Czechmate

by Seth Harwood

  “Still coming behind us,” Shaw reports.

  “Best plan of action?” Jack says. “Anyone got anything?”

  “Stop the car,” Vlade says. “Let me out.”

  “You crazy?”

  Al adds, “Let us all out. We will stop them!”

  “Shaw?” Jack’s hoping for something better than this, some secret passage that’ll get them out of downtown and away from these Hummers.

  “Quick turn left up here,” Shaw says. “Watch for this little street.”

  “Yes.” Niki cuts across two lanes too fast and gets into the left turn lane, cutting off two cars, and makes a quick turn into a small side street, barely more than an alley.

  “Pull up twenty feet on the left,” Shaw says. “And then stop. This is where we wait them out.”

  Jack can hear police sirens coming closer, not more than five city blocks away. “You mean this is where we wait for them and hope they don’t see us?”

  “No,” Shaw says. “This is where we wait for them and hope that they do.”

  As the car idles, Al gets himself situated again in the back seat.

  “Is everyone OK?” Vlade asks.

  “This car’s fucked,” Shaw tells them, nodding toward the shot-out back window and to the door beside Jack with its new extra bend.

  Niki laughs. “It is rental. Vlade has the way with rentals.”

  “This is why we left the Fastback in the garage,” Jack says. “I can’t believe anyone here even rents to you two anymore.”

  Shaw turns toward the back of the car again, watching the street behind them.

  A few cars pass, then the Hummer rolls by slowly, without stopping. This is good in Jack’s book; anything that’s not direct action with Akakievich is good.

  Jack’s phone starts to ring again. Shaw grabs it out of his hand, answers it before Jack can stop him. He starts the conversation with, “This is where it ends, you Russian fuck.”

  Jack’s got to admit, Shaw has a way with words.

  “You just drove right past us. Come on back and you’ll see a side street. We’ll be waiting for you right here, asshole.” Shaw hangs up the phone.

  Vlade slams a new clip into his weapon, and Niki cocks back the slide on his Makarov, chambering a round.

  “Did I say I didn’t want a gun?” Jack asks. “Did I say that?”

  15

  Drop Off

  In the front seat of the Escalade, Vlade and Niki both kiss their weapons on the front side of the barrel.

  “Can I have gun?” Al asks.

  At the same time, they both say, “No.”

  Vlade opens his door and steps out into the alley. He opens Shaw’s door and stands behind it, crouching to fit into the open window with his gun pointed at the bottom end of the street.

  Shaw slips out of the car. “Bring your motherfucking H2 on back here, you Russian fuck,” he says.

  Jack takes his phone off the seat and holds it like a hot piece of lead. “Guys. Why aren’t we hiding somewhere?”

  “We take him now,” Vlade says. “We end this.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about.” Shaw drops the clip out of his weapon, jams home a fresh one and chambers the first round. “Let’s fucking rock.”

  Jack steps out into the alley. “Is that the police I hear?”

  Niki slips out the driver’s side door and comes around the back of the car.

  “Jesus,” Jack says. “Can I have that gun now?”

  Shaw pulls the .38 from his ankle holster and tosses it across the back seat to Jack. “Now you’re coming around, soldier.”

  Jack picks up the gun and feels its weight—something he likes. “What is this, another one of your Vietnam flashbacks?”

  Shaw turns to face Jack and raises his eyebrows, twice. “Jungle shit here, motherfucker.”

  Jack half expects him to pull out a disposable razor and start scraping it across his dry scalp while they wait, like the bald guy in Predator. He knows he’s not likely to get much response, but says, “Am I the only one who thinks we should get out of here?”

  At the top of the street, Jack sees the black H2 turn in toward their car. “Guys, our friends at twelve o’clock.”

  The rest turn to face forward, and Niki comes around the side of the car to the front door.

  Then Al says, “Also they are behind us.”

