The Bleeding Edge

by William W. Johnstone

  The death toll among the invaders was slightly higher than Stark had estimated. They found fourteen corpses, including three in the burned-out pickup. Another five men were wounded and unconscious. Stark figured some of them would succumb to their injuries.

  He used his walkie-talkie to check in with the forces at the gate.

  “Nick, how are things up there? You copy, Nick?”

  Nick Medford’s voice came back, and Stark was relieved to hear that the man sounded like he was all right.

  “We drove them off, Mr. Stark,” Nick reported. “They managed to get inside the gate, but then we shot out their tires and pinned them down, just like you talked about, and after a while they all piled into the two cars that were still running and got out of here.”

  “Good job,” Stark told him. “Any casualties?”

  Nick’s voice became thick with emotion as he said, “José Alvarez was killed.”

  Stark drew a deep breath in through his nose as his jaw clenched. He didn’t know his neighbor José Alvarez well, but any loss affected all of them.

  “Any others?” he asked.

  “A couple of bullet wounds, but nothing too bad. We were lucky.”

  Stark knew that was true. The invaders had spread around a lot of lead. Fortunately, they didn’t seem to be very good shots. They had never had to be. They’d usually had the advantage of numbers and superior firepower.

  Not tonight, though.

  Except for that grenade launcher, of course.

  Stark told Nick to let him know when the emergency vehicles got there from Devil’s Pass, then went and picked up the launcher. It was U.S. military issue, of course, stolen from somewhere by the cartel.

  He supposed they were fortunate that the invaders hadn’t shown up tonight with a tank.

  With things under control, Stark took out his cell phone and thumbed the speed dial number for Alton Duncan’s house. When his next-door neighbor answered, Stark said, “Hey, Alton, everybody all right there?”

  “John Howard!” Alton exclaimed. “Man, it’s good to hear your voice! We were all worried about you.”

  “Did Hallie stay there with you like I told her to?”

  It wasn’t Alton who answered the question, and as he heard Hallie’s voice he realized that she had taken the phone away from her dad.

  “Yes, I stayed here, but don’t get used to giving me orders, John Howard,” she said. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m fine,” Stark assured her. “Think I might’ve twisted my knee a little when I jumped out of my truck, but it’s nothing to worry about.” He paused. “My truck, on the other hand, is a total loss.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I can replace it. You’re sure everybody’s all right there?”

  “The fighting never got anywhere close to us,” Hallie said. “Is it over?”

  “For now. Those fellas the cartel sent to run us off have done some running away themselves. The ones who still could, that is.”

  “John Howard . . . were some of them killed?”

  “More than a dozen,” Stark said flatly.

  He heard Hallie sigh on the other end of the connection.

  “You know this is just getting started, don’t you? It’s really going to hit the fan now.”

  “I figured as much,” Stark said. “But what else were we gonna do? Let those animals bust in here, slaughter half of us, and send the rest running for the hills? We couldn’t do that.”

  “No, I know you couldn’t. I’m just saying to get ready for more trouble, and it won’t be the kind you can fight with shotguns and rifles this time.”

  Stark smiled, even though she couldn’t see him.

  “I’m not worried,” he said. “I’ve got a good lawyer.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  The apartment building was old but well kept up, and its location near Dupont Circle meant that it was also expensive. There was never any shortage of tenants, however, despite the high rent. A number of very well-paid lobbyists lived here, along with various legislative aides and deputy assistant undersecretaries from the different cabinet departments, most of whom came from wealthy families that had paid for their educations at Harvard and Yale and helped them secure their positions in the government, where they could help pass legislation that raised taxes and spending in a never-ending spiral and implemented regulations that made it virtually impossible for small businesses to comply and generate any profit at all.

  But that was all right. As long as the middle class made any money at all, the government could just keep on taking it.

  And foolish sheep that they were, the average citizens would allow the government to keep on doing just that, Ryan thought as he rode up in the elevator with a couple of young men who looked barely old enough to be out of the exclusive prep schools they had no doubt attended.

  “Senator Bascomb’s going to introduce the bill next week,” one of them was saying to the other.

  “What’s it going to do again?”

  “Create a commission to study the commission on equitable distribution of healthcare benefits and also empower the secretary of health and human services to establish new guidelines to cut off coverage for non-viable patients.”

  “Non-viable meaning?”

  “Anyone over the age of seventy. Although I’m trying to persuade the senator that he can get away with a provision lowering that to sixty-eight.”

  The second legislative aide laughed.

  “And we used to accuse the other side of wanting to turn Granny out into the street to let her die.”

  “I know! And people actually bought it!”

  As the two of them snickered, Ryan thought about how easy it would be to reach over and snap their necks, one at a time. He would be doing the world a service, he told himself.

  But if he left their bodies in the elevator, he ran the risk of having them discovered, and that might interfere with the job that had brought him here. He didn’t want that.

  So when the elevator stopped on the third floor and the two young men, still telling themselves with smug satisfaction how smart they were, stepped out of the car, Ryan just smiled and said, “You fellas have yourselves a good night now.”

