Quincy said something to Sage that Bianca missed. Sage punched him in the shoulder.
Ah, brotherly love.
“Straight home,” Bianca ordered, rolling down a window.
“Twenty minutes,” Sage retorted over his shoulder.
Bianca waited while the two got in Sage’s car. Quincy gave her a little wave as the Malibu drove away.
According to the dashboard clock, ten minutes of Quincy’s hour remained. She could make that work.
Now she had a plan.
She drove back to the trap house, pulled into the parking lot of the apartment building next door, parked as close to the house as possible, got out and opened the trunk. She’d already disabled both the interior light and the trunk light in honor of the night’s earlier mission, so she didn’t have to worry about them coming on and attracting attention, not that, as far as she could tell, there was anybody around whose attention she needed to not attract. Conversely, the disabling of the trunk light meant that she had only the dim halogen set in a distant corner of the parking lot to aid her in finding what she needed. Good thing she was organized: she knew exactly where everything was without really having to see it.
A place for everything and everything in its place: more words to live by.
Depressing the latch that unlocked the false bottom she’d had installed in the trunk by an under-the-radar body shop she occasionally worked with, she shifted the Guardian Consulting signs aside, lifted the carpet-covered floor and peered down at what lay beneath.
The Win Mag was secured in a special side unit. She wouldn’t be needing it, or the gun she’d taken off Quincy. She wasn’t bulletproof, she could get shot just like anybody else, but minus a stray sniper or two she wasn’t worried: she had no intention of letting that happen. And since she had no intention of shooting the moronic teenage thugs in the house either, a gun would just get in her way.
What she took from the trunk was the balaclava, gloves, earwig and a custom tool kit, which was kept in a canvas messenger bag. She added a length of rope to the bag and was good to go. The only other thing she needed—a large rock or other heavy weight—she was going to have to scavenge.
Suiting up as she crossed the strip of overgrown grass that separated the parking lot from the house, leaping the trash-filled ditch that ran down the middle of it, Bianca was thankful for the darkness. Clad all in black, with the balaclava and gloves covering her blond hair and pale skin and the tool kit slung over her shoulder, she was just one more shadow among many. She knew a sniper couldn’t have her in his sights because he couldn’t have gotten here before her and thus wouldn’t have had time to set up. And he couldn’t have gotten here before her because no one could have known she would be here, because she hadn’t known herself. And she was almost 100 percent positive that she hadn’t been followed. Therefore, the creepy-crawly feeling at the back of her neck could only be the product of her own edginess.
So get over it.
This late at night, the whirring of the insect population accounted for most of the noise. A series of faint metallic clanks on top of that had her looking swiftly toward the sounds, but only the clumsiest assassin on earth would make that much noise so she attributed the clatter to the cat and the trash cans. The dank smell of the river mixed with the rotting-meat smell of what Bianca hoped was trash. She wrinkled her nose.
She pressed the button on the earwig. Through it, she could hear a girl—she assumed it was Francisca—sobbing even before she reached the lit-up double-hung window on the side of the house.
“—hoy nuestro pan de cada dia. Perdona—” The girl’s voice was soft and punctuated with sobs. During the few seconds that it took Bianca to translate, realize that the girl was praying in Spanish and the prayer was the Padre Nuestro, or Lord’s Prayer, she ascertained that the window belonged to a bedroom, as she had suspected, and was indeed covered by a pulled-down roller shade. The lock was an ordinary sash lock. From elsewhere in the house she could hear muffled shouts. The voices were male.
Bianca frowned as she listened.
“—nuestras ofensas—” Francisca murmured.
More male shouts: “—got my head blown off!”
“You shoulda lobbed the grenade!”
What?
“Give me the damned controller!”
Oh, a video game.
Placing a gloved hand on the wall for support, Bianca edged through the waist-high, half-dead azalea hedge that ran the length of the wall and peered through the narrow gap between the frayed edge of the shade and the window frame.
“—perdonamo a los que nos—” Francisca prayed. Shouts continued from wherever the video game action was happening, but now that she knew what that was all about, Bianca tuned them out.
What she saw was a Pepto Bismol–pink wall with maybe half a dozen half-full and tied-up black trash bags piled against it and a corner of a mattress—no bed frame, no box spring, just a mattress plunked down on the stained hardwood floor. The mattress was covered with a pink-and-green floral fitted sheet. To the right of the mattress, a pair of oversize feet in red high-topped sneakers and long, thick legs in black sweatpants stuck out into the room from what she had to assume was a chair in the corner. The feet and legs clearly belonged to a male. Bianca couldn’t see his face—but, resting across his lap, she could see his Marlin .22 rifle. Otherwise known in military and law-enforcement circles as a mouse (as opposed to an elephant) gun. She didn’t know about the others, but this particular member of the junior punk version of the Juarez Cartel wasn’t packing the heavy artillery tonight.
“—caer en tentacion—”
From the direction and proximity of the girl’s voice, Bianca was certain that Francisca was lying or sitting on the mattress.
