Umbrella Man (9786167611204)

by Needham, Jake

  ***

  Tay moved away from the hotel entrance and slid into the shadows. Across the street, number 38 was still and dark. Had he been mistaken about seeing a brief glow of light? No, he didn’t think he had been.

  Taking a deep breath he walked quickly across the street and took cover behind a silver Toyota van parked at the curb about twenty feet away from the entrance to number 38. He could see the red door reasonably well from where he was, and it appeared to be closed, but the interior of the carport was in such deep shadow he could make out nothing there at all.

  Tay briefly considered what to do next, but nothing occurred to him other than the obvious. He could either check the building to see if anyone had gone into number 38, or not. Lurking in the street behind the Toyota van wasn’t going to get him anywhere.

  Stepping up onto the sidewalk, Tay moved as quietly as he could up to the red front door of number 38 and tried the handle. It was locked. He flicked on the Maglite and examined the doorframe paying special attention to the area around the lock, but then it occurred to him he had no idea what he was looking for and flicked it off again.

  Then Tay checked the gates in front of the carport to see if they were locked, too.

  They weren’t.

  The right-hand gate was open a few inches, but in the darkness Tay hadn’t been able to see that until he was right in front of it. He pushed gently at the gate and it drifted back another foot. Tay slipped inside the carport through the narrow opening.

  ***

  Moving to the back of the carport where he was certain he had seen the dim light, he found nothing except a concrete wall painted the same faded yellow as the rest of the shophouse. He flicked on the Maglite and examined the wall for some kind of an opening through which he might have seen a light.

  Nothing.

  Sweeping the light to the left, he realized the entry to the shophouse protruded beyond the back wall of the carport and in the wall of the protrusion there was a narrow door. It was a way to enter the shophouse directly from the carport without going back out through the gates to the street and then in through the front door.

  Moving as silently as he could, Tay crossed the carport to the door and shifted the light onto the lock and handle. He bent forward to study them holding the Maglite out in front of him. He focused all of his attention on the scratched gold doorknob with a single keyhole in the center of it.

  When the door suddenly swung inward and the handle flew out of the circle of illumination, for a second Tay was too surprised to move.

  And a second was all it took.

  Tay had a momentary awareness that the beam from the Maglite was now resting on a leg wearing blue jeans when the flashlight was suddenly wrenched from his grasp and his arm was jerked forward into the darkness of the shophouse. He felt the heavy Maglite crash down on the back of his neck, and after that he was aware of nothing at all.

  ***

  When Tay came to, he was lying on a concrete floor. His head hurt like hell and his mouth was dry. His first thought was to wonder how long he had been out.

  “Only a few minutes,” a voice told him in a tone so low it was almost a whisper.

  For a moment Tay wasn’t certain anyone had spoken at all. Perhaps he had only imagined an answer to the question he was asking himself. He pushed himself up into a sitting position.

  “I didn’t hit you very hard, Sam. I didn’t want to hurt you. I just wanted to shut you up until you were inside.”

  Then Tay knew what he was hearing wasn’t just in his imagination. And he knew who it was talking to him.

  “August?”

  “Your humble servant, Inspector.”

  It was too dim wherever they were for Tay to see clearly, but he had no trouble expressing himself clearly.

  “What the fuck is going on here?”

  “Shhhhhh. Keep your voice down.”

  “Why should I?” Tay asked, but he lowered his voice to a whisper anyway.

  “We’re in a storage area with concrete walls and the door behind us is steel, so I’m pretty sure we can’t be heard inside, but you never know.”

  “Who’s inside to hear us?”

  “Vince Ferrero.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because he was asked by a man he trusts to meet me here. Well…not me exactly. He thinks he’s meeting somebody who has a job for his company.”

  “Do you have a job for his company?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why are you meeting him?”

  “So I can kill him.”

  The silence that followed seemed to Tay to last an hour or so, but of course he knew it was only a few seconds. August squatted close to Tay so they could talk without raising their voices.

  “The thing is, Sam, I thought I needed to keep you in the game when I was looking for him. You’re a better detective than I am and I figured you’d find Vince pretty quick if I goosed you up a little bit.”

  “But you found him without me.”

  “Yeah…I like to have several things working when I’m trying to solve a problem. Eggs, baskets, like that.”

  “So why did you keep warning me off?”

  “Because I know you, Sam. The harder I pushed you to give up, the harder you’d work not to. I needed you to find Ferrero. Or for Ferrero to find you.”

  “You mean I was your bait?”

  “No, you…well, yeah, I guess you were.”

  Tay thought about that as he shifted himself into a more comfortable position.

  “I can’t just sit here while you kill him, John.”

  “So…what would you do if I gave Ferrero to you? Arrest him?”

  “Yes.”

  “And put him on trial for Johnny’s murder.”

  “That’s not my call, but I’m sure. Yes.”

  “You have the evidence to convict him?”

  Tay said nothing.

  “I didn’t think so.”

  “I’ll get it.”

  “You know, of course, the US would ask for extradition. They’d call it a terrorist act against a US citizen or something.”

  Tay shrugged.