  They glanced back at him, obviously wondering why some middle-aged nobody was even talking to them, the best and the brightest of yet another generation of self-proclaimed best and brightest, and walked off never knowing how close they had come to death.

  The door closed and the elevator rose smoothly toward the fourth floor, where Ryan’s target lived.

  His employer hadn’t been happy that he was still in Washington instead of in Texas dealing with John Howard Stark, but Ryan operated on his own timetable, always had and always would. Anyway, it was a lucky break that he was here, because there was another little mess that needed to be cleaned up.

  And cleaning up was his specialty, after all.

  The elevator stopped again and announced in a sleekly modulated, recorded female voice, “Fourth floor.” The door opened and Ryan stepped out.

  His footsteps made no sound on the thick carpet in the hallway as he looked for apartment 407, finding it four doors up on his left. Before he could knock on it, the door of one of the other apartments on his right opened behind him. His first impulse was to look back and make sure he hadn’t walked into some sort of setup. Probably some of his contacts in the government lost sleep at night from worrying that he knew too much. They might have decided it would be better just to get rid of him.

  But if the door opening was entirely innocent, as it probably was, then he didn’t want to show his face to whoever was back there.

  He kept walking, going past 407 so that no one could testify that he’d stopped there. He heard footsteps receding behind him. A man said, “We’ve got plenty of time to make it. The reservation isn’t until nine.”

  “Sure, plenty of time,” a woman said. “If nobody else is on the streets of Washington tonight. That’s bound to happe
n.”

  “Why don’t you just let me worry about it, okay?”

  “Fine.” The woman’s voice was chilly. “You won’t hear me say anything else about it.”

  Ryan smiled faintly as he heard the elevator door open. That was going to be a tense ride down to the lobby, he thought.

  When the elevator closed, he swung around and started back toward 407. The corridor was deserted now. He’d already made sure there were no security cameras in the hallway itself. While he was in the elevator he had kept his head turned so that his face would be partially obscured from the camera in there, without being too obvious about what he was doing. The same was true in the lobby downstairs.

  The two legislative aides he had ridden up with might remember him, especially since he had spoken to them. That had been a dumb move, he told himself. They had annoyed him, though. Anyway, a couple of self-centered brats like that might remember him vaguely, but they wouldn’t be able to describe him. Ryan knew from experience that eyewitnesses were notoriously unreliable, even when they supposedly were paying attention.

  Ryan stopped in front of the door to 407, took a pair of skin-colored latex gloves from his coat pocket, and pulled them on. He knocked on the door.

  Ten seconds later, the target opened it. Ryan recognized him right away from the photo that had been emailed to him. The man had been young and handsome once, with thick, unruly dark hair. Now that hair was thinning and shot through with gray, his waistline had thickened considerably, and there were pouches of weariness under his eyes. He said, “Yeah? Can I help you?”

  Ryan reached under his coat and took out a manila envelope.

  “Josh Mumford?”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’ve got a delivery for you.”

  Ryan was too old and too well-dressed to be a messenger, although in today’s ruinous economy, you never could tell. People took whatever jobs they could get.

  Everybody liked to get packages, though, and since Mumford worked at the Justice Department, he probably had documents delivered to him fairly regularly. He said, “Oh, thanks,” and stuck out his hand to take the envelope.

  Instead of handing it over, Ryan dropped the envelope and grabbed Mumford’s wrist. He jerked the man toward him, at the same time taking a syringe and hypodermic needle from his pocket. He stabbed the needle into Mumford’s neck just below the jawline and shoved the plunger down. It should have been an awkward maneuver with Ryan’s missing thumb and finger, but he had done this often enough that he had no trouble with it.

  Death happened so fast Mumford’s eyes barely had time to widen in surprise before they began to glaze over.

  Ryan pulled Mumford closer and got an arm around him to hold him up. He kicked the envelope into the apartment and wrestled Mumford out of the doorway, then heeled the door closed behind him. He pulled the needle out and put it back in his pocket.

  The computer on Mumford’s desk was on, and the swivel chair in front of the desk was turned toward the door. Ryan carried the dead man over and lowered him into the chair. Mumford’s head sagged forward. Ryan turned the chair so that Mumford was facing toward the monitor again.

  A top-notch medical examiner might notice the needle mark, but given its location the chances were that it would be mistaken for a tiny shaving nick. Ryan saw several similar tiny marks on Mumford’s neck. Anyway, there wouldn’t be any reason for anybody to be suspicious. The drug in the syringe mimicked a heart attack so closely that it was almost undetectable. Just looking at Mumford, he appeared to be a prime candidate for cardiac arrest, and he would be found in front of his computer, where a lot of people were found dead these days.

  Facebook was up on the monitor screen, Ryan saw. He patted Mumford lightly on the shoulder and said, “Should’ve updated your status while you had the chance, amigo. And you shouldn’t have hacked into things that were none of your business.”

  He looked around, made sure he hadn’t left any signs of his presence, and left the apartment, setting the lock on the door and easing it closed behind him. He was just starting to turn away from it when the elevator door opened a few yards down the hall and a man charged out of it.

