I ponder the likelihood of someone hearing the gunshots and calling 911, and realize the chances aren’t good. The shooters are using suppressors, and the trees do a decent job of stopping the echoes.
Latham is still bound, still bleeding. I need to get to him, but between us is a vast open space, all of it viewable by the snipers. I counted at least two shooters, but I’m guessing that all three are here. I have no clue why. Are they pissed off I didn’t die in Ravenswood?
Harry picks an apple slice off of his shirt and pops it into his mouth. “I never got to thank you for inviting me over. We should do this more often.”
“Alex forced me, Harry. I tried to warn you.”
“No biggie. Who needs balls anyway? They make your pants fit funny.”
“It’s bad?” I ask.
Harry pulls out his waistband and peeks inside.
“I don’t think they’re supposed to swell up this big.”
“You need to see a doctor.”
“I need to see Mr. Ripley.”
“Mr. Ripley?”
“The Believe It or Not guy. I should make a plaster mold for his museum.”
I toss him the frozen peas. He stuffs them down his pants.
“COLD!” Harry yells. “SO COLD!”
I stare at him, hopping from foot to foot, and then I look at the freezer door of the stainless steel refrigerator. It’s pockmarked with bullet holes, each in the center of a huge dent. Strange. Full-metal jacketed slugs should have punched right through without denting it. I crawl up to Harry to get a closer look.
“So what shitstorm did I wander into?” McGlade asks. He drains the beer, tosses the bottle at Alex’s head, misses, then reaches for another.
“Three snipers. They kill sex offenders. Call themselves TUHC.”
Harry belches and says, “The Urban Hunting Club.”
I appraise him. “You’ve heard of them?”
“No. But there’s a producer of DVD adult entertainment called TUBC. The Urban Booty Club. Lots of college girls taking off their tops and eating Popsicles, stuff like that. The first DVD is only nine ninety-nine, but that’s how they sucker you in, because they send you two new DVDs every month for twenty-nine ninety-nine each. And they’re only forty-five minutes long, which is a real rip-off.” Harry scratches his nose. “So I’ve heard.”
The Urban Hunting Club sounds right. That’s something a group of disgruntled blue-collar Grabowskis would call themselves.
“They killed three rapists to night, then gunned down ten cops,” I say. “Looks like they followed me home.”
“You think?”
I open the fridge, can’t find where the bullets have gone through on the inside. The door seems to have stopped them. I shake it, and hear some slugs rattling inside. I use a spoon to pry back the plastic molding, and a gray bullet drops out. It resembles a mushroom. The snipers have switched from jacketed rounds to soft points. A soft point has more stopping power, expanding on impact, but not the penetrating power of a full-metal jacket slug, which didn’t deform as much.
“You know, Jackie…” Harry stares down at me, “the top of your head is really sexy.”
“This is the only time you’ll ever see it, McGlade.”
He takes out his cell phone and snaps a picture.
“Hot,” Harry says. “I especially dig the gray roots coming in. I like a woman with de cades of experience.”
I ignore him, something I’m particularly good at. “We need to turn off the lights. We’ve got two in the kitchen, three in the living room, the hallway, the bedroom, and the garage. Then, when it’s dark, I can grab the gun bag in the bedroom, pop outside, and sneak up on these bastards.”
“You can kill all the lights at once,” Harry says. “Got a circuit breaker?”
“End of the hallway, in the laundry room.”
“I’ll wait here.” Harry shakes his prosthetic for effect.
“Actually, Harry, I’m thinking we use this refrigerator for cover.”
“You want to push this heavy thing all the way across a carpeted hallway? Good luck.”
“We’re going to push it.”
“And give the psycho kitty another chance to use Acorn Andy as a scratch post? No thanks.”
I reach into the refrigerator, take out the squirt gun we keep in there for when Mr. Friskers disagrees with guests.
“Just spray him if he gets close.”
“Like this?”
Harry squirts me in the face. Big surprise there. Then he sprays me in the chest a few times, squinting to see through the material. I take the gun away from him.
