Rum Runner - A Thriller (Jacqueline Jack Daniels Mysteries Book 9)

by J. A. Konrath

  “I ain’t telling you shit. Go ahead and kill me, asshole.”

  Phin stood up and shoved the SIG in his vest. “I already did. You got hit in the femoral artery.”

  The kid didn’t seem to understand.

  “You’re bleeding to death,” Phin said.

  “I’m… dying?”

  “Yeah.”

  “No shit?”

  “No shit.”

  “How about a tourniquet or something?”

  “Too high up.” Phin bent over, took the boy’s hand, and pressed it hard against the wound on his groin. “Hold here. Maybe it’ll give you a few extra minutes.”

  The realization on the kid’s face was an awful thing to see. From hardcore criminal to scared little boy in just a few seconds.

  “I don’t want to die, man.”

  “You should have made better life choices.”

  “I got a baby.”

  “How many men are at the house?”

  The kid began to cry. Phin fiddled with the dugout, packed the metal one-hitter with a big dab of marijuana. He gave the kid a nudge with his foot, and held up the grass.

  “Is this good shit?” Phin asked.

  The kid nodded.

  Phin crouched, put it to the kid’s lips, and blazed it with his Zippo. The kid took a big hit.

  “I have a baby, too,” Phin said. “How many men are there?”

  The kid blinked. The weed must have been damn good, because he actually smiled.

  “One-twenty.”

  “A hundred and twenty guys?”

  A nod.

  Phin had gotten twelve. That left 108.

  Those odds were impossible.

  “You should run, man. Save yourself. T-Nail just wants the cop.”

  “Cop is my wife. Mother of my child.”

  “She’s dead, man. Ain’t no way they’re letting her go. Hit me again.”

  Phin flicked his Zippo once more. The kid inhaled deep, blew the sweet smoke out slow.

  “My moms told me thug life would kill me,” he said.

  “Who owns the Toyota?”

  “Dave.”

  “Which guy is Dave?”

  “White dude. Beard.”

  Phin turned to look for Dave, and the kid called to him. “Hey, man. Another light?”

  Phin tossed the kid the lighter, then went to Dave and patted down his corpse until he found the car keys. He walked back to the Toyota.

  The kid was dead. Eyes wide open. A wisp of smoke trailing up from his parted lips.

  Phin took his lighter back, got into the Toyota, and wondered how the hell he was going to save his wife.

  JACK

  Back in the control room, I stared at the security monitors and hoped to hell my husband was safe. I reasoned that no news was good news. If they knew I was here, they knew about Phin. If they had him, they’d use him as leverage. Not seeing him was a good thing.

  But the problem was, I understood how Phin ticked. He was one fiercely loyal son of a bitch. If he knew about this siege, he’d come back for me.

  Best case scenario, he’d come with reinforcements. That would be the practical thing to do.

  Phin wasn’t the practical type.

  I pushed it from my mind, focusing on the control panel. The hot water sprinklers were a smart touch. But they would only be an effective deterrent for as long as the water was hot. Harry had equipped his safe house well, but hot water needed a water heater, and water heaters took time to heat water. T-Nail would figure that out, sooner or later, and then commence his attack.

  I leaned back in the desk chair and noticed a Kindle Fire plugged into the wall. I opened it up and it immediately came to life.

  Harry had a lot of porn on his Kindle. When did clown porn become a thing? For scientific curiosity’s sake I pressed a video file and let a few seconds play.

  So much groaning. So much honking. When they began doing X-rated things with balloon animals, I switched it off. Besides the adult entertainment, he also had the Marriage Saver App he’d told me and Phin about, and a large number of games, with titles like Balloon Bop Big Top Circus and Cookie Factory Crumble Ninjas. I clicked on something colorful involving a lollipop factory, spent thirty seconds popping virtual bubble wrap to earn silver stars to buy pixie dust, and then exited the app, deeply troubled about how the Western world chose its leisure activities. Give me a good book any day of the week.

  I clicked on his device library.

  All fairytale erotica. What sort of warped mind would make Alice in Wonderland a porn adventure? And there was no WiFi or 3G, so I couldn’t download any new books.

