Christmas Target
Prologue
His business life was in shambles, and that was putting it mildly.
He had gotten in way over his head. He’d become a building inspector for all the right reasons initially, in serving his community the best way he knew how.
But financial pressures, including overspending, alimony to his greedy as hell ex-wife Maureen, and gambling debts that threatened to swallow him up whole, had put a serious strain on his ability to deal with it all fair and square.
It left him no choice but to take action that was less than on the up-and-up.
Some would say criminal, and it could land him in jail. Or much worse.
Now he was paying the price in more uncomfortable ways than one.
His mortgage lender was threatening to foreclose on his house.
Loans were overdue and underpaid. The Feds were hot on his trail, he’d heard through the grapevine.
He feared that they could arrest him at any time.
The mere thought of spending years behind bars, his freedom lost, didn’t sit well with him.
Maybe he could cut a deal. After all, why should he be the one to go down? Or the only one? Especially when there were bigger players in the game than him. Would the FBI be interested?
Or might he use his predicament as a bargaining chip to take an even bigger piece of the pie—giving him some needed wiggle room to work with? He’d earned it. After that, maybe he could get the hell out of Dodge and go into hiding someplace where he might never be found.
Was that even possible? Or plausible?
Wrestling with these unsettling and conflicting thoughts, Horace was still unsure which way to go. He knew for certain he was in an untenable situation and something—or someone—had to give. But did it have to be him?
When he reached his North Second Street destination, the Gotzon Garage, he parked on the third level and got out.
Admittedly overweight, but hoping to change that, he felt his heart beating fast as he slammed the car door shut.
He scratched inside his thinning, slicked-back graying hair and was just about to dig his cell phone out of the pocket of his brown linen pants when a shuffling sound got his attention.
Looking over his shoulder, Horace’s blue eyes, with heavy bags underneath, widened with fear when he was accosted by two tall and muscular gun-toting figures. Ski masks covered their faces, and they wore black gloves.
Horace flinched but tried to sound tough as he demanded, “What is this?” He had a pretty good idea, knowing that brazen robberies and carjackings had become increasingly common in Phoenix in recent years.
The heftier of the two assailants responded sardonically, “What does it look like? We want your wallet, cell phone and your car.”
The other person, slightly thinner but taller, added in a deep voice, “Don’t cause any trouble and you can walk away from this on your own two feet.” He aimed the silencer-equipped firearm at his head. “Otherwise, this can get ugly—really ugly—for you…”
Horace weighed his options, which were really none at all.
He didn’t have a death wish—not like this—even if the current predicament just added to his woes.
Sensibly, he capitulated to their demands.
“You can have the wallet—with everything in it—the cell phone and car. None are worth losing my life over,” he stressed.
“I won’t fight you on this.” As if he were in any position to do that and come away unscathed.
“Good boy,” the heavier male said with a mocking laugh. “Wallet, please—and there better not be anything else coming out of that pocket…”
Following the orders, Horace slowly removed the wallet with four credit cards and three hundred and fifty dollars in it from his side pocket, handing it to him. “It’s yours,” he muttered with compliance.
Without looking inside the leather wallet, the man slipped it into the pocket of his jeans, peered at Horace, and barked, “Cell phone!”
Horace took the burner phone out of his other pocket, having thankfully left his primary phone at home, and passed it to the man.
The man put the phone into another pocket and said sharply, “Now, let’s have your key fob.”
With self-preservation still very much in mind, Horace again did as told. He hoped that would satisfy the robbers. “It’s insured, so I’ll be fine,” he told them, regarding his vehicle.
The thinner man took the key fob from him and said with a smirk on his face, “Thanks for your cooperation. I’ll be sure to pass that along to the person who hired us…”
“Person? Hired you?” Horace’s eyes popped wide with fresh apprehension. “What the hell are you talking about?” he asked, as if clueless. Only he had a very good idea who had put them up to this—and why.
