The Harry Starke Series: Books 7-9 (The Harry Starke Series Boxed Set Book 3)

by Blair Howard

  I looked around the exterior of my home and the grounds; what a damned mess. The crime scene tapes were still very much in evidence, although those closest to the house had been removed, allowing us access to the pool and patio. But the gardens were destroyed, more by the crime scene people than the invaders. I was pleased to note, however, that there was a black and white Lookout Mountain police cruiser parked discreetly at the end of the road; that made me feel a little better.

  Bob had gone inside to change his clothes. I spent a few minutes with Amanda and Jacque, and then I followed him.

  I changed into jeans and a golf shirt and went to kitchen to grab a beer from the cooler. Screw it. Just one won’t hurt!

  Bob was already there in the kitchen, an incongruous bear dressed in tan cargo shorts, a white T-shirt, a white Greg Norman hat, and a pair of Jesus boots. I stopped, stared at him, and shook my head.

  “What?” he asked.

  “I just hope to hell you don’t go out in public dressed like that.”

  “Meh. It suits me. That’s all I care about.”

  “Not anymore, Bobby Boy.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “Kate, is what it’s supposed to mean.”

  He reddened, but didn’t answer. He left and returned a couple of minutes later. The shorts had been replaced by jeans and his feet were bare. I grinned at him. He ignored me, grabbed a handful of glasses and tumblers and walked out into the sunshine.

  I loaded a Yeti cooler with ice, another Blue Moon for me—Okay, so two is fine, right?—a couple of Buds for Bob, two bottles of white for the ladies, and then I followed him poolside. I grabbed a lounger under an umbrella and started unpacking the drinks; Bob took another lounger and dragged it closer to the pool. He flopped down on it, beer in hand, then lay back and pulled the hat down over his eyes.

  Kate was still inside. Claimed she needed a shower. A shower before a swim? I don’t think so.

  Knowing her as I did, my guess was she just needed a little time alone. I could have done with some of that myself.

  “How did it go?” Amanda and Jacque asked in unison as I parked my rear on the lounger and fell back.

  “Well enough, I suppose,” I said, not really wanting either of them to know just how badly it had gone, or that our lives were still in danger.

  “And?” Amanda insisted.

  And she kept insisting until I laid it out for them, and by the time I’d finished they were both seated at the table under the umbrella, looking for all the world like two deer caught in the headlights of a speeding truck, which is exactly what I’d expected, and feared.

  “I don’t think we need to worry about another episode like the one last night,” I said, but even as I said it, I wasn’t sure it was true.

  “They’ll know we’ll be on guard, and that the local police are on site, so… well, it will be okay.” I hope.

  “So what are we going to do?” Amanda asked.

  I need to get Jacque out of it, I thought. I have to do that. She’ll be pissed, but what the hell? Better pissed at me than dead, right?

  “We,” I replied, “and by that I mean me, Bob, and Kate, we wait. We can’t do a damned thing until we know something, until Benny calls.”

  “What about me?” Jacque asked quietly. “You didn’t include me in the ‘we.’”

  “Because you aren’t in it. You can stay here, with Amanda and my family, but I don’t want you in any danger. For what you did last night, I’ll be eternally grateful, but as far as you’re concerned, it’s not part of your job description, and you’re not qualified, so it’s over.”

  And then I saw the look on her face. Oh hell, here we go.

  “The hell you say,” she exploded. “Just who da hell you tink you talkin’ to? I killed a man for you. I saved you ass and you wan’ dump me? I don’t tink so. I was in last night, and I stays in. No matter what you say.”

  I glared at her. She glared back. Oh, she was angry. I opened my mouth to speak, closed it again, thought for a minute. Hell, she was right. I stood up, walked around the table, took her hand, pulled her to her feet, wrapped my arms around her, and hugged her.

  “Yeah, you’re in,” I said. “Of course you are. There’d be no ‘in’ if it weren’t for you. I just don’t want you to get hurt. You do get that, right?”

  She nodded and sat down again—suitably mollified, I hoped.

