by Tim Stevens
Chapter 25
When Paul didn’t answer the buzzer the first time, Beth assumed he was in the bathroom. She stood on the top step and waited, giving it a minute or so.
He was home, this she knew, because she’d seen the light on in his window on the second floor. Also, he’d asked her to come round, and she’d said she was on her way, so it was unlikely he would have gone out.
She pushed the button a second time.
After ten or fifteen seconds, she heard his voice. He sounded terse, distracted. Not his usual cheerful self.
Then again, it was difficult to tell a person’s tone over an intercom.
She pushed the door open and went inside, heading for the stairs rather than the elevator. As she mounted the steps, the door to his apartment came into view on the right. It was shut. That was odd. Normally, he opened it as soon as she announced her arrival.
Beth reached the landing.
From somewhere, definitely on the other side of Paul’s door rather than one of the adjacent apartments, came a thump.
Beth paused.
Was Paul okay? Had he tripped over or something? The thud had sounded heavy, like it was made by a human being colliding with a hard object, or the floor.
Two things happened next.
First, Paul’s voice came, horribly high-pitched and anguished. Three words run into one syllable.
“Bethgetout -”
Second, the very door seemed to rock in its frame as a colossal, awful explosion crashed behind it.
Beth felt herself propelled backward, realizing only afterward that her legs were carrying her before her conscious mind had a chance to react. She teetered at the top of the staircase and almost toppled over before her clawing hand grabbed the banister and she was able to swing round and steady herself.
Through the ringing in her ears, Beth registered men’s voices, several of them, trying to keep their volume down but failing.
For a moment, Beth was rooted to the floor at the top of the stairs, clutching the banister, as if some delayed effect of the sudden thunderclap from within the apartment had turned her to rock.
Then an ancient instinct kicked in and she began taking the stairs down, two at a time, her mind shrieking at her to get away, put as much distance between her and the apartment as she could and as quickly as she could.
Just as her head was disappearing below the level of the landing, she saw two doors fly open at almost exactly the same time.
One was the door to Paul’s apartment.
The other was the next door along.
Despite her panic, she slowed for an instant.
An elderly man emerged from the next-door apartment, thin legs protruding below a bathrobe and a look of bewilderment and fear on his face.
Through Paul’s door came a denim-clad, wasted-looking younger man.
For a moment, his eyes made contact with Beth’s. They were the eyes of a nightmare creature from an Hieronymous Bosch painting, the corneas more yellow than white and visible all the way round the pupils.
Then his gaze snapped sideways to the old man.
His arm came up and something bucked and roared in his hand and there was another blast, even louder this time because there was no door between it and Beth.
Beth screamed as the old man was punched back through the open door of his apartment.
She leaped the remaining stairs, landing painfully on her feet and stumbling forward onto the lobby floor, losing her balance and then regaining it and hurtling toward the entrance of the brownstone. Behind her she registered yelling, several voices now, and her back tingled dreadfully as she sensed the gun taking a bead on a spot between her shoulder blades, the terrible wrenching impact of the bullet only a split-second away.
The next explosion of gunfire came just as Beth hit the entrance door and thumbed the release button and shoved against the door with her other hand. As the heavy door swung open and she felt the sucking of the chilly night air, she heard a crash and turned involuntarily to see a bulky man tumbling down the stairs, head first.
From behind him came more yells but she didn’t linger, just flung herself down the sidewalk to her right.
A car door was starting to open ahead of her and Beth tried to shout and warn the person emerging, to tell him to get back in and get out of there because there were armed men about to pour out onto the street and they seemed to be shooting people indiscriminately. She tried, but although her mouth opened, no sound came out apart from the sawing of her breath. Instead, she waved her hands like a crazy woman, gesturing him away.
The man was tall, dressed entirely in black, with a smoothly bald head that gleamed under the streetlamp.
His eyes were dark and shadowed.
Oh God, Beth’s mind gibbered as the realization hit her. He’s one of them...
She was ten yards from the man.
His arm came up, braced itself across the open door. In his hand a gun glinted dully.
Without hesitating, Beth threw herself to her left, between two other parked cars and straight across the road. She didn’t look to see if there was any traffic, simply relied on the fact that she couldn’t hear any car coming. At the same time she stooped to a crouch, a distant part of her giving thanks that she’d worn sensible, flat shoes to work that day rather than anything with the slightest hint of a heel.
The first shot sang behind her, terrifyingly close, and smashed through the windshield of one of the parked cars. The second followed in quick succession, disappearing off down the street.
Beth reached the other side of the street and turned right, because there was a corner close by up ahead. She kept low, using the line of parked cars as cover, cringing from the knowledge that the tall man would be across the street at any moment and then she’d be an easy target.
The corner beckoned ahead. Twenty yards. Fifteen.
Behind her and off to the right, tires howled against tarmac, and an engine revved.
He was back in the car. And he was going to head her off.
Right on the corner, a garbage can fixed to a lamppost overflowed and spilled its contents on the sidewalk, not yet emptied by the municipal authority. Beth saw the neck of a wine bottle protruding from amongst the detritus.
