Assume Nothing

by Gar Anthony Haywood

  ‘Hello? Who’s this?’

  Somebody had picked up the phone. Bent out of shape, big time.

  ‘Mr Cross? Oh, you are there, good. Well, yes, like I said, this is Brad Dunphy, your neighbor down in unit one-oh-five, and—’

  ‘You said something about scratching my car?’

  ‘It’s more than a scratch, really. That’s why I thought I’d better call. I feel terrible about this, really awful, and I’m down here with the car right now if you’d like to come take a look for yourself.’

  Reddick heard a loud click, indicating the man on the other end of the line had hung up.

  Stifling a grin, he raced down the hall to the door to Cross’s unit and caught him just as he was about to fly through it, car keys in hand. He was still dressed for bed in a silkscreened gray T-shirt and green flannel pajama bottoms.

  Reddick jammed the nose of his .40 caliber Smith & Wesson hard into his gut, stopping him cold in the open doorway.

  ‘Uh-uh. Back inside, Mr Cross. Hurry up.’

  The younger man’s mouth opened to speak, but then realization dawned, common sense took over, and he backpedaled into his condo, Reddick following and closing the door right behind him.

  ‘Make a sound and your life ends right here,’ Reddick said. ‘Try me and see.’

  Cross just looked at him. Unsettled, but not yet afraid. Reddick made a note-to-self: This was a different animal than Andy Baumhower.

  ‘Anyone else here?’ Reddick asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Yes. You must be Joe Reddick,’ Cross said.

  ‘That’s right. So now you know what time it is and why you don’t want to give me any fucking trouble. Don’t you?’

  ‘I think so.’

  Reddick dropped his bag to the floor and slammed a fist into the other man’s abdomen, just under his ribcage, bringing Cross, coughing and gasping for breath, to his knees.

  ‘When I ask a question, I need you to be a bit more affirmative than that, Mr Cross.’

  ‘Yes! Yes, I know,’ Cross managed, down on all fours now, eyes fixed on the floor.

  ‘When you’re ready, we’re gonna find a phone and you’re gonna call your boys Ben and Will, tell them they need to come over right away.’

  Reddick waited for Cross to respond. Cross sucked air into his lungs, pushed himself up to his feet again, the air of defiance he’d shown Reddick moments earlier already making a comeback.

  ‘And why should I do that? You’re going to kill me anyway,’ he said.

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘You murdered Andy, didn’t you?’

  ‘Maybe I murdered Andy because he ran his fucking mouth instead of doing what I told him to do. You ever think of that?’

  Cross didn’t answer, weighing the chances that Reddick was telling him the truth, that maybe he wanted more out of all this than just Cross’s head, and those of his friends Clarke and Sinnott, on a stick.

  ‘You’ve only got two choices, asshole,’ Reddick said. ‘You can play along and live long enough to see what I’ve got in mind for you, or don’t and join your pal Baumhower right now. What’s it gonna be?’

  Cross looked first at Reddick, then at the gun that was now pointed directly at his chest. One seemed to promise death just as much as the other. He didn’t know who Reddick was or what his ultimate intentions were, but he decided what Reddick had just told him was indisputable: If he didn’t follow the man’s orders, at least for the moment, he was as good as dead.

  ‘OK,’ Cross said.

  They wound up in the playroom, Cross on the couch, Reddick in a chair only inches away, the little gym bag sitting on the floor at his left hand. Reddick had the other man’s cell phone, Cross having led him to it in the bedroom upon being asked. The Smith & Wesson forty was sitting in Reddick’s lap, aimed with almost casual indifference in Cross’s general direction. Still, Cross wasn’t fooled into thinking his visitor couldn’t kill him with one shot if he tried something stupid. The more he saw of Reddick, the surer he became of his capacity for mayhem.

  ‘OK, listen up,’ Reddick said. ‘You’re gonna call Sinnott first, then Clarke. On speaker, so we can both listen in. In twenty words or less, you’re gonna give your friends a reason to get their asses over here ASAP. Don’t answer any questions and don’t take no for an answer. Tell ’em anything you want, but keep it brief and get the job done.’ He leaned forward in his chair to give Cross a closer look at his face. ‘And understand this: I know coded language when I hear it, and I know more about the three of you than you could imagine. You try dropping any secret messages on either of your friends, your call’s gonna end with a bang. You catch my drift?’

