by Cross, Mason
She looked taken aback for a moment, probably because she wasn’t expecting her compliant muscle to start calling the shots. She got over it quickly, signaling acceptance with a brief, crooked smile that was the first genuine thing she’d offered since she’d started talking to me.
She pushed off her stool violently and stood up, rolling her eyes in disdain as she walked away. I was happy she hadn’t overdone it by slapping me or maybe yelling. She was much better at acting pissed off than she was at feigning romantic interest.
I watched her go and waited for a few seconds. As I’d expected, the guy in the leather jacket got up from his seat and made a beeline for the corridor. He could read as well as I could. He knew there was a back exit. That’s why he was in the bar while his friends waited out front. He glanced at me as he passed. I pretended not to notice.
I got up and followed behind him as he quickened his pace. The restroom doors were on the left-hand side, and the corridor vanished around a corner to the right, another sign for the fire exit pointing the way.
“Excuse me,” I said.
He started to turn around, and I put all of my weight into a short, rapid punch to the bridge of his nose. He screamed in pain and lunged forward, and I grabbed his head and smashed it down on my knee. He crashed down on the beer-stained carpet, unconscious. I glanced behind me to confirm the yell of pain had been masked by the music and crouched on one knee, patting him down. I found his gun in the inside pocket of his jacket. It was a Heckler & Koch HK45. Close to military spec—definitely trouble. I relieved him of it and tucked it into the back of my belt.
I moved quickly down the remainder of the corridor and found the blonde standing by the open fire exit. Her real name wasn’t Emma, of course. Her real name was Caroline Elizabeth Church. She was twenty-four years old. Her Massachusetts driver’s license listed her as five eleven, brown hair, brown eyes. Two out of three matched up with the person in front of me.
“My car’s around the front,” she said, oblivious to the altercation in the corridor.
“Forget it,” I said.
I took her upper arm and pulled her through the fire exit and into a narrow, dingy alley. Dumpsters lined the wall, trash overflowing from some and strewn across the pitted concrete. The alley terminated in a dead end twenty feet to my right. Fifty feet to my left it opened onto the road that led off the main street out front. The buildings on either side were one- and two-story affairs: the blank rear walls of bars and diners and anonymous office buildings. If we were fast, we could come out on the street, circle the block, and get into my rented Honda without the two guys staking out the bar noticing. Assuming they hadn’t moved from their earlier position, of course.
I started fast-walking toward the street, trusting that Caroline would follow. She didn’t disappoint.
She trotted on her heels until she was abreast of me. “What the hell do you mean forget it?”
The mouth of the alley was still clear. I scanned the low rooftops on both sides. “The two guys out front—who are they?”
“Slow down!”
I stopped and faced her. “Who are they?”
She looked away. “Nobody. Just an ex-boyfriend. He turned kind of creepy. Won’t leave me alone.”
“Just an ex?” I asked, turning to walk again.
Caroline caught up again, surprisingly quick despite her heels. “Yeah. Why?” Curiosity in her voice. She knew I knew she was withholding information and was more interested in how I knew than in keeping her secrets.
“Because standard creepy exes park outside your house and post nasty messages on your Facebook page. If they’re really brave, they might even try to get physical. They don’t generally bring armed flunkies with them. Not unless they happen to have a couple lying around already.”
“Who’s an armed flunky?”
I took the gun out and held it in front of her in my palm. Her eyes widened. “I just took this from the third guy in the bar. The one you didn’t know about. It’s an HK45 Compact Tactical pistol. Costs about twelve hundred bucks. It’s not an entry-level model. Who’s the boyfriend?”
“Oh shit. He said he was gonna kill me, but . . .”
We reached the mouth of the alley. I motioned for Caroline to keep back and kept the pistol low, finger on the trigger. I glanced around the corner and found myself looking down the barrel of another gun.
Which meant another change of plan.
