Penance jl-1

by Dan O'Shea

  “The Picasso?” Lynch said.

  “Yeah. Called it the flying monkey, and a few other things. But my dad loved it, so I’m told.”

  “Had to be hard not knowing him.”

  “Let’s cut the shit, Lynch. My dad was a faggot. Only reason I’m even alive was he needed a beard and he could act straight enough to get her pregnant. And your dad found out. Now they’re both dead and here we are, better than forty years down the road, still trying to clean up the mess.”

  “So let’s do that.”

  “What I hear, it is all cleaned up, or close to it. What I hear, I don’t gotta worry. I got friends. What I hear, you’ve been losing yours.”

  “You know what your friends are doing?”

  “Don’t wanna know.”

  “Sure you do. That’s why you’re talking to me, that and when Paddy Wang talks, your lips move. Your friends kidnapped a cop and are going to kill him and frame him for murder. Your friends are planning to sacrifice an innocent woman tomorrow just to help clean up your mess. Your friends think they’re the smartest guys in the room, that this is all gonna break your way. But here I am, twelve hours before game time, and I’m telling you isn’t. Your friends are going to be dead or up to their eyeballs in indictments by the end of the week. All this shit from 1971, it’s coming out. You can’t stop it. Your press guy is already getting the calls, and you’re sitting up here with your head up your ass. Your buddy the president is a dead man walking. I know it. More importantly, Wang knows it. Hell, Clarke probably even knows it. We are less than twenty-four hours from the biggest political scandal in this country’s history. You can be on one side of it or the other. We both know what you are, Hurley. You’re a cowardly piece of chicken shit like your grandfather. You’re always going to be that. But right now, you’ve got a chance to decide what you’re gonna look like, and that’s what you really care about.”

  Hurley stood with his back to Lynch still looking out the window. Lynch expected a reaction, he got nothing.

  “And what do you care about, Lynch?” Hurley asked.

  “I care about ending this without being an accessory to murder.”

  Still Hurley didn’t move. For a long time he didn’t speak.

  CHAPTER 62 — CHICAGO

  Weaver sat at the table in the breakfast nook at the back of Manning’s first-floor condo with the three guys he’d picked for the entry team. Out the window, he could see the white cargo van. Cunningham was locked in the body box in the back, ready to go. Weaver didn’t know how far he could trust the shooters he’d shaken out of the president. He had the Israelis, a bunch of CIA paras, couple of contract guys. When they got their radar read, they’d shoot up Fisher’s hide. That’d feel like a straight-up job to most of these guys. But they had no idea how far out in the breeze the president had hung their asses, and Weaver did. If things got hinky, they’d have to blast their way out — and that would mean shooting cops, civilians, whoever got in the way. And the loaners, they weren’t going to play for those stakes.

  But the entry team was his — long-time InterGov, and all of them with more than enough blood on their hands to know where they stood if things went south. When Fisher took his shot, Weaver was going with the entry team, to be with them personally to handle the dirty work with Cunningham. Besides, he wanted to see that fucking Fisher dead himself. So he was keeping these boys with him. If things got dirty, these boys would get dirty with it.

  It had gone harder than they figured, getting the confession out of Manning, but they had it. He hadn’t iced her yet, had her drugged up, on the bed in the room toward the front. Too late to dispose of her now and still have time to clean up the mess. They’d pack her out after, take care of it then. If it came to it, they could use her as a hostage.

  Brown walked back into the kitchen.

  “You got the player?” Weaver asked.

  She pulled the small digital device from her pocket and waved it at him. Weaver looked her over one last time. She was dressed in Manning’s clothes, hair matched perfectly. With the make-up, she was almost a dead ringer.

  “You ready?”

  Brown nodded. “Let’s rock and roll.”

  Weaver clicked on his comm unit. “Brown is rolling. Ping me as soon as she’s in the church and we’ll fire up the radars.”

  Through his scope, Ishmael Fisher watched Andrea Manning leave her condo and walk toward the church. It was almost over now. They were near, he had seen signs, but it didn’t matter. He was not where they would expect him to be. He would get his shot. After was after.

