When the Man Comes Around: A Gripping Crime Thriller (Lawson Raines, Book 1)

by Bradley Wright

  I’ll do my best to contact you again if I hear anything, but I hope when I try you’re already gone.

  I love you, Lawson, you are like my brother. If there was any other way, we would do this. But there isn’t.

  Be safe.

  Lawson stared blankly at Cassie’s letter. It was as if someone had hit the pause button on his mind. He tried a deep breath, but the words on the page in front of him scrambled. He blinked a couple of times to bring them back into focus. His eyes returned to form, but his brain was still on a break. On autopilot, he stood from the bed and walked out to the minibar. He found another minibottle of bourbon, unscrewed the cap, and downed it in one swig.

  As the alcohol burned its way down his throat, just as he had hoped, it felt like someone hit the reset button on his brain, and slowly it rebooted, returning his thoughts to him. He knew he had to dust the cobwebs off his old detective mind and get to work. He walked over to the window and stared down at the lights. What in the hell could the FBI possibly have against a man who had been locked up for the last ten years? And according to Cassie, what they thought he knew, or the threat they thought he posed, had to be important enough to want him dead. As the bourbon settled into Lawson’s bloodstream, his mind drifted to the notebook. If there was any chance for him to understand what it was the FBI was trying to protect, it would be in there. One of the ways that Lawson curtailed his boredom, as he spent nearly every waking moment in his cell, was to write in the notebook. And most of what he wrote were notes about conversations he had with other inmates. He never knew what he might need to remember in order to take advantage of someone in that prison, so he made notes. Nothing of incredible importance ever really stuck out to him that he could remember offhand, but there were years’ worth of notes in there. It was his only chance to understand how he could help himself out of this apparently life-threatening situation.

  Lawson turned from the window and made his way to the closet. He tried to flip through the pages of the notebook in his mind as he went to it, hoping something would jump out at him. But it was useless. It was going to take some digging to find something, if there was anything to be found in there at all.

  Somewhere at the back of his brain, thrumming all the way down to the bottom of his spine, was a strange sensation. A distant vibration. One that was sending signals to his mind’s eye. Faces flashed in front of his eyes. Faces attached to the names he had written on his list. The list of who was to blame.

  Faces, plural.

  That vibrating sensation began to tingle. And it felt familiar. It was the tingle of his detective mind picking up on a clue. For the first time since he started dreaming of revenge all those years ago, there wasn’t just one shadowy silhouette staring at the end of his gun. There were a few.

  All that had happened to him and his family may very well be the work of one puppet master, but that still meant that there were a lot of puppets. And just like that, the names on his list took on a whole new meaning.

  They weren’t just a list of individuals.

  They were all working together.

  12

  Lawson’s mind was running in overdrive. He had to see those names again. He wanted to look at them in this newfound light. A lot of things were jumbling in his head, but one thing had become crystal clear. If the FBI, or someone in the FBI, wanted him dead, it wasn’t because of what happened in prison. It wasn’t even because of what happened to Lauren. This started long before all of that. But he had made notes about that too. At the time, he thought he was being crazy. He thought he was turning into a conspiracy theorist. And now he remembered bringing it up to Cassie years ago, and she had thought the same thing. Turns out, his first instinct may have been right. It had to be.

  With the buzz of a case coming together, Lawson punched in the four-digit code to open the safe. And just as he was reaching in to pick up the notebook, starting to put everything together in his mind, he heard a distant click behind him. It was faint, but it sounded like the hotel room door in the other room. Lawson moved his reach from the notebook to the stainless steel Beretta 92FS that had been left for him by De Luca. He wanted to shut the safe but couldn’t risk the sound it would make. He darted across the hall into the bathroom. He pushed the door behind him to where it was only open a couple of inches, then moved quickly over to the large walk-in glass shower and turned on the water as hot as it would go.