  He wasn’t attacking Ryan, though. He was muttering to himself instead, saying, “If she wouldn’t pester me all the time, I wouldn’t forget my damn wallet—”

  He looked up and saw Ryan standing in front of the door to Josh Mumford’s apartment.

  Ryan reached into his pocket, took out a small automatic barely bigger than the palm of his hand, and shot the man twice in the forehead. The shots halted the man’s momentum in midstep, and he wavered before pitching against the wall and sliding to the floor. Blood began to pool under him and soak into the carpet.

  Ryan uttered a heartfelt curse. This was an unlucky break. Even unluckier for the guy who was going to miss his late dinner reservation after all.

  The man didn’t have his wallet, clearly, because he’d left it in his apartment and come back to get it. But he had keys to a Lexus in his pocket. Ryan took them to make it look as much like he could as a robbery. Having a guy killed in a mugging almost right outside the door of another guy who’d died of a heart attack about the same time might set off a few flares, but the cops wouldn’t be able to prove anything.

  Nobody emerged from any of the other apartments. The gun didn’t have a noise suppressor on it, but it was pretty quiet to start with. Ryan walked along the hall to the stairs. No cameras in the stairwell. He shook his head. For a building in the nation’s capital, they didn’t take their security seriously enough. Of course, that worked to his benefit, so he wasn’t going to complain.

  Five minutes later he was driving back toward his own place in Georgetown, somewhat irritated that the night’s work hadn’t gone perfectly. Life was full of unexpected developments, though, and all a man could do was adapt to them.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  Stark hoped there were no other law enforcement emergencies in the county tonight, because every available deputy was here at Shady Hills, along with Sheriff George Lozano himself.

  “I warned you this would happen, Stark,” Lozano said angrily as they stood beside his SUV that was parked not far inside the gate. “Damn it, I warned you!”

  “It sounds like you’re more worried about those men who tried to kill us than you are about the law-abiding citizens of this park,” Stark snapped back at him. He had just about lost all his patience with Lozano. He didn’t believe the sheriff was in bed with the cartel, but with the politician’s instincts that had gotten him elected in the first place, Lozano didn’t want to rock anybody’s boat too much, either.

  Ambulances moved back and forth steadily from the retirement park, transporting bodies to the morgue. The first thing the EMTs had done was to stabilize and load up the wounded to take them to the hospital in Devil’s Pass. Deputies went along to guard all of them, including the residents of the park. An outraged Sheriff Lozano had declared that until a full investigation had been conducted, he was going to consider everybody here a possible suspect in numerous crimes. Hallie had protested that the residents had been acting in self-defense, but Lozano had told her to take that up with the district attorney.

  “Don’t worry,” she’d told him with an angry snort of her own. “I will.”

  Now Stark and Lozano were meeting one on one, and the air was thick with anger on both sides. Even so, Stark wasn’t expecting what happened next.

  “You’re under arrest,” Lozano said. “Put your hands behind your back.”

  Stark’s eyebrows rose in surprise.

  “Under arrest?” he repeated. “What the hell is the charge?”

  “Inciting a riot, for one thing. This bloodshed might not have happened if you hadn’t armed these people and stirred them up into a killing frenzy.”

  “You’ve got to be joking,” Stark snapped. “Those thugs showed up and started shooting at us first. We just returned their fire.”

  Lozano shook his head and said, “That�
�s not how the survivors tell it. According to them, they were just driving by the park—on a public road, I might add—when the residents opened fire on them. That’s on you, Stark.”

  “First off, that’s a blasted lie, and second, what about the ones who came in the back? They drove a pickup right through the fence. That’s trespassing, at the very least,” Stark said with a thick note of scorn in his voice.

  “And that may be all we can prove against them. Again, you can’t work up a bunch of old geezers so they start shooting at somebody for knocking down a fence.”

  Stark knew that Lozano was being willfully obstinate. The sheriff wasn’t stupid; he knew what had happened here. But for reasons of his own, he was bending over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to the invaders.

  Maybe he was being paid off, Stark thought.

  Or else Lozano was just scared of what might happen if he openly defied the cartel. The sheriff had a teenage daughter and son, Stark recalled, along with a very attractive wife. He had seen a picture of the whole family in the newspaper after the last election.

  Stark could feel a little sympathy for Lozano if the man was frightened about what might happen to his family. But that didn’t excuse Lozano’s failure to do his duty. If you were going to be in law enforcement, some risk always went along with the job.

  “You’re really going to arrest me?” Stark asked.

  “Damn right I am. Now turn around.” Lozano rested his hand on the butt of the holstered revolver at his side. “Or are you going to resist?”

  “I’m a law-abiding man,” Stark said. He turned away from Lozano and put his hands behind his back. He felt metal bite into his skin as the sheriff snapped old-fashioned handcuffs onto his wrists.

  “Hey! Hey, what the hell are you doing?”

  That shout came from Hallie, who had gone off to check on some of the residents of the park. Stark looked over his shoulder and saw her running toward him and the sheriff.

  “Stay back, Ms. Duncan,” Lozano told her. “Mr. Stark is under arrest, and you don’t want to be interfering with me right now.”