He stepped silently into the entry hall and then stopped, listening intently. During his twelve years in the infantry and Special Ops, Bob saw more than his share of dead men, both friend and foe. He knew what it looked like, knew what it smelled like, and all too often knew what it felt like. When he came upon it, it rarely came as a surprise. He stepped through Charlie’s front door and paused. The foyer and living room appeared perfectly normal to the untrained eye, but each of his senses screamed a warning. Something was not right in here, he realized, as he stepped away from the door, dropped into a defensive crouch, and waited. First, the house was deathly quiet, too quiet; and second, there was no cat. They say that pets and their owners often begin to resemble each other. Charlie and his old Persian cat were no exceptions. She was a white, very overweight, and very nosy Persian. Bob had visited the house often enough to know it was impossible to set foot inside without hearing the distinctive clatter of cat claws on the hardwood floor as the ever-suspicious feline would run out to see who was invading her empire. No cat meant big problems.
The house plan was simple, with a large living room, dining room, office and kitchen on the first floor, a central staircase, three bedrooms up, and a largely unfinished basement down. That was one of the many improvements that Charlie kept telling him he would get around to someday. Bob didn’t believe in collecting “things” and had never “nested” anywhere for more than six months at a time until he met Ed and Angie Toler, as his sparsely furnished apartment in Arlington Heights more than attested; so he could only look at Charlie and laugh. Now, however, he wasn’t laughing.
He advanced slowly down the entry hall with his back to the outside wall. Room by room he cleared the first floor. Charlie never was much of a housekeeper, but someone had trashed the living room and the office. This wasn’t a home invasion or burglary. It was a messy, destructive search by people who didn’t care what they broke and may not have even known what they were looking for. Still, Bob didn’t see anything alarming until he reached the kitchen, where he saw a lump of bloody white fur lying in the far corner. It was the cat. Someone shot her, and she was dead. What had been a cautious, combat-ready look in his eyes suddenly turned ice-cold, as if an arctic wind had blown through the house. He understood killing when it was necessary, and had done plenty of that himself. What he could not tolerate was needless, stupid cruelty. He went to the knife rack near the stove and pulled out two carving knives from a German cutlery set that Charlie had won in a raffle. One knife was eight inches long and the other six inches long. They were heavy, solid, well balanced, and razor-sharp, and he hoped he would find an excuse to use them. He retraced his steps to the stairs, crept silently up to the second floor. One of the bedrooms was empty and one held three useless, complicated, and largely unused pieces of exercise equipment that Charlie had seen on TV, and had to have. The master bedroom and its closets had been ransacked like the first floor rooms, but that was all he found.
That only left the basement. He quickly retraced his steps to the kitchen, as the old warning bells began to clang louder and louder in the back of his head and his combat instincts took over. He opened the basement door and immediately sensed that all-too-familiar smell of death hanging in the air. It wasn’t something you can readily describe to the uninitiated, but to an infantryman or perhaps a homicide detective, you knew it when you stumbled onto it. The basement ceiling lights were on. Bending low, he dropped to the floor and edged far enough down the stairs to see into the basement.
There was no need to be quiet, and there was no need for the knives. The basement was empty, except for Charlie. He sat upright, naked, tied to an old kitchen chair in the center of the room. Even from halfway down the stairs, it didn’t take a practiced eye to see that he was very much dead. Bob got to his feet, descended the stairs, and quickly walked the perimeter of the basement, but there was no one else there, only the body of an old friend. Charlie was tied tightly to the chair with what looked like electrical wire, which they must have found down here or ripped from the ceiling. He’d been beaten, burned, and tortured. No doubt, he struggled, because the wire cut deep into the ample fat and soft tissue on his arms, chest, and legs.
