“What did you say?”
“I said I am surprised you would be stealing money from Farm Aid. That money goes to help people who need it. It doesn’t belong to wealthy gamblers or Old Families. Well, it did—I mean, they were the ones who donated it—but it goes to—”
“I know who it goes to,” Jim growled, turning to look at Tychus. “I just didn’t know where it came from. But you did, didn’t you, Tychus?”
“Jimmy, just listen up a moment …,” said Tychus, lifting a hand in a placating manner.
“Fekk that. You knew! And you didn’t tell me because you knew I wouldn’t go along with it! That money helps people. My people.”
“It’s a goddamned tax break for folks who have way too much money—that’s what it is,” Tychus retorted. “Jimmy, the only reason this Farm Aid was even created was to help the rich out. Help them feel good about themselves and their empty but very wealthy lives. Come on, I know you know that!”
“That doesn’t matter! That money lets people stay in their homes, Tychus. It means they got enough to eat. It means their kids got enough to eat. And you didn’t tell me!”
“That’s because sometimes you’re too stubborn and stupid for your own good,” Tychus said, his brows drawing together. “Shut up and take the damned credits, Jim. Then you can be a rich big baby and indulge your morals all you want to. So help me, if we get out of this alive, I’m gonna kick your ass so hard—”
There came a sudden high-pitched whine. Out of the corner of his eye, Jim saw movement. Faster than he would have believed possible, he whirled and brought his foot crashing down on the tiny spider that was scuttling toward Woodley’s feet, smashing it to bits before it could inject its venom into the terrified agent.
“Th-thank you kindly, Mr. Raynor,” Woodley managed in a weak voice.
“Aw, shit,” Tychus muttered. “Why the fekk did you have to go and do that, Ash?”
Jim looked around, aghast at what he saw.
Dead. They were all dead. The tellers, the guards, the poor saps who had done nothing but come into a bank to make a deposit or withdraw some cash—they lay slumped where they had fallen. At least they didn’t look like it had hurt. While he could imagine the lovely Jennifer putting a lethal toxin into the spiders for emergency purposes, he couldn’t see her choosing one that would cause undue pain.
He turned slowly around to face Ash. “You activated the spiders, you son of a bitch. These people did nothing. Why did you do that?”
“To get you to shut up and focus,” Ash said. “Get your ass in here and get back to loading up the money. At least we don’t have a stupid hour time limit now.”
Something snapped, cold and final, inside of Raynor. He looked down at the two sacks of creds he held, then opened his hands. They dropped to the floor, spilling their contents. Jim lifted his gaze.
“I’m done,” was all he said. He turned around and strode to the door.
“Don’t you touch that door,” snarled Ash. “Raynor! Raynor!”
Jim kept moving.
And the bullet ripped through him.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Jim grunted as the bullet seared his right shoulder and heard Tychus bellow in fury. Jim whirled, gun in hand, to face Ash. But Tychus had beaten him to it.
Tychus hadn’t bothered with a weapon. He was one.
He grasped Ash by the lapels as if the other man weighed nothing at all and slammed him hard into the wall. Ash went limp as a puppet when the strings were cut. Tychus dropped him at once. Ash lay where he had fallen, his head at an impossible angle.
Rafe and Win had been so surprised by the speed of this turn of events that they were only now just drawing their own weapons. Jim, gritting his teeth against the pain of his wounded shoulder, lifted his gun and fired. His arm was unsteady due to the injury and wavered slightly. The bullet took Win in the upper chest instead of the head, and the man grunted and dropped his weapon.
Jim started to fire again, but Tychus was there. He had Rafe’s throat in one powerful hand and crunched down hard even as he sprang onto the wounded Win.
“You … don’t … shoot … my … friend!” he grunted, punctuating each word with a solid punch into Win’s thin, ratty-looking face. By the time he had reached the word “shoot” Win’s face was a bloody mess, and by the time he reached “friend,” it was obvious the man was dead.
But Rafe wasn’t. He was still struggling. Jim lifted his gun, steadied his arm with his other hand, and fired into Rafe’s chest.
