone and found the app to access that cloud account. He uploaded to the cloud just so he could access his files away from the office. A moment later, he was logged in.

  Desmond and Jim Bob began discussing guns while Ash scanned through his old work files. He opened a few case files, but nothing jumped out at him.

  “I had a man come in yesterday and sell me three Uzi submachine guns,” Desmond said. “Not pawn, but sold them bad boys to me.”

  “Is that legal?” Jim Bob asked

  “Well, it is for me. I have a license to buy and sell automatic weapons,” Desmond said. “Now, I have my doubts about if the seller came by them honestly, but I sent the proper paperwork to the authorities. If they were used in a crime I’ll be shit outta luck when the cops come and confiscate them.” He took a sip of beer. “Still, I got them so cheap it was worth the gamble.”

  “Who can you sell them to?” Ash asked.

  Desmond smiled. “I know people.”

  Ash and Jim Bob looked at each other, then back at Desmond. Jim Bob spoke first.

  “People who do dirty deeds dirt cheap?”

  Desmond laughed. “No, they’re not that cheap.”

  “I don’t think I need to know any more,” Ash said, turning back to search.

  He scrolled through his last year of work files, right up to the very last case file. Nothing stood out. Nothing… He stopped and looked again.

  What the hell is that? Personal life insurance?

  Ash was strictly commercial. But there it was, a life insurance case for a Mary Steinberg. The name Steinberg did ring a bell for some reason. Then he quickly opened the previous case. Yep. She was the shipping magnate who had gone down with her ship in the Pacific. But he didn’t remember handling her life insurance policy.

  Clicking that file, a PDF opened up on his phone. It wasn’t easy reading it on the phone’s small screen. It took some time and effort, but Ash went through the file.

  Even though he didn’t take care of that kind of case, some things did jump out at him. For one, the policy had been purchased by Mary’s husband, with no signature from her anywhere that he could see. Also, the date looked suspicious. He double-checked the previous case and confirmed that Joel Steinberg had bought the policy the day after she’d set sail on the ill-fated Pacific Runner.

  I remember the ship sinking, but I don’t remember the life insurance case.

  He scrolled down to the bottom to check the date. There was his name, and above it a signature. But not his signature. Someone had signed his name, but it wasn’t him. The signature was forged. Hell, whoever had signed it didn’t even try to properly mimic his signature.

  Insurance fraud.

  Joel Steinberg? Ash had never met with Mr. Steinberg, so how did he get that document into his computer? None of it made sense. But if Steinberg had sabotaged the ship to kill his wife, then it was more than just insurance fraud. It was the cold-blooded murder of Mrs. Steinberg, the officers, and crew of that ship.

  That is a pretty good reason to want me dead, too. That means I’m looking at a very rich man who hired assassins to kill me. So I can’t just deal with the assassins, because he’ll just send more.

  The question was: should he fight fire with fire and go on the attack? Or should he hand it all over to the police and let them deal with Mr. Steinberg and his hired killers?

  Chapter 25

  Ash punched it. The F-150’s V8 revved up and he shot into traffic like a bullet. The early afternoon traffic might’ve been light, but all of the road construction bottlenecked everyone onto one lane.

  I swear, if they aren’t working on Central, they’re tearing up LBJ, he thought.

  They’d been adding lanes, turning I-635 into a combination toll road and freeway, for years. People were working on LBJ from Los Colinas in the west, to Mesquite in the east. And that included tearing down and building new bridges.

  I should’ve taken Central south to I-30, and then out to the farm.

  Hindsight.

  Ash was heading out to the farm to fetch the hard drive. Giving it to Bellucci and the police seemed the best course of action. Joel Steinberg would be implicated immediately, so killing Ash would be a strike against him after the police got involved. He’d have to call off all assassins. He hoped.

  At least that was what good, law-abiding citizens did. Five years of training, mental self-conditioning, and violence had altered how he viewed the world, and especially the judicial system. The system had failed him when Milly and the twins had been gunned down in the streets of LA.

  I’ll give Bellucci the hard drive and files, but I’ll prepare for the worst, too.

  In fact, he seriously considered grabbing Deanna and taking her into hiding. Maybe go to a cabin in the Ozarks. If there was one thing Ash excelled at, it was erasing himself from the face of the earth. He still had multiple bank and credit card accounts under fake names. He could take Deanna and vanish without a trace.

