“Over by your friend,” Mitch instructed.
The man moved closer to the prone figure, which was now writhing into a fetal position, becoming slowly aware of its pain and helplessness. Then, turning, they faced one another again, ignoring the one on the ground.
“What do you want?” the man asked, his hands still spread open at the level of his chin.
The truth, Mitch thought. That’s what I want. “Information,” he said.
The man shrugged, said nothing.
Like a thunderclap on a sunny day, the needle of light appeared without warning from the hand of the man twisted into a fetal position on the ground, striking Mitch full in the chest. And for the second time in his life, his Silent Guard gave him another chance—the grace period he had paid for.
One second burned away. Anticipating Mitch’s collapse, the man standing leaned forward, preparing to walk away. When Mitch did not slump to the ground in death throes, the man’s lips parted as if to voice his disbelief. During the second second, Mitch could feel the fatal heat, smell the acrid odor as the laser attempted to eat its way through the unexpected barrier. Like a cobra striking, he swung his own laser toward the man on the ground, squeezing the trigger vengefully. The sapphire bolt that sprang from its mouth sought the source of the beam still blistering his chest for the third consecutive second, tracked it in flaring silence, and incinerated the hand that was clutching it. The man shrieked in stunned, searing pain, and the fingers spasmed open, dropping the laser; the shaft of light disappeared. Mitch swung the laser back to cover the man standing beside his writhing partner, all in the blink of an eye.
Breathing hard now, his heart pounding with the exhilaration of still being alive, Mitch could feel the perspiration on his back and forehead. The momentary thought flickered through his head: Nothing is as invigorating as being shot at and missed...It was incredible. His lungs opened fully, and he found himself gasping long, deep draughts of welcome night air, crisp and cold. His hand was rock calm, amazingly steady.
The jaw muscles of the man opposite him clenched and unclenched. Mitch saw his eyes telegraph his fear, his understanding. His respect. Mitch liked what he saw. The two-man edge had now undeniably shifted to him. The awareness of it hung in the air between them, palpable and sure.
Mitch’s nostrils flared, still stung by the fumes from his scorched jacket and shirt. The burn-hole had widened to become a three-centimeter-diameter puncture of charcoal and curling, acrid smoke.
The man on the ground was still twisting and groaning. Mitch looked at him, feeling nothing. Then he looked back at the man he was covering.
“Move away from him.”
The man moved.
“That’s far enough. Don’t move.”
The stranger had no intention of moving. Mitch walked over to the man on the grass without taking his eyes from the one with his hands raised.
He glanced down at the injured man, then quickly back at the one at bay.
“Lie down on your stomach.”
The man didn’t move.
“Or I’ll kill you.”
The man lay down on his stomach in the cool autumn grass.
“Put your hands behind your back.”
Slowly, the hands appeared, clasping one another at the small of the man’s back. Mitch reached for the slash zipper on his right breast, slid it open, and extracted the cuffs. They glinted in the cold moonlight. He walked over, bent, and snapped them expertly on the man’s wrists.
“Don’t move,” he added. “Anything.”
The man was motionless.
Mitch turned his attention to the one who had absorbed the laser twice. But he did so carefully. He was certain that both of these goons were capable of absorbing enormous quantities of pain; to take them lightly, he knew, would signal his imminent demise. Grabbing the man by the back of his coat collar, Mitch lifted him to a rough sitting position and propped him against the bole of the willow. The man’s leg flopped at a strange angle, he noted; he noted, too, that the blood seemed to have been stemmed there. The man was heavy and swarthy, and he bore his punishment well. His pale face was tortured, and angry; his teeth bared as he bit back sounds of his personal torment. Blood had caked on his lips and nose, but the whites of his eyes flashed alertly all the while. Mitch glanced at his hand. The baby finger and the ring finger beside it were missing, and the blood was flowing freely from a ragged, welling slash across the fleshy part of his palm.
