by Brian Wiprud
Suggested course of action: 1) Contact G. Underwood by phone and attempt to coerce his cooperation, possibly with the assistance of an FBI tactical negotiator. 2) Intel surveillance section needs to re-establish data mining of Nee Fat Tong to determine if an exchange has taken place with Gill Underwood.
Thirty-nine
China Boss’s eyes were constantly on me in the rearview mirror as the Toyota bolted down the Van Wyck Expressway.
I was both nervous and tired. My mind kept wandering as the world zipped by outside. For some reason I found myself remembering the day Phil Greene fell. We were on a scaffold thirty-seven floors up cleaning windows on an office building. He was an ex-con, one who’d actually held onto a job and left crime behind. When I’d applied for the job the boss tossed my resume back at me, said I had no experience and he wasn’t in the business of training window cleaners. Phil was in the shop at the time and overheard. He approached and asked me what my last job was. I told him, and I told him I’d been in the hospital after being wounded. Greene stepped up to his boss and said he’d train me. The boss agreed, but said he wouldn’t cut Phil any slack on his quotas, either. So I went to work with Phil, and he literally showed me the ropes, the locking and loading of the scaffolds, the safety harness procedures.
“Accidents happen when you don’t respect the odds,” Phil used to say. The odds caught up with him when he unhooked briefly to adjust a roller bearing on the underside of the scaffold. He didn’t realize there was a kink in the cable that untwisted suddenly and dropped his side of the scaffold two feet. I fell to my side, dangling from my hitch, and when I got my feet under me Phil was gone.
By the time I got to him there were already police there and an ambulance arriving. I pushed through the crowd, but a cop grabbed me by the arm.
“Not so fast,” he said, jerking me back.
“I’m his partner.”
“Name?”
“Phil Greene.”
He let me go and I knelt next to Phil. Dead. His head was shattered, but still together more or less. The rest of him looked crumpled. The cop and his partner came up behind me.
“Phil: what happened?”
I turned and told them about the twist in the cable.
“Who is he, Phil?”
I blinked.
“That’s Gill Underwood.”
They misunderstood me. I could have corrected them. But I didn’t. Opportunities to change up my identity didn’t come along that often, and this one was a gift. Phil was single, similar age and build as me, no family.
Here was Phil, a criminal who’d gone straight, done well for himself, and in an instant all that adds up to is a shattered corpse. How long before I was a schmuck like Phil face down on the pavement? All for what? No better time to embrace my inner jewel thief.
I knelt back down and slid out Phil’s wallet. With my back to the cops, I wiped the blood off Phil’s wallet onto my own wallet, and handed my Gill Underwood wallet to the cop. The EMT guys nudged me out of the way and I never saw Phil again. I handed in his resignation, and obviously passed on the funeral that our boss paid for. It was closed casket so nobody was the wiser.
“Here? Hello?”
Doc was waving a hand in front of my face.
“Yes, here. Turn here. Short-term parking.”
We entered the short-term parking garage at JFK, each of us searching our surrounding carefully. We were probably all looking for the same thing: China friends or Kurac or both. I didn’t see any. My guess was that China Boss’s people would be there soon enough, but that I had a window of opportunity to make the exchange and slip out before they arrived. I could only hope the failed exchange at the Banana Republic had the Kurac a furlong behind and wouldn’t place.
“Go to the top floor of the garage. Doc? I’m going to ask one last time: please make this go smoothly. All kinds of really bad stuff could happen here, or we could all walk away rich. Let’s not have anybody get greedy.”
Doc gave me a wink and a nod.
I checked Phone #3 and no calls had come in that might make it vibrate. I re-seated the trigger.
“Park over there,” I held Phone #3 up where my pals could see my thumb hanging over the speed dial. “Park next to the stairs.” There were almost no vehicles in that back part of the garage, just a beat-up pickup truck catty corner to us at the stairway. I guessed it might belong to an employee, free parking, but out of the prime spots near the airport entrance. I looked at Tito’s watch; it was going on five thirty. Perhaps that employee worked an odd shift and wouldn’t happen to stumble upon our exchange.
China Boss turned off the car, keys in the ignition, and looked at me and stared at the phone in the mirror.
“I’m getting out, you two stay in.”
I opened my door.
China Boss opened his and skipped ten feet away, a silver automatic pistol in his hand. A black suppressor the size of a stick of dynamite was fixed to the end of the barrel.
I glanced at my phone. It had timed out the speed dial feature. China Boss must have seen that in the mirror.
Doc was out of her side of the car, her head jerking back and forth between me and China Boss. “Gill, don’t do anything stupid! Let me talk to him!”
China Boss barked at me, cruel teeth flashing, and fired a shot into the passenger window of the car, the suppressor doing little to silence the blast of the pistol. Safety glass rained like a cascade of rice onto the garage floor, the thwack of the shot echoing through the other levels of the garage.
I put my hands up. “Tell him I have no weapon, Doc.”
Doc came around the front of the Toyota, the Chinese coming out of her rapid fire.