“Grow up, Harry.” I yell over my shoulder, “Mom! Latham! We’re going to shut off the electricity!” I face Harry again. “Let’s do this.”
Harry grins, then adjusts his peas. “All right, but I’m warning you—if it’s really heavy, I’m going to make you check me later on for a hernia.”
“I can’t wait,” I deadpan. Then I unplug the fridge and we begin to push.
9:21 P.M.
PESSOLANO
PAUL PESSOLANO PEERS THROUGH the yellow lenses of his aviator sunglasses, trying to find his backpack in the darkness. He can’t see shit. Pessolano feels around in the grass where he’s sitting, and locates one of the straps. He pulls the bag closer, lifts up his glasses so he can see inside, and removes a magazine filled with five Lapua .338 Mags. He pops the old magazine out of the TPG-1 and clicks the new one in place. Then he gives it a slap, like he’s seen in a thousand war movies.
Even though he told the others differently, Pessolano was never in the armed forces. The closest he ever got to the sands of Kuwait was Miami Beach. Six months ago he worked in a chain video store in Tampa. Then his elderly mother died. He quit his job, sold her house, and used the money to buy some top-of-the-line sniper rifles and surveillance equipment. His plan was to become a mercenary. Or a hit man. Or a wandering gun for hire, like George Peppard on The A-Team.
Work wasn’t easy to find. He tried reading the police blotter and calling up the parents of juveniles involved in illegal activities, asking if they wanted to hire him to make their lives easier. He never got any takers, and after cops showed up at his apartment (he hid inside and didn’t let them in) he fled the state.
Swanson’s ad in Soldier of Fortune, asking for “civic-minded mercs who wanted to make things right,” is the first freelance job Pessolano has actually been on. It doesn’t pay anything, but that’s okay. This is all about getting some experience. Once he turns this corner, he’s sure he’ll find other jobs. Because Pessolano is now, officially, a killer.
It was easy, killing the pervert. Pessolano had been worried about it, afraid he wouldn’t have the guts to pull the trigger when the clock struck five. But he pulled that trigger. And he shot that pervert in the back of the head. Baptized by fire, a culmination of the greatest few weeks of his life.
All the preparation, all the practice up to this point, didn’t seem real. Pessolano felt like he was living someone else’s life. He liked the feeling, but didn’t fully believe it. But he believes it now. He’s not a pretender. He’s the real deal. And he’s got the dead body to prove it, and good friends to share it with. Though Swanson seems a little soft, and Munchel a little crazy, they are his friends. That’s why he doesn’t mind them using his guns and equipment.
And now the thing Pessolano wants to do most is impress his friends. He knows they look up to him. If he can kill all five of the targets by himself, they’ll revere him even more. That’s why he’s using the better bullets. The Lapuas, which can shoot through a brick wall. These are the last of the full-metal jacket rounds. He gave Swanson and Munchel cheaper bullets—soft points. They work fine, but they aren’t as deadly as the Lapuas.
He pulls back the bolt. The brass flies out. He chambers a round and spends a minute tracking down the ejected cartridge and pocketing it. Then he presses his cheek against the pad and sights his target: the hallway. He can see all the way down to the laundry ro
om. If he switches position, he can see into the bedroom where the two women were fighting over the black bag.
Perfect. Now all he has to do is wait.
The wait isn’t very long. After hunkering down for only a minute or two, something appears in his scope. Something large and silver.
A refrigerator. The woman cop and the guy with the fake hand are pushing it into the hallway, trying to use the doors for shields.
Pessolano smiles. One of his bullets could shoot through five of those fridges stacked side by side. He lines up the mil dots in the scope, aiming at the door she’s hiding behind, right where her heart should be.
9:22 P.M.
JACK
“DAMMIT, HARRY! PUSH!”
“Hold on. I need to hydrate.”
