Just seconds later, Kozlov was secured inside the van, and it was my turn.
I pulled into the park from the eastern entrance, the steps shaking the ambulance’s suspension.
I turned right at the monument, so that the rear end of the ambulance faced the bench; it would make shifting the prisoners that much easier.
I got out of the ambulance, Kane jumping out with me, close by my side, and we approached the back doors together.
One cop remained next to the Ovcharka, watching him through the open rear door with his Glock 22 aimed at him, and the other two met me at the back of the ambulance.
I leant forward, grabbed the handles and pulled the doors open, revealing the twin brothers tied up within.
‘Here they are, boys,’ I said. ‘Pyotr and Grigory Kozlov, underbosses of the Kryukovskaya Bratva. They’re all yours.’
The cops looked at one another and smiled.
And that was when everything went horribly wrong.
Chapter Four
The cop with the rifle opened fire into the back of the ambulance on full-auto, and I watched the bodies of Pyotr and Grigory absorb shot after shot, blood erupting over the walls and ceiling of the cramped space, even as the second cop turned his shotgun toward my head and fired.
I managed to move at the last moment though, getting my hands up to deflect the line of fire while moving my head in the opposite direction. The blast of the weapon sent ringing through my ears though, and I was disoriented for a moment.
Time seemed to slow down, my brain processing everything so quickly it seemed the world around me had almost stopped; as my hands pushed the gun away, I saw the cop by the SUV – just fifteen feet away – reach in with his Glock and put a single .40 caliber round through the head of Konstantin Kozlov, handcuffed and helpless on the back seat; saw his blood and brains explode across the rear window and his huge body slump forward in death; saw Kane sinking his sharp teeth into the calf of the cop with the shotgun, the man screaming in pain; saw the other cop’s rifle click on empty, thirty rounds blasted without mercy into the defenseless men I’d brought here; saw their shattered bodies resting in the back of the ambulance, their crimson, wet insides painted across the interior.
And then I was moving, my hand going to my belt, drawing and slashing with the Benchmade folder, the sharp blade finding its mark at the cop’s neck as his friend tried desperately to reload his AR-15.
The throat in front of me was sliced open by the violent passage of my knife, and I was covered in a spray of blood.
But I was already moving again, throwing the body of the first cop to one side and launching myself at the second, ready to stab the blade right through the bastard’s chest.
Before I could get there, my body was turned in a violent arc as a bullet struck me in the shoulder; and I saw a spray of my own blood as I hit the floor, vision cloudy.
I realized it was the cop by the car; even in my pained state, recognized it as a good shot; and then shuddered as I realized the other guy had finished changing magazines on the assault rifle and was leveling it toward me.
But Kane was faster, and clamped his jaws down on the cop’s arm, causing him to scream in pain and drop the weapon.
Kane’s own body was turned in its own violent arc then, and I screamed in rage as I saw blood spurting over his soft fur.
He let go of the cop’s arm as he slumped to the floor, and the guy – delirious with pain – staggered to his feet, ignoring the assault rifle beneath him as he escaped to the safety of his friend.
In a burning rage that overcame the pain in my shoulder, that supercharged my body and mind with a sudden jolt of adrenaline, I reached over with my good arm and took hold of the AR-15, opening fire at the two cops by the SUV.
But my aim was off, and I just managed to hit one of them – the one who’d had the assault rifle – in the back of the leg; and at the same time, one more of the other cop’s rounds hit home, hitting me in the inner thigh.
There was a massive jolt of pain that raced through my entire body, but I shrugged it off, the adrenaline giving me the power to carry on, and I fired off more rounds with the AR-15; but the cops had the SUV for cover now, and the rounds bounced off the metal bodywork.
But with one wounded man, and a fight that involved an AR-15 assault rifle versus a Glock handgun, the cops decided that discretion was the better part of valor; they hauled out the Ovcharka’s near-decapitated body onto the sidewalk, climbed into the vehicle, and immediately put it into reverse, careening backwards, half-on the path and half-off, until they crashed back onto M Street and accelerated away.
