Judging by the expression on his face, Thomas considered this a haunting revelation. Dr. Kruk, however, remained unfazed.
“You really think that your father is capable of murder?”
Thomas’s answer was immediate.
“Oh, I know he is, Doc. I know, because he has admitted to killing before. When I was younger, he spoke about the time he spent in Colombia… something about helping some US government agency or group doing a survey there. I’m pretty sure that’s where he met Raul, too. He said that there was this militant group who had kidnapped a bunch of locals, forced them into making heroin in the jungle. He said he had to ‘knock them off’—he used the same words.” Thomas paused to take a deep, shuddering breath. “Why is he doing this, Doc? Why would he get messed up in this sort of thing? I mean, I don’t know how much my dad is worth, but it’s gotta be up there, eight, maybe nine figures. Why would he do this?”
“Power,” Dr. Kruk blurted.
Drake heard the word in stereo: from the TV and from Dr. Kruk, who was standing not 15 feet away, still rummaging through one of the boxes.
He leaned forward and pressed the pause button.
“What the fuck you doing over there, Kruk?”
The doctor looked over at him, a smile on his face—a nearly identical smile to the one that was frozen on the video.
“There’s something else you need, Drake. Just keep watching, you’ll see.”
Drake frowned and pressed play.
“Yeah, power… I guess. I think that’s what it’s all about with him. What it’s always been about. But this… this is taking it too far.”
Dr. Mark Kruk appeared to think this over for a moment.
“And how do you feel about this, exactly? How does this pursuit of power make you feel?”
Drake knew little about how these sessions were supposed to go, but there was something clearly off with this discussion.
The man had just admitted to overhearing his father plan a murder, yet Dr. Kruk was only focused on the idea of ‘power’.
“It’s not for me. I mean, I’m not naive; I know that it’s his money that enables myself, Clarissa, and Thomas Jr. to live the life we do. But I don’t need it… I don’t need any of it. To be honest, I think I would be a happier man today if he just spent more time with me as a kid, instead of just trying to maximize revenue… and power.”
Dr. Kruk scribbled something before replying.
“Do you think that perhaps your lack of motivation for power—a clear difference between you and your father, and your brother Wesley as per our previous discussions, has put in rife between your relationship? Perhaps this is why you believe that your father is capable of these horrible deeds, of the unimaginable. I will stress again that often times a strong confirmation bias is at play when our emotions are fraught. For instance, how can you be so certain that your father and his partner weren’t just discussing a business proposition and your mind filled in the blanks?”
Thomas lifted his eyes.
“I thought the same thing, Doc. That’s why I watched the tape multiple times.”
The comment took Dr. Mark Kruk by surprise and for the first time since the tape began, his expression changed.
“The tape?”
Thomas nodded.
“Yeah,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a small SD card. “Just in case I was making things up, I decided to take a video of the whole thing.”
Chapter 67
“What the hell are we going to do now?” Screech asked, his heart racing. When Yasiv didn’t immediately answer, he repeated the question.
“I’m thinking,” Yasiv replied. Screech watched intently as the man pulled a worn piece of paper out of his pocket.
He looked at it, nodded to himself, and then turned to Screech.
“I have an idea. Tuck your gun into the back of your pants and follow my lead.”
The comment was both ambiguous and ominous at the same time. Just before Yasiv turned the corner, Screech reached out for him.
“Yasiv!” he hissed. “What the fuck? What are we doing?”
But Yasiv shrugged him off and started around the corner. Screech cursed and then followed.
They hadn’t made it five yards before the man with a machine gun strapped to his chest noticed them.
“Who the fuck are you?”
He was a large, hulking man with a shaved head and a scar that ran from his earlobe all the way to the corner of his mouth.
Yasiv tapped the shield on his belt.
“Palmer sent me,” he said as he continued forward.
Palmer? What the hell is he talking about?
Screech’s heart was racing so quickly now that it was all he could do to keep from rocking with every beat. Sweat started to drip down his forehead, and he tried his best to keep a straight face.
“Yeah?” the big man asked, the grip on the butt of his rifle loosening.
Yasiv nodded.
“Yeah, said he couldn’t reach Horatio—has a message for him.”
Horatio? Who the fuck is Horatio?
Screech felt as if he had stepped into the Twilight Zone.
The guard pressed his lips together tightly and shook his head.
“I didn’t get no message.”
“You want to ask him yourself?” Yasiv asked, slowly and deliberately reaching down to his belt. Instead of going for his gun, Screech watched as the man withdrew his walkie-talkie and held it out. “Ask him yourself, then. Go on.”
The big man let go of his gun and reached for the walkie.
But he never grabbed it.
To Screech’s shock, Yasiv managed to flip it around and swing it in a wide arc. It cracked off the side of the man’s head and his eyes went wide. There was a short pause as if time itself had stopped, and then he dropped to his knees. The man brought his hands up to the wound on his head, his face filled with shock.