  With the rushing of the water in the shower to conceal the sound, Lawson performed a press check, making sure the Beretta had one in the chamber. He then removed his blazer and rolled up his sleeves. The steam from the hot shower began to encompass the large bathroom. Most importantly, it fogged the large mirror opposite the bathroom door entirely. This would allow Lawson to wait behind the door without being seen by whoever would be opening it.

  As he waited, he tuned his ears. He hadn’t heard anything since that faint click a few moments ago. For all he knew, it could have been one of the maids checking his Do Not Disturb sign or someone mistakenly realizing they were at the wrong room. But with what seemed to be half of Las Vegas after him, he certainly couldn’t take that chance. It had been a long time since he found himself holding a pistol, awaiting the move of a potential target. The weight of the Beretta felt good in his hands. All the battles he had been in recently had only involved his fists and of course the occasional makeshift prison weapon. He used to be an expert with a handgun. He hoped it would be like riding a bike. And while he wasn’t bad at hand-to-hand combat before being locked up, he would now put his fighting skills against any man in the world. If his gun skills did come back to him, he figured that would make him about as formidable as anyone that could be after him.

  That’s when the next thought slapped him across the face. Those skills would make him about as formidable as anyone . . .

  Anyone but a professional hit man for the FBI.

  The bathroom door began to inch open. The safe move would be to kill whoever was walking through that door as quickly as possible. The problem with that was that dead men can’t talk. He would be safe for now, but if Lawson killed the intruder, he wouldn’t get any information as to who sent him and why. It would be short-term gain at a long-term loss.

  A flood of adrenaline released into his veins as he watched the tip of a black pistol make its way around the door into the steamy mist wafting from the shower. Lawson already knew he had gotten lucky. He knew immediately that this was not a man trained or hired by the FBI. He wouldn’t have made a sound at the front door if it was, and he wouldn’t be this sloppy coming into the bathroom.

  Lawson stepped forward, reached for the wrist holding the gun, and locked it in a death grip. As he forced it toward the wall, the trigger was squeezed and a bullet blasted into the mirror. Shards of glass shattered to the marble floor. Lawson slammed the gun hand against the wall, and the sound of the gunshot in that small space jammed a sharp pain in his ears. The gun fell to the floor, and without turning around, Lawson fired an elbow directly behind him, and the force from the blow to the gunman’s nose knocked him onto his back out into the bedroom.

  While it was good for Lawson’s health that it hadn’t been a professional hit man, he also couldn’t completely relax. Sure, he’d already bested whoever this was, but small-time criminals like this gunman rarely traveled solo. That’s why when Lawson stepped out into the hallway of the bedroom, over the top of the unconscious man sent there to kill him, he already had his gun raised and his finger on the trigger. He squeezed it twice when another man entered the room from the door in front of him on his left. Two bullets in his chest, another man down.

  Lawson trained the barrel of his gun straight down toward the unconscious man’s head. The man’s nose was steadily leaking blood from the impact of Lawson’s elbow. He kicked the man’s leg, trying to rouse him from the depths of the temporary blackness he was experiencing, while keeping his ears tuned to the adjacent room for another possible attacker. The man lying below him was fairly big, d
ark hair, wearing a black sport coat. Without hearing the man’s accent, it was impossible to know if it was one of Sokolov’s men or De Luca’s. Lawson stepped over into the closet and checked his phone. He didn’t have any messages from Johnny, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything either. If this was retaliation from De Luca for the way Lawson had treated Johnny earlier, Johnny wouldn’t have texted a heads-up. And if it was Sokolov’s men, Johnny wouldn’t have known to give him a heads-up text anyway.

  Lawson noticed a black duffel bag on the floor to his right. He gathered a few of the wearable clothes that were hanging around him, a pair of sneakers, some sweats, and threw them in the bag. He added his notebook and a stack of cash, readied the Beretta, and walked out of the closet to the man on the floor groaning into consciousness.

