by Seth Harwood
Shaw never has been one to make a quiet entry.
Like Arnold in Predator, Shaw lets out a jungle yell that takes him back to his old days on South American Ops, places that the US Government would never admit to having gone. He sees red for a moment, but with Jack and the Samoan bodyguard in the middle of things, it’s too risky to start shooting up some Russians. He watches as the two guys standing with their backs to him turn around and promptly jump behind Jack and the Samoan.
Beside Akakievich, a rolling metal table stands off to the side of Jack’s chair and the others. Shaw knows he can get a clear shot at that, at least, and he takes it out, shoots it back and onto its side in a quick burst from the AK. Alexi hides behind Jack, but Jack’s not fighting him off or pushing him out into the open where Shaw can draw a bead on him. For this rescue attempt to work, Jack’s going to need to bring more to the bargain.
For all Shaw did with the Leatherman to the Samoan—Shaw thinks his name might be Freeman—and all the bullets Jack put in him, Shaw’s got to give the big man some serious credit; he’s still fighting off the guys around him with one hand and a cast on the other, from a wheelchair! He throws the guy trying to hide behind him off to the side, on top of the guy who’s already knocked out, and Shaw puts a burst of bullets through his arm, his side, and his head.
“All of you fucks come clean,” Shaw says. “Stand up and show me your hands. This shit is about done right here and right now.” He starts toward the others with his gun raised. “Don’t make me end your shit right here!”
Alexi calls out from behind Jack, “Welcome to our party, Officer Shaw. We are glad that you are here. Would you like some drugs?” And as he finishes saying this, Alexi tosses something in Shaw’s direction, something that flies on a high arc across big room, almost hitting one of the beams on the ceiling before it starts its descent toward Shaw. He looks up and in the moment he does, he knows it’s a grenade and that his first instinct was one hundred percent the wrong thing to do.
In that moment, he notices more than its size and trajectory, he recognizes it’s a flashbang, a stun grenade with its cylindrical shape and black color. It goes off before he can look away; almost at the same time as he recognizes this, it explodes in a blinding flash of light and a boom so loud that it knocks him back on his ass.
He blinks and closes his eyes, shields his face, but he still sees the image of the flashbang high in the air against the ceiling. And that’s all he can see, as if its image is burned onto his retinas. It is.
Shaw yells. He can barely hear his own voice; it sounds like it comes from so far away. He keeps the gun up, hoping for some sign of motion that will tell him where to shoot. His vision should be back in a few seconds. His hearing, he’s not so sure of.
But even close to deaf, Shaw still hears the rumble and cracking of another AK being fired off to his right. He rolls away from it and comes up into a crouch. That’s when something like a baseball bat hits him across the shoulder and knocks him face first into what feels like a light metal table. He gets a glimpse of the floor, bright green spots obscuring most of it, but his vision is slowly returning.
Then something else lands on top of him and a punch clips him in the side of the head.
Someone says something to him in an angry Russian, and Shaw covers his face with his arms. He feels the AK ripped out from under him and hears it crash into something else behind him somewhere. From the direction of the front wall of the building, he hears someone else calling out in Russian, and then a loud crash to his right, like a huge piece of furniture getting pushed down the stairs.
“Officer Alvin Shaw.” It’s Akakievich yelling, somewhere above and behind him now. Shaw turns his head in the direction of the voice, but strong hands clamp around his neck. It still feels like there’s a table on his chest.
Shaw tries to turn his head in the direction of the voice. He can’t see Akakievich, but he’s starting to see the wide white face of the man who’s above him, trying to choke his head off. Even with what’s left of the bright spots, Shaw can make out a thick bent nose that’s been broken a few times and a vein popping out of the guy’s forehead.
“It is good time for you to meet Sasha?” Akakievich gestures to the guy on top of Shaw. “Yes, it is good time to meet Sasha.” And the guy, Sasha, punches Shaw in the face.