Yasiv hit him again, this time in the temple.
The guard continued his descent and collapsed to the ground where he went silent.
Yasiv turned to Screech, the now shattered walkie-talkie falling from his hand in bits.
“Fucking amateur,” he said.
Screech gaped.
“I thought—I thought we were just going to do recon.”
Yasiv shrugged.
“I saw it in his eyes; he wasn’t going to let us in there. I don’t think he was going to let us walk away, either.”
As Yasiv grabbed the door that the guard had been standing in front of and started to open it, Screech glanced down at the man’s fallen body.
“He’s a big fella, he’ll be fine,” Yasiv said as he pulled the door wide.
Screech had so many questions, but he never got a chance to ask any of them. Sergeant Henry Yasiv was on the move again, and he found himself following after like an obedient puppy.
Chapter 68
A tape! Thomas Smith has a tape of his father talking about the heroin!
The thought reverberated inside Drake’s skull.
He must have made a sound, too—a gasp, perhaps, because Hanna looked over at him.
But before she could say anything, they both turned to face the garage door, which had started to close. It took a moment for Drake’s eyes, having been locked on the CRT TV for so long, to focus.
And then he sprang into action.
“Kruk!”
Dr. Mark Kruk had abandoned the box he was searching through and was now standing on the other side of the door. He offered Drake a smile, a curt nod, and then he started to run.
“Fuck!” Drake yelled as he broke into a sprint, Hanna at his heels.
Under normal circumstances, he might have been able to slide underneath the closing door, Indiana Jones style, but nothing about this was normal. Drake had been battered and bruised and his body no longer wanted to listen to his commands.
His first thought when it became clear that he wasn’t going to make it in time, was to slide his foot ben
eath the door to keep it from closing completely. But then Drake remembered how solid it had been when he’d knocked on it; he had no desire to add a crushed foot to his inventory of injuries.
Hanna had been slow to react as well, and while she was faster than Drake, she too came up short.
Uttering a stream of obscenities, Drake resorted to pounding on the door with both fists, but the only thing this served to do was to re-aggravate the ringing in his ears.
Hanna’s efforts were more productive; she was fiddling with the control box on the inside of the door. As she tried desperately to open it, Drake stared at her, unable to believe what had just happened.
They’d left the bastard alone for less than five minutes and in that time he somehow managed to outsmart them both.
Drake had just facilitated the release of a serial killer, a man who was hopelessly obsessed with his ex-partner, Chase Adams.
Furious, he reared back with his right hand and punched the door as hard as he could.
A shockwave of agony traveled up his wrist and he immediately tried to shake the pain away.
“Goddamnit!”
A spray of sparks in his periphery drew his eyes over to Hanna who had managed to break open the box with the fingerprint scanner. She used her car keys to tease a pair of wires loose and then brushed their frayed ends together.
The lights dimmed momentarily, and then, to Drake’s surprise, the door started opening again.
It rose about three feet before he dropped to his belly and slid through the opening.
Pulling himself to his feet, he stared up and down the narrow alleyway, peering around Hanna’s parked VW.
But Dr. Mark Kruk was nowhere to be seen.
“Kruk! Kruk!” he yelled at the top of his lungs. “We had a deal!”
“Any sign of him?” Hanna asked.
Drake didn’t answer; it seemed impossible that the doctor could have gotten far given that the door had been closed for less than a couple of minutes, but he was.
“He has to be close,” Hanna said, as if reading his mind. “After all, he’s still handcuffed.” She hurried to her car and opened the door. “Come on, Drake. Get in!”
Drake hesitated.
“Not without the tape,” he said, starting back toward the garage.
He grabbed the tape out of the VCR and was heading toward the VW when something caught his eye.
The light was reflecting off something metal in the box that Kruk had been searching through.
“He’s gone,” Drake said, picking up the set of handcuffs and holding them out for Hanna to see.
The woman swore and got out of the car. As she made her way over to him, Drake looked inside the box. There was a note lying on top of a stack of files.
“New deal—I give you the video and I get to go free,” he read out loud.
Beneath the note was an SD card taped to what looked like a photograph that was folded in half.
There was no way of knowing if this was the SD card that Thomas had given to Dr. Kruk all those years ago, but so far everything that the doctor had promised had come to fruition.
And if there really was a video of Ken Smith speaking to Raul about getting heroin into the city on it, it was all the evidence he needed.
Drake peeled the SD card free and held it up to the light.
“Is that it?” Hana asked. “Is that the video?”
Drake shrugged.
“I dunno,” he admitted, slipping it into his pocket. He was about to throw the photograph to the floor with the note when he realized that it looked familiar.
Squinting, Drake peeled the rest of the tape away. And then his heart skipped a beat.
It was the photograph of Jasmine holding the brick of heroin; it even looked like the original. Only it had been taken in landscape mode, not portrait as he’d first seen it when Raul had left it on his coffee table in an attempt to blackmail him.
