Lone Wolf, page 24
A long silence, just the rush of wind through the half-burned house across the street. The razor teeth atop the fence glittered like icicles. From up close he could see that the crumbled stucco of the house was in fact deliberate, accommodating a pair of sawed slits through the cinder block, each just wide enough to fit a muzzle through.
Evan clasped his hands behind him, did his best to look unthreatening. It wasn’t hard.
The gate buzzed open.
As he tugged it to enter, the big man on the porch rose. The chair gave a creak of relief. A gold-colored belt buckle spelled JACKO in case he forgot his name while he was taking a leak. The folding knife twirled once around the back of Jacko’s hand, and he caught it upside down angled parallel to his forearm, a proper edge-out reverse grip.
He watched Evan’s quiet approach, then held up a hand. “Stop.”
Men like Jacko even smelled like alphas. A distinctive musk came off them. Skin of sun-battered leather, stubble coarse as wire. He looked like he subsisted on dried meat and chewing tobacco, like he’d rip your head off and chug mead from your skull.
Evan halted.
They were eye to eye, though Evan had to tilt his head back to meet the man’s gaze. A slight twitch of the left eye and the cant of the shoulders gave away the man’s favored side.
Keeping the knife, Jacko patted Evan down extensively with his other massive hand, taking care to administer a urology-worthy crotch grope. Then he removed what looked like a fat walkie-talkie from a bag beneath his chair—a professional-grade RF detector. He wanded Evan down head to toe, checking for any wireless surveillance tech.
When Jacko was done, he stepped back without turning around and knocked twice on the door behind him. A heavy clank announced a security bar retracting, and then the door opened with a foomp worthy of a submarine hatch.
A fist reached through the gap, grabbed Evan’s shirt, yanked him in, and slammed him against the wall.
43
The Holding Pen
A Benelli M1 combat shotgun rose and jammed its muzzle into the soft skin beneath Evan’s chin.
Lucky day—M1s were Evan’s favorite.
Behind the Benelli, a guy with ice-gray eyes patted Evan down once more and then returned to his gun station at the side of the front door. A matching guard, similarly armed, was posted at the second of the muzzle slits carved through the front wall of the house, the ones Evan had spotted from the call box. A half dozen other men lounged in folding chairs around a pool table, exuding an aura of stageworthy calm. A few had their guns drawn, resting on their knees. The lineup of briefcases atop the green felt were all closed, but a digital currency counter near a corner pocket gave away the game.
Sitting in their midst was the blonde Evan had spotted before, a full-figured woman barely contained by a half shirt and tight black jeans. She wore a vacant, drugged expression and had bruises on her wrists, red spots on her arms, and a raspberry on her chin. A heap of locks pushed high on her head, pouty lips glossed with wet pink lipstick, high-end perfume applied liberally enough that it reached Evan from across the room. He could picture her getting off a bus from Des Moines or Nashville with a suitcase and a proverbial spring in her step. In some other distant context, she would have been sexually attractive, a reality Evan noted and then dispensed with. Something in her bearing, the birdlike perch at the edge of her chair, one shoulder shrugged up as if to defend against a blow, suggested she’d been brought here to be disciplined. Her blasted-wide pupils focused on nothing; she’d gone somewhere else, leaving her body behind to endure whatever it had to endure.
Metal sheets sufficient to deter a volley of RPGs covered the rear door and reinforced the interior walls.
A desk in the back held a flat computer monitor that showed rotating angles of an off-site structure that looked like a repurposed apartment building. The interior cameras showed various hallways, men patrolling them with batons like night watchmen. But that wasn’t what was chilling about the hallway feeds.
The doors along the halls had been taken off and replaced with prison bars. Beyond the bars was nothing but blackness. The entire building had been retrofitted.
A holding pen.
Evan at last brought his full focus to the ninth man, the one around whom the room’s latent energy swirled. The man had broken the polo-and-khaki dress code, instead wearing a double-breasted dark pinstripe suit baggy enough to indicate abrupt weight loss. Thick black wavy hair without a trace of gray. Sunken eyes magnified by silver-rim glasses, titanium-frame arms denting pronounced sideburns. A slender cigarette holding a good half inch of ash protruded from two knobby knuckles. Above a gaping cuff, a gold Rolex hung loosely around a just-visible strip of hairy wrist.