  Cross just glared at him.

  ‘I don’t hear you.’

  ‘Yes,’ Cross said.

  Reddick dialed both numbers for him, having committed each to memory as part of the info he’d taken off Baumhower’s laptop. He was not at all surprised to learn that Cross was an expert liar; at the point of a gun, the younger man made a case for needing to see Clarke and Sinnott right away that sounded both plausible and unforced. He said the cops had called him that morning with some follow-up questions regarding Andy Baumhower’s murder and he wanted to make sure they all had their stories straight, before Clarke and Sinnott could be questioned next. Sinnott bought in right away, keeping Cross on the phone no longer than a minute or two, but Clarke, as Reddick might have predicted, was a harder sell.

  The big man’s voice, even over Cross’s speakerphone, was instantly familiar; the memories it brought back for Reddick chilled him to the bone, and he had to fight the urge to kill Cross right now, without comment or provocation, in his stead. As he listened in, Cross was forced to do some fast talking to deflect all of Clarke’s demands for elaboration, rephrasing his request for a meeting as a direct order so that Clarke would accept it as non-negotiable. Cross was crimson with anger when he handed the phone back to Reddick, embarrassed to have had his authority over his partners so openly tested.

  Reddick sat back in his chair again, digging in for a long wait. There was an extended silence as Cross studied him, trying to determine the exact nature of the adversary he was facing.

  ‘What exactly do you want?’ he asked.

  ‘For starters? I want you to shut the fuck up,’ Reddick said. But there’d been nothing about the way he’d said it to suggest he hadn’t meant it at least partly in jest.

  ‘What Ben did was a mistake,’ Cross said. ‘It was stupid and wholly unnecessary.’

  ‘And he was acting entirely on his own, I suppose.’

  ‘Yes. He was. Didn’t Andy tell you that?’

  ‘Andy told me a lot of things.’

  ‘Including . . . ?’

  ‘How your friend Gillis Rainey wound up dead in the LA River?’ Reddick nodded. ‘I’m afraid so.’

  Cross took the news incredibly well; the twinge of disappointment that flashed across his face had almost been too small for Reddick to catch.

  ‘Did you have any idea Andy had put him there before he told you? I’m betting you didn’t.’

  ‘And if I didn’t?’

  ‘Then you must know what I’m telling you is the truth. Only an idiot like Ben would think blackmailing a man to keep him silent about something he doesn’t even know he knows could ever be a good idea. I mean, do I look that stupid to you?’

  ‘You look plenty stupid to me,’ Reddick said. ‘But so what? What’s done is done. I don’t give a rat’s ass now who or what made Clarke do what he did.’

  ‘You think we’re all equally culpable.’

  ‘Damn straight.’

  ‘So what happens after you get us all together? Surely you don’t intend to do to us what you did to Andy?’

  Reddick ignored the question.

  Cross let out a small chuckle, incredulous. ‘You can’t be serious. You’d kill four people just because one of them broke into your house and shook your wife and kid up a little?’
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  Reddick bristled, incensed to hear a smarmy little weasel like Cross describe Dana and Jake’s ordeal in such blasé terms. ‘I know,’ he said. ‘Doesn’t seem fair, does it?’ His eyes turned black and his jaw grew taut, giving Cross his first real look at the madman he was facing. ‘But that’s life. Sometimes, the shit end of the stick is all you get.’

  EIGHTEEN

  Cross could see Reddick was all done talking, but Cross went on talking anyway, finally understanding the full extent of the danger he was in.

  ‘If you know as much about us as you say you do, you must know what we’re worth. What we could pay you to let us go and just forget about all this.’

  ‘Shut up, Cross,’ Reddick said, and this time there was no questioning his sincerity.

  Cross took the hint and fell silent, putting his mind to work immediately on the problem at hand. A smarter man than Andy Baumhower, he didn’t need Reddick to tell him what he had to lose by trying something foolish. He knew Reddick could make his death either quick and painless, or slow and agonizing, and between the two, Cross had a definite preference. But that wasn’t his only reason to be cooperative. There was also hope; the possibility, however remote, that between now and the time Will Sinnott and Ben Clarke arrived at the condo, something for Reddick would go wrong. He’d make a mistake or lose his nerve, or Clarke would take the initiative and do something reckless to disarm him.

