Chapter Forty-One
Knock and announce. It was a maxim drilled into us when working with the DEA, meaning that before we ever entered any private home we were to knock three times and announce who we were prior to going inside. One of the most basic tenants of American law enforcement, not knocking and announcing our identities was right up there with failing to read a suspect their Miranda rights for the fastest ways to get a case thrown out of court.
The rules when working internationally were a bit different. Not entirely, but with many, many shades of gray. That was why from day one, if there was even the slightest chance that a perpetrator would ever end up in a United States courtroom, we were sure to knock and announce.
Working against five years of muscle memory, I blew through the front door of the Blok home without doing either. If someone wanted to nitpick, an argument could be made that I did both by driving the heel of my shoe through the wood pane alongside the doorknob, sending the front door hurtling backward, shards of wood spraying up around me.
I was not law enforcement, and there was no way in hell these people would ever make it to see a courtroom.
A Mark 23 held in either hand, I let the momentum of the kick carry me inside, my arms extended, my silenced weapons adding another ten inches to both. The door opened into a wide front foyer, hardwood flooring extending out in every direction. To my right was a sitting room that looked to be barely touched, the furniture resembling something found in the sixties. On the left was a formal dining room, table settings and a centerpiece all in place, the overhead lights off.
“Excuse me, sir, can I—” an older man in a smoking jacket and slacks asked, appearing from the middle hallway and walking toward me.
I cut him off midsentence; a pair of shots, one from each gun, stopped him midstride. A low flash of light barked out of each on command, the recoil minimal in my hands. One bullet struck him in the left half of his chest, the other tore a hole between his eyes. His body fell straight back where he stood, blood pooling behind his head.
Guns still stretched out in front of me, I stepped past his body, avoiding the widening sanguineous circle beneath him, and proceeded into the front hallway. The wood floor creaked slightly as I went. Long shadows moved over everything. Only a few lights were still on within the house.
The hallway ended in an expansive kitchen, a modernized affair with stainless steel appliances and a palatial refrigerator masked to look like cabinetry. A quick check found the place to be empty, the rich smells of food hanging in the air. Dinner was not far past.
I ignored the scent and continued moving through the house, every sense on high alert, my body rigid, moving one cautious step at a time. While my shots had been muffled, there was no way Blok hadn’t heard me come through the front door. From the outside the only visible lights were on upstairs, meaning he was most likely holed up there, waiting for me to come to him.
So be it.
Sliding the gun in my left hand back into the waistband of my slacks, I grabbed a cast iron skillet from atop the cold stove top and carried it with me. Again I stepped over the remains of the butler lying in the hall, the front of his coat now slick and stained with dark blood, the circle beneath him thick and shiny.
One step at a time I ascended the staircase, my back to the wall, gun in one hand, pan in the other. I held the cast-iron cookware close to my head to help shield me from any gunfire, the thick metal more than capable of stopping most small-arms fire. An inch at a time I rose upward, pausing halfway up and listening.
Somewhere above me, the smallest creak of a floorboard sounded. My heartbeat evened out and my breathing receded to completely normal, my body tense but focused, feeding on the adrenaline I had starved it of all these years.
Hefting the pan in my left hand, I lowered it by my side and tossed it high, aiming for the middle of the top landing. I paused a split second before hurtling my body upward after it, the matte-black object hitting the second floor just before I did.
Four shots rang out in rapid succession as it got there, two of them striking iron, and yellow and orange sparks flashed in the darkness. They slammed into the pan from the right; the shooter was standing to that side, firing a handgun.
My mind managed to compute all that information as I leapt over the last few stairs and landed on my shoulder, gun trained out with my right hand, left cupping it for support. Without bothering to wait for suspect confirmation I squeezed off three quick shots, muzzle flashes igniting in front of me.
My target was a pudgy older man dressed in a maroon track suit; his shaved head made it almost impossible to decipher a definite age. The first shot whizzed past him, shattering the window at the end of the hallway. Glass exploded out into the night air, and a gust of cold wind rushed in behind it.
The second bullet struck him in the right shoulder, and his upper body twisted to the side. His gun jerked at an angle as he did so, squeezing off another round that took a chunk of plaster from the wall. Blood spurted from his wound, spraying against the hardwood floor, blending in with the dark red of his suit.
My third shot struck him in the thigh, pitching his body forward at the waist. A throaty moan slid from him as he doubled over and pressed his free hand against the wound. Blood bubbled up between his fingers, pulsing forward in bright red stripes, spilling between his digits, and streaking the shiny floor beneath him.
Artery shot.
Once more he fired an errant round into the wall before retreating into the room on his right, dragging his leg behind him, moving slowly. A trail of blood smeared the floor as he went.
Leaving the cast-iron skillet where it lay, I pulled myself to a standing position and drew the second Mark from my waistband. If anybody else was in the house that could fire a weapon, the odds were they would have already shown themselves, long before letting the old man himself take two direct hits.