When normal people stumble upon an awful scene like that, they would feel their heart pounding in their chest, hear a ringing in their ears, and probably find that big Bob Evans breakfast rising in their throat. Not him. If a doctor was there with him at that moment and hooked him up to a blood pressure cuff and a heart rate monitor, he’d barely find an uptick in the readings. The Army and the CIA had trained those normal human reactions out of him years before. Still, he was not a machine, far from it. What all that “wet” work and training did was to focus that fear, revulsion, and anger into a cold energy.
He stepped closer and examined the body. Unfortunately, he had seen too many similar scenes during his years in Iraq and Afghanistan. Usually it was locals — Sunnis doing it to Shia, Shia doing it to Sunnis, or Al-Qaida, drug lords, or one tribe doing it to another, not that the reason mattered much. The result was always the same. From the bruises and burn marks on Charlie’s face and the small pools of blood on the floor, they went at him for quite a while down here and the fat bean counter died hard. What did they think Charlie knew? What were they after? Bob knew that answer the moment he stepped inside the house — they were after him and the game had changed once more. First, it was Eleanor Purdue. That angered him, but he didn’t know her. Once he met Greenway and Scalese, Bob wanted simple justice for her. Then came Sabrina Fowler, and his reaction shifted to anger and a grim determination to see that the arrogant perpetrators of a crime like that were punished. Now, after what they did to Charlie, it became intensely personal. He wanted justice and punishment, but his desire turned much darker. They had declared war on him and his, and they were about to get one back the likes of which they had never seen. He would decide the rules of engagement, not them. He would define the battlefield. It would be Burke’s war. He’d have his vengeance, he’d give no quarter, and he’d take no prisoners.
About ten feet from the body, he saw a puddle of vomit on the bare concrete. It was too far away to be from Charlie. Perhaps things went too far and one of them discovered a conscience? He found that hard to believe, but there was nothing more he could learn here. He reached out and touched the back of his hand to Charlie’s chest. The basement was cool, and so was Charlie — cool, but not cold. Most of the streaks of blood on him were dry, but the larger pools on the floor were not, which meant he was killed less than an hour ago.
With knives at the ready again, Bob climbed back to the first floor and went into Charlie’s small rear office, located off the kitchen. It had been ransacked worse than the living room or the upstairs bedroom. They had pulled the books out of the built-in bookcases and tossed the files from the drawers in his desk and file cabinet all over the floor. A thick, random layer of books, paper, pens, and other office paraphernalia covered the carpet. He stepped into the room, pushing the books and papers aside with his toes so as not to step on a sheet of paper. The men who did this were not so careful. He saw several large footprints in what appeared to be dried blood on several sheets of white copier paper. He placed his own foot next to one of them. He wore a size ten, but the shoe print from the other man was much larger, at least a size twelve or thirteen, and it showed a deep, one-inch long nick on the left side of the heel. Bozos, he thought. Whether they didn’t know or didn’t care, a distinctive shoe print like that could be as good as a fingerprint. However, since they owned half the cops in Cook County and hired the best lawyers in town, they probably figured they’d never go down for “nuttin.”
From the randomness and the completeness of the destruction, it appeared they tossed the room for the sake of tossing it. Even if they didn’t know what they were looking for, they were determined to make it appear they were thorough. Bob knew if he went back to his own apartment in Arlington Heights, it would look about like this too. So would Eleanor Purdue’s by
now, and Linda Sylvester’s too. They were looking for whatever Eleanor Purdue took with her, but they didn’t know exactly what that was. Being low-tech thugs, they expected it to be paper, which was why they tossed the place out of frustration. They didn’t understand computers, so their medieval Sicilian predilection was to smash all the office equipment, as if they were killing the malevolent little Jinni inside. They threw his printer on the floor, dropped his desk monitor, and ripped the modem from the wall. Not having found Eleanor’s papers in his files, they vented their remaining energy on his new HP Envy desktop computer. It had been repeatedly dropped, kicked, stomped on, and shot. They got those Jinni real good, Bob thought as he continued to look around.