There was silence in the bank as Jim and Tychus caught their breath. Tychus was spattered in blood. He turned to Jim with a large grin.
“It stopped bein’ about the money,” was all he said. “Let’s take a look at that shoulder.”
They had gotten very good at field medicine, and within a few moments Tychus had packed the wound with antibiotics from a small kit he’d brought with him and bound it tightly. “You’re a lucky son of a bitch. Bullet went clean through.”
“Search Ash,” Jim said. “Make sure we got everything we need.”
Tychus went to the broken body and quickly went through Ash’s pockets. “Good call,” he said. “He’s got the key to the penthouse.” He relieved the corpse of everything else of value as well.
A thin whimper reached their ears. “Woodley,” Jim said remorsefully. He’d forgotten all about the man. “Don’t worry. If we weren’t gonna shoot you on the train, we sure as hell ain’t gonna shoot you now. But I’m afraid we gotta disable you for a bit.”
Woodley looked relieved. “Of course you do,” he said. “I certainly understand. Are you gonna, um, knock me out?”
Jim glanced around. His eye fell on the lifeless bodies of their former cohorts. “Nah. Just going to truss you up a bit. Tychus, get their ties?”
Three minutes later, George Woodley beamed up at them as Tychus bound Woodley’s hands and feet with Ash’s and Rafe’s ties. Tychus let a big hand fall almost affectionately on Wood-ley’s head.
“You are one lucky devil, George Woodley. You should write your memoirs: How I Survived Two Robberies by Tychus Findlay and James Raynor.”
“Be kind to us in the retelling, will ya?” Jim said, grinning.
“Of course, sirs, you know I will!”
“I believe you,” Jim said, and he did. “And … I’m glad you told me where the money came from.”
Woodley gave him an oddly sweet smile. “You’re mighty welcome, Mr. Raynor. I knew something had to be wrong. You just wasn’t the type to steal from poor people who needed that money so bad.”
A lump rose in Jim’s throat. “No. No, I ain’t. Thanks for stopping me from doing that.”
“I hate to break up this sweet scene, but time is ticking by, and we did announce our presence by blowing a safe and firing weapons,” Tychus said. “Let’s get a move on.”
The elevator had been one of the casualties of the EMP, and they didn’t dare risk the stairs. Tychus had been right: once the safe had been blown, the residents and employees of various businesses located in the Covington Bank building had been tipped off to something more than just a pesky power outage. The luxury suite was fourteen stories up. In their planning, they had intended to make sure that the elevator car would be on the same floor as the bank when the EMP hit. It was there now, too—either that’s where it spent most of its time, or they had just been lucky. Tychus quickly popped open the hatch on the roof and stuck his head up.
“My arm’s pretty bad, Tychus,” Jim said. “I don’t know if I can climb this.”
“Well, Jimmy, I sure as hell ain’t leaving you to the authorities,” Tychus said, hauling himself up to sit on the roof of the car, “so you’d better try.”
It was a hot day, and the vehicle that Wilkes Butler had rented was not the most comfortable, but he bore it stoically. Because he was certain that his vigil would bear fruit.
He had been up all night, but it had been worth it. His research efforts had turned up what Butler was almost c
ertain was the reason Jim Raynor and Tychus Findlay were on Bacchus Moon at this particular point in time.
One, he knew they would have done their research, and would likely not have scheduled a “visit” during an Interstellar Marshals Convention if their little caper could have been done at any other point in time. For instance, if they’d had some kind of gambling gig in place, they could have waited four days.
No, they were here because they had to be here. Which meant that something specific was going on.
Further research and calling in a few favors had revealed the likely target: the Covington Bank was going to be the repository of several million credits for a period of thirty-seven hours. And that sounded exactly like the sort of thing that would interest Findlay and Raynor.
Butler had alerted the bank to increase their security, even giving them descriptions of Raynor and Findlay, and had been rather snippily told that “The Covington Bank, sir, always operates under the highest level of security available. I’m sure your tip will be appreciated, but I am also sure it is unnecessary.”