That was good: Evan needed to keep track of the time.
This man looked connected, a cut above the others. A capo. He nodded at the gray-eyed guard who’d frisked Evan. “Thank you, Domenic.” The capo’s cheeks were concave from illness, and his voice rasped when he spoke. His dark eyes found Evan. “You say you’re a rep of the Wolf.”
From here, Evan could smell his breath. Breath mints covering rot, the reek of necrotic tissue, black spots eating into lungs.
“Yes.”
The capo sipped at his cigarette. His bloodshot eyes watered, showing the hurt.
Behind him the security feeds rotated on the monitors. Evan caught an exterior angle across the blue stucco of the holding pen’s front wall. Near the sun-scorched paint of the entry, darker shades of numerals memorialized the spots where street numbers had been pried free. A six? An eight? The feed rotated before he could snapshot the image, and he vowed to catch it when it circled back around.
Besides, he had to focus on the Rat Pack escapee with the dead lungs who was about to threaten his life.
The man said, “Talking your way in here was the easy part…”
“The hard part’s gonna be getting out,” Evan said.
The man looked disappointed that his payoff line had been preempted.
“You think I’m playing games?”
“I don’t care what you’re doing. The Wolf has received an unusual level of law-enforcement scrutiny from the last job she conducted for you. Her determination is that you have loose lips inside your organization. She has handled the inconvenience but it was costly in time and money. She demands a thirty-percent bonus for having to contend with your laxity.”
For a moment the capo’s face remained still with surprise, wrinkles fanning outward from his eyes like sun rays. Then he smiled, white caps large in his mouth. Evan half expected a gold tooth.
The capo waved his cigarette, tracing a slender scarf of smoke around him. “Her inability to handle her business is no business of mine.”
“It is if the problem originated inside your operation.”
“‘If,’” he said. “You come here. You make threats. Over ‘if.’”
The other men kept a dutiful silence while the capo spoke. Past his shoulder, the surveillance feeds rotated around once more on the monitors, and Evan scratched his nose to cover a quick shift of his eyes to catch the address digits. He snagged the first three—867—before the angle changed once more.
“It’s my understanding that the original agreement provided terms for contingencies like this,” Evan said.
The capo looked surprised.
“You didn’t know that,” Evan said.
“My not knowing means the terms do not hold. And anyone in my employ who believed they could negotiate on their own will be dealt with.” The capo canted forward, head slightly ducked, conspiratorial. “I’m the king of this particular jungle,” he confided, his breath a noxious gas. He wasn’t bragging. He was just telling it like it was. “I only answer to one.”
“God?”
The capo showed his yellowed teeth. “You could say that.” He lifted a slender finger, tobacco-stained at the first knuckle. “In this world, I don’t handle the trifles. Terms and contracts.”
“Who does?”
The capo looked shocked at the audacity of the question. His eyes flicked toward the building on the monitors, the smallest tell.
Evan pieced together a working theory: Money ran through here. Truly incriminating matters—kidnapped humans and murder contracts—were handled at the other site.
“Underlings.” The capo waved his hand, and Evan took the opportunity to check the man’s watch: 11:17.
“It shows weakness,” Evan said, “if they’re agreeing to terms without your approval.”
“Weakness.” The capo’s head bobbed. “Weakness?” Without looking over, he snapped his fingers in the direction of the pool table. “Amber. Up.”
Amber’s expression did not change. She rose, stumbled a bit, righted herself with a hand on the felt, and then dutifully trudged over. The capo cupped her chin, stared into her face. Her glazed eyes looked back, long lashes blinking.