“Hey, Snake, how much longer we gonna wait?” The sudden yell from red high-top dude in the corner was loud enough to drown Francisca out and make Bianca jump as it blasted through her earwig.
“Pip-squeak got eight more minutes,” came the answering yell, which originated from wherever the video game marathon was happening, i.e., somewhere else in the house. Snake: Bianca recognized his voice.
“You hear that, bitch?” red high-top dude said to Francisca. “Eight minutes, and then I’m gonna give you something to cry about.”
“—libranos del mal.” Francisca finished her prayer in a shaking voice and started over again. “Padre nuestro—”
Step one: locate the girl.
Check.
The sounds from the bedroom faded as Bianca moved on around the front of the house.
Three double-hung windows—one lit up behind a shade, belonging to the bedroom Francisca was in; one the same size and dark, another bedroom; one smaller and dark, probably a bathroom—later, Bianca strode past the closed front door. The slab porch connected to a pebbled concrete walkway that led to the driveway, and she followed it. She was just registering the house number—112, in bronze metal numbers affixed to the siding beside the door—when she spotted a concrete block that had been upended in the middle of the front yard to hold a birdbath. The concrete block could work as the weight she needed. She made note of it for later use.
“Watch out for that guy!”
“Where?”
“On the roof!”
Forget the earwig: the sounds of the video game and the players’ voices were loud enough to be heard without it even before she stepped up to the plateglass window and peeped through a gap in the curtains, so she hit the button to turn the thing off. The TV hung on the outside wall. On it a virtual soldier was firing an M16 at a target Bianca couldn’t see. On the shelf of a pass-through window that led to what she presumed was the kitchen, stacks of folded foils announced the presence of crack for sale. If Sage had it right, various other drugs were kept in the house as well, but the small aluminum foil packets were all that were within her line of sight.
Step two: find out where the bad guys are.
Check.
Since the conversation in the living room consisted of exchanges like, “Get him!”, “He’s over there!”, “Shoot him!” and “Blow him up!” amid the frantic sounds of the game, Bianca dismissed it as worthless except for its sheer volume—the better to drown you out, my dear—as she got on with what she needed to do.
Picking up the pace, she jogged around to the back of the house and located the only other door, which opened out of the kitchen. The kitchen curtains were drawn and the room was dark, but the light spilling through the pass-through from the living room and a gap in the curtains covering the window in the kitchen door combined to allow her to see mounds of baggies piled high on the counter. She couldn’t tell what the baggies contained, but she could tell that they held something and was willing to bet that that something was an illegal substance. The empty kitchen also served to reinforce her conviction that the only people in the house were the four in the living room and Francisca and red high-top dude in the back bedroom.
It took her less than thirty seconds to remove the doorknob from the door.
If anyone tried to exit the house through the kitchen, the inner doorknob would come off in that person’s hand. It wouldn’t keep the junior punk cartel inside the house forever, but it should keep them inside long enough.
Picturing the blank look on Snake’s face if the would-be escapee happened to be him made her smile. She was still smiling—and pulling on surgical gloves from her tool kit over her leather ones—as she ran back around to the front of the house.
Now she really had to hustle: a glance at her watch told her that there were a little more than six minutes left.
Step three: cut off a twelve-foot section of rope.
Bianca scooted under the Impala, grimacing as the rough surface of the driveway dug through her turtleneck to gouge her back. She located the fuel line. Using an awl from the tool kit, she punched a hole in it. Gas began to trickle out, dribbling down onto the asphalt and filling the area beneath the chassis with its acrid smell—and its fumes. She dredged the rope in the gas before tying one end around the punctured pipe. That done, she shimmied out from under the car, taking care to avoid the growing puddle. Once she was on her feet again, she laid the gasoline-damp rope flat along the driveway, then removed the gas-tainted surgical gloves and stuffed them into a Ziploc bag in her tool kit.
Then she grabbed the concrete block from the center of the yard and lugged it over to the ice-cream truck. A curtained serving window set into the truck’s side was framed by a painting of a grinning clown holding a chocolate cone with sprinkles, and the words I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.
More like, I scream, you scream, the police come, you get arrested.
Time remaining: three minutes, forty-one seconds.
Through the driver’s window she saw that there was no key in the truck’s ignition and the vehicle had manual locks. She also saw the wire to a car alarm. It ran along the edge of the window, which, of course, was rolled up.
The junior punk cartel was probably making too much noise with their video game to hear the alarm if it went off, but she didn’t want to chance it.
It took less than a minute to insert a slim jim in between the weather stripping and the door frame, use it to rip out the alarm wire and then hook the notch in the end of the bar around the lock’s rod mechanism. She dragged the slim jim forward, heard a click and the door unlocked.