That had not been motivation for him to press the matter. He almost thought that such arrogance deserved what it got, but he was a lawman, and he badly wanted to collar these two. So he had had stakeouts operating from the moment he figured out what was going on, and now it was his shift from 0800 to 1600.
He had sat up when he saw the two approaching shortly before one. He almost didn’t recognize them; they were certainly nattily dressed. But that was not what surprised him the most. There were three other men entering the bank with them, equally well dressed. Five total, then. Odd: usually Raynor and Findlay worked alone. Butler didn’t like this. He didn’t want to make a move without knowing the identity of these new comrades. Quickly, Butler vidsnapped a few pictures before the other three went in and transmitted them to his office with instructions to “find out who these three are.”
The reply came back fairly quickly. Two were unidentifiable; the third, a fair-haired man, had a list of aliases as long as Wilkes’s arm. The names didn’t concern him. What did was the information tacked on at the end: “believed to have been or still be in the employ of Scutter O’Banon.”
O’Banon was bad news. It surprised Butler that “his” criminals, as he thought of them, had fallen in with such bad company. This changed the game. He would need backup, and that would take at least a few minutes. He would not be able to collar them quietly now. To further complicate matters, once backup did arrive, a family, two parents and three children clearly playing tourist, had decided to stop for a rest on the green lawn in front of the bank and feed the birds. Wilkes fumed quietly. Time was ticking by.
In fact … he checked his chrono and frowned. It seemed to have stopped. His gaze fell on his dashboard: it was dark. Butler returned his attention to the bank. They had been in there a mighty long time. His instincts told him that something was very wrong indeed. He got out of the vehicle, his hand dropping to his weapon.
At that point he heard an explosion—muffled but unmistakable—from inside the bank. Butler seized his comm unit and found that it was dead. He swore. He turned and waved to one of his men, who had parked a distance away, and pointed at the bank. The man nodded and tried to comm in for backup … then Wilkes saw his face fall as he realized his equipment, too, had somehow been shorted out.
Damn them. He pulled out his weapon and raced toward the bank. Help would be coming eventually, but not immediately. For the moment, Wilkes Butler was on his own.
The climb up the elevator shaft was difficult.
Actually, the climb up the elevator shaft was pretty much hell. What seemed like kilometers of shiny metal loomed above them. Four stories would have been challenging; fourteen seemed impossible. There were, thankfully, service ladders attached to the sides at various points. No doubt those who paid the exorbitant costs of a luxury penthouse demanded that if there was any problem getting in and out of said penthouse, it would be attended to immediately.
Tychus pulled Jim up out of the elevator car and glanced up—and up—at the ladders. “Can you hang on to me, Jimmy?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Jim answered honestly. “I’ll try.”
Tychus muttered and undid his belt. “Ain’t good enough.” Quickly, he made a loop with his belt and strapped it around Jim’s shoulder, crossing it diagonally over his chest on the side opposite the injury. “Hang on to me as best you can, and I’ll hang on to this.”
With a curse, Tychus tied the bags containing the credits to the bottom rung of the first ladder, patting them fondly. “Soon as I get you up to the suite, Jimmy, I’m coming back for this. Love you like a brother, man, but you ain’t about to cost me my retirement.”
Jim managed a grin. He wrapped his arms around Tychus and clung for dear life. Tychus gripped the belt holding Jim with his left arm and used the right to climb, jerkily and one-handed, up the ladders. At one point, though, Jim’s worry turned out to be completely justified. His arms gave way, and he dropped about a foot. Tychus grunted as his arm was nearly yanked out of its socket. His hand missed one bar, and they both dropped. At the last second, Tychus’s powerful hand grabbed a rung, bringing them both to an abrupt halt so painful that Jim blacked out for an instant.
The last several ladders were a blur of pain to Jim. Later, he would dimly recall Tychus muttering and shoving and positioning him, sometimes ungently, but never, ever letting him give up. Jim knew, even in the red haze of agony, that no other man could have done this but Tychus Findlay.
