Burke's War: Bob Burke Action Thriller 1 (Bob Burke Action Thrillers)

by William F. Brown

  She nodded, closed her eyes and turned away, and let the words spill out. “He got me up in his office this afternoon and almost raped me. He’s so big and strong, that I…”

  “Almost? Well, that’s a good thing,” he tried to comfort her.

  “Not really!” she said and quickly turned away. “He kind of hypnotized me, and then he drugged me with a cloth or something he held over my face. I felt strange, and it happened so fast. He grabbed me, bent me over his couch, and ripped my underwear off. I couldn’t stop him, and… God! I was so scared, so vulnerable, so humiliated. He leaned against me and was about to… That was when one of the girls downstairs called for me on the intercom and he suddenly stopped. He… he let me go.”

  “He let you go?”

  “Yes, he said this was a little demonstration, to make a point.”

  “A demonstration? I saw his eyes when his fingers were wrapped around Eleanor’s throat up on the roof. That was no demonstration.”

  “The whole thing was my own stupid fault. Eleanor warned me never to go up to his office alone. She told me… well, I think he did the same thing to her and a lot of others. Apparently, he wasn’t quite as bad back when it started, but he got rougher and rougher until Eleanor told him to leave her alone. He didn’t want to, but she threatened to talk to Scalese. He stayed away from her after that, but by then the office expanded and he could pick from dozens of younger women, as she said he did. I think that was when she went to the police. He’s a sick pervert, but what he did to me wasn’t sex, or even rough sex. It was a power game he was playing, trying to terrorize me, and it worked. Goddamn him, it worked.”

  “Only if you let it. But why did he suddenly pick on you? Was it because of last night?”

  “Maybe. He told me Eleanor stole some things from the company — documents, reports, maybe a DVD or a flash drive. They must be important, and he thinks I know where they are.”

  “It wasn’t Bentley Eleanor was talking to, it was the US Attorney.”

  “Oh, God! Greenway and now the US Attorney? I'm dead. I’m dead,” she moaned and turned away, only to sit up and turn toward him again. “But how do you know that?”

  “His name’s Peter O’Malley. He came to see me this morning, to threaten me, and he was not very subtle about it. He has a Grand Jury looking into organized crime and Medicaid fraud, and his first target is CHC. Eleanor was secretly helping him, bringing him some reports and documents, probably the stuff Greenway is looking for. He must have found out what she was up to and it got her killed.”

  “I snuck into her office today. Her desk drawers were empty and everything was gone, her files, her computer, everything. They stripped it clean, but I do not think they found anything. If they did, Greenway wouldn’t have come after me like that.”

  “He’s desperate, so is O’Malley, and they have you and me sandwiched in the middle.”

  “Oh, my God,” she slumped back in the seat and shook her head. “What am I going to do? Greenway threatened my job, my house, even my daughter, and he was about to rape me right there in his office, to prove he could do it and get away with it. He said he would keep doing it, keep violating me anytime he wants, until I get him those documents. And he knows there’s nothing I can do about it.”

  “No, maybe you can’t, but I can,” Bob turned and looked at her, his eyes growing as cold and gray as a hard winter’s day.

  “You?” She looked over at him and opened her hand. Lying in her palm was his badly wrinkled, sweat-soaked business card. “But… you’re what? A ‘telephone guy?’ That’s what Scalese called you.”

  “Yeah, well, I do some of that too,” he looked at the card and smiled.

  “Scalese and his men are professional thugs. They’ll kill you.”

  “Let me worry about them.”

  She frowned and said, “You really are crazy, you know.”

  “Maybe, maybe not,” he shrugged, looking at her, waiting. “Well?” he finally asked.

  “Well, what?”

  “Well, do you have them — the documents, or whatever the hell it is they’re looking for?”

  “No! At least I don’t think so. Oh, I don’t know. A week ago, Eleanor and I went to a bar after work. It got pretty ‘drunk out’ that night. Anyway, she told me a lot about Greenway and CHC, and gave me a set of keys for her office and her house. She said she put something inside a box of Cocoa Puffs in her kitchen pantry, something important.”