Many times before, I had heard the expression that someone sick with bloodlust was seeing red. Around me, the hallway downstairs, the floor in front of me, were both painted red. The metallic smell of blood hung in the air.
Even still, what I saw wasn’t red. It was black. Making Sergey Blok bleed was not enough, would never be enough, not for me or the memory of my family.
He would feel my pain, and he would die, just as they had.
I reached the door he had passed through in just a few quick seconds. The trail of blood beside me was even heavier than I thought, thick spatters dotting the floor. With a quick breath I spun out on the floor, both guns in front of me, my knees sliding across the slick boards.
Standing across from me was a woman in her sixties, a pink housecoat on over flannel pajamas, knit stockings on her feet. She stood ten feet back from the door, her husband’s gun held in both hands in front of her.
The moment I appeared around the base of the door the gun flashed twice, two harsh barks in quick succession. She wasn’t ready for me to be so low to the floor, both shots whizzing by above me.
My first shot caught her square in the chest. The beginning of a scream was cut off halfway through, the air wheezing out of her. The gun fell from her hands as she wobbled in place, clutching her chest, the light blinking out of her eyes.
Taking my feet I kept one gun pointed in her direction and stepped into the room, my left hand aimed out wide.
Seated behind an expansive desk was a man whom I presumed to be Sergey, his dumpy form slumped into a rolling chair. His right hand rested atop the desk, his fingers slick with blood, trying to operate a .38 revolver. In his left was a wadded-up roll of cloth he pressed into his thigh, most of it soaked through with blood.
He stared at me with defiance in his eyes, the life ebbing from him just as surely as it was his wife. Given the gaping hole through his femoral, I gave him no more than thirty seconds before he was done, too.
“Blok,” I said, stepping forward, malevolence dr
ipping from the word.
“Tate,” he responded, the same tone in his response.
The fact that he used my given name proved just how little he knew about me. Nobody ever called me Tate, not even the teachers I had in school or my parents growing up. To this man, I was never an adversary, not somebody worthy of respect or fear.
I was nothing more than a potential roadblock, something to be mowed down on his way to getting what he wanted.
“So you know who I am?” I asked.
He stared at me through narrowed eyes, sweat dotting his brow, breaths coming in shallow rasps. A small nod was his response, no words crossing his lips.
Without looking away from him, I fired three times into his wife, the rounds hitting her center mass, tossing her body against the wall before it slid to the floor, bloody streaks behind her.
“Then you know you never should have killed my wife and daughter,” I hissed, twisting both arms around to face forward, guns aimed at his chest.
Across from me Blok stared at the bloody remains of his wife, his face a mixture of agony and contempt.
After a long moment he moved his gaze back up to me, a murderous roar sliding out from him. Propping his weight against his bad leg he pushed himself to a standing position, trying to hurtle himself forward at me, his hands pawing for the gun on the desk.
Firing each gun in succession I put a half-dozen rounds into him, starting at his chest and placing the last one right in the middle of his bald head. It entered at an angle, tearing a short trench through the skin before exiting the top of his scalp, slamming into the wall behind him.
His body hung suspended in the air, weightless, motionless, for a long second before falling backward, depositing itself in the chair. His momentum pushed it back several inches across the floor before it came to a stop.
The house was now silent and, except for me, lifeless.
Chapter Forty-Two
Even though Blok and his wife were both dead, I knew they were only the tip of the spear. Somewhere out there was Pavel, along with Viktor and who knew how many others. Those two for certain knew who I was, the rest would probably figure it out eventually.
I decided to help them along, just in case.
I left the Bloks upstairs in the office, their blood striping the floors and walls. There was no need to arrange their bodies in any particular manner, no point in exerting the effort to put them on display. In an hour or so, it wouldn’t matter anyway.
Keeping both guns in hand, I made my way back down through the house, not bothering to mask my noise. Anybody even close to the place would have heard the shots fired from Sergey and his wife, would see the front door sagging open. If they were brave enough to venture inside for a look, they would see the butler lying in the middle hallway, his unblinking eyes staring up at the ceiling.
Stepping over him, I made my way back into the kitchen and dug through the cupboards below the counter, coming up with a gallon jug of cooking oil and a bag of flour. I returned the Mark 23s to the small of my back and ditched the jacket, sliding it down over my shoulder and leaving it on the kitchen floor.
The button-down shirt I stripped off as well, twisting it into an elongated bundle, the finished product looking like a homemade cigarette two feet in length. I jammed the tail end of it under the grate on the stove and turned the heat on high. A blue-hot flame sparked to life beneath it. A few moments later the material caught, the smell of burnt cotton filling the space.
Bright orange flames licked upward behind me as I started with the oil, dribbling some on the bottom of the shirt, splashing the remainder around the kitchen. As more of the shirt burned, the light grew stronger, illuminating the walls around me. Photographs of Blok and his family stared down as I deposited the last of the oil throughout the kitchen, leaving the empty jug on the floor by my jacket.
