Killing Trade

by Don Pendleton

  “Right,” Burnett said dubiously. “Because I was planning on shooting the suspect as soon as I saw him.”

  Bolan looked at Burnett hard. “Don’t get yourself killed, either.”

  “I’ll do my best,” Burnett said. Bolan marched off. The two men started rapping on doors, both of them staying well clear of the doors themselves. Bolan had been on the receiving end of more than a little gunfire through locked doors before. Burnett either had experienced some of the same, or he was just good at his job. Either way, Bolan was glad not to have to hold his hand; the man was a veteran officer and knew his way around.

  Bolan was on his third door, having received no answer and hearing no movement at the first two, when the hollow-core door flew open.

  “What the hell is it?” The woman who answered was slim and not unattractive, despite the heavy black eye makeup she wore. Her bottom lip pierced by several silver rings. She wore shorts and a halter top, her bare midriff covered in Celtic tattoos. Bolan, his gun held low behind his right leg, nodded to her.

  “Miss,” he said. “I’m looking for someone.”

  She smiled up at the Executioner. “What a coincidence,” she said, one hand sliding idly up and down the door frame as she leaned in the doorway and eyed Bolan up and down. “So am I.”

  Bolan produced a small photo from the inside pocket of his windbreaker. “I’m looking for this man,” he said, letting her get a good look at the photo of Jonathan West. “He might not look like this. He may have changed his hair color, or grown a beard or done something else to disguise himself.”

  The woman frowned through a lip full of metal. “You a cop?”

  “No,” Bolan said truthfully. “It’s very important—”

  Several shots rang out two doors down, as bullets peppered the thin wood of the apartment door on which Burnett had been knocking.

  Burnett jacked the pump on his Remington 870, pressing himself against the wall beside the door. “Police!” he bellowed into the corridor. “This is a lawful entry!”

  The door practically disintegrated under a withering full-auto blast, peppering the plaster of the opposite wall. Bolan tackled the woman before him, throwing her down through the doorway onto the scarred hardwood floor of her apartment. He stayed on top of her until the shooting stopped. Burnett’s shotgun sounded like a cannon in the narrow corridor outside as the lawman fired back.

  Bolan checked the woman beneath him, who looked at him with a mixture of fear and excitement. The Executioner nodded to the large windows at the end of the small studio, beyond which he could see a fire escape.

  “Does that go all the way across the front of the building?” Bolan asked sharply.

  She thought about it for a second. “Yes,” she said, as Bolan got to his feet, his Beretta in a low two-hand grip. “It connects all the apartments on this side.”

  “Stay low,” Bolan told her. “Don’t go out until the shooting stops. And call 9-1-1!” He was moving before she could say more, throwing open the window and stepping outside. Wind tugged at his hair as he crept along the rusted metal fire escape. From the apartment two doors down, more gunfire erupted. It was the unmistakable chatter of an Uzi, punctuated by more of Burnett’s shotgun blasts.

  Wincing as his combat boots rang on the metal fire escape, Bolan slowed and dropped to his knees as he neared the window he wanted. Then he threw himself on his back, using his legs to shove himself forward as he stared skyward, concealing himself between the window ledge and the floor of the fire escape. Below him, New York City continued to bustle, temporarily oblivious to the slaughterhouse within the unassuming fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side.

  There was another lull in the automatic gunfire. Bolan popped up, his pistol held compressed against his chest in both hands. He fired twice, punching spidery holes in the window glass, then lowered his shoulder and dived through. He came up, still targeting the shadow he’d seen through the glass—a single, relatively small man with a submachine gun in his fists. The gunman was shoving another stick magazine into the grip of the weapon.

  “West!” Burnett called from the hallway. “Stop!” The small man charged the door. Bolan dived aside as a shotgun blast from the doorway peppered the rear wall of the apartment. Then Burnett was down, tackled as the Uzi fell to the floor. The two rolled into the corridor. Bolan closed on the doorway, his Beretta leading, unable to get a clear shot.

  “Cooper!” Burnett called, wrestling for his shotgun.

