by Eric Beetner
Dale nodded, not bothering to answer the rhetorical question. A free pass was not an option. They’d gotten their wish—they made it down to the bottom. Only, this was a little farther than they expected.
Nowhere else to go. This was the final standoff. This would determine if Dale would get a chance to face his fate in court and learn how much this rescue mission had cleared his name. And Lauren would get to confront her dad and go win her prizes and take her new job at CNN.
Dale noticed a box marked Land Mines. Land mines? Tat was just fucking with them now.
CHAPTER 34
“Vehicle approaching, sir.”
Schuster turned and looked back inside the tactical team van. “Where?”
An officer at a video monitor pointed to his screen where a car was turning onto the road leading into the compound. Bad timing. The SWAT team had been deployed and currently lay in wait in a half dozen strategic points near, but not in direct view, of the building. They were armed and waiting for instructions. They had orders to shoot to kill if anyone but Dale and Lauren exited the building.
Schuster hadn’t thought of someone driving in.
“Who is it?”
“Unconfirmed, sir.”
They didn’t look to be speeding. Only the driver was visible.
“Pick them up. Don’t let them get close. We can’t screw this up now.”
Dahlia sat forward in the back seat. “You can get me to see him? Your boss, I mean.”
The driver shook his head, sounded dubious. “I can ask. I doubt you’re gonna get very far with that gun in my back, though.”
“I don’t want to hurt anyone.”
“Shoulda thought of that before you shot that dude in the head.”
Dahlia wondered for a second what the hell the guy was talking about, then remembered in a muzzle flash the inhuman act she’d done. “He was already dead. I just needed you guys to think I was serious.”
“Yeah, well, mission accomplished.”
The car rounded a corner and Dahlia pitched forward as he hit the brakes. Four men stood in the road, cops by the look of it. Dark navy jumpsuits over Kevlar vests. Tactical helmets. Each held a gun out and a hand demanding that they stop.
“What are you doing?”
The driver lifted his hands off the wheel. “When four dudes with guns tell you to stop, you stop.”
Dahlia’s heart rate tripled. Were these more men out to kill her? Her last run in with the police hadn’t gone well. Maybe they were here to finish the job. “Drive through them. Or go around.”
“Look, lady—”
Panic got the better of her. “I’ll shoot you.”
“And you’ll drive from the back seat?”
The four men started approaching. Dahlia hopped on the seat, unsure what her next move should be. The only thing she knew for sure was that she wanted to live long enough to see the baby born. If the day’s weird events hadn’t already killed the child in her womb, she had no intention of rescheduling her appointment. The decision came to her like a bright light in her mind. She wanted this baby. Dale would want it too.
Dahlia stepped out of the car, gun in hand. “All I want is to see my husband.”
The four men stopped, raised their guns, and stood their ground. One of them radioed back for instructions.
“A woman, sir.”
“A woman?” Schuster squinted at the tiny image on the monitor. One of the team’s shoulder-mounted cameras showed a woman now out of the car and brandishing a gun at the team. She hadn’t identified herself or indicated if she had anything to do with Tat, but she was armed and that was a threat. “What does she want?”
“She asked to see her husband, sir.”
“How the fuck is that my problem?”
The team leader lowered his weapon, shifted to hostage tactics. “Ma’am, set the gun down and tell me who your husband is.”
“No. You’ll shoot me.”
“Not if you put the gun down. Let’s see if we can help you. Who is your husband and why do you think he’s here?”
Dahlia pointed her gun beyond the curve of the road to the compound. “Dale Burnett. He’s in there, I think.”
Schuster put a hand to his forehead. “Son of a bitch. Bring her in here. Tell them not to shoot.”
“Ma’am, if you come with me we’ll see what we can do. But put the gun down first.”
One of the men split off and went to the driver’s door to get the man out from behind the wheel. He knew when he was beat so he complied without problem.
Dahlia kept her gun on the men now taking baby steps forward.
“You’re going to take me somewhere and dump my body.”
“No, ma’am. Why would we do that?”
“Do you have any idea the amount of bullshit I’ve been through today? Do you?”
The team advanced slowly, almost invisible to Dahlia. “Let’s get you safe then. In our custody and out of danger, but Mrs. Burnett, you need to drop that gun.”
“The last cop I went to said I’d be safe. The guy who gave me a ride said I’d be safe. My neighbor, Mrs. Joosten said I’d be safe. Why should I believe you?”
“I have no reason to lie to you.”
“Then tell me why they wanted to kidnap me.”
“I don’t know that, ma’am.”
Dahlia felt hot tears brimming her eyelids. No one had answers. Dale had been keeping secrets, now everyone else was too. She was tired of it. If these men were here to kill her, she wasn’t going down without a fight.
“I can’t trust you.”
“I’m going to need you to, ma’am.”
She watched their boots shuffle synchronized steps over the road, moving as one body toward her. The only way she was still alive was by her own wits. Her unwillingness to lie down and let other people dictate her fate. She wasn’t going to give that up in the last stages.
Dahlia lifted the gun and fired.
With practiced efficiency, the four men in the team fired back.