  “A box of Cocoa Puffs?” He gave her an odd look, but that didn’t stop her.

  “I’m serious. She said it was a note, and she made me swear if anything ever happened to her, if she ever disappeared, or anything, I was to go get it and do whatever it said. She said something else, something about it being the key.”

  “The key?” Bob stared out the front windshield for a moment, thinking. “Then that’s what we’ll do. “We’ll go to Eleanor’s and find out what’s in that box of Cocoa Puffs.”

  “Are you sure? I didn’t want to get you involved in this, but…”

  “There was no one else you could call, right?”

  “Makes me sound really pathetic, doesn’t it? But I was too afraid to go over there alone.”

  “So, you figured you’d call the ‘telephone guy,’ and let him find out if there are any of Tony Scalese’s goons waiting inside?”

  “Well, yes, but I meant for us to go together.”

  “All right, when do you want to go?”

  “I don’t know,” she answered, surprised by the question. “But it has to be before 3:00 o’clock tomorrow afternoon.”

  “Why? What happens then?”

  “That’s the deadline Greenway gave me — 3:00 o’clock tomorrow afternoon — or else he’ll come looking for me and my daughter. So if this doesn’t work, I’m on the road at 2:00,” she said as she turned her face away. “God… I can still feel his hands, and his fingers all over me, and him pressed up against me. I get so sick every time I think about it, I told him I'd kill him if he ever touched me again -- me or my daughter -- and I meant it.”

  “It's not going to come to that, I promise. But do you have somewhere you can go?”

  “Montana, New Mexico, Florida, I really don’t care, so long as it’s away from him.”

  “Then, I guess we’d better make this work,” he said as he started the car.

  “Where are you going?”

  “Eleanor’s. I figure this is as good a time as any, isn’t it? You can stay here, get yourself some more coffee, and relax. I’ll go to her house and get whatever is in that box,” he said as he held out his hand. “Give me the keys and tell me how to get there.”

  “I can’t let you go there alone. It’s too dangerous.”

  “Too dangerous? All right, then we’ll both go.”

  “Well, do you have a gun or something?”

  “A gun? No. The only thing a gun does is invite someone to shoot at you. Don’t worry, though, I do have ‘something.’ If you come with me, however, you must promise to do exactly what I tell you to do, when I tell you. Exactly, agreed?” She started to say something until he put his finger on her lips and shook his head. “I mean it, no discussion and no questions.”

  Night fell on the north suburbs as they drove north on Route 53, got off on the Northwest Highway, and drove through Des Plaines, until they reached Mount Prospect, where Eleanor lived. Bob pulled over, disabled the interior dome light, and switched places with her, so Linda could take the wheel. Before he got back in, however, he opened his trunk and dug through several boxes he kept back there. When he got in the passenger seat, he wore a black pullover sweater with big pockets on the front and soft-soled black running shoes. In his hand, he held a black knit ski mask and a pair of thin, black high-tech gloves.

  “You’re kidding, right? Are you some kind of a Ninja or something?”

  “You’ve been watching too many movies,” he chuckled. “Let’s go.”

  Eleanor’s house was on a cul-de-sac in a nice, tree-
lined section of Mount Prospect. “What’s her address?” he asked as he pulled out his smartphone.

  “927 Asbury Circle. It’s a nice two-story Dutch colonial, not too big, but cute.”

  “Cute, huh? I’m not sure my GPS app does ‘cute,’ ” he said as he entered the address and began playing with the display, making it larger, and then smaller, until he memorized the surrounding streets. When they got within three blocks, he told her to make a series of turns, slowly circling Eleanor’s street in an ever-tightening spiral. “Take the next right,” he told her. Go halfway up and park under the trees.” When they got there, he turned to her and asked. “Okay, as we looped through her neighborhood, tell me what you saw.”

  “What I saw? Well, uh, trees, nice houses, some parked cars… it was pretty dark.”

  “It’s not dark, there’s a thin crescent moon — big difference.”

  “Really?” she said, obviously getting irritated.