  Five minutes later, Kate appeared. Bob had his beer at his lips, and when he saw her he involuntary took a deep breath. Not good. The beer went up his nose and he just about choked, and no wonder. She was wearing a white, very backless one piece, and she was gorgeous. She stepped onto the springboard, performed a glorious dive, and set off for the far end of the pool at a fast crawl. Two laps in she slowed the pace, turned, and headed to the far side of the pool. When she reached it she seemed to flow up and out of the water, onto the top of the infinity wall where she lay on her back, drops of water on her body sparkling in the sunshine. A jeweled, bronzed goddess, untouchable. She was breathtaking, not in the same way Amanda was beautiful, but….

  And then I happened to look at Amanda. She glared at me, and I winked at her. Bad idea. I shrugged, she rolled her eyes, and then she saw the way Bob was following Kate’s every move, and she smiled, looked at me, and nodded. And life was, at least for the moment, good.

  And then Benny called.

  The funny thing is, I’d been waiting for the call for almost two days, and when it came it took me completely by surprise.

  “Hey, Harry. It’s me, Benny.”

  “Jeez, Benny, where the hell have you been?”

  “I bin doin’ what you asked, an’ I bin stayin’ outa trouble, an’ outa sight. Harry they’s lookin’ for me. I cain’t go home. I’m staying at one of them sleazy extended-stay, no-tell motels up here in…. Hell, never mind where. Anyway, I found ’em.”

  I waited for him to go on, but he didn’t. I figured he was playing for effect. Not a good time to play such games.

  “Well?” I asked, in a tone of voice he couldn’t mistake for anything but anger.

  “They’re in the Old Woolen Mill in Cleveland. You know, that big old derelict factory place on South Church, the one with the tall chimney an’ all?”

  “You’re joking, right?” I asked. But I knew he wasn’t.

  “That’s what I said, Harry. The Old Woolen Mill.”

  “You’re talking about the old textile mill on Southeast Church Street.”

  “Yeah, that’s the one. Didn’ I just say that? You should pin back your ears. I cain’t keep on repeatin’ m’self. Now, I gotta go. Good luck, Harry.”

  “Hey!” I shouted. “Don’t you hang up, you little creep. What you just told me is not going to get it done. I want details, dammit. Now spill.”

  “Harry, I gotta go. They’re after me. Damn you. I never should have gotten myself involved. I’m gonna wake up dead an’ buried if I ain’t careful.”

  “Talk to me, Benny. You don’t, you definitely will wake up in a coffin, only you won’t be dead.”

  “Jeez, Harry. That’s not a nice thing to tell anyone. You made my friggin’ skin crawl. Ugh.”

  “I’ll make you crawl if you don’t get on with it. Stop screwing around.”

  “Look, Harry. All I knows is that Tree, Duvon James, Henry Gold, and a whole bunch of brigands are working drugs outa that mill. The tale is that they’re working for Johnny the Shark—”

  “Johnny the Shark? Who the hell is that?” But I already had a good guess.

  “Greene! For Christ’s sake, Harry, Johnny Greene, the lawyer. They’s workin’ for him. Shady is in charge of the troops—he don’t get outa there hardly at all, on’y at night, so they say. He’s like goddamn bat. Nocturnal son of a bitch, always was, but you know that….”

  “For God’s sake, Benny. Stop running your mouth. Forget Greene for a minute and tell me about the people Tree has working for him. How many are they?”

  “They’s a nasty bunc
h, Harry. Most of ’em is white…. Strange, that, doncha think, him bein’ black an’ all?”

  “Benny!”

  “Yeah, yeah, I know. I heard there was about twenny-five or so of ’em. Nobody seems to know ’xactly. As I said, they’s mostly white with a few blacks an’ browns thrown in. Some of ’em is ex-military—no Seals or anything, no Special Forces… well, maybe one. Some guy they call Loopy…. Maybe that’s what he is, loopy…. Yeah, yeah, I know, Harry. I heard they was mostly just ex-sojers, on hard times. Couple of nasty biker types, too. Well, mor’n a couple, five or six or seven. Hey, I heard they lost a few people last night. You have anything to do with that? Don’t answer that. I don’t wanna know. Look, I need to get off this phone an’ go somewhere safe. You’ll lemme know when you’ve cleaned ’em up, right? You… are gonna clean them up?”