She snatched up the bottle, having to raise herself from her crouch to do so, and reached the corner.
The car, an SUV, vaulted up across the sidewalk just then, ramming itself aggressively across her path..
Beth flung the wine bottle just as the man emerged from behind the wheel, not blindly but with no time to aim. Nonetheless, she got lucky. The bottle hit the tall man square in the face and his head snapped sideways.
She didn’t turn the corner, just carried on running straight across the street. This was a main road, not a sidestreet like the one she’d just come up, and the headlamps bore down on either side, the horns setting up a frantic cacophony of disharmonious noise.
Beth stumbled and dodged and weaved, hearing tires squealing left and right, the crump of one fender hitting another and of glass shattering, furious shouts and curses. The ugly sounds of big-city rudeness, and to Beth’s ears they might just have been the most beautiful, welcome noises she’d ever known.
She didn’t stop running when she reached the other side of the street. For all she knew, the people after her would simply open fire without pause, mowing down every single driver in their path. She was aware of a horrible exhilaration within her, the hysterical cousin of shock and terror, and it goaded her heart and her lungs and her limbs and drove her on.
*
Through the waves of pain and the paralyzing wash of helplessness, Paul Brogan somehow heard the door buzzer sound a second time.
His eyes fought against him, demanding to stay closed. His vision was blurred and double, and he could just about make out Gene Drake, several Gene Drakes, walking away from him and back into the living room.
Paul recognized he was dying. Detachedly, he observed that this was by definition
something nobody he’d ever spoken with had ever described before. Obviously, because dying was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, and couldn’t be talked about afterward.
With a ferocious effort, he forced his thoughts back to the present.
He was dying, because Drake was going to kill him, and there was absolutely no way he was going to get out of this.
And Beth was going to die too.
No.
That was the one thing he had a shot at preventing.
Paul wasn’t a physically courageous man, at least not more than average. But he understood now that he had nothing to lose.
This understanding drove him to do something he’d never have thought himself capable of.
Reaching up and behind him with arms that felt leaden, he gripped a drawer handle on either side, and levered himself into a sitting position.
From the living room, he heard someone say “...Come on up.”
His face a grimace of agony, Paul hauled himself until he was standing, propped against the counter.
He took one step forward, the kitchen rocking and tilting. Then another.
Though the doorway, he saw one man kneeling on the carpet, and the younger pair, the man and the woman, side by side, facing the front door.
Closest to Paul was Drake, his back exposed.
There wasn’t time to find a weapon. Besides, Paul wasn’t sure he had the wherewithal to locate anything useful.
The only weapon he had that might be of the slightest use was surprise.
With a final surge of effort, he launched himself across the few feet that separated him from Drake.
His shoulder hit the jamb of the door between the kitchen and the living room, interrupting his momentum, and although he never lived to appreciate it, this in fact gave Paul an advantage. Because it meant he never reached Drake. If he had, he would simply have been clubbed to the ground.
What he wanted was for Drake to shoot him. He needed to provoke a noise that would warn Beth off.
Paul gasped as he bounced off the door frame, and Drake pivoted.
The shotgun came up reflexively.
The muzzle erupted in flame, and Paul knew nothing more.
Chapter 26
Venn’s phone rang as he was sitting at his dining table. Despite his promise to himself earlier, that he wouldn’t think about the case, he’d felt compelled to pore over the data he’d obtained from the clinic and from Fil. He told himself as his eyes roved over the printouts that if he let the names and figures soak into his brain, his mind might be able to piece things together while he slept, to present him with some answers when he woke the next morning.
The caller ID said it was Beth.
He thumbed the receive key. Before he could even say her name, her voice burst from the speaker.
“Venn? It’s... I’m being...”
She sounded close to tears. No, more than that: close to hysteria. In the background he could hear street noises.
“Beth.” His voice was low but urgent, the one he used to establish his authority in situations where he also needed to bring the level of tension right down. It worked sometimes with hostage-takers. “Slow down. Tell me what’s –”
“Paul. It’s Paul. He’s dead. I think they shot him.”
Venn was on his feet, the phone clamped between his face and his neck, as he reached for his jacket and pulled it on. The gun was still in its shoulder holster, and his car keys were in his jacket pocket.
“Who shot him, Beth?”
“A – a man. More than one man. In his apartment.”
“Where are you? Are you hurt?”
“No. But they’re after me.” Her voice disappeared for a moment. “I’m in Tribeca, somewhere. Can’t see a street sign.”
“Where’s Paul’s apartment?”
“Three, four blocks away.” She stammered out an address. Venn made her repeat it to make sure he’d heard.
“All right,” he said. “I’m on my way. Beth, go into the most public place you can find. A restaurant, a coffee bar, like that. Keep away from stations and subways. They’re too anonymous.”
He charged down the stairs to his Jeep.
*
On the way, as he veered through the traffic, his detachable siren and flasher going full blast and the heel of his hand almost constantly on the horn, Venn called the police dispatcher.
