Read Online Red Right Hand by Chris Holm - Free Book Online

lessons were his ex-wife’s idea, no doubt intended to waste Sal’s money and drive him batty when it was his weekend to take Izzie—but the phone ringing was not the house’s primary line. It was his business line, the one that rarely rang, the one he never let his daughter answer.
    Sal worked for the Council. He was, in fact, its only full-time employee. Council business was typically carried out by freelancers or members of its constituent organizations, but because those organizations were often rivals, the Council required someone unaffiliated with any of them to act as go-between.
    That man was Sal. He was solely responsible for executing Council orders and looking after Council interests worldwide. It was a position that commanded fear and respect. He had no formal title, because he had no need of one—but thanks to his predecessor, who’d originated the role, those who whispered about him in dark corners of the underworld referred to him as the Devil’s Red Right Hand.
    Personally, Sal had never much cared for the sobriquet. For one, he’d been an altar boy growing up and didn’t like the implication he was playing for the wrong team. For two, it was a little arch. And for three, it made him wonder if there was a counterpart on God’s side who’d one day punish Sal for everything he’d done.
    Sal’s office was a cliché of a gentleman’s study. Mahogany paneling. Built-in floor-to-ceiling shelves lined with books he’d never read. A hinged, hand-painted globe that doubled as a bar cart. Burnished-leather armchairs. Banker’s lamps. An antique Wooton desk on which sat a phone, a leather blotter, and a computer.
    Sal walked by it without a glance. His office was for show. A rodeo clown, intended to distract. He never conducted any business of real import in it.
    The ringing phone was in his second guest room, which was tucked behind the kitchen. The third floor of Sal’s house comprised a guest suite—bedroom, bathroom, and sitting room—and that was where visitors typically stayed. Consequently, this bedroom was rarely used, and everything about it appeared to be an afterthought: The simple, metal-framed twin bed. The cheap floral comforter. The empty dresser. The prefab particleboard nightstand, upon which sat a lamp, a box of tissues, and an old rotary phone.
    The phone wasn’t registered in Sal’s name. In fact, the line used to be connected to his neighbor’s teenage daughter’s room. When their house was foreclosed on years ago during the recession, he had surreptitiously had it rerouted and set the bill to auto-deduct from an online checking account opened for just that purpose. The former was a simple matter of redirecting a single wire; the latter, snatching a bill from his neighbor’s mailbox and calling the phone company to update the payment method. Committing fraud to get money out of major corporations is a tricky business, but committing fraud to give them money is easy, because they never think to question getting paid.
    Sal stepped into the bedroom and shut the door, muffling Izzie’s halting notes but not silencing them entirely. The phone continued to ring, as he knew it would until he picked it up. He fished around inside the tissue box on the nightstand and pulled out a small electronic device the size of two stacked decks of cards: an audio jammer. Its textured black plastic surface was perforated at one end to accommodate an internal speaker, and its controls consisted of a single on/off/volume knob on the side. It was powered by a nine-volt battery and had cost him a little over a hundred bucks—from Amazon, if you can believe it.
    He turned it on and cranked the volume up. The sound of static filled the room, not so loud as to be intolerable but loud enough to render useless any listening devices within a hundred and fifty feet. Then, finally, he picked up the receiver. “Yeah?”
    “Sal, it’s Bobby V. We gotta talk.” Bobby V. was the Council rep for the Ventura