CHAPTER 35
Mayor O’Brien let the car idle as he listened to the phone ring. He’d placed a call to Lewis. Like so many times before, he was the only person to turn to. When his wife wouldn’t do because she needed to be kept in the dark, when other members of his staff wouldn’t do because they weren’t ruthless enough, Lewis was the one to call.
He listened to the third ring, then the fourth, and thought he may have used up his last chance with Lewis.
The phone line clicked. There was a pause. The air crackled between them until finally, “Yes?”
“Lewis. Please. I need to know where to find him. It might already be too late.”
O’Brien could hear the muffled breathing of Lewis struggling through his blood-clogged nose. His career was over, too tied to the mayor’s to do anything but burn from the residual heat when O’Brien went public and let his daughter ruin everything they’d built. They’d be lucky to have the state protect them by putting them in prison out of fear of what Tat and his men would do to them once the operation was exposed. And then, when they were behind bars, they had to pray for a white-collar facility or fall victim to one of Tat’s many minions lurking with shivs and strangulation wires in every max-security cell in the state.
O’Brien listened to Lewis snort a clot of blood up his sinuses, then spit it out into a trash can. “Where are you now?”
O’Brien let go a sigh and felt his body melt into the seat. He described where he was and Lewis told him how to find Roy, but he knew it might be too late.
BASEMENT
Dale had never played shuffleboard, but he thought he might be good at it. He pushed another land mine across the cement floor of the basement and it skidded to a halt within inches of where he wanted it. The thought did cross his mind that he was boxing himself in a corner, but better to be protected while they figured out a plan than to sit around and wait for Tat and his boys to come and get them.<
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It had become too much to remember. Lauren wished she brought her voice recorder, a nifty little tool Arneson gave her when he hired her. She still had so much to learn about reporting. This was looking more like a book than an article, though. If she survived, that is.
Damn, that would have been the way to go. She should have been making notes all along so if they didn’t make it, Arneson could run her diary of the final moments. Shit, no one would believe it.
Now Dale was tossing land mines across the floor like hockey pucks.
There hadn’t been much time to think about her parents. She wondered if they were sitting by the phone waiting to hear their daughter’s fate. Were they holding a press conference? Were they even aware she was missing?
Fighting so hard to survive just so she could go destroy her family as she knew it was a weird feeling. She held a match in her hand and could see the fuse; it was up to her to light it and run. She didn’t know if Mom would be angrier at Dad or at her for exposing him. She’d feel lied to by her husband (nothing new) and betrayed by her daughter (not exactly breaking news there either). Whatever the outcome, Lauren would find out soon enough.
Then there was Dale. This weird guy who seemed to be on some mission of contrition and soul salvation. He was here for her, sort of. More like she’d been a passenger on his own journey down river. He was taking the trip away from, rather than into, his own heart of darkness. She admired that. As much as she could understand it. He was still a crooked cop, still part of the machine she was going to bring down with her reporting. And it still could all fall apart around them in a fiery blaze of land mines and hand grenades.
Yeah, they’d made it to the basement all right. In more ways than one.
Tat’s hand had grown stiff, like a part of his body had already gone rigor mortis. He tried to ignore it while he commanded his troops.
“No shooting, okay? We don’t want the whole place to go up. Unless you have a clean shot. If you can take him or her out, do it. Head shots. No question. I want dead, not wounded. And as much as I’d like to say leave them for me, I know I’m not a hundred percent. Just kill them. I’ll get the next ones.”
A large man to his left, Junior, looked down a row of tall boxes. Guns on the right, ammo on the left. “Don’t the cops know he’s here?”
“If he was here with the cops, where are the rest of them?” Junior shrugged. Tat went on. “He’s trying to be the guy from Die Hard. He’s an idiot.”
The six men surrounding Tat all nodded. “Now lock and load.”
Dale peered around a stack of boxes, looking for a way out. He wondered if there was more money in this room—in the value of arms to the highest bidder—than in the safe room a few floors up. And he wondered who Tat dealt to. A front for a front for a front could lead back to ISIS or something. Dale wouldn’t be surprised, and he doubted Tat would feel any guilt.
These are the men he got in bed with, he accepted money from. Sweet fucking Jesus, where had it all gone so wrong?
He beckoned Lauren close to him. When she came, he whispered in her ear: “I think if we stick to the walls and go along the outside we can make it to the stairs. I see some gaps where we can keep a row of boxes between us and any view. I’m gonna guess he’s going to come more down the center of things.”
“Guess based on what?”
“Based on making myself feel better about a plan. You got a better one?”
Lauren shook her head.
“Okay, so let’s start out—”
The explosion rocked the cinder-block room. Dale’s chest rattled with the concussion and he prepared for a barrage of shrapnel to tear through his body, but none came. He checked on Lauren and aside from looking very freaked out, she seemed fine. He peered around his stack of boxes again.
Midway through the room was a small cloud of black smoke rising to the ceiling. After a delay, a man’s screams started. “Fuck, my legs!”
A land mine. It must have been one of the first ones he laid out, before they started making their retreat deeper into the bowels of the basement. Still, too close for comfort. They needed to move.