For one thing, no other man would have been so stubborn.
Finally, they made it. Jim crawled out into the dark corridor of the fourteenth story and lay panting. The pain was unspeakably bad; worse, it was starting to render his right arm almost useless. He was utterly dependant on Tychus, and they both knew it.
“On the left,” Jim murmured, trying to get to his feet. Tychus saved him the effort by grasping his good arm and hauling him up. Jim nearly blacked out, but he fought to stay conscious.
There were only two penthouses on this level. O’Banon said he would “take care” of the residents in the one across the hall to ensure they would not be disturbed. The door had recently been fitted with an old-fashioned lock and key in addition to the extremely complicated alarm system that was now completely useless. Jim had to grin as he watched Tychus fumble for the key, so small in his massive hands, and open the door.
Still holding Jim by his good arm, Tychus swung it open.
“Holy shit,” Tychus said.
They had apparently opened the door to one of the deeper levels of Hell.
For the first horrified instant, as the primal parts of their brains registered only what they saw and not the source of it, they simply stared at the multiple scenes of torture and carnage displayed before them.
Ezekiel Daun was everywhere. Right in front of them, laughing at a woman who was bleeding from dozens of stab wounds but who was yet far from the mercy of death. Over by the fireplace, cutting off the head of Ryk Kydd. In the doorway to another room, collecting fingers from someone who begged him to stop. And there, and there, and there—
And the sounds. They had begun the second the door had opened, and the cacophony was overwhelming. The begging, the pleading: “No, please, what is it you want? I’ll tell you anything!” “Please stop … please … oh, God, just kill me!” “Who are you? Who the hell are you?” And Daun’s voice, promising more pain and suffering, and sometimes just … laughing.
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” his voice came to them. “I can smell your fear. It’s like perfume. Luck has been on your side, but not anymore. Which way do you want to go? Strangled? Stabbed? Mr. Raynor already has one gunshot wound. I can give him matching ones.”
This couldn’t be happening. After all the tension of planning the heist, finding out about the source of the money—the fight—Jim was already near breaking. This threatened to put him over the brink.
Daun. Always Daun. They couldn’t es
cape him, no matter how they tried.
Then suddenly Tychus’s lips were near his ear, and the bigger man hissed, “Stay strong, Jimmy: the bastard loves to gloat. Let’s keep him gloating.”
Shaking, hanging on by a thread, Jim nodded. Tychus was right: Daun did love to gloat; he loved to scare them, and even though they had somehow managed to elude the bounty hunter twice—which had to be some sort of record, he thought wildly—Daun wasn’t about to just shoot them and be done with it.
Tychus had already drawn his weapon, and now Jim did likewise, his wounded hand slowing him. He tried to remember what the escape plan had been. Things were fuzzy now, and he realized he had lost a lot of blood. Focus, damn it, Jim, focus….
They had to get out of here, away from the fourteenth story. What was the escape plan? Ash had told them; why couldn’t he remember—
“You son of a bitch,” Tychus said, “you think you’ve got us? Well, remember what happened the last time. We rubbed your face in it, you sick bastard. I’m going to give you a one-fingered salute when we give you the slip this time.”
He was pointing his gun in various directions, ready to shoot but not until he had a certain clear shot. He let go of Jim, and Jim nodded, indicating he could stand on his own. Tychus pointed to one side of the room and then began to move slowly toward the other. Daun’s laughter came from somewhere.
“I’m almost tempted to let you live, you know. Keep you for my own amusement. I’ve not had so enjoyable a chase in a long, long time. But alas, I am a businessman, and I have a contract to fulfill.”
Climb down? Jim thought frantically. No, that wasn’t it. Jump. Something about jumping down and running away too fast to be followed. But that was crazy talk. It was impossible; no one could jump from this height and hit the ground running fast enough to elude their would-be captors—
He began to move, slowly and unsteadily, around the penthouse, using the light given off by the holograms and the fire burning so incongruously cheerily in the fireplace. Ash had said that the resident had—
StarCraft II: Devil's Due Page 20
