Rope on Fire (John Crane Series Book 1)

by Mark Parragh

  ###

  Crane worked his way through the downstairs rooms, searching for the rest of Melissa’s team. He found only piles of dusty junk left over from the construction. He did notice a sliver of sunlight at the end of a dark hall and found a door blocked open by a milk crate. Perhaps the others had escaped this way. At any rate, they weren’t down here.

  Crane headed back up toward the rooms Melissa had shown him earlier. Everything had been shot to pieces. Computers and microscopes, even a ventilation hood had been peppered with bullets. He smelled chemicals. As he moved through what looked like a storage room, he caught movement and spun, the gun ready.

  “Don’t shoot!” a terrified woman cried. Crane lowered the muzzle.

  Three figures stepped out from behind a bullet-scarred metal cabinet. The rest of Melissa’s team, alive. Crane felt a flood of relief.

  “Is anyone hurt?”

  “We’re okay,” said the woman; Lupe, he remembered. “What about Melissa? She was with you.”

  “She’s in the woods. I’ll take you there.”

  He led them back downstairs, to the open door.

  “We got separated from Sabelio,” one of them said.

  “I saw him get out. Melissa’s probably found him by now.”

  At the rear door, Crane looked outside, saw nothing. “Okay, stick close to me and keep moving.”

  “Did Melissa give you her keys?” It was Lupe again. Crane could see in her expression that something wasn’t right.

  “No. Why?”

  “How did you get this door open?”

  “I found it this way.” Crane had a sudden bad feeling. He examined the door. This was no fire exit. The lock was a deadbolt, separate from the knob. There was no manual latch anywhere. Even from the inside, the only way to unlock it was with the key.

  Which Melissa had. She must have sneaked in to try and get her team out. Damn it.

  “All right, go,” said Crane. “Move. Get to the woods. I’ll find her.”

  He sent them out, watched them run for the cover of the trees. Then he turned and headed back down the hall.

  The moment he stepped into the atrium, he heard a shout from above. He jumped back, and a burst of gunfire splattered off the cement floor in front of him. That was no warning shot fired over his head. They must have found the man he’d taken out and realized someone was fighting back.

  He heard the shooter’s footsteps coming down the stairs and dropped to a crouch, ready to fire when the enemy came around the curve of the stairway. Then a second man appeared across the atrium, running toward him. Crane had no cover. He moved back into the darkened hallway and ducked through a doorway.

  He stepped into an empty room, lit only by a faint column of sunlight from the ceiling. It looked like the opening for stairs that had never been built. But someone had left a metal ladder behind. Crane climbed up into another empty room, this one with windows that looked out on the rainforest. Crane pulled the ladder up behind himself.

  Where would Melissa go?

  The best place to look for her was the atrium. He’d have visibility down the long hallways. He made his way back there. It was empty. He checked the hallways in all directions and saw nobody. Then he knelt by the railing and looked down between the panels to the lower floor. One of them emerged from a storage room, speaking into a mic on his collar. Then he crossed the atrium toward one of the hallways.

  Crane was considering whether to shoot him when Melissa popped out of the same doorway. She was carrying a length of pipe like a club. She didn’t see Crane.

  “Melissa!” he called quietly, hoping not to draw the attention of the man she was following. But she didn’t hear him.

  Crane swore under his breath. He might catch up with them if he headed downstairs, or he might not. The man with the gun had to come back upstairs, though. Crane was getting enough of an idea of the layout that he thought he knew where to intercept him. He set off at a trot, hoping he could get to them before Melissa got herself killed.

  ###

  “I found him!” a voice shouted into Acevedo’s earpiece. “I’ve got him!”

  “Who is that?” he demanded. “Acosta? Where are you?”

  “Yeah, I’ve got him cornered. Bottom floor of the atrium. Tall guy, anglo, dark hair, black pants, and a T-shirt. He’s got Gavilan’s gun.”

  “All right,” Acevedo answered, already moving fast. “Keep him pinned down. I’m coming to you.”

