A Man of Lies, page 9
Jonny Boy starts going through the storage box, loading shells into the shotgun’s magazine. “This isn’t a normal house, Cass. Holzmann’s got guards and shit, and there’s only three of us.”
“The storm will cover us,” she says as she checks the action on the Hellcat. “We just gotta go in fast. Before they realize we’re there, we’ll get the safe and be gone.” She puts the key into the glove box, where the pistol had been. If something goes wrong, she wants it out here as a bargaining chip.
“Hey, Cass,” Vic says, pointing toward Holzmann’s house. “Something’s happening.”
Cass looks up. There is, indeed, something happening. The front gate opens, and two black sedans pull out. “Stay low,” she says. The sedans turn toward them.
“He knows we’re here,” Jonny Boy says. “Richard told him.”
“No,” Vic says. “He wouldn’t do that.”
Cass isn’t so sure. She lowers her seat, hoping to stay out of their view as the cars approach. The sun reflects off their windshields, keeping her from seeing their passengers. How many of Holzmann’s men is she going to need to deal with? She’s got twelve rounds in the Hellcat. If she can start shooting first, she can take a few of them out, maybe drive the rest off.
She slides into the footwell. If Holzmann’s men are going to open fire blindly, they’ll focus their attention where the bulk of her mass should be. She might be able to dodge the worst of the volley if she stays here.
“Give me the shotgun,” Vic says. He’s laid his chair as flat as it will go and reaches back for the gun from Jonny Boy. Good. Cass would much rather he have it. She’s not sure Jonny Boy would be able to pull the trigger.
“Hey, Vic?” Jonny Boy says, handing the gun over.
“Shut the fuck up,” she hisses at him. The sedans are fifty feet away and closing.
The sun isn’t down yet. The storm hasn’t arrived. She’d been counting on those to cover their noise and fragment Holzmann’s forces. They need to do this quickly. Deal with whoever is coming and get into the estate before Holzmann realizes that his little ambush has failed. They’ll have no margin for error, but she can pull this off.
She inhales deeply, willing her pulse down. The lead car is thirty feet away. She slowly lets the breath out. She’s a decent shot, but the tiny pistol is unreliable, and she’s shooting from the hip through the side of the van at an ambiguously placed target. She needs the car close if she wants to make this count. Twenty feet now. At ten she’ll take the shot.
“Be ready,” she whispers to Vic.
A cloud passes over the sun, the first hint of the encroaching storm, and the glare drops away. She can see the driver. His eyes are forward, not on her. The passenger looks away, gesturing at nothing. Both are Holzmann’s men, but they’re paying her no mind. The back is empty.
Vic shifts beside her, rising up to fire. She throws a hand out. “Wait!” she calls, willing command into her voice while trying to stay quiet enough that she doesn’t draw attention from the passing sedan. Vic falls back into his seat.
The second sedan passes, just like the first, without a glance toward them. Two more soldiers heading somewhere else. Cass watches them go, and only once they turn the corner and leave her view does she slide her finger out of the trigger guard and make the Hellcat safe.
“Fuck,” she says, drawing the word out into an exhale. “They weren’t coming for us.”
“Where were they going?” Jonny Boy asks.
“How the fuck am I supposed to know that? Christ, Jonny Boy. Use your fucking head.”
The storm is getting closer. Soon it will be time for them to move, and the universe seems to be reaching out to Cass. It knows it has given her a hard fucking go of it. But it is ready to make amends.
“It’s good news,” she says. “Holzmann’s sent his men away. The place will be empty.”
“Yeah,” Jonny Boy says. “I guess you’re right.”
The rest of the storm’s approach passes with agonizing slowness. Waiting for the cover of darkness and the distraction of thunder is critical, but she doesn’t know how long those four men will be gone. The storm inches closer, and the sun sinks further behind the clouds. Jonny Boy hands out balaclavas.
When the rain lets loose, Vic sets off with a wooden ladder under his arm and the shotgun strapped to his back. He scales the wall around Holzmann’s compound, and two minutes later the pedestrian gate out front pops open. Cass and Jonny Boy hurry through to find Vic holding two guards at gunpoint.