Harry reaches in the refrigerator for another beer. I’ve been in life-and-death situations with him before, and being flip is Harry’s normal MO. He lacks the ability to recognize the severity of his position. Either that, or he recognizes it and chooses to ignore it. I suppose the attitude has served him well so far, because despite the efforts of many people, Harry McGlade isn’t dead yet. But I don’t want to get my head blown off because he thinks everything is one big joke. Harry might have delusions of immortality. I don’t.
So I take the beer from his hand and shove it back in the fridge.
“Stop acting like an idiot and let’s push this thing. On three. One…two…three!”
I half expect him to reach for the beer again, or shoot me with the squirt gun, but Harry knuckles down and pushes. The fridge is a high-end model, the rollers heavy-duty. It moves easily on the kitchen linoleum. But when we get onto the carpet, every inch becomes a battle. The hallway isn’t long—no more than twenty-five feet—but it might as well be a mile. We strain and shove and grunt, putting our weight into it, digging our heels in. In less than a minute we’re both winded, and the fridge hasn’t moved down the hallway more than three feet.
“Do you need help?” Mom, from the bathroom.
“Hell yeah!” Harry says.
“Mom, stay where you are.”
“She wants to help, let her help.”
“She’s not—”
The bullet punches cleanly through the refrigerator door, and I feel it tug against my jacket’s shoulder pad. I drop onto the ground, hugging the floor, thinking, Oh my God, that wasn’t a soft point.
“Uh-oh,” Harry says.
He kneels next to me, but his mechanical hand prevents him from lying down. Another bullet hits the fridge, a few inches above his head. I consider crawling down the hall, back into the kitchen, but that would leave Harry stranded in the hallway, an open target.
“Run, Jack!”
I can’t believe it. Harry isn’t the heroic, self-sacrificing type.
“Run in front of the bullets!” he yells. “Shield me!”
I stand up, put my palms on the refrigerator door, and scream at him, “Push!”
We push. And we’re surprisingly effective. Funny how someone shooting at you can give you extra motivation. We move the fridge two feet, then four, a bullet barreling through the door only two inches from my hand, then we get some momentum going and we’re really making headway. Then another shot rings out and Harry falls to his knees and cries, “I’m hit!”
We’re less than a foot away from the bathroom. If we make it there, we can duck inside and dodge the gunfire. But Harry is useless, clutching his shoulder.
I suck in a big breath, find some deep, hidden reserve, and put everything I have into pushing that refrigerator another two feet, Harry on his knees and barely able to keep up. I reach the door, then help Mom drag Harry into the bathroom, to safety.
Harry sits on the floor, his metal hand still holding on to the refrigerator door. Mom takes another pair of scissors from the medicine cabinet and begins cutting off his shirt, looking for the bullet hole. True to his name, Harry has the hairiest chest I’ve ever seen. It looks like he’s wearing a brown and gray sweater. Mom cuts all the way up to the shoulder, but Harry refuses to take his hand away from the wound.
“I don’t want to look,” he says, hyperventilating.
My mom pats his head. “It’s okay.”
“If I die, I want you to make the funeral arrangements, Jack.”
“I will.”
“I want strippers there.”
“Okay, Harry.”
He removes his hand, reaches out for me. I hold it. Mom pulls away his shirt and reveals—
“It’s a scratch,” I say.
“Don’t sugarcoat it,” Harry moans. “I can handle the truth.”
I release his hand and peer at the thin red line. I’ve given Latham worse injuries with my fingernails.
“It’s not even worth a Band-Aid, McGlade.”
“You got a mirror?”
I hand him the tweezing mirror from the vanity. He holds it on an angle and looks.
“We cut my shirt off for this? I paid sixty bucks for that shirt.”
I sigh, stand up. Mom, however, stares down at Harry with a strange look on her face.
“Mom, you all right?”
“Harry…McGlade is your last name, right?”
“Yeah. Harrison Harold McGlade. I see you’re loving my chest hair. The ladies think it’s cute. I go into bars, ask them if they want a fuzzy navel. Then I lift up my shirt and jiggle. If it gets a laugh, I ask them if they’d like something stiffer.”
Mom seems transfixed.
“Is that a birthmark on your chest?”
