Hammerlocke

by Jack Barnao

  I glanced around the roof once more and let myself down on the rope, clutching it between knees and clenched elbows so I could slip to the floor in one motion. I went down it like a fireman down his pole, so quickly that I was well inside when I heard the gunshots below me on the ground floor. Pistol shots. That meant Giacomo hadn't gotten off the first round. Which meant he was dead. I was only a yard from the floor when the rope above me gave way and I fell inside. Savario had cut the rope. I guessed he got scared by the shots. After I was dead he would tell his boss the rope had broken and he couldn't follow. Nobody would know different.

  I rolled away from the drop zone. It was pitch dark but I had the flashlight stuck down my left sock. If I managed to get downstairs in one piece and find the back office I could check the story of the trapdoor. The hell with Savario.

  I crouched against a pile of cardboard boxes, listening hard. No feet pounded upstairs. No voices shouted instructions at one another to go and check the broken window. All I could hear was the faint street sounds, flooding up the side of the building and spilling in through the broken skylight. It meant only one thing. Whoever had shot Giacomo knew I was in the building and was lying in wait for me. Probably at the foot of the stairs, waiting for the little mouse to stick his head out of his hole so they could blow it off.

  I waited for about ten minutes but nothing broke the silence in the building. They could be just as patient as me. It was changing nothing. I had to move.

  I hadn't had much time to look over the building as we drove by but I had noticed one very ordinary feature. The windows were placed above one another. It was the same back and front. That meant that if Herbie really was in a cellar inside the back office, he was accessible from the back office of this floor, given a rope and surprise. And I still had the rope.

  Carefully I retrieved it. It was about thirty feet long, I'd been generous when I flopped it down the open skylight and Savario had done the cutting outside, between the skylight and the chimney we'd tied to. I coiled it over my shoulder and wormed back to the rear of the floor, listening for movement in the building. None came. I checked the offices. There were two of them, Victorian fashion, half-glass so the boss could look up from his desk and be sure all his elves were working. The doors were fastened with simple Yale locks and it took only one second with a credit card to open one of them.

  I went inside and waited another minute, still straining my ears for sounds. Still nothing. I imagined the men's smiles would be turning into scowls by now but they would hold themselves ready at the stairs, superior in firepower and cunning. They would wait all night if necessary, guarding their prisoner. In daylight they would come up and if I'd managed to scramble out they would shrug philosophically. They'd done their job, they had Giacomo's carcass to prove it. I felt for the poor bastard. Guts is fine but it won't win over luck or training, preferably both.

  There was no handy radiator to tie my rope to but the window was a casement and I was able to open it silently and knot the rope around the hinge. Nearly ready. Now I had just one thing left, a diversion, then I could move.

  I felt my way down the middle of the floor, judging the path by the square of grayness that was the broken skylight. At the far end of the room there was an ancient cage-style elevator. I pressed the button and it groaned upwards.

  I listened hard and it seemed that I could hear a shuffling going on, below the whining and scraping of the elevator mechanism. The boys downstairs were stirring, waiting for me to make my terminal mistake. The elevator reached my floor and stopped. I opened it, using a half-second flash from my light to locate the controls, then threw a cardboard box into it and pressed the down button, stepping back as it started to descend.

  In the eight seconds it took to reach the ground floor I had sprinted on tiptoe back to the office, pushed through the window, and was ten feet down the rope, poised just above the lower window.

  I heard the elevator stop with a whine and then two rapid shots, big flat bossy bangs from Giacomo's shotgun. And as the echoes rattled around me I slid another six feet, kicking away from the wall so I could pendulum back again, feet first through the glass of the downstairs office.

  I chimed through the shattering glass, eyes clenched shut against splinters. The rope checked against the top of the window and I let go, landing on my feet behind a big old desk. There were lights on in the warehouse beyond the same half-glass walls I'd seen in the offices on the floor above.

