Burned Bridges

by A. J. Stewart

  “Just us,” said the guy.

  “Who is us?”

  “Me and Cust. That’s it.”

  “Two of you?”

  The guy nodded to the extent he could lying on the ground. Flynn lifted the concrete chunk higher and poised it ready to slam into the guy’s face.

  “I swear, just us. Me and Cust. That’s it.”

  Flynn had more questions, but now was not the time. He had the tactical advantage and he planned to use it. There would be time for questions later. He grabbed the little guy by the shirt and picked him up and flopped him over. Pulled the coat off him like he was skinning a beast. Left him in just a T-shirt. He put his boot into the middle of the guy’s back and rifled through the pockets of the coat. Found some gum and a cell phone. The phone was a basic model. He knew them well. Prepaid, and if done right, untraceable. He slipped it in his pocket.

  He threw the coat to the two men watching him quietly nearby, sipping the whiskey Flynn had given them. Then he reached into his pocket and pulled out a plastic tie that he had gotten from Hutton. It was thick plastic, hard but flexible. He looped it around the guy’s wrists and pulled tight. The tie bound his wrists together and he groaned as it dug into his skin. Flynn lifted him again, like a big bag of rice. Dropped him against the wall of ivy that marked the rear of the lot. The ivy hid another chain-link fence. Flynn got on his knee and saw the markings on the guy’s arm. Tattoos. Not designs he knew, exactly. But he knew the type. He pulled the guy’s other arm out and saw more ink. Different markings. Much poorer quality. Like the tattooist had been drunk. He knew that type too.

  Flynn used another plastic tie to bind the cuff around the guy’s wrists to the fence. He could pull and pull and never break the plastic. He’d cut his wrists off first. Flynn stood over the guy and looked at the two homeless men.

  “Can you guys watch this one for me? I’ll be back shortly for him.”

  “You got it, mister.”

  “If he starts making too much noise, feel free to slap him around.” Flynn raised his eyebrows at the little guy. The guy didn’t move. The inside of his mouth was bleeding, and his already limited cognitive function was further impaired. He wasn’t going anywhere. Flynn nodded at the two homeless men.

  “Thanks for the drink, mister.” The man held up the bottle of Irish whiskey. Flynn nodded. Then he turned and walked away. He ventured off the path into the knee-high grass and made a wide berth around the four men and their open fire. Such was his instinct. He opened his phone as he walked, and called Hutton.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  “All good. One down. There’s only one to go. The guy in the car.”

  “There are only two?”

  “Amateur hour. You find a spot?”

  “Yes. One block east, two blocks south.”

  “Let’s do it.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  The driver was getting twitchy and he understood the irony of it. But his partner had been gone too long. It was a vacant lot. What was there to see? A few bums standing around a fire. And the guy. Either he was there or he wasn’t there. One or the other. It didn’t require a high school diploma. Then the driver got really twitchy.

  The woman came back. The one who had been with the target. Hutton. He recognized the scarf and the hair. Not manly exactly, but not sexy all the same. She walked like she took no nonsense. Fast and angry. The way women walk when they stride a little too long and flail their arms right through their full rotation, front to back. Power walking. Like she was full of opinions that the driver didn’t want to hear. She strode right up to the vacant lot. Stood for a moment with her hands on her hips and then slipped through the fence and out of view.

  She was gone no more than a minute. She pushed her way back under the hole in the fence and then stood on the sidewalk. She looked both ways, east first, then west toward the driver. Then she snapped back around and looked east again. Searching for something. Or someone. She pulled out a cell phone and put it to her ear and then started pacing. Up and down. Five paces one way, five paces the other. She stopped and looked at the screen of her phone as if it were malfunctioning. Then she held it to her ear and paced again.

  This time her mouth was moving. The driver was no kind of lip reader, but he knew what pursed lips meant. She was angry. She spoke, and then she seemed to listen. She glanced into the vacant lot and said something more. Then she shoved her phone back into the pocket of her coat. And she turned on her heel and stormed away.

  The driver watched her and then looked at the section of the vacant lot he could see. There was no movement. No one came out. Not his twitchy partner, not the target. No one. The woman kept going toward the end of the block. The driver gripped the steering wheel hard. Where was his partner? Where was the target? Where was the woman going?

  He watched the woman turn right, down the cross street and out of view. Behind the building that sat next to the vacant lot. Then the driver began to panic—the vacant lot had another way out. He started the Yukon and pulled slowly by the lot. He passed the chain-link fence and the section that had been pulled open and was curled up like a mouth. Beyond the fence was darkness. Nothing to see. No movement. No way to tell if it was bricked in by its neighbors or if there was another fence back there, opened like another mouth, out onto another street.

  The driver kept going. He turned right. The street was quiet. Vehicles parked along both sides of the road. Hard to see the woman, but he picked her up nearing the end of the block. He eased off the gas as she waited for the light at the crosswalk. She crossed over the next street that took traffic back to the west side of the island. He struggled to find the burner phone in his pocket. Pulled it out and looked at the small display that told him there were no calls. He couldn’t call his partner. If he was still following the target, that might blow his cover.