Dale put a hand on Lauren’s arm. “We’ve come too far. We’re getting out of here, okay?”
“Okay.” She gave him a look that was equal parts fear and trust. Dale led and Lauren followed.
He started by putting his back to the wall and moving as far as he could until he came to a stack of boxes. He gave a quick look around the edge, then motioned for Lauren to follow. They bent low, not allowing their heads to bob above the line of cover they found behind the row of boxes. Ahead, the maze veered right and dipped away into unknown corners. Each turn could be an ambush, a pit of vipers or one of the land mines Dale himself had tossed. He tried to remember where he put them all, but the jumble of crates and narrow passages made it impossible. He tried his best to keep one eye on the floor and one eye ahead where he knew Tat and his men waited.
The screams faded as help arrived for the wounded man. His cries went muffled as a hand obviously went over his mouth. Dale kept moving forward, Lauren at his heels.
He was trying to stick close to the wall, to follow the line of the building to loop them around to an eventual staircase. He knew it was a good possibility Tat had ordered a man to stay there and watch the potential escape route. Dale told himself this was the same as it was upstairs. If a man aims to do you harm, you must shoot first. His old partner his first years on the beat lived by the adage: when in doubt, take him out.
Lauren had never been claustrophobic but being underground gave her an uneasy feeling. Something about being up high made escape seem much more tangible. Down in the basement she felt that much closer to being in a grave.
Dale was moving fast up ahead, snaking along the disheveled rows of crates. Arms dealing was a part of Tat’s business she’d been unaware of. She wondered if some of his South American suppliers got paid in guns and grenades. Not that he didn’t have enough cash on hand. She saw that for herself, and as impressive as this stockpile of arms was, it didn’t compare to the stacks of cash upstairs. Why the hell hadn’t she brought a camera?
Oh, yeah. Because Tat and his men stripped her of everything she came in with.
A bullet splintered a crate next to Lauren’s head. She threw her hands up and ducked lower, not bothering to look for land mines as she dove for the floor.
Dale was beside her in an instant. The single shot had pierced an unmarked box. Dale searched for the shooter but saw nothing.
“You get her?” The goons were communicating in shouts from their different hiding places.
“Not sure.”
Dale wanted to yell out, to let them know they’d missed, but he didn’t want to give away their position. He bent down and put a hand under Lauren’s arm. “Let’s move.”
Tugging her along, Dale resumed his wall-hugging escape route. He rounded one jutting stack of boxes and turned again to the left to rejoin the wall and found himself facing one of Tat’s men.
The man raised an arm, caught off guard by the sudden visitors. He leveled his gun at Lauren’s face. She froze momentarily, caught in the proverbial life flashing before her eyes.
Dale flung his arm up, catching the barrel of the gun with his forearm and bumping the pistol toward the ceiling as it went off. The flash of heat from the gun singed his arm hair, but the bullet sailed north of Lauren’s skull by inches.
Dale was in close. He could smell the gunpowder and the sweat on the man in front of him. He could grapple the man down to the floor, disarm him, hope for the best. But now was not the time for hope.
His arm stayed bent as the gun came up. Dale couldn’t straighten his shooting arm with the man so close. He shoved upward, pushing the barrel into the soft flesh under the man’s jaw. Without thinking—he fired.
The Desert Eagle was a powerful gun. The man’s head jerked back and the crates behind him were painted red. The man went limp instantly an
d he fell away, the top of his head down to where his skull met spinal cord was gone, evaporated in a rain of red splatter.
As if roused from a nightmare, Lauren jerked the trigger on her own pistol and shot the man as he fell. A token gesture to her own near death.
The sudden exchange of gunfire alerted the rest of Tat’s crew to their location and Dale heard footsteps coming. Dale took up Lauren’s arm again and started a retreat, backing down the aisle in the direction they came.
The dead man’s body hit hard against a tall stack of boxes and the tower tilted forward. Already Dale and Lauren’s backs were to it, but the five-high stack of crates tipped and fell. A set of thundering footsteps rounded a corner in time to see the boxes fall. He wasn’t in time to see the black letters stamped on the side: Grenades. Nor was he in time to see the land mine Dale had skidded across the floor earlier laying in the path of the falling boxes.
When the crates landed, the land mine went off. The explosion shook the building and took out both legs of the man fast approaching. Before he could stop his legs from moving, he was amputated below the knee. The electronic message of pain had barely made it to his brain when the first box exploded. A dozen hand grenades went off all at once.
Dale had put two stacks of boxes between them and the carnage behind. They felt the concussion like the ground had risen up to pound them on the back. Both Dale and Lauren stumbled forward but kept moving.
Several residual explosions popped like aftershocks of an earthquake. The sole eyewitness to the explosions had been reduced to a puddle of liquid and shards of bone.
Concrete dust shook loose from the walls and ceiling. The room was packed too tightly to echo. The sound of falling debris and settling shrapnel went on for longer than Dale imagined.
“Who’s still with me?” Tat’s voice called out from ahead of them, in the direction they were heading. He was near the back of the room where Dale and Lauren started from. Dale reversed course again and marched toward the explosion. He figured they wouldn’t look for them in that mess.