Hidden Trump (Bite Back 2)

by Mark Henwick

  On a completely different topic, the meal turned out to be a gold mine for me. Jen mentioned in passing that she was considering buying some art from a gallery owned by one Floyd Underwood.

  Tullah had read my update on the Quinns’ case, including the strong suspicion that Underwood had been responsible for the theft of the medal. Without so much as a glance in my direction, Tullah became fascinated by Underwood’s gallery and the range of his collections. The wine worked on Jen as well, and she chatted, happily and indiscreetly. I felt several twinges of guilt, but hey, it wasn’t me asking the questions.

  “…and you wouldn’t believe the private military collection he keeps in his office.”

  “Military? Like medals and so on?”

  “Yeah. He showed me a couple. Not my thing, but he has pretty much every medal type ever awarded.”

  Tullah, you just earned yourself a stripe.

  I simply knew that the medal would be in his private collection, in his office, at the Keynes building in Capitol Hill.

  Back at Manassah, Tullah headed off to bed while Jen poured herself a brandy nightcap.

  “Not for you, honey?” She held up my favorite rum.

  I shook my head.

  “Heading out again?” Her voice was flatter. Not so happy.

  “I have to go check out something on a case,” I said. Another late night, but it made sense for creeping around the old bowling alley. I changed the topic. “You know, it’s not secure enough here.” I tested that the patio doors were locked. Through them I could see the larch border stirring in the wind and the distant lights of the Country Club twinkling. “Maybe you should get one more of Victor’s guys back to patrol the grounds?”

  “Enough guards. But all the more reason for you to be here.” She sipped her brandy. “That’s when I feel secure.”

  I didn’t rise to the bait. Yes, I had saved her life twice, and yes, she was safer if I was around. I just couldn’t be all the time.

  “Also, I have a shotgun in my room,” she said. “I used to shoot clay pigeons.”

  A shotgun that might or might not be loaded, that might have been fired ages ago by someone who used to use it to shoot at practice targets. Not going to be good enough if I had my way.

  Jen finished her drink.

  She paused and I could see her think through a dozen things to say, but in the end she chose to keep it simple.

  “Be careful. Please.”

  I gave her a hug and waited till she’d closed her door before going to my suite.

  I rummaged through my walk-in closet and found a dark sweatshirt. I changed into my work boots and took out my gloves, black ski cap and a stockman’s coat. I’d liberated the coat when I’d busted Tucker’s drug smuggling operation, and one of Jen’s staff had patched, cleaned and weatherproofed it. The night had turned wet, and I would be glad of it. It would also make me look twice as big and, even better, it would hide things.

  From the trunk of the car I picked a couple of things for it to hide. I was already wearing the HK in a shoulder holster. I added the silencer. I took a shorty pump action shotgun for use as a last resort when silencers wouldn’t be any good. And my old entrenching tool. Personally, I’d never entrenched since boot camp. Sure, we used the tool in Ops 4-10. We called it our portable toilet. I wouldn’t want that tonight, but it had a lot to recommend it for breaking into old buildings.

  I checked my messages on the octopus. Matt had sent me an update—Power use at the bowling alley fell off a cliff this afternoon. Car auction place still cold, has been for a week.

  Crap. I tried to kid myself that it could just be they’d decided to move somewhere more pleasant to hide out. I still had to go; the bowling alley was my only trace on Hoben. I was tired of shadow boxing. I growled. I needed to hit something. And I might get lucky and find a clue to where they’d moved to, or maybe where they’d keep Larry.

  But realistically, moving out today? No coincidences. They had spotted me drive by.

  Or in the worst case—the most likely, whispers Ben-Haim—they’d gotten Larry and he’d talked. They had found out he’d told me about the bowling alley and the car auction site.

  Either way, I was going to walk into a trap.

  Chapter 27

  The night made the old bowling alley look very sinister.