He has already disarmed and gagged them, and it’s a good thing, too. If they were to talk, they’d scare Jonny Boy with threats of Holzmann’s retribution. Instead, all that they can offer are drooly, muffled grunts.
“I thought the place was empty,” Jonny Boy says. “You said Holzmann sent all his people away.”
“They’re just watching the gate,” Cass says. “And Vic took care of them. The house will be open.” Vic frowns at her but doesn’t say anything. She has no idea if it’s true, of course, but by the time Jonny Boy learns otherwise, it’ll be too late for him to back down.
Cass checks the guardhouse for an alarm panel they might have hit. Instead, she finds and snags a bundle of riot cuffs. One pair locks each guard’s hands behind their backs, another binds their ankles together, and a third attaches those two sets to each other, effectively hog-tying the men. She locks them, gagged and bound, in the little structure. Cass grabs their pistols—no need to use her own when Holzmann so helpfully provides—and hands one to Jonny Boy.
“Hey,” Vic says, holding out the shotgun to Jonny Boy. “Trade you? I’m the better shot with that.”
The three of them, already soaked by the rain, hustle toward the house. Cass points to the front door.
“Head in there. Sweep the house. Don’t give them a chance to react.” She has to pause as the thunder makes all communication impossible for a moment. “I’ll go around back and catch anyone trying to run. We meet in the middle, and we’re gone in five minutes.”
With a nod, Vic takes off for the front door, and Jonny Boy, after giving her one final sad look in the hopes that she will call the whole thing off, follows.
CHAPTER 21 Jim Pickens, 5:03 P.M.
At five o’clock, the storm arrives. The sun is still well above the horizon, but the clouds roll across it and bring an early twilight. When the rain comes, it comes suddenly, a furious torrent of water.
The men in the yard scramble for cover, trying to shelter beneath the building’s eaves before acquiescing and moving into the guesthouse. From there they can still watch the yard and be at the main house quickly.
When the first bolt of lightning strikes nearby, it shakes the building to its foundation. Holzmann glances outside with disapproval, upset at nature’s audacity. As the peals of thunder continue, one every minute or so, and visibility through the window is reduced to mere feet by the sheeting rain, Holzmann’s frown deepens. He should have been celebrating his triumph by now, toasting the new growth and respect that the safe’s contents would afford him.
The first crack of gunfire might be mistaken for another thunderclap, but as a dozen more shots and a scream of pain follow in rapid succession, there is no doubt as to what is occurring in the front of the house.
“Get down,” Holzmann says, though Pickens is already flat on the ground. “Protect the safe.” Holzmann goes into a cabinet and comes out with a rifle.
This is not what the locksmith signed on for. His criminality lies in the quiet patience of a puzzle, not the frenetic destruction of a firefight. But there are soldiers between Pickens and the danger. Trained men who know how to handle themselves wait on the other side of the solid door, ready to defend him.
There is another quick burst of gunfire. Closer than the last one. Pickens curls behind the solid workbench. At any moment the gunmen could burst through the door and kill him. He never should have come here. Someone is begging for their life. Words nearly indistinguishable through phlegm and panic. Pickens wishes they would be quiet.
“Control yourself,” Holzmann hisses at him. All traces of his accent have disappeared. Pickens closes his mouth, and the begging stops. “War is a trial of moral forces by means of physical ones. If we do not break, they cannot defeat us.”
Pickens stares at Holzmann. The old man has placed himself behind the door which leads to the house. Should the gunmen try to come here, they will find Holzmann and his rifle at their backs.
More gunfire, closer than before, drives him again to the ground. Then a scream of profound pain tears through the wall. It is formless in its agony. It is shock and suffering stretched beyond the capacity of words to contain. It falls in pitch as the lungs and vocal cords that sustain it give way to the inevitable demands of the body.
