Angel Face Page 19

  Al Zeffri’s a simple man. Certainty appeals to him and he’s happiest when he only has to think about one thing at a time. Right now he believes, with all his heart and soul, and quite correctly, that his life is hanging by a thread. If he does anything at all to antagonize the man with the gun, his parents will be forced to bear the costs of a funeral they can’t afford. He obeys Carter, retreating to the foot of the stairs, assuming the position.

  Carter lets the Glock fall to his side as he moves from one fallen enemy to another, checking for a pulse, pronouncing each man dead. That task complete, he approaches Al.

  ‘You’re in over your head,’ he explains. ‘I’m better than you, better trained and better prepared. Do you understand that?’

  Zeffri glances at his buddies as he performs a simple calculation. Four men assigned to guard the basement, three of them dead, one attacker who’s calm as a fuckin’ robot. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I get it.’

  Carter touches the Glock’s barrel to the top of Al’s head as he skirts the man to climb the stairs. He retrieves his tool bag and half-drags it back down, finally dropping it into Al’s lap.

  ‘You’re going to break into Bobby’s office.’

  ‘The Bunker?’

  ‘Yeah, the Bunker.’ Carter’s ribs are on fire, but his tone conveys certainty. ‘If you do a good job, if you work real hard, I’m going to let you live. You want to live, right?’

  ‘Yeah, I do.’

  ‘Good. Now carry the bag to the office door, put it down, then kneel down beside it. Understand? Carry the bag, drop the bag, kneel. Do it now.’

  Carter follows Al across the basement. The kid’s shoulders are slumped and his head’s slightly bowed. He’s apparently surrendered. Carter finds himself annoyed. Keeping his promise will entail logistical problems – there’s no convenient place to confine the gangster and there are guns everywhere – problems he doesn’t have time to resolve. Carter glances at his watch: eighteen minutes.

  When Al drops to his knees, Carter issues a series of commands, pausing between each until the task is completed.

  Take the rifle out of the bag and hand it to me. Take the propane torch out of the bag and place it next to you. Take the pry bar out of the bag and lay it next to the torch. Take the hammer out and lay it next to the pry bar. Take out the chisel and lay it next to the hammer.

  Al obeys each command. He doesn’t protest, doesn’t ask any questions, doesn’t say anything until Carter instructs him to close the bag. Then he manages a wistful, ‘OK?’

  ‘Yeah, so far, so good. But it gets a little tricky now. Have you ever used a torch?’

  ‘Yeah, I used to work demolition.’

  Carter tosses him a cigarette lighter. ‘See, what we’re gonna do is burn away the wood around the lock so the door will open with the lock still in place. But what I want you to do right now is run your finger around the lock. Do it.’

  Al’s right forefinger traces the edge of the lock. Then he looks up, his dark eyes reminding Carter of a puppy’s.

  ‘Good, Al, very good. That’s the part you’re going to burn. Only there’s a problem. Can you guess what it is?’

  ‘You’re afraid I’ll try to burn you?’

  ‘No, that’s not it. If you move on me, I’ll kill you without hesitation. I think you know that. The problem is that the door might catch on fire. See, there are no windows in the basement and the dinky ventilation system won’t handle the smoke, so we can’t have a fire. You with me so far?’

  ‘No fire.’

  ‘Exactly. Use the propane torch to char the wood …’

  ‘Char?’

  ‘Blacken. Use the propane torch until the wood turns black, then use the hammer and the chisel to gouge the black part away. After you gouge out as much as possible, use the torch to blacken some more.’

  Carter positions himself fifteen feet to Al’s left and slightly behind him. Now he can watch the kid and the stairway at the same time. If there’s to be an intrusion, it will have to come down those steps.

  ‘Start now, Al. Light the torch.’

  The process is slow, as Carter expected even before he came down the stairs. Perhaps three inches thick, the door is made of seasoned oak. It shows little tendency to char, much less burn, and Al’s forced to wield the hammer and chisel again and again. Five minutes pass, then ten, then fifteen, with Carter urging his captive to work harder. The pain in Carter’s ribcage has eased off, but he’s not all that confident about his ability to re-climb the rope and haul up two heavy bags afterward.