  “Could be a nasty jurisdictional tussle. The result is hard to predict.”

  Tay said nothing.

  “Here’s my thought, Sam. A bullet in the brain brings absolute certainty.”

  “I can’t let you do that, John.”

  August cleared his throat and consulted a spot on the floor somewhere between them.

  “That makes it sound like you’re part of my problem now, Sam. Another detail I’m going to have to take care of.”

  If Tay had heard that from anybody other than John August, he would have taken it as a threat. But surely August meant something else, Tay thought. Didn’t he?

  “I can’t let you mess this up, Sam.”

  Maybe he didn’t mean something else.

  “We can’t take a chance that Vince starts shooting off his mouth,” August said. “And if you jam him up for killing Johnny, he might do that.”

  “Who’s this we you’re talking about?”

  August didn’t answer, but then Tay hadn’t really expected him to.

  “I can’t sit here and let you commit a murder in Singapore, John.”

  “As I remember—”

  “I don’t want to talk about that. I’m not proud of it. It’s not going to happen again. It’s not going to happen tonight.”

  August exhaled heavily. “You sure about that?”

  “Absolutely sure about that.”

  “Then I guess there’s nothing else for us to talk about.”

  Before Tay could react, August launched himself forward and pinned him against the floor on his back.

  From somewhere August produced a piece of what felt like duct tape and pasted it over Tay’s mouth. Then from somewhere else he came up with a pair of handcuffs, jerked Tay over against the wall, and cuffed both of his hands around a pipe that ran up the wall and into the floor above.


  “I’m sorry, Sam. But Vince needs to be dead or we’ll have all kinds of problems you don’t even want to know about. I can’t let you get in the way.”

  August pulled himself into a standing position. Then he bent down and shifted Tay’s body around and made him as comfortable as he could under the circumstances.

  “I’m going upstairs now and getting this done. Then I’ll come back and release you if you promise to stay quiet until I’m gone. If you don’t promise, I’ll have to leave you like this until somebody else comes around and releases you, and I really don’t want to do that.” August gave Tay a tired-looking smile. “Think about it while I’m gone.”

  Tay tried to say something, but all he could manage behind the duct tape was a kind of strangled gargling sound so he stayed quiet.

  “There you go, Sam,” August said. “You’ve got the idea now. No need to waste a lot of breath over nothing.”

  ***

  August turned around and knelt in front of the steel door. Tay watched him take something from his pocket and work it in the keyhole until the sound of a click was clearly audible in the small room. Then August pushed himself to his feet and returned whatever he had used on the lock to his pocket. Tay continued to watch as August reached under his shirt and produced a handgun which Tay recognized it as a Glock 9mm. August worked the slide slowly and deliberately, chambering a round.

  Slowly turning the handle of the steel door and pushing it open about a foot, August slipped through. The door swung closed behind August, but not completely. Tay strained his ears to focus on the tiny crack it left, listening for any sound from behind the door.

  ***

  At first Tay heard nothing at all, not even footsteps.

  Then he did hear something. He just wasn’t sure what it was.

  It sounded like August had stumbled into something, making contact with whatever it was twice and causing two separate noises from the two impacts. After that, there had been a metallic clicking sound followed by a muffled thump as if August had shoved the obstruction out of the way. Had August stumbled over a table with first one leg then the other and shoved it aside? No, he wouldn’t have been nearly that clumsy.

  Tay suddenly realized what the metallic clicking noise had been. It was the cycling sound of the action of an automatic pistol.

  Then, all in a rush, he knew exactly what he had heard.

  Two shots had been fired from a handgun with a noise suppressor on its muzzle and a body had hit the floor. And Tay knew whose body it had been.

  He had gotten a clear look at August’s Glock when he had pulled it from under his shirt just before he went through the steel door.

  There hadn’t been a noise suppressor on it.

  FORTY-NINE

  TAY WAS PRETTY sure there weren’t any guests at this little wingding other than the three of them: August, Ferrero, and himself. Well, to be fair, he wasn’t really a guest. He was more of a party crasher.

  He ran the sounds he had heard back and forth through his mind several more times, searching for a less ominous explanation. He couldn’t think of one.

  Vincent Ferrero had shot John August. Any other possibility was too remote to consider. And from the ensuing silence and the absence of any return fire, it seemed likely that August was dead.

  If Ferrero discovered he was here, this was going to end badly for him, too. Here he sat on the concrete floor of a storeroom, his hands cuffed around a pipe. If Ferrero came through that steel door, what was he going to do? Either fighting or fleeing was out of the question. Ferrero would be free to put a bullet in his head if he wanted to, and Tay had no doubt he did.

  Tay pushed himself away from the door and tried to make himself as small as possible, but it was a foolish reaction to his circumstances and he knew it. There was nowhere to hide. If Ferrero came through the door, he was dead. It was just that simple.

  He strained his ears for approaching footsteps, and waited.

  ***

  As the minutes passed without Ferrero crashing into the room, Tay began to breathe more easily. At one point he thought he had heard something that sounded like footsteps, but he couldn’t tell for sure if they were coming toward him or moving away. He guessed if the sound had really been footsteps at all, they must have been moving away.