China Boss snarled.
Doc gulped. “Take us to the sparks, Gill. Show us where they are.”
I nodded toward the stairwell, and China Boss motioned us both with the gun barrel. We all slowly stepped in that direction, with Doc going through the door first.
The landing was a little cramped for all of us, so China Boss stood in the doorway, his foot propping the door open.
“It’s in the fire hose box, Doc. In back.”
Doc’s trembling hands fumbled with the door to the box, got it open, then she struggled to move the hose, first one way, then the other.
China Boss barked at her and she barked back. The hose jerked loose and swung out. The black plastic wrench box fell out of the cubby onto the floor.
We all hesitated.
“That’s it, Doc. The sparks are in that box.”
She picked the box up and struggled with the clasps. I stepped forward to help, but China Boss objected with a swing of his gun barrel. It caught me on the shoulder instead of behind the ear, and I wheeled away from Doc and against the stair railing.
Doc made a complaining sound, and China Boss came back with a slithery remark that made Doc stop and spit at him.
China Boss leveled the gun in front of me and the barrel popped like a nail gun: a bullet thwacked into Doc’s throat, high where the base of the tongue would be. She dropped the box, mouth agape and red, eyes filled with rage. China Boss fired again into her forehead, and it was like a red party favor burst out the back of her skull. She jerked left, then right, blinking rapidly, but still standing. I don’t know what she did next because my fist was tight on that black suppressor.
There’s only one way to disarm someone holding a pistol: brutally and by the barrel. When you grab a pistol by the barrel you have a lot of leverage to peel it out of the attacker’s hand. Force it up and relentlessly toward the attacker’s head, with everything you’ve got because you may not have anything at all if you don’t. Keep your center of gravity and head low, surge upward. True, this also tends to force the attacker to grip the gun harder, and to sometimes squeeze off a shot or two into the air. All good. Fewer bu
llets in the gun is a good thing. Also, there’s a decent chance that any given automatic will jam if the ejector side of the gun is obstructed or turned upward. The suppressor had lengthened the gun barrel, to my advantage. More leverage.
For good measure, it never hurts to kick your assailant in the nuts. I missed, but a sharp blow to the shin was almost as good.
China Boss reeled back against the stairwell wall and out of the doorway, his eyes wild behind the yellow sunglasses. I was bigger, heavier, and he tried to twist farther to the side. The door to the stairwell slammed shut just as a shot from the gun burst off into the ceiling. Another thing about suppressors: they don’t get as hot as the barrel, so I was able to maintain my grip. He tried jerking the other way, from under me, but that rolled the barrel under his right ear. I heaved, jamming him into the corner, and the pistol went off again, splattering the corner behind the door with blood and probably his ear canals. After a violent twitch, he went limp immediately, air groaning out of his lungs.
I stepped back, my vision swimming, adrenaline frothing my brain.
There’s an animal rage you have when engaged in hand-to-hand combat that isn’t easy to shake off. You’re in kill mode, all switches turned toward brutality. I began kicking dead China Boss, cursing him, then pulled away and crouched at the railing, eyes shut, trying to restore normal breathing. As my heart rate came down I felt sick, my stomach knotting up and trying to crawl into my chest. Killing someone wasn’t exactly routine for me. I’d only done it twice, both after the squad was killed and before I was rescued. Both of those guys were smaller, too, but they had AK-47s, which was actually better because it was harder for them to turn the barrel on me at close quarters. They both smelled really bad, and the one kept spitting on me for some reason. One begged for mercy. But once I started to kill it made it easier to keep doing so no matter what. I didn’t regret having done it—like China Boss, each of them was trying to kill me. Yet I hated how I felt afterward. Aside from the nausea, there’s a feeling something like the day after you get drunk at a party and embarrass yourself. You don’t remember everything that happened, just flashes of the worst moments, and those stay with you. I had hoped to never do it again. But who was I kidding?
I was lucky China Boss’s people weren’t there yet or I would have been a dead man because I was so shaky I couldn’t have run if I tried.
I opened my eyes and looked down the stairwell. Doc lay flat out on the next landing, lips and fingers twitching. I staggered to my feet and looked through the door’s window. People in the distance, but no commotion. How much time had passed from the first shot, I wasn’t sure. Could have been only thirty seconds. If anybody had heard it, they couldn’t have been sure it wasn’t a hammer or nail gun or a door slam.
I unzipped the legs on my pants and put them on my hands like mittens.
The pistol was on the floor behind me. I picked it up by the suppressor. Sure enough, the last shell had jammed in the ejector as that side of the gun was pressed against China Boss’s chest when it went off.
