Their assumption was confirmed just moments later, when after driving in and relocking the gate, Pullo drove around the bend and parked by the rear door that led to the office.
Merle and Earl watched as Pullo exited his vehicle and walked towards them with purposeful strides.
“Good morning, Mr. Pullo,” the boys said in stereo, but were greeted with only silence.
Pullo shifted his eyes towards the rear of the limo and Merle rushed over and opened the door for him.
“You want us to take you somewhere?” Earl asked.
Pullo nodded.
“Yeah boys, you and I are going for a little ride.”
Earl looked over at his brother, and by the look on his face, he saw that Merle finally got it. They were dead men.
CHAPTER 24 - Bathroom break
The first of the hit team members entered the bathroom.
It was the blond man with the buzz cut and baseball cap.
Through the crack in the stall door, Tanner could spot the man’s back in the mirror, as he lined himself up with one of the urinals.
The bathroom contained three urinals on the left, with a line of four stalls to their right. Across from the stalls was a row of sinks with a long mirror above them, and on the wall beside that was a hot air machine for use in drying hands.
From his perch inside the second stall, Tanner heard the sound of the man’s zipper going down, followed by the splash of liquid against porcelain.
That was when Tanner struck, as he came up silently behind the man and plunged the blade of his knife deep into the back of the man’s skull, jamming it directly beneath the adjustable strap at the rear of the ball cap.
The man grunted in shock as his mouth opened in surprise and then he fell to the floor with a severe spinal injury, but was still alive. Tanner remedied the latter condition by smashing the lid from a commode atop the man’s head, which cracked his skull open.
After dragging the man’s body into the last stall and propping him in the corner, Tanner used the man’s shirt to clean up the spilled blood and piss, and was standing at the same urinal when the next man walked in.
Tanner wasn’t blond, wore boots instead of the bright sneakers worn by the man he had just killed, and was also wearing suit pants and not jeans, but between the black leather jacket and the baseball cap he wore, he fooled the next man long enough to kill him, as the man sidled up to the urinal beside him.
It was the largest of the men, the one with the shaved head.
Tanner rammed a boot heel into the back of the man’s knee, causing him to fall forward and bang his face against the steel flush valve atop the urinal, the impact broke several of the man’s front teeth and caused him to stumble backwards, where he fell to his knees.
The man spit out the pieces of his broken teeth, but the pain in the man’s mouth became a secondary consideration when Tanner reached around and sliced the thug’s throat open.
The blood left the man’s body with such force that it painted the mirrors above the sinks red, while filling the room with its coppery scent.
Tanner let the man drop, stepped out in the hallway and came face-to-face with another member of the hit team, the man with the dark crew cut.
The man had been headed into the bathroom while talking on the phone, and Tanner shot him twice in the face, with one bullet entering his open mouth.
He then followed the man to the floor, to lay half in and half out of the bathroom, with his face turned away and the gun tucked out of sight.
“Hans!” the last man cried out, the one with the ponytail, as he sprinted from the conference room in reaction to hearing the shots.
The man cursed loudly in Dutch when he saw his friend’s body, and Tanner felt a gentle hand touch his shoulder.
“Seth, where is the shooter?”
“I’m right here,” Tanner said, while turning over and shooting the man three times in the stomach.
The man fell backwards to the carpet, dying, and soon to be dead. Tanner claimed his gun, a Beretta FS92, and took aim at Bruno Heinz, who was standing in the doorway of the conference room with eyes made large from astonishment.
“Tanner?”
Tanner fired an instant after Heinz was yanked backwards into the conference room, and his shot passed through the doorway and struck a picture on the wall.
“Tanner! Is that you?”
Tanner thought the voice sounded familiar, but couldn’t place it.
“My name is Vance, Tanner, and unlike those four fools with the matching jackets I’m man enough to kill you, and I’m going to do just that.”
Tanner could hear Heinz yelling into a phone. That meant that more men would be coming.
He had to get by the conference room to access either the stairway or the elevators, which meant he had to get past Vance.
Johnny Rossetti was paying him a small fortune to take down Heinz, and Tanner realized that he was going to have to earn every cent of it.
CHAPTER 25 - Cold sweat
Merle’s hands were gripped tightly upon the steering wheel of the limo, as he and Earl headed for the George Washington Bridge.
Pullo had yet to tell them their destination, but simply said to take the bridge into New Jersey, a state where the Giacconi Family often dumped their victims’ bodies.
Pullo had instructed the boys to leave the partition open while they drove, and so the two brothers couldn’t talk freely, but each one knew by the other’s expression that they were both fearful.
Earl shook his head slightly as he thought of Tanner and cursed the day that he and Merle had met the man. They had been threatened with death several times since entering Tanner’s orbit and it looked like their luck was about to run out.
“Damn Tanner,” he muttered.
Merle heard the whispered curse and nodded his head in agreement.
***
Pullo sat in the rear of the limo in a somber mood.
While he was angry that the Carter brothers hadn’t told them that Tanner was alive when they believed he was dead, he held no real animosity towards the men.