Drake didn’t want to unfold the photo; he didn’t think he could handle seeing the rest of the image.
But he couldn’t help himself, either.
“Please,” he said as his trembling fingers bent the glossy paper.
Then he moaned and dropped it to the floor.
Chapter 69
The inside of the warehouse was not that different from the exterior: crumbling and dirty and in a general state of disrepair.
But Screech didn’t let this fool him. You didn’t put an armed guard outside an abandoned building unless you had something to hide.
Yasiv led the way, using his flashlight to cast an eerie glow down the hallway. Eventually, they came to a fork, and then the man turned the light to the floor. The cracked linoleum on the path to the left was covered in a layer of dust, but the right seemed cleaner. Not clean, by any stretch, but Screech could make out the cheap design on what might have once been fashionable tiles.
“This way,” Yasiv said, turning right.
They moved slowly, both of them holding their guns out in front of them. The deeper they went into the warehouse, the warmer it seemed to get, and Screech found that he had to blink constantly to keep the sweat out of his eyes.
Fifteen or twenty paces later, they heard the voices. Slowing to a mere crawl, Yasiv clicked off the light just as Screech made out the outline of a large door ahead.
“The order’s come in, we gotta get this place shut down and cleared out.”
“I’m just wrapping up here—I need to finish two more reactions and I’ll have enough ohmefentanyl to blend with the entire supply that came in. I just need fifteen minutes.”
“The order has come in,” the first man repeated. “Shut it down.”
The next time they heard the voices, they seemed more distant.
“It’s taken three days to get to this point, if I shut it down now it’ll take at least that long to get it up and running again. Not to mention we’ll have to get more reagents. Just give me—”
“I said, burn this fucking place to the ground. Ken’s orders.”
Eyes wide, Screech glanced over at Yasiv. He could barely make out the man’s features in the dark.
“What now?” he whispered, dreading the answer even before it came.
He wanted Yasiv to say that they would head back outside and wait for backup. That they would call someone in who was a professional, a team of people perhaps, who would raid the place.
NYPD, ATF, FBI, NRA, the fucking IRS… Screech didn’t care who, provided he could retreat to the safety of the car.
Better still, back to Triple D.
But there was no ignoring those ominous words: burn this place to the fucking ground.
“There’s more than enough for probable cause,” Yasiv whispered back. “Screech, stay behind me. No matter what happens, stay behind me.”
Chapter 70
The radio on the dash suddenly squawked to life and Leroy almost pissed himself.
He’d been drifting in and out of consciousness, catching up on many nights of lost sleep, when the first blast of static filled the car.
“Sergeant Yasiv, come in. Over.” There was a short pause during which Leroy debated answering the call before cursing himself for being so foolish. “Sergeant Yasiv, come in. Over.”
Leroy just stared at the radio, his breathing shallow as if dispatch could hear him even though he hadn’t touched anything.
“Yasiv, there’s been an officer involved shooting—Officers Pontiac and Dalton have been killed, gunned down by local gang members. Police arrived on scene and engaged. Two gang members were also killed during the shootout. Your presence is requested before IA and RHA arrive. Over.”
Leroy’s face drooped.
Dead… Pontiac and Dalton were dead.
He pictured their smug expressions as he came sprinting up to his apartment after it had been vandalized, after his mother had been assaulted.
And then he pictured them again when they’d picked him up on the side of the road as he tried to return the heroin to Chris and his gang
.
He thought they were going to kill him; just another young black kid killed while trying to resist arrest.
But Sergeant Yasiv had saved him and now they were the ones who had been killed.
He knew it was wrong to feel pleasure under these circumstances. His mother had told him that it was a sin to revel in the pain of others.
But he couldn’t help it.
They were dead… the cops who had brained him and tried to put him in prison were killed by gangbangers who in turn had been gunned down by the police.
Even though dispatch hadn’t mentioned the names of the gangbangers, he knew who they were.
It was Chris and BT coming back for their heroin. He just knew it.
And this realization caused him to smile even harder, despite the pain from the bruises on his face.
They were all dead.
“Sergeant Yasiv, you there? Come in. Over.”
It wasn’t just pleasure he felt, but vindication.
Vindication for his dead brother who only wanted Leroy to get out. To leave the confines of the ghetto.
“Good,” he whispered.
“We tried reaching on your walkie-talkie, but it isn’t going through. Over and out.”
I’ve got to tell Yasiv, Leroy thought suddenly. I have to tell him that they’re dead, that I can go home now.
He reached for the door and pulled it open. A few seconds later, he was heading down the side of the building in the direction that he’d seen Yasiv and Screech disappear.
Chapter 71
Yasiv brought his finger to his lips. They could still hear footsteps on the other side of the door, but they were fading fast.
Detective Damien Drake series Box Set 2 Page 55