“Possible homicide in Tribeca.” He gave the address, and his own name. “The perps have likely left the building but are in the area. No, no description.”
His thoughts raced more quickly than he could keep up with them. If Beth was right, if Brogan had indeed been shot, then it was a development straight out of left field. It could of course be a home invasion, of the kind that might happen to anybody. But that would be highly coincidental.
Once he’d crossed the bridge into Manhattan, Venn called Beth again.
“Where are you?”
She sounded marginally worse, if anything, her voice trembling. “A dim sum restaurant. Lee Ho’s, on Canal Street.”
“Any sign of anybody after you?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
“Stay put.” He changed course in the Jeep slightly. “Beth. What did you see?”
“Two men, at least. One raddled-looking, like a meth head. He shot a neighbour of Paul’s, an old man. And I think another neighbor, too. The other guy was out in the street. Tall, in black. Driving a dark SUV.”
“Okay,” said Venn. “You’re doing good, Beth. I’ll be there in ten minutes, Fifteen, tops. Meantime, I’ve called it in, so there’ll be patrol cars in the area anytime now.”
“I’ve already seen some,” Beth said. “The neighbors must have called 911.”
She gave a little yelp, then, and at the same time in the background Venn heard a muffled whoomp.
“Beth, what is it? What was that noise?” He resisted the urge to yell.
“I... I don’t know,” she said. “It sounded like an explosion of some kind.” Around her, Venn could hear the level of conversation in the restaurant increase, bewildered voices asking the same question he had.
Jesus. What the hell was going on? Some kind of terrorist attack?
“Stay on the line,” he said, and put his foot down.
He was tearing up Broadway when he heard, and saw, the first of the fire engines scream past.
Chapter 27
Drake watched Brogan’s body twitch on the kitchen floor where it sprawled, thrown back by the force of the Remington’s blast. The doctor’s brains were sprayed across the wall beside the door and across the kitchen itself.
He felt no triumph. No sense of achievement, of vengeance having been wreaked.
He just felt cheated.
Eight long years he’d waited for this moment. Eight years of being controlled by the system, of living under the control this man had exerted over him.
It was his turn to be in control now. Yet, at the very end, Brogan had gotten the upper hand.
No time to dwell on it. They needed to act, fast.
“Get her,” Drake hissed, unnecessarily – the woman would have already been alerted by the shotgun blast. Skeet was nearest the door. He gave a whoop and flung it open.
Drake heard him fire, but it was off to one side. A high-pitched shriek came from somewhere along the corridor.
The twins were at the door, behind Skeet, but Drake shouldered them aside. He saw the top of an auburn head disappearing down the stairs.
“Hey,” a man’s voice yelled. “What the hell –”
Across the corridor, the door of another apartment had opened. A large man, casually dressed and with a bag of potato chips in one hand, stepped out.
Without hesitation Drake pumped the shotgun and fired. The man staggered in a spray of blood and chips, twisted sideways, and toppled down the stairs.
Drake and Skeet got to the top of the stairs before the fat guy had finished his roll to the bottom. Drake saw the front door of the brownstone swing shut.
>
“Walusz,” he shouted.
“Already called him,” said Herman, at his shoulder.
They barrelled down the stairs, Drake in front, followed by Skeet and Herman, stepping awkwardly over the body at the foot, which was wedged across the lower steps between the banister and the wall. Drake shoved at the door, cursed when he remembered he had to press the release button first, and got it open the second time.
He stepped into the street, just in time to see the SUV peel away from the sidewalk in a U-turn.
Drake looked up, at the windows on the other side of the street. His instinct was to chase after the woman. She’d seen Skeet, at least, and could potentially ID him. On the other hand, Drake was aware how exposed he and the others were, out on the street and armed to the teeth. The cops would be here any minute, alerted by the gunfire.
Besides, there was the little matter of his DNA and that of the others, scattered all over Logan’s apartment. Drake had anticipated being able to clean the place up at his leisure, after he’d killed Logan. Now, that wasn’t going to be possible.
As if reading his mind, Gudrun, who’d appeared alongside him and Herman and Skeet, said: “Don’t worry. The apartment’s taken care of.”
“What?” He stared at her, not understanding. Then his head snapped back round. The SUV had mounted the curb on the corner and he could see Walusz getting out.
Walusz suddenly jerked back. It looked as if something had bounced off his head. After a second’s delay, he dropped back into the SUV and took off again.
Gudrun said, “We should get out of here.”
Drake felt anger through his confusion. “Hey, darlin’. I say what we do.”
She wasn’t fazed, just smiled sweetly at him. “It’s just that the apartment is about to blow. I turned up the gas burners on the stove. Set a paper fuse under the front door and lit it.”
Drake stared into her eyes. Then comprehension dawned.
He grinned, slapped her on the shoulder like she was a good ol’ boy during a beer session. “Brilliant.”
Skeet was already over at the Hyundai, parked down the road, and saying something to Rosenbloom behind the wheel. Herman got into the station wagon, Gudrun taking a seat in the back without being asked, while Drake opened the front passenger door.