The Professionals

by Owen Laukkanen

  “When the kids come, we’re going to show your face just so they know you’re alive,” he told her. “That way they’ll all come out in the open. When we’ve got all four of them, I’ll let you go.”

  She turned to face him. “Really?”

  He tried to hold her gaze. “Really,” he said, thinking, you’re getting too damn soft.

  She stared into his eyes. “You lie,” she said, and her voice was like damnation.

  Pender crouched low and ran through the shadows, clutching the Uzi and keeping his eyes open for Beneteau’s men. I feel like a Marine, he thought. Urban warfare.

  He ran down the side street a couple blocks from the kill zone, expecting to hear gunfire as he made his way forward. But no gunfire came, and he was alone in the darkness. He reached the end of the block and zagged up toward the drop site.

  He stopped a block away and stared up toward the spot, searching the distance for any signs of life, any cars in weird places, any assassins with heavy weaponry. But everything seemed normal. Nothing and everything felt out of the ordinary.

  He stayed as far off the road as possible, his jeans rubbing against weeds and his sneakers ruffling through the fall’s last moldy leaves as he crept up the block. They’d scoped the intersection on the Internet and decided that the vacant lot on this south side would be the likely staging ground for the kidnappers, and as Pender approached he scanned the dark hulks of parked cars for anything fresh and out of place.

  The whole street was silent, the only noise the occasional rumble and clank from the switch engines in the CSX yard a few blocks down, and Pender tried to fight the panic in his gut, tried to block the terrifying knowledge that there were multiple men out there in the dark whose only purpose was to kill him.

  He crept toward the vacant lot, one eye on the road and the other on the first brief row of cars. There were three vehicles that he could see, all rusted and broken and abandoned, and he crouched down and took cover behind the first, holding the Uzi to his chest and wondering what to do.

  He was staring through the spiderweb window of the first rusted hulk when he saw the SUV parked hidden in the back of the lot. It was a late-model Ford, and it looked untouched and new, incongruous in the bleak surroundings.

  Had to be them. The truck was too pristine to be sitting in this neighborhood more than a couple of hours. It sat about twenty feet away, angled out, facing north toward the intersection with the passenger windows pointed in Pender’s direction.

  Twenty feet away. Twenty feet of pure empty space. There was a chain-link fence running the length of the lot and a mostly empty yard behind. No shadow until the other side, where a factory overhang and a row of trees cast camouflage onto the gravel. Twenty feet. A mad dash and a gamble.

  He stayed in a low crouch and peered out around the car’s rear bumper. The lot was dark, but anyone watching from the road would see him clearly. No getting around it.

  Pender forced himself to take a deep breath, and he let it out slow. He took another deep breath and this time closed his eyes and ran. He stayed low but the noise of his feet on the gravel sounded like gunfire already, and he seemed to be running in molasses; it took an hour to close the twenty feet before the shadows but he kept running, kept low, every step a prayer.

  He reached the back of the lot and the long, safe darkness and crouched down again behind the Explorer, hunched over and daring to hope that nobody inside had seen him. He sat for a minute, catching his breath, listening hard, but there was nothing but the distant rushing backdrop of the city.

  Pender peered around the passenger side of the Explorer and out into the lot. Nobody anywhere. Maybe we got the wrong intersection, he thought. Maybe we got the wrong time. Maybe there’s nobody in this Explorer and we’re all running around like idiots. But then he caught a glimpse of something in the passenger-side mirror, a face. A girl’s face. She caught his eye for a second, then looked away.

  That must be Haley, he thought. Perfect. He slouched back behind the truck and tried to figure out a plan. If he snuck up along the driver’s side, he’d be spotted in an instant. He could sneak up the passenger side, but then he put Haley in between the Uzi and the target.

  Pender crept back around the passenger side and stared at the girl’s face in the mirror, trying to catch her eye again. After a minute or two, she glanced in the mirror, and Pender held up his hand. How many, he mouthed, holding up one finger. The girl nodded, quick and almost imperceptible. Pender nodded. Distract him, he mouthed. She frowned. He held up his free hand and made like a talking mouth. Pender watched as she turned to the driver and started to talk. Then he crept around the other side of the Explorer and slowly made his way up to the front of the vehicle.