  Jack turns around and sees the second Hummer come into the bottom entrance to the street. “This is fucking great.” And then they both stop, neither one of the Hummers closer than twenty yards from the Escalade—close enough that everyone could start some serious shooting with Jack, Shaw, and the Czechs caught right in the middle.

  The Hummers don’t move. Nothing happens.

  Al says, “What’s happening? Why they stop?”

  Shaw’s voice is cold as he says, “Wait and see. Just watch.”

  The windshields of the black Hummers are too dark to see inside. Jack can’t tell who’s in them or even how many people they hold.

  Shaw says, “They know they start shooting at us, they liable to hit their friends.”

  “I hear police cars,” Al says.

  Jack’s phone rings on the seat beside him. He looks at it.

  Shaw points his chin toward the phone. “See what he wants, Jack.”

  Jack shifts the gun to his sling hand, then picks up the phone, opens it slowly by prying its top half up against his chest. “Hello.”

  It’s Jane Gannon. “I’m getting calls from beat cops now, Jack? Dickheads calling me to check up on you?”

  Jack shrugs. What can he say? He guesses he could start by asking for some help with the alley situation, but somehow the words won’t come. “Sorry, Jane. Had to be done.”

  Shaw and Vlade shake their heads. “Gannon?” Shaw says. “The fuck is this? Call that motherfucker up.”

  On the phone, Gannon doesn’t sound happy. “So what’s your plan, Jack?”

  “We’re in a meeting with Akakievich right now. Seeing what he’s got to say.”

  “What? Are you crazy?”

  “Too late to stop now,” he tells her.

  Beside him Shaw says, “Fuck they waiting for? I’m going over there.”

  Vlade shakes his head. “This I do not like. We are not in good position here.”

  Jack goes on, “You might say we’re at the point of engagement. Want to send some backup to Chinatown?” He tells her where they are. Gannon says to sit tight. They hang up.

  “She’s coming,” Jack says. “What do we do?”

  Shaw jumps back into the car. “You know what? Fuck this. Drive us out of this shit, Niki. Something’s wrong.”

  Niki glances back at Shaw, unsure if he heard right. If they’re both looking at the same alley, there’s no way for him to drive them out, short of going through one of the Hummers. And maybe that’s what Shaw intends. Niki hops into the driver’s seat and closes his door. Vlade shrugs and gets back inside as well.

  “Fuck this rental,” Niki says, dropping it into drive and screeching the tires, heading straight for the H2.

  Vlade shrugs. “I have insurance through my credit card.”

  Al laughs. “What is in your wallet?”

  Jack watches the Hummer get bigger in front of them. Then it drops into reverse and pulls back away from them into the street. It shoots out into the traffic of the next street—backwards—and rear ends a passing car. The impact flips it around so it’s facing to their left, westbound and into the thick of the city, the wrong way on this three-lane, one-way street. A white sedan stops short of the Hummer’s bumper, blaring its horn.

  Niki slows down as they reach the end of the alley, looking for an opening in the traffic. Now the H2 shoots ahead, knocking the white sedan back—more horns honking—and veers wide around it, into the middle of the street, to go against the traffic.

  “Fuck this,” Niki says and shoots into the gap the Hummer’s left. They
pull out behind it, almost hit it in the back. Now both SUVs head against the traffic, but at least Niki doesn’t have to lead. Cars swerve out of the way in front of them and all around, clearing the middle of the street as the two big SUVs tear up it. This is when they all hear the police sirens start blazing behind them. Shaw swears. Jack turns around but doesn’t see anything other than a street full of angry drivers, trying to get back into their lanes.

  Jack wonders if Akakievich would stoop low enough to have the SFPD do all his dirty work for him. Then he considers whether the SFPD would stoop low enough to do it. That part, that’s a definite yes.

  Ahead of them, the street climbs up a ridiculous hill, complete with street lights and traffic, and takes them further and further into downtown—a definite mess.

  “Park coming up on your right, Niki,” Shaw calls out. “Hit it. Now!”