  I put the Kindle down, and went back to the schematics, my eyes again finding the word balistraria.

  What did that mean? It was listed on the house blueprints, several walls labeled with the word.

  I used my cell to take a pic of the blueprint, then left the control room to find one of the balistraria spots. In the living room, behind the flat screen TV, there was supposed to be one. All I saw was a bad oil painting that bore a faint resemblance to Michelangelo’s sculpture, David. With two exceptions. First, it was McGlade’s face, instead of David’s. Second, the penis was grossly out of proportion with the rest of the body. If McGlade was that large in real life, his sex partners needed to be concerned about having their lungs punctured during the dirty deed. I highly doubted that was the case.

  Much as I didn’t want to touch the bad art, I removed the painting and set it down facing the sofa. On the back of the painting was a copy of the exact same painting. As in real life, Harry refused to be ignored.

  I turned my attention to the wall, and found…

  A wall.

  Plain old wood paneling. I rapped it with my knuckles, looking for hollow spots, but it sounded solid wherever I touched it.

  Odd.

  I went back to the control room, saw the gangbangers were keeping off the property, and then went in search of a dictionary.

  It didn’t surprise me that Harry had no library. Or bookcases.

  But he did have an extensive collection of board games, including Scrabble. On a hunch, I took the Scrabble box off the shelf, opened it, and found a thesaurus inside.

  I looked up balistraria, and it had a single word synonym: embrasure.

  Some help. I looked up embrasure.

  Crenel.

  I looked up crenel, and was rewarded by an entire sentence.

  Any open space between the merlons.

  “You gotta be kidding me,” I said to myself.

  Without hoping for much, I searched for merlon.

  The solid upright section of a battlement.

  Then memories of high school history class kicked in, and I remembered what a balistraria was.

  I went back to the wall, studying the wood paneling again. This time I pushed on the seams between panels, and was rewarded by a board that pressed in, then swung out on a hidden hinge.

  And there was the balistraria. The crenel between the merlons.

  I checked the pic on my phone. There were eight of these spots around the house.

  “Nice.”

  I went back to the control room, to see if McGlade had any other defenses I’d missed, and caught movement on the cameras.

  Smoke. And fire.

  And at least thirty sprinting men armed with lit Molotov cocktails. Before I could react, they launched them at the house.

  The roof, the outside walls, the garage door; they were all soon ablaze. Almost every camera was flickering with orange flames.

  I hit the sprinklers. The men retreated, yelling and cursing and trying to protect themselves from the scalding water. But I was less concerned with getting them away from the house and more concerned about burning alive.

  Luckily, McGlade had anticipated that kind of attack. Several of the sprinkler jets were aimed at the house, and had already begun extinguishing some of the flames.

  Several of them. But not all. And it wasn’t a fast process. I guessed the h
ouse was fire retardant, but there were spots that continued to burn.

  And the longer they burned, the longer I had to leave the sprinklers on.

  The longer I left the sprinklers on, the more hot water I used up.

  I checked the blueprints, trying to find information about the water heater and how big it was. Harry hadn’t spared any expense when it came to this safe house. But every place ran out of hot water eventually.

  I watched the monitors and held my breath.

  DEL RAY

  Fire’s goin’ out.”

  Del Ray looked at one of his soldiers. Older dude, Hispanic, had a triangle soul patch on his chin that was thick as a carpet. He didn’t know the man’s name; there were a lot of guys on this run, many from affiliates. Del glanced at the patch on his vest, noted he was one of the Hermanos Locos from Milwaukee. Cool. It meant word was spreading, more troops were joining the party.

  “And the cop is wasting all her hot water, putting it out.”

  The man’s face scrunched up in obvious thought, then he grinned, showing a gold tooth. “Smart, homes.”

  He walked off, and Del Ray turned back to the house. He’d anticipated difficulties, but not this extreme. With a hundred-plus men, he could take over a ten story apartment building. But one old cop in the backwoods of Wisconsin was proving a challenge.