Mitch studied the two figures, planning his strategy. He bent and quickly pocketed the laser that had sought to burn a hole through his chest, then he began a weapons search. Attached to the man’s calf, under the pantleg of his torn, twisted limb, was a Viper Knife. The watertight, hollow handle, when popped open, exposed a forty-centimeter wire garrotte; there were also two tiny needles, their tips wrapped in adhesive. Mitch knew that their tips were fatal. Alloy handle, he thought, and stainless steel fifteen-centimeter blade. He added it to the laser in his pocket.
In a leather holster on the back of the man’s hip, above his right buttock, Mitch found a “Star” pistol, the reliable Spanish-made weapon renowned for lightweight accuracy and reliability: 45 ACP, a ramp front sight, crisp trigger action, all polished blue. Mitch hefted it, feeling traces of familiar envy and anger surfacing. About 230 grams, with ammo. Nice. Bastard, he thought, trying to control the surge of sudden hostility.
It, too, disappeared into his pocket, which was now becoming bulky.
That seemed to be it. Mitch let the man sag back against the willow, his gaze pitiless in the dark. The man’s right hand, minus the two fingers, was pressed tightly against his stomach, the blood spreading wetly into an amorphous stain. His teeth were still clenched harshly in reaction to the pain flooding throughout him.
Mitch turned his attention to the one on his face in the grass. Walking to him, he bent and clutched him by his shoulders and slid him along the grass to within a few meters of his cohort. Then he rolled him onto his back and hauled him into a sitting position by the front of his coat. Stunned, the man nevertheless stared back at him, his anger and hate all too evident.
Mitch picked the lightweight plastic G.E. laser pistol from the grass where it had been dropped, adding it to the swelling arsenal in his own pocket. Then he turned and moved his hand up the man’s calves as he pressed the butt of his Bausch & Lomb against the throbbing vein in the man’s left temple; the man continued to stare at him, radiating waves of fear and odium.
Mitch smiled coldly back.
This one was loaded. Mitch suddenly realized what exactly had been stalking him, and how lucky he was to have them both submissive here like this. On the right calf: a military-issue Gurkha Kukri knife, a super-chopper with a half-centimeter-thick thirty-centimeter blade. Its sheath was the classiest Mitch had yet seen—leather, with wood lining and brass fitting. Undoing the entire assembly, he tossed it aside a few meters where he could still see it.
On the left calf: an aluminum telescopic blowgun, in a doeskin leather fitting, with six .38-caliber steel darts. The only place Mitch had even seen one was during a weapons exhibition and demonstration years ago in basic training. He recalled the stats now: speed, one hundred meters per second; range, seventy-five meters. He had seen it demonstrated and remembered how it had pierced two-centimeter plywood at maximum range. He undid it carefully with his left hand, fully aware that the darts would have poisoned tips, and tossed it beside the Kukri knife.
Mitch found another laser in a concealable shoulder holster. Larger than any he had seen before, it had a barrel about twenty-five centimeters long, with a retractable telescopic shoulder-rest so that it could be fired like a rifle. He rolled the smooth black plastic over in his hand: a Sanyo. Probably maximum heat and maximum range for a hand weapon, he thought. So this is the future, Mitch mused bleakly. When he saw the slots for attachments along its sleek barrel, he realized what it was missing. Dropping it into the grass behind him, he rifled through the man’s pockets again as best a
s he could with his left hand only until he found it. A Nite-Hawk Scope, complete with tiny argon cylinder. Clipped to the Sanyo, it provided infrared death to total darkness, at phenomenal distances.
Mitch felt a cool belligerence sweep through him. “What will your boss say?” he asked suddenly.
The man was surprised at being spoken to. “Don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“All this...stuff’—Mitch gestured toward the array of weaponry—”and I got you.”
For a moment, the man could only seethe. Then: “Yeah. For the time being.”
“No,” Mitch said. “For as long as I want.”
The man’s brow wrinkled in a perplexed frown.