  Niki turns hard, cuts off a BMW and skids through the right lane of traffic to hit the sidewalk hard where there’s a gap left for a bus stop. He jumps the curb and hits the sidewalk; the car bucks hard to its left side, and Niki turns the wheel hard back to the right, hits the park at its southwest corner, which happens to be where a wide concrete path starts through the bushes and trees. Jack’s bad shoulder’s bounces off the side of the Escalade and he’s thrown into Al. Vlade pounds on the dashboard, cheering Niki’s driving. “Yes! Yes! Yes!”

  A few homeless people in the park scatter in front of them, running and even diving to get out of their way as Niki tears up the path that winds through the block-wide park. Behind them, the police sirens carry on.

  “Fuck me,” Shaw says. “I just thought of something.”

  “What?”

  Niki peels up the walkway, steers around a concrete garbage receptacle, and slams the car into a hard turn to follow the path. They barely make it between a couple of trees. Then, ahead of them, the path drops off.

  Niki calls out, “Oh, shit!!”

  Shaw says, “Stairs.”

  “Stairs!” Vlade yells. “Hang on!”

  Ahead of them Jack sees the path turn to nothing. The next street’s out there, but the path doesn’t go right into it; there’s a height difference between where they are and the next street. And this park’s made for people, not cars. People can walk down stairs.

  “Fuck,” Jack yells, grabbing across his body for the handle above his door.

  “No, Jesus.” Al wedges himself between the two front seats, and everyone else grabs onto whatever they can hold.

  The Escalade hits the end of the path and shoots out into empty space.

  No way a car this big and heavy makes a jump like this, not in the real world, not outside of an action movie. Jack knows the one thing they have going for them, and this maybe even not so much, is ground clearance.

  For a second, even less, he feels the Escalade in the air, still moving forward. Then its weight in the engine, or lack of speed, or whatever, brings its nose down hard. They hit the middle of the stairs, where there’s a short landing—the SUV’s front bumper scraping against the concrete—and their back wheels hit the stairs and push the car forward, spinning and thrusting it onto the landing, where the undercarriage scrapes in an awful sound of spinning axle and who knows what else hitting against hard, solid concrete. Still the SUV doesn’t stop bumping and slamming down the rest of the stairs and onto the sidewalk where the nose hits again, the back wheels spin on more stairs and finally bump hard onto the sidewalk.

  They’re on flat land again, shooting out into California Street, and Niki does his best to turn hard to the right, with the traffic, and to stay in the right-most lane. Even still, they come within inches of taking out a white taxi. Jack lets go of the door handle and rubs his forehead where it got bounced off the top of the doorframe a few times.

  “Jesus,” Shaw says. “Fucking nice job there.”

  “Thanks for the tip,” Niki answers.

  Jack takes a quick look back to confirm what he thought he’d seen just beyond the park: a small alley that ran from street to street without the trees, pedestrians, garbage cans, and definitely without the stairs.

  “There was an alley back there—” he starts to say.

  But Shaw cuts him off. “Yeah. And nobody likes a second-guesser, Jack.”

  At the end of the first block on California, Shaw tells Niki to pull over. On their right is a big plaza with a huge, ugly, black sculpture that looks like a rounded off shark’s fin.

  “Let us out here,” Shaw says. “We got to break up this party. Divide and conquer, you know?” Niki screeches to a stop, cutting off a taxi that leans on its horn.

  Jack looks around, half-expecting to see a Hummer or an oncoming cop. “You crazy?”

  “We don’t split up now, we’ll all be fucked.” Shaw claps Niki on the shoulder and congratulates him. “Great fucked-up driving.” Then he barks, “Get the fuck out the car, Jack,” and opens his door.

  Jack tucks the revolver into his sling and slides across the back seat as Al pushes himself into the front to make room. He gets out on Shaw’s side of the car because his door’s too bent in to open and, when he’s close, the cop grabs him around the shoulders and practically throws Jack out the last few feet into the street by the curb.

  “Damn.” Jack can’t help but say it.

