“Speaking frankly, the District of Columbia is a Third World shithole. The local leaders are quacks, demagogues, and outright thieves. Public schools and hospitals are appallingly bad, tens of millions of dollars of public funds have been stolen or squandered, charges of racism are endemic. The Washington Monthly magazine said the District has ‘the worst government in America,’ which is probably true. A U.S. senator called it the most corrupt and most incompetent urban government in America. With me so far?”
Their food came. The waitress asked if they needed anything else and they both shook their heads. When she was gone, Yocke continued:
“Except for tourism and government, the District has no other economic base, nothing to create middle-class jobs. Its people don’t believe in self-help or education. They blame all their woes on the U.S. government. If this place were in Central America or Africa, Barry would have proclaimed himself ‘maximum leader’ or ‘president for life.’ Since they have the misfortune to be surrounded by the United States, however, they want this sixty-four-square-mile banana republic to become the fifty-first state.”
“Why?”
“Why not?”
With his mouth full of a bite of BLT, Jake said, “Being a state won’t help.”
“Of course not. But Marion Barry can be governor and Jesse Jackson can be a senator. The Democrats will get a bigger majority in the House and Senate and three automatic electoral votes. What more do you want, for Christ’s sake?”
“You really are a cynic, aren’t you?”
“Oh, come off it, you overpaid nincompoop in a sailor suit. I’ve been a reporter in this town for three years. I go out every night and look at the bodies. I spend evenings at the emergency room of D.C. General with the abused kids, the wives beat half to death, the overdoses, the gunshot victims who won’t tell who shot them, the rape victims. I stand in the courthouse halls and watch the attorneys plea-bargain, selling their clients’ constitutional rights for a reduced sentence or probation. I go to the jails and look at the same old faces again and again and again. I talk to the victims of muggings, robbery, burglary, auto theft. Human carnage is the name of my game, mister. Who the hell do you think you are?”
“Three years,” Jake Grafton sighed. “It’s too long, yet it’s not long enough.”
The reporter suddenly looked tired. No doubt his day had been as long as Jake’s. He said, “No doubt you’d feel better if I had said ten years. Let’s change it. Ten years’ experience it is.”
“You’re floating down a sewer in a glass-bottom boat, Yocke. Sooner or later you have to get in and swim.”
“You think I’m to blame for some of this?”
“I read the paper. I haven’t seen any of this with your byline.”
“You ought to read the paper more carefully,” Yocke said. He rubbed the stubble on his jaw. “There’s a whole bunch of very talented people who think their mission in life is to write all of it—the good, the bad, and every subtle nuance in between. They put all of it in the paper. The hell of it is nobody pays any attention. It’s like tossing pebbles into the Atlantic Ocean. Doesn’t even disturb the fish.”
Jake took a sip of coffee, then helped himself to another bite of BLT. After he’d chewed and swallowed, he said, “You’ve heard about the National Guard deal. How will that go, in this city you describe?”
Yocke took his time. He drank some coffee and slathered the remainder of his sandwich with more mustard. “I don’t know. If the troops are just going to stand around public buildings looking spiffy and the shooters stay home, everything will go swimmingly. Absent a charge of child molestation, Quayle will be our next president.”
“Why’d you say if?”
“You’d be home in bed, Captain, if that was all there was to it. Neither of us rode in yesterday on a hay wagon.”
Grafton caught the waitress’ eye and held his cup aloft. She brought the pot and gave him a refill.
After swallowing his last bite of sandwich, Yocke continued: “A lot of people in this town are fed up to here with these dopers and politicians. They’ve been demanding action and getting politics as usual. Something is going to give.”
“What’re you saying? There’s going to be a revolution?”
“Packed emergency rooms, innocent people slaughtered, children starving and neglected and abused, jails packed full as sardine cans, cops fighting for their lives. Now I’ll tell you, a lot of little people are sick and tired of going to funerals. They’ve had it. And you know what? I don’t think the political cretins have a clue. They’re dancing between the raindrops blaming the big bad Colombians and the white establishment and the National Rifle Association.”