“At all times, I have a coterie of women who obey me. That isn’t status. It’s pure strength.” The capo was gazing at Amber but speaking to Evan, the effect unsettling. “I can walk into any high-end restaurant from Beverly Hills to Monaco and if I snap my fingers and ten beautiful women obey, all those beaten-down husbands and dutiful young men see me as an ancient god. Their cells cry out to be freed the way I’m free. I have built an empire around me. An empire I carry on my back. Do you understand what I am telling you?”
“Coercing female companionship isn’t my definition of strength,” Evan said. “I’m old-fashioned that way.”
“Coercing?” The capo laughed his laugh. Evan wondered what his breath smelled like at Amber’s distance. She didn’t blink, didn’t turn away. “You may be old-fashioned,” the man continued. “But I’m primal.”
Were it not for Amber, Evan would have been bored. He focused on the playing board. One of the men by the pool table chewed gum. Another stroked his mustache. Their muscles were coiled, but they were doing their best to project cool. Domenic was closest to Evan, two strides behind him to the right. The capo’s Rolex was momentarily hidden, but one of the seated men had a big-dick diving watch that showed 11:20.
The security monitors continued their lazy rotation through and around the holding pen, not yet back at the angle Evan needed to complete the address. He continued to assemble a picture of the off-site building: Three floors, each patrolled by a single guard. Nerve center on the ground floor—more security monitors, more computer hardware—manned by a single guy with a Benelli. A fifth guard surveilling from the roof, heavy-duty headphones clamped over his ears, bopping away.
“‘Coercion’ is too weak a word. ‘Ownership’ is more appropriate.” The capo waved his hand, the ash at last falling, scattering across his polished shoes. “I’m not talking about gutter work, managing lot lizards. No. That’s barbaric shit. I own these fine young women. I take what I want from them and when I’m done I sell them to cathouses, individuals, the Mexicans or Armenians who have street operations that require meat, stale or otherwise.”
Evan was tired. Tired of the endless war on corruption, of men doing bad things, of how much work it took to right some small part of any of it. He slid a half step back toward Domenic, closing the distance. On the monitor, the exterior angle Evan needed came up, and he filled out the street numerals of the off-site structure: 86774. None of the men’s watch faces were visible, but Evan knew time was getting tight.
The capo palmed Amber’s head like a basketball and pressed it against the wall hard enough that her cheek shoved forward, pooching her lips. He used his right hand, providing Evan a glimpse of the Rolex—11:23.
Nearly go time.
Amber hadn’t made a sound. She didn’t even look scared. Nothing human seeped through her numbed façade. She’d been treated like an object so long and so consistently that her outsides had learned to believe it. He wondered if she was still in there, receded behind a thousand layers of scar tissue, and if she’d ever find her way back to the surface.
The capo took the cigarette from his mouth and held it vertically like a tiny chimney, smoke unspooling from the top. Still pressing her head to the wall, he looked over at Evan. “Eye or cheek,” he said.
Evan didn’t answer.
“Since you’re so concerned about equity,” the capo said, “I’ll let you choose.”
“What sort of businessman damages his own product?” Evan said. “If you disfigure her, you just lose income.”
The capo blew a fierce glow into the cherry of the cigarette and hovered it right over her temple. “If you don’t choose, I do both.”
Amber hadn’t issued a single noise of complaint but her squirming eye found Evan, the pupil pulling downward: Cheek.
Evan said, “Cheek.”
A sizzle. The stomach-turning stench of burning flesh. Amber grunted but it was without fear or anger, just a response to the stimuli. The Rolex read 11:25. The men around the table were distracted by the spectacle. Domenic’s shotgun was at his side, aimed at the ground two and a half feet behind Evan’s right boot. The safety was off, bolt closed, so he presumed a round in the chamber.
The capo flicked the cigarette at Evan. It hit his chest and fell to the ground.
“It’s funny,” he said, “that you thought you’d get out of here alive.”
Evan felt the tug of a smile, his muscle memory warming its engines. “I was just about to say the same thing to you.”
In a single fluid movement, he snatched the Benelli from Domenic’s grasp and crushed the guard’s left knee with a piston kick. While everyone else was busy being startled, Evan had the barrel up. It was trained on the capo’s center mass, but with a shotgun at this range it didn’t have to be. The other men scrambled with their pieces, laggards on the draw. The capo shouted “No!” and they froze.