  He felt an intense love for Manning as he watched her walk toward the church, grateful that he would be the instrument that would deliver her to paradise. His right hand worked the beads of his rosary. The Joyful Mysteries.

  Cunningham lay in the body box working his left wrist. Most of the last two days were a blur at best. But the drugs had worn off that morning, and they hadn’t shot him up again. Came to strapped to a bed in his shorts, leather cuffs lined with wool on his wrists and ankles. Somebody didn’t want to leave marks. Four guys had come down shortly after, carrying some camo gear.

  “Time to get dressed, big boy.” It was the FedEx guy.

  They only loosened one cuff at a time, slipping his arms and legs into the fatigues, rolling him around on the bed. Worst thing about it was that they’d done it before, they had a process. Cunningham tried to fight, but it was no good. They pulled his boots on him one at a time. They unfastened the wrist cuffs from the bed, clipped them together. Did the same with the leg cuffs. Someone came in with a dolly, a big packing box on it, the thing FedEx guy had had in the lobby of his place. They set that down on the floor and flipped up the lid. It was foam lined, with clips for the restraints attached to the sides.

  “Time for a little ride.” FedEx guy again.

  They lifted him by his arms and legs, set him into the box, then clipped the restraints to the sides. When they snapped the lid shut, Cunningham knew they hadn’t spotted their mistake. While they were dressing him, he’d bent the fingers on his left hand and grabbed the sleeve of the fatigue shirt, pulling the fabric up over his wrist. The fabric was fairly thick. It was trapped between the wool lining of the cuff and his wrist. Not much, but probably enough. Cunningham kept working the wrist, feeling a little more give each time.

  Ferguson and Jenks were under the big AC unit on the roof of the building across from St Mary’s, covered by a tarp, their rifles barely protruding.

  “Here she comes,” said Ferguson, watching Manning leave her building. Manning walked into the church. A couple of minutes later, Jenks’s radar detector started to peep. He looked at the screen, moving it back and forth slowly. First reading was south. He got the line, put his eye to the scope, and looked at the building. The box was on the third floor, balcony on the right, sliding door cracked open, vertical blinds almost closed. Shooter.

  “West negative thirty-three,” Jenks muttered into his comm unit. He swung the detector back north, repeated the process. Window box. Slight shadow two windows over. Shooter number two. “West sixty-one.”

  “You sure?” Ferguson asked. “Doesn’t make sense.”

  “West sixty-one,” Jenks repeated.

  Chen popped up in their earpieces.

  “Where the hell is Lynch?” she said.

  Lynch sat in the back pew of the church, watching the door. Manning came in. He got up, walked toward her, but she took a hard left into the first confessional. Lynch moved to stand between the confessional and the door to the church. He’d have to catch her on the way out.

  Lynch waited, that weird feeling where you lose concept of time. Over the comm unit he heard Jenks give the radar locations. West sixty-on? What the hell? That was Manning’s place.

  Then Manning stepped out of the confessional.

  Captain Starshak sat in the back of one of the SWAT vans lined up two blocks west, still not believing that all the shit Lynch had told him over the past ten hours was actua
lly going down. Lynch had gone over maps with Starshak, explained the location codes, given him the comm frequencies that Ferguson would be using. Starshak had briefed the leads in all the other units. Now they were listening in, waiting for Ferguson to name the locations, ready to roll. Only thing Lynch hadn’t said was where Ferguson and this Jenks guy would be. Said he didn’t know. Starshak had let that go. Knew the line Lynch was walking. Hell, if he were in Lynch’s shoes, he’d be walking it himself. Things worked out right, it wouldn’t matter. Things worked out wrong, well, it wouldn’t much matter then, either.

  The SWAT guys weren’t thrilled with Starshak being CO, but Starshak had been SWAT before, and with what Lynch had on the mayor, Lynch was calling the shots. The circle of people Lynch trusted was closing in, and he wasn’t going to have anybody outside of it in charge of anything.

  The SWAT guy in the front passenger seat said, “Roger that,” and then turned back to Starshak. “Manning just left her building.”

