by Jack Quaid
And kicked the bathroom door in.
Carlos was on the other side of the door with a shotgun in his hand.
He pulled the trigger, and the blast hit Russell square in the chest.
When they left Carlos on the roof in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but a V8 engine block chained to his ankle, they thought they were leaving him for dead. They didn’t count on Carlos spending forty-five minutes dragging up that massive three-hundred-pound engine by the chain. All those hours at the gym had finally paid off. When that engine finally reached the roof of the decaying office building, he lay on his back for an hour and stared up at the night sky while his arms twitched and his body felt like it was on fire. After that hour, the reality was that he was still in the middle of nowhere with a V8 engine block chained to his ankle. Step by painful step, the biggest Mexican to ever come out of Mexico carried that V8 in his arms down the darkened stairwell. Then he walked out of that industrial wasteland and onto I-482, where he sat on the edge of the road with his V8 and waited. The occasional vehicle that passed would speed by the tattooed, muscular beast, and Carlos didn’t blame them. He wouldn’t stop for him either. But eventually, just before dawn, a semitrailer pulled over, and the driver hopped out of the cab. It was curiosity more than anything that caused Ray ‘The Extreme’ McAllister to bring his haul to a stop.
He looked Carlos and his V8 up and down and picked some jerky out of his teeth. ‘You seem to be missing the rest of your car there, fella.’
Carlos told him an abridged version of what had happened. Ray McAllister had done some time behind bars himself way back in what his wife referred to as his wild years, so he sympathised with Carlos’s story. He found a small hacksaw in the back of his truck and got to work cutting the Mexican free. Half an hour later, they were on the road, and that V8 was left abandoned on the side of the road.
He got back to Chicago, told Maria Garcia what had happened, and now there they were.
Carlos’s ears were still ringing from the blast as he racked the pump action and took a couple of steps forward to access his handiwork.
‘Motherfucker,’ he mumbled.
Russell, the tough son of a bitch, was still alive.
Angus cursed for close to ten minutes after Russell left. It was motherfuck this and motherfuck that, and after the cursing died down, he started to think of a way out. Not only had Russell cuffed him to the steering wheel, he had taken the Goddamned keys with him. There was a .38 under the seat and nothing in the glove box but a bottle of water, road maps, and a KA-BAR fixed blade.
The way Angus saw it, he had two options.
1) Cut through the cuffs.
2) Cut his hand off.
Option one would take too long, and option two, in Angus’s opinion, could go and get fucked.
But there was a third option.
Angus kicked the casing off the steering column and got to work on separating the steering wheel from the rest of the car.
Russell’s eyes snapped open, and the first thing he felt was a pain in his chest from the four cracked ribs from the shotgun blast. The Kevlar vest he wore was uncomfortable, but given his current circumstances, it was less uncomfortable than being dead. The second thing he felt was the sting of a busted lip, and the third thing, a blow to the side of the head. He was coping a beating, and by the look of things, the beating started long before he woke up.
A tattooed figure hunched over him with blood dripping from his knuckles.
Russell’s vision cleared: Carlos.
He copped another blow. A right cross.
He coughed blood.
‘He’s awake,’ Carlos mumbled. He stepped out of the light, and there was Maria Garcia, leaning against the bench on the far side of the room.
A year had passed since he had last seen her, but he wouldn’t have known it. She didn’t look a minute older. Russell, on the other hand, had aged a lifetime in the past twelve months. His hair had started to grey around the sides, and beyond his stubble, the lines on his face had grown as deep as canyons.
Russell glanced around. He figured he was on one of the disused floors of the Stevens Hotel. The room itself had been gutted to the steel and concrete while the windows were blacked out with newspaper.
There was dried blood on the floor, and streaks of it spattered up the wall; there was a fair to good chance that he wasn’t the first guest of their particular part of the hotel.
‘I never in a million years thought you would be this stupid,’ Garcia said.
‘Well,’ Russell said. ‘People are always underestimating me.’