And then a crash as the door flies in on a wave of splinters. Pickens just has a chance to see Holzmann’s eyes widen as the slab of wood swings around, knocking the rifle off target and slamming him into the wall. A massive man stands in the doorway. His face is obscured by a balaclava, but the whites of his eyes shine through with rage and pain. He is massive not in height, but in girth. A gun, all black steel and hatred, hangs from a strap in his fingers, but he pays it no heed. He takes in Pickens, cowering on the ground, and then passes over him, following Pickens’s gaze to Holzmann, recovering from the shock of the blow behind the door.
Holzmann lowers his rifle, but the intruder catches the barrel in one solid fist. He tears the gun from Holzmann’s fingers and tosses it clear. Pickens sees in the old man’s expression something that he has clearly not felt for a very long time. Holzmann is afraid.
There is something perverse about it. Something private. Pickens turns away from the old man’s shame. The rifle lies, ignored, on the far side of the room. He could get there before the attacker could stop him.
But Pickens has been saying all day that he shouldn’t be here. He wants nothing to do with this. He was brought here to open a safe. When it comes time to do so, he will gladly execute the terms of his agreement. Until then, he is a houseguest who has overstayed his welcome and now finds himself in the middle of a domestic spat.
There are two doors out of this room. One, which has just been half torn from its hinges, would take him back into the house, toward the screams and the gunfire. The other leads to the backyard, to the storm and the fury of nature. He’ll take his chances with the lightning.
CHAPTER 22 Cass Mullen, 5:07 P.M.
The rain runs down Cass’s face. She can’t see a fucking thing as the holes in the balaclava gather the water into her eyes. Fuck it. She’ll be out of the city soon, and she wants Holzmann to know it was her that fucked him. She rips the mask off.
Even without it, visibility is shit. The universe must still be looking out for her, though, because she meets no resistance as she heads into the backyard. She ducks beneath an eave as another clap of thunder rings out. It would be fucking rich if she got this far only to get fried by lightning.
Three doors lead from the backyard into the house, but she doesn’t have long to wonder which one hides her prize, as the nearest opens. She presses herself against the wall of the house, hoping to stay out of view of whoever is coming.
A Black man she’s never seen before crawls into the grass. He is underdressed for one of Holzmann’s men, wearing khakis and a short-sleeve white shirt with a collar and tie. Usually they wear full suits, really leaning into the whole mafioso aesthetic, but this guy looks more like a computer geek than a goombah.
She steps into his field of view and raises the pistol. He looks up at her from the mud with wide eyes. He looks terrified. Terrified means malleable, and that’s good enough for her.
“Who the fuck are you?” she asks.
The man stares at the gun. “People call me Pickens,” he says.
“OK, Pickens. Where’s the fucking safe?”
He glances back over his shoulder. Just inside the door, resting on a workbench, is a black box, about the size of a shoebox. She smiles and says a silent thank you to whatever celestial being she owes for this one. She pushes Pickens ahead of her and back into the house.
This room is spacious. A desk is set up along one wall, and a small table sits in the corner with a stack of papers and a brown paper lunch bag on top of it. The safe, in the center of the room, is surrounded by tools. Near the shattered remnants of the interior door, his gun forgotten on the ground beside him, Jonny Boy stands over Holzmann. He has pinned the old man to the wall with one forearm across his chest and the other raised back to slam a fist down into the cowering crime lord’s face.
Holzmann’s eyes, wide with panic, fall on her as she slips fully into the room. This is the most feared man in the city. She has never met him, and if she didn’t know that this was his estate, she might not recognize him. Holzmann is a force. His power is a constant in Omaha. But this man before her is desperate. He is pleading. He is broken. And he has been brought to this state by, of all people, motherfucking Jonny Boy. It would be beautiful were it not so pathetic.
She catches Pickens by the collar as he tries to slink back out into the rain. He mumbles something incoherent, and she tosses him into the room.
“Jonny Boy,” she calls, but the fat man doesn’t respond. He brings his fist down into Holzmann’s face. She doesn’t want him to kill the old man. He could still be useful.
