Suicide Mission

by William W. Johnstone

  They all looked like the enemy, and he had to control the impulse to start blowing them away.

  “All we want’s the cash,” T.J. went on. “You babies pick up your coke and back on outta here, do you another deal some other day, capisce?”

  The head Arab was the only clean-shaven one of the bunch. He said, “You men are very foolish to be interfering with our business.”

  The bald-headed boss of the Ukrainian crew said, “You think we let you walk out of here with our money?”

  “I don’t think you got any choice, man, long as me and my partner got these grenades.”

  T.J. could have at least tried to disguise his voice, thought Bailey. He didn’t plan to speak at all unless he had to. There were plenty of guys in New York City who were as big as he was—well, maybe not plenty, but some, for sure—so that was all he was going to let them know about him.

  All the gunmen had started to reach under their coats for their weapons at the first sign of trouble, but the sight of the grenades had stopped them from completing their draws. Bailey didn’t know how long that would keep them frozen, so he wanted to get this over with. He was glad when T.J. went on, “Close the case with the money, put it on the floor, and slide it over here.”

  “Go to hell,” the boss Ukrainian said, adding some colorful and anatomically improbable suggestions. He finished by saying, “You can’t throw those grenades at us. You’ll blow yourselves up, too!”

  “Not when you’re over there and we’re over here,” T.J. said. “Anyway, it’s a chance we’re willin’ to take. Are you?”

  The Arab said, “Leave us out of it,” and reached for the briefcase full of coke.

  “Don’t touch that!” the Ukrainian snapped. “Our deal was concluded.” He glanced toward Bailey and T.J. “The cocaine is ours now, as per our agreement. So if anyone is to lose the money, it is you.”

  “Lies!” the Arab responded. “The deal was not finished. That is still our cocaine!”

  Bailey saw T.J. glance over at him uneasily. This argument was something they hadn’t anticipated. When you’re ripping off crazy foreign gangsters, any complication is a bad one, Bailey realized.

  T.J. said, “Look, you guys can hash that out after we’ve got the cash and gone.” He giggled. “Hash it out. Only that’s coke, not hash!”

  The two groups ignored him. They were glaring at each other now. The Ukrainian pointed at the case with the coke in it and said, “Those are my drugs.”

  “No, those are my drugs,” the Arab insisted.

  T.J. said, “Hey! We’re the ones with the grenades!”

  Both leaders lunged for the coke at the same time. As they did, the men with them clawed guns from under their coats and started shooting at each other. Flames flickered from the muzzles of machine pistols as lead spewed from them. The shotgun boomed.

  T.J. yelled, “No!” and ran forward, probably intent on grabbing the briefcase full of money from the middle of the firefight. Bailey made a grab for him with the hand holding the grenade but missed.

  The grenade slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor, bouncing once and then rolling. The arming lever had spun away as soon as Bailey let go of it. Bailey’s eyes bugged out as his brain automatically started counting down the seconds.

  He sure as hell wasn’t going to throw himself on the grenade to protect this warehouse full of scumbags. Instead he took a fast step forward and kicked the damn thing, sending it scooting past T.J. as it slid straight toward the table over which the Ukrainians and the Arabs were blazing away at each other.

  The grenade detonated just as it went under the table.

  Bailey had already thrown himself flat on the floor when the explosion rocked the building. With his head down, he couldn’t see anything, but the image in his mind’s eye of what had to be happening was pretty clear.

  The blast blew the table into a million pieces. A cloud of smoke mixed with cocaine billowed toward the ceiling. Deadly shrapnel sprayed through the air and shredded the flesh of the men standing nearby. Tiny pieces of money swirled around and floated back to the floor like snowflakes.

  Bailey was untouched. With his ears ringing from the explosion, he lifted his head and looked around. The single high-intensity bulb fastened to one of the rafters overhead still burned, casting its harsh light over the scene. Bailey saw huddled lumps of bloody flesh and torn clothing lying on the floor near the site of the explosion. He looked for T.J. . . .