  So what had he heard?

  Ferrero shooting August and then leaving the shophouse? No, he was pretty sure he would have heard an exterior door closing if Ferrero had left, so he must still be somewhere inside. Most likely upstairs. Maybe he had to sanitize the place before he took off. After all, if he had been having meetings here that involved whatever it was Paraguas Ltd was doing, there might be paperwork or notes lying around that Ferrero wouldn’t want to leave behind. Tay shifted his body upright and strained his ears. But he heard nothing at all.

  ***

  When he started feeling more secure, Tay began thinking about how he could free himself. His first thought was to get to his phone somehow and call Kang. Kang probably had a handcuff key on him. Who knew whether that key would work on the cuffs August had used on him, but that was still a good place to start.

  Tay’s phone was in his left front trouser pocket. He twisted his body against the wall and tried to pull one hand far enough away from the pipe around which he was cuffed to reach into his pocket, but he quickly realized it was going to be a lot harder to do than he thought. Tentatively, he shifted position, first in one direction and then in another, but a way to contort his body enough to get either cuffed hand into his pocket eluded him. Finally he gave up even trying and decided try again from a standing position. He grabbed the pipe and began to pull himself upright.

  Tay was startled when the weight of his body caused the base of the pipe to pop loose from its coupling at the bottom of the wall. The noise was no more than the pop of a champagne cork, but in the silence of the little storeroom it sounded to Tay like an explosion.

  Tay froze, his eyes flying to the tiny crack where the steel door stood ajar. He breathed as quietly as he could and listened.

  Nothing.

  Moving slowly and quietly, Tay squatted and slipped the cuffs over the end of the pipe where it had broken loose from the wall. Then he stood up and turned toward the door that would take him out to the carport. All he had to do was get the hell out of here. After that, he could call Kang and Kang would bring in some support, and they could grab Ferrero.

  Still…Tay hesitated.

  It would take a while to do all that. At least fifteen or twenty minutes. Maybe longer.

  What if Ferrero was gone by then? What if August was dying in there and getting him to a hospital right now would save his life? How much time did he really have?

  Tay couldn’t just turn his back and walk out that door, but what was he going to do? His hands were still cuffed in front of him and he had no weapon. Then he saw on the floor the Maglite August had taken away from him when he jerked him in through the carport door. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing.

  He scooped it up and hefted in his hands as well as the cuffs would let him, then he stepped toward the steel door. Leaning forward he put his ear to the crack where it stood open, but he heard nothing and Tay could see no light beyond the door.

  He put his shoulder against the door and cocked the Maglite back ready to swing it as well as he could. He pushed gently and the door swung open without a sound.

  ***

  Straight ahead was a short hallway. At the end of the hallway Tay could see the main entry door to the left and opposite it a staircase leading to the upper levels. Now that Tay was inside, he could also hear soft rustling noises from somewhere up the stairs. He had been right. There was someone up there and he had no doubt it was Ferrero.

  The dim light seeping down the staircase was just strong enough for Tay to see the body sprawled at the foot of the steps.

  He crept forward as quietly as he could and risked a quick look up the staircase. The rustling sounds were louder now, but he
saw nothing in the gray dimness.

  He squatted and examined the body at his feet. He knew it was August even before he saw his face. There was a lot of blood, and Tay thought he could see two entry wounds in August’s chest. Neither was pumping blood but a thin trickle was oozing from each hole. Tay supposed that was a good sign, if you could ever say there were any good signs connected with taking two shots in the chest.

  Tay placed a hand against August’s neck and was relieved to feel a pulse. It was faint and irregular, but it was there. August was still alive. At least he was for now. But he had to get to a hospital, and quickly.

  ***

  All at once the rustling noise from upstairs became much louder and Tay froze. He listened as footsteps came toward the staircase, then they stopped and moved away again.

  He had to have a weapon or there really wasn’t anything he could do. A real weapon, not just a heavy flashlight.

  Being careful not to let the chain connecting his handcuffs rattle against the floor, Tay felt around for the gun August had when Tay watched him disappear through the steel door. He couldn’t find it. Tay decided Ferrero must have picked the gun up after he shot August.

  But just in case the gun had somehow ended up pinned beneath August’s body, Tay lifted August a little, first one side and then the other. He saw nothing, but one of August’s legs made a curious clunking sound as it rolled against the floor so he ran his hands over the area where it had hit. One hand brushed August’s shin and he knew immediately what he had found.

  A back-up gun in an ankle holster.

  Tay raised August’s cuff and pulled the little gun from its holster. It was a Glock 26, the Baby Glock, barely six inches long and only about a pound and a half in weight. But it was still effective enough at short range if you were a decent shot which, Tay reminded himself, would be an extremely generous characterization of his own limited skills. And he wasn’t sure what having his hands cuffed together would do for those skills. Somehow he doubted it would improve them.

  Tay slid away from the bottom of the staircase and dropped the clip. He was relieved to see the glint of brass-jacketed 9mm rounds and pushed down on the top one just to be certain. Full. He had ten shots. Returning the clip to the gun as quietly as possible, Tay chambered a round.