Black Friday Read online

  “It’s not that obvious, is it?” the girl asked worriedly. “I don’t want to get fired.”

  “No, it’s not obvious,” Ashley assured her. “I just know what it feels like because I’ve been in the same place.”

  “Really? I need the money—”

  “Oh, I know. Believe me. Tobey, let’s buy a few things.”

  He shrugged and said, “Sure, whatever you want.” They picked out several items and paid for them.

  Then as they walked on toward the middle of the mall, Tobey told Ashley, “I didn’t know you’d worked at a place like that. I’m trying to imagine you dressed up like a German milkmaid. It’s kinda sexy.”

  “I never wore one of those silly costumes,” she said now that they were out of earshot of the girl they’d been talking to. “You can tell she was embarrassed, though. She’s probably hoping none of her friends sees her.”

  “Nothing embarrassing about honest work.”

  “That’s where you’re wrong. There are all kinds of honest jobs that are plenty embarrassing. Especially if you’re a teenage girl.”

  “That’s something I never had to worry about.” They had reached a sporting goods store. Tobey slowed down and looked at the place with interest.

  Ashley noticed what he was doing, just as he figured she would. She said, “Why don’t you go on inside and look around to your heart’s content? We can meet up later.”

  “But we came to spend the day together,” Tobey protested, hoping the objection sounded genuine.

  “There’ll still be plenty of the day left. I was thinking I’d go look at earrings and purses. You don’t really want to do that, do you?”

  “Well . . .”

  “It’s settled, then. We’ll meet in the food court in, say, an hour?”

  “Sounds good to me,” Tobey said with a nod.

  That was true. Things were working out just the way he had planned. The jewelry store was close by, and once Ashley was out of sight, he could go over there and pick out her engagement ring.

  She was going to be surprised in just a few weeks when he asked her to marry him.

  * * *

  Habib didn’t panic when the man spoke to him unexpectedly. For a split second his pulse spiked and he was afraid that the plan had been discovered, but then his iron will took control and forced a sense of calm to flow through him.

  He even managed to put a smile on his face.

  This took place in a matter of heartbeats, so there was hardly a discernible delay between the question and Habib’s response to it. He turned his head, smiling, and saw an American standing in the doorway of the storage room.

  The man was tall, rawboned, lantern-jawed, with bushy eyebrows, and he wore the uniform of a mall security guard, including a pistol strapped into a holster at his waist. Habib had never seen him before, but that didn’t stop him from sounding like the two of them were old friends as he said, “Oh, hi.”

  “Hi, yourself,” the American said. He seemed more puzzled than actually suspicious, but he wasn’t going to let go of that curiosity. “I asked what you’re doin’ in here, pal.”

  How Habib hated the infidels’ habit of addressing each other as “pal” or “buddy”!

  On the other hand, that instinctive urge of theirs to believe that, deep down, everyone liked them was one reason it was going to be so easy in the long run to conquer them. You have to be able to recognize your enemies before you can defeat them.

  “One of the janitors asked me to come in here and look for something for him,” Habib lied easily.

  “That’s not your job,” the American said in a somewhat disapproving tone.

  “I know, but it didn’t seem like much trouble. I mean, why not help out a fellow mall employee, you know?”

  The American grunted and said, “You’re one of the new guys, right?”

  “That’s right. Why do you ask?”

  “Because if you’d been here very long, you’d know not to trust them custodians. Biggest bunch of connivin’ con men you’ve ever seen.”

  “I’m sure they say the same thing about us guards,” Habib replied with a chuckle.

  “Yeah, maybe.” Instead of going away, the American did the one thing Habib didn’t want him to do. He took another step into the storage room and asked, “What is it you’re looking for, anyway?”

  Habib wasn’t prepared for that question. He said the first thing he could come up with off the top of his head.

  “Um . . . urinal cakes.”

  “Urinal cakes?” the American repeated. “They’re not even kept in here! Somebody should’ve warned you about those custodians.”

  “I . . . I’m sorry,” Habib said, getting angrier all the time as control of this situation slipped further from his fingers. Why wouldn’t this infuriating infidel just go away?

  The man laughed suddenly and said, “Ah, don’t worry about it, kid, I’m just screwin’ with you. There’s no such thing as the urinal cake scam.”

  “Oh. It was just a joke then.” That didn’t make Habib feel relieved. In fact, it made the flame of his rage burn that much brighter.

  “Yeah. I’m Dave Dixon, by the way.” So far Habib had been standing with his back to the American, so the man couldn’t read the name tag pinned to his shirt. But now the American stepped even closer and leaned forward so he could see the front of Habib’s uniform. “And you’re . . .”

  The man stopped short and frowned.

  “Wait a minute. I know Donald Reed, and you’re not—”

  While the American was voicing his unfortunate discovery, Habib slid out the combat knife from inside the waistband of the uniform trousers.

  Before this day was over, he was going to kill hundreds of Americans anyway. He might as well start now, he thought again.

  A flick of his wrist opened the blade. He brought it up, the move almost too fast for the eye to follow, and plunged it into the man’s chest, angling the knife up to reach the heart, the same way he had killed Donald Reed some twelve hours earlier.