  Lawson set the bag down and took a knee beside him. He pressed the muzzle of the pistol forcefully into the middle of the man’s forehead.

  Lawson said, “One, if you lie to me, I pull the trigger.”

  The man’s eyes popped open, wide as half-dollars. Lawson spoke again before the man had a chance.

  “Two, if there is another man here with you, other than the man I just put two bullets in, and you don’t let me know right now, I pull the trigger.”

  The man jerked his head back to look behind him. He caught a glimpse of his dead partner just before Lawson grabbed him by the hair and brought his focus back to him.

  “He is only one, I swear!” the man said with a Russian accent and a nose stuffed with blood.

  One of Sokolov’s men.

  “Good, you already have the hang of this.”

  Lawson rose to his feet and gestured by flicking the gun upward for the Russian man to do the same. Lawson knew he didn’t have a lot of time. At this point the gunshots had been reported, and at the very least, hotel security would already be on their way to the suite.

  “Who sent you?”

  The man looked down at his feet, hesitating, shaking his head. Lawson shot him in the foot. As the man dropped to the floor, wailing in pain, Lawson took a step forward and once again placed the gun to the man’s head.

  “And here I thought you understood how this worked. Let me be clear. The next bullet goes into a much more life-altering place. Who sent you?”

  The man started to look down again but immediately jerked his head back up and looked Lawson in the eyes.

  “Evelyn Delaney.”

  13

  Evelyn Delaney pulled up to the mansion, the gate opened, and she pulled into the secluded driveway. It was just a few blocks from the Strip, but once inside the gate it may as well have been another zip code. That was the only reason she had ever entertained having a meeting here. The district attorney could hardly be seen anywhere near the vicinity of a crime boss’s mansion and still maintain her professional credibility. She continued driving to the end of the driveway where she stopped and put her Ferrari in park. She reached for the passenger seat and pulled her Chanel lipstick from her new Louis Vuitton handbag. She reached up and adjusted the rearview mirror so that her face—lips—were in view. She traced the lines of her lips with the bright red lipstick, her usual color of choice. It didn’t hurt that it matched the cherry red of her car and the bottoms of her Louboutin heels. It was also the power color, and that turned her on as much as any man had in years.

  Her cell phone rang––her old pal Phil Walters, chief of the Las Vegas Police Department. Unlikely friends, unless of course you know the genesis of their relationship. They were nothing alike and would never run in the same circles. Evelyn had far more class than that. But when you come together for a common goal, things you don’t have in common tend to become less important. And tonight, their common goal, after ten years of quiet, had once again reared his ugly head.

  “Chief Walters,” Evelyn answered. “Don’t tell me you have more important things to do tonight.”

  “Hello, Evelyn. No, nothing like that, I’m on my way. I just wanted to make sure we are on the same page before our meeting.”

  “We don’t need a same page to be on, I’ve already taken care of everything,” Evelyn said, full of confidence.

  “And just why don’t I like the sound of that?”

  “Because you worry too much. And while men like you sit around and worry, women like me get things done. See you in a few, darling.”

  Evelyn ended the call. She knew her decision to go ahead and rectify their little problem wasn’t going to be a popular one. But as long as the problem was gone, she didn’t really care. Ultimately, she knew they wouldn’t care either in the long run. She watched as a large man in a suit approached her car. As with every time she had come there for a meeting, she waited, as instructed, for one of the guards to come and escort her in.

  The car door opened. “Ms. Delaney.” The man held out his hand.

  Evelyn took it, and he helped her from the vehicle.

  “Right this way, ma’am.”

  She followed behind the man as he walked her toward the back entrance to the mansion. They stepped inside a doorway, then he immediately walked her over to the elevator. She stepped inside and when the elevator doors closed, she adjusted her red dress in the reflection of the mirrored wall to her left. She was never the prettiest of women, but power has a way of making you look gorgeous.

