by Ninie Hammon
“Tell the others how it works if you’re intent on explaining. They will be the ones installing them.”
No, installing wasn’t the proper terminology. There was nothing to install. Each device was a self-contained unit that functioned independently of the others. But they shared the same detonation programs, so they could join each other in gay abandon if he punched the proper codes into his phone.
As soon as Mikhailov’s men had taken charge of restaurant security earlier in the afternoon — with their lapel pins that trumped the rank of any of Crenshaw’s employees — the devices had been distributed to the spots he’d indicated.
Disguised as they were to look like micro “speakers,” they were not the least suspicious looking. Ahhh, the wonders of nanotechnology — that something so powerful could be rendered into such a small package.
Mikhailov shook his head in amazement. He shouldn’t have. He should have held his head steady, perfectly steady. When he shook it, red mist like that smoke they used at rock concerts poured out of his skull into the world. It flowed in a soundless rush from his ears, nose and eyes. It muted every color, stole shapes and replaced them with lurking shadows. The world all around him filled with mist, seeping out from under doors and out of crevices and vents, flowing down from the ceiling and up from the floor.
He would never be rid of the mist now, never be free because it would be everywhere before him, in the rooms where he was going before he opened the doors, out in the world obscuring the trees and blotting out the sun. He would breathe it in and breathe it out and …
Stopping abruptly, he closed his eyes. Calmed himself. Took hold of his mind and held it in firm hands. When he opened his eyes again, he was certain he would see the world cleared of mist and —
No. It could not be. The dragons had joined the mist outside his head. They had escaped. Watching in horror, he saw the dragons — a sparkling gold one he had named Rage, a purple one he called Brutality and a red one, Bloodlust. The beasts lumbered toward him down the hallway, knocking aside the people they passed with a flick of their horned tails.
They were ugly beyond conception. More horrifying by half than the human mind could endure. He had conceived them, birthed them and when they were inside his mind, he controlled them.
Now, no one controlled them.
No! Wait.
He was suddenly horrified.
Not today. Some other day — destroy all of creation some other day. This was his party. He was the dragon here that breathed fire and destroyed. He would not have the glory stolen from him.
Mikhailov advanced on the nearest dragon. He would throttle the beast with his bare hands.
The layout of the back of the casino/hotel complex was pretty much as T.J. had pictured it. Back here out of sight were the loading docks for supplies and the huge green dumpsters that contained the mountain of garbage the place generated.
T.J. prided himself on bein’ indifferent to cold and for the most part he got away with that little self-deception. Not tonight. The cold wind off the water had sliced right through his wool shirt and t-shirt and by the time he got to the back of the complex, he was so cold his fingers was growing stiff.
A four-horsepower Evinrude outboard don’t make a whole lot of noise and what little it did was masked by the noise coming from the building. Big sodium lights brighter’n streetlights illuminated the facility and he’d have been visible in the water but wasn’t nobody looking.
The “floating island” might have been only a hundred feet from shore, but all the deliveries still had to be loaded on something that floated to be transferred to the facility. A big loading dock that connected the building to the shore — that’d make the island a peninsula — wasn’t in keeping with the floating casino image.
Nobody was working the loading docks on a night like tonight and he was able to pull his little jon boat snug up against one of the pontoons the deck floated on in the shadow of one of the barge slips, and tie it up. He climbed up onto the deck and hurried to the building, where overhangs over the doors and loading bays provided at least some shadows where his black face and dark clothing could blend in. He walked down the loading docks, carefully testing all the doors, hoping he could find one that somebody’d not bothered to lock.
That didn’t happen. Finally, he settled on the loading bay on the end, as far away as possible from the sodium light. There was a light in the overhang above the door, but he picked up a piece of slat from a supply pallet and broke out the bulb. Then he took out his pocket knife and began to go to work on the lock.
Most locks wasn’t terrible hard to pick if you knew what you were doing and had the right equipment. He did and he did. Oh, he didn’t have all his lock-pickin’ tools, didn’t carry them around with him just in case he decided he wanted to break in somewhere. But Dobbs had given him for Christmas a Swiss Army knife that had more gadgets on it than the tool shelf in his garage. A bottle opener, magnifying glass, hole punch, two sawblades, wrench, scissors, hacksaw blade, corkscrew, pliers, tweezers, ruler, fingernail file, screw driver — both flat and Phillips head, and a compass. He’d long ago removed the useless fingernail file, ruler and magnifying glass and used the space they’d occupied to insert half a dozen small picks in various sizes.
He had the lock disengaged in less than a minute, stuck the knife back in his pocket and eased the door open an inch. It was dark inside, a storage room or warehouse. He slipped inside and closed the door noiselessly behind him. Then he stood still where he was for five minutes. That’d been one of the hardest things for him to learn in Special Forces training — allowin’ his eyes to adjust to low light by standin’ still while they did. Patience.
A patient man would always be rewarded in the end. He believed that, just was often unable to apply the principle to his own affairs. Within five minutes, was able to see shapes emerge out of the gloom and that was good enough. It was a big storage room with a high ceiling. He spotted a forklift parked nearby and began to make his way down the aisles of boxes and pallets of industrial-size green beans to the glow of light at the other end of the room.