  A few moments later, “Shit. I lost him. There’s a hole in the ceiling in here. He’s on the first floor somewhere.”

  Acevedo swore. Whoever the interloper was, he was slippery. They needed better coordination. There were four of them now, against one guy. They needed to work together, herd the bastard into a corner and overwhelm him. No matter who the son of a bitch was, he was still just one guy.

  “Keep after him,” he snapped into his mic. “He’s probably heading toward the front doors. Push him that way and I’ll move to head him off. The rest of you, start moving back in toward the center. We want to corral the son of a whore. If you get a shot, take him down. This guy’s trouble.”

  He checked his watch. Just over four minutes since they’d come in. If things had gone to plan, they’d be finished now, falling back to the van, and this whole business would be over. But things weren’t going to plan. It was a bullshit job from the start, and it just kept getting worse and worse.

  A man shouldn’t have to put up with all this shit for a fishing boat, Acevedo told himself as he swapped a full magazine into his gun and headed for the center of the building to meet up with Acosta.

  ###

  Melissa looked with dismay at the sample storage room. Crates had been knocked over, trampled, shot to pieces. Coolant pooled on the floor. Nothing here could be salvaged. At least she hadn’t found any bodies.

  Then she heard a man’s voice outside. “Roger that,” it said. “Coming to you.”

  She ducked behind the wreckage of a storage refrigerator as a masked figure appeared in the doorway. He looked around, sweeping the room with his gun, and then disappeared again. Melissa hurried to the door, peered around the frame, and saw the man moving off down a corridor. She followed.

  He turned and found the stairs to the main level. Moving quietly, she followed him up. She knew this building better than anyone. The stairs would take him to a side passage that opened into one of the main central corridors.

  Melissa took a deep breath as she reached the top of the stairs, and hefted the pipe. Then she sprinted forward. She was already into her swing when she realized he knew she was there—had known all along. He wheeled to face her, raising the gun and parrying her swing with it. The pipe hit the gun’s metal frame and skated down the barrel. The impact jarred her arms, and she felt herself overextending. The pipe slammed against the wall, and there was a terrible scrape as the end gouged a scar into the concrete. She was off balance, stumbling forward.

  A moment later, a blast of agony swept through her as he jammed the rifle butt into her ribcage. She gasped out a loud, ragged breath and couldn’t breathe in. She fell and lost her grip on the pipe. It clanged away down the hallway as she hit the floor hard. The man kicked her in the stomach, rolling her over onto her back with another gasp.

  He leveled the rifle at her. His eyes glared through his ski mask.

  “No,” she tried to say. “Please, don’t.” But the words didn’t make it past her throat.

  Then the left side of his head erupted in a spray of blood and bone, and he pitched forward. She felt the blood spatter her face, saw him toppling forward toward her, and this time she did scream as he fell on top of her.

  A dark shape approached from down the hall. It resolved into John Crane.

  He stalked toward her, gun leveled, dark eyes peering down the barrel, and she suddenly realized that this was who he was. For all his looks and charm, he was a killer and this was his world, not hers, that she’d gone charging into with her stupid pipe.
/>   “Are you all right? Can you walk?”

  He didn’t look down at her. He turned, keeping his eyes on the spot where his gun was aimed. She could hear the calm anger in his voice. For the first time, she was afraid of him.

  “Can you move?” he repeated. Then he suddenly let one leg go limp and fell into a roll. Melissa heard the shots, heard the bullets spatter off the cement where he’d been.

  Crane rolled over one shoulder and came back up into a crouch. He sprayed a long, uncontrolled burst down the side passage, filling it with bullets, and she caught just a glimpse of a figure retreating around a corner.

  “Jesus Christ,” she breathed.

  He rose and now looked down at her. His eyes were fierce.

  “Come on,” he snapped.

  And now she got to her feet and ran back toward the stairs and out the basement door as Crane moved, quick and calm behind her, covering her as she fled.