  The girl leaned over toward D’Antonio. “I’m bored,” she said. “Where are these guys?”

  D’Antonio scanned the intersection. “They should have been here by now.”

  She put her hand on his leg. “Can’t we do something while we wait?”

  D’Antonio let himself enjoy her touch for a few seconds. When this is over, he thought, when these kids are nothing but gristle and shell casings, I’m going to go back to Detroit and I’m going to take a long nap. Then I’m going to have Rialto send over a couple girls, and I’m going to forget all about this crazy bitch. He shook his head. “Just wait.”

  D’Antonio saw the gun before he saw the man. Just outside his window, a submachine Uzi with an extended clip. Hard-core hardware. Then he saw the shooter. It was one of the kids, and for a second he was confused. How did those little punks get their hands on artillery like that, he wondered.

  “Don’t make a sound,” the kid told him, keeping his gun trained on D’Antonio’s head. His voice came muffled through the glass, but D’Antonio could sense the kid’s nerves, his false courage. “Open the door, slow.”

  The kid stepped back to give him room, and he let the Uzi drop just enough that D’Antonio saw his chance. Slowly, he reached down with his right hand until his fingers met the steel of his Glock. He wrapped his hand around it, and then he moved quickly, bringing the gun up and spinning to jam the weapon hard against the girl’s throat.

  “Hey!” The kid jumped forward, shoving the muzzle of the Uzi against D’Antonio’s neck. “The fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “You shoot, I shoot,” D’Antonio replied. “Think about it.”

  The kid went silent. D’Antonio could hear him breathing hard, trying to keep it together. “All right,” D’Antonio said, his voice smooth as butter on toast. “Now drop the weapon before I drop this girl.”

  “I’m not dropping anything.” The kid’s voice was shaky. “You even move and I’ll put a whole clip in your head.”

  D’Antonio smiled. “This isn’t the movies, kid.” With his left hand, he reached up to the steering wheel and punched down on the horn. The noise echoed around the abandoned buildings, loud as a jet airplane in the silence of the night. “I’d say you have maybe a minute until the cavalry arrives,” D’Antonio told him. “You want to make a decision, make it fast.”

  sixty-seven

  Sawyer crept down the spur line, keeping to the weeds on the side of the right of way and trying to stay in the shadows as he headed toward the intersection. He kept his head on a swivel, trying to imagine where Beneteau’s goons were hiding.

  This is just like Xbox, he thought. On some Call of Duty shit. He made his way slowly up toward the level crossing and peered out from around the side of a warehouse toward the intersection. The streets were deserted.

  Somewhere out there, Pender is running around with an Uzi, he thought. That’s a scary idea. He listened close, straining for a cough or the snap of a twig, something to give away the bad guys’ locations, but he heard nothing.

  Christ, he thought. Where the hell are those guys? He kept listening, hardly daring to breathe, searching the shadows for any signs of life.

  Then he saw it. So brief he thought he’d imagined it. A little chuff of condensati
on, hot breath in cold air. It came from a shadow on the other side of a loading dock, about halfway between the tracks and the intersection. Sawyer stared at the spot, and a couple seconds later he saw the cloud reappear.

  Sawyer flattened himself against the wall and slunk forward toward the loading dock, trying to pick the guy out in the darkness. He reached the dock, a five-foot shelf that jutted out toward the road, and he crouched down below it. The man was on the other side, barely ten feet away, and now Sawyer could hear his muffled breathing, the shuffle as he shifted his weight. Bingo, he thought. Now we see whether it’s possible to be stupid and lucky.

  He stayed so low he was almost crawling, inching around the loading dock until the man was maybe two feet away. He peered around the side of the dock. The man was facing away from him and dressed all in black. He was huge. Probably six foot six, a real heavyweight lunkhead. The man cradled a machine pistol in his hands, and he was staring out toward the empty intersection.

  Sawyer crept back to the other side of the loading dock and felt around in the weeds for something big enough to use as a weapon. After a minute or two of searching, he got his hands on a length of four-inch-thick cast-iron piping, and he picked it up, testing it. A little short, but it would do.