  As Bolan approached he could see blood soaking the khaki shirt the small man wore. Burnett’s blast hadn’t been a complete miss. The cop used his size advantage to muscle his way to his feet, shaking the smaller man back and forth as the pair fought each with both hands on the Remington.

  Bolan aimed the Beretta two-handed, trying and failing to acquire his target. He lowered the weapon, then raised it again as first Burnett, then the small man moved into his line of fire. “Down!” he shouted.

  Burnett took the cue and dropped onto his rear, falling back and slapping his arms. The small man, who had been pushing against Burnett’s resistance, flew forward with the shotgun in his hands. Bolan fired once, low, catching the gunman in the thigh. The man grunted and stumbled over Burnett down the corridor, out of Bolan’s view. The shotgun fell from his fingers.

  “Stop!” Burnett called. From the floor he clawed for the gun holstered on his hip. Bolan reached the doorway as the wounded gunman rammed the door of the woman’s apartment two doors down. It opened and the woman screamed.

  “Shit,” Burnett cursed, pushing to his feet with a .40-caliber Glock in his fists.

  “Back! Get back!” the gunman shouted. He reappeared in the corridor, one arm around the young woman’s neck. He held a folding knife to her face, the serrated S-curved blade just barely below her right eye. His face was ashen. A pool of blood was forming where he stood.

  Bolan advanced, the Beretta high in his line of sight. Burnett backed him as the two men crept forward.

  “I said stop, damn your eyes,” the small man said. He spoke in a clipped, British accent. “Come any closer and, I swear, I’ll carve this bird’s eye out.”

  The woman’s eyes widened at that, but to her credit she remained still. Bolan’s gaze found hers and her expression hardened with resolve.

  “You’re going into shock,” the Executioner said. “You won’t be on your feet for long.”

  “Get back, I said!” the wounded man shrieked. “I’m walking out of here, you lot, and little missy here is coming with me. If I start to go, I’ll cut her throat as I do. Now, drop the hardware!”

  Bolan nodded, almost imperceptibly.

  The woman jerked her head to the side, away from the knife. It was just enough. Bolan’s shot drilled through the man’s eye. The body collapsed, a puppet with its strings cut, the folding knife still clutched in one dead hand.

  The woman screamed.

  “Easy,” Burnett said, holstering his Glock. He went to her and put one arm around her shoulders as she started shaking. “Easy,” he said again. “It’s okay. We got him. We got him.”

  Bolan stepped around them and leaned over the corpse. There was a lot of gore, but most of the face was still visible. He took his phone from the inside pocket of his windbreaker and checked the photo viewer, examining the small image on the color screen.

  Burnett, still calming the distraught woman, caught Bolan’s frown. “Is it him?” he asked.

  “No,” Bolan said, steadying himself on one knee. He activated his phone’s built-in digital camera, snapping a couple of shots of the dead man. “I’ll transmit these—”

  “To where?” Burnett queried.

  “I’ll send these,” Bolan said evenly, “for analysis.” He nodded to the woman. “Get her back to her apartment and call in before we’re buried in units responding to the gunfire. I’m going to check West’s apartment.”

  Burnett nodded and ushered the crying woman past the body and through her doorway. Bolan backtracked,
unclipping the SureFire combat light from his pocket. With the Beretta and the light together in a Harries hold, he swept the cluttered and dim studio, wary for West or someone else hiding in ambush.

  The studio was a wreck. Apart from the bullet holes just added to it, and the litter of empty pizza boxes, soda cans and other bags of garbage, what little furnishings it held had been torn apart. The sofa cushions had been cut open, as had the mattress sitting without a box spring in one corner. A set of bookshelves had been knocked over and many of the books torn up as whoever had tossed the place—probably the dead man in the hallway outside—searched for hiding places. A rolling computer desk bearing a state-of-the-art desktop unit was relatively unscathed, but the computer itself had been gutted.

  Bolan checked near the desk and found the hard drive on the floor. It was badly damaged. No computer technician himself, Bolan was not sure if its data was retrievable or not, but he placed the drive in a pouch of his blacksuit nonetheless.