  ###

  Acevedo moved carefully. The stranger was nearby. He could feel it.

  “Fourth junction, still nothing,” said his earpiece. That was Sosa. He’d met up with Old Rodriguez and they were sweeping forward. The target was in front of them. He had to be.

  “Keep moving,” Acevedo said, his voice steady. His control had slipped a little when the stranger took out Gavilan. That wasn’t good. But he had things under control now. His men were working together as a team, the way they’d been trained.

  “Acosta, where are you?” he asked. If they could hook up, they could trap their quarry between themselves in front and Sosa and Rodriguez behind him.

  “Coming upstairs,” said Acosta.

  “Pick it up. I don’t want him slipping through.”

  “I’m coming, I’m—” Then Acosta shouted. Acevedo heard metal hitting metal and then something metallic ringing hard against the cement. He realized he could hear it, not just on the radio. The next junction, and then right.

  He was almost there when he heard the single shot. Acevedo froze. Why just one shot? Why now?

  Acevedo looked around the corner and saw Acosta on the floor. His head was a bloody wreck; a pool of blood was spreading against the pale gray cement.

  The woman lay near him—near his body—but she hadn’t killed him. At the far end of the hallway stood the stranger, his body leaning over the rock-steady barrel of Gavilan’s AK. He had killed Acosta.

  Killed Acosta.

  He’d lost a man. His friend was dead. Acevedo had a vague sense of everything coming apart around him, a moment of terror. He fought it down. For Acosta. He stepped into the intersection and fired a burst, aiming for center mass just the way they’d done it in the academy.

  And yet, somehow, he missed. The figure seemed to collapse, and for an instant Acevedo thought he’d hit him. But then he came up to one knee and a long burst sprayed the hallway.

  Acevedo sprang back, hearing bullets drill through the air nearby and ricochet off the walls.

  Who the fuck was this guy?

  His watch started to beep. Their time was up.

  Now the wall of his reserve gave in earnest. Panic washed over Acevedo. He had a dead officer to explain and a man out there he couldn’t seem to just kill. He needed to get out of there, get the others out, before this all went more to shit. Get out and figure out what to do next.

  “Fall back!” he shouted. “To the van, get to the van! Rodriguez, get ready to move. Everyone get to the van, now!”

  Then he turned and ran down the corridor toward the front doors.

  ###

  They were outside when Crane heard the engine and ran to the parking lot in time to see a white van disappearing around the bend in the road. They were gone. It was over. At least the shooting part. The rest was just beginning.

  His first priority was Melissa and her team. He’d gotten them out of the building and left them in the safety of the forest before he went back inside. They were still there, in a tight huddle at the tree line. He put the gun down and brought them back across the rear lawn. They were silent, docile. The adrenaline was fading.

  Once he got them inside, Melissa took charge again, leading as they moved in a group from room to room, taking inventory and surveying the damage. Few words were spoken. Just an occasional awed, “Oh, no,” as they discovered the ruins of expensive gear in each new room. Lupe was crying, and the IT guy was trying to comfort her without much success.

  “We should call the police,” Sabelio said dully.

  “I tried,” said the botanist. “Lines are dead.”

  That seemed to break the dam of silence, and Crane was bombarded with questions.

  “Who were they?”

  “Why are they doing this to us?”

  “Why didn’t they kill us?”

  Melissa took her team to the conference room where they got the chairs back in place and sat down. Then she spoke softly to Crane. “We should take care of…”

  He nodded. “Stay here. I’ve got it.”

  But she followed, and he didn’t stop her. She stood back as he turned the body over. She winced at the sound his clothing made as it pulled free of the drying blood on the floor. But she stayed.

  Crane pulled up the ski mask to reveal his face. He’d been a good-looking man. In his late thirties, Crane guessed. Removing the gloves revealed a tattoo on the inside of one wrist, and a wedding ring. This man had a family waiting for him. But he wasn’t coming home, because he died trashing a research facility for no damn reason that Crane could see.