  “I’m going to do my best, but I’m not done with you yet.”

  “Harreee. The hell you ain’t.”

  “Benny, that’s a huge building. It’s vacant. Has been for twenty or thirty years. It’s a death trap waiting to happen. I need to know exactly where they’re holed up in there.”

  “I don’t know that! How would I? They’s in there. That’s all I know. I gotta go,” he said, and then he was gone.

  Whew, what the hell do we do now? Twenty-five, maybe more, and bikers too, and this guy Loopy. What the hell is that about? And there are only four of us. Ah, four’s a good number, and they won’t be expecting us. Four to one, maybe five to one, right?

  I didn’t answer myself. They do say that when you start doing that, you’ve entered the first stage of insanity. Yeah, and I was already beginning to wonder about that.

  I looked down at the now disconnected iPhone in my hand, leaned sideways and dropped in on the table top, picked up my glass of Blue Moon, and resumed thinking, but not for long.

  “Hey,” Bob said loudly. “You gonna share or what?”

  “Huh? Oh. Yeah, just give me a minute. I need to get my thoughts in order. You overheard most of it anyway.”

  “I did.”

  I sipped the beer, stared at Amanda floating on an inflatable raft, then at Kate floating beside her, not really seeing either of them. I slowly shook my head. It wasn’t anything to do with them. I had images of the huge edifice that was the Old Woolen Mill floating around in my head. It was going be a tough nut. That I knew for sure.

  How the hell….

  “Bob,” I said, returning my glass to the table. “What do you know about that old mill up in Cleveland?”

  “Not a damn thing. I’ve only been to Cleveland a couple of time. I’ve never even seen the place.”

  Well, I had, and I knew we were in trouble.

  Cleveland is a small city of about forty-five thousand, give or take a couple hundred. Today it’s something of a bedroom community for Chattanooga. There was a time, back in the early part of the twentieth century, when it was quite a bustling little industrial town, and the Old Woolen Mill had been an important part of it, the hub of it in fact.

  I’d driven past it many times. Four stories rising eighty or ninety feet high, and spread across maybe a half dozen acres, it was an imposing and, in my opinion, beautiful old building. It was on the National Register of Historic Buildings, too. A relic of a bygone age.

  But, beautiful though it may have been, if Tree and his mob really were holed up in there, it would be a nightmare in the making.

  “The place is derelict,” I said thoughtfully. “Huge, no electricity, no lights. It’s a death trap, a damned box canyon, an ideal place for an ambush.”

  “So what’s your plan?”

  “I don’t have one, not yet. We need to figure something out, though. I guess we need to do some reconnaissance. I wonder if there are any drawings, floor plans…. Nah, we don’t have time to search them out even if there are. Damn, I bet it would take a week just to explore that place, and we don’t have that kind of time.”

  “Okay,” Bob said, staring at Kate over the top of his beer can, “so we go look at the place now, tonight.”

  “Nope. It’s too late now. It’s after seven thirty. By the time we got there it would be dark, and I don’t want to go wandering around even just the outside of that mausoleum at night.”

  “Night vision?”

  “No, we need to be able to build a tactical approach. We need to see what we’re looking at, in daylight. I want to know the lay of the land. We’ll reconnoiter the place tomorrow morning, and move in after dark tomorrow night. In the meantime, let’s see what we can find on the web. Google Earth should give us an idea what we’re dealing with, but we’ll need better info than that. C’mon.”

  I got up and headed into the house. Dug my laptop out of my briefcase, opened it, turned it on and waited for it to boot up.

  Bob and I sat together at the kitchen table, the laptop in front of us. We were joined moments later by the three women. They all watched as I pulled up Google Earth and then Cleveland, and then the Old Woolen Mill on Southeast Church Street.

  “And there it is,” I said, as I flipped from map view to 3-D, and then leaned back in my seat so everyone could see.

  “Wow,” Amanda said. “It’s huge.”

  She was right. It was. Even bigger than I’d thought.