3
Caroline’s ex-boyfriend was the taller one of the two men I’d seen outside earlier. He looked in his mid-to-late forties, but in good shape, with jet-black hair and angular, handsome features. The combination of designer leather jacket, expensive hardware, and the dead, disinterested look in his gray eyes told me everything I needed to know.
He waved us back into the alley, off the street, and told me to drop the gun. I did as I was told. I watched his eyes and saw there was more going on than was first apparent: calculation, deliberation. That was good. It meant I wasn’t dealing with an outright psycho. I slowly raised my hands, taking a second to glance down the street and confirm that he was on his own. I guessed the other one was still covering the front.
“What’s this, Lizzie?” he asked, shooting a glance at the girl with the ever-expanding list of aliases. “New man already?” He spoke with the barest trace of an accent. If I’d had to guess, I’d say Serbian. Factor in his age and willingness to point guns at people, and it seemed like a reasonable bet he was a Kosovo veteran. The voice reinforced my impression of a calm, deliberate man. It also told me that he hadn’t chased Caroline down purely on account of her feminine wiles.
“He’s nobody, Zoran,” she said. “Let him go.”
He didn’t look at her, kept staring at me, and I was pleased to see a hint of consternation on his face. We both had a problem: I was the one with a gun pointed in my face, but he was the one who had to decide what to do about it. An irrational man would shoot me and leave me to bleed on the sidewalk. If my estimation of this man was right, he wouldn’t want to invite the potential consequences of that action, not without good reason at least.
Zoran hadn’t taken his eyes from me the whole time. That was smart, because he hadn’t given me the split second I’d need to take the gun from him. It also meant he hadn’t been able to look down, to examine the gun I’d been carrying and perhaps identify it as the one belonging to his man in the bar. That left open the possibility that he might underestimate me.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Caroline tensing, as though weighing whether she could make a run for it. I hoped she wouldn’t. It would likely be a bad decision for both of us, and particularly for me. No one said anything for a moment. I heard the low rumble of a northbound train on the Tri-Rail line a few blocks over.
“What do you want?” I asked the man with dark hair, fixing my eyes on his so he would know that this was not a rhetorical question. We were just two guys calmly discussing how best to resolve a mutual problem.
Zoran nodded at Caroline Church, still not taking his eyes off me. “I woke up two days ago and she was gone. So was fifteen grand cash from my apartment.”
“Okay,” I said. Then, without turning to Caroline, I addressed her. “Give him your car keys.”
“What?”
“I don’t give a shit about the car, friend,” Zoran said softly. “I just want my money.”
From the tone of his voice, I guessed he was lying and it wasn’t really about the money. Or at least, not primarily. It was about the principle—a man in his position could not be seen to be ripped off in this way.
I nodded in Caroline’s direction. “She spent last night in a hotel on North Andrews Avenue, checked out this morning. If she still has your money, it’s in the red Audi coupe around the front.”
Caroline started to say, “How the hell do you—” then shut up.
And then she ran.
Zoran made a split-second calculation. The choice was staying with me or chasing Caroline. If he stay
ed with me, his money and his opportunity for redress would disappear once again. If he chased Caroline, he’d be leaving me with the gun I’d dropped. He made the smart move, the most ruthless move. But not quite fast enough.
As he pulled the trigger, I was already diving for the pistol.
A .45-caliber slug carved itself into the wall behind where my head had been a moment before. As I hit the ground, I swept the heel of my shoe hard into the back of Zoran’s knee as I simultaneously picked up the gun I’d dropped. His knee buckled, and he fell as my fingers closed around the weapon. He fumbled his grip a little, recovered quickly, and started to bring his gun back toward my face. I smashed his wrist with my left fist as the gun discharged, the loud bang echoing and reverberating from the walls of the alley. Before he could take another shot, I had the muzzle of the H&K pressed into his forehead, equidistant between his eyes. His eyes brightened for a moment in surprise and then narrowed.
“Don’t be an idiot,” I said.