  He checked the rest of the body. He had a pistol—a Glock 18, a much better weapon than the cheap AK knockoff he’d been using. Crane took it, along with a pair of spare magazines in a pouch on his belt. His wallet had a few dollars and a driver’s license that gave him a name: Hector Acosta.

  “The hell did you think you were doing, Hector?” Crane murmured.

  “Who was he?” Melissa asked.

  Crane had a bad feeling about that. He checked the chest pockets in Acosta’s shirt and felt a squarish shape.

  He pulled out a leatherette case and flipped it open to show her Acosta’s badge with the seal of the Puerto Rico police.

  “He was a cop.”

  Chapter 12

  Melissa blanched. “A cop? That doesn’t make sense.”

  “They were all cops. This is a police-issue radio.” Crane listened to the earpiece, but the channel had gone dead. He doubted it would come back.

  Then he turned to Melissa. “Is there any reason why the police would take an interest in your operation?” he asked, his voice stern. “Anything you kept from Josh? Is anything going on behind the scenes?”

  “No!” she protested. “This project’s too important to me! And I’d know if my people were up to something.”

  Crane heard the indignation in her voice. He believed her. The other explanation made more sense, anyway.

  “I had to ask,” he said. “That means they’re working for somebody. We need to find out who and what it’s about.”

  “How do we do that? What do we do now?”

  “Well, we don’t call the police yet. We don’t know who’ll show up, what they know, or what side they’ll be on. We need to contain this. Send your people home. Tell them not to talk to anyone, forget this ever happened. If they want to take some vacation, this would be a good time.”

  She nodded, still lost in the implications.

  “Nobody was here today. Do you understand? Monday morning, you’ll come in to open up and you’ll find the place trashed. That’s the story.”

  He took her arm and gently turned her away from Acosta’s corpse. He walked her back toward the conference room.

  “How do we explain the body?” she asked.

  “There won’t be a body. I’m going to need the keys to your Jeep.”

  Lupe offered Melissa a ride back to her place in San Juan. Once they had all left, Crane wrapped the body in a paint-stained tarp he found in a storage room downstairs and carried it outside. He loaded the body into t
he back of the Jeep and drove out.

  Once he hit the paved road, he drove steadily north as development grew denser and the traffic became heavier. He was surrounded by people going about their lives with no idea that the battered Wrangler had a dead cop in the back.

  Crane glanced over his shoulder at the tarp rattling in the wind. Acosta’s death was bothering him, and he tried to unpack it, figure out why. It wasn’t that he was a cop. That was happenstance, even though it complicated things going forward. He didn’t regret killing him. Acosta had put himself in that situation, as had the other men Crane had killed.

  Of course, when he’d killed before, he’d always had the full force and authority of the United States government behind him. Now he was just some random civilian. If he were caught, his future would be bleak. There was no way he’d get a self-defense verdict for killing a cop. He’d be lucky if he ever made it into a courtroom.

  But that wasn’t really it, either. He’d only been on two missions for the Hurricane Group before they’d shut it down, but on both, he’d spent long days risking capture and death. He’d been well trained, and he knew what to do to avoid that outcome. He wasn’t afraid of being caught.

  He picked at the emotion as he drove through Canovanas and on northward toward Carolina. He wasn’t ready to dispose of the body until he’d sorted this out.

  Yes, he’d shot people before, abstract bad people who threatened him or other innocents. And to be sure, Acosta had done that. But this one had a name. He was Hector Acosta. He was a police officer, if a corrupt one. He had a wife somewhere who didn’t know she was a widow. Maybe children without a father.

  That was it, Crane decided as he drove through the outskirts of Carolina. Acosta had somehow gone from an anonymous enemy to a real person with a life, one that had collided with Crane’s and stopped. That’s why he was driving into a populated area with a dead body in the back of his open Jeep instead of burying it in a shallow grave in the rainforest. Because that family at least deserved a chance to bury their loved one and mourn.