Flashback (Out of the Box Book 23)

by Robert J. Crane

  I shifted down and off the wall, trying to get a quick peek through some of the bullet holes without giving them a clear view of my eyeball peering in. I had an idea of the room layout thanks to what I'd absorbed from Mr. Lummox out in the parking lot, but I had a feeling things had changed if the guards had decided to turn loose on the freaking door with every bullet in their arsenal.

  Five. There were five guards inside, and I could see four of them. Every single one of them was carrying an HK MP5, a submachine gun that was absolutely illegal under federal law, especially for these purposes. But honestly, if you're already running an illegal casino, who gives a damn about violations of the National Firearms Act of 1934? They were probably chump change in prison time compared to the other stuff going on here.

  “I want one of their guns,” I muttered, and my grandmother frowned, but nodded. For most people, automatic weapons were a terrible idea. Tough to control, accuracy goes all to hell, and overpowered for the purposes they were put to. In the hands of a meta, though, they were a lot more controllable and accurate. Give me one of those MP5's and I could shred the last four guys in seconds.

  I'd do it, too. Anyone who decided to open an illegal gaming house and then responded to an attempted kickdown of the door with high-volume fire was an asshole worthy of being shot. We could have been cops for all they knew.

  Larry was getting pretty tentative as he approached the door. His shadow grew longer in the frame, comically exaggerated by now so that he looked like the world's tallest man. He was really hesitating on these last few feet, reluctant to present us a clear shot. He shuffled from side to side as he approached, trying to cover both sides of the door frame and not doing a great job of either.

  It was a good thing Lethe had smashed the light, because otherwise we'd be clearly shadowing through the bullet holes in the wall, giving the guys inside a perfect idea of where to shoot for maximum effect. As it was, we were both trying to stay a little off the wall to keep from allowing the light inside to highlight our clothing, which would give us away almost as well. The wall was reasonably thick, fortunately, and the lights inside the casino were low, providing us a nice double coverage against that method of detection.

  Lethe gritted her teeth rather obviously, patience flagging as Larry made another cowardly sidestep. She shook her head, met my eyes, and nodded once.

  I got what she was saying, and rose to my feet, five inches off the wall.

  She went low. I went high.

  I sliced the pie, putting my revolver barrel against the edge of the door frame and stepping out an inch at a time until I had a clear shot at the first hostile. I had the hammer back on the .38 and drew a bead on the center of his head as he registered surprise at my sudden appearance.

  Pressing on the trigger gently, I felt the kick of the .38 and controlled it as the barrel jumped and the cylinder cycled. I fired again, going for the double tap, even as I registered that I'd caught my target mid-forehead with the first round and a geyser of red sprayed out the back of his skull, pink mist filling the air behind him even before my second shot had left the barrel.

  I stepped out further, slicing the pie by another couple of inches. Larry's bulk was now in my way and I caught him looking down, moving his attention back up because of my muzzle blasting inches from his face. He must have seen Lethe go low, because he'd started to shift his aim down, my shots forcing his attention back up. As tends to happen when a gun goes off a foot from your head.

  Bringing the snub nose around, I centered the target on the middle of his forehead and lit him up. I double-tapped, two quick shots that prompted a spray of red in my direction and sent him stumbling back. I reached out and caught the barrel of his MP5, which was snugged around him by a sling. I ignored the burning feeling as it singed my palm and yanked the barrel up and over his head as I kicked him back into the room in hopes of causing a little chaos.

  Sliding back around the edge of the door, I took a knee and dropped the .38 into my pants at the small of my back. Mom's jeans had a snug enough waistband that the .38 held there, at least for now. I didn't hold much hope that it'd remain in place if I started getting acrobatic in my motions, but the scalding barrel rested against the flesh at the base of my spine, forcing me to again grit my teeth against the burning sensation of hot metal against my skin. I only had one shot left anyway, so it was definitely getting relegated to backup gun status.