“Yo, fuck this.” Shaw’s got his sight back now and his hearing too. He punches Sasha in the ribs with a quick hit, then when the guy shifts his weight from that, he knees him hard in the same place. This really moves Sasha out of the way. As Shaw rolls the metal table off of himself, he pushes it at Akakievich. When he gets to a crouch, he hits Sasha with all he’s got: Sasha’s on his hands and knees and from the side, Shaw can see the bottom of his chin. This is where he puts the punch—right onto the floor is where Sasha’s face winds up when he delivers. Shaw stands tall with Akakievich in front of him, and notices for the first time that old Alexi Akakievich is now sporting a big swollen black eye.
“Look at your Jack Palms,” Alexi says. “He begged me for the drugs, for the white gold, as you call it.”
Shaw looks over at Jack: alone now, he sits immobile in his chair, a strap across his chest. Freeman has lost his fight with the other Russian big man and is getting worked over on the other side of the room by two guys now. He’s starting to look pretty messy.
“Look at you,” Shaw says. “Jack did that to your eye?”
“And he killed your friend the officer Hopkins.”
“Who?”
“Jack Palms.”
Shaw shakes his head.
“You will find a pistol on the ground by his side with his prints on it. You will also find a bullet in the head of your Mills Hopkins that forensics will match to the same weapon.” Alexi shrugs. “It will be easy to prove.”
“If the police ever get here.”
Alexi laughs at this, tells Shaw that they’re already on their way.
“Bullshit.”
“You think the bullshit?”
“Oh, fuck this.” Shaw steps toward Alexi and swings for the bald, bearded head. But Alexi’s quick, moves much faster than Shaw would have given him credit for; he blocks the punch with his forearm, gets Shaw hung up with his arm extended and his side open, and slams home a fast jab into his ribs.
Shaw moves back with his side stinging. He shakes it off and comes back at Akakievich with a whole new sense of urgency and anger.
35. Gannon Joins the Party
Jane Gannon watches as Vlade starts up the stairs to the warehouse’s second level and then, just as Vlade gets halfway up, a big metal desk starts its way down. Above the sounds of everything else going on—shouting, the ring of the explosion or whatever else just went off upstairs and shots fired—the sound of a metal desk banging its way down a set of stairs beats them all.
She freezes at the sight of the falling desk, then gets pushed up against the wall as Niki rushes past her. She watches as Vlade does his best to catch the desk, stop it in mid-fall, and gets caught under it. On one hand, he’s stopped the desk, but on the other, he’s now holding its weight over his head while standing on uneven stairs. Vlade screams as he does this, a blood-tensing sound that she would have never imagined this serious, all-business Czech guy to make. Then she remembers what she’s read in his file and she corrects herself: he’s not Czech, he was Russian originally and defected. Vlade and Niki are both ex-KGB defectors from the fall of the Bloc.
Niki gets up under the desk with Vlade and helps him hold it. Gannon thinks of going up to help them, but she’s frozen about the best choice. Suddenly Al looks at her, and she waves him on; maybe she’s not going to be any help with holding a desk, but he definitely can be.
Gannon steps out to the bottom of the stairwell and yells, “I’m covering you guys.” She flips the safety on her Beretta to off and takes aim at the gap above the desk at the top of the stairs. As soon as the first Russian face pops out on the second floor—a guy with the barrel of an AK-47 po
inted down at them—she rips off two shots to his head. She knows at least one of them hit its mark.
“Lower it slowly,” Vlade yells, and the others start walking the desk down the half-flight of steps. Gannon backs up to give them room, her gun still trained on the gap above.
She hears a dull moan and feels hands grab her by the shoulders. A huge Russian comes at her and tries to wrap her up in some kind of bear hug. The Russian Crush, or some Siberian wrestling move like that.
She slams her elbow into the big guy’s belly and he huffs loud over her shoulder, his arms relaxing enough that she can turn around to face him. In the second before she hits him, Gannon notices the guy’s face is already in bad shape; his nose looks broken badly across its bridge, and he’s got blood around the lower half of his face. He’s as tall as they come, but not so tall that she can’t reach him with a strong uppercut featuring a handful of Beretta handle. She catches him right up under the chin with it, and his face splits open right along his jaw about an inch from his chin.