  At the far end of the floor three men were standing around the elevator, one of them with Giacomo's sawed-off pump gun, the others with pistols, their heads screwed around towards me. The man with the shotgun reacted first, starting to raise it but pulling the trigger a moment later than I did. I hit him in the face. He hit the guy next to him in the legs, blowing one of them off. The third guy threw down his gun and sank to his knees screaming at me with his hands clenched as if in prayer.

  I came out of the office on the run, moving fast enough to throw any other gunman off a clean shot. But no shot came. There were only the three of them in the place. One dead, one dying, one paralyzed with fear. Then I saw Giacomo sprawled alongside the elevator, his looted pockets pulled inside out.

  I rapped the fearful one in both collarbones with the barrel of my pistol and he collapsed, yowling. I whipped his belt off and wrapped it around the stump of the other guy's leg, twisting it tight with a cargo hook until the gouting blood slowed to a pulsing seepage. Then I left him and ran to the back office again pulling back the worn rug from the floor, checking for a cellar entrance.

  There was nothing in the floor of the office I'd crashed. I went next door, smashing the glass with my pistol to reach through and turn the latch. I whisked the rug aside and found the trap door. I opened it and called down into the darkness. "Herbie, can you hear me?" I was too wary to shine my light down the hole. I kept to one side and called again and this time I heard a groan. I swung onto the edge of the hole and vaulted down the seven feet to the floor, avoiding the steps, landing in sawdust and rolling as I would have done after a parachute drop.

  I ended up beside a man who was lying like an abandoned pile of clothing. I could tell without looking that it wasn't Herbie. He smelt of garlic and urine and fear. And the words he was hissing at me were all in Italian.

  I flicked on my flashlight and checked him over. His hands were tied behind him and his face was bruised shapeless, like an apple that's been used as a football by a grade-school class. One eye was shut and most of his teeth were gone but through all the damage there was enough to tell me that this was the guy who had approached Herbie and me in the restaurant, the day before.

  Chapter 13

  I holstered my gun and pulled my knife, slashing the ropes off his wrists and ankles. He groaned and seemed to fall apart, flopping into a totally relaxed posture, fingers half open, legs sprawling, reaction against the cramp he had been suffering while he was tied. After a second or so he got control of himself and rolled up into a sitting position, rubbing his hands weakly. I grabbed him by the shoulder and hoisted him to his feet. "We've got to get out of here. Let's go."

  He mumbled something and tried to walk but his feet were still numb and he fell. I threw him over my shoulder in a fireman's lift and headed up the steps to floor level. He moaned at each step I took and made a feeble effort to adjust his position over my shoulder. He had internal injuries I guessed. Whoever had worked him over had worked him all the way over, ribs and gut as well as the head. It had been a professional bashing, probably with a solid purpose, like finding out where Herbie was. And that made me think, even as I lifted him up and listened for sounds in the warehouse. Why had Carla's friends lied to me? Why hadn't they told me Herbie wasn't there? Had they just been afraid their own men would chicken out on the attack? It seemed they were right but I hadn't come to Italy to act as cannon fodder for the Mob. They could carry out their own bloody rescues if this was the way they handled things.

  I paused below floor level, draw
ing my gun and snapping a couple of quick glances over the top and all around to check that the coast was clear. It seemed to be. I climbed the last five steps and toppled my find into the armchair. "Wait there," I told him, "I'll find us some way to leave."

  His English was gone now, he was in shock but he nodded and said, "Sì," and sat still, too beat even to rub his numbed wrists.

  I ran down the length of the warehouse and glanced out of the front window. Carla's car was down the block about fifty paces and I could see the glow of a cigarette on the driver's side. She was waiting like a good little mobster for the boys to come marching home. Fine. That much had gone right in the plan.

  I went to the big door at the front. It had a little Judas door set in it and I half opened it and waved my flashlight at her, keeping my face out of sight. There was a thirty-second wait, and then I heard the car approach, then the door opening, and the tritch-tratch of her high heels crossing the cobbles.

  She was saying something haughty in Italian until I reached out and grabbed her wrist and pulled her inside. That made her shriek, but it was only a tiny noise and it died when she saw my gun.