Killing them was a precautionary measure, nothing more and nothing less, and he would take no pleasure in the act.
His phone rang. It was Laurel.
“What’s up, Beautiful?”
“Can you come by the clinic? I need to see you.”
“Right now, or can it wait a few hours?”
“Now would be better, why, are you out of the area?”
“No, but I was headed into Jersey, but hold on a second.”
Pullo covered the phone with his hand and spoke to Merle.
“We have to make a detour, boys, turn around and head to West 26th and Tenth Avenue.”
Merle acknowledged the request with an accompanying sigh of relief, and Pullo spoke to Laurel again.
“I’ll be there soon, but what’s up?”
“I’d rather tell you in person, but don’t worry, it’s not serious.”
“Okay,” Pullo said, while not liking the note of dread he heard in her voice, but he decided to push it aside and not dwell on it.
He and Laurel spoke for another minute, before ending the call.
“Hey, you two?”
Merle looked at Pullo in the mirror, while Earl turned around in his seat.
“Yes sir,” the boys said together.
“You don’t have wives or girlfriends, do you?”
“No, women only seem to like us in small doses,” Earl said.
Pullo laughed.
“You’re lucky; they’re a lot of work sometimes.”
Merle caught Pullo’s eye in the mirror.
“Are we really lucky?”
The humor left Pullo’s face.
“No, maybe not,”
And the way Pullo said it made both brothers break out in a cold sweat.
CHAPTER 26 - The best
Tanner dragged the man with the ponytail into the bathroom and checked to see if he was dead yet. He was, and
Tanner went to work cutting off the ponytail.
With that done, he set a roll of toilet paper on fire and held it up to the sprinkler head in the ceiling, while hoping that the renovation hadn’t disabled the fire control system.
The system was still functional, and within seconds, the sprinkler activated, showering him with water, but more importantly, it triggered the fire alarm.
With the fire alarm operative, the safety controls in the elevator would refuse to send the car up, and would let out all passengers onto lower floors.
With the reinforcements delayed, Tanner exited the bathroom while firing towards the conference room.
Vance had ventured out into the hallway, and Tanner’s bold advance surprised him and caused him to dive back into the conference room.
Tanner kept coming, he had little leeway for doing anything else, or he risked being trapped.
Vance fired at him as he opened the door to the stairway and Tanner cried out in pain as a bullet sliced open his side, just beneath the left ribs.
The pain of the wound weakened him, and after rushing into the stairwell, he nearly tumbled down the steps, but caught hold of the railing just in time to halt his momentum.
He was on the landing when the door opened, and he fired a shot that drove Vance back beyond the door.
Tanner headed down the stairs, and was on the landing between the fourth and fifth floors when he heard Vance enter the stairwell again.
When the door on the fourth floor opened and three men with guns entered the stairway, Tanner pointed up.
“The man named Vance has gone mad, kill him!”
The men all looked at him. Tanner was still wearing the black leather jacket of the hit team along with the baseball cap, and hanging down his back was a ponytail. After cutting it off the dead man in the bathroom, Tanner had tied it to the rear of the cap.
Everything about him said hit team member, and so the men ran past him and headed up the stairs. When they ran into Vance, a firefight ensued.
Tanner kept moving, his one objective was now aimed at escaping and when he reached the door that led to the second floor, he leaned against it, resting for a just a moment, as the wound in his side sapped his strength and turned the white shirt beneath the jacket blood red.
“Tanner!”
It was Vance. He had won the firefight against the three men in an impressively short space of time.
From the sound of his voice, Vance was still two flights away, but Tanner knew that translated to a very narrow gap of time.
He found no one as he entered the second floor hallway, and ran towards the rear of the building. At the end of the hall was a large window, and Tanner fired at the glass before he reached it.
With the glass gone, he stepped up onto the windowsill, bent his knees and jumped, to land atop the dumpster in the back.
He was in his car and driving away when he spotted Vance in his rear view mirror, as the man left the alley and ran into the street.
Vance stomped his foot in frustration while keeping his gun hidden, not daring to risk taking a shot, as several other cars and pedestrians were about.
The last glimpse Tanner had of the man, he saw that he was pointing in his direction, in essence saying, there will be a next time.
Tanner agreed, but next time, only one of them would be walking away.
***
Pullo stepped out of the limo in front of Laurel’s clinic and Merle and Earl gave him a puzzled look. The clinic was located in the rear of a squat building. It was surrounded by a high fence that had an antiques shop in the front, and its entrance, an old rusty metal door, sat below a tattered green awning.
“Are you buying antiques, Boss?”
“No, now stay with the limo and I’ll be back in a few minutes.”
Merle and Earl watched as Pullo input a code into a control pad near the door and entered the building.
With Pullo out of sight, both men breathed a sigh of relief.
“You still think he don’t want to kill us?” Earl said.
“I don’t know. For a while there I thought that was where we were headin’, but if that was true, why leave us alone?”
Earl thought about that and became confused, after being certain that Pullo wanted them dead.