  At the same time, his other hand shot out and closed around the American’s throat to choke off any outcry.

  Habib rammed his weight into the man and forced him back against the wall. The man’s skull thudded hard against the wall, but it was unlikely he felt much of the impact because he was already dying. His eyes bulged and his mouth hung open.

  Habib’s knife hand pressed against his chest. Every bit of the blade was buried inside the American’s body.

  Habib twisted it and took savage pleasure in the action. Given better circumstances, he would have preferred to slit the American’s throat and let him bleed to death, or even more satisfying, drive the knife into his belly and rip it from side to side, creating a huge, gaping wound through which the man’s entrails would spill.

  It would have been nice, seeing the American staring in horror at his own guts before he died.

  But right now, killing this man quickly and silently was best, Habib knew.

  Later, there would be plenty of time for him to luxuriate in watching Americans die.

  Chapter 15

  Tobey hadn’t planned to get distracted, but it was difficult not to once he was in the sprawling sporting goods store that was one of the mall’s anchors. There was just so much to look at.

  The store carried every sort of camping equipment anybody could ever need, a vast array of fishing gear, bows and arrows, exercise apparatus, balls, bats, nets, shoes, boots, waders, camo clothing, trail mix, granola, water purifiers, and around the outside walls were dozens of glass-fronted cases filled with edged weapons and guns.

  Bowie knives, skinning knives, axes, hatchets, and personal defense blades. Revolvers, semi-autos, shotguns, hunting rifles, AR-15s, replicas of famous guns from the Colt .45 Peacemaker to the Winchester ’73 and the Sharps Big Fifty. Calibers from .22 on up. Shelves and shelves of boxed ammunition.

  For a guy like Tobey, it was a little slice of heaven.

  In the meantime, he kne
w he needed to get over to the jewelry store and buy Ashley’s engagement ring, but he found himself looking at a display of beautifully made 1911s and had trouble tearing himself away.

  The guy working behind this section of counter came over to him and said, “The classic, iconic handgun of the twentieth century, just like the Peacemaker was the classic of the nineteenth.”

  “You’ll get no argument about either of those things from me, amigo,” Tobey said.

  “You want a closer look at any of them?”

  Tobey looked at the prices on the guns, sighed, and shook his head. He had enough money for that ring, but not if he spent it on some fancy 1911.

  “No, I guess not,” he said regretfully.

  “Come on,” the salesman urged. “What are you gonna spend it on that’s nicer than one of these babies?”

  Tobey thought about Ashley. Guns were nice, but he was in love with her and always would be.

  “I’ve got something in mind,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “Well, come on back any time. We’ll be here.”

  Tobey nodded and turned to head for the jewelry store, where he planned to spend the money he’d saved on the true love of his life.

  * * *

  Habib had stopped Dave Dixon’s heart so quickly that when he withdrew the blade from the wound, only a small amount of blood welled out to stain the American’s uniform shirt.

  Carefully, Habib lowered the body to the floor, sliding it down the wall until Dixon was in a sitting position. Habib wiped the blood from the knife with the inside of the man’s jacket, then put the weapon away.

  He had to move quickly now. One of the mall’s maintenance workers could come in and ruin everything, as the guard almost had.

  Habib started moving the stacks of crates around. He needed to create an open space big enough that Dixon’s corpse would fit into it. Once he had done that, he could move the crates back in front of the dead man to hide the grim sight.

  Urgency nibbled at the edges of Habib’s brain as he worked. Everything had gone perfectly until now, and this glitch in his plan annoyed him.

  Of course, he had known from the beginning that he couldn’t control everything, couldn’t account for every possibility. At some point, like it or not, he would have to trust to luck.

  Luck was sometimes good, sometimes bad, but always capricious and unpredictable. Habib had to count on his swift wits and determination to overcome any setbacks.

  Just like he was doing now. In a matter of minutes he had fashioned a hiding place for the corpse. He pulled the dead man away from the wall and got behind him, so there was no chance he would get blood on his own uniform as he grasped Dixon under the arms and lifted him. Grunting with the effort, he picked up the limp weight and hauled it backward into the little space behind the crates.

  He stretched Dixon out along the wall and rolled the body on its left side to face the cinder blocks. Then, holding Dixon in place, he used his foot to shove one of the heavy crates against the body to keep it from rolling back. Another crate and then another formed a barrier. Habib began to stack them again.

  A few minutes later, he was finished, and no one had disturbed him. If anyone glanced into the storage room now, all they would see were the crates of janitorial supplies.

  No one would suspect that a dead man was hidden behind them.

  Or a small arsenal of automatic weapons.

  Beads of sweat covered Habib’s face. It was cool back here in the areas of the mall off limits to the public, but you couldn’t prove that by him. He heaved a sigh of relief as he sleeved some of the drops off his face. The speedy recovery he had made from this potential disaster told him that Allah was still on his side, still guiding his actions with the divine hand of vengeance.

  Leaving the body hidden there worried him, but he couldn’t stay and watch the place. He had other things that had to be done if the plan was to go forward. He eased the door open, checked the service corridor, and finding it empty, stepped out and pulled the door closed behind him.

