by Seth Harwood
Al runs over to a silver Porsche Cayenne as soon as he sees it. Vlade raises his eyebrows at Niki, but Niki shakes his head. When they tried the booster in Chicago, it worked on a ’97 Dodge, but anything after 2000 hasn’t worked. In addition, as Niki gets closer to the car, he sees it’s a Turbo. A Sport model, maybe they could get away with, but a Turbo’s enough extra money that any alarm on it will be better than the equipment they have without any doubt.
Even another rental, an Escalade or possibly something smaller, would do them better than setting off a whole garage worth of alarms. The truth is, just one alarm in this garage will keep them from getting out clean—maybe even getting out at all. Finally Vlade walks over to a midsize VW sedan—enough car to get them around and not enough to have a fancy alarm they can’t break.
Niki nods as Vlade takes the scrambler out of their duffle and points it at the VW. It makes a series of clicks and squeals, then stops. This is where the doors are supposed to pop open on their own if the scramble works. The locks don’t pop. Vlade and Niki look at each other.
“We should just take the Cayenne,” Al says. “What if we have to get out of somewhere very fast?”
Niki walks toward a less conspicuous car: a blue Honda minivan. He goes right up to the driver’s side and jams the slim jim into the window, just between it and its rubber guide.
“Odyssey,” Vlade says, standing at the back of the car.
Al knocks on one of the sliding side doors. “Good for the drive-by,” he says.
Niki gets the slim jim down and starts fishing for the lock release. In his old days, he’d do this in the streets in Prague and never take more than ten seconds. Now, he’s slowed down, lost some of his touch; it’s a good thing they’re in a quiet garage. He finds the bolt of the lock and pulls up on it hard, feels the slim jim’s hook slip off it. Then he pushes it down again and catches the release clean on the second try. The door’s lock pops up in front of him.
Vlade elbows Al out of the way to get to Niki. He points the scrambler at the car. It squeals and makes a few clicks, then makes a muffled ring. “No alarm.” Vlade shakes his head. Niki opens the door, crawls under the steering column, and he’s got the engine started in under a minute. Europe or not, he still knows his wiring, and this thing’s barely a challenge.
Vlade gets in on the passenger side, and Al sits in the back behind the tinted windows. Niki doesn’t like him in the back with the duffle of guns and his ideas about drive-bys; he drags the bag forward in between the two front seats. In a few minutes, they’re at the exit gate of the garage, where Niki hands the parking stub to the attendant, then agrees when the attendant calls him Mr. Barry and asks him if he’d like to charge the parking to his room.
“Absolutely,” Niki says in his best American accent.
After that they’re on the street and headed downtown. Vlade enters the address Gannon gave him into the van’s navigation system, and Niki follows the directions as it speaks.
“Call Palms,” Al says.
“No.” Vlade shakes his head. “Gannon said that he is with Akakievich. If she is right, then he will not answer his phone.”
“What do we do?”
“We go to find him. And then we make Akakievich beg.”
26
The Visual
Without Jack, Shaw watched the scene in the lobby and then approached Jane when the Russians and Jack had gone. Like a good federal agent, Jane had her car parked close by, and so they were able to trail Akakievich’s Hummer. The follow wasn’t hard, especially for a fed trained in ten years of surveillance. Got to hand it to Jane Gannon for that.
They got confused when it looked as if the H2 was heading for the Bay Bridge, but hanging back, the switch to Mission wasn’t a hard one. Things started to get weird when they crossed over Mission Creek and, in the flats of Mission Bay South, they had to park well away from the Russian’s building to avoid being seen.
They’ve been waiting in the car, watching the building for close to twenty minutes, when Shaw decides he’s had enough.
When it comes down to it, he just wants to go in. Either the two of them together, or he’ll go in alone and kill those Russian fucks—or die trying. In twenty minutes there’s no telling what they might have done to Jack. But Jane wants them to have more guns, backup, even in the form of some crazy-ass Czechs.