  A moan made him turn his head. T.J. lay to one side where the force of the blast had thrown him. He was still alive. He had been farther away from the grenade, so it hadn’t killed him—yet—but he had caught some shrapnel. Bailey saw blood on T.J.’s Windbreaker.

  As Bailey tried to gather his wits, T.J. rolled onto his side and started struggling to his feet. Bailey knew they had to get out of here. The explosion would draw the cops, and they didn’t want to be here for that.

  The coke and the cash were gone, destroyed in the blast, but at least maybe they could escape with their lives, Bailey thought as he got his hands and knees under him and tried to lever himself up off the floor.

  A thought struck him. Where the hell was T.J.’s grenade?

  Still on all fours, Bailey looked around wildly, thinking that T.J. must have dropped the grenade when he was knocked down. It might go off at any second.

  Then Bailey spotted the ugly thing lying on the floor a few feet away. His heart slammed against his chest and then tried to crawl up his throat. The terror that gripped him was stronger even than anything he had experienced during the war.

  But as he stared at the grenade, he realized that the pin was still in it.

  T.J. had never pulled it.

  Either T.J. had forgotten to pull the pin, or he had been running a bluff he’d neglected to tell Bailey about. Anything was possible where he was concerned. But the important thing was that the grenade wasn’t going to explode. Bailey’s muscles were limp with relief, and that kept him from getting up for a moment longer.

  T.J. staggered toward the blackened crater in the floor where the table had been.

  “T.J.,” Bailey croaked. “What are—”

  “Might be some money left,” T.J. mumbled without looking back. Even injured, he wanted the payoff. “Might find some—”

  One of the lumps on the floor moved then. Something lifted and pointed toward T.J., and Bailey didn’t even have time to shout a warning when he recognized it as the shotgun carried by the Ukrainian driver. Somehow, the man wasn’t dead yet.

  Flame gouted from the weapon’s muzzle. The buckshot caught T.J. in the chest and flung him backward. He hit the floor right after the shotgun, which had been torn from the wounded man’s hands by its recoil.

  Bailey scrambled over to T.J. on hands and knees. He sat down and pulled the limp body into his lap. T.J.’s head lolled loosely on his neck. His chest was a bloody mess where the shotgun’s blast had struck him, not to mention the shrapnel wounds scattered around his body.

  He might have survived the shrapnel if Bailey had been able to get some medical attention for him. The buckshot had killed him, though. His eyes were wide open, staring sightlessly. They were all Bailey could see of his face because of the ski mask. Sobbing, Bailey took hold of the mask and peeled it off.

  “T.J., I’m sorry, I’m sorry, buddy, I should have stopped him, oh, God, I’m so sorry . . .”

  The words poured out of Bailey in a river of sorrow. He cradled T.J.’s bloody form against his chest and rocked back and forth. They had been through so much together, and now suddenly, shockingly, it was over. It couldn’t be, it couldn’t be.

  Bailey wasn’t thinking about the cops anymore. There was no room in his brain for that. Instead it was filled with grief, and then slowly, anger began to filter in and replace some of that sadness. He reached up and pulled his own ski mask off, gulping down deep lungfuls of air between sobs. After a few minutes, he eased T.J.’s body to the floor and staggered to his feet.

  T
he revolver he had dropped lay close by. He scooped it up and walked toward the Ukrainian who had wielded the shotgun. The stubborn son of a bitch still wasn’t dead, although he was so close now he was too weak to lift the weapon or even reach for it. All he could do was lie there, his body a wreck where the explosion had torn into it, his face a bloody mask with grotesquely staring eyes.

  Bailey stood over the man and pointed the revolver at his face. He couldn’t tell if the Ukrainian actually saw him or not. It didn’t matter.

  Bailey pulled the trigger.

  Then he pulled it again and again until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. The Ukrainian’s head looked like a pumpkin somebody had dropped from the top of a ten-story building.

  Bailey lowered the empty gun and let it slip from his fingers. It thudded to the floor beside his feet. He turned away from the gory mess, not really thinking about anything, just allowing the primitive instincts inside him to move his muscles.