The other man glared at his partner. “Shut up!” As the thinner man stood mute, clearly intimidated, the larger man regarded Horace and told him tonelessly, “Start walking and don’t look back—if you value your life—”
Horace nodded. He gazed at both men once more and had a sinking feeling that they had no intention of allowing him to leave the garage alive.
Even if he couldn’t identify either of them.
The carjacking was a ruse with their true objective as clear as day.
Why hadn’t it occurred to him from the outset?
This was meant to silence him, once and for all.
Still, Horace felt that there must be some way out of this. Maybe if he started to run and could just get behind another parked vehicle nearby before bullets started flying, then maybe there was a fighting chance he could live to see another day. And many more days beyond that.
I’ve got to give it a try, he told himself, knowing there was nothing left to lose at this point. Not when his life was clearly hanging precariously in the balance.
With his knees shaking like leaves on a windy day, Horace turned from the men and began to move away from them.
No sooner had he taken a few painstaking steps when he felt the bullet slam into the back of his head, causing his brain to explode.
He went down like a heavyweight boxer who had been put out for the count by a stiff uppercut to the chin.
By the time the second bullet shattered his skull at point-blank range, Horace Eckhart was already dead.
As a result, he was never privy to the sound of his BMW M8 Gran Coupe driving off with its two occupants inside.
PHOENIX POLICE DEPARTMENT Detective Hallie Flores of the Violent Crimes Bureau’s Homicide Unit was notified that a man had been found shot to death in the Gotzon Garage on North Second Street.
She headed right to the scene in her blue Ford Mustang Mach-E unmarked vehicle, knowing it was par for the course in her life, unfortunate as this was.
As a twenty-eight-year-old member of the Tonto Apache Tribe, Hallie was proud to represent her people as a law enforcement officer, having earned a Bachelor of Science degree from Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice.
She was just as pleased to represent herself as a smart, single and able-bodied woman who was more than up to the task of performing her duties, trying as they could be at times.
After arriving at the garage and parking, she exited the vehicle, with a department-issued 9-mm Glock 17 Gen 5 semiautomatic pistol tucked inside a concealed carry holster.
Hallie approached the crime scene on a slender five-three frame, where police officer Chad Hassler, thirtysomething and tall with a brown crew cut, stood guard over the corpse as if his life depended on it.
“Hey,” Hallie said, her long black braided hair tickling the back of her neck.
“Hey.” Chad, whom she was acquainted with, furrowed his brow above blue eyes. “Looks like the victim was ambushed.”
She turned her small brown eyes to the deceased male, who Hallie guessed was in his midforties, on the heavy side, and about six feet tall.
Wearing an olive button-down striped shirt, brown linen pants and black loafers, he was lying on his side in a pool of blood.
It appeared as though he had been shot in the back of the head twice, the bullets slicing their way through the slicked-back, short salt-and-pepper hair.
She noted the spent shell casings on the garage floor.
Clearly, whoever did this was pretty cavalier or unconcerned about leaving behind critical evidence toward potentially identifying them.
“Do we have an ID for the victim?” she asked.
Chad shook his head. “Not yet. Looks like whoever killed him took his wallet. Cell phone is missing, too, assuming he had one with him. Could be a robbery gone horribly wrong. At least for the dead man.”
Hallie glanced around the garage and saw a few parked cars.
All were within a short distance of the body.
“My guess is that this was a carjacking—or if not, the victim never made it back to his vehicle, if it’s still in here.
Either way you look at it, the killer or killers apparently weren’t interested in leaving alive someone who could identify them.
Or for whatever other reason someone might have wanted the man dead—”
“We’ll see what security cameras can tell us,” Chad said, thoughtful with a frown. “Who entered, exited the garage, the time and whatnot.”
Hallie nodded. “Yeah, and see if there are any witnesses who might have seen something or someone in action.”
As she called in the Crime Scene Response Unit to collect evidence and awaited the Maricopa County medical examiner to arrive to take possession of the body, at the moment Hallie had to consider the unnamed murder victim to be a John Doe.