That they’re not going to wait for the actual FBI boys, Shaw can’t believe. On one hand, crooked or not, the FBI should have the best trained men around. On the other hand, the way Niki handled that Escalade in traffic, even took it down those stairs without hesitation, the clean and cared for condition of his weapon, all of these make Shaw willing to work with him again. Call it a feeling, a congeniality, or whatever. He knows Niki is a good man to have in your foxhole. Vlade might even be too.
Al? Al he’d just as soon throw off a bridge than go into this warehouse with him.
But when she called Vlade and told him where they were, that’s when Shaw knew exactly how fucked up this whole thing had gotten. For a federal agent to call in suspected drug smugglers and dealers who are defected agents of a once foreign superpower’s secret intelligence force, to do this because the local police and the rest of her FBI unit are so corrupt she can’t trust them, then this must be the law enforcement apocalypse.
At least in San Francisco.
Shaw’s wanted by the cops, his face has been flashed on the news as a criminal, and there is no going back. Dirty or legal or illegal, the rules are gone; this is the time of us versus them—your friends and your enemies and just a bunch of guns that do the separating. The black hard truth is that this was how things used to be when Shaw ran a Special Ops unit for the Pentagon, and so he’s not even that surprised or upset by it. The craziest part of the whole thing is that this shit makes him feel the most like himself, at home in his body, and as one with the world.
That’s not something you come to grips with or ever get happy about.
He wakes up every morning and tells himself life is special, looks in the faces of his wife and two kids and tells himself he should be happy to be alive; he tells himself their lives would be worse without him. And yet he doesn’t feel anything like that. The worst part is that he doesn’t feel a thing.
Shaw waits with Gannon and watches as the other black Hummer shows up and three more Russian fucks get out and go inside the old building. That makes at least six guys and Andre, Alexi’s sick right-hand fuck, inside the building. Seven. And Alexi’s the guy who’ll be more pissed at Jack than anyone else. Shaw’s got a hunch that taking a guy’s BMW M6, a hundred-thousand-dollar car, and smashing the shit out of it against a few garage walls, like Jack did, is going to piss a guy off—even if the guy should really be pissed at Tom Gannon for shooting it up.
Shaw starts locking and unlocking his door. “This is bullshit, Jane. We have no idea what they’re doing to Palms in there. They could be butt-fucking him with a shotgun right now.”
Jane Gannon winces. “Thanks for that visual, Officer. But do you really think it makes sense for us to go in alone?”
Shaw takes his weapon out of the harness and checks it again. There is no sense anymore, he knows. No right and wrong, just do and do not do.
“I’m going.”
They hear the scream of a man from inside the building, and Shaw tells Gannon that she can fuck the whole operation, that he’s going in and to call his wife to tell her he loved her if he doesn’t come back.
He opens the door and stands up from her car. Then he leans back in and says, “Tell her I loved my kids too.”
She tries to stop him for a moment and then gives up. “Fuck it,” she tells him. “You want to go, then go.”
“OK.”
Shaw moves from the car and sprints to a dumpster on the other side of the street. He crouches behind it, takes one last look back at Jane—she checks her phone—and then ducks around its far corner toward the building. If anyone watching fr
om inside sees him, he’s all but fucked—or butt fucked.
He comes around the side of the dumpster and makes a sprint across the open parking lot to Akakievich’s building. There’s no other way to come up on it than to just run across the parking lot hoping they aren’t looking.
Maybe waiting and getting reinforcements might work for Gannon—that’s what they teach you in the FBI—but in his world, you got a friend inside hostile territory, which this building definitely is, then you get his ass out. The scream is all Shaw needs to be reminded of that.
So when he hears a second scream come the moment after he reaches the side of the warehouse, he chambers a round into his Beretta and makes for the front door. That’s when he hears a single gunshot, the sound of a .38 revolver.
27
Triple Dose
Jack comes to when a Russian, whether it’s Ivan or Sasha he can’t tell, slaps him across the face with a wet towel. The first thing he notices when he opens his eyes is that he’s sitting and his shoulder hurts—his good shoulder. He’s got his arm stretched out in front of him and he can’t move it. Across from where he sits, he sees a bed angled up toward him, a bed with a whole lot of blood on it: the pillow’s a mess with blood, some caked onto it, some fresh, and there’s what looks to be something worse than blood, something slippery and alive in the middle of the sheets.