Down the stairs, I wrapped Doc’s right hand around the pistol’s blood-misted handle, unscrewed the suppressor with my prints on it and put it in my pocket. I lifted the pistol by the trigger guard and the back of my index finger, went up the steps, and placed it at the top landing. I checked to make sure I didn’t step in any blood, which was localized to the wall and pools under both of the dead. For Doc and China Boss to have killed each other, one would have had to survive longer than the other, and I was counting on forensics to show Doc lived longer, so must have had the gun last to have killed China Boss. That’s why her prints needed to be on the gun. True, they might find traces of fiberglass from the suppressor in some of the wounds, but I couldn’t wipe down the bloody suppressor and not have that look very suspicious. The only clean part of the gun the part closest to the wound? No way.
I put the black plastic wrench under my arm and leaned again against the railing, trying to smooth out my breathing. Voices.
Carefully, I peered out at the car.
China friends, five of them. They were examining the Toyota’s broken glass, peering into the car, at my money case and at the cigar box. I turned on Phone #2 and found the speed dial. How I hated to lose that money. Then again, I could take all five hoods out, leave a pile of burned money, and let the police draw their own conclusions about what happened between the car and the stairwell, not to mention the brand-new fishing tackle in the trunk. Probably take them weeks of head scratching even with the FBI involved. A nice explosion would give me a diversion to dash down the stairs and slip away. I did still have a hundred and fifty million dollars in sparks under my arm, and a million in Guat bonds, plus maybe five inches in hundreds.
Bad people and bad luck don’t always cancel each other out, but it’s nice when they do. Three Audis came squealing around the corner of the parking garage. The Chinese took notice, and a couple of them looked toward where I was in the stairwell, maybe thinking about running. Of course there was no way to lock the door and I didn’t have anything to wedge it shut with.
It didn’t matter, because there wasn’t any time to do much of anything: the Kurac pointed their machine guns out the Audi windows and raked the Chinese. Slugs wumped into the metal door next to me and shattered the wired glass.
Just a little bit closer.
I should have been running at that point.
Then again, if there was a chance to take out a bunch of those Serbs, and Vugovic, it was worth it to press my luck and have them out of circulation. That was mission critical.
There was the sound of shell casings tinkling on concrete and the squeal of breaks.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi …
Car doors opened.
I jockeyed my eye at the edge of the shattered door glass, moving to erase the blur of broken glass with a clear view.
The Chinese were splayed around on the ground next to the Toyota.
Audis behind them, doors open, the Kurac approached the splayed, bloody Chinese. Vugovic swaggered from the far side of the nearest Audi, chin out and clearly pleased with his handiwork.
I pressed the redial, and rolled away from the door glass.
One Mississippi, two Mississippi …
A pressure wave hit my body.
The explosion: FWOOMP—BOOM.
A burst of shredded metal and windshield slammed the door, the glass window cracking, a billowing cloud of smoke rampaging through the garage.
I didn’t take another look.
Leaping whole flights of stairs I hit the ground floor, the shockwave of the explosion still vibrating in my body, my ears still ringing.
I looked through the wired door glass into the first-floor parking lot and saw red flashing lights race into the parking lot entrance. I had to wait long enough for the cops to get past me and upstairs but not so long that they locked down the garage or possibly even the entire airport.
First things first.
I used my pant legs to quickly wipe myself down. No doubt there was blood on me somewhere, but I had to make sure there was nothing obvious. I even took off my shirt and checked the back. I was clean, except for the white running shoes, which were speckled with blood.
Wiping down the suppressor I wrapped it in one pant leg with Phone #2 and beat it against the cinder brick wall, just to make sure the phone was completely dead, and because I was still angry at the phone for timing out on me. I don’t like technology making bad decisions—that’s what humans are supposed to do.
Through the glass I could see a street drain close by, so I opened the door.
A ginger-toned black guy—the kind with red hair and freckles —ran right into me: “Whoa!”
I blurted: “Some bad shit up there, man!”
“What happened? I heard this huge … what happened?”
H
is jumpsuit had “Gunny” scripted over the breast pocket. His cologne was the faint smell of vodka. Not sure why people think vodka has no smell and they can get away with drinking it on the job.
“Must have been a car bomb! I was just coming down from the second level when there was this BOOM on an upper level …”
“And I just started my shift! Shit! My truck! I gotta see.”
He raced past me into the stairwell, headed up.
Gunny was in for a nasty surprise.
The pant legs with the phone and suppressor went into that drain, and I went toward the parking lot exit, black plastic box in hand, the air filled with sirens and the acrid smell of oxidized nitrates from the explosives. There were a lot more cars at that lower level, and businesspeople with roller luggage trotted nervously toward their cars. Nobody except me knew what happened, of course, but it was in the air, people just knew something really bad went down.
I jogged across the access road and curved back toward where the taxi stands were at arrivals. From the distance I could already see cops locking down the roads.
A Hertz jitney rattled by and I waved it down. The driver didn’t want to stop but I stood in the road so she had no choice.
“Thanks for stopping.” I smiled as she opened the door.
“Not supposed to pick nobody up from out here.”
“Something crazy happened, an explosion. They wouldn’t let me go to the bus stop. I need to get my rental.” I clambered up into the bus. There were a lot of people with big, scared eyes. They were dwarfed by walls of multicolored luggage.