Chapter Fifty-One
“Begone!” Mikhailov shouted at the dragon lumbering down the hallway. “Leave me!”
A bellhop passed by and looked at him when he spoke.
“Kill him,” Mikhailov screamed at the dragon. Now the bellhop walked faster, looking at him the way you looked at a poisonous snake you almost stepped on in your garden.
He continued to issue commands at the dragon.
“Hurt him first. Pull out his guts and make him eat them. Make him chew off his fingers.”
Mikhailov snatched at the glove on his right hand, but it was tight, hard to get off. He wanted to show the bellhop the hideous result of chewing off your own … but by the time he’d removed it, the bellhop was halfway to the end of the hall, looking over his shoulder, his eyes wide with fear.
Holding up the scarred horror of his right hand, he screamed at the bellhop to look, to come and see, but he spoke in Russian. He didn’t mean to, thought the words in English but they came out his mouth Russian.
The bellhop dropped the tray of dishes from somebody’s room service order and bolted through the door marked “stairs” and was gone. The dragon looked at Mikhailov. Mikhailov nodded and the beast followed the bellhop. The dragon would make him pay.
So Mikhailov did still control the beasts after all. He smiled at that. Loosing dragons on the world that you could bend to your will, that was a good thing.
When he breathed out, a tongue of flame left his mouth and heated up the air in front of him.
Oh, my!
How spectacularly glorious! He could breathe fire. He looked at his watch but could not read the dial through the red mist. It didn’t matter. It would be soon, only a few minutes, and after tonight he would not have to employ the Arab gunrunner. He could breathe fire on his own! This was the last time he’d be a spectator. He would watch. Applaud. Laugh at the agony of
his enemies.
After tonight, he would destroy all who opposed him. He would burn them with his breath … starting with the bumpkin sheriff, McGreggor. The blind sheriff. Mikhailov would see how long he could drag out the man’s death, burning him a little at a time.
That was for later, though. Right now, he had a job to do, a show to watch, an enemy to destroy and he must not be late. He felt in his coat pocket for his phone. Abi-Nadir had already programmed into it the detonation number for the devices — one after the other.
The first one … a pause to allow the emotional agony to strike its blow, and then the second. All he had to do was touch the screen lightly and the hateful, hiding witness would die.
It was a shame he had forgotten to bring marshmallows.
Of course, there was no plan Bailey could devise, in ninety seconds or ninety years, that would miraculously whisk María out of harm’s way and stop Mikhailov in his tracks.
She wasn’t a superhero, some secret agent with a black belt in karate and a fountain pen that turned into a bazooka. This wasn’t a movie or a comic book. This was real life. She was a thirty-year-old widow who’d come here with her pitiful little amateur plan, thinking she could outsmart a professional killer, a murderous psychopath. All she’d gotten for her effort was blisters on both heels.
So what could she do? Because she had to do something. She couldn’t just run like María’d said, throw her sister under the bus and condemn Bethany to a lifetime of fear and eventual murder. Bailey would fight to the death to prevent that.
Fight with what? She’d once fought with lumps of coal and had beaten a monster to death.
Her weaponry now consisted of what? Two icepicks and a cap gun.
What else did she have to fight with?
What would T.J. do?
Or Brice?
Think!
But she couldn’t because her mind was in such chaos—
She stopped breathing.
That was it — chaos.
Confusion.
Disruption.
Do something, even if it’s the wrong thing. That’s what T.J. would say. Action is always better than inaction.
When in doubt, do the unexpected. That’s what Brice would do. Kick up dust.
Throw as much mud as you can in every direction and hope some of it sticks.
When Bailey’d heard María’s shout in her head, she had frozen so abruptly in place that an older couple who’d been walking behind her bumped into her.
“Oh, I’m so sorry, dear,” said a white-haired lady with bright blue eyes and skin like cracked porcelain. “I didn’t mean to—”
“Get out of here!” Bailey screamed the words inside her head but her voice said them in something like an urgent whisper.
“I beg your par—” began the old man with a cane at his side.
“Run! There’s a bomb in the restaurant!”
A look crossed over his face Bailey had seen before. It was the one that had been on the face of Macy Cosgrove’s mother when Bailey had tried to get her to run from the flood. Incredulity. Confusion. Disbelief.
All morphing toward anger.
She brushed the sputtering old man aside. Mere words would never work. Her eyes raked the walls of the casino. There had to be one somewhere. It was a requirement. She took several steps, shoving people out of her way, looking around frantically. Desperately.
About thirty feet away a small group of people all moved along together and the red box appeared on the wall behind them.
She ran to it, stumbled into a fat man in a red jacket, spilling his drink on his coat. She banked off him, shoved aside a couple of middle-aged women with badly dyed hair and too much makeup and literally slammed into the wall beside it.
The red fire box was incased in a plastic box that had to be removed.
Pull to open cover, then activate fire alarm.
There were white arrows pointing upwards from the words, apparently indicating what direction you were supposed to pull down. She clawed at the plastic cover, realized she was whimpering.
A man appeared beside her.