This is when Jack recognizes Mills Hopkins’s voice. “Jack,” it says. “Jack, kill me.”
And it all comes clear sickeningly fast: Mills’s face in the middle of the pillow, his temples black from where it looks like they’ve been burned, his mustache above a gash that looks like where there were once lips are now just bloody, dry sores. In the middle of the hollows below his forehead are two small, red eyes. He looks like he hasn’t been eating. Below the neck, Mills’s collar bones stand out in stark relief, roughly bursting from his skin. One of them reveals a rough, dark wound in the middle of it, black almost, that must be where Mills was shot with the .50 cal. The wound appears to have a shiny ointment spread all over it. Jack’s not sure, but it almost seems like he can see a piece of the sheet through this gash, the hole from where the .50 slug went through. Below that, his chest has a thick dark strap across it, one that looks like it’s been there for a long time. Some of the blood is dried and caked to it. Below that one are two others across Hopkins’s thin body.
“Jesus.” It comes out of Jack’s mouth before he can even think, and yet it makes sense as a kind of cop’s resurrection has taken place here. “How are you still alive?”
Mills’s eyes shut slowly, his dark lids falling, his eye sockets going fully gray, then they open and Jack can see his eyes: small, yellow, bloodshot. Where once the man had a thick, round face, he’s now gaunt, angled, like something out of a cubist painting.
“What the fuck?” Jack says.
To his left, Alexi starts to laugh. Jack notices why his shoulder’s bothering him: his wrist is cuffed into a metal shackle in front of him, his arm stretched straight out, and he’s not sure how long he’s been like this. The shackle is supported by a stanchion, something like a mic stand bolted to the ground. Jack can’t move his arm or pull his hand out.
When the triple dose of Vicodin kicked in with the burns on his arm, it appears he fell asleep. But for how long? His left arm is still in its sling, but this is trapped under a leather strap that’s wrapped around his body. He can’t move his head; it’s locked into place by what feels like a strap pulled tight around his forehead.
“Mills.”
“You—” His voice is scratchy, barely more than a whisper. It’s clear he has to struggle to be heard. “—call this alive? These fucks—”
The Russian who slapped Jack in the face to wake him slams a left jab into Jack’s ribs. Jack coughs and his mouth tastes of metal, probably blood. The other Russian thick-neck, Jack sees it’s Sasha, hits Mills across the chest with a thick belt. Mills barely makes a sound. As it dangles by Sasha’s side, Jack can see it’s the buckle end he’s using to hit Mills.
“Yes, Jack. Your friend, Mills. He is dead but I keep him alive.” His lower lip sticks out of his beard, a red frown in the midst of the wiry hair. “But he is not even alive, anymore. He has the addiction now that would turn him to paste on the streets. Bring him back to his wife like this and see what she says.”
Akakievich gestures toward a short metal table and a tray full of syringes. “His is even worse than yours, Jack. Worse even than you will have before I kill you.” Alexi picks out a syringe and holds it up toward Jack. He presses the plunger and a quick stream of liquid, just a short burst, spurts up. “Yes, Jack. These are your old friends. Welcome back to your addiction.”
Freeman’s voice booms from behind Jack. “You best listen to this fuck, Jack.” He rolls forward in his wheelchair, comes up next to Jack, his face close to Jack’s face. “Motherfucker will take you back to the stone age,” he says softly. “Look at your boy Mills’s hands.”
He looks down at the middle of Mills’s body, sees the arms pinned close to his body by another thick strap. Below the elbows, neither of Mills’s hands have their thumbs; they’re just four-fingered claws now, not even hands. The stumps of where the thumbs had been are just wide red wounds: part scab and still part blood.
“This you like?” Akakievich raises Jack’s chin roughly with his hand, points Jack’s face toward his own. “This is what I will do to you too, Jack Palms.” He raises his eyebrows.