  Behind the desk, on the floor in the far corner of the studio, Bolan found Jonathan West.

  The image in his phone’s data file confirmed it. It was Jonathan West and he was quite dead. The smell hit the Executioner as he examined the body, finding nothing in the man’s pockets and discovering a small-caliber wound behind the dead man’s left ear. Judging from the condition of the corpse, West had been murdered at least a few days previously.

  The Executioner frowned again. The gunman he and Burnett had intercepted hadn’t been here to kill West, at least not that day. That meant he’d had some other purpose in mind. Bolan’s eyes fell on the gutted computer again. He would have the hard drive couriered to a mail drop for the Farm, where Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman and his team could take a crack at it. Stony Man’s wheelchair-bound computer expert and his assistants had worked similar miracles in the past. If anyone could manage it, they could. It might be nothing, of course. But it might just be the case that the dead man in the corridor had come to destroy the computer, which meant the information on it might be valuable.

  Bolan was no cop and he had no interest in playing detective. He did, however, need to find the source of the DU ammunition. Without West, there was no telling where it might be, where it was coming from, or how much more of it could be waiting to hit the streets and turn them red. If West could not tell the Executioner his secrets, perhaps West’s computer could.

  “Cooper!” Burnett’s voice was agitated as he called from the doorway to West’s apartment. He held a wireless phone to his ear. “We may have a break.”

  Bolan holstered his Beretta. “What have you got?”

  “The department called. It’s Caqueta. The cartel wants to deal.”

  4

  Burnett parked the Crown Victoria illegally, checking his Glock unnecessarily as he and Bolan exited the vehicle. As they crossed the street, a horse-drawn carriage clopped past, the tourists inside staring about happily. Both men paused for a hurtling yellow cab before taking the asphalt-covered path into Central Park.

  “I hate leaving the shotgun in the car,” Burnett said as they walked.

  Bolan said nothing. He had his messenger bag slung over his shoulder across his body, his windbreaker covering the Beretta and his spare magazine pouches. Behind his left hip he wore a SOG Pentagon dagger in a custom Kydex Sheath inside his waistband. The guardless, double-edged, serrated dagger had a five-inch blade. There’d been no need for the weapon before now, but he’d worn it since arriving in New York and recovering the Beretta and his other personal items from the courier drop at the airport.

  “That was good shooting back there,” Burnett offered.

  “You didn’t do too badly yourself,” Bolan said.

  “Yeah, whatever.” He looked back at the car as they left it behind. “Cooper, I’m bringing you in on this because I don’t figure I can keep you out of it if I want to.”

  Bolan looked at him as joggers, power walkers and various people on bicycles passed the two men. He was uncomfortably aware of the number of innocents who might be caught in the line of fire. “If the Caquetas are part of the street war in New York, the one West or someone else has been using as a market for the DU ammo, he’s a legitimate target. He’s also a potential source of information.”

  “Exactly,” Burnett said. “Though I don’t know as I would have listed them in that order.” When Bolan said nothing, Burnett forced a chuckle. “I guess I still wouldn’t mind having a little more firepower.”

  “Neither would I, but then, I said as much already.”

  “Don’t go there.” Burnett laughed genuinely this time.

  Back in Jonathan West’s apartment, Bolan had briefly considered taking the Uzi from the dead intruder in Jonathan West’s apartment, but the idea had made Burnett too nervous. The weapon was evidence in the shooting, as was the knife the intruder had used. Burnett had assured Bolan that he’d be able to borrow suitable hardware from the department, given his pull with the powers that were. Bolan had in turn given Burnett an address to which they had driven before coming to the Caqueta meet in Central Park. There, at what was a government agency safehouse, they had shipped the hard drive to the secure mail drop that would, though Burnett didn’t know it, get the data to Stony Man Farm in a matter of hours.