Carlos mustn’t have liked the tone in his voice, because he planted a nice uppercut into Russell’s ribs. Russell heard at least one snap.
He was strapped to a plastic chair, his arms and legs taped to its arms and legs. He flexed his muscles, trying to test his bonds without being too obvious about it: things looked bleak.
Garcia paced under the fluorescent light; it sucked the colour out of her skin and made her eyes look black. ‘I know what you’re thinking.’
‘Yeah and what’s that?’
‘That you should have taken the money and killed the cop.’
Russell looked around at his current situation. ‘The thought did cross my mind.’
Carlos came at Russell with a right cross. His head snapped back. His mouth filled with blood. He leaned forward and spat. A tooth bounced along the concrete floor.
Russell smiled.
‘You got something to say?’
Russell’s eyes meet Garcia’s. ‘My son is going to kill you.’
‘Just out of curiosity,’ Garcia said. ‘How’s he going to do that?’
‘Unpleasantly.’
Garcia pushed off the wall. ‘Take your time with this one.’
And she left, closing the door behind them, leaving Russell alone with the big Mexican.
Russell didn’t know what was going to happen next, but whatever it was, he knew it was probably not going to be good.
Carlos made his way over to a gym bag sitting up on a bench, unzipped it, rustled around inside for a moment or two, and when his fist pulled out of the bag, there was a set of knuckle-dusters wrapped around his fist. ‘Do you know how heavy a V8 engine block is?’
‘Heavy I’d imagine.’
Carlos clenched his fingers into a fist. Light bounced off the knuckle-dusters. ‘I’m going to take every single one of your teeth.’
‘You know,’ Russell said. ‘You could always take me to a dentist.’
‘Where would the fun be in that?’
This wasn’t the first time Russell had been strapped to a chair with some son of a bitch ready to punch the hell out of him. It happened in Afghanistan in ’85, Berlin in ’89, and there was also that one time in the summer of ’96 when he let his guard down and was captured in North Korea. None of the experiences were particularly fun, but if one thing was clear, it was that Russell was certainly experienced in the situation, and experience had taught him one thing. That being strapped to a chair wasn’t necessarily as dangerous of a situation as one might think.
First things first, it was important that if one was going to torture somebody, either for business or pleasure, they had to have the appropriate equipment. To his credit, Carlos did have the knuckle-dusters, so that was a tick in the column of being prepared, but what he had overlooked, and it was a common thing for people to overlook, was the chair Russell was strapped to. A chair made of steel or iron really should be the first choice but was not always the easiest to find. The second-best choice would be a chair made out of wood. Not the best choice, but in a pinch, a wooden chair would do just fine. What absolutely, positively, under no circumstances would be appropriate was a chair made out of plastic. Which just happened to be the material that Russell was currently sitting on.
So when Carlos came at Russell with the knuckle-duster on his fist, Russell wasn’t as worried as somebody in his situation would typically be.
Russell sl
ammed his feet into floor and launched himself into the air; it was only a couple of feet, but if he came down hard enough on the ground, there was a good chance that the plastic chair he was strapped to would smash to pieces. The chair hit the ground. Russell threw his weight on it, and just as he expected, the plastic chair snapped into a handful of different pieces, and within seconds, Russell was up on his feet and free of any restraints.
Carlos paused and cocked his head.
‘Bet you weren’t expecting that,’ Russell said.
Carlos was huge. Carlos was weaponized. Carlos was unfazed. ‘Doesn’t change a thing.’
But it did.
You see, Russell wasn’t just a shooter. He was a killer. Far away, up close, via remote control, it didn’t matter to him. Killing was his trade, and he was damn good at it.
Carlos stepped at him. Pulled his fist back. He was big. There were no two ways about that, but big didn’t mean he was fast.
Russell saw the blow coming a mile away. Everything moved in slow motion for him. He saw the big man’s arm swing back.
He saw his fingers tighten around the knuckle-dusters.
He saw the massive blow start to head his way, and then…
… well, that’s as far as Carlos made it.