  He didn’t want to start over with another armory. Most of those weapons would go with them. Just so he didn’t spook Deanna too much, he would go find a safe place to hide, transport his weaponry up first, and then take her up. Hopefully, it would just be a short “vacation” for her, and then they could head out to Savannah and their new life together.

  Ash’s eyes never rested. He kept one eye on the road and the other on the mirrors. He even exited off LBJ three times to ensure no one was following him. And then he got paranoid, pulled over into a gas station, and crawled under his truck to ensure there weren’t any GPS tracking devices.

  “Fool me once…”

  Once he reached the suburb of Mesquite, Ash took I-30 east across Lake Ray Hubbard, through Rockwall, and out to Royce City. His rented farm waited outside of that small town. He pulled up the long white-rock drive, all senses on alert.

  Everything looked right. Nothing out of place. No strange vehicles parked out front of the old farmhouse.

  He parked in front of the house, though he paused on the front porch. Should he move the pickup to the barn to be out of sight? Ash decided he wasn’t going to be there long enough to worry about it so he went inside and quickly turned off the security system.

  Everything was as he’d left it. The AC felt a little cool, which just wasted his money since he didn’t live there anymore. Ash promptly changed the thermostat setting to seventy-eight degrees. It had been at seventy-two degrees.

  Ash headed to the barn to get the gun cases. Everything had to be packed up. He couldn’t leave anything behind that might implicate him in the whole Osorio affair that went down.

  Even Bellucci couldn’t save him if the local cops figured out he had straight up eliminated a drug lord and his entire crew.

  He’d need to rent a local storage unit to hold some of his stuff. Eventually, once Steinberg was dealt with, he could sell off his weapons and other tactical equipment. Maybe Desmond would give him a good deal?

  After setting aside a Glock 19, plenty of ammo, and his last remaining submachine gun, an Uzi, Ash packed everything else up. At the moment, nothing in the house had been used to kill anyone. He’d already dumped those weapons. But everything had been purchased off the black market, with a high likelihood that they’d been used in previous crimes. The cops would really get bent out of shape if they found his hand grenades.

  His few remaining clothes were stuffed into duffle bags. They could be donated to charity, along with the furniture and other household items. Deanna would want to use her own furni
ture and stuff.

  The sound of a car slowly driving up to the house, and then stopping, froze his heart. How did they find him? Did he miss a tracking device?

  Ash grabbed the Uzi, inserted a full magazine, and then chambered a round. He checked the Glock 19 as well. The last weapon he wanted to use was his brand-new registered Glock, still holstered under his belt in back.

  Hurriedly slipping out the back door, Ash paused to listen for footsteps. Surely, they’d send someone around to secure the back door first. Not hearing anyone, he eased over to the corner and peeked around. Nothing, so he stealthily hurried to the front corner.

  “Crap,” he muttered, spotting Deanna’s blue Nissan Altima.

  She was knocking at the front door, wearing jeans and a baby blue tank.

  “Ash! I know you’re in there. Open up,” she called.

  “Actually, I’m not,” he said, stepping out in the open. Her eyes locked on the Uzi. “Sorry, I was afraid you were one of the bad guys coming after me.”

  She just stared at him a moment. “I thought that was over. You said the police were handling it.”

  “They are, but the bad guys are still out there looking for me,” he said.

  “Is that why you’re avoiding me? Are you back in the game and hunting them?”

  He took a step toward her and in response she took a step back.

  “I’m sorry, Deanna, but I had to get some weapons for self-defense,” he said. “I’m not hunting them, but they are definitely hunting me. That’s why I need to stay away from you until this all blows over. But I’ll be watching over you.”

  Her eyes widened. Deanna took another step back, shaking her head.

  “You’re scaring me,” she said. “You think they might try to kill me?”

  Her terror was a gut-punch. Ash’s shoulders tensed up and he ground his teeth. Deanna didn’t deserve any of this. She was a true innocent bystander. Her only crime was having fallen in love with him.

  “I don’t think so, but I’m a cautious man all the same,” he said. “In fact, tonight I was going to suggest you take some time off. I want to take you far away until the police catch the remaining two men.”