I gasped with sudden pain and dropped the assault rifle, turning to Kane, pulling my blood-slick body across the path to him.
I put my hand on his chest, felt that he was still breathing, felt through the fur for the bullet wound and found it high up on his back leg, knew that he still had a chance.
But not if we stayed here.
And so it was that, half-broken and in a world of agony, I pulled myself up and dragged Kane into the back of the gore-stained ambulance, ignoring the dead bodies as I shut the doors and made my way to the front seat.
I was shot, yes.
But where there was a will, there was a way.
And I had one hell of a will.
Somebody, I promised myself, was going to pay for this.
Epilogue
‘Call him,’ I said to Martin O’Hare, Mayor of Boston City, as we sat on opposite sides of a beautiful rosewood table in his opulent office on the top floor of City Hall.
A little over two weeks had passed since the incident at the park, and a lot had happened in the meantime.
I’d driven the ambulance to a payphone that fateful morning, called Christine and begged her to come and pick me up.
She’d done it too, even followed my demands to take Kane to a veterinary hospital first; she’d pretended it was her dog, shot by a gang of young kids in her yard, just for fun.
He was still there now, stable but under observation. It looked like he’d pull through though, and I was thankful for that; it was hard to imagine life without him.
By the time Christine had got back to the car, I’d passed out from shock and blood-loss; but when she’d pulled up outside Massachusetts General, I’d woken and demanded that she drive away immediately. If they took me in, gunshot wounds would be immediately reported to the police, and I’d seen firsthand what the police were capable of. A bed at Mass General would have been like a cell on Death Row, only the sentence would be carried out one hell of a lot quicker.
Instead, I’d instructed her on what to get from the pharmacy to help stabilize me, and then I’d had her drive me all the way up to Manchester in New Hampshire, where she’d called the emergency doctors to take my unconscious body out of the back of her car.
It was the trauma department at Elliott Hospital that treated me, and they did a good job too; and more importantly, Manchester was sufficiently far enough away – and across State lines – from Boston to attract the immediate attention of their police department.
I allowed myself to stay long enough to be stabilized and to undergo initial surgery, but left after two days, before my past had time to catch up with me.
Christine was good to me – I don’t know why, after all I’d put her through – and she let me recuperate in her home.
She helped me to investigate, too; although the first bit of work, I took care of myself.
I called my buddy who’d given me the information on Gerry Cahoon, asked him to email a copy of the man’s driver’s license through to Christine’s home computer.
The document had come through, in perfect quality.
And the picture was not of the man I’d met at the café, or again at the waterfront; it was not the man who had put me in touch with the cops who had killed the Russian bosses, who had tried to kill me and Kane. It was someone else altogether, and – with a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach – I knew I had bee
n conned.
Christine helped me find out who had been behind the deception, although I’d asked her what to do. ‘Find me a picture of Mickey Quinn,’ I’d told her; and sure enough, when she came back with pictures of the Irish mob boss, it was a man I knew – the man who’d been posing as Gerry Cahoon, who’d asked me to help him.
And help him I had, right back into complete control of the Boston organized crime scene.
With the Russian bosses dead – and the evidence from their businesses mysteriously missing – Quinn and his boys had simply stepped into the vacuum, and taken over where Kozlov had left off. He and his associates now owned all the waterside property, and it looked like the city council was about to authorize a deal for Mondial to regenerate the Old Harbor district.
It didn’t hurt that Martin O’Hare here wasn’t just the mayor of Boston; he was also Mickey Quinn’s cousin.
Why then, I’d wondered, had O’Hare been willing to deal with the Russians?
The answer was simple – along with Chet Elkins, Mickey Quinn was the largest shareholder in Mondial Holdings, Inc.; he stood to make a fortune, whatever happened.
I looked across at O’Hare and tapped the telephone on his desk. ‘Go on,’ I said. ‘Make the call.’
Reluctantly – and only because I had a silenced pistol underneath the table, aimed right at his groin – the mayor complied.