  ‘OK, Al, you’ve done good work. You’re almost through. Now, stand up and kick the door in.’

  Al’s as slow and uncoordinated as he is big and strong. The remaining wood around the lock splinters, but doesn’t break on his first, second or third kick. Carter decides to motivate him.

  ‘If you don’t break through that door, and I mean right the fuck now,’ he declares, his tone matter-of-fact, ‘I’ll kill you and do it myself.’

  Al launches himself at the door, slamming his shoulder and his head into the wood. Somehow, he misses the lock, which remains attached to the frame when the door crashes open, offering next to no resistance. That leaves Al to land in a stunned heap on the brown carpet in Bobby’s office.

  Carter glances at his watch: forty-two minutes. He follows Al into the office, flips the light switch and looks around. There’s nothing – no suitcase, no box – large enough to hold the sort of money he’s hoping to find. That leaves the room’s two closets.

  ‘Get up, Al.’

  ‘I think I hurt my head.’

  ‘Get up, Al.’

  Al presses a hand to the right side of his head and staggers to his feet. ‘I did what you asked me. I did it.’

  ‘True enough, but you’re not quite finished.’

  Carter’s reminded of the game show, Let’s Make A Deal. Is the prize behind door number one or door number two? In this case, he’s allowed to try both, which doesn’t mean, of course, that he won’t be zonked. Which doesn’t mean that he hasn’t killed three men for nothing.

  Carter points to the closet door furthest away, the smaller of the two, and says, ‘Open that door.’

  Al complies, a half-assed smile on his face. His usefulness has pretty much come to an end and he knows it. Shelves dominate the closet’s interior, from top to bottom. There’s a mop, a bucket and a vacuum cleaner jammed between the shelves and the door, but no suitcase.

  ‘The other one now.’

  Despite his outward calm, Carter releases a held breath when Al pulls the door open to reveal a suitcase next to a bag of golf clubs. That it should be unprotected seems impossible at first glance, at least to Carter, but there’s a simple explanation. Bobby never kept money in his office because his office would be the first place searched by the cops if he became the target of an investigation. Carter’s emergence forced him to bring the money where he could protect it with muscle, a perfectly rational decision. If he’d left the money in the Bronx, it would already be gone.

  ‘Take out the suitcase, lay it on the desk and open it.’

  Carter half-expects the suitcase to be locked, but it’s not. Opened, it reveals stacks of banded hundreds and fifties. Carter looks down at his watch: forty-six minutes.

  ‘I need you to move a little faster, Al. First, close the suitcase. Then put the tools back in the bag and carry the suitcase and the bag to the stairs. Do it now.’

  ‘Please …’

  ‘Do it now, Al.’

  Al’s expression is glum, but he doesn’t protest. He repacks the tool bag, picks up the bag and the suitcase and walks toward the stairwell. Carter’s now thinking that his night’s work is almost over, but it’s not to be. As Al lays his burdens down, the radio strapped to Carter’s belt clicks twice. Bobby Ditto’s come to play. He’s come to play and he’s brought a friend along, hopefully the Blade.

  Carter waits until Al turns to face him. In combat, this kind of decision, whether to kill a prisoner, wa
s beyond his pay grade. Now he displays the enlisted man’s first instinct, which is to cut through red tape. He puts a bullet into Al’s right knee, then silences the kid’s scream by slamming the Glock into the side of his head.

  TWENTY-NINE

  Carter was right about everything. Damn him. The minutes are dragging, every second an opportunity for self-torment. Angel’s sitting in the back of the van, in the dark, surrounded by the cop’s useless tracking equipment, her galloping imagination leaping from one catastrophe to another. Just now, her attention has turned to the walkie-talkie, the one strapped to Carter’s belt. Walkie-talkies have a limited range, as Carter explained when he instructed her in their use. If the men inside the warehouse defeat Carter – if they kill him, let’s be honest – the next item on their agenda will be whoever’s on the other end of the walkie-talkie. That would be Angel Tamanaka, thank you.