Russell was faster. He didn’t need to be stronger. He just needed to strike in the right place. And the throat was exactly the right place for a big bastard like Carlos.
He hit the deck like a sack of shit.
His windpipe was crushed.
He thrashed around on the floor, gasping for air, while Russell just stood above him and watched. Even if he called an ambulance, which would defeat the purpose of having hit him in the first place, but even if he had, it wouldn’t matter. With an injury like that, Carlos would run out of air, and within three minutes, he’d be dead.
Russell watched every single second of it.
And there wasn’t an ounce of guilt in his heart.
Russell found his shirt and leather jacket on the floor in the corner of the room. He picked up his .45, tucked it into his waistband, and stepped out into the hall. Every step hurt. He gritted his teeth and took deep breaths as he made his way down the hall to the elevator. He slammed the button and called the elevator and then leaned against the wall and closed his eyes and tried not to pass out—the shotgun blast had taken more out of him than he had thought.
He blinked for a long time, and when he opened his eyes, there was movement down at the other end of the hall. The figure wore a Boise suit and hat: sicario.
Russell yanked the .45 out of his waistband. The son of a bitch felt like a brick.
Too slow.
The sicario fired twice. The first shot went wide and buried itself into the elevator door. The second shot wasn’t so wild and hit Russell in the belly.
He slid to the floor and tried to raise the hand cannon, but his fingers were covered with blood, and the pistol slipped from his fingertips and clanked to the ground. He pattered around, but he could barely move and couldn’t find the thing anywhere.
It was a hell of a wound. It wouldn’t be long. His heart would pump blood out of his gut until there wasn’t any blood left to pump.
At best, Russell had minutes.
The sicario knew he had him, and the steps he took down the hall were slow and deliberate. He couldn’t have been much older than twenty or twenty-two, and by the calmness in which he approached, it was clear that this killing wasn’t his first.
He reached Russell and pushed the brim of his hat up with the barrel of the Magnum. ‘You don’t look so good,’ he said in Spanish.
Russell didn’t speak Spanish, so the words meant nothing to him. ‘Fuck you.’
‘No, fuck you.’ The sicario raised the Magnum and pushed it squarely into Russell’s forehead.
Then there was a ‘ding’.
The elevator arrived.
The doors opened, and there was Angus with the handcuffed steering wheel of the Nissan Skyline in one hand and the .38 special in the other.
He saw the situation and didn’t think twice.
Angus squeezed the trigger and sprayed the wall with the sicario’s blood and brains. The sicario’s body unceremoniously slumped to the floor without much fanfare, and Angus dropped a knee to his old man.
‘How do I look?’ Russell asked.
‘You’ve looked better,’ Angus said as he tried to shift Russell forward. ‘We’ve got to get you out of here.’
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘I’m not going.’
‘Yes, you are.’
Russell put his bloody hand in his son’s. ‘I know when I’m done, boy. And I’m done.’
‘We’ll get you to a doctor. They’ll patch you up, and you’ll be as good as new.’
And he went on about how his father was going to be all right, but Russell shook his head, and that was the end of the conversation. ‘I don’t really see things panning out like that.’ He coughed a little blood. ‘Do you?’
Angus leaned back on his heels and took in the sight of the bleeding man in front of him. He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said in barely a whisper.
‘Can you do something for me?’
‘Of course.’
Another father would have told him to run, hide, live a life far away from gunfire, violence, pain, and killing. But he wasn’t anybody else. He was who he was, and all he knew was one thing. ‘Kill Maria Garcia.’
He told Angus everything he knew, from the location he had beaten out of Carlos to the flight Maria Garcia had booked in five hours and the fact that as soon as she stepped onto the aircraft, she was gone forever along with any chance of revenge they were going to get.
‘I can kill Maria Garcia,’ Angus said without skipping a beat.
It was in that moment that Russell first saw himself in his son. He hadn’t been much of a father. He knew that. Every time he looked at Angus in the past six months, he saw Genevieve’s sweetness and her smarts. He didn’t see much of himself in Angus, and he was fine with that, relieved even. But the boy kneeling in front of him, agreeing to murder the cartel boss without any doubt in his voice or fear in his eyes, that resolve, that was all Russell.