‘Mickey!’ said O’Hare when his call was answered. ‘How are you? . . . Good, good. Now listen Mickey, we’ve got a bit of a problem with the zoning committee. Can you meet me here at the office? . . . Okay, let’s say one hour? . . . Good, good, yes, see you then. Bye.’
O’Hare put the phone down and I smiled at him. ‘Good boy,’ I said.
‘Now what?’
‘Now . . . we wait.’
‘Afternoon, Martin,’ Mickey Quinn said in his thick Boston accent as the mayor opened the door for him; a door that I now hid behind. ‘How are you doing?’ He shook hands with O’Hare, then embraced him as two men followed him into the office, broad-backed and ugly.
‘Good, Mickey,’ O’Hare said, ‘good.’
‘So what’s this about a problem?’ Quinn asked, getting right down to business as his bodyguards shut the door behind him.
I immediately raised the silenced pistol and shot the two guards in the back of the head; there were two muffled bangs – unlikely to be heard beyond the confines of the office – and the Irish boys’ blood splattered in wild patterns over the mayor’s woolen rug that covered half of the floor space.
‘I’m the problem,’ I informed the Irish mob boss, even as Martin O’Hare went white with fear at the sight of the two dead bodies on the floor of his office and started to shake himself into a corner.
‘My, my,’ Quinn said with a smile as he turned to me. ‘The Thousand Dollar Man. I’m impressed. I was wondering when you’d show up. How are the arm and leg?’
‘Getting better,’ I said, glad that it was true. Walking was still a sonofabitch, and I had trouble using a knife and fork at the same time, but I wasn’t dead yet.
‘And the dog?’ he asked with a wicked grin.
‘Take off your jacket,’ I told him, ignoring his comment – for now, at least. I watched as he did as I’d asked, checking him for weapons. But he was clean, and I pointed at an easy chair. ‘Sit,’ I ordered; and when he didn’t move quickly enough, I pistol-whipped the bastard, dropping him heavily into the chair as O’Hare continued to look on in horror.
‘Martin,’ I said, ‘come here.’
The mayor complied and – as he got within range – I pistol-whipped him too, only this time a little harder. He fell unconscious to his office floor, and I smiled across at Quinn.
‘Just the two of us,’ I said.
‘So it would seem,’ he said, putting his hand to his head where I’d hit him and pulling it away, covered in blood. ‘You’ll pay for that,’ he said calmly.
‘No,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘I won’t.’
‘You sound confident for a man who’s been played so easily.’
‘I just want to know why,’ I said. ‘Why get me involved? That’s all I want to know.’
‘Why?’ Quinn asked with a smile, and then shrugged. ‘Believe it or not, this has all worked out better than I’d ever imagined, you’ve done a much better job than I wanted. ‘Protection for me and my family’, that’s what Gerry Cahoon asked for, isn’t it? So how did you go about providing that?’ He laughed out loud. ‘By killing the bloody lot of ‘em, that’s how. You’re a regular one-man army, aren’t you? A killing machine.’
‘Doesn’t that worry you?’ I asked, gun pointed toward him.
‘Nah,’ he said dismissively. ‘If you wanted to kill me, you’d have done me like my two boys there, the moment I came in the room. Nah, you want something else. Money, maybe?’
‘Later,’ I told him. ‘For now, I just want answers.’
‘Like what?’
‘Let’s start at the beginning. I travel all over the country, how did you know I’d be in Boston?’
‘I didn’t,’ Quinn said. ‘But I admit, I’ve read up on you in the papers over the years, was curious about you, wondered if I might be able to use you somehow. Been tracking you, too. Reports in the papers, on the internet, suspected sightings, crimes where you might have been involved, if you actually existed, police reports, that sort of thing. I knew you were in the area, anyway. Thought – hoped – you wouldn’t be able to resist the lure of Boston while you were near.’
I was surprised – I’d never considered myself predictable, never realized someone might be actively tracking my suspected movements. But, I supposed, perhaps my routine was predictable; I moved around on foot most of the time, which kept me confined to a certain radius. And it was true that I bounced from major city to major city, fitting in plenty of small towns on the way.