  Lethe was in the doorway, firing between Larry's legs as he tumbled backward. She rolled, prone, sideways toward me as someone fired back through the door, chewing up the concrete where she'd been a second earlier with about thirty rounds in ten seconds. It was like being back on that tarmac again in Revelen as the AC-130 lit it up, except on a much smaller scale.

  I stooped and looked through the bullet holes in the wall, picking out my target. I could see one guy standing, and thrust the MP5 into one of the bigger holes, trying to aim without use of the sights. I lined it up as best I could and pressed the trigger. The submachine barked, hammering a quick blast that chewed through the guy around the midsection and caused him to scream as he fell backward, blood already seeping out from between his fingers as he hit the ground.

  I held up a single finger and Lethe nodded. I swept left, rolling through the long shaft of illumination at the door, seeking targets as I moved. An MP5 chattered at me from behind the far-left side of the door frame, out of my view.

  Someone was trying to get in position to shoot at where I'd been huddling, and they were pretty close. Only my choice to move had gotten me out of the arc of their fire.

  Once I was safely on the other side of the door, I looked at the Swiss-cheese-like bullet holes covering the wall. I was seeking the shadow, looking for where the guy was covering.

  I found it about five feet back from the door frame and drew aim on the biggest hole in the wall I could find in that sector, letting it rip with a quick burst.

  That drew a scream, and the shadow moved down the wall as my target fell to his knees. His head appeared in one of the holes, and I took aim, letting loose another burst, finishing him.

  Lethe aimed through the door with her Beretta, covering the whole room as she cut the pie and finally emerged into the casino. She had her mask back up. It had fallen sometime in the fray, as had mine, and it reminded me to do the same. Once that was done, I stepped into the light behind her.

  “Money, money, money,” Lethe said, plainly practiced at this. There was a crowd of huddled patrons all scattered on the floor around gaming tables that were piled high with chips. “That's all we're here for, so if you be good boys and girls and stay down, you don't have to fear catching lead, lead, lead.”

  In the corner of the room was the money cage, a concrete structure built into the basement and probably usually protected by the guys we'd just killed. I spared a thought for how their deaths might affect the timeline and decided that probably – probably – the deaths of five or six mobsters from Des Moines weren't going to utterly change the world.

  Also, was all this built into the timeline already? Since Lethe had clearly hinted to me in my time that this had happened?

  I put the paradoxical, time-loop thoughts, which seemed destined to cause me a headache, out of my head as we stormed our way toward the casino cage. A metal door on the far side of the squat little structure kept it locked off from the gaming crowd, and the guy inside looked like he was panicking and looking for a way out.

  There wasn't one, of course.

  Lethe went right up to the cage and shoved her pistol under the metal bars. “Open the door.”

  The guy inside ducked down, under the sweep of her aim. “No,” he said, voice muffled where he'd buried his face under the counter.

  “Please?” she asked, nodding to me to take the door.

  “Pretty please?” I offered. “With sugar on top?”

  “No!”

  “Suit yourself,” I said, and came around the side of the cage. It was about as big as an outhouse and l
ooked like an unnatural outgrowth of concrete from the basement wall. The door was steel and reinforced, which told me these mob guys took the security of their money very seriously.

  Such a shame for them I needed it more and respected the ways they'd accumulated it not at all. This was the problem with operating outside the law. It left you open to all sorts of unsavory types – like me.

  I kicked the door off its hinges and it crashed inward, prompting the guy behind the counter to scream. The oversized door got lodged tightly in the confined space, which was probably not all that much bigger than the box of legend my mother had used to punish me when I was a kid – though clearly, she hadn't resorted to that just yet, judging by the innocently sweet me sleeping out in the car.

  With a sigh, I let my gun hang on the sling and reached in. The steel door was now wedged into the cage, and the guy behind the counter was screaming like I was actively murdering him. “If you don't cut that caterwauling out, I'm going to give you something to scream about for real when I get this door out of the way,” I said, lifting it and turning it sideways to drag it from the cage.