“Jonny Boy!” she shouts again, crossing the room to pull him off Holzmann.
Jonny Boy turns, snarling. Spattered across his skin, visible through the gaps of the balaclava, are flecks of red. He looks ready to turn his wrath on her, to strike her with the same fury that Holzmann just felt. Instead, his eyes narrow, and he deflates, like a toddler finally accepting that the adults will not indulge his tantrum. She snatches the shotgun off the ground. The barrel is cool to the touch. Jonny Boy never fired the thing.
“Where’s Vic?” she asks. Jonny Boy looks to the ruins of the nearby door.
“Herr Wright,” Holzmann whispers. “You will suffer for this.”
“You shut your fucking mouth.” Cass raises the shotgun to aim at the old man.
He pulls himself away from the wall, whatever panic he was feeling driven off. He stands straight. A slow trickle of blood highlights the wrinkles that cobweb his face.
“And you must be Cassiopeia,” he says. “You, my dear, are on the verge of a grave mistake from which there can be no recovery.”
Cass will deal with that bullshit in a minute. She still hasn’t gotten an answer from Jonny Boy.
“Where is Vic?” she asks again. He continues to stare at the ruined door. She takes a few steps toward it, keeping Holzmann on the business end of the shotgun. She can smell the mingling of blood and powder now, the stench of human offal.
What’s beyond the door doesn’t make sense. For all her talk, she’s never actually seen a dead body, not even someone who passed peacefully in their sleep, like Vic’s grandma. She had always imagined that people would behave a certain way in death. They would hold themselves in a particular manner—leaning against a wall or falling to their knees in a final moment of prayer—before they expire, their head lolling to the side as they slip into a gentle repose.
This room is not gentle. The bodies are not in repose.
It takes time for the details of the room to resolve. For the swirling images to solidify, the fragmentary horrors to coalesce from a hundred tiny details into a singular reality. There are only three bodies in the room. Two look like Holzmann’s guards. They wear suits. Their hair is neatly trimmed. The third had perhaps been on a break, or at the end of his shift. He wears a black tracksuit, and a balaclava conceals his face. He is roughly Vic’s size and build.
She steps away from the room and its viscera.
“Where is Vic?” she asks for the third time.
Jonny Boy stares at her. “They shot him,” he says. His voice rasps in his throat. “Vic is dead.”
That doesn’t make sense. Vic can’t be dead. She just saw him five minutes ago.
“I will give you one final opportunity.” Holzmann is still talking. The son of a bitch sounds almost bored. How the fuck can he be so calm? She’s supposed to be in fucking charge here. “One chance to save your lives. Give me the gun.”
At some point while she was looking into the other room, Jonny Boy must have found a rifle, because he now has one in his hand, and he is about to give it to Holzmann.
“You shut your fucking mouth,” she screams at the old man, pointing her shotgun at him once more—she must have let her aim fall away from him, though she has no memory of it—and taking a step closer. “What the fuck are you doing, Jonny Boy?”
Jonny Boy looks from her to the gun in his hand.
“You will not escape me, Herr Wright,” Holzmann says. There is an emptiness to his expression that terrifies her. He no longer cares what happens in this room. He has seen how this ends, and now he is merely relaying those facts. “No matter how far you run, I will find you, and I will deliver to you terrible suffering.”
“Shut your fucking mouth and turn around.” She should kill him, but he might still have value as a hostage. “Pickens, get over here. Grab the safe.”
“You don’t know what you’re doing.” Holzmann ignores the weapon aimed at him. “You cannot open that safe.”
“I’ve got the fucking key,” she says.
“But not the skill to apply it,” he replies gently.
Fuck. The fucking bastard is right.
Looking at this safe, she wouldn’t have the first fucking clue how to get it open. She’d been hoping there would be a spot that the weird metal ball would fit in, but it looks to her like any other safe in the world, except for the cluster of holes drilled through the front. There’s a dial with a bunch of numbers and a big gray handle, but no clear way to use the key to get it open.
“I’ll figure it out,” she says, reaching for the handle.