“Port-wine stain. Looks like a fish, doesn’t it?”
Harry uses his fingers to part the gray, giving us a better view. His birthmark is several inches long, and indeed shaped like a fish, with an ovalish body and a triangle-like tail.
“Yes, it does,” Mom says. “It’s very distinctive. How old are you? Forty-nine?”
“Yeah. But the doctor says I have the body of a thirty-year-old, if the thirty-year-old was really unhealthy and close to death.”
I don’t like where this is going. My mother seems way too interested in Harry. “Mom?”
She ignores me. “Were you born in March?”
Harry’s eyes narrow. “On the twenty-ninth. How did you know that?”
Mom’s knees begin to shake, and I put my arm around her for support.
“Mom? What’s wrong?”
“One last thing,” Mom says to Harry. “Were you adopted?”
Oh my God, no. A thousand times no.
Mom had told me that before she met my father, she had a baby out of wedlock. A baby boy. With a sailor she had a one-night stand with when she was a teenager. When I became a cop, I’d tried to track my half brother down, tickled that I had a sibling out there. But I never thought that my brother could be someone like…
“No,” Harry says.
Thank Christ.
“I was raised by the state,” he continues. “In an orphanage.”
Mom’s jaw hangs limp. So does mine. Harry puts two and two together and says, “Are you saying that I might be your son?”
Mom nods.
Harry grins, his smile as wide as a canoe.
“Mom! Sis! It’s so good to be home!”
9:28 P.M.
JACK
IF KARMA IS REAL, I must have done something unspeakable in a previous life.
“This has to be some kind of mistake,” I say to my mother. I may have actually been pleading a little. “He doesn’t look anything like you.”
“He looks like his father.”
Harry makes puppy dog eyes and says, “Mom? Tell me about Dad.”
I don’t have time for this. Latham is bleeding and we’re surrounded by snipers. I need to kill the lights and grab the gun.
I poke my head into the hallway, on the opposite side of the fridge. While FMJs can shoot through it, the snipers can’t see through it. That means I can run to the laundry room and hit the circuit breaker without being spotted.
“He was a sailor,” Mom says. �
�I never knew his last name.”
“I’m going for the fuse box,” I say.
“What was his first name, Mom?”
Mom pats Harry on the head. “His name was Ralph.” She used the same soothing voice on me when I was younger and sick with the flu. “You have his eyes.”
“I’m going now,” I announce. “I hope I make it.”
“Did you love him?” Harry ask.
Mom says, “For about three hours.”
“Wow,” Harry says. “Three hours.”
“Latham!” I call out to my fiancé. “I’m going for the circuit breaker!”
I hoped for a be careful. Instead I got: “Is that creepy private eye really your brother?”
I rub my eyes.
“Ralph had a lot of body hair too,” Mom says. “All over.”
That’s my cue. I duck low, suck in a breath, then hustle out the door and down the rest of the hallway, skidding into the laundry room. No one shoots me. The circuit breaker is on the wall, next to the dryer. I hook a finger through the metal ring on the door and tug. It’s stubborn, and doesn’t want to open. The panel isn’t broken, it has a strong spring inside that makes sure it’s always closed. I pull really hard, my finger aching, and then it finally gives. I squint at the rows of breakers, and press the large black button that reads MAIN.
The house goes dark, and the panel door slams back into place. I don’t hesitate, scrambling back into the hall, using memory and feel to find my bedroom. I take four steps inside before bumping into the bed. Then I spread my hands out over the top, seeking the ammo bag. My fingers brush the carrying strap, and I jerk the bag to me. I work the zipper, stick my hand inside, and yank out my competition pistol, a Kimber Eclipse II .45 ACP. I flip the safety and jack a round into the chamber. I feel around for extra clips, find three. They’re all empty. Bullets have been on my shopping list for a while.
There’s also a nylon holster in the bag. I shrug that onto my shoulder, the straps getting twisted in the dark but still doing the job.
Then I head for the window to sneak outside and round up the bad guys.
Jack Daniels Six Pack Page 108