  Lethe appeared a step behind me, apparently having given up on trying to shoot the screaming moron through the cage window. “How's it coming?”

  “Slowly,” I said, having muscled the door over into position to drag it free of the cage opening. “Just a sec.”

  I heaved the door into the corner of the room, careful not to tweak my back by twisting it too unnaturally. Because of this overabundance of caution, I ended up doing a full turn from the cage-

  And I caught a shotgun blast in the back for my troubles.

  The boom of the shotgun was world-ending, like the sound of death and thunder and lightning actually striking me down, the AC-130 losing control of fire and walking 40mm shells over me on that tarmac. It was fire and hell and it stitched its way across my spine and down to my kidneys and burned in my lungs.

  I pitched forward as Lethe fired mercilessly into the cage, my face finding the floor and the carpet, a thin-pile kind that lacked much in the way of cushion. That mattered little, because however much the landing hurt my jaw, it was a mere pittance of pain compared to the angry nuclear bomb that someone had detonated in my back.

  “You okay?” My grandmother was at my side, hand on my arm. I'd fallen on my MP5, but it was the least of the discomforts afflicting me.

  “I got shot-gunned in the back,” I said, a little blood spraying from between my lips. “No. No, I am most definitely not okay.”

  “I have to get the money,” she said, patting me on the shoulder. “Can you walk?”

  “I don't know,” I said, gritting my teeth. I tested my toes. They still moved, somehow. “Spine's intact, I think. But I'm about a quarter second from screaming my head off because this hurts. So. Much.”

  “Okay, just hang out for a second,” she said.

  “Yeah, yeah,” I said, squeezing my eyes tight. “Stay on mission...and we'll...” I had to stop mid-sentence because blood ran out between my lips.

  Lethe patted my arm and then she was gone, catapulting me into what felt like an hours-long battle against the pain. It felt like someone had taken an icepick – no, a rock drill – and was probing all the different corners of my back with it. And that they were using a blowtorch attachment to heat things up before each press. You know, for added fun.

  My breaths were hard and every one of them hurt. They were coming in fierce gasps, and I tried to settle them down, make them slower and easier so they'd hurt less, but this did not work, much as I might have wanted it to. Blood was streaming out of my mouth at this point, pooling on the carpet below my lips. I tried to lift my head but failed, and ended up kissing the puddle, my lips making an impression in the thickening liquid.

  “I said give me your purse!” Lethe shouted somewhere behind me.

  “What...the hell...?” I called. “I thought we were taking the house, not the patrons?”

  “We forgot to bring a bag,” she said, returning to the cage, her footfalls loud enough I could hear them.

  “Oh,” I said, and my back spasmed, sending me into a blackout world of pain. When I came out of it, the blood puddle beneath my face was smeared all over the threadbare carpet.

  “All right, I got the money,” Lethe said, returning to my side. “Oh my.”

  “How much?” I muttered.

  “Enough,” she said. “Close to a hundred thousand, I think.”

  “Cool,” I whispered, and pitched forward into my own blood again.

  When I came to once more, my feet were dragging against the concrete stairs, my grandmother pulling me up, her arm under both of mine. I fumbled for my MP5 in case we ran into trouble on the way out, but she managed to get us to the top of the stairs and navigated the kicked-in section of wall daintily, only the minimum spikes of pain hammering me as she did so.

  “Get the door for me, will you?” she asked the couple who was sitting at the bar, still, apparently cowed by my earlier threat. The man leapt up to do just that, holding it wide for her, wobbling a little as he did so. I noticed an empty bottle on the bar in front of his companion, and I guessed now that all three of the barflies were tanked, or would be very, very shortly, once the alcohol fully made its way into his bloodstream. “Thank you,” Lethe said, pulling me through sideways.