Jack Yocke threw up his hands. “Ah well, even Fidel Castro got the message finally, just before they shot him.”
Jake nodded. “Yeah.”
A few minutes later, Yocke asked, “Why’d you stand up today when they shot at Quayle?”
“Stupid, I guess.”
“Captain, whatever you are, stupid isn’t on the list.”
“Wondered where the shot came from. Took a look.”
Yocke’s eyebrows went up and down once. “Well, thanks for the sandwich.” He shoved the check across toward Grafton.
“Any time.”
Approaching Freeman’s house, for the first time in a long time Harrison Ronald did not feel the dread. He didn’t drive by, of course. After the fracas earlier this evening over at Teal’s Freeman would have a squad of men in front and another squad of men in back, some of whom would inevitably recognize Sammy Z.
Harrison parked two blocks away and walked.
The streets were silent and empty. Amazingly quiet. A gentle breeze made the tree limb shadows cast by streetlights stir and shake.
He was behind a car, crouching, when he got his first look at the end of the alley. A streetlight was on the pole. But there was no one in sight. No guard.
Odd.
Using the cars for cover he worked his way to the alley and looked down it. He couldn’t see anyone.
He went down the alley with the automatic in his hand, flitting from shadow to shadow, pausing occasionally to look and listen. Nothing.
Even Freeman’s backyard was empty.
Nobody home. Okay, where would he be? Three or four possibilities suggested themselves, and as he mulled them Harrison Ronald tried the back door. Locked. He pounded loudly on the door with the butt of the pistol and stood to one side.
Thirty seconds passed, then a minute. He put the muzzle of the silenced pistol against the lock and pulled the trigger.
Inside the lights were off. He proceeded slowly, warily. The house was empty.
In the weapons room he wiped the prints from the automatic, even popped the magazine out and wiped that off on a handy cleaning rag, and tossed it into the box with the others. He selected another automatic with a silencer already attached, loaded it, and helped himself to a couple more loaded magazines. He was about to leave when a silenced Uzi caught his eye. Why not? He took it and four magazines of 9-mm ammo.
Leaving the Uzi inside the back door, he pulled the door shut behind him. He trotted down the alley and the two blocks to the car, then drove it back.
He maneuvered it into the parking area and dragged Vinnie from the car. God, the body was heavy! The corpse hadn’t been this heavy when he loaded it into the car. Or perhaps he had been too pumped to notice.
He put Vinnie in the easy chair in front of the television, then turned the set on. The rest of the lights he unplugged.
Another trip to the car for Vinnie’s twelve-gauge, which he laid across the dead man’s lap. The empty brass casings in his pocket he tossed around the room after wiping them.
When he started the car, he thought for a moment, trying to decide if there was anything else he wanted to do.
Yeah. Come to think of it …
Standing in the door to the living room, he sprayed a magazine of 9-mm slugs from the Uzi. Above the guttural buzzing of the
silenced weapon the sound of the television shattering and the slugs slapping the plasterboard was plainly audible.
That magazine spent, he loaded another and went into the bedroom. Three bursts there, then into the kitchen where he finished out the magazine on the refrigerator and oven and dishes in the cabinets. He put another magazine in and emptied it in Freeman’s bathroom into the toilet and the bathtub and the mirror and sink. The shattered porcelain and glass flew everywhere.
This was like pissing on Hitler’s picture. Somehow it just wasn’t enough.
He went back to the storeroom and got some more magazines for the Uzi. He looked around. Under the couch where the boxes of ammo were stored was a cardboard box half full of grenades. Harrison helped himself.
What would you have to do to make Freeman McNally pay enough? For what he did to the Ike Randolphs, for what he did to all the people he peddled his poison to, for all the unspeakable misery and pain this man gave the world so that he could line his pockets—for what he did to Harrison Ronald Ford—what would you have to do to McNally to even the balance in the ledger?