  Angel fishes through her purse, pushing the detritus aside, until she finds the little automatic tucked beneath the dish towel. She takes the weapon out and stares down, the sight of it producing a rueful laugh as she remembers how powerful she felt when she first cradled it in her palm. Now she’s envisioning Carter’s Glock, envisioning his Glock while she imagines the assault rifles and street-sweeper shotguns available to the gangsters inside the warehouse.

  Well, she finally decides, the little gun definitely has one practical application. She can put it to her head and pull the trigger before allowing herself to be captured.

  Angel’s itching to make a hasty retreat. The van’s key is in the ignition. She need only give it a little twist, need only turn the wheel slightly to avoid the graffiti-covered panel truck in front of her, need only step on the gas and …

  Angel’s train of thought comes to an abrupt stop, as if that train had jumped the tracks to slam into the side of a mountain. Two blocks away, a car turns on to the block, its headlights so bright in the side-view mirror that Angel can’t tell the make or the model. But then the vehicle passes beneath the only working street lamp on the next block and the light bar spanning the roof leaps out at her. Cops.

  Angel’s mind kicks back into high gear, the transition between stunned and warp speed too brief to measure. What if Carter shows up right now, a suitcase tucked beneath his arm and who knows how many bodies left behind? What if the cops are responding to a silent alarm inside the warehouse and they catch him off-guard? What if they decide to check out the van? What will she tell them when they find her crouched in the back?

  Driver fatigue is responsible for soooooooooooo many accidents. I just had to take a nap.

  Yeah, that’d work. Angel can almost feel the cuffs settling around her wrists, almost hear the cops radio for back-up. Which leads her to another question. What if a judge sentenced her to spend the rest of her life in a cage? How would she feel, standing there, listening, her lawyer’s attention already straying to the next defendant on her list? This is a question Carter’s already posed, a question she left unanswered.

  Paralyzed by fear, Angel doesn’t move. A good thing, too, because the cops are simply patrolling the sector assigned to them, their mission as innocent as a donut run, and just as routine. Angel hunches down as the patrol car slides past. Now she can see the cops in silhouette, a man and a woman, both on their cellphones. At the corner, they take a right and head toward the Ikea box store on the waterfront.

  Angel doesn’t have to check her pulse. Her heart’s thudding against her ribs, the beats coming so fast she’s unable to count them. And the saddest part is that risk is what she signed up for, the great adventure, a walk on a side that’s proving much too wild for the likes of Angel Tamanaka. And still no sign of Carter, no signal from the man who warned her, again and again, that he wasn’t invulnerable, had no super powers, and might not survive his next violent encounter.

  Angel extends her wrist into the front seat where there’s enough light to read the hands on her watch. Forty-one minutes. It might as well be forty-one years. She falls back against the seat and methodically surveys her surroundings. All quiet, except for her out-of-control brain, which again poses a series of what-if questions.

  What if she panicked when the cops turned on to the street two blocks away? What if she jumped into the front, started the van and tried to flee? What if she signaled Carter and he now believed, wrongly, that the cops presented a threat? What if he aborted the operation? What if he came out shooting?

  Enough, enough. Angel covers her ears and shakes her head violently, her hair whipping the sides of her face hard enough to sting. Somehow, a memory surfaces, something a cop boyfriend told her a few months after she arrived in New York. Fight, flight or fright, he’d insisted, are the only possible reactions to a sudden threat. You ran away, or you raised your fists, or you just plain froze. Angel had taken the third path, that was obvious, and she didn’t fault herself. But her cop lover had been wrong. There was a fourth way, a way embodied by Leonard Carter. Fear leads to panic, he’d insisted, and panic is the ultimate enemy. Stay calm, fight well.

  Angel’s attention is drawn by movement on the left side of the windshield. Across the street, a wharf rat makes its way along a corrugated fence. The creature slithers a few yards, its back hunched, then stops to raise its snout and sniff the air before dashing forward again. Initially repulsed, Angel watches the animal until it comes upon a small gap in the fence and wriggles through.