  I left the car half a mile away, in the parking lot of a hotel tucked up against the intersection of the I-25 and I-70. It was quiet; I’d seen few other people as I walked here, my collar turned up against the rain, and none of them had been walking.

  The adjacent cement manufacturing businesses were closed and their security lights just made the shadows darker where they gathered. A couple of old cars were parked on the street in front of one of them, but there was no sign of their owners.

  I went up and over the fence with no more noise than it made anyway, rattling in the wind. Even that was lost against the clatter of trains passing on the railroad tracks behind the building.

  Inside the perimeter, rain had blurred the edges of the tire tracks in the dirt, but it was still all churned up. Several large vans had been here recently. I slipped into the shadows around the building. Nothing else stirred on the site.

  I couldn’t hear anything from inside the building. I couldn’t smell anything other than rust and old oil, and cement from the neighboring businesses. There was no sensation of warmth in the walls. The jury-rigged repairs to the roof screeched and banged in the wind.

  I did a circuit of the building, not being a fan of places with only one way in or out. Rotting wooden shipping pallets and rusted forty-gallon drums were littered around the back. Weeds had forced their way through the concrete slabs ringing the building and taken over the space between the building and the fence separating it from the tracks.

  The main doors at the front were sealed behind a metal grill bolted to the building. There were old emergency doors halfway down the side, but they were heavily boarded up. The only obvious way in was a small side door, and that was the last way I wanted to try.

  I climbed the metal grill on the front doors, then up over the Lucky’s Lanes sign to reach a ledge just wide enough to stand on. From there I could stretch and peer in through slot windows too narrow and high to have been worth boarding up. They were caked in cement dust.

  It was almost completely dark inside. Except where a lone guard sat next to a caged work light, smoking a cigarette and fiddling with a pistol. He sat on one of the old row seats where bowlers had waited their turn. The plastic covers were ripped and a plank of wood evened the legs. On the left was an old office structure, just about the only thing in the building that remained enclosed. Even the ceiling tiles had been taken, leaving the interior like a metal skeleton draped with trailing light cables. The old alley borders were there, and a sad pile of rental shoes in one corner. The flooring and the racking mechanisms had been too valuable to leave; they had been torn out, leaving gaping holes in the internal wall at the back.

  I was almost insulted. This was Hoben’s old hideout and it was screaming ‘trap’ at me, but why leave a single man inside it? One so dumb he sat there with a light on, ruining his night vision. Of course, the internal wall might hide more of them. Or the office.

  I was ready to climb back down when the guard moved.

  He checked his watch and got up, flicking ash off his jacket. Then he walked to the office and shone a flashlight through the glass panel in the door. Apparently satisfied, he took a cell phone from his pocket and dialed. Amateur hour. He was calling in. What was he reporting on in the office? Larry?

  Why set up a trap and leave Larry here? As bait? Easier to believe if I could see him. What if it wasn’t a trap, and they hadn’t found anywhere to store him safely yet? Or it was something or someone else being held in that office? Blood slaves?

  Trap or not, I was going in—the problem Hoben and Matlal would find with traps is they don’t always work the way you think. The guard had to know something, and that was more
than I had any other way at the moment. He might be my only lead on Hoben, and the clock was running down.

  The question was, how? Not through the obvious side door.

  I got down and walked around the building again, getting impatient and knowing that could be fatal. I had no one to call on. House Altau were too stretched and the Snakebite police team had been disbanded. This was a solo job. I had to do it right.

  In the back, there were holes in the brickwork where the venting systems had come out. The valuable metal had been ripped out in a hurry, leaving large irregular gaps. They were about twenty-five feet off the ground, high enough that they hadn’t been completely boarded over like ground floor windows. They looked like the only alternative way in, with a bit of work. And one that would be at least partly shielded from the guard by the internal wall.