  “I’m serious. What else? Did you see anything unusual?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like the midnight-blue Lincoln Town Car parked one street over with a man slumped down in the front seat smoking a cigarette.”

  “Uh, no, I…”

  “He’s probably been sitting there all day.”

  “All day? How did you know that?”

  “There were a half dozen cigarette butts in the street outside his window, and a City of Chicago registration sticker on the window. For future reference, we’ll call him Bozo #1. All right, did you see the second car parked in the shadows inside her cul-de-sac? It was probably a Chrysler, with a man sitting inside that one too. He’ll be Bozo #2.”

  “No, I… no. Who do you think they are? Greenway’s men?”

  “Greenway?” he chuckled again. “You may not think so, but Greenway’s a lightweight. Those Gumbahs belong to Tony Scalese, or more correctly, to Salvatore DiGrigoria.”

  “You mean the Mafia?” her mouth fell open. “But why would they…?”

  “Why? Because they own Greenway and CHC, and they’re watching Eleanor’s house, waiting for you, or for someone.”

  “But Greenway gave me until tomorrow afternoon.”

  “It’s not his call, Linda. Scalese probably put them here this morning.”

  “You’re saying, if I had come here by myself… Oh my God!”

  “I suspect you’d have ended up next to Eleanor, wherever that is,” he looked over and saw the terrified expression on her face. “The two Bozos in the cars were easy to spot. There are probably more inside the house. They may take me a few minutes more, so relax.”

  “A few minutes? You can’t go out there,” she said, terrified. “When I asked you…”

  “What can I say? I have a sudden craving for Cocoa Puffs,” he grinned as he put the knit ski mask on and pulled it down. With eyeholes and a slit for his mouth, it covered his face.

  “You really are crazy. I should never have dragged you into this, they’ll…”

  “You didn’t drag me into anything; Greenway did when he strangled Eleanor Purdue up on that roof.”

  “But there’s too many of them.”

  “Not when you take them down one at a time. Look, Linda, long before I went into high-tech telecommunication system design — not installing phones — I was involved in irregular warfare and counterterror operations in places a whole lot worse than Mount Prospect, Illinois. Believe me, those guys are the ones with the problem, not me.” He looked at his watch. “I want you to drive away and stay away from here for thirty minutes, then come back around and pick me up here — thirty minutes, exactly. If I’m not here, drive away and come back ten minutes later. If I’m still not here, drive back to McDonalds and wait for me there. You got that?”

  Her eyes went as round as silver dollars as he slipped out of the car and simply vanished into the shadows.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  First things first, Bob Burke told himself as he vanished into the shadows like a supple black cat. First, he would check the perimeter of the house, and then go inside and retrieve the note in the pantry. After that, the games could begin. Approaching Eleanor’s house from the rear, he passed between two occupied homes, avoiding the pools of light that fell onto the grass from lit windows, keeping low. He moved silently around the hedges and shrubs, quickly crossing another dark street and through more yards, until he had a clear view of the rear of Eleanor Purdue’s house. He was not afraid of the Mafia “soldiers” Tony Scalese probably left to watch the property, not after he saw the two Bozos sitting in the cars out on the street. Even if Scalese was smart and put still more eyes outside and inside the house, once Burke located them, he could take them out with minimal effort. The only things that concerned him were large, trained guard dogs and exotic electronic surveillance equipment or motion sensors he might not locate until it was too late. In a neighborhood like this, though, the dogs would likely be someone’s house pet and the alarm systems came from Best Buy.

  To Bob Burke, this was a recon mission, not a serious “Black Op.” The men up ahead weren’t battle-hardened Al Qaeda fanatics, Afghan mountain tribesmen, the Russian Alpha Group, or the Chinese PLA “Shadow” Special Ops troops, each of which he dealt with at one point or another during his career. Those missions were neither easy nor pretty. Tonight, the men he faced were third-generation arm breakers from Cicero. They might think they were tough, but they were the ones who were out of their league. Whether there were only the two men inside the cars or a half-dozen more hiding in the house and around the neighborhood, they were about to learn why it didn’t pay to eat too much pasta, smoke too many cigarettes, set up static, one-man observation posts in the front seats of big pimp-mobiles, or pick on a “phone guy.”