  "We can talk later, sweetheart. But first I've got a sick man to move away from here. You're going to find us somewhere cozy." I let go of her and rebolted the Judas door. She made no attempt to run. Possibly she thought her boys were still in charge. She walked ahead of me, rapidly, unafraid, towards the back of the building and when we came to the blood and the bodies she gave only a tiny gasp. "Giacomo's been shot," she said, without turning.

  "It's too late to help him. But the other guy needs a doctor, pronto. You can call an ambulance as we leave. If he gets help within twenty minutes he could make it."

  She shrugged and walked on while the wounded man stared at her, open-mouthed in his agony, his eyes glazing, too shocked even to moan at her callousness. I stooped to check his tourniquet. The bleeding from the stump had stopped altogether now but the other leg was still bleeding steadily. I figured he was down to about fifteen minutes left.

  Carla was in the front office, talking to the guy I'd found in the cellar, half-screaming a torrent of anger. He held up one hand feebly but she bored on. When I came in he said, "Signor, please. I need a doctor."

  "Right away," I promised. "Carla, get his arm over your shoulder, I want you taking half his weight."

  She straightened up, nostrils flaring like a blood mare. "Me, touch this, this thing?"

  "Grab him and support him or I'll break your teeth," I said. I'd never come up against a woman as arrogant as she was. Tough, yes, some of the undercover women of Ulster had been even tougher, but hard as any of them had been they had always had compassion, at least for their own men. Not this woman, she looked at life as if it were a mirror, seeing nothing anywhere but herself.

  She hissed her fury but not at me, nor the injured guy, it was a blind gesture of protest at Fate. She took his arm over her shoulder and we staggered him out to the front. I stuck my gun into the front of my belt, and unlocked the Judas door.

  I reached across the back of our burden and held Carla by the wrist, locking her thumb under mine so that she couldn't pull away. "You're going through first. If there's anyone out there, you start laughing and acting drunk. Got that?"

  "Let go of my thumb," she said.

  "When you've been a good girl. Cross me up and I'll tear it off for you." I was angry. She'd got me into this and I'd been lied to and I'd been deserted under fire. I wasn't going to take any more nonsense from her or anybody else.

  She stuck her head out of the door, then tugged at my hand. "It's clear, come on."

  I stooped to lift the man's feet over the foot-high lip at the bottom of the door, then followed him out and pulled the door shut behind me. We covered the fifteen paces to her car and I propped our man against it and let go of her wrist. She jerked her hand away. "You sonofabitch," she hissed.

  "Give me your keys." I held my hand out and she reached into her bag. I knew what was happening before she could complete the move and grabbed her fingertips, my thumb underneath them, fingers locked on top, and rolled the heel of my hand upwards, putting a near breaking strain on her hand. She yelped and flopped down and the gun she had been drawing clattered out onto the stones. I picked it up with my left hand and released her. "I want your keys," I repeated. In the dim light of the street I could see that her eyes were filled with tears, fury probably, I hadn't hurt her. She was as proud as she was beautiful and I had gotten right under her skin.

  She gave me her keys and I opened the door to push the man in but she said, "No, there are roadblocks. He must go in the trunk."

  "Where the hell are we taking him?" I asked her. As we were talking a pair of lovers came down the street, arms around one another's waists. I let our man's head sag and turned him so that I was between his battered face and the kids, who weren't watching us anyway. Carla picked up her cue like a movie star. She came up to me flirtingly and laughed and put one arm around my neck, obscuring our prisoner still further. She whispered to me, teasingly. The kids must have thought she was making romantic promises. She wasn't.

  "You've just killed a man. If you let the police get to you you'll rot in jail for the next thirty years. Got that?"

  I beamed at her, for the benefit of the kids, and said through my big happy smile, "It was self-defense."

  "Marvelous," she cooed. "You kill a man after you've broken into the premises to commit a felony. That's murder."

  "I wasn't going to commit any felony, I was going to spring this sonofabitch, thinking it was Herbie."