  Somehow, the rat’s manifest caution serves to calm Angel. Though subject to no imminent threat, it had remained supremely vigilant, nose twitching, head turning, as if surrounded by enemies. Angel checks her watch before settling down. Forty-five minutes. Fifteen lifetimes to go.

  In fact, only three lifetimes pass, three minutes, before Bobby Ditto’s armored Ford describes the same left turn made by the cops five minutes before. Angel recognizes the car immediately, but this time she manages to check a rising panic. She signals Carter first, then drops the radio on the seat and tells herself to think carefully. There are two men in the vehicle that slides past the van, its sound system blaring, Bobby Ditto and the other one, the one who grabbed her ass as they walked down the street on the day Carter rescued her. The one who spelled out exactly what sadistic games he intended to play with her in the hours preceding her death.

  Angel slides the side door open and gets out before the Explorer comes to a stop in front of the warehouse. Her eyes criss-cross her surroundings, evaluating risk and reward. Crouching, she dashes across the street, exposed for a few seconds, until she finally drops to a knee before the corrugated fence previously traversed by the rat. She raises the little gun and focuses on the end of the block, fifty feet distant. If she was spotted as she crossed the street, Bobby and his buddy – the Blade, that’s his name – will have to come around the corner to stand directly in her line of fire. Not that she’s likely to hit anything from this distance with a poorly manufactured .32, but one thing is clear to her. She didn’t freeze and she didn’t flee. That means Bobby and the Blade have to be incapacitated, at the very least, for her and her partner to survive. Fight being the only option still on the table.

  Angel gets to her feet, takes a few steps and comes to a stop, the gun held out in front of her, steeling herself against a sudden assault, prepared as Carter might prepare, or so she hopes. She pauses long enough to draw a breath and release it slowly, then continues to advance, in fits and starts, until the sound system in the Explorer suddenly cuts off and she hears Bobby Ditto shout, ‘What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.’

  The Blade echoes his boss. ‘What, what, what?’ he asks.

  ‘Get around here!’

  ‘Get around where?’

  ‘Get around here, ya fuck. Just do it.’

  Propelled by his boss’s exasperated tone, the Blade circles the car. ‘You wanna tell me what’s happenin’?’

  ‘Donny’s not answerin’. And don’t tell me he’s not gettin’ a signal. I spoke to him this afternoon.’ Bobby punches Donny Thorn’s number into his c
ellphone for the second time. He listens through four ringtones, all the way to the faggy message at the end: Hi, this is Donny. I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’d care to leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

  ‘Bein’ as it’s four o’clock in the morning, maybe Donny shut off his phone,’ the Blade suggests. ‘I mean, the alarm on the front door is still set. You can see the red light blinkin’ from here.’

  Bobby looks at the light, his mind still whirling. ‘What about the roof? Did you lock down the skylights?’

  ‘Yeah, with case-hardened padlocks, but even if Carter beat the locks some way, there’s still four men protectin’ your money. Unless you think Carter broke through the door in the basement and whacked four men before they could even warn us. I mean, we’re not talkin’ about punks.’

  Bobby’s heart rate drops a notch or two, but he doesn’t move. The armored Explorer now stands between him and the warehouse, which is just the way he likes it. Carter might be anywhere, he might be nowhere. Bobby draws the H&K .40 cal tucked into his waistband as he studies the truck yard and the roofline, his gaze intent. But there’s little to be learned, what with the moon having set and working street lights few and far between. The trucks in the yard are parked haphazardly, creating impenetrable shadows, while the ledge on the roof, long in need of repair, is as broken and irregular as the Blade’s teeth after the cops worked him over.

  ‘Tell ya what, Marco,’ Bobby says. ‘How ’bout you stroll through the front door and check it out for yourself? Here, I’ll give ya the fuckin’ keys.’

  The Blade’s face reddens, but he doesn’t take the challenge, in part because he’s not armed. ‘All right, Bobby, I get the point. So, now whatta we do? Wait for somebody to come out?’

  ‘No, lemme try one more thing.’ Bobby slides the gun inside his waistband, then scrolls through his phone’s call log. ‘I know I called him a couple of weeks ago,’ he tells the Blade.