  The most common way to break into a house was through the front or back door. That was where burglars usually went, because most residential door locks came from Home Depot and could be jimmied with a credit card or a butter knife. All too often, however, they weren’t locked to begin with, and burglars preferred simplicity. Eleanor’s house was dark, with no lights on in any of the rooms or around the exterior, except for the dim glow of a television set on the rear screened-in porch. They’re watching television? Amazing! It took him four minutes to circle the house and check the windows and doors for alarms and wires. Except for some third-rate commercial sensors on the windows, he found nothing serious. Circling around to the back again, he crept closer to the screened porch. From ten feet away, Bob smelled cigarette smoke wafting out through the porch screens and heard an old Magnum P. I. rerun playing softly on the television. It was another of Scalese’s men, and he became Bozo #3.

  Bob crept away and turned his attention to the basement crawl space. He pulled a folding tactical knife from his pocket and set to work on the wooden knockout panel. It took less than thirty seconds to cut the paint seal, loosen the panel, and slip inside. This was a fairly new house. As he expected, the floor of the crawl space was gravel covered with plastic sheets. He turned on a small, high-intensity penlight. Other than leftover insulation, paint cans, and wood trim, the crawl space was empty and there was an open access panel into the basement furnace room at the far end. Moving quickly and silently in a “duck walk,” he crossed the crawl and dropped into the basement. Like the rest of the house, it was dark, with an empty, dead air smell about it; so he headed for the stairs. One useful trick they taught him at an infiltration course many years before at Fort Benning was that new or old, bare or carpeted, a wooden staircase always squeaks. The only way to go up or down one without making any noise was to do it in slow motion, ever so gradually shifting your weight seamlessly one pound at a time as if making perfect Tai Chi movements. Slowly, but silently, he moved up from one riser to the next until he found himself standing at the landing, listening at the door.

  He pulled a small, spray pen of WD-40 from his pocket and spritzed the hinges on the inside of the door, waiting a minute for the oil to penetrate before he silently eased the door open, crept i
nto the kitchen, and paused to hear and smell. The sliding glass doors to the screened-in porch and deck were open, and he could see and smell the dim outline of Bozo #3 backlit by the TV set. He lay in a big recliner with his back to the kitchen, his feet propped on an ottoman, and a cigarette dangling from his left hand. A .45-caliber automatic pistol, a cheap Motorola two-way radio, and a cell phone lay on the end table next to him. Wedged in the chair with him was a large open bag of potato chips, which he was noisily munching away on, watching the muted TV, without a care in the world. Before he dealt with this clown, Bob turned, crept silently down the hall, and peeked into the dining room and living room. That was where he found Bozo #4 sleeping on his back on the couch. His shoes lay on the carpet next to him and his pistol lay on his big beer gut, rising and falling as he snored. How could incompetents like these two manage to live this long, he wondered.

  He quietly checked the rest of the house, but found no other gunmen lying around. Retracing his steps to the kitchen, he decided to take Bozo #3 off the board first, since he was awake. As Burke crept through the open doorway to the back porch, one of the floorboards creaked. “Eh! Dat you? I’m starved,” the guy snorted with a mouthful of potato chips, turned his head, and looked back over his shoulder. “Want to order out for some pizza, or should…”

  Good question, Bob thought as his hands and forearms slipped around the man’s neck in a very effective chokehold that instantly silenced him and cut off the blood flow to his brain. Burke pulled back, squeezed hard, and Bozo #3 was quickly out cold. Bob could have as easily snapped the guy’s neck or kept the hold on a while longer and killed him, but there was nothing personal in this, not yet, and killing them wasn’t why he came. Instead, he rolled Bozo #3 out of his chair and onto the floor, cut off the cords from several of the horizontal blinds on the windows, stuffed the man’s handkerchief into his mouth, and hogtied him with his feet and his hands drawn up behind his back. With that done, Bob shoved the .45 into his rear waistband and the man’s wallet, radio, and cell phone into the deep pockets in his pullover sweater.