When this was over, I might look into changing my habits.
‘What happened to the real Gerry Cahoon?’ I asked. ‘And who were those kids the Russians were threatening?’
‘Oh, Gerry’s just fine, trust me; he’s back at the café now. I just asked him – politely – to take a backseat for a while. Those kids were his, the real deal; I wanted to make it as realistic as possible.’
‘Considerate of you.’
‘I’m that sort of guy. Now, I knew the kind of jobs that you like, the kind of people you help, that’s why I used Gerry. I knew you were never going to go to work for me directly. But Gerry’s business really was being targeted by the Russians, he really did have a problem. So in effect, you actually did help him and his family out, so you can give yourself a big pat on the back for that, can’t you?’
‘Maybe when my shoulder’s better,’ I suggested.
Quinn laughed. ‘I like a man who can see humor in dark moments. A sign of character.’
‘Talking about my shoulder,’ I said, ‘what happened to those cops from the park?’
‘Well,’ Quinn said, ‘one of them is dead, his throat slit. I think you’re to thank for that, right?’ I shrugged, and he continued. ‘The other two have gone mysteriously missing,’ he said. ‘Which is fortunate for me I suppose, because if internal affairs started to talk to them because of that botched job they did, it might not look good for me. They might have said something they’d have regretted.’
‘Lucky for them they can’t,’ I said, and Quinn laughed again.
‘Yes,’ he said jovially. ‘Lucky for me, lucky for them. Nice how these things work out sometimes.’
I nodded. I wasn’t too upset that Quinn had had them killed; it saved me having to do it.
‘So you put the advert in the paper,’ I said, ‘and then – when I contacted you – you impersonated Gerry Cahoon. What were you wanting to achieve?’
‘I wanted you to put the cat among the pigeons; the Russians had a good system, knew how to avoid being found, hard to crack. Plus, everyone in the crime world round here knows everyone else, more or less. What I need
ed was a fresh set of eyes, a new face. We were also running short of muscle, what with all of the things going on up in the Seaport District, we had no real way of forcing our way back in to the territory we’d lost. And – from what I’d read – I believed that you were highly skilled, highly motivated, as well as being quite . . . extreme in how you handle your work, would that be fair?’
I shrugged. ‘You tell me.’
He smiled, pointed to the unconscious body of the mayor, at the two corpses on the office floor. ‘I’d say ‘yes’. You’re extreme. So I suppose I was expecting fireworks, of one kind or another. Open the Russians up a little, so we could start getting back into things ourselves.’
‘But why?’ I asked him. ‘You made a fortune from Seaport, you’re a major shareholder in Mondial, why bother?’
Quinn sighed. ‘Why do you do what you do?’ he asked. ‘Solve problems. Help people. Kill other people. It’s because you love it, right? Of course it is, it’s in your blood, just like the streets of Southie are in my blood. I’m a rich man, yes. But I’m still the same street-tough kid I was all those years ago, in here,’ he said, hand on his heart. ‘And you don’t just give that up, even when you’re a millionaire. Even when you’re a billionaire. So, I wanted some help getting back in the action.’
‘But you’re still going to profit from it, it’s not just about the thrill of taking power.’
‘Of course I profit,’ he said. ‘I get all the Russian real estate, all the business, for free. Mondial doesn’t have to pay a dime for it, so we save a billion dollars right there. And without the Russians to get in the way, the Quinn gang will control all the businesses that’ll be operating out of the Old Harbor project. And not just the ones who’ll be based there when it’s up and running – luxury condos, hotels, casinos, you name it – but also the contractors for the construction phase, we’ll be taking kickbacks all over the place, grafting the workforce, you name it. The whole thing is a license to print money. But trust me kid, that’s not the main reason I did it, that’s not the reason I’m so happy with what you did for me.’
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR CONTRACT: Colt Ryder Is Back In His Most Explosive Adventure Yet! Page 15