The filthy fuck would have to scream until his soul shattered.
Seven cars were parked outside the Sanitary Bakery warehouse, including Freeman’s big Mercedes. No guards in sight outside. Maybe they were all inside having a snort and a drink, still celebrating the big party at Willie Teal’s.
Sitting here in the green sedan looking it over—this was really weird—Harrison Ronald wasn’t scared. Not the least. He felt good, real good, like he had had a snort. He had never told the FBI agents of course, and would never tell anyone else, but he had had to snort the stuff in front of Ike and Billy Enright, and a couple times in front of Freeman and his brothers, just to prove his bona fides. Feds and cops would never touch the shit, according to street wisdom.
It had been tough leaving the stuff alone after he had used it more or less regularly for several months. Excruciatingly difficult. But that wasn’t the hardest part. He had been nervous, scared, all along, but after doing the coke he had his first real attacks of paranoia, and they hadn’t ceased, no doubt because he had plenty to be paranoid about. All he had to fight it had been grit and determination. They weren’t enough.
But now all those waves of panic and loose-boweled terror were gone. He had made up his mind. He was going to attack. Maybe die.
And he felt good, real good.
He parked the car on the north side of the warehouse by the chain-link fence where the garbage trucks were kept and locked it after he got out.
The neighborhood was quiet enough—only traffic sounds coming across the railroad tracks from New York Avenue. That and the low guttural snarls of the two Dobermans on the other side of the fence. He stood looking between the garbage trucks at the slab-sided black bulk of the building. There was a door over there somewhere. He had seen it before during the daylight.
He used the silenced pistol on the dogs. Two shots each. The Dobermans went down like they were sledgehammered.
The gate through the ten-foot-high fence was held together by a big chain with a padlock on it. Two shots for the padlock, then sixty seconds to unwrap the chain, squeeze through, then wrap it again.
The door was nailed shut with a two-by-six across it. No doubt there was other timber on the other side. He tried to remember if he had noticed this door in his many walks through the interior. If he had, he would remember, but he didn’t. Still, there was undoubtedly concrete and steel in there somewhere for the bullets to ricochet from. The sound of the full-metal-jacketed 9-mm slugs spanging through the old warehouse would certainly announce his arrival. And his intentions.
Well, here goes nothing.
He sawed the board in half with half a magazine from the Uzi, then kicked at the center of it with all his strength. It gave.
He kicked three or four times. The noise was loud here. It was probably echoing all over that huge mausoleum. Yet apparently something was holding the upper part of the door on the inside. He used the rest of the magazine on the point of resistance and kicked some more. It sagged.
Empty magazine out, new magazine in, Uzi ready, he gave one last mighty kick and the door flew open. Harrison Ronald dived through and rolled sideways, right into a wall.
He lay there for a second, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. He was under a stair that led up to the second-floor balcony. The main stairwell that led to the upper levels was off to his left. The room that the guard was in—that the front door opened into—was off to his right on the other side of the building.
He heard someone running.
Up, moving to his right along the wall, the Uzi ready. He could see the light coming from the doorway to the guard room. The door was open. The only other light in the place came from a naked bulb on the third-floor landing on the east end of the building. But it was so high and far away the light seemed to get lost in the cavernous space.
A flash and a loud report came from behind a box against the far wall. The bullet hit near Ford’s head. He scuttled toward the darkness, away from the open door.
Another shot. And another.
He used the Uzi. A three-shot burst. Little flashes against the masonry where the jacketed bullets hit. He fired again, not trying to aim in the semidarkness, just walking the slugs in. The third burst drew a scream.
Ford was up and running for the stair at the east end of the huge room when two wild shots from the screaming man sailed by. He kept going, running hard, and was in time to see the vague outline of someone coming down the stairs.
Harrison Ronald triggered a long burst at the stairway as he ran. The figure slumped and went down. From fifteen feet away he triggered a short burst into the body, then took cover beside the stairway, breathing hard.