  Shaw slams the door and Niki takes off, peels radial to head off east toward the Bay. “We’re going in there,” Shaw says, pointing at the corner building, one Jack recognizes immediately by its jagged, angled edges as the skyscraper from the first scene of Dirty Harry. They start toward it, police sirens crying from not far off. Jack turns to see not two, but three police cars speeding after Niki and the others.

  16

  High-Rise

  Shaw heads right for the middle set of revolving doors of the big office building. Jack’s not sure what they’ll find there, but he follows, changes his .38 from his sling to the back of his pants as discreetly as possible.

  “Why are we running?” Jack asks.

  Shaw points toward their right, and Jack sees the second Hummer, the one with its back smashed up from where it plowed into Jack’s door. It’s coming up the block, headed right for them.

  Jack leans forward to run faster.

  They hit the revolving door and have to slow down to go through. For good reason, these things never spin around at running speed, no matter how hard you push. Jack gets into the compartment behind Shaw and they push their way into the building. With luck—and theirs holds out—the place has no metal detectors inside the lobby. It’s also a busy building with enough traffic that Jack and Shaw don’t draw too much attention coming in, even running. In the middle of the afternoon on a Wednesday, there’s just too much going on. Over his shoulder, Jack looks back toward the street and sees the H2 pull up outside and two—no three!—big Russians get out of it. They start toward the building. The only good news is that none of them are Akakievich.

  “I see them,” Shaw says, walking fast now, heading for the first bank of elevators on their left, which turn out to be the ones that go all the way up, service-only floors forty to fifty-two.

  They hurry onto an elevator with a couple of guys who’re talking about business—a marketing plan it sounds like. Whatever it is keeps them occupied enough to not realize they’re in an elevator with two fugitives they’ve probably seen on TV, one of whom, Shaw, is doing a bad job of concealing a large handgun.

  They stand in the back of the elevator, facing the doors, trying to look as normal as possible. “You know what we’re doing?” Jack asks.

  Shaw shakes his head. “We’re moving. Sooner we get out of the lobby, the harder we are to find.”

  Above the doors the numbers have stopped rising and the display reads Express. Jack swallows hard to keep his ears from popping as he’s hit with a bolt of pain from his shoulder that comes on like a memory, a piece of bad news he forgot for a while and then suddenly remembered. He shakes his head, the pain like a wak
e-up call to get him back into the moment, and he’s glad he didn’t take Vicodin. If moving fast is the difference between his ass and not his ass, whether it gets handed to him by a Russian or Shaw, he wants to move fast.

  On the forty-third floor, the two suits get out, still talking about their plans. Shaw hit the button for the top floor—straight to the roof, like the sniper in Dirty Harry—but now he hits a few floors below it. If someone’s watching their elevator’s progress from the lobby, watching for the floors it stops on, it’s better to confuse them by giving options for where they might be. After stops on forty-four and forty-seven, Shaw tells Jack to come when the doors open at fifty.

  “Five-O,” Jack says. “Nice symbolism. Or is that metaphor?”

  “Fuck you,” Shaw says, stepping out of the car. He crosses the hall to the men’s room and holds the door open while Jack enters. Inside, he goes straight to the sinks and lays his gun down on the white marble. Jack looks around, even checks under the stalls; there’s no one else here. He watches Shaw steady himself with two hands on the sink and look at himself in the mirror. He takes two deep breaths. “Palms, you all right?”

  Jack nods, heads over to the sink and runs his hand under the faucet until water comes out. He splashes some on his face. “What’s our plan here, Detective?”

  Shaw raises an eyebrow at the title. “We catch our breath. Figure out the next move and hope Akakievich isn’t downstairs waiting for us.”

  Jack looks at himself in the mirror: his face is haggard, roughed up from everything they’ve been through, with dark circles under his eyes. He looks and feels far worse than this morning. One-handed, he splashes more water on his face. Even bending down, this doesn’t work as well as it would with two hands, but he manages to wake himself up a bit, calm down, get clean. He’s reaching for the paper towel dispenser when his cell phone rings.