  Then the radio tuned to Ferguson’s frequency went live. “West negative thirty-three.” A pause. “And west sixty-one.”

  Starshak keyed the command channel.

  “Go, go, go!”

  As the van lurched forward, Starshak ran his finger along the map, counting down the buildings. West sixty-one was Manning’s place. What the fuck?

  Starshak keyed his mic. “We’re taking west sixty-one.”

  Fisher watched Manning on his monitor and listened to her confession. The priest ordered no penance. Fisher cursed the priest’s weakness as he set the monitor and his rosary down and brought the stock of the rifle up to his cheek, his eye behind the scope, the doors of the church as clear as heaven.

  Lynch watched as Manning walked toward him.

  “Ms Manning, my name is John Lynch. I am a detective with-”

  The eyepatch killed Lynch’s peripheral vision. He barely saw the kick coming. Manning’s left foot flashed up toward the right side of his head. He only managed to turn with the kick a fraction before the boot hit his head and he hit the floor, his vision narrowed to a small tunnel, his ears ringing. Manning was rushing past him to the doors of the church. The doors were pushing open. Lynch was just up to his hands and knees when he saw her stagger and drop to the ground, the door closing behind her.

  Ferguson and Jenks didn’t have time to think about west sixty-one. They saw the church doors open, saw Manning drop, heard the report to the north. Close. Real close. Both fired at the radar units.

  Weaver heard three things almost at once. A rifle shot from right outside the front of the condo, the radar box being hit by a bullet, and a loud screech of tires. He snatched his M4 off the table and ran up the hall to the front window. Cops in raid gear were piling out of a big Chicago PD truck. Fuck this, Weaver thought. The president was on his own. Gotta slow things down just a tad, get to the van, get out of Dodge, live off the money in the Caymans.

  Weaver fired a long burst from the hip through the front window and into the line of cops running from the truck. Aiming low, going for legs. Didn’t need to kill anybody. And they’d be armored up anyway. A few of them dropped. That ought to keep them away from the door for a few seconds. Then Weaver put a three-round burst into Uri, who was crouched at the window looking back at him. He didn’t need any of the lend-lease guys Clarke had dug up swapping stories for plea deals.

  “Fire up the van,” he yelled to the entry team as he sprinted for the back door, swapping out his magazine on the run.

  Starshak was first out of the truck, bolting toward Manning’s condo. He was closing on the door, the two guys with the ram behind him, when he heard shots from somewhere south and a bullet slammed into the small box sitting in the planter hanging from Manning’s window. Must be the guys Lynch had told him about taking out the radar units. Then a burst of automatic fire came from inside, shattering the glass. A couple of the guys behind Starshak went down, and he and the ram team broke left, flattening against the building. He heard another short burst inside the condo.

  Further back, two of the assault team returned fire, chewing up the window the shots had come from.

  “Let’s move,” shouted Starshak, and the ram team went around him and hit the door.

  Starshak and the ram team went through the door first, the rest of the team streaming in. One dead to his left, by the window. The team spread out through the condo, Starshak hearing “clear, clear, clear,” as they checked the rooms.

  “Got one in here, Captain.”

  He walked into the bedroom to the right off the hallway, saw one of his guys checking the pulse of the girl duct-taped on the bed. Manning. But Manning was at the church. What the fuck?

  “She OK?” Starshak asked.

  “She’s out, but her pulse is good.”

  Someone yelled from the back. “Got a white van headed south down the alley.”

  Ferguson was about to fire on the shooter in Manning’s window when the police truck squealed around the corner and slammed to a stop. Fucking Lynch had gone Boy Scout on them, still trying to color inside the lines. Manning was still dead, though.

  “Lynch, you asshole — you didn’t even save the girl,” Ferguson shouted into the comm. Only one thing left to do. He turned to Jenks.

  “Your audio unit — you get a read on Fisher?”

  “Ground level, straight across from Manning’s place. Got to be the red pickup with the white cap.”

  Ferguson swung his rifle right, lined up the truck, and started putting rounds through the roof and truck cap as quickly as he could. Jenks did the same, both spacing their rounds so that nobody in the truck could avoid being hit at least two or three times.