  The door into the warehouse office crashed open. Heavy footsteps pounded on the cement floor. Uniformed shapes flitted in front of Bailey’s eyes. Dimly, he heard a lot of strident, shouting voices telling him to get down on the ground.

  He fell to his knees, but not because anybody ordered him to. He was just too tired to stay on his feet anymore. Something hit him in the back and knocked him forward onto his face. The rough concrete scraped his face. He didn’t care.

  He just didn’t give a damn about anything anymore.

  CHAPTER 19

  Georgia, three years before the New Sun

  Wade Stillman burrowed his head down in the pillow, hoping he could get it deep enough to shut out the sound, that awful, endless, screeching yap that haunted his waking hours and lately his nightmares, too.

  No luck. He could still hear Lucy Kammen talking to him.

  “Don’t forget the rent’s due day after tomorrow, Wade. And if we don’t pay the electric company, they’re gonna shut off our power, honey. I can’t handle that, so you better see if you can get an advance at work, okay? I’d ask my sister, but I’ve already borrowed so much from Trish . . . Oh, hey, I know, sweetie. You can ask your daddy for a loan. Why don’t you go over there and do that today before you go to work, okay? I’m sure he wouldn’t mind helpin’ us out a little.”

  Wade raised his head and blinked bleary eyes. Lucy was standing on the other side of the room in front of the mirror on the old dressing table. She had her blouse on but hadn’t pulled on her pants yet, so that meant he had a good view of the round curves of her panty-clad butt.

  He moaned and dropped his head back into the pillow so that he couldn’t see her anymore. When he looked at her and his brain got addled by how sexy she was, her words actually seemed to make sense, and he didn’t want that. He couldn’t handle that.

  “Did you hear what I said, honey? About goin’ to see your daddy?”

  Wade wondered if he could push his face into the pillow’s soft, enfolding darkness hard enough to suffocate himself. It might be worth a try, rather than facing another day.

  “Sweetie?”

  He knew she wasn’t going to stop until he answered her. He lifted his head again and said, “My daddy don’t have any money, Lucy. You know that.”

  “Oh, he’s got a little put away. You told me he did.”

  “That’s to pay for the rest home when he gets old. He’s been puttin’ a little aside for that for years.”

  Lucy picked up a brush and started stroking it firmly through the thick auburn hair that tumbled around her shoulders. The motion tensed her muscles and made her butt look even better.

  “He’s still a long way from needin’ a rest home,” she said. “He can spare a little now. Just enough to keep our power on. You know, if you were to go down to the electric company and talk to them, you might could pay them part of what we owe, and that’d be enough to keep ’em from turnin’ off the power. What do you think about that?”

  “I think you should come back over here to the bed,” Wade said.

  “Oh, hell, no, honey, there’s no time for that, no matter how good it sounds. I got to get to work.” She set the brush aside, reached for her pants, and drew them up her sleek legs. “If I’m late for the lunch rush, Solomon will kill me, you know that.” She stepped into her shoes and blew him a kiss. “Don’t forget what we talked about.”

  Two minutes after she was gone, while he was still lying in bed, Wade said aloud, “Wha . . . what was it I wasn’t supposed to forget?”

  He rolled over and went back to sleep. Chances were, it wasn’t important anyway.

  When he woke up, he realized he had overslept and had to hurry to make it to work on time. Avery Calhoun, the manager of the sporting goods department at the MegaMart, always tried to cut Wade as much slack as he could—“Once a Marine, always a Marine,” Avery liked to say, and if he wanted to use that as an excuse to do favors for Wade, that was just fine—but there was only so much he could do. If Wade was late too many times, he’d wind up getting fired, and although the MegaMart job wasn’t the best one in the world, it was probably the best one Wade could get in his hometown. He wasn’t exactly what anybody would call highly skilled.

  Except at killing people. He had gotten damn good at that while he was in the Marines.

  So he took what he could get, which in his case was working in the MegaMart selling fishing poles and deer rifles and hunting and fishing licenses. And putting up with Avery’s boring stories about ’Nam. All for not much more than minimum wage and no freaking benefits, although he’d been promised that he’d move up to that after he’d been there for a while. Wade wasn’t convinced the day would ever come, though.

