by Matt Rogers
‘And who’s that up to?’
‘Not me.’ Otis gestured to the intricate engineering on the inside of the apartment’s front door.
Troy stared at it. Thought about whimpering.
Otis reached delicately into the mess of wiring and flipped a switch with a gentle flick of his index finger. A red light began to flash, softly illuminating the oil on his face with the rhythm of a Newton’s cradle. Once per second, blinking away. Otis smiled and swung the door open to slip out. He took one final look back at Troy.
There was nothing for either of them to say.
Otis closed the door behind him, sealing Troy inside.
Troy stared at the back of the door and gulped fear.
35
The giant man finally looked at King and said, ‘Who’s whitey here?’
King figured he was playing the role of enforcer, so he death-stared the guy even before Slater said, ‘This is my muscle. It’s a risk me coming here. I’m sure you can understand.’
Slater was making it up on the spot. Alonzo hadn’t texted through any details regarding the gangsters or the deal, because he didn’t know any. It had been impossible to ask questions via text without generating suspicion.
The big guy looked at Slater as he said, ‘I get it now. Why whitey’s here. ’Cause even you talkin’ like a whitey. You an Oreo.’
Slater stayed quiet.
The gangster glanced at his friend. ‘He don’t know what it means. Oreo. You black on the outside, white on the—’
‘I know what it means,’ Slater said. ‘What’s it got to do with making money?’
‘That’s on you. We been out here for fifteen minutes, ready for this. You got the product?’
‘Close by.’
Another paranoid glance at his buddy. ‘Nah. We don’t like that. We do the deal here.’
Slater hazarded a wild guess at a dollar amount. ‘What, you don’t want three hundred k?’
‘Three?’ the guy said, suspicion counterbalancing greed. ‘What you spent the last week talkin’ about two hundred for then?’
‘Wanted to see if you were serious. You sell everything I’m about to give you, you’ll make a third more. Street value’s a hair over three hundred. So be grateful.’
‘Ain’t no free lunch in this game. You doin’ that for a reason.’
Slater sighed. ‘I’m with Cash Boyz, right? You hear that name? You can’t guess what I like to do?’
’Makin’ it,’ the big guy said. ‘Not givin’ it away for free.’
‘I’m generous with the right people. You move this stuff right, there’s a lot more where it came from. Now we doing this or not?’
‘This cool with LaMarcus?’
‘You think I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t cool with LaMarcus?’ Slater snorted. ‘Come on. Now you want this shit or not?’
‘Yeah,’ the big guy growled. ‘We do.’
He turned away from the window.
Slater eased his hand off the Glock.
In the space of less than a minute, he’d managed to bullshit his way through a drug deal he knew absolutely nothing about. The product in question hadn’t even been specified. Could be meth, could be heroin, could be cocaine. It mustn’t have been directly addressed in the “Signal” messages, otherwise Alonzo would have found the information and texted it through. They probably used codewords for the drugs anyway.
Slater got out first, letting King act as his shadow. He stepped up onto the sidewalk and faced off with the two guys. They were both four or five inches taller than he was, and outweighed him by nearly a hundred collective pounds.
Slater said, ‘That all of you?’
The guy who’d been doing all the talking growled, ‘Nah.’
Another man detached from the shadows. Smaller, more wiry, but similarly fearsome. They made an intimidating trio. There had to be nearly seven hundred pounds of muscle and fat between them, and there was no mistaking the pistols under their shirts, tucked into their waistbands.
The same guy said, ‘Where we doin’ this?’
Slater jerked a thumb at the walk-up down the street, hovering over its neighbouring shops. ‘Got a place in there.’
‘Yeah? How come we never seen you comin’ in and out? This our turf.’
‘Because it’s a rental. Haven’t had it for long. And I don’t let anyone see me doing anything I don’t want them to see.’
Suspicions were elevated. ‘You know we ain’t got the money on us, right? One of my boys’ll bring it when we see the product. In case you thinkin’ of tryin’ somethin’—’
Slater waved a hand in dismissal, cutting him off. ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever. Doesn’t matter to me. Let’s get this done.’
That stunned the guy into cooperation. He’d probably never had a deal go this smoothly. Without another word, Slater set off at a stride down the sidewalk. He was toeing an impossibly narrow line here. One wrong sentence, or a second’s hesitation at an inopportune moment, and they’d see right through his schtick. But, with the right combination of momentum and frenzy, not allowing anyone the chance to catch their breath, he could get away with it.
And he did.
They followed on his heels, King walking beside them. They were clearly nervous to let him get too far ahead, so they slipped through the shadows together, a tight-knit party of five. He kept the apartment number Dominic had provided them burning in the forefront of his mind: 320.
He shoved a pair of swinging doors open and moved fast through a small lobby, tiles hard and lighting sharp. The tubes crackled overhead, glaring in their intensity. With no elevator to worry about, Slater was justified in making immediately for the stairs, and he took them up three flights without looking back.
One of the gangsters managed to mutter, ‘Hold up,’ but King kept a similarly ferocious pace, and within five minutes of getting out of the car they were up on the third floor, the gangsters out of breath carrying all that weight, King and Slater breathing normally.