  A couple of old rusted drums allowed me to get a handhold on a ledge. Using the entrenching tool like an ice pick, I hauled myself up until eventually I got a foothold in the damaged wall. Then I got the tool’s blade in behind the boards and levered them off little by little, the noise masked by passing trains. In reasonably short order, I had a new way in, and possibly a way out.

  Beneath the exit vent holes there was the skeleton of a raised floor which had presumably been used for maintenance access to the racking systems. I slithered in the hole and lowered myself carefully onto the frame and from there to the ground.

  The scene inside the main hall hadn’t changed. The guard lit a cigarette from the stub of his last. His back was to me and the way I’d come in was shielded from him by the tattered remains of the internal wall.

  I could smell his cigarette now, so there would be movements in the air if he paid any attention to that. But I could also smell chemical toilets and wet cement, masking other odors.

  From this angle, I could see some wired-up devices rigged over the small door at the side that I was supposed to have come in.

  Nice little surprise.

  The advantage was all with me. The guard was in a bad position, and even if his brain hadn’t caught up, his body knew it—I could smell his fear.

  And through the spectrum of other smells assaulting my nose, there were traces of Matlal. And blood. My gut tightened.

  The guard started his check and report-in routine. That made it once every fifteen minutes or so. Plenty of time, hopefully.

  The wind was rattling and banging the jury-rigged roof repairs outside, and I couldn’t hear him talking to his contact, so it wasn’t a surprise he didn’t hear me. He’d sat back down and put his pistol on the seat beside him while he called.

  He ended the call and I reached over and took his pistol away.

  He fell over, scrabbling for something in his jacket.

  I vaulted the seating.

  “Should have gotten it before,” I said as I paralyzed his arm with a blow and shoved him face down on the floor. He’d been going for a dart gun, little brother to the one they had used in Cheesman. Only accurate to about ten yards, just about good enough for me coming through the door.

  I lifted him up and slammed him against the bare brick wall, holding his own pistol underneath his chin. Dust drifted over us in a cloud. Cement dust. That did nothing for my temper.

  “Please, I had nothing to do with him,” he shouted. His eyes were wide with panic and he stank of fear and sweat and cigarettes, enough to make my nose try to close down.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Him. In there. It’s the fucking vamps, I tell you. I said not to get involved. The boss wouldn’t listen.”

  The chill that had hung over me settled in my stomach.

  I dragged him to the office. The small window I’d seen him looking through was almost opaque with dust. So thick, I could barely make out Larry slumped in a chair. The ropes binding him seemed to be holding him up. He didn’t move.

  The guard hadn’t gone in. That thought stopped me. What would they expect me to do? Rush in.

  “There’s another trap, isn’t there?” Two traps. Two chances to get me. It’s what I’d have done.

  “N-no,” he stammered. He was lying. How stupid did he think I was?

  I used his body to break the door open, shoving him through and then snatching him back. Sure enough, a spring-loaded net whipped down. If I’d gone through I’d be trussed up like a turkey now.

  I used him to force it out the way and get to Larry.

  Who didn’t stir. And would never stir again. He sat there with his chest torn open, his heart and lungs ripped out. His face was stretched in his final agony.

  I’d been far too late for him.

  I closed my eyes for a moment, feeling a cloud of despair and hate build over me. But I couldn’t let blind fury take over. There was only one thing now that would make his death mean something—getting his killers brought to justice.

  I couldn’t linger. I hauled the guard out and shoved him back against the wall.

  “Who did that?”

  “Matlal’s bunch,” he stammered.

  “Where?”

  He looked blank.

  “Not. Enough. Blood.” I kept slamming him against the wall for punctuation. “He was killed somewhere else and brought here. Where? Where was he killed?”

  “Don’t know. It’s the truth,” he whimpered. “I don’t know.”

  “Where’s Hoben, then?”

  He started to cry, shaking his head from side to side.

  Even if I face a certain, painful death one day, I hope I face it better than that. I wasn’t going to kill him, and even though he didn’t know it, that made his cowardice worse for me.