  "That might work in Canada. Here you're just another foreigner running around with a gun. That makes you either a crook or a terrorist. Either way you'll be sixty-five before they let you out."

  She may not have been right. Maybe I should have gone to the police and taken my chances, and my lumps. But the maggiore's warning was still fresh in my head. No guns. No violence. Let the police do it. I didn't have any friends down at headquarters. And I hadn't recovered Herbie so I couldn't expect Kate Ridley to go to bat for me. "Okay. So what now?"

  "Do as you're told and we'll get the kid back and you get off the murder charge," she said.

  It sounded better than her first suggestion so I unlocked the trunk and when the kids were safely past I rolled the man into it. "Lie quiet, we're taking you somewhere safe," I told him and shut the lid. Then I gave the keys to Carla. "You drive."

  She went around the car, not lifting her eyes from mine, it was as if she figured her gaze was a dental drill and I was a rotten tooth that was going to cave under pressure. I just made sure she didn't run off. When she sat behind the wheel, I got in and slammed the door.

  "We need somewhere to stay overnight, somewhere we can get a doctor to look at the guy in the back. What do you suggest?"

  She twisted the key in the ignition, holding it after the engine started so that the starter motor whined. "Just stop ordering me around," she said. "Remember that I'm the one with the answers and keep your mouth shut and we'll get on just fine."

  That didn't sit well but she was right so I just waved one hand at her and sat back in the seat as if this whole thing was my idea.

  She pulled away from the curb, honking at a Vespa scooter with a couple of kids on it who seemed to be trying to consummate their courtship while driving sixty miles an hour.

  "We cannot go to my place, that's impossible."

  "Why, are those other scumbags going to be looking for you?"

  "It is not in my plan," she said.

  "What plan?"

  "You don't need to know the details. But I will tell you a little of it, just so you understand where you fit in."

  "Go ahead. Maybe it'll make more sense than what's been happening so far," I said.

  "Understand that I am in charge of this kidnapping. Me." She took one hand off the wheel and pointed a finger at her bust. "Me," she repeated. "Not Scavuzzo, not Tassone, me."

  "Okay. You get your name above t
he title when they make the movie. Then what?"

  She flicked a glance at me and it seemed that her mouth turned upwards in amusement but her tone was serious. "There are things to do. Other people heard of the ransom. Other people took the boy away. We have to get him back. When we do, I get the money, you get the boy. You take him back to his parents and the police forget about that dead man at the warehouse."

  "They'd be more likely to forget it if I get the kid back before the money is paid out," I said.

  "You have no choice," she said simply. "If you try to use force on me I will lead you to the wrong places and you'll get blown away. Work with me and you win, work against me and you end up dead or in jail. Take your pick."

  "Look, let's see how serious you are. There's a man in that warehouse who'll die if you don't call him an ambulance. Do that right away and I'll consider what you're saying." That was part altruism, part cunning. I needed time to think things through, to work out just how deep in trouble I already was.

  "All right." She slammed the brakes on. "There's a phone in that restaurant, I can use that. Wait here."

  "Nice try," I told her. "I'll come with you."

  She slammed the car door and then walked quickly into the restaurant, smiled a million dollar's worth of charm at the maître d', and picked up the phone. I watched her dial O and then chatter rapidly, including the word ambulanza. She could have been stringing me along but it was enough for me. I didn't owe the guy in the warehouse anything more friendly than a bullet but I hate to see wounded left untended, anybody's wounded. And if the ambulance arrived soon he might make it.

  We went back to the car and got in. She drove off more calmly this time, thinking hard. I didn't interrupt her. I was doing some thinking of my own. I was in trouble. The maggiore had warned me not to go anywhere, raise any hell. Capelli had turned a blind eye to it but since then I had killed a man. If I'd found Herbie in the basement I could have got away with it. But now my best bet was to steer clear of Capelli for a few days, trying to find Herbie on my own, with whatever help I could squeeze out of Carla and the guy I'd found down the hole in the floor.