Opening the door, she heaved the concrete block onto the floor inside. It landed with a heavy thud that shook the truck. A quick sweep of a flashlight around the back of the vehicle revealed a digital scale, digital caliper, a number of spice grinders, stacked bundles of rolling papers and bulk cans of pure caffeine powder. Clear plastic canisters served as vases for about four dozen limp-looking red roses. They were the kind of roses that were sometimes available for individual purchase in drug or convenience stores. Bianca was momentarily baffled by their presence—until she took a closer look, saw that each stem was thrust into its own test-tube-like glass vial, and realized that the roses weren’t what was being sold. Customers purchased the vials, which were used as cheap crack pipes and were sold with roses in them to disguise their true purpose. All of it was drug paraphernalia—the caffeine powder could be used to cut heroin—and it was right out there in the open on the shelves, alongside ice cream scoops and syrups and sprinkles. There wasn’t time to look inside the cabinets, but there was enough in plain sight to attract any cop’s attention.
Plus, once the door was opened the smell of weed was unmistakable.
Just to be sure, Bianca hopped in and yanked the curtain off the serving window. That way no one—read cop with a flashlight peering through the window—could miss what the ice-cream truck was really selling.
You are going down, she silently promised the gang in the house.
Jumping out of the truck, she hurried back toward the loose end of the rope. Pulling the burner phone—once again, preparation pays off, although in a slightly unexpected way—from her pocket, she dialed 911 as she went.
“Nine-one-one. What’s your emergency?” a female operator answered.
“Help! Send the cops! Lots of ’em! There’s guys in this here house sellin’ drugs and there was this huge explosion, and—oh, the address?” Bianca rattled off the address, using her best breathless and terrified teenage-girl-from-Georgia’s-mean-streets voice. At the same time, she pulled a cigarette lighter from her tool kit. Flicking her Bic, she bent to the end of the rope and set what was essentially a twelve-foot-long wick alight. As the flame caught, flaring bright because of the gas on the rope, she let her voice verge on the hysterical. “There’s an ice-cream truck they’ve been selling dope out of and it’s—oh, no, here they come, they all got guns and—help! Hurry!”
She ran back toward the ice-cream truck as she disconnected, racing the fire that was eating hungrily through the rope. Jumping inside the truck, she grabbed the drill from her tool kit, shoved it into the keyhole, turned it on and destroyed every lock pin the bit could reach with one quick whir. Yanking the drill free, she thrust a screwdriver into the keyhole in its place and turned it just like she would have done if it had been the key.
The engine started on the first try.
Success.
The rumbling engine was loud, but at that point it didn’t matter if the group in the house heard: in a matter of seconds they were going to know something bad was going down. Stomping the gas, she spun the ice-cream truck out into the front yard and watched out of the corner of her eye as a fringe of dancing orange flames surged along the rope. A few more feet, and the flames would reach the pool of gas, and the fumes, beneath the Impala.
Hanging a one-eighty, she aimed the truck at the house, steering with one hand and using the other to drag the concrete block onto the gas pedal so the vehicle would keep charging on without her.
Boom!
The Impala blew up just as she leaped from the truck. The force of the explosion sent the car shooting skyward like a goosed bullfrog. Flames shot out everywhere. The front yard was bathed in a sudden burst of orange light and strafed by exploding car pieces. The blast made the ground shake, rang in Bianca’s ears, filled the air with a tsunami of heat and a nasty burning smell. One thing was for sure: the cops weren’t going to have a problem finding the house.
Meanwhile, the ice-cream truck hurtled forward, rattling over the grass, bouncing over th
e walkway—
Hitting the ground, rolling to mitigate the force of the impact to shoulder and hip, Bianca watched the blazing Impala crash back down to earth, now a fireball on four wheels. The house’s front door started to open—
Bam! The front wall of the house caved as the ice-cream truck slammed into it, crashing through at an angle that took out the front door and the plate-glass window and stopped up the house like a cork flying into, rather than out of, a champagne bottle.
A lot of yelling erupted inside the house. One of the junior punk cartel out-and-out screamed.
Probably the guy opening the door.
The truck came to rest with a shudder, half in and half out of the house, totally plugging up the hole it had created and making any exit from the front impossible. Chunks of vinyl siding, drywall dust and shards of glass hit the ground along with Impala parts. A smoking (literally) side-view mirror landed at Bianca’s feet.
Step four: unleash Armageddon.
Check.
With sixty-two seconds to go.
Bianca would’ve given herself a big ole “atta girl,” but she was too busy racing toward the window of the bedroom where Francisca was being held.
Shouts, sirens, the crackling roar of the burning car and the fainter sounds of opening doors and running feet (neighbors? ’Cause nobody was getting out of that house this fast) followed her, along with the tinkling strains of “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
It took Bianca a moment to realize that the crash had set off the ice-cream truck’s Pied Piper-ish music.
She rounded the corner of the house at a dead run: the clock was ticking down.
She didn’t know what the junior punk cartel had planned for Francisca when time was up. She did know she didn’t want to find out.
5
Bianca shoved through the hedge, reached the window, hit the on button on her earwig and looked in. As she’d expected, red high-top guy was gone. He’d almost certainly bolted to join his friends. After all, it wasn’t every day that an ice-cream truck rammed the living room of the house you were in.
The Moscow Deception--An International Spy Thriller Page 5