He remembered Charlie also owned a small, older model ASUS notebook computer, which he used on business trips such as the one they took to Washington. Burke didn’t immediately see it in the rubble, giving him at least a short burst of hope, until he saw its small black carry-case lying in the corner with a bullet hole in the center. He bent down, picked it up, and unzipped it. Pulling the small computer out, he saw they had shot it, dead center, but if the bullet missed the hard drive, he might be able to move it to another machine and there could yet be hope.
He looked at his watch, gave the room a last, quick look, and then headed for the rear kitchen door. Time to get moving, he realized. He had touched nothing inside, and unlike Tony Scalese’s Bozos, he left no footprints. True to his “Ghost” nom de guerre, he would come and go, leaving no trace behind. With the knives in one hand, the blades pressed against his forearm, and the computer case dangling from the other, he used his handkerchief to cover the knob again, opened the rear door and gave the back yard a quick scan as he slipped outside. It was empty. Through the gaps between the houses behind Charlie’s, he saw the flashing lights from at least a half dozen police cars. He figured the entire Wheeling Police Department must be back there, checking out the two perverts in the Buick. Good, that meant there would be none around to watch the rest of the neighborhood. He walked across the rear yard and around the side of Charlie’s house as casually as he could.
Tony Scalese parked his LS 460 Lexus in his usual space at the rear of the CHC parking lot. His foray out to Wheeling with Greenway and two of his men to “visit” Burke’s accountant had not been a success. Killing him didn’t bother Tony Scalese in the slightest. It was not being able to make the stubborn bastard talk and not finding anything useful in his house that left the big Italian seething with anger. He should have let Greenway use his drugs on him, but the Doc got sick watching his boys work on the fat man. Scalese in turn became impatient, lost his temper, and hit him hard one too many times. Now he had nothing. Well, it was that stubborn accountant’s own fault. All he needed to do was tell them where they could find Burke. Now, Scalese must try some other approaches. He would find that “telephone company” bastard. It might take a bit longer now, but when he did, he would kill him the same way he killed his friend -- with his bare hands, and he would enjoy every minute of it.
Scalese entered the building quietly through the back door and walked down the long hallway past the employee lounge to the lobby. It was already 11:30. Normally, the lounge was full of laughter and chatter from the early lunch crowd, but not today. The building was surprisingly quiet, as if a tense pall had fallen over the place. “And not a mouse to be heard,” he thought to himself as he smiled at several of the worker bees taking an early lunch in the lounge. They smiled back, politely enough, but quickly turned away. Scalese understood exactly what that meant. They all knew Purdue was missing and that Sylvester was now missing too. The office jungle drums would have picked that up a long time ago, and now they were all scared.
When he reached the lobby, he saw a new girl sitting at the receptionist desk. She must be the one from accounting. She was young and cute, definitely Greenway’s type. Seeing her sitting there reminded him of another problem he must take care of — Linda Sylvester. From her dust-up with Greenway in the hall this morning, apparently she had thrown her lot in with that little prick Burke. That made her one more problem he could lay at Greenway’s feet.
First things first, however, he decided as he took the elevator up to the third floor and turned right toward the Doc’s office. He didn’t bother to ask the receptionist whether he was in, because Scalese didn’t care. Greenway’s car wasn’t parked out front, but if he was in, he would soon wish he wasn’t. The arrogant doctor showed no hesitance to rape and strangle women, but he couldn’t watch a man take a good, old-fashioned beating. Greenway had run up the basement stairs and disappeared, just when Scalese might have used him and his bag of drugs. That left Scalese angry at both Greenway and the bean counter, which became a lethal combination.