  He heard the whirring of an electric motor, but didn’t turn to face T-Nail as the man rode up. Even though Del had drunk a cup of sizzurp and smoked half a blunt, his hand still throbbed from the nail gun. T-Nail had missed the bones, but the injury still hurt enough that Del Ray couldn’t make a fist. He didn’t hate his War Chief for the corporal punishment; up in the higher levels, shit got real and brothers had to know their place. But Del was disappointed with how the man conducted himself. He’d been hearing stories about the great T-Nail since Del Ray was a shorty. Epic tales of ass kicking and hardcore drama. So far, T-Nail hadn’t lived up to expectations.

  It was goddamn disappointing.

  “You got a way in?” T-Nail said. His voice had an edge to it, like a car engine getting ready to backfire.

  “Working on it.”

  “You need to do more than just work on it.”

  “Bitch is smart, G. You know this.” Del Ray didn’t remind T-Nail that this Jack cop got the drop on him, and that’s why he did two dimes. No need to diss on top of injury. “But I got my back-up coming. We’ll smoke her ass out, or flatten her crib trying.”

  “I want her alive. You got a brother on our team that’s flakin’?”

  Flakin’? Now that was old school. Had anyone used that term since NWA released Straight Outta Compton in ’88?

  “Got one or two.”

  “How about we put one or two in some cars, run up into that shit, see if we can’t knock a damn door down.”

  Del Ray nodded. “I’ll get on that.”

  It would be a waste of a vehicle, Del Ray knew. But it would buy some time until the real deal got there.

  “You think this is just another bum rush, don’t you, dog?”

  Del Ray looked at his War Chief. “What you mean?”

  “This ain’t about revenge,” T-Nail said. “We ain’t wasting all this capital on some personal grudge.”

  Then why the hell are we all here? Del thought.

  T-Nail stared at some point in the distance. “This is an intentional show of force. It’s all about power. A little girl cop puts you away, she be in control. You put her in the ground, you be in control. Ain’t no gang without control. You know your roots, man? You know where you come from?”

  “Born and raised Chi-Raq, homes.” That wasn’t the truth, but Del had never told anyone the real story.

  “I’m Kakwa. My father came from a small village in East Africa. He fought with Idi Amin. You know of Amin?”

  Del Ray nodded. Idi Amin was a soldier in Uganda in the 1970s. He overthrew the government and ruled the country as dictator. Legend was he cannibalized his enemies.

  “Amin knew what power was,” T-Nail said. “He understood control. He showed no mercy. Those who dared rise against him were killed. Amin tortured and killed more than three hundred thousand of his enemies. This is what a great man does. How a true leader acts. His official title was His Excellency, President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin Dada, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Seas and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular.”

  That was some hardcore shit. The way T-Nail talked, he obviously idolized the man. “And your pops fought alongside him?”

  “My father was with his State Research Bureau. He and Amin were great friends. My father castrated more than a thousand prisoners in Nakasero for his Excellency. But in 1977, the year I was born, my father offended Amin. He was in a bar, and told a joke about Amin’s weight. The President for Life forced my father to castrate himself. Then he had him nailed to a concrete wall and skinned alive. I know this, because he made my mother watch.”

  T-Nail turned and looked at Del Ray. “My mother brought me to Chicago when I was a baby. I grew up hearing how terrible Amin was. She didn’t see the purity and logic of his regime. True power, true control, does not ever compromise. A true leader eliminates all obstacles.”

  Del hadn’t known that about T-Nail’s father. But it was well-known that T-Nail killed his moms when he was twelve. Pushed her off the fifth floor balcony at the Robert Taylor Homes, before they’d installed the security fences.

  Apparently, she’d been an obstacle.

  T-Nail pushed the joystick on the Gyro, and began to roll away. “Jacqueline Daniels dies today,” he called behind him. “I won’t tolerate failure.”

  And I won’t tolerate threats, Del thought. And he was getting damn sick of T-Nail’s. The OG was all about power and control, but that door swung both ways. T-Nail was either too stupid, or too cocky, to understand that he was also an obstacle.