“Lady, what are you trying to—?”
Without warning, the plastic cover came open in her hand. An ear-splitting shriek squalled out of the box.
The man leaped back and put his hands over his ears. Bailey ignored the “prank alarm” on the plastic box.
Inside the cover was the red fire alarm box.
Pull down, it said on the lever.
Bailey pulled down.
Chapter Fifty-Two
Brice had walked into the trap like a lamb to the slaughter.
When the man stopped him as he was getting on the launch and said Crenshaw wanted to talk to him, he was too thrilled to be suspicious. He had put the fear of God in Crenshaw and the fear had been eating at his guts ever since Brice left. Apparently, the fear had eaten all the way through his tough-as-rawhide exterior to the coward beneath.
But he was a businessman, and if he had seen Mikhailov in the past month, surely he’d seen signs of his mental deterioration. He’d noticed, alright, but didn’t know what it meant until Brice told him. Now, Crenshaw knew Mikhailov couldn’t be trusted, that whatever business arrangement they’d forged together was about to go seriously south.
And he’d decided to fess up, save his own precious backside and help Brice corner Mikhailov and find María.
Brice believed that lovely little fairytale right up until he stepped into the room where the guy said Crenshaw was waiting to talk to him — privately, away from prying eyes — and found not Crenshaw but two clearly-mafia-esque goons with guns drawn.
One of them was the pockmark-faced man he’d caught a glimpse of in María’s apartment, before the man had shot him. Twice.
He saw recognition on the man’s face, too, behind his blank stare. He knew Brice was “the one that got away.”
Brice was quickly relieved of his weapons, both the one in the holster at his side and the backup on his ankle, and held at gunpoint waiting for … Mikhailov? Of course! Brice’s mind became a washer on spin cycle. He, T.J., Bailey and Bethany had driven from Boston; these guys had flown. But the method of their travel didn’t matter. How they had known where to come did. How had they found out? María couldn’t have told them because she didn’t know.
Maybe that “there’s-no-leak-in-the-U.S.-Marshal’s-office” line was a crock of the warm, sticky substance you found on the south side of a horse going north.
Even that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that Mikhailov was here. Brice was sure of it. If he was here, so was María. He intended to use her as bait for some kind of trap for Bailey.
The mobsters said nothing. Efforts to get information, insight, anything from them were met with a stony silence these guys had perfected over a lifetime. They didn’t give a rip that he was a law enforcement officer. He was prey, their boss was the predator, Brice had been caught and it would likely soon be their jobs to dispose of him.
He’d heard Mikhailov enter the room, had not observed the unwritten rule that you only looked at the boss when he allowed it and was rewarded with a gun to his temple.
The fat guy had jammed something like a nightstick into Brice’s belly when Brice tried to talk to Mikhailov. Then the old man had stood in front of him so clearly losing it that Brice couldn’t believe the guy’s flunkies didn’t pick up on it. Maybe they did, but just didn’t have the guts to do anything about it.
Mikhailov was as monstrous as Bailey had described, all the more chilling for his lack of passion, the offhanded nature of life and death he dealt out on a whim. He’d been like that two years ago. But the old man with white hair who stood before Brice now was even more dangerous than the man who’d shot Bailey’s husband in the street. That man operated with sequential thinking, weighed cause and effect, had reasons — though certainly not justifiable reasons — for doing what he did.
What stood before him now was pure evil wearing a thin veneer of humanity
— like a kid in a Halloween costume.
There was unhinged madness in his eyes, chilling insanity. Mikhailov had said he wanted to know what Brice’s relationship had been with Jessica Cunningham. Had, past tense. Speaking of her as if she were dead.
But she was at that moment under the watchful care of Dobbs and three of his deputies, so what was he talking about?
What was the show he had orchestrated and couldn’t be late for? It had something to do with María and Bailey and that thought froze Brice’s heart in his chest.
As did Mikhailov’s direction to his men to tie Brice up … and blind him.
They’d screwed this up last time. They’d be more careful now. Two of them. One of him.
Not good.
He took note of his jailers as they marched him out of the room. Pock Face was on the right, holding a gun on him. A bald guy walked beside him, armed but his weapon wasn’t drawn.
They began to pass through a labyrinth of interconnected passageways, consulting with each other in Russian at intersections. Brice quickly figured out they were as unfamiliar with their surroundings as he was.
That was good.
He assumed the destination, the room where he was to be tied to a chair, couldn’t be very far away. Once in there, it was over. Escape was only possible while they were en route.
Brice had deliberately raised his hands in the universal “I surrender” position when the man pointed a gun at his back. If the man had known anything about tactical defense, he’d have told Brice to lower them. Apparently, he didn’t.
Now, Brice gradually slowed down. The men behind wouldn’t realize that they were slowly getting closer and closer to him.
“Hey, get the lead out,” Pock Face said. “Move it along.”
Okay, they did notice, were more watchful than he’d hoped. If they noticed the slow-down, they were too observant for him to execute the maneuver he was planning, the one card he had to play. There was only one way to disarm the man holding a gun on him. But Brice would need a distraction — a second of inattention — to pull it off.