Mere seconds had elapsed since the sound of the gunshot, but I was keenly conscious of two sounds that marked the passage of time: Caroline Church’s footsteps fading into the night and the sound of voices from the opposite direction. Now I was the one with the dilemma. Only that wasn’t quite true. Zoran was the one who was going to dictate what happened: whether he lived or died.
His grip relaxed and the gun dropped from his right hand, smacking on the pitted concrete. A rational man. I gave him an apologetic shrug and slammed the butt of the pistol into his right temple. Nonfatal, but enough to give me time to make a graceful exit. He’d thank me in the morning, once the concussion wore off.
I picked up Zoran’s gun as he dropped to the sidewalk; then I glanced out at the street. Caroline had vanished. If she was smart, she’d forget about the car and the fifteen grand and vanish into the night. But then, her actions so far hadn’t exactly been characterized by an overabundance of good sense.
The shouts from the street were getting closer, and I remembered the third guy, less than a block away, who would certainly have heard the gunshots. And he’d be the only person within earshot who wasn’t using his cell phone to call the cops at that moment.
I pocketed the two H&Ks and moved quickly to the nearest Dumpster, pushing it all the way back to brace it against the stucco wall. Then I pulled myself up on top of it, caught my balance, and jumped vertically. I caught the edge of the roof with both hands and pulled myself up and over the parapet, rolling to my feet. From below, I heard a scream and loud voices. I crouched down and risked a glance over the edge to the alley below. Three people at the mouth of the alley, and one of them was Zoran’s guy—the third man I’d seen outside the bar earlier. The other two were a middle-aged couple, tourists from the look of their clothes. The woman was doing the screaming.
“Oh my God, is he dead?”
The husband was crouched beside Zoran, checking for a pulse. The third guy was looking up and down the street frantically, his right hand jammed deep in the pocket of his coat. I ducked down and crawled back before he looked in the right place. I rose to my feet when I’d gotten far enough from the edge and started running back toward the line of units that housed the bar. The soles of my shoes were virtually soundless on the soft asphalt roofing, weathered by ten thousand sunny days. The roof was a long, flat rectangle, patched haphazardly and spotted with air-conditioning vents. It extended for a couple of hundred yards to the point where it intersected the line of units along the main road, of which the bar was one. Beyond the edge of that block, I could see the upper thirds of the palm trees that lined the road.
I picked up speed as I headed for the end of the roof, calling up a mental picture of the street outside the bar as I ran. I estimated that Caroline’s coupe was parked at around the position of the tallest palm tree in my line of sight. She had a good head start, but I was taking the most direct route.
I covered the distance in seconds, grateful for the explosion of energy after the days spent on planes and in cars and sitting down in bars. I heard the peal of a police siren from somewhere behind me as I reached the edge of the roof and peered over the edge. My estimate had been dead-on. The red car was parked directly below me, and Caroline Church hadn’t reached it yet.
She was approaching fast, though. Running barefoot and carrying her boots in her left hand as she dug the keys out of her bag. I turned and looked the opposite way down the street, expecting the third man to appear at the corner at any moment. Small knots of people were beginning to wander up the side street, drawn to the commotion a little farther up like iron filings to a magnet. No sign of the third guy, though. Not yet.
Caroline Church reached the car and fumbled with the key fob, finally finding the right button that made the lights flash and the locks disengage with a clunk. I took two steps back to give myself room and then launched myself off the roof, coming down on the car’s roof and then sliding off to the sidewalk, between Caroline and the car.
“I’ll drive.”
She caught her breath, looked back up the street the way she’d come, and back to me. She looked irritated. “Who in the hell are you, mister? And how do you—”
“Hey!”
The yell from the other direction snapped my head around. Coming toward us at a run, right hand buried deep inside the jacket pocket, the third man. Obviously, he’d seen what had happened to his boss and had made sure to remove himself from the immediate vicinity before the police showed up.
I swung the door open and plucked the keys from Caroline’s hand as I got inside. I put the keys in the ignition as Caroline got in the passenger seat and slammed the door. The engine purred to life as our pursuer reached us, getting close enough to slap the dented roof before I peeled away from the curb.