  The woman reached the end of another block and turned east and crossed the street in front of the driver. She didn’t look back at the Yukon. Her eyes were firmly on the blacktop in front of her. She strode behind the corner building. The driver tapped the gas to move to the intersection. Reached it and looked east and saw the woman less than half a block away. Fortunately the street she was on was an easterly thoroughfare. He turned a wide left to get a better view. The woman walked by a streetlight. Moving purposefully now but not as fast. As if the anger inside was abating. She moved into a dark section of the sidewalk. No streetlights.

  She didn’t come out.

  The driver instinctively took his foot from the gas pedal and coasted forward. As he reached it he realized that the sidewalk was dark because it crossed a laneway. Not a posted road, not a city responsibility. A private lane. Perhaps for delivery access to the buildings either side. He was wary. Lanes were dark and tight. But he was in a big SUV. A Detroit tank. He flicked his headlights off and checked his mirrors and saw nothing behind, so he pulled across the traffic lanes and into the alley.

  It was pitch black. There was no sign of the woman. There was no sign of anything. Perhaps he had been mistaken. Perhaps she had walked on and he had missed her. Then he brushed the thought away. She hadn’t walked on. She had gone down the alley. He was certain of it.

  He looked in his mirror again and saw the yellow glow of the street behind him. He wondered if the woman had gone into one of the buildings. He couldn’t see any doors. He couldn’t see anything. He needed to see. He put his hand on the headlight switch. Hesitated a moment and then flicked it on. The alley burst into light. And he saw the woman. She was standing in the middle of the alley.

  She was looking straight at him.

  Chapter Sixteen

  The driver hesitated. That was his first mistake. He thought about reversing straight out of the alley. But he found his hand had moved to the console between the bucket seats, where he had dropped the burner phone. He picked it up and glanced at the small screen and clicked on the second of two numbers and let it ring. He jinked his head to the right to hold the phone between his
jaw and shoulder, and put his hand up to the gear selector on the steering column. Gave it a hard thunk into reverse.

  The phone was cheap and the call answered hollow in his ear. He pressed his jaw harder into his shoulder.

  “Hang on,” said the voice.

  The driver hesitated again. That was his second mistake. He kept his foot firmly on the brake pedal, phone cradled to his ear, the woman standing in the headlights in front. Hang on was not the response he had expected.

  “What?” he replied.

  All he heard was a loud cracking sound.

  Flynn stayed in the shadows. Followed the Yukon following Hutton. Saw the Yukon pull a wide left turn into the alley. That was the spot. That was where Hutton had led him. Now he moved fast. He had reached the corner of the alley when the phone in his pocket rang. Not his phone. The burner. He pulled it out, flipped it open. He knew who was calling.

  “Hang on,” said Flynn.

  Six long paces from the sidewalk, he was in the alley and at the rear bumper of the Yukon. The driver had made many mistakes. He had driven into a dead end with only one way out. Flynn didn’t know the alley. In theory it might not have been a dead end. But he did know Hutton, and he knew she would make it so. The Yukon driver had ensured his defeat by charging into the small space and then blazing his headlights. All pretense of tailing his quarry had gone out the window. He was made. And in the process, his headlights had blinded him to the only place an attack could come from.

  The rear.

  Flynn let go of the little guy’s phone as he reached the rear tires of the truck. Let it drop from his hand to the blacktop. It made a hollow plastic thunk. It wasn’t likely to have broken. It wasn’t a big fall, and in his experience cheaper phones were often hardier than the expensive ones with glass screens and expensive casings.

  His only concern was the door. If it was locked, things would get difficult. But he wasn’t overly concerned. People didn’t lock their cars when they were in them. It was as if they sat in some impenetrable bubble. But carjackings happened every day, in every city of the world. So newer models did the job for the driver. Once the accelerator was engaged, the doors would lock themselves. But not in a truck that had to be fifteen years old. The Yukon was old school, and the driver would have to do it himself. And if the tattoos on the driver’s little friend told Flynn anything, they told him these guys thought they were tough guys. Flynn knew a lot of tough guys. A lot of tough guys joined the French Foreign Legion. A lot of tough guys failed to make it through training. And those guys, just like the driver of the Yukon, didn’t lock their doors.

  Flynn timed his movement like choreography. It was practiced. Not this move specifically, but the idea of it. He had learned how to move, how to box, from his father. He had learned how to fight dirty in the Legion. Then he had learned how it all fit together from an Israeli officer on the West Bank.

  His right foot landed just before the door. Not too close and on the ball. He reached forward and grabbed the handle on the door with his left hand. Pressed and pulled at the same time and yanked the door open hard. His right foot pivoted as the door flew open, and his body spun with the centripetal motion so he was looking at the driver over his right shoulder.

  He let go of the door and it continued on its arc, falling wide open. Flynn continued on his arc, rotating at his core, letting his left shoulder move away and his left arm cock and his left hand ball into a fist.