“Damn! I like this job. Rossetti treats us right, we get to wear suits, look at hot women, and don’t have to work hard.”
“What? Are you startin’ to think that Pullo doesn’t want us dead?”
“I don’t know, but I get the willies every time he looks at me.”
Merle scratched his head, as he tried to figure out what to do.
“If we run and they don’t want to kill us, then, they might start thinkin’ that we did somethin’ and send somebody to kill us.”
Earl slapped the dashboard.
“Why can’t life be simple?”
“It is simple. If they want to kill us, we’ll be dead soon, if not, we keep this sweet job, but simple don’t make it easy.”
“What do we do, Merle?”
Merle looked over at his brother.
“I’m thinkin’.”
Earl leaned back in his seat. When Merle thought about something, it could take a long time.
***
Inside the clinic, Laurel separated from Pullo after sharing a kiss, then, she took the piece of paper from her pocket that Tanner had given her.
“What’s that?” Pullo said.
“Tanner gave it to me last night at the house.”
Pullo’s expression hardened.
“He came by to see you, and what happened?”
“Nothing, I swear, and I don’t think he was expecting anything to either, but he gave me this number where I could reach him. He said that the Giacconi Family was going to war and he wanted me to be able to reach him in case I needed him... needed him in case of trouble.”
Joe looked down at the paper and then back into Laurel’s eyes.
“Did you want something to happen? I know you still love him.”
Laurel hugged Joe.
“Tanner is a part of my past. I’m with you now and the reason I’m telling you about this is, well, I don’t want any secrets between us.”
Joe tilted her head back and stared into her eyes.
“I care about you, Laurel. These last few weeks, they’ve been the best of my life.”
Laurel smiled.
“We’re just getting started.”
They kissed again, and when they separated, Pullo pointed at the number Tanner had given her.
“Keep that. Tanner was right, there’s trouble coming, and if it comes here, between the two of us, we’ll stop it.”
Laurel smiled.
“No one would attack the clinic. We’re like the Red Cross.”
Joe took her by the hand and began walking towards the door.
“I have to get going, but I’ll be back in town in time for dinner, so why don’t we go out?”
“That sounds great, but where do you want to go?”
“Anywhere is good for me, baby, as long as I’m with you.”
Pullo opened the door and stepped outside. The first thing he saw was the empty limo, but then he spotted Merle and Earl. They were at the rear of the vehicle and headed for the fence.
Merle had finished his deep thinking just seconds ago and had concluded that they should run and hide.
“Hey! Where are you two going?”
When the boys spun around, Pullo saw the fear in their eyes, but then, something bizarre occurred, as first Earl, and then Merle, gawked at him and began pointing his way.
The two brothers then turned and stared at each other, as if to verify that they were seeing the same thing, and yes, both of them had the same wondrous look in their eyes. When they turned back around, there were tears forming, even as their faces wore wide grins.
What the hell? Pullo thought, as he took in the spectacle, but no sooner had he pondered the boys’ strange reaction, when Laurel rushed past him a
nd ran towards the brothers with open arms, and she was shouting their names.
“Merle! Earl!”
The brothers also opened their arms to receive her, and Laurel hugged first one and then the other, before the three of them came together in a tangle of arms, while tears of joy rolled down their faces, as Merle and Earl kept asking the same question over and over.
“Laurel Lee, oh Laurel Lee, is it really you?”
Pullo broke from his trance and walked over to join them.
“What the hell is going on here?”
Laurel wrapped an arm around each of the boy’s waists and smiled at Pullo, as pure happiness radiated in her eyes.
“Joe, this is Merle and Earl. They’re my big brothers.”
Pullo stared at the three of them, as a horrified look animated his features.
“What? No, that’s not possible.”
Laurel kissed the boys on the cheek.
“We had the same daddy, and now that we’ve found each other after so many years, we’ll never be separated again. Isn’t it just the best?”
Pullo stared at the boys’ grinning faces.
“Yeah, the best,”
CHAPTER 27 - Thumpity, Thumpity, Thump,
As he drove towards Midtown, Tanner took out his phone and called Sophia.
“Where you at, baby?” she said.
“I’ve been shot. The wound is bleeding badly, but I don’t think it’s serious because the bullet just nicked me. Does the Calvino Family have any clinics in the city?”
“No, ours are only on Staten Island, but there’s one we use on West 26th, or somewhere around there, and I heard that the doctor is good. Go there, and are you sure it’s not bad?”
“I’m sure, and yeah, I’ll go there.”
“I’ll meet you after I change and shower.”
“Sophia,” Tanner said, but she had already hung up.
He had wanted to avoid seeing Laurel again, but it looked like it couldn’t be helped, as the wound on his side definitely needed attention.
He saw her face in his mind’s eye and the hint of a smile curled his lips.
***
Inside Laurel Ivy’s clinic, Pullo learned about the branches of the Carter Family tree.
The TANNER Series - Books 4-6 (Tanner Box Set Book 2) Page 34