  He made his way back around the base of the loading dock. This time, something made him hesitate. The man was right there, waiting to be taken down, but something wasn’t right. Sawyer waited. He could hear the man breathing, heavy, and then he knew: The thug had turned away from the intersection. He was facing Sawyer now, so close Sawyer could have reached out and tied his laces together.

  Shit, Sawyer thought. He stayed crouched, silently begging the guy to turn around. Then he heard the car horn, and he knew he had his chance.

  It rang out from across the vacant lot, close enough that it had to mean something. Sawyer heard the thug beside him tense up and turn to face the intersection again. Sawyer stood quickly, holding the pipe like a baseball bat, and he swung for the bleachers, catching the goon square on the jaw, the pipe shattering bone with a sickening crunch and sending the man reeling back toward the warehouse wall, back and down.

  Sawyer worked quick, following the guy backward and teeing up with another home-run swing before the thug could grab his gun. This time the man’s skull made a sound like a burst pumpkin, and the pipe came back bloody. The guy sunk to the ground and stayed there.

  Sawyer stared down at the thug for a second, his heart pounding. Then he reached down and unclipped the gun from around the guy’s neck, dropping the pipe by his feet. The gun was warm in his hand, and for a second Sawyer felt sick. Then he caught himself. He straightened up and shook it off and turned back to the street.

  Two more thugs, both similarly super-sized, were in the middle of the intersection, walking from opposite corners toward the vacant lot. One guy had a machine gun, looked like an Uzi, and the other a big sawed-off shotgun. Big guys. Big fucking guns.

  Sawyer examined his own weapon, a full-sized TEC-9 machine pistol with what looked like a fifty-round clip and a ventilated shroud on the end of the muzzle. The thing was a killing machine, but Sawyer had played enough video games to know you sacrificed quality for quantity when you shot a TEC-9. No sniper shit, he thought. We spray and pray.

  The thug with the shotgun was closer, but Sawyer wanted to neutralize the Uzi first. He danced through the shadows up to the corner of the intersection, and then he dashed across the street, making for a Buick on blocks on the other side of the pavement.

  He got there and crouched behind the car and watched the thugs, both starting across the lot by now, the guy with the Uzi about forty feet away. Just like the movies, he thought. Exhale slowly, then fire.

  Sawyer held the gun in both hands. He took a deep breath, then stood and drew his mark. He let the breath out and pulled the trigger.

  The sound was deafening, the gun jumping all over the place with the recoil, and Sawyer let off a burst of maybe ten shots before he got the gun back under control. The thug with the Uzi was down on the ground, but Sawyer couldn’t tell if he was hit or just diving for cover, and meanwhile the other thug was making for a line of cars at the edge of the lot.

  Sawyer advanced across the street, keeping low and heading for the cover of the building on the edge of the lot. The guy with the Uzi looked back and fired a wild burst, and the Buick’s windows smashed to nothing on the other side of the street. Sawyer shot from the hip as he ran, holding tight with both hands and keeping the trigger pulled until the thug was laid out and screaming.

  He made the side of the building and leaned back, out of sight, trying to catch his breath. Then he peered back into the vacant lot. The thug with the Uzi was flat on his back, blood pooling around him. Sawyer scoped out the row of junker cars, searching for the second shooter. He spotted him crouched between the first and second rides, the barrel of the shotgun giving him away.

  Where the hell is Pender, Sawyer thought. That shotgun will blow me away at close range.

  Sawyer peered back around the wall. The shooter had crept forward out of the cover of the parked cars, and now he was making his own dash for the wall. Sawyer stepped out and fired, bracing himself against the wall. The first burst missed, and the shooter fired a blast from his hip and kept running. The shotgun sounded like the end of the world, and Sawyer ducked for cover.

  Gotta get him before he gets to the wall, he thought, and he forced himself up and out again, diving into the middle of the lot as the shotgun boomed behind him. The thug was aiming at the corner of the building, and Sawyer caught him with about ten rounds before he could swing the shotgun around. The thug let off one more blast, but it went high and wide, and then he was slumping down, the shotgun falling to the gravel beside him.