  My anger started feeding on itself. My hand gripped his throat and he choked. His eyes bugged out. Why not kill him? The waves of fear coming from him seemed to flood my brain. With a shudder, I realized my Athanate could learn to feed off that.

  “What were you guarding here?” I asked him, easing off the pressure. “What was your assignment?”

  He hesitated, his eyes darting back and forth. I tightened my grip slightly. No escape. “C-capture you,” he stuttered. “For Hoben.”

  Damn. There were no clues here—he was nothing but bait. Except…why nets and trank darts? Why risk a live guard at all?

  “I wasn’t gonna hurt you, I swear,” he continued, his voice pleading. No, just turn me over to his sick, sadistic boss. Touching, all this concern for me.

  Hold on. Turn me over to his boss.

  “You were supposed to deliver me to Hoben, once I was unconscious, weren’t you?” His eyes widened in fear. I gave him a little shake. “Where?”

  He moaned. “I can’t tell you that! You saw what they did to him.” His eyes flicked toward the office. “Hoben will get one of those vamps to rip my heart out.”

  “Hoben’s not here,” I said. “I am.”

  My own rules. I wouldn’t kill him now, but he didn’t know that. I pulled the hammer back on his pistol and stuck it in his groin. He held up his hands as if to ward me off and started babbling incoherently.

  The clock was ticking, and he was annoying me. I jabbed him with the pistol. “Dammit, where?”

  His eyes shifted to the watch on his wrist. The babbling stopped as suddenly as a radio in a power outage. He met my eyes, cold as ice.

  “Here.” The corner of his mouth twisted. “Got you, bitch.”

  Outside, the compound gates smashed open. As in, someone drove a pickup through them at full speed.

  He punched and caught me in the side. No weak, half-hearted jab, either. A powerful blow. But, in his arrogance, he’d given me a warning, and I’d turned slightly. He busted his knuckles on the shotgun hidden under my coat.

  I swore and hit him with his pistol, hard, thrusting it deep into his solar plexus. I jumped back out of his reach as he doubled over and flick-kicked him in the face. He staggered, blinded. I grabbed his lapels, swung him around, and threw him onto the trap that had been set up for me coming through the side door.

  The net snapped down and spu
n him around, tangling him like a fly in a web. Just as they got to the door, I jammed the seat he’d used against it. As they tried to force the door open, I ran.

  In Ops 4-10, we never left any of our team behind. I couldn’t manage that tonight. I was shaken by flashes of Larry. Smelling of bourbon and acting like a drunk. Joking about it. The way his voice changed when he spoke of his kin. Him kneeling on the road at Castle Pines. I’d thought he was a coward then, and he wasn’t. Next, I’d been afraid he was trying to trap me, and he wasn’t that either. He was brave and he was dead, and I had to leave him here.

  I was clambering up towards my emergency exit in the back when they rammed the pickup into the door, making the whole building shudder. Cement dust billowed off every surface and formed a choking cloud, quickly shot through with powerful flashlight beams as they fought their way in through the twisted wreck of the seats and the body of the guard.

  The skeleton of rotten supports groaned and started to buckle beneath me. I leaped upwards as it fell, desperately scrabbling, just catching the edge of the vent holes. As I heaved myself upwards, I heard more pickups follow into the yard, engines snarling and tires squealing.

  I fell out of the building, twisting around, catching my foot on a rusty drum which buckled at the blow. Luckily there was no one out back yet.

  I ran flat out for the fence. A pickup came racing around the side and skidded to a stop in the back, then revved again as it roared across the lot towards me. No freaking amateurs, these. There was shouting behind me. I’d been seen. Reach, grip, lift and…flip. Up and over. A pull from the razor wire on the coat. It was going to need repairs again, but I hadn’t lost my skills getting over obstacles.

  Someone fired. The chilling wheep of a bullet going by my head told me I wasn’t clear yet. Apparently the orders to take me alive didn’t apply if I was going to escape.