  “Listen, Cooper,” Burnett said soberly, “Caqueta is an animal. He’s the elder statesman of the cartel now, but he used to get his hands plenty dirty, especially when he was clawing his way up the chain. We couldn’t nail him on it, but early on in his stewardship of the Caqueta Cartel he killed an undercover narcotics agent with his bare hands. Beat him to death. His greatest hits, if you’ll pardon the pun, include garroting a woman he suspected of cheating on him, using what used to be his favorite piece of piano wire stretched between two pieces of broomstick. He is also widely believed to have personally pulled the trigger on the family of the Colombian prosecutor who took him on in the late 1990s, trying to pin the Caquetas down at home. Shot the man’s kids in front of the mother, then kneecapped her. Had his lieutenant, Razor Ruiz, cut the eyes right out her head, so the death of her children would be the last thing she ever saw. She couldn’t testify against him because she killed herself before the trial. Drank oven cleaner. It was ugly.”

  Bolan didn’t comment. Caqueta and his people were no different than countless other thugs he’d battled in his War Everlasting. Luis Caqueta was a means to an end. He was also a predator whose people had shed gallons of innocent blood. He would not get any more chances to prey on New York or any other city, when the Executioner finished with him.

  The two men followed the trail to the designated spot. There, on a park bench, sat Luis Caqueta. Bolan recognized him from the file photos.

  Caqueta was a bit thick around the middle, with curly white hair cut close to his head. He was in good shape for a man his age, though, with strong, muscled forearms crossed over a silver-tipped walking stick. He wore a linen suit that was completely unnecessary in New York in autumn, but which would have looked right at home in Colombia. His face was smooth, almost peaceful, with subtle features that belied the monster staring out from his large, brown eyes.

  The man standing behind the bench to Caqueta’s right was also someone Bolan and Burnett recognized. Tall, painfully thin, with gaunt features and hollow, sunken eyes, Razor Ruiz stood almost at attention by his employer. He wore a lightweight dark trench coat over a black T-shirt and slacks. Bolan didn’t like that at all; Ruiz could be hiding anything under that long coat.

  There were no other men in sight. Bolan took in the landscape with one sweeping glance. There were several park buildings nearby, not to mention more than a few civilians going about their business. Some were sitting and reading. Others were playing with dogs or simply walking. Any of them could be plants to back up Caqueta. He could have troops stationed nearby, too.

  It would not be the first time the Executioner had walked into an ambush to trigger it before rolling right over the top of it.

  Ruiz had his hands
in the pockets of his trench coat as Bolan and Burnett approached. They stopped a few feet from the park bench. Caqueta leaned forward on his cane but made no move to rise.

  “So, Detective Burnett,” Caqueta said, smiling like a shark. “You have come.” His voice was a rich baritone, slightly accented. “And you bring a friend. Who is this large fellow?”

  “That’s really not—” Burnett began.

  “You were instructed to come alone,” Caqueta said sharply. “Yet you bring another. Explain to me why I do not simply leave now and let you take your chances.”

  “Cooper,” Bolan told him. “Justice Department.”

  “Justice?” Caqueta’s eyes widened. “And what would you know about justice, Mr. Cooper? Is it justice that my people are gunned down in broad daylight in the most prosperous part of this, the crown jewel of the East Coast? Is it justice that I must take ever more drastic means to protect them, to protect my family, to protect myself?”

  “Spare me the tale of woe,” Burnett said scornfully. “You and El Cráneo have been trying to take each other out for years. Now you’ve found a way to do it while endangering even more people. It’s not enough for you that innocent men, women and children get caught in the line of fire while your family and Taveras’s people gun for each other. Now you’ve got weapons guaranteed to cut up anyone within sight of your murders.”

  “Ah,” Caqueta said thoughtfully. “You speak of the special bullets.”

  “No shit, Caqueta,” Burnett said. “I speak of the special bullets. I know your organization isn’t faring well in your war with El Cráneo, either. That’s why you’re not going to do anything but sit right here and tell me what you wanted to tell me. You wouldn’t have called if you weren’t desperate.”

  Caqueta shifted uneasily on the edge of the bench. Behind him, Ruiz bristled, his dark eyes flitting angrily from Burnett to Bolan and back again. Bolan watched as the detective worked Caqueta verbally. The man was good. Bolan’s already high estimation of Burnett rose accordingly.