Somebody had heard the shooting. Down the hall, on another part of the floor, footsteps pounded on the exposed concrete floors. More cartel shooters were on the way.
‘Put a gun in my hand,’ he said. ‘I’ll buy you some time.’
Angus slapped the .45 into Russell’s bloody hand.
He wanted to tell Angus he loved him, that he was proud of him, that he was Russell’s favourite thing in the world, but he didn’t know how, and they didn’t have the time, so all he did was yell, ‘Go!’
There was no more time to argue.
Angus hit the stairwell. Two flights later, he heard the muffled sounds of gunfire, and a few minutes after that, he was out of the building and on the street.
Russell had a safe house twelve blocks from the Stevens Hotel, and Angus cried every single step of the way. He cried when he punched in the security code to get into the building. He cried as he made his way up the stairs to the apartment. He cried as he fumbled for the keys, but as soon as he stepped into the apartment and closed the door, he told himself that there would be no more crying.
Angus didn’t skip a beat. He only had three hours to put out the lights of the cartel boss, which wasn’t a hell of a lot of time. Maria Garcia was having dinner with some business partners at a restaurant on Willow called Alina. From there, she was going to the airport, and after that, Garcia would be gone. If this was going to happen, it needed to happen at the restaurant.
Russell taught Angus to be careful, to plan ahead, and to recon the location until he knew everything about it. How many exits did it have? How many staff members were typically on at any given time? Was there a security system? Video cameras? Was there a security guard? Was he armed? Was he an off-duty cop. Were the windows the kind that could be unlocked from the inside, or
were they the kind that needed a key? Then and only then, when he knew absolutely 100 percent everything about the location, should he walk into a building with the intent to commit crime.
Angus was going in blind, and he had no other choice about the matter.
The safe house was fully stocked. He scanned the room and saw three M1014 twelve-gauge shotguns, five M4 carbines, two MK 17 rifles, a shitload of C4, and an assortment of Glocks, Kimbers, SIGs, and a Heckler & Koch stacked up in the corner.
He wasn’t starting World War III, so after Angus uncuffed the steering wheel from his wrist, he picked up a Desert Eagle .44 Magnum Mark XIX and two extra magazines. The Desert Eagle was a weapon for those not in the mood to fuck around, which was exactly Angus’s mood when he picked the big bastard up. It certainly wasn’t a pistol for the faint of heart. The son of a bitch weighed something close to five pounds and used a short-stroke piston, not unlike that in the M1 carbine. The gas passed through a hole underneath the bore into the gas cylinder, where it pushed the piston. The inertia drove the slide back, where the bolt unlocked after the pressure subsided and the extraction, ejection, and feeding cycle began.
What did all that mean?
It meant it would put a fucking hole in almost anything.
Sullivan slipped it down the back of his jeans, grabbed the keys to the clean Camero parked out on the street, and hit the road.
Alina sat just three buildings down from the intersection of Halstead and Willow in Lincoln Park, an upscale suburb of the city that was home to three judges, two Chicago Cubs players, and the mayor of the city.
Angus downshifted the Camero and cruised past the restaurant at fifteen miles per hour. He was looking at a black-and-grey bricked two-storey restaurant with dining rooms on both floors and windows that looked out into the street. It was wedged between two brownstones with the entrance on the right-hand side of the building that could be best described as a kill box if he was caught in the middle of it. At nine pm on a Saturday night, the place was busy, and the street was full of parked vehicles. There was a black SUV with its engine running, which wasn’t uncommon. It was the middle of winter, and people wanted to stay warm. The window opened a crack. A cigarette butt was casually dropped onto the road, landing in a pile of other cigarettes—they had been there awhile. The windows were tinted, and the street lights were dim, so besides the driver, Angus couldn’t see how many people were inside. There could have been as few as one and as many as four. All of which would rush into the restaurant at the first sign of the shit hitting the fan.