Well, the doctor’s absence would give Scalese the opportunity to take a long look around inside his office. Scalese turned the doorknob and walked in without knocking. As he expected, Greenway was out. No doubt, he remembered some Chamber of Commerce or Kiwanis luncheon he just had to be at, and was hobnobbing with the local gentry, letting himself be seen. Or, Greenway could have driven into the city and was making a nuisance of himself in one of CHC’s clinics or warehouse operations down there, trying to corner another young girl in the stockroom. That pompous ass actually believed that his sexual antics were no one's business but his own, and that was an immense miscalculation on his part. Old Sal went to Mass every afternoon and considered himself a moral man. Like most of the senior Mafiosi he had committed every crime listed in the State and Federal Statutes, but those were ‘business.’ They were never personal. In his day, he had mistresses and frequented prostitutes. That was simply “men being men, with willing women” in the finest Italian tradition. However, sex crimes like rape, sexual blackmail, and any other form of forced, non-consensual or non-compensated sex was an “infamia,” an evil act that ranked right up there next to child abuse; and it would soon earn Greenway a quick trip to Hell..
Scalese looked at Greenway’s ridiculously large desk and the oversized credenza sitting behind it under the window. “You can tell a lot about a man by looking at what he leaves out on his desk,” someone once told him. Tony agreed, but you could tell even more by seeing what he was hiding inside. He sat in Greenway’s large, black-leather chair and looked around, but saw nothing of interest lying on top of the desk. However, there were three drawers on the left side, a thin drawer in the middle, and a cabinet door on the right, which he assumed held vertical files. All were locked. Reaching into his jacket pocket, Scalese pulled out his 9-inch stiletto, opened the blade, and worked it into the gap between the top of the left drawer in the desk. He worked it back and forth until the lock snapped open. Rummaging through the drawer, he found an untidy collection of office supplies, a calendar that was largely blank, and a stack of pornographic magazines, which seemed to run toward S and M, leather, and the very kinky. Disgusted, he turned his attention to the two drawers beneath it. The top one held pens, pills, note pads, and nothing of interest. When he opened the thin, center drawer, however, he saw a small .32-caliber Mauser automatic pistol lying in the clutter. Scalese pulled out his handkerchief, carefully picked up the Mauser without touching it, and slipped it in his jacket pocket, thinking the small ‘pimp’ gun could be useful later.
Scalese quickly went through the remaining desk drawers, broke the lock on the file cabinet, and went through the credenza behind the desk as well, but found nothing of any particular use. He shoved the drawers closed halfheartedly, not really caring whether Greenway knew someone had rummaged through his desk or not. Satisfied, he left the office and walked back to his own office at the other end of the hall with a thin, fresh smile on his lips.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Bob Burke took a half-dozen steps into the front yard and realized trouble had arrived. The old Ford Taurus sat at the curb on the other side of the street, engine running, with Linda inside. Instead of circling the block, she must have stopped and decided to wait for him to come out. Tha
t was when a dark-blue Lincoln Town Car pulled in behind her. She should have tromped on the accelerator and driven away right then, but maybe she was watching the house and didn’t see them. Now it was too late. The Lincoln’s front doors hung open, its trunk was up, and two large Gumbahs in cheap suits stood next to the driver’s side door of the Taurus, guns drawn, daring her to try. Their backs were to him, their attention focused on her and the car, but he immediately knew they were Tony Scalese’s men. One of them was rattling the driver’s door, trying to pull it open, while his pal worked on the rear door. They were shouting at her and she was shouting back. Despite the panicked expression on her face, they hadn’t succeeded yet. All four doors were locked, but that wouldn’t keep them out much longer.
That was all Bob needed to see. To him, there was one basic rule of fighting — there were no rules — and at that moment, he burned to give them a little payback. That meant hit first, hit hard, and end it before the other fellow even realized he was in a fight. That was particularly true when there were two of them, each of whom was bigger than him by five or six inches and at least fifty pounds. Unfortunately for them, they were so intent on getting into the Taurus, that they had no idea what was about to hit them.
Burke's War: Bob Burke Action Thriller 1 (Bob Burke Action Thrillers) Page 25