Grabbing up the flour in one hand I trailed an uneven path of the flammable white powder behind me, sprinkling it down the front hallway, tossing a thin layer on the butler, throwing large handfuls into the parlor and dining room to either side.
In my wake, the oil caught with a thunderous whoosh, heat and light both kicking up fast. Flour hung in the air like white smoke, mixing with the real thing now funneling out of the kitchen, and visibility was dropping by the second. The mixed scents filled my nostrils as I opened the front door and stepped outside, bits of white dotting my slacks and black compression shirt. My skin shone with perspiration, the end result of the extra clothes, adrenaline, fire.
The front door still stood gaping wide as I stepped out into the night, found my briefcase still resting where I’d left it just minutes before. Already my mind was moving on to the next step, knowing that time was limited before the fire was called in and authorities found the scene. With luck the blaze would be burning strong enough by then to keep everybody back, the police having to wait until at least morning before pilfering through and finding the charred remains of three people inside.
Armed with only a rough outline of the streets nearby, I needed to put as much space between myself and the house as possible. The scent of smoke lingering on me was too strong to allow for public transportation, my only hope to catch another cab in a public area, allow it to carry me to my next stop.
Briefcase in hand, I made it three steps down the path before I saw it, my pace slowing to an abrupt halt. My supercharged system somehow managed to push out a bit more adrenaline, my heart rate once more rising. In a slow, exaggerated movement, I raised the briefcase to shoulder height beside me and released it, the black leather valise landing silently in the grass.
Standing before me, his hulking figure just inches inside the gate, blocking my exit, was Pavel. Behind him a black sedan sat idling on the curb, its lights off, a puff of exhaust rising from the tailpipe.
“Hawk,” he said, his voice a deep rumble that sounded more like a growl.
As I had suspected all along, he was the one in the organization to be reckoned with. The fact that he knew and employed my real name proved he had done his homework. His role was as an enforcer for the Bloks, one he took quite seriously. Under different circumstances I would consider him a worthy adversary.
Those times were long in the past, though.
“Pavel,” I said, letting him see the silenced Mark 23 in my right hand.
Behind me I could sense the fire was catching on, tearing its way through the house. The sound of wood snapping carried out into the night, hungry flames devouring the bait I left for them, expanding into the rest of the home. Smoke began to pour out, the smell strong, acrid. Shadows and disparate colors danced across the front lawn, bathing everything in multiple hues.
Pavel motioned with his chin toward the house. “Sergey? Anya?”
“And the butler, too,” I said, nodding.
His mouth twisted into a sneer, his eyebrows lowering a fraction of an inch, bunching together above the bridge of his nose. “He was shit. They were family.”
“So were my wife and daughter,” I replied.
I had no interest in standing on the front lawn having an epic back-and-forth with him. As much as this man needed to die, I had no interest in becoming a martyr in doing so. The clock was ticking, and the Russian police weren’t far away.
Sensing my train of thought, Pavel reached behind him and removed a handgun from the small of his back. He dangled it in front of him before tossing it into the yard, then reached back again and pulled out a pair of Russian shashkas, the curved blades almost two feet in length. He swung them back and forth across his wide body, the muscles in his arm reacting to the movement like corded steel, the striations obvious in his forearms, before tossing one my way. It skidded across the concrete with a spark, coming to a stop just inches from my toes.
“Why don’t you put down that gun and we settle this like men?” he asked, his mouth and eyes both twisting up in a look that bordered o
n glee.
Even on my best day, physically I was no match for this man. In most situations, my training was enough to carry me through. Ninety-eight percent of the people I encountered were used to relying on natural acumen, their size, strength, to get them through. When pitted against such opponents, I was almost assured victory.
In a case like this, though, where both men were similarly trained, poised, physical attributes made the difference. Not who connected the most punches, but who did the most damage while doing so. In that regard, it was obvious Pavel was without equal.
What he didn’t realize, though, was I had no intention of a fair fight.
I didn’t say a word, just raised my weapon and fired twice, one to each of his knees. The firelight behind me muted out the muzzle flashes as I stepped forward toward him, guns extended. He wavered in place for just a moment before his bulk became too much to support, his knees folding in on themselves. He fell straight forward onto them, slamming down onto the concrete, the sound of bone splintering reaching my ears as he hit hard.
Even if I were to walk away and not look back, he would never be right again. The damage to his joints was too great, his size too immense, to ever allow them to recover. From where I stood I could see the lower halves of his legs jutting out at odd angles, blood seeping through his pants and onto the concrete.
To his credit he never made a sound, masking the pain he was in as he stared up at me, malevolence on his face. “Coward,” he spat at me, watching me grow closer, weapon in hand, the second shashka still lying where he tossed it.
I put a third shot into his right wrist without responding, one final bark of the gun that twisted his body to the side, bright red blood coursing onto his pale skin. His hand flopped open on impact, useless, as the shashka fell from it, blade clattering against the ground. For a moment he started to reach across his body with his left hand before abandoning the idea, accepting his fate.
Cold Fire Page 24