  “Got him or we didn’t,” said Ferguson. “Time to go.”

  The two men dropped their rifles on the tarp, walked to the ropes at the east end of the roof, clipped on, zipped to the ground, and trotted down the alley heading east.

  Fisher lay prone on the street beneath the bed of the pickup, listening to the rounds ripping through the cap on the truck and thudding into the bags of sand he had set across the bed. Methodical fire, rounds walking down and across the truck bed. Then the firing stopped.

  He looked up toward the church. He saw Detective Lynch stumble from the church porch, dive off the porch, and then start toward the truck. Behind Lynch, a young priest walked through the door. Not one of the priests Fisher had seen during his recon. The priest pulled a hand gun from the slit in his cassock and began to raise the weapon toward Lynch.

  No time. Fisher snapped the Dragunov into position and fired.

  Lynch got to his feet and staggered to the church doors, leaning on them and pushing them open, his head still fuzzy. Manning was flat on her back, arms splayed, the entrance wound center chest, just like Marslovak and Riordan. The top of her coat was open. It looked like she had a vest on under it. What the hell?

  Up the street, he saw the first of the SWAT units squeal around the corner and angle in toward the curb in front of Manning’s place, the assault team scrambling out. He heard shots coming from inside the building.

  He heard Ferguson in his comm. “Lynch, you asshole — you didn’t even save the girl.” Then he heard rifle fire from Ferguson’s position. Lynch hit the cement on the church porch and rolled off the south edge, thinking Ferguson was after him, but he heard no rounds hitting. He looked up. More fire from Ferguson’s position. Ferguson and Jenks were shooting up the red pickup parked across the street from Manning’s condo.

  Had to be Fisher’s hide. Lynch got to his feet, stumbled down Sheridan, and then he heard another rifle shot, saw a muzzle flash underneath the truck, felt the round zip past him, left of his head, heard a shot immediately behind him, pistol, felt a tug and a burning on his left arm, heard a grunt. Lynch span around. The young priest who had been hearing confessions was sprawled in the street, a big chunk of his head gone, a Glock on the asphalt near his right hand.

  Lynch dove to his right, rolling behind a parked car. He didn’t know if Fishe
r was trying to kill him or save him, but if it was the former, he wouldn’t miss twice. He looked at his arm. A chunk was missing along the side of his left triceps. He remembered the pistol on the pavement next to the dead priest’s hand. Fisher’s shot had gone past his head, so Fisher hadn’t shot him in the arm. That meant the priest had. Which meant Fisher had saved his life.

  Cunningham was soaked in sweat, but he’d freed his left hand. He reached across his chest, rotating his trunk as far as he could, and unbuckled the cuff on his right wrist. No way to get to his ankles in the box.

  He unclipped the leather wrist cuffs from the sides of the box. Heavy bastards, big buckles. He looped one cuff through the other, and buckled them tight. He held the cuffs in one hand, snapped his wrist a little. All together, maybe two feet long, good heft, decent leverage. He fiddled with them a bit so that the heavy buckles were right where he wanted them.

  Motherfuckers would have to open the damn box eventually.

  Weaver held on to the door grip as the van spun out of the spot behind Manning’s condo and south down the alley toward the church. Never set up a mission without a back door. Weaver had four rental cars in the basement garage of a building three blocks east.

  The three guys in the van were all long-time InterGov pros. They knew the drill. At this point, it was get away or get dead.

  Just as the van neared the end of the alley, a PD truck pulled into the alley from the south, blocking their exit.

  The InterGov driver swung the van hard left into the parking lot on the north side of the church, barreled through the church lot out on to Sheridan on a diagonal, clipping the front end of a car as it made the turn east.

  A Chicago squad car shot out an alley on their left, trying to cut them off. Weaver’s driver swerved to give Weaver an angle. Weaver already had the M4 out the window. No aiming for legs now. He put most of a clip through the windshield of the squad as the van shot past it, two wheels up on the curb, pedestrians diving out of the way. The cop car swerved, slowed, bounced up the curb and crunched into the brick three-flat across the street.