  He took a quick shower and was out of the house he and Lucy rented. A quick stop at a drive-thru window fortified him with a cup of lousy coffee and a greasy breakfast sandwich.

  A look of relief came over Avery Calhoun’s face as Wade walked into the sporting goods department. Avery was tall and mostly bald, with glasses and a little belly that hung over his belt. The days of him being in good enough shape for the Marines had vanished into the mists of time.

  Avery said, “I’m glad to see you, Wade. I was about to get a little worried.”

  “Yeah, I know I cut it a little close. But I’m here, and I ain’t late.”

  “No, you’re not,” Avery agreed. “And that’s good, because we’ve got a truck coming in any time now.”

  That meant they would spend the afternoon unloading merchandise and storing it in the stockroom. That wasn’t Wade’s favorite thing in the world, but it beat waiting on customers.

  “You look a little tired,” Avery went on. “Are you getting enough sleep these days?”

  “Yeah, I guess.” Wade felt a flash of annoyance. He liked Avery, he really did, but the guy could be too much of a mother hen. “Sometimes I dream a little too much.”

  Avery nodded knowingly and said, “I understand. It took me years to get to where I didn’t dream almost every night about some things that happened in country.”

  There he went again, the wise old Vietnam vet. Truth was, Wade hardly ever dreamed about what had happened in Iraq. Most of his nightmares involved Lucy nagging him. Once he had even dreamed that she was trying to beat him to death with a shovel. He had no idea why she’d been using a shovel instead of some more conventional weapon, like a baseball bat, but there it was, for whatever it was worth.

  The first couple of hours on the job went okay. They weren’t too busy and were able to get half of the truck’s cargo unloaded. Then Avery answered the phone behind the counter and held the receiver out toward Wade.

  “Lucy,” he said in a quiet voice.

  Wade frowned. He wasn’t supposed to get personal calls at work any more than she was, and she knew that. So this might actually be an emergency of some sort.

  He took the phone from Avery, who was keeping his expression carefully noncommittal, and said into it, “What’s up?”

  “Did you go by the electric company and ta
lk to them?”

  The tense tone of her voice as she asked the question told him that she already knew the answer. He winced, knowing that was one of the things he had forgotten. He wouldn’t have had time, anyway, since he’d slept so late.

  “Sorry, I didn’t get a chance—”

  “You didn’t talk to your daddy, either, did you?”

  “No, but how—”

  “How did I know? Because they just called my cell phone. The account’s in my name, you know.”

  How could he not know that? She was the only one who had any semblance of good credit.

  She went on, “They called to tell me they were there at the house right then to shut off the power unless I could bring them the money for that overdue bill. And of course I had to tell them to go ahead and shut it off because I didn’t have the money, and anyway I couldn’t leave work. Which means that I’ll have to go home to a house without electricity and it’ll cost even more in the long run to get it turned back on!”

  “Now, honey, take it easy,” Wade said. “I’ll get it all straightened out—”

  Again she interrupted him, saying, “If you trip on something in the dark when you get home, it’ll be all your crap that I’ve thrown out on the front lawn!”

  “Look, I’m sorry, I just didn’t—”

  “No,” she broke in coldly. “You never do.”

  The phone clicked in his ear.

  Wade looked at it for a second, then replaced it on the base. He sighed and said, “Well, hell.”

  “Don’t worry, she’ll cool off and it’ll all blow over,” Avery said. “If I had a nickel for every time my wife got mad at me . . .”

  He was the wise old married man as well as the wise old vet, Wade thought. He said, “Lucy and I ain’t married.”

  “Well, I know that, but still, it’s pretty much the same—”

  A loud, angry voice somewhere nearby overrode what Avery was saying. Both men turned to look and saw a large man in blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a feed store cap berating a small boy who hung his head in misery and shame. A pale, narrow-faced woman who was obviously the boy’s mother stood nearby, fidgeting nervously.