It took a moment for the gust of air from the exclamation to reach Evan. It curled up his nostrils, rancid enough to make his eyes water. The second guard was the only one in Evan’s periphery, but he hadn’t gotten his Benelli to horizontal and couldn’t now without Evan taking note.
For a moment everyone remained stock-still.
And then Amber broke the suspension, pressing herself languidly off the wall. Walking back to her chair, she picked her way through the men and sat. The red spot floated beneath her cheekbone, tinged black at the edges.
Domenic’s mouth wavered silently for another few seconds. Then he emitted a confused moan. Evan’s piston kick had staved in the leg, devastating it. Khaki held the bone, tented up where the shard had shoved through the skin.
The diving watch was at 11:27.
“I’m gonna go now,” Evan said, backing to the door. Now he could hear the sirens, barely audible, maybe four blocks out. “Stay away from the muzzle slits. If you come out after me, I’ll cut you all down in the doorway. Understand?”
The capo’s smile had returned, his choppers a polished wedge of insincere mirth.
“You really think—”
Domenic propelled himself off his good leg, lunging for Evan. Without lowering the shotgun from the capo, Evan lashed out with a side kick, driving his heel into Domenic’s chin. The guard’s head torqued with an audible crackle, and his body hit the floor, convulsed twice, and stilled.
After that the capo didn’t see fit to finish his sentence.
Easing backward, Evan reached the door, knocking on it twice to set Jacko at ease outside. Then he jerked through onto the porch and slammed the door behind him. Jacko leapt up from his folding chair, blade in hand, surprise on his face. His arms had snapped into knife-fight readiness—forearms out to present muscle, not tendons—but the rest of his body was misaligned and off-balance.
Evan flipped the shotgun horizontally at Jacko’s face. Instinctively Jacko dropped the knife and caught the Benelli with both hands before the barrel struck the bridge of his nose. Evan snatched the folding knife as it fell and drove it straight up through the big man’s throat.
It was as messy as he’d anticipated. Jacko flailed back, gurgling. Evan relieved him of the shotgun as he fell over. Crouching, Evan doused his hands in the stream issuing from Jacko’s neck and smeared it around his own face. Jacko looked up at him uncomprehendingly, head joggling back and forth on the concrete of the porch until it didn’t jog anymore.
Sirens, louder.
Evan backed down the walk and onto the sidewalk, jamming the shotgun beneath the gate to pin it open. After liberating the zip ties from the Fritos bag, he nestled the bag back into the gutter, stuck his hands through the plastic loops, cinched them tight with his teeth, and collapsed on the sidewalk.
Squealing tires, roaring engines, and finally lights as the cavalry blasted around the turn, four police units, paddy wagon, ambulance.
They arrived, pouring from vehicles, weapons out, pouncing on the scene.
“Help me,” Evan croaked. “Help … I called. I called for help.”
A shadow fell over Evan, gloved hands tilting his head, checking for injuries. “You okay?”
He thrashed his head weakly. “Yes. My friend’s daughter … inside. Please … careful.”
Medics hoisted him up and pulled him back. He let them, dragging his boots weakly, nearly disrupting the Fritos bag in the gutter. They brought him to the rear of the ambulance parked just out of the line of fire, giving him a quick once-over, and cutting off his zip ties.
“Thank you. I’m okay. I’m okay. There’s a woman inside. She’s injured.”
“Wait here—wait here.” The medics crept into safe position near the gate, standing by for after the entry.
The cops had cautiously unfurled themselves across the front yard, vectoring at the door, shouting. There were enough to make a shoot-out a bad option.
Evan sat hunched forward, blanket across his shoulders, staring at the back of the paddy wagon about twenty meters away. It was parked across the street in front of the burned house. Jacko’s blood dried across the side of Evan’s neck, tightening his skin. The Fritos bag was about five meters ahead of him, obscured by leaves. He made no move for it. The timing would have to be perfect.