Slater took stock with a single sweeping glance and noted the number 314 on the door opposite, and 316 to its right. He gestured two doors down on that side of the hallway and addressed the big man who’d been doing all the talking. ‘320. After you.’
It puzzled the guy but everything was happening too fast. He was on the back foot. ‘Why?’
Slater answered like he was frustrated he had to spell it out. ‘Thought you might want to be first to lay eyes on the goods. You might want to make sure I don’t tamper with them or switch them out. I take pride in my product. You get first look because I trust you. Same with the extra cash on your end. They’re the ways of good business, my friend. Every good deed comes back around.’
‘Yeah,’ the big gangster said. ‘Right.’
He sounded like he was barely paying attention. Slater immediately knew he was a junkie. The guy’s eyes were alive at the prospect of being able to sample the goods, get in there first before Slater could step in the way and make things all complicated. A test of the product’s purity was justifiable, too. It didn’t make him an addict. Slater figured it was meth. Had to be. The guy looked like he couldn’t wait to be stimulated.
There was a brief moment where Slater thought, Is this right? Taking a guess like this?
Then he gave himself a reality check. These guys were spreading amphetamines through poor hoods, sucking in vulnerable souls who didn’t know any better, and they all had rap sheets a mile long. Fuck them.
The big guy gestured “Come on” to his two buddies and they hustled down to apartment 320.
They didn’t knock.
The big guy pushed down on the handle and swung the door open.
It blew up in his face.
36
Slater was already turning away, covering his eyes and ears, because he could sense what was coming.
Nothing gave it away, only a cold gut instinct.
As he spun, he saw King doing the same.
The explosion was colossal in the c
onfined hallway. The bang was so loud it was inaudible, the decibels tearing through Slater’s eardrums and fading away into a total silence, accentuated by high-pitched whining in both ears. He nearly fell over from the disorientation, but managed to take two staggering steps toward the stairwell and right himself on the doorframe. King stumbled into him, and Slater pulled him upright. They both worked their jaws left and right, trying to coax some hearing back.
As one, they turned to survey the scene.
The door was gone, and so were the surrounding walls. The blast had smashed a crater into existence, pushing wood and plaster and brick outward faster than the eye could see.
Two of the gangsters had been practically liquefied.
The guy doing all the talking and his buddy copped the majority of the explosion’s force to their unprotected chests and faces. Their top halves no longer existed. Their detached lower halves hit the ground in unison, buried under rubble in an instant. The third guy managed to stay in one piece, and upright, but he would die from the internal injuries regardless. He was blown back across the hallway, upper back ricocheting off the door to the apartment opposite.
Before the sole surviving gangster could even stumble forward, the door swung open, way too fast for it to be an unassuming neighbour. If there was a real civilian in the opposite apartment, they’d have spent at least a full minute reeling from the proximity of the blast, convinced an earthquake had shaken the building on its foundations.
Instead the door whipped open and two gunshots erupted from within, blasting through the gangster’s back as he stumbled away.
He pitched forward and fell, and Slater picked up the faintest hint of a high-pitched laugh, mimicking the circus clown of some demented horror movie.
The tinnitus still encompassed most of his world, so the voice was muffled like the apartment’s occupant was shouting into a pillow, but Slater still picked up the words, ‘Looking for Troy, you dumb fuck?!’
Then nothing.
Calculations being made, and doubt seeping in. The man who’d laid the trap hadn’t stepped over the threshold into view of King and Slater. He was still hidden away, but he had a direct line of sight to the mess the explosion had created.
He would’ve counted three bodies, all African-Americans, and thought, Hang on…
Slater took off running for the doorway in unison with King. He’d already ripped the Glock 43X free, even though silencing his rounds was the last thing on his mind. Not even a regular gunshot could rival detonated explosives, and the hallway wobbled with surreality as he ran. The discomfort didn’t matter. All that mattered was making it to the doorway without falling over so he could get the jump on the assailant.
King had the same idea, bringing his SIG up double-handed before he surged past Slater and looped into the doorway, putting himself in harm’s way without a second thought.
King jolted in recognition and fired a pair of unsuppressed shots into the apartment.
Then he winced and shook his head. When he said, ‘Shit,’ it sounded so muffled Slater had to read his lips.
The hearing loss was substantial, and Slater hoped it was temporary.
He skirted sideways, filling the space next to King with his Glock raised, so he could see inside the untouched apartment.
There was no one there.
King had shot out the window at the far end, set into the façade facing the street. Glass fragments spilled off the sill to the thin carpet below.
Slater didn’t have time to ask what King had been shooting at. King had already surged into the apartment, heading straight for the open frame. He charged right up to the sill, stuck his gun out the window, and swept the street below. Then cursed to himself and turned back to Slater, shook his head.
Slater stepped into the apartment, actively moving his jaw left and right, up and down. He clenched and unclenched his teeth. King was doing the same. Encouraging their hearing back, except they needed to talk now. They resorted to exaggerated mouth movements, so they could read each other’s lips.
Slater said, ‘What’d you see?’