Mitch stood up, backed away a meter. Then he opened his coat and shifted the Barking Dog on his belt toward his navel, where it could get a proper sighting.
The man’s eyes widened as he saw it, recognized it.
From his pants pocket, Mitch took out a small leather case and flipped it open. A circular glass cap about the size of a silver dollar, with a rectangular black vertical attachment, appeared in his hand.
“What’s that?” The words had slipped out before the man could stop them.
“Scan-eye infrared viewer,” answered Mitch tonelessly, screwing the cap onto the video-eye of the Dog. “The Dog wants to see your faces. All of them.”
The man swallowed. “What do you want?”
“I told you. Information.” The assembly completed, Mitch flipped the box closed and put it back into his pants pocket.
“This whole business is too big for you, Helwig. We know who you are. You can’t get away with anything. You do anything to us...” He glanced at his partner. “Anything else...and you’ll be taken out, permanently.”
“By the Archangel.”
The man said nothing.
“Watch.” Mitch bent and retrieved the buffed black Sanyo laser. He slid the retractable shoulder-rest from its condensed mooring, tucked the laser snugly into his right shoulder, then turned and sighted it on the man propped against the tree. Even with his face clotted in blood, and through the haze of pain emanating from his leg and hand, the stranger came to full awareness as Mitch leveled the laser at him.
“Can you give the Dog any reason why I shouldn’t kill you?”
The man just stared at him.
“Any reason at all.”
“Because if you do, we’ll get you!” the man in the cuffs screamed suddenly from beside him.
Mitch turned his head to glare at the one whose laser he now controlled. Then he turned back to the injured man twisted at the foot of the tree. “Bullshit,” he said.
He squeezed the trigger.
A bolt of light with a blue shimmer to it erupted from the mouth of the Sanyo and tracked instantaneously onto the chest of the man at the foot of the black willow. Its power, Mitch realized as he held the trigger down, was devastating. The man made no sound as he died. The hole in his chest grew to the size of a fist, and his eyes and mouth gaped openly when Mitch finally released the trigger, having burned the heart to a bubbling vapor. Blood welled freely from the smoking cavity, flowing toward the cold, silent earth.
Mitch turned away from the man he had killed and methodically studied the stunned visage of his remaining captive. The man’s hardened features had been transformed from the texture of carved apple to mashed potato in the last few seconds. Good, thought Mitch. Very good. He had used his two-man advantage as dramatically as he could, and now it was time to see if it had paid off. The look on the man’s face told him he was close.
“Jesus Christ,” the man muttered.
Mitch held the Sanyo at a calculated half-mast. With his left hand, he spread his jacket open so that the Barking Dog could see the man clearly.
The man’s eyes were wild now, darting from Mitch to the body of his partner and back again. He was anticipating his own death, and wasn’t handling it very well. Not nearly as well as he handled his victims’ deaths, Mitch reflected bitterly.
“What’s in the warehouse?”
The man licked his lips. “You’ll kill me whether I tell you or not.”
“Maybe not.”
The man was silent for a minute, running the whole horrid skein of possibilities through his fevered brain. He didn’t like any of them.
Mitch began to raise the Sanyo.
“Wait! Wait a minute.”
Mitch shrugged the butt of the shoulder-rest comfortably into position. “Why?” He ran a finger down the burnished shaft of the weapon.
“I’ll tell you. I’ll talk to you.”
It was the truth. There was no telltale shiver from the Barking Dog.
Mitch took his time lowering the laser, not wanting his acquiescence to seem too quick. A sheen of perspiration had sprung out on the man’s upper lip, in spite of the cold night.
The Sanyo came to a halt once again at half-mast, never completely leaving the scene—or the man’s imagination. The stranger risked a glance at his dead partner, licked his lips in fright and shock, then let his weakened eyes meet his captor’s.
“What’s in the warehouse?” Mitch asked again.