I reached across and pushed Caroline’s shoulders down, hunching down myself and snatching glances in the rearview as I accelerated away. The guy was still on the sidewalk where we’d left him. He had not taken the gun out of his jacket. As we hung a left on the first corner, I guessed he didn’t want to push his luck on what had already been a pretty bad night for his team.
I resisted the impulse to floor the gas pedal, even though the streets were quiet. It would take guy number three a couple of minutes to reach his car, if he even had one. By taking a few random turns, I could make sure the trail was nice and frosty by then. The last thing I wanted to do was draw attention to a car leaving the scene of a shooting. I navigated down a series of side roads before finding the South Federal Highway. When we’d put a mile or so between ourselves and the bar, I slowed down and started paying attention to the signs.
“Okay, who the hell are you? Really?”
“I told you.”
“Bullshit. You’re no consultant. And why have you been following me? Are you some kind of stalker? Is this how you get a thrill?”
I saw a sign for the A1A. Fort Lauderdale was brand-new territory for me, but I remembered from the day before that that route would take me where I wanted to go.
“You’re welcome,” I said. “You have a high opinion of yourself, don’t you, Caroline?”
“You know my name? Of course you know my name.” She frowned. “My dad sent you, right? What did he do? Pay you to kidnap me?”
I turned west onto the A1A and kept my eyes on the exit signs. Palm trees lined the route on both sides. Though I couldn’t see it, I knew the Atlantic was dead ahead, beneath a dirty orange night sky.
“I don’t kidnap people. Your father hired me to find you and to give him my assurance that you’re safe. I’m not sure I can fulfill the second part. How about you?”
She said nothing, bit her lip petulantly.
“I’m betting that right now, going back to Boston and your generous allowance seems a little more attractive than it did. Seriously, you ripped off a Florida gangster for fifteen grand?”
“My dad stopped my allowance. A girl’s gotta eat.”
I saw the exit I wanted and came off the highway onto Sebastian Street.<
br />
“You gave a fake name in the hotel last night. The guy who sold you the car didn’t ask to see any ID. That’s good. Did you tell anybody down here your real name?”
She said nothing for a moment, then grudgingly shook her head.
“That’s good,” I said. “If you’re going to lie, be consistent. Okay, I’ll get rid of the car and the guns. Like I said, I can’t tell you what to do, but if you have more than two brain cells to rub together, you’ll be on the first plane back to Boston with your father.”
“My father’s here?” She sounded horrified.
I saw the building I wanted and pulled the car to a stop at the curb, twenty feet from the front door of the Sunnyside Beach Resort. I took my cell phone from my pocket and dialed a number from recent calls. It was answered on the first ring.
“Blake—any news?”
“Mr. Church, I’m outside your hotel with your daughter.” I glanced at her as I said this, half expecting her to make another break for it. Running was what she seemed to do best. But she didn’t make a move, just rolled her eyes as she resigned herself to the lesser of two irritants.
“Thank God. Is she all right?”
“She’s in one piece.”
“Thank God. Thank you, Blake. You’re worth the fee. You say you’re downstairs right now?”
“That’s right. If you want to come down, I’m sure the two of you can work something out.”
“I’ll be down right away.”
I looked back at Caroline Church. I’d known her for all of twenty-five minutes, but already she’d cost me a year’s worth of hassle.
“Make it quick.”
SUNDAY
4
LOS ANGELES
The man in the baseball cap drove on through the night.
The rain had abated an hour before, leaving streets that shone with surface water. The man drove with caution, but not overcaution, aware that he didn’t need to run red lights or exceed the speed limit in order to draw attention to a vehicle like this. All being well, there would be no trouble, though, because fortune favors the prepared mind. The spare had replaced the shredded rear tire, and he’d taken the time to confirm that there was no visible damage to the bodywork and that all of the exterior lights were operational.