  Del Ray put it out of his mind for the moment, and looked down at his vest. More than twenty scalps hung from it. A far cry from the thousand that T-Nail’s father had castrated.

  He smiled to himself. What a fucked-up vest that would make. Can you imagine it?

  Del Ray had never seen anyone get castrated.

  He wondered what it was like.

  HERB

  HOMEBOY!” squawked Homeboy.

  Herb stared at the bird, and much to his embarrassment, his stomach grumbled. It didn’t matter that the parrot was the most obnoxious animal Herb had ever encountered. With its plucked body, it looked like a roasting chicken. And chicken made Herb hungry.

  “You give him a nut?” Harry McGlade yelled from the driver’s seat of the Crimebago.

  Herb looked at his knuckles, which were still bleeding. “Yeah. Awesome pet, McGlade.”

  “I know he’s a little rough around the edges, but I think we’re bonding. Check this out.”

  McGlade switched on the stereo, which was slightly louder than a 737 taking off. Herb forced his hands over his ears as gansta rap shook the entire vehicle, the bass so strong it made Herb’s mustache vibrate.

  Homeboy opened his mouth in what Herb guessed was a scream—he couldn’t hear it over the hip-hop—and then fell off his perch and began to twitch on the floor of his newspaper-lined cage.

  “Is he dancing?” McGlade asked. He was holding a CB handset to his mouth, which he’d apparently connected to the speakers.

  “I think he’s having a seizure,” Herb said.

  “He loves rap,” Harry said, oblivious. “That’s him doing the chest pop. Check out those funky fresh moves.”

  What Harry thought were dance moves looked more like convulsions. Homeboy’s whole body twitched and jerked, his naked wings flopping about, his eyes seeming to roll up into his tiny head.

  McGlade shut the music off, and Homeboy immediately recovered, climbing back up to his perch by using his beak on the cage bars.

  “You okay?” Herb asked the bird.r />
  “METH! METH!”

  “You and me both,” Herb sighed.

  Herb peeked out one of the tinted windows, trying to spot a street sign or landmark to tell him where they were. They’d been driving for half an hour, and by Herb’s best estimate they were somewhere near O’Hare airport. He tried Jack on his cell again, got no answer, and then tried the Spoonward PD. It rang and rang and no one picked up. So he used his phone to look up the Wisconsin State Patrol Sawyer Post, and dialed Lieutenant Josh Bickford.

  “Bickford.” He had a low, scratchy voice, like he routinely gargled coffee grounds.

  “Sergeant Herb Benedict, Chicago PD. I’ve got a cop up in a home in Spoonward, and can’t reach her. There’s a high chance some bad guys are involved. Can’t reach the locals there. No one picks up.”

  “Shit, Benedict, no one can get ahold of anyone. The fire.”

  “Fire?”

  “You don’t know? We’re dealing with the biggest forest fire Burnett County has ever seen. Got every man on it. Chief Schuyler is probably busy evacuating civilians. I bet he’s got the town phone set up to forward to his cell, but the fire has knocked out some cell towers.”

  “Is the fire near Lake Niboowin?”

  “I got thirteen thousand five hundred square miles in my county, and half are burning down. If your cop buddy had any sense, he got the hell out of Dodge already. I gotta go.”

  “Lieutenant—”

  Herb was speaking to a dial tone.

  The Crimebago came to an abrupt stop, and Homeboy screamed, “AAAAAARRRRRRGH!”

  “Where are we, McGlade?”

  McGlade climbed out of the cockpit and walked past Herb. “One of my storage lockers. Get out and help. I don’t know what kind of shape it’ll be in. If it’s in as bad a shape as you, we’re in trouble.”

  Herb narrowed his eyes. “Can you just go five minutes without being a dick?”

  “I dunno. Can you go five minutes without being a fat ass?” McGlade turned to Homeboy and spoke in a baby voice. “Did the lumpy man try to eat you? He looked at you like you were a chicken, didn’t he?”

  Herb considered shooting him. It wasn’t the first time he’d considered it. He’d even picked out a spot where he’d bury the body. But McGlade knew where Jack was at, so any homicides would have to wait until they’d found her.