  “Have a good night,” I mumbled, slurring my words a bit. I thought about asking him to toss me a bottle of something, because if a shotgun to the back wasn't a reason to break sobriety, especially when there were no painkillers readily available, I didn't know what was.

  But I bit my tongue – literally – and let Lethe haul me out into the parking lot, and the moment of opportunity passed.

  “Whew,” I said, once we were halfway to the car. It started up, lights flaring ahead to blind me. My mother must have seen us coming.

  “What?” Lethe asked.

  “Nothing,” I mumbled. It was damned dark out here, save for those headlights. Or was that my flagging consciousness? “Just...stayed strong, that's all.”

  If she shot me a befuddled look, I missed it in the blackout pain. Mom threw the car into gear and skidded across the dirt parking lot to come to a stop in front of us. “Get in,” she said, putting the car in park and stretching over the back seat to gently lift little me, pulling her over the front seat and strapping her in.

  “That...is a violation of child safety laws...involving car seats,” I muttered as Lethe threw open the door and pushed me in. I let out a gasping scream and went out for a second, coming back into focus as the pain died down a few notches, from “death, horror and screaming,” to merely, “horror and screaming.”

  “I think that might be the least of the laws we've broken tonight,” my mother said, putting pedal to metal as my grandmother slammed the door behind her.

  “Take off your mask,” my grandmother ordered me, and I tried to, thought it wasn't so much a mask anymore. It'd become kind of a knotted cloth around my neck, like a bloody noose. I worked it free, wondering exactly how much of my face it had actually covered in the final stage of our heist. Probably not much, at least on the way out.

  She was working on my back and had my shirt up. “Damn,” she muttered.

  “How bad is it?” my mother asked. Hopefully she was keeping her eyes on the road, because based on the level of vibrato running through the car, we were really hauling ass.

  “Well, it's not good,” Lethe said. “Double ought buck to the back seldom is.”

  “Lucky it wasn't to the head,” my mother said. “There are some things you can't heal from, after all.”

  “This...might be one of them,” Lethe said. “At least...not without some help.”

  “...What?” I muttered, trying to get into the conversation without actually having to speak much. Because...man, it hurt. Little lights were flashing in front of my eyes even as I was burying my face in the cloth back seat. It was warm and wet, either from drool or blood.

  “There's buck
shot in her lungs, I think,” Lethe said. “The shot in the muscle tissue should come out on its own, pushed out as it heals. But the lungs...” She shook her head. “She needs surgery for that.”

  “I can live...with some metal clanking around in my...lungs,” I managed to gasp out.

  “Not this much, I don't think,” Lethe said.

  “Well, what the hell are we supposed to do about it?” my mother asked, sounding near-frantic in the front seat. “It's not like there's a hospital in Des Moines that's going to perform surgery on her without asking how she got shot-gunned in the back.”

  There was a long pause as Lethe considered her answer. “I'm not proposing we take her to a hospital. Or at least...not a-”

  I lost the last word as I entered a spell of choking, the blood in my mouth, in my throat, in my lungs reaching unsustainable levels. I gagged, unable to breathe, and the world started to grow dark around me.

  “Damn,” Lethe said. “I need-”

  I didn't hear that either, as I spasmed so hard from my coughing that I passed out, darkness enfolding me in its depths, the pain diminishing as I fell into its depths, and wondered, dimly, if I would ever wake again.

  29.

  Gerasimos

  London

  “A casino?” Gerasimos looked up from the note that Bastet had handed him.

  The dark-skinned woman was wearing a smile, a glow, almost. “A Mafia casino. In an old speakeasy.”

  Gerasimos looked again at the faxed photograph of a scene of carnage. “What does this do for us?”

  “There's blood everywhere,” Bastet said. “Surveillance footage suggests Lethe and the other girl – not Sierra – did the robbery. The unidentified woman was hit in the back with a shotgun round. Badly injured, from what we can see.”