  Reddick sat there eyeing Cross with mild amusement, reading his mind as easily as he might were he actually inside it. Cross was neither a hero nor a fool; he would wait things out and see what developed. Still, Reddick knew, he bore watching. Pragmatist or no, the closer a man came to the hour of his own death, the more likely he was to try anything – anything – to save his skin.

  Reddick expected this to be especially true of Clarke. The big man was the first to heed Cross’s call, roughly twenty minutes after receiving it. Reddick and Cross went to answer his knock at the door together, Reddick hiding behind it until Clarke had stepped across the threshold and into the spider’s web. Reddick gave him a split second to see what was coming, just to twist the knife a little, then greeted him the same way he had greeted Reddick at Dana’s two days before, with a blow to the head that carried the weight of an oil tanker. Or so it must have seemed to Clarke, having been hit with the two-fold force of the heel of Reddick’s gun and the thirst for Clarke’s blood Reddick had been choking on since the two had last met.

  Your boy over there breathes a word about the accident to anybody, you’re all dead.

  Clarke crumbled to the floor like a windblown house of cards, Cross stepping out of the way to let gravity do with him what it would. His face came to earth first and the rest followed, his landing making a sound not unlike a baby grand falling off the back of a speeding truck. He blinked once or twice, not fully out, and Reddick helped him along with a kick to the jaw that left him drooling blood and teeth all over Cross’s carpet. That should have been the end of it, the big man having absorbed enough punishment to kill a man half his size, but Clarke’s voice was still booming in Reddick’s ears.

  I’ll start with the kid and leave you for last.

  Reddick kicked him again, once, twice, three more times, all in the chest and midsection now, as Cross stood at a distance and watched, his face alight with both fascination and terror. After the third kick, Reddick spun around abruptly to face Cross, sucking wind, sweating buckets, and it became obvious to Cross that, for several seconds at least, Reddick had completely forgotten there was someone else in the room.

  A landline phone somewhere in the condo chose this moment to ring. It had rung once before fifteen minutes ago, not long after Cross had made his calls to Sinnott and Clarke demanding a meeting, but Reddick had ignored it then, just as he intended to ignore it now. Even if the caller was Sinnott, he could see nothing to be gained by letting Cross answer it.

  This time, however, the incessant ringing was harder to shut out. The sight of Clarke had turned something loose inside Reddick and his head was pounding, crawling with voices and images from out of his near and distant past. Little Joe’s sheet-enshrouded body on a gurney. If anything happens to me, your wife and little boy are dead. The white of Dana’s eyes as Clarke flashed the blade of a knife directly in front of her face. Donovan Sykes standing in room number 10-G of the Palm Beach County Courthouse, smiling at the inside joke of a life sentence for having slaughtered Reddick’s entire family.

  Cross’s phone rang once more and stopped. Reddick shook his head to clear it, wincing, and told Cross to take Clarke back to the playroom.

  ‘What? He outweighs me by forty pounds!’

  ‘Grab him by the ankles and drag him!’ Reddick snapped. ‘Now!’

  Cross did as he was told, Reddick trailing behind. Leaving a smear of blood along the floor as he went, Clarke looked for all the world like dead weight in the most literal sense, a thought that brought Reddick little grief. When they reached the playroom, Cross huffing and puffing like he’d just scaled a high wall, Reddick took a roll of duct tape from his gym bag and tossed it to him.

  ‘Bind his hands behind his back and his ankles together,’ he said. ‘Then cover his mouth. Hurry the hell up.’

  Again, Cross complied without argument, though Reddick could tell he was watching him now with a different level of interest, perhaps looking for a weakness that hadn’t been there before. It was for certain that Reddick felt more vulnerable; being this close to relief from his greatest fear, to putting the threat of Clarke and his friends bringing harm to Dana and Jake behind him forever, had him feeling anxious and lightheaded. His skull was still throbbing and his legs were weak. He wasn’t so far gone that he couldn’t drop Cross with a single shot if pushed, but he knew he had to appear diminished enough to give Cross reason to wonder.