“There’s...there’s all kinds of stuff in there,” he stammered. “It’s a storehouse for goods that need to be fenced, or disguised, or just given time to cool down. There’s...” He stopped, looking at the Dog, then continued, “Drugs, automobiles, guns, stuff like that.”
It was all true. But Mitch knew that they hadn’t scratched the surface yet. It would take more questions, and more answers.
And fear. And uncertainty.
“Tell me about the drugs.”
“I don’t know much.”
True.
“Tell me what you do know. Tell me something interesting.”
“Mostly coke.” He spoke more quickly now. “It’s easy to store, easy to move.”
“How much is in there?”
“Don’t know.”
A flash of cold illuminated Mitch’s side. He began to raise the laser.
“Wait! I mean I don’t know the exact amount, or the total amount, really! I have some rough ideas.”
“Like?”
“Like, several tons—”
“Tons!” It was true.
The man shrugged. “I’ve been trying to tell you—these are the Big Boys. They’re not gonna risk their operation for one guy, a cop like you. You’ll be put away when they find my partner—and if you kill me. Listen”—he tried his angle—“you can still get out of all this. I’ll make a deal with you. We’ll work out a plausible story about what happened to him,” he said, nodding in the direction of the corpse by the tree. “You can still walk away from all this. It’s not too late.”
Mitch pretended he was considering it. “Tons of coke,” he repeated. “One ton’s worth about five billion on the street. How many tons?”
“I’ve seen five personally. I understand there’s more.”
Mitch was stunned. No wonder we can’t dry up the streets, he thought. “Is it manufactured on the site?”
“Not that I know of. It’s all Colombian—best stuff.”
“How do they get it in?”
“Lots of ways. But I don’t really know much about it. It’s not my line.”
“What is your line?”
“I look after Mr. Scopellini’s personal interests.”
“Him, too?” He indicated the dead man.
The man glanced at the body automatically, then swung his eyes away swiftly. “Yeah. Him, too.”
“Not very good at it, are you?”
The man said nothing.
“Tell me more.”
“Like what?”
“There were six thousand lasers stolen from the Moss Park Armory recently.” And seven men murdered, he added to himself. “Are they in there?”
The man hesitated, then nodded.
“I couldn’t hear you.”
“Yes.”
The Dog did not bite. Mitch’s brain was beginning to re
el as he considered the magnitude of his find.
And this is just one city, he thought suddenly. Is this going on in all the other cities of the same size? If it was true, and he suspected it had to be, police forces were sadly overmatched, in awesome proportions. And in his heart, he knew it was so. He also knew what he had to do.
“There’s something else.”
Mitch was startled back to the present. “What?”
“Something you should know.”
Mitch waited. The Dog waited.
“There’s a dossier on you and your family being completed right now. The Archangel will have it by morning. He’ll know everything about you. He’ll know about your wife, about your daughter—”
“What about them?” Mitch’s voice was razor-sharp.
“They’ll be in danger if anything happens to me, and I don’t cover for you. If we don’t come up with the right story to explain all this away...” His eyes were gleaming. He figured he had found the wedge he needed and had pounded it tentatively into the man standing over him, searching for the proper amount of force without cracking the subject of attention.
On the surface, he remained calm; but inside, Mitch boiled with outrage at having them mentioned at all—at even an implied threat. He contemplated the scum sitting in front of him, knew he couldn’t let him get to him before he had milked him.
But the man continued. “The Archangel oversees dozens of things. Most of them, I don’t even know anything about.” Thinking that if he told the man hovering over him about one particular facet of the Archangel’s domain, it would shake his tormentor to his roots and might get him out of this hole, the cuffed man went on. “He’s into everything. You name it, he’s got a piece. He’s even going legitimate in some things—you know, portfolios arranged by lawyers, IBM stock, Bell Telephone, breweries, Xerox...But he’s into the dirty stuff, too.”
“Like?”
Barking Dogs - A Mitch Helwig Book Page 16