In the Company of Killers by Bryan Christy (ebook reader for pc and android .txt) 📕

happy enough to question our expenses. Hyenas waiting for Vance to stumble . . .”

Klay wondered if it could be that simple. He guessed Eady earned about a million dollars a year as head of The Sovereign. Then there was his Agency pay.

Klay followed the paved driveway nearly a half mile up toward the main house. The house had been an inn originally. It had nine fireplaces, four upstairs and a big walk-in that filled the dining room. There was a flagstone patio in the back. Most of the horse stables had been converted to a kennel, where Eady kept his prizewinning Jack Russell terriers. Two seldom-used guest cottages lay south of the stables. The spring-fed pond was stocked with rainbows, blue catfish, and triploid grass carp to keep it clean.

Klay pulled into the drive’s final horseshoe and parked behind Eady’s Grand Cherokee. Anyone who knew Eady well enough to visit knew he kept a key under the mat outside the summer kitchen door. No one who visited twice ever bent to look for it. The Eadys never locked the house.

Klay stepped from his vehicle, and a dog shot toward him from beneath a row of boxwoods. A screen door slammed. “Goddamn it!” Eady yelled as he strode briskly across the driveway, flanked by a pack of Jack Russells. “Off!” he yelled.

The jumping dog was big for a Jack Russell. Klay didn’t know whether to pet it or catch it. He was trying to do both when Eady kicked at it, nearly losing his loafer.

“Off!” Eady repeated. “Sorry, Tom. Hankins down the hill lets his goddamn heeler roam free. Got on Integrity’s Desire. I drowned ’em all but this one got away. Off!”

Klay looked down at the energetic mutt. It had the head of a Jack Russell, but its tall body was thicker and spotted the color of newspaper. There was a black bull’s-eye above its right hind leg.

“Anyway, thanks for coming, Tom,” Eady said in his phlegmy bass, offering his hand.

Klay’s mind flashed to Barrow’s words. Bring him into the light, he had said. We’ll take care of the rest. Meaning: find a way to make Eady vulnerable.

Klay turned and reached for something inside his vehicle.

“Did you bring an overnight bag?”

Klay looked up to see Eady moving toward the back of his Land Cruiser, talking, trying to see inside.

“Just this.” Klay showed Eady his backpack.

“Good.” Eady turned. “Good. Okay. Come on in, Tom.”

Klay followed Eady and his tide of Jack Russells through a door into the summer kitchen. Eady continued through the room and stepped into the main house, causing the dogs to surge ahead of him. “Good dogs,” he called, and shut the door.

Klay and Eady stood alone in the summer kitchen with its thick whitewashed stone walls, deep-set windows, and cool Mexican-tile floor. It was appropriate that it would happen here, Klay thought. This had always been his favorite room in the house. It smelled of woodsmoke, fresh fish on newspaper, and cloves. Klay’s father used to say that smell was the most powerful of man’s senses. The smell of this room was what Klay conjured when he thought of home. Not lilies or embalming fluid.

This was the room where Eady and Ruth shared morning coffee sitting at the round maple table. A bottle of Lagavulin and two glasses were on the table now. One of the glasses, with liquor already in it, was in front of the spindle-back chair Eady favored. Klay took the chair opposite. Eady’s fishing hat lay in the seat of a third chair on top of the day’s Washington Post, folded to the crosswords.

Eady filled two glasses of water from the sink, served Klay, and sat down. His hair didn’t look as if he’d recently worn a hat.

“Could use this,” he growled, pouring Klay a whiskey. He raised his glass, hesitated when Klay didn’t join him, then drained his scotch in a swallow. He set his glass down on the table in front of the third chair, but did not release it. Klay looked at Eady’s hand. It was too close to the table edge, too close to the hat in the third chair. “That the way you want to play this, Vance?”

Eady tilted the glass to look into it, tapped it hard on the table, and refilled it. He folded his hands in front of him and turned to look out the small window.

It was a bright, clear day. Klay knew the view without taking his eyes off of Eady. Below the window was a flower garden with a bird bath held up by a concrete cherub whose arm had broken off. Farther on, down the hill, was Eady’s trout pond.

“Do you remember how you started, Tom?”

“You are a murderer,” Klay said.

Eady unfolded his hands. “Not at the magazine,” he continued. “How you and I started. Your training . . .”

Klay wanted to smash Eady’s head into the table, lean on his skull until his temples caved and his blue eyes leaked. But that was outside of scope, he told himself. “We were down there,” Klay said flatly, nodding out the window. “You looked at my fingers and said if I learned to tie a Parachute Adams and could catch a rainbow on a double-haul cast in a good wind, I’d know everything I needed to know about espionage. Wouldn’t need the Farm.”

“And you never did. Need it, I mean,” Eady said, adding, as he had those many years ago, “Make the fish see what you want them to see . . .”

“Well, you did that,” Klay said.

“We’re all the fish. Tom.”

“I’m counting on that,” Klay replied. He was done humoring this remorseless bastard.

Eady nodded, poured himself another, and looked across the kitchen at a framed photograph of himself standing beside Nelson Mandela. Eady had covered Mandela’s release from Robben Island for The Sovereign. In the photo Mandela, gray haired, dressed in a gold and brown silk Madiba shirt smiled fondly while Eady, still on assignment, cameras slung over both shoulders, beamed admiration.

“Both of my brothers are Wall Street bankers,