  The plan always went to hell as soon as the boots hit the ground. That was Colonel Laporte’s theory, one that he had acquired from Napoleon, who had probably stolen it from someone predating him. In Flynn’s experience it was universally true, and no less so now. Often things got a lot harder than the plan had ever foreseen. Sometimes the opposite. Flynn had assumed that a few punches would be required. He anticipated and planned one, two, three shots to the face, right at the nose. He had left the concrete chunk back in the lot, and he didn’t like using the butt of his Glock. It was as hard as a rock, but in close combat a gun could get dropped—or lost. Sometimes the other guy ripped it away. Flynn had never stared down the barrel of his own weapon, and he wasn’t planning on trying it.

  So it would be his fist. Hard and savage and designed for maximum impact. It would have to be his left hand. His dominant hand. He had learned to shoot right-handed because that’s how most guns were designed. Not such an issue with a pistol, but the ejection port on a Remington rifle spat hot spent shells that had burned his arm the first time he had tried to shoot it left-handed. So he’d gone the other way with shooting—but not with a baseball pitch and not with a punch.

  Plastering a guy’s nose all over his face usually had the desired effects. Shock and disorientation. So he spun and cocked his arm and looked at the driver and saw that the plan had changed completely and the whole thing was going to be a lot easier than he thought.

  The driver was leaning right. His head was cocked toward the interior of the truck. Flynn assumed the phone was tucked in there, between the lower mandible and the collarbone. So his reaction to the door opening was to spin around. His head jerked left and the phone fell from his shoulder and he tried to move his focus from the front of the Yukon, where Hutton stood, to the more immediate danger of the opening door.

  He didn’t quite make it.

  Doctors called it rotational force. Flynn had learned about it after a transport he was in was blown up by an IED in Burkina Faso. It was some kind of prehistoric thing, an evolutionary quirk, like having eyes in the front of the head, rather than the sides. More subjects became unconscious from side impacts because the head wasn’t designed for them. That was the working assumption, according to the doctor in Burkina Faso. The brain bounced off the side of the head with maximum force. The doctor said the worst was rotational force. When the head was moving one way and the impact was the other way. For example, turning to see who had opened the door of your truck, spinning your head left and getting a massive fist into your chin as you did. Two opposing forces, one winner.

  Flynn’s punch drove into the driver’s chin and continued through, snapping his head both up and away. Circuit overload. The brain bounced and the synapses fired in disarray and the whole thing went into reboot. The driver was unconscious before Flynn had finished his follow-through. He flopped sideways toward the console between the seats, and his right foot slipped off the brake pedal. With reverse gear engaged, the Yukon moved backward. Not fast. There was no great acceleration. But the truck was determined to follow the transmission’s command and get out of the alley.

  Flynn didn’t want that. He didn’t want to do what he needed to do sitting perpendicular across a Manhattan street. He gripped the back of the driver’s seat with one hand, and the door frame with the other, and pulled both feet off the ground. Slammed his right foot onto the parking brake pedal in the footwell. The Yukon jerked to a halt like it had been shot.

  He moved fast. He didn’t know if the driver would be out for five seconds or five minutes or forever. Knocking a guy out was an inexact science. It was dangerous. An event that should result in a cumulative effect to the brain could just as easily be catastrophic. A punch might only stun one guy but kill another.

  First thing Flynn did was flick the headlights off. Better for night vision, and better not to attract the attention of passing vehicles. Then he pushed the gear stick into neutral and dropped back to the blacktop. He passed Hutton at the front bumper without a word. Ran around the truck and opened the rear door on the passenger side and jumped up and in. He grabbed the driver under his arms and pulled him back onto the rear seat. He wasn’t wearing a seat belt, but he was dead weight, so it took some doing. He got the driver’s back onto the seat by stepping out of the truck himself. Hutton jumped up into the driver’s seat and flopped his legs over the seat back. The guy came to rest half on the rear seat and half on the floor. It wouldn’t have been a comfortable position had he been awake to feel it.

  Flynn slammed the rear door home and opened
the front door and jumped in. Hutton punched the gear into reverse and was moving backward out of the alley before she pulled her door closed. The Yukon hit the street and she pulled away, not too fast but not too slow.

  “Is he alive?” she asked as she crossed the lanes and cut to the right.

  “Yes.”

  “Sure?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “Will he be okay?”

  “He wasn’t okay to begin with.”

  Hutton drove a big circle. Right, right, right. They came back up Park Avenue. Flynn watched the guy in the back. No movement. Some breathing. They did a loop and stopped by the vacant lot. New Yorkers parked wherever they could. It might not have been Los Angeles freeways, but there were way more cars than spaces. The monthly rent on a single compact car space in a downtown garage would get a four-bedroom ranch house with acreage in Kansas City. But even New Yorkers shied from parking out in front of a vacant lot. As if the lot were vacant because the building had been swallowed whole by the earth, and any nearby vehicle might be next.

  Hutton stopped adjacent to the hole in the fence. Flynn jumped out and lifted the wire and stepped through the gaping mouth. He marched toward the back. Found the little guy still tied to the fence at the back of the lot. The two homeless men were still watching him.

  “He was yellin’,” said the guy with the whiskey bottle. “But he gave up on that pretty soon.”

  Flynn nodded and stepped to the men. Pulled a roll from his pocket and peeled off a couple of hundreds. He handed one to each of the men.