  Once Clarke was trussed up to his satisfaction, emitting a baleful moan or two that no dead man could utter, Reddick returned to his chair and ordered Cross to do likewise on the couch, where both men took up the waiting game anew.

  Reddick wanted this thing over with. He needed it over with. He checked his watch, the effort of focusing his eyes on the dial almost more than he could bear, and saw that nearly forty minutes had passed since Cross had gotten off the phone with Sinnott.

  ‘Where the fuck is he?’ he asked.

  Cross shrugged, the expression on his face falling just short of a smirk. It seemed he was starting to feel like his old, arrogant self again, an observation that only heightened Reddick’s mounting anxiety.

  Seven more minutes passed and Reddick was contemplating the unthinkable, killing Cross and Clarke while leaving Sinnott for later, when somebody knocked on the door. Reddick got to his feet and glanced at Clarke, who once again resembled nothing so much as a corpse; alive or dead, he wouldn’t be going anywhere. Reddick gestured for Cross to rise and the two of them went to the door, where they took the same positions they had upon Clarke’s arrival.

  Cross let Sinnott in and Reddick stepped forward, into Sinnott’s view, to close the door behind him. He felt no need to welcome Sinnott as he had Clarke, and he could see at a glance that it would have been overkill if he had. Sinnott wasn’t the sorry sister Baumhower had been, but he was surely only one rung up the ladder from it; true to the photos Reddick had seen on Baumhower’s laptop, he was a pudgy doughboy with bloodshot eyes who reacted to the sight of Reddick and his gun like someone who’d just found a scorpion in a dresser drawer. Had he squealed aloud, Reddick wouldn’t have been surprised.

  But he didn’t squeal. All he did was exchange a glance with Cross, whose face told him everything he could have possibly wanted to know.

  ‘Oh, Jesus . . .’

  ‘Shut it,’ Reddick said. ‘Into the other room. Let’s go.’

  Cross led the way back into his playroom, Reddick taking up the rear. Sinnott’s eyes fell to the trail of Clarke’s blood they were following and his knees buckled once, almost giving way altogether. In the playroom, they found
Clarke exactly as Reddick and Cross had left him, eyes closed and body motionless. Sinnott took one look at him and collapsed into a chair, unable to obey Reddick’s first order a moment longer.

  ‘Oh, Jesus,’ he said again.

  ‘Check to see if he’s still breathing,’ Reddick told Cross.

  ‘Check him yourself,’ Cross said. He understood that the moment had come for Reddick to either put up or shut up – the three men he wanted dead were all here now, ripe for the slaughter – and doing Reddick’s bidding no longer offered any discernible payoff. If he wished to torture them before killing them, he would; continuing to kiss his ass wasn’t going to change that.

  Reddick knew he was being tested and wasn’t happy about it, but neither was he ready to start shooting. His idea all along had been to waste Cross and his three friends with a single shot each, in rapid succession, and then beat a hasty retreat. If he started with Cross now, he would have to do them all, and he realized with some consternation that he wasn’t prepared to do Clarke in his present state. They were all here because of him; Reddick needed Clarke awake and cognizant when he pulled the trigger. Putting one in the back of his head while he lay on the floor like a wet sack of grain just wasn’t going to be good enough.

  ‘Back up,’ Reddick told Cross.

  Cross complied after taking great pains to be slow about it.

  Reddick closed in on Clarke, crouched down to probe his wrist for a pulse, careful to keep sight of Cross all the while. It took a few seconds to find one, but a pulse was there, though it could only have been more faint had it been absent altogether. Reddick slapped him once, twice across the cheeks, trying to bring him around. The big man’s eyes had fluttered open, then closed again, when someone behind Reddick said, ‘Drop the gun, Mr Reddick, and turn around very slowly.’

  It was Sinnott’s voice.

  Reddick turned his head, saw Sinnott standing in front of the chair he’d been sitting in only moments before, what Reddick judged from this distance to be a nine millimeter Beretta clutched tightly in his right hand. ‘Please. Drop the gun. I’ll shoot you if you don’t, I promise you.’