  Holy shit. Sawyer ran to the cover of the row of abandoned cars and crouched down, staring out over the vacant lot and the carnage. He saw the truck parked way in the back of the lot, nearly hidden by shadows, and he decided that was where the horn had come from. That’s where the big boss is camped out, he thought. But where the hell is Pender?

  Then he felt the gun at his back. “Stand up, motherfucker.”

  Sawyer stood, cursing himself as the thug pressed his gun hard into the side of his neck.

  “Drop the gun.” The voice was vaguely Mediterranean. “Drop it now.”

  Sawyer felt the adrenaline rush subsiding, and all of a sudden he just felt tired and he knew this was where it was all supposed to end. He let go of the TEC and it clattered to the ground and the guy spun him around, a big ugly grin and a nickel-plated MAC-10.

  “You had to get cute, huh?” the guy said, pressing the gun harder against Sawyer’s skin. He leered into Sawyer’s eyes, drunk on power. Then he shoved Sawyer backward. “Well, come on, then, cutie,” he said. “Hope you saved me a dance.”

  sixty-eight

  D’Antonio watched as Dmitri hauled the kid to his feet, the muzzle of his machine gun pressed tight to the kid’s neck. Jesus, but that little punk had done a lot of damage. Yuri and Dario both done, and where the fuck was Paolo? Either dead or dying somewhere.

  They’d watched from the darkness as the kid had come out of the shadows and laid waste to both goons like the angel of death. D’Antonio kept his Glock pressed tight to the girl’s ear, holding her close and daring the kid with the Uzi to try something stupid. Now they watched as Dmitri roughed up the punk, whipping him with the butt of his gun, laughing in his face, having a little fun before the kill. “You must be Pender,” said D’Antonio. “The man with the plan.”

  The kid spat. “And who the hell are you?” His voice was still shaky.

  “I work for Donald Beneteau’s people.” He shifted a little. “You ever fired a gun before?”

  “I killed your goons in Miami, didn’t I? Tell your man to let my friend go.”

  “Not a chance.”

  “Let Haley go, at least. She’s got no part in this.”

  “You’re in no position to be making demands,�
�� said D’Antonio. “If you drop the Uzi, then maybe we talk. Maybe I let Haley go.”

  The kid pressed the gun tighter. “Not good enough.”

  Outside, Dmitri had the punk stood up, but barely. The kid was punch-drunk and reeling, his mouth a bloody mess and his left eye half closed. D’Antonio honked the horn, and Dmitri glanced over and nodded, briefly, before kicking the punk backward and leveling the gun at his forehead.

  “Fine,” said D’Antonio. “Then you all die. Starting with your pal out there.”

  Sawyer was beat-up and rotten. His head throbbed. He felt his legs giving out when the horn blared and the thug quit beating on him at last. The guy kicked him back, and he nearly collapsed, but just barely held on and stood upright. I’m going out standing, he thought as he stared down the gun. I can say that at least.

  The thug had a flair for the dramatic. He gave Sawyer a wink and made kissy lips and then straightened the gun, and Sawyer braced for the kill shot. He closed his eyes. Then he heard the roar of the engine, and he opened his eyes again, quick.

  The thug wasn’t staring at him, but at the minivan as it sped out from the shadows, its ancient motor straining under Tiffany’s heel. The van headed right for Sawyer, and for a moment he could swear he saw Tiffany smiling.

  The thug spun away from Sawyer and fired a long angry burst across the front of the van, his shots arcing up and to the left, shattering the windshield. The engine revved higher, Tiffany’s eyes all murder and vengeance, and she slammed into the thug doing forty or so, rolled over him twice and came to a stop halfway down the block.

  Sawyer ran back to the thug, who lay broken and bleeding on the pavement. He kicked the machine gun away from his hand and stared down at the bastard, the thug’s face all grease, glass, and grit, his breathing ragged and bloody. Sawyer stood over him for a minute, watching the man struggling to breathe, and then he picked up the MAC-10 from the side of the road and put a burst through the thug’s chest.