He lets Gannon go to bring his hands up to his face, blood gushing between his fingers. She looks at the bottom of the Beretta’s handle, sees that a part of the clip has a tear of skin attached to it.
“Oh, that’s got to hurt,” she says, and punches the fat guy straight in his nut sack with her other hand. He’s just tall enough for this to work perfectly. “Sorry, baby,” she tells him, as he falls to his knees.
When Gannon turns back toward the others, she sees the desk safely lowered to the foot of the stairs, and Niki climbing over it to start making his way up. Al lets off a few rounds from his weapon above Niki, shooting at a wall on the second level.
He’s probably come within a foot of shooting his friend, shot off an automatic weapon with the barrel pointing in his friend’s direction, and this is enough for her to want Al out of the mix for good.
From behind, she brings the handle of her Beretta down hard on the back of Al’s head. He lowers his weapon for a moment and looks around. She hits him again, this time harder. He crumples.
Vlade looks at her in disbelief, but before he can say anything, she says, “Don’t even try to tell me he’d help us here.” She points a finger in Vlade’s face. “Now get this desk out of my fucking way.”
Vlade blinks at her twice; he looks as if he wants to shake his head and make her go away, but he starts pushing the desk to the side before she yells anything else. From above them, she hears more shooting and hopes that Niki and Jack are all right.
Almost as an afterthought, she realizes that Shaw might be up there too, but she knows he doesn’t need her wishes. That animal can handle himself.
36. Niki / Freeman
Niki reaches the top of the staircase and the first thing he sees is a dead man with two bullet holes in his forehead and an AK in his hands. He rolls to his left and moves for cover along the wall, assessing the scene as fast as he can.
This is what he sees: on the left side of the room, Detective Shaw stands toe-to-toe with Akakievich, the cop favoring his right side, and one of Akakievich’s guys pushing himself up onto his hands and knees beside him; on the right side of the room, the first thing Niki sees is two thickly muscled goons working over Freeman Jones, the big Samoan who got shot when the Colombians hit The Coast. He raises the Makarov at the one on Freeman’s right and puts two rounds into his thick shoulder. The guy hits the deck like he dove on it, and as Niki draws a bead on the other goon, he notices a chair just beside him with what looks like Jack Palms strapped into it. With a glance at Shaw and the left side of the room—the officer can handle himself—Niki breaks into a run for the spot where Freeman’s attacker stands. This guy’s not dressed like the others: where they’re mostly just wearing tight shirts and jeans, this guy’s got on a black suit.
He reaches inside its jacket and pulls out a gun, which is all Niki needs to see to get him on the floor and rolling out of sight behind a metal table. The whole room’s covered with what look to be old metal desks, high tables, and tables converted to beds. On two of these closest to Niki, what look like drugged-out teenage girls are tied down by their wrists and ankles. If their eyes weren’t open, Niki would say they’re asleep, but with their eyes open, blank stares on their faces aimed at the ceiling, he knows it can’t be that. Nothing short of being drugged out to the hilt would get this effect. And that’s when he knows that the rumors he’d heard even all the way back in Czech were true: that Akakievich is running not only the sex trade of high-end girls for sale in this city, but a low-end mass sex room where girls lie tied to tables for men to have however they like. And this is where he realizes for certain that Akakievich must die.
Handcuffing him to a couch and letting the American police take care of things was a mistake at The Coast. The American police in this city are good for nothing; they can’t even keep themselves away from hunting their own kind. He shakes his head, knowing they’ll probably be on their way already, hot to arrest Jack and Shaw, the last two people they should be after.
He hears two shots come from the direction of the black suit, knows this guy’s shooting without regard for the girls in his direction, and gets even madder. He starts low-crawling beneath the tables toward Freeman’s chair and the black suit.