Jack doesn’t respond. He doesn’t say anything because he’s still looking at Mills Hopkins, trying to believe that this mixture of man and bed is the cop he once thought of as a friend.
The Russian with the good jab, Ivan, puts a silver .38 revolver into Jack’s hand, the one that’s two feet in front of Mills’s face. He squeezes Jack’s fingers around the handle and one finger onto the trigger of the cold metal, the weapon pointed at Hopkins’s forehead. Jack can’t move his hand.
“You take this gun, Jack Palms,” Akakievich says. “Show us that you are not afraid to put your friend out of his misery, that you are not afraid to end his pain.”
Mills’s eyes close. He tries to close his mouth, to wrap what’s left of his lips around his teeth, but Jack realizes he no longer has enough lips to even close his mouth; his teeth are now his mouth.
“You—” Jack starts but he doesn’t want to say it, to ask.
“What, Jack Palms?”
“You cut off his lips?”
“Oh yes. That was just for fun. I let Andre do that.” Alexi throws back his head, roar with laughter.
Beside Jack, Freeman says, “Tip of the iceberg, man. This fucker does much worse shit.”
Akakievich bends down toward Jack, speaks with his face right alongside Jack’s. “Show me that you are more than actor, Jack, so I can see it with my own eyes. I want to see you shoot this gun. Show me you are the action man who took my girls. Show me you want to play in this game.”
Jack tries to pull his hand out of the cuff and can’t. The metal is locked tight around his wrist; as long as he holds the gun, his hand is too big to pull out of the shackle.
“See this, Jack?” Freeman whispers. “This is the shit I told you not to play in. And you didn’t listen. You had? Who knows? Probably all three of us be better off.”
Jack tries letting go of the gun, and the Russian jabs him again in the ribs.
Alexi clicks his tongue against his teeth, scolding. “No, Jack. You do not want to drop that gun. Listen to my proposition first. Then you will make decision.”
“And I’ll fucking shoot you,” Jack says.
“Here are your choices. You can shoot your friend here, end his pain, or you can drop the gun and pull your arm out. But—” Jack starts to let go of the gun again and Alexi grabs his hand, holds it around the gun. “But if you drop the gun, we will give this needle to your arm, Jack Palms. We will fill you with your old friend, the drugs.” With his other hand Alexi shows Jack the needle, b
rings it alongside his face and drags the tip down his cheek. Jack winces; it feels like Alexi might be cutting him with it, or maybe it just fucking hurts. But Jack thinks it feels like a cut.
Alexi breathes deeply. “Ahh, yes. That hurts, no?”
“And if I shoot him?”
Mills’s eyes are trained on Jack. Now that he sees they’ve cut off Mills’s lips, Jack knows part of why it hurts him so much to talk. Above his teeth, Jack can see the start of Hopkins’s gums. Even though it’s only been a few days that Akakievich has had him, Hopkins’s life will never be the same; his body is irreparably fucked up. Without moving the cracked sores on his face, or trying not to, Mills says, “Do it, Jack. Kill me.”
“If you shoot him, he will die.” Alexi puffs his lips out at Jack and shrugs. “He dies. You hold the gun. Maybe we will let you use it to kill Freeman Jones next.”
“The fuck—” Freeman starts to wheel himself away from the rest of them, and Ivan catches his chair, holds him where he is. When Freeman tries to push Ivan away with his good hand, the Russian pulls a revolver on him and holds it in his face.
“Ahh, yes. We are all one happy family now. Let us sit here and make this decision. What will you do?”
Akakievich brings the point of the syringe toward Jack’s arm, teases the spot of the worst burn with its tip, picking at the fresh scab. He slaps the inside of Jack’s forearm, just below the elbow, as if he’s looking for a vein. “Do you feel it, Jack? Do you feel your body calling out for its old friend?” He watches Jack’s eyes, waiting for an answer, and Jack does his best not to look at his arm, his best not to look at whether there’s a ready vein sticking out, screaming for the needle.
“Maybe just a taste?” Alexi brings his eyebrows together. “Just a little reminder, Jack?” He pushes the needle against Jack’s arm, denting the skin just above a blue vein. And then it goes in.