  A moment later, he was out in the mall again. He walked toward the bank of escalators in the center of the mall, and when he reached them, he looked up and saw Mahmoud Assouri standing on the second level, resting his hands on the black plastic top of the clear glass railing.

  Habib’s eyes met Mahmoud’s. Slowly, Habib nodded his head just a little. The gesture was so small, so commonplace, so innocent, that no one would notice it.

  Mahmoud smiled slightly, but that was his only reaction. He turned away from the railing and disappeared from Habib’s angle of sight.

  Habib didn’t have to see his second-in-command to know that Mahmoud was carrying out the next step in the plan.

  And none of the Americans had any idea what was about to happen.

  * * *

  An instinct for trouble was maybe the most important quality a good cop could have.

  Jake Connelly had learned that over the years, and his own instinct was honed to a keen edge. He could pick out a troublemaker a mile away.

  Because of that, he was suspicious as the gray-haired woman approached him in the home furnishings store and asked, “Could I help you, sir?”

  “Yeah,” Jake said. “I came to get a set of these.”

  He held up his phone to show her the picture of the curtains Adele had sent him to buy. He didn’t want a lot of other stuff. No shams or flounces or whatever the hell they were called. Just plain, old-fashioned curtains.

  “Oh, those are very nice,” the woman said as she looked at the webpage Jake’s phone displayed. “And they’re on sale today, so you can get a good deal on them.”

  “Yeah, that’s what my wife said.”

  “She sent you to get them?” the woman asked knowingly.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well, I’ll be sure and take good care of you, then.”

  Jake figured that meant she planned on selling him a bunch of things he didn’t need. She was going to be disappointed, though. He was no pushover for a sales pitch.

  “They’re right over here,” she said, turning and pointing. “You’d better not waste any time getting them. Those curtains are a popular item, especially today.”

  “Thanks,” Jake said, trying to sound sincere instead of surly. He hated to ask for any favors, but he went on, “Maybe you could show me . . .”

  The woman smiled and said, “Of course.”

  The aisles were crowded, just like every other place in the mall. Jake wasn’t sure why she had singled him out to approach, unless it was because he looked a little lost and she took him for an easy mark.

  Or maybe she actually was trying to be helpful, he told himself. It wasn’t easy to break through the shell of cynicism that years on the job had given him, but he knew, logically, that there were still some nice people in the world.

  Just because he hadn’t dealt with them very often didn’t mean they weren’t out there.

  It could have been worse, he mused. The parking lot was crowded, but he’d been lucky and had come up on a fairly close spot just as a shopper was backing his car out. Jake had waited and then swooped in, beating a car coming from the other direction to the punch.

  Inside the mall, pedestrian traffic was heavy, but people were moving along with a minimum of standing around. They were bent on their errands as much as he was, he supposed.

  “Here are those curtains,” the saleslady said. “What color do you need?”

  Jake’s brows drew down in a frown. Adele hadn’t said anything about the color.

  He held up the phone again and said, “This one, I guess. The one in the picture.”

  “Well, this style comes in five different colors. If you look at the webpage, you can see the drop-down menu where it asks you to pick a color if you’re ordering online.”

  “You mean you can order these online?”

  “Of course. You can get any merchandise in our stores from our website, and other options, besides.”

  Then why
in the hell hadn’t Adele just ordered what she wanted and had it delivered to the house, he asked himself. Why send him out into this . . . this hellhole of good cheer?

  Maybe she just wanted a break from him, he realized. He supposed he did tend to hover a little. Or maybe she honestly thought it would do him some good to get out of the house for a while. She probably wished she could get out of the house and go somewhere besides doctors’ offices and treatment centers and hospitals.

  Feeling foolish and a little embarrassed all of a sudden, he said to the saleslady, “The room where these are going is a pale blue, I guess you’d call it. I don’t know the fancy name for that particular shade.”

  “Then I believe these will do just fine,” she said as she picked up a set of curtains in a clear plastic package. She handed them to Jake and asked, “What do you think?”

  He held them up, squinted at them, and tried to imagine what they would look like hanging over the windows in the bedroom. That wasn’t easy, because he had about as much visual sense as a rock when it came to things like that.

  But after a moment he nodded and said, “Yeah, I think they’ll look okay,” even though he still wasn’t a hundred percent certain.

  “Excellent. What else can we get for you?”

  Here came the sales pitch. He shut that down right away by saying, “That’s it. This is all I need.”

  “The checkouts are at the front of the store, then,” she told him with a smile. “Thank you, and have a wonderful holiday season.” She glanced around and added in a slightly conspiratorial tone, “Is it all right if I wish you a Merry Christmas?”

  “It’s all right by me, lady,” Jake said. “Merry Christmas to you, too.”

  For a second he was tempted to buy something else, just because she hadn’t been cowed completely by the forces of political correctness. But he didn’t know what it would be—he didn’t exactly need new throw pillows or anything—so he just smiled and nodded and headed for the checkout.

  Long lines stretched from all of them. Jake passed the time while he waited by playing solitaire on his phone. He might be a crusty old curmudgeon most of the time, but some aspects of modern technology were okay, he supposed.