Freeman’s taken worse beatings than this in the entirety of an NFL season, but without a doubt this has been the most physically punishing month in his life. And it all started out with that bastard Jack Palms. Fucking Palms. He lifts his chin off his chest and can see Palms within a few feet of him through his left eye, the one that still opens. Palms, that dumb fuck, strapped to his chair and nodding off in a haze of heroin. Why the fuck couldn’t they just shoot him up with a syringe of heroin instead of beating on him? Two fucking guys kicking his ass and only one good hand to protect himself with. A lot of good that did. Freeman looks down at his good hand, sees where they broke his thumb by holding it out and hitting it between the two knuckles with the butt of a gun. Fucking fucks.
Freeman looks at his thumb, sees how fucked up it is, and notices for the first time that the thumb has one less knuckle than the rest of his fingers. The fucking thumb. All the other fingers have three knuckles and the fucking thumb just has two. Now, of course, his thumb bends in three places just like the rest of his fingers, but it never was supposed to. These fucks.
To the right of his chair one of them lies on the ground holding his shoulder where someone just shot him. Hopefully a cop. Freeman looks down at the guy and if he had any appendages he could hit the guy with, anything left that didn’t hurt, he’d hit the guy with all he has. Shit, if he could even move his chair, he’d roll over the guy’s fucking head. But no, he’s got nothing to hit with so he does all he can: he builds up a big bloody loogie and spits it right onto the guy’s face, streaming it across his nose and down his cheek.
The guy looks up at him, pissed all to hell, his sweet ass flattop gelled out and his fancy shirt covered in blood now, and what does the guy do? He fucking takes his good hand and punches Freeman in his leg, just below the place where Jack shot him. And that hurts worse than anything should hurt, worse than getting blasted in the face with a helmet, worse than getting chop-blocked across the side of your knee. This fucking bastard.
So Freeman does what any man would: pain or no pain, screaming agony or no screaming agony, he moves that Goddamned leg and kicks that fucker’s face in four or five times until the guy lies flat out and stops moving altogether.
That’s when this fucking other bastard, this guy in the suit who calls himself Andre, starts bucking off shots right next to Freeman’s head. And Jesus, if everything else wasn’t hurting bad enough, the last thing Freeman needs is his ears to start stinging, worse now than when the explosion went off a few minutes ago. For real, this guy’s gun isn’t three feet from Freeman’s damn head.
“Fuck you,” Freeman says through his bloody lips. Fucked up thumb or no fucked up thumb, he takes what’s left of his “good” hand and knocks that guy’s gun down,
pulls it out of his hands and throws it across the room.
“Now what you going to do?”
Andre looks at him in amazement, acting like he’s the craziest one in the room, and shit, Freeman considers it for a moment—maybe he is. Maybe five seasons in the NFL will do that to you and all the rest of these guys are just pussies. Andre follows up this look with a straight right to Freeman’s nose, what’s left of it, and Freeman’s not sure what he can do back. If he could have just one chance, he’d like to try catching this guy’s fist in his teeth, biting his next punch, and chewing his hand off, but he knows that won’t happen. He goes to stab Andre in his kidney with the fingers of his “good” hand, but just as he’s about to, someone jumps that fuck and takes him to the ground.
It’s a good flying tackle, and if it weren’t for the damn bed with Hopkins on it, the guy would’ve taken Andre a good five feet in the air, but as it is, they both hit Hopkins’s bed at the foot of it and the bed flips over, landing on top of them both. Damn. Freeman shakes his head. The last thing he’d want right now would be to get touched by what’s left of Mills Hopkins.
He tastes blood flowing down his face from his nose and spits a mouthful toward the guy on the floor who now lies unconscious from his kicks.
37. Bite / Jack
As soon as Niki sees Freeman take the black suit’s gun away, he gets going on all fours working up to a run and tackles the guy flat out with all he has. He sees the bloody bed behind the suit and would do his best to take him in another direction, but he doesn’t want to hit Jack. At least he thinks that’s Jack; he’s had a glimpse of the shaved head and the profile from under the tables and, truth is, there’s no one else it could possibly be. Even if the guy looks fucked up and passed out, it’s got to be Jack.