  The door dinged and opened to the elaborate library-style office, and she was greeted by another large man—his hair more slicked back than the last—and escorted through the walkway of shelved books on either side. The shelving gave way to a sitting area, a table encircled by couches and chairs, and beyond that a large desk in front of her on the back wall. Four men stood on each side of the desk, each more intimidating than the next. A man in a suit behind the desk spread his arms, wearing a charismatic smile.

  “Evelyn Delaney. It’s been too long. Welcome.”

  “Nero. You look well,” Evelyn told him. She then glanced at the men on both sides of his desk. “Some things never change, I see.”

  “You can never be too careful.” Nero waved his arm toward a door on the wall behind him, and immediately all the men in the room exited, except one. “You’ve met my son?”

  Evelyn stepped forward, her hand stretched toward the handsome young man beside Nero. “I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure.”

  “Johnny De Luca,” he said, turning her hand over and giving it a chivalrous kiss.

  Evelyn smiled. “The apple doesn’t fall far, I see.”

  Johnny smiled. Nero De Luca rounded his desk and embraced Evelyn with a hug.

  “You look lovely as always, Evelyn. Shall we?”

  Nero gestured toward the sitting area. Evelyn followed him there.

  “A drink?” Johnny asked.

  “Vodka. Thank you.”

  Evelyn took a seat as Johnny poured her a drink. Nero poured himself a whiskey in front of her. The elevator dinged again, and when it opened, a large black man walked into the room. Evelyn hardly noticed him out of his police uniform.

  “Getting started without me?”

  Nero stood, and Evelyn stood along with him to greet the man.

  “Johnny, you can go now. This is grown-up business.” Nero said, completely dismissing his son. “Chief Walters,” Nero said. The two men shook hands.

  “Hello, Nero,” Chief Walters said, then nodded toward Evelyn. “Evelyn.”

  Nero gestured for the two of them to sit. Evelyn remained standing.

  She finished her vodka in one drink. “Sitting won’t be necessary,” she said. “I’ve already taken care of our little problem. I just wanted to give you the courtesy of telling you in person.”

  Nero De Luca and Chief Walters shared a glance.

  “I grew tired of waiting for the two of you to take care of him. Chief, how many times did you try while he was in prison? Three?” She looked over at De Luca. “And you, did you ever try? Or were you too busy using him to further your agenda, having him take out your enemies’ men? I’m sure I don’t need to rem
ind you what would happen to all of us if he were to put together what really happened.”

  Nero ignored her last few statements.

  “What do you mean you took care of him, Evelyn?”

  “Just what I said. I sent two men to kill him at the hotel suite you put him up in.”

  Nero shook his head.

  “That wasn’t what we discussed, Evelyn,” Chief Walters said.

  “No it isn’t.” She was direct. “I listened to both of your convoluted versions of how we should handle the pardon of Lawson Raines, and both of you failed to understand that we couldn’t let him get started on what surely was the only thing the man thought of for ten years. Killing whoever was responsible for the murder of his wife. Something we never should have been involved in anyway, but we let you sway us, Nero.”

  “Let me sway you?” Nero stood, his debonair demeanor turned sour. “You saw your money train”—he pointed to himself—“was in danger of running dry, so you went along very quickly with keeping him from finishing the case he was building against my father. If he and his partner would have been able to take him down, your pretty little car parked outside, your beautiful home, and your closet full of things, I’m sure, like that purse and those shoes would never have happened.”

  Evelyn waved him away with her hand. “Either way, it’s taken care of.”

  Nero’s demeanor turned even darker. “I told you I needed him. I had everything under control. I was going to use him to put all of us in an even more advantageous position. And you’re telling me that you went on your own”––he made air quotes with his fingers––“and ‘took care of it’?”

  Nero picked up his phone. “Johnny, get back in here. Now.”

  Nero didn’t say anything while they waited for Johnny to make it back to them. He just stared a hole through Evelyn. After an awfully long awkward silence, the door to his office finally opened.