‘Some guy halfway out the window. Slimy-looking motherfucker.’
‘Slimy?’
‘Real oily. Beady eyes. He was staring back at me when he vaulted out. Gone before I got the shots off.’
‘He’s not down there? It’s a three-storey fall…’
King shook his head. ‘Maybe he Spider-Man’d his way into another apartment. Who knows?’
He went quiet, furrowed his brow.
By now, Slater could hear again. Neighbours shouted through thin walls. Babies screamed. Pandemonium in the walk-up, hysteria spreading like a plague. Understandable, too. The noise and the gut-punch of the reverberation would’ve made everyone in a five hundred foot radius leap with fright, feeling like their hearts had stopped in their chests.
Slater sensed King withdrawing inward and said, ‘What?’
King pulled himself out of thought, looked up. ‘It was like he was comfortable in the thick of it. Like us.’
‘No shit. You heard what Dom said. They were black ops.’
‘I didn’t believe him. How many grunts did you run into over the years who over-inflated what they did? Hell, an instructor could tell a recruit to do any menial task that wasn’t listed in the schedule and that boot would think he’d taken part in a covert op.’
‘Well, they used Semtex,’ Slater said, recognising the characteristics of the blast. ‘So they’re legit, and they know what they’re doing.’
King leaned to the side to look past Slater. He had his back to the window he’d shot out, so when he stared round Slater’s shoulder he could see all the way down the corridor, out into the communal hallway, then into the opposite apartment that had been rigged to blow. He froze up.
‘Oh, shit.’
Slater wheeled before he could say, ‘What?’
He froze up too.
Beyond the gaping crater in the front of the apartment sat a man tied to a chair, which was in turn bolted to the floor. He was positioned maybe fifteen feet back from where the front door used to be. When the gangsters had triggered the explosives lining the back of the door, the blast had killed him — that was, if he wasn’t already dead. His face was gone, as was a decent chunk of his torso, his black long-sleeved shirt hanging in tatters over his body.
Slater said, ‘What — they wanted to kill two birds with one stone?’
King shoved past Slater, focused on getting away from the scene before the authorities arrived. As he went by, he said, ‘He’s wearing the same shirt and pants as the guy I shot at. I think it’s a uniform, like they’re paramilitary. I think that’s Troy.’
37
Thankfully they only had three floors to descend.
Bedlam reigned in the stairwell.
King went first, surging down through a diverse sea of residents evacuating their units. By now it seemed a regular occurrence, dealing with hysterical civilians. Chaos and destruction seemed to follow them everywhere they went, and it was a small miracle that the worst thing the surrounding population ever had to deal with was panic. King had always sworn he would become a recluse if civilians started getting caught in the crossfire. It wasn’t worth going to war against scumbags if there was a pattern of collateral damage, innocent men and women and children cut down by gunfire simply for opening their door at an inopportune time. It was always the first priority, even ahead of neutralising the target. He wouldn’t fire a kill shot if there was a chance someone might get clipped who didn’t deserve it.
Not even if it meant letting a tyrant escape.
That had been his modus operandi for as long as he could remember, and it wasn’t about to change.
He made it to the lobby with Slater only a few paces behind. They spilled out onto the sidewalk to a chorus of approaching sirens, and both sprinted for where they’d parked. There weren’t cops or fire trucks or ambulances in sight yet, but there would be soon.
Not after the descr
iptions Boston PD would be getting of the men who lived in the homes that had been burned in Winthrop.
Worst case scenario was being identified as part of a pattern.
They leapt into the vehicle — Slater behind the wheel — and peeled away before they saw flashing lights, or, more importantly, before those with flashing lights saw them.
Somehow with more questions and fewer answers than when they’d arrived.
Through gritted teeth, as he accelerated, Slater said, ‘Why would that have been Troy?’
‘Maybe Dom wasn’t bluffing when he gave us Troy’s location. I believed him when he told us, and I rarely believe anyone. So maybe he and Zach knew nothing about the trap. Maybe the rest of the squad knew the brothers would give up Troy.’
‘By our estimates,’ Slater said, ‘there’s, what, two left?’
‘Hopefully. The slimy guy and … someone else.’
‘You any closer to figuring out what this is about?’
King shook his head, massaging his earlobes as if that would bring his full range of hearing back faster. ‘So they knew Troy would talk if we grabbed him? And they took care of him before he could?’
‘I’m sure his mouth was taped, or he was unconscious, so we wouldn’t hear anything before we tried the handle.’
‘They’d take out their own guy like that?’
‘Evidently,’ Slater said.
King’s pulse raced. The edges of his vision gently throbbed — a moving, twisting vignette effect. If they’d been a few steps closer to the door when the Semtex went off, it would have been a whole different story. He grimaced as he hunched over, holding his head in his hands.
Slater looked over. ‘You good?’
‘Think so. You, uh ... feel bad about getting those guys involved?’
Slater shook his head. ‘You heard the criteria I gave Alonzo. Whoever tapped on our window … the world won’t miss them.’
‘You had a hunch it’d be a trap,’ King said. ‘But you didn’t predict what happened to Troy.’