  “Damn,” Bob growled. “That’s impossible. If they’re holed up in that four-story section…. It must be a quarter mile long by 100, 120 feet wide, and look at all of those smaller buildings. And that… what’s that? Looks like a slimed-over swimming pool.”

  “That would have been the reservoir used to feed the boilers, I think.” What the hell was I talking about? I had no idea what it was.

  “Hey, take a look at that,” Kate said, leaning over Bob’s shoulder and pointing at the screen. “It’s some sort of canal. It looks as if it runs from beside the pool under the wall into the building. That might be a way to get inside unnoticed.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “But it’s worth a look.”

  “What’s this here?” Jacque asked, pointing out a strangely shaped two-story outbuilding. It was roughly a right triangle, the base of which might have been forty feet wide; the long left side maybe two hundred feet and the diagonal… hell, I couldn’t even estimate it, but long.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “This is helpful, but it’s not what we need.” Jeez, Not what we need. That’s an understatement.

  The five of us stared at the screen in silence for five or ten minutes more. The more I stared at it, the more impossible it seemed to be. Somewhere in that monstrosity twenty, maybe twenty-five men, had made their hideaway. Should be easy enough, right? Not hardly. I’d never been inside it, but I’d heard tales that in its heyday there had been some fifteen hundred workers in there, on four floors that had to be at least fifty-thousand square feet apiece. More than an acre per floor. I knew it must have been vast, a veritable warren, and not knowing where the twenty-five might be…. Well, you get the idea.

  Finally I hit Ctrl + P to make prints of the Google Earth image. We’d need that when we went exploring the following morning.

  I went to my office—okay, closet—in the basement and collected the prints, then returned to the kitchen and handed them out. When I got back, the women had left, presumably to get dressed. Bob was still staring at the image onscreen.

  I joined him, sat down, snapped the computer shut, and handed him one of the prints.

  “Not a whole lot of good, is it?” he asked, shaking his head as he stared at it. “How the hell do you figure on even taking a real-time look at the place? If they have people on those top floors, on lookout, we’ll be spotted the minute we get there.”

  “Yeah, I thought about that. We’ll just have to make sure we’re not spotted. I think we need to go early tomorrow morning, be up there before sunup. If they are what we think they are, they’ll either still be asleep, or feeling pretty secure. What do you think?”

  “Makes sense. Trouble is, Shady knows you, and maybe me too. We run into him,
we’ll have a firefight on our hands.”

  I nodded. “We go, just the two of us. Kate and Jacque will stay here. They won’t like it, but this is one of those times when less is more. Agreed?”

  He nodded, stared at the print, shook his head, looked up at me, and said, “Harry, I have a bad feeling about this. In the dark, at night, is one thing. But in broad daylight?” Again he shook his head. “I dunno.”

  “That’s why I say we do it early, really early. Look, sunup’s around six thirty, but it starts getting light just after six. If we’re there by then, and ready, we can be in and out in thirty minutes. By six thirty we can be on our way home. You agree.”

  “No I don’t, Harry. Look at this place.” He waved the print in front of my nose. “It would take us thirty minutes just to walk from one end to the other, much less creep around it, trying to stay out of sight. I think you’re being overly optimistic.”

  I nodded. Looking at that massive layout, I had to agree with him. “So how would you do it?”

  “That’s just it,” he said. “I don’t know any other way that makes sense. We sure as hell can’t go banging around the place in broad daylight… and that brings up another point. What about inside? The exterior isn’t too difficult, but what the hell are we likely to run into inside?”

  There was no answer to that. Getting inside to look around was out of the question. When the time came, we’d just have to play it by ear, and that was what I told him.

  He snorted. “If that’s what you think, we might as well play it all by ear. Stay here until dark and then….”

  “Now you’re being mulish,” I said. “We leave here at five and get there before first light. That’s it. You and me and your Jeep. They’ll spot the Maxima before we get within a mile of the place.”

  He nodded.

  “See here,” I said, pointing at the print. “We’ll come off the interstate here at Exit 20. Bear right at the red light here, onto Third Street. That will bring us to the north end of the building. We turn right here, on Church, and cruise the front of the building, turn left on Sixth, then left again on Euclid. That will bring us back to Third Street at the north end of the building. Make sense?”