His heart was thudding like a trip-hammer, yet he felt good, oh, so good. He should have done this six months ago.
The first man he had shot was still screaming. And cursing, the high-pitched wail of a man in agony. Like Ike Randolph in his final moments.
Someone above him on the balcony fired at him and a shard of something struck his face. It stung. He wiped at it. Wet. Blood.
Whoever was up there was moving—he could hear him.
Harrison dug a grenade from his coat pocket, got the pin out, and holding the Uzi in his left hand, came out of the darkness running and lofted the grenade upward with a basketball sky-hook shot.
The damn thing might come bouncing down before it popped, but what the hell. End it here.
It didn’t. The grenade went off with a flash and boom that was painful in this huge masonry echo chamber. A big piece of the wooden balcony rail came crashing down, the gunman in the midst of it. He landed with a splat a dozen feet from Ford and lay where he had fallen as the dust and dirt settled around and on him.
“Hey, down there!”
The shout came from upstairs.
“I don’t know who the hell you are down there but you’d better stop this shit, man!”
It sounded, Harrison decided, like Billy Enright. Maybe at the head of the stairs.
The stairs were pretty conventional. They went upward to a landing against the outer wall, then turned 180 degrees and went on up to the second floor, the balcony level. And so on, a landing between each floor, up to the fourth floor. If Ford could gain the balcony everyone above him was trapped. This was the only exit from the higher floors.
He tiptoed up the stairs and stopped on the step prior to the landing. He took out another grenade and pulled the pin. Then he stood, listening and waiting.
“There’s five of us up here, man, and we’re all armed.” It sounded like Billy was right around the corner at the head of the stairs, standing on the balcony. His voice was tense, wound tight. “I think,” he continued, “that you’re only one—”
Ford leaned around the corner and tossed the grenade.
“Fuck! You fuck—”
The concussion of the explosion was intensely painful in this confined space. Some of
the shrapnel ricocheted against the wall and bounced off Ford, too spent to penetrate.
Harrison Ronald rounded the corner with the Uzi spraying and charged up the stairs two at a time.
Billy Enright sat with his back to the waist-high balcony rail, trying to hold his guts in with both hands. In the center of his ripped-apart face his eyes widened in recognition. He opened his mouth, but only blood came out. Then he slowly toppled sideways.
Ford heard a laugh. From someplace. Where? He moved back into the stairwell and scanned the balcony, trying to see.
“You get him, Billy?”
Freeman McNally.
“Naw, Freeman. Billy’s lying here trying to hold his guts in. Maybe you got a cheerful word for him. He could use it right now.”
Another laugh. “Well, well, well. If it ain’t our good buddy the fucking stoolie, Sammy Z.”
“I ain’t a stoolie, Freeman. I’m a cop. The FBI put me in to get the goods on you. And I got ’em. Ten fucking months worth. They got it all. You’re gonna be in jail until you’re too old to get it up, Freeman, if you make it through tonight, which is very doubtful.”
McNally laughed again. It sounded like he was somewhere above, maybe on the fourth floor, talking out of one of the interior windows.
“This ain’t your night, Freeman. You get lucky and kill me, you’re going straight to the butt-fuck house. I hear all those homos got AIDS, man. They’ll be delighted to see your tight little cherry ass.”
“Well, you got one thing right, Sammy. I am sure as hell gonna kill you.”
“It’s already been tried tonight, Freeman. I hope you didn’t waste any money on Vinnie and Tony. They won’t ever be able to pay you back.”
Ford heard a noise above him, in the stairwell. Someone was coming down. “I’m gonna kill you slow, real slow,” McNally said, “like I did ol’ Ike. You’re gonna fucking beg for a bullet, boy.”
Ford ascended the stairs, both hands on the Uzi. He was four steps up when the top of a head peeped around the corner. Ford pulled the trigger and held it down.
The body plopped out from behind the wall onto the landing. Brains and blood were scattered all over the wall behind.
05.Under Siege v5 Page 40