The Loot

by Schaefer, Craig

  He flashed three fingers.

  Negotiations had broken down. She zeroed back in on Leon. He was aiming, finger on the trigger, and she knew she didn’t have time for a perfect shot.

  The Remington bucked against her shoulder, half a second before he opened fire. Her bullet went wide and sparked off the wall six inches to Leon’s left. He jerked in shock, his rifle swinging off balance just as the muzzle flashed white, wasting his shot.

  Dom broke into a feral grin as she cradled her rifle and rolled. She came up on one knee, pushing up and sprinting along the wall, hunting for a new perch before he could drop a bead on her. Under her breath she whispered a prayer to the Goddess of Superior Firepower.

  Beckett heard the gunshots as he ran, barreling behind a tower of scrap and getting out of Leon’s line of sight. On the far side of the boulevard that ran down the junkyard’s heart, he watched Charlie dive to the dirt, roll, and come up dusty but not bleeding. She gave him a quick thumbs-up and darted out of sight. Good girl.

  He hoped Dom had taken out Leon with her first shot, but he never put much credence in hope. The big man kept his head down and his eyes up, hunting for shooters from above. The scrapyard crane was empty, no sign of movement inside the operator’s cab, but that left twenty more obvious hiding places and probably another twenty he hadn’t noticed yet. That was all right. He could adapt to the battlefield.

  Beckett always found a strange center of calm when the bullets started to fly. He stood square in the eye of the storm, his heartbeat steady, his breath falling into a yoga rhythm: four seconds in, four seconds out, slow and easy. He moved with purpose, fast but not rushing. The job wasn’t complicated. Step one, search and destroy. Step two, rendezvous with Dom and Charlie, make sure they were all right. Step three, secure the client, or whatever was left of him.

  He gave Sean Ellis fifty-fifty odds of living through this. Wasn’t something he needed to think about right now, much less worry about, until the fight was over. He was alive or he wasn’t. Schrödinger’s client.

  He rounded a corner . . . and ducked, fast, as a chrome bumper whistled through the air and crashed into a wall of junked cars. Metal slammed against metal, showering flakes of rust. He fell back, catching his balance, as Brock came for him.

  Brock gripped the bumper like a caveman’s club, swinging it high over his head and roaring as he charged. Beckett closed the distance, driving two jackhammer punches into the madman’s stomach. The bumper fell, clattering to the dust, and Brock’s fists slammed down onto Beckett’s shoulders.

  Brock had earned the nickname Brick for a reason in his college-football days, and age hadn’t stolen the fury burning in his eyes. Beckett dropped to one knee under the onslaught, stunned for the space of a breath, and Brock locked one fat arm around his throat. He hauled, twisting Beckett around, making his spine ache as he bent him backward and cut off his air.

  Beckett threw an elbow back, then another, hammering Brock’s ribs. He just squeezed harder. Gray spots flooded Beckett’s vision, and he scrambled to keep his footing as Brock dragged him backward. He spun around, feet twisting out from under him. Five feet away, a pile of cars stood in half collapse, buckled by weight and time. A chunk of a doorframe jutted out at chest height like a jagged spear sheathed in grime.

  Brock grunted as he hauled Beckett toward the spear, closing ground fast. The last of Beckett’s air ran out, and the darkness roared up to claim him.

  Charlie loped between the junk piles, making her way toward the crane at the heart of the labyrinth. It stood silent now, but she knew the machine’s rumble from when they’d first brought her here, blinded with a burlap sack over her head. She’d heard the sound just before they’d brought her into their hideout.

  If Sean Ellis was still alive, that’s where she’d find him. And with the handoff gone sour and the bullets flying, Sally wouldn’t hold back any longer. Ellis would live or die depending on who got to him first. Charlie dug into the pocket of her cargo pants and gripped the ASP Key Defender like a medieval flail, bracing the metal spike in her clenched fist.

  Another pair of rifle shots cracked across the cold and dusky sky. Neither was aimed at her. Somewhere, far to her left and right, Dom and Leon were dueling at long range.

  She ducked as she rounded a corner, the treads of the crane in sight, and off to the left, the low-slung and dirty walls of the yardmaster’s shack. The front door hung open, pale electric light burning inside.

  All of Charlie’s instincts and training came back in full force, as if she’d never left her tour of duty. She checked every corner, measured the approach, slicing her field of vision into chunks of data like the pieces of a poisoned pie. There was no such thing as safe harbor, out in the field, only measured risk and reward. She took a longer approach to the shack, one that kept her body in cover, weighing her safety against the client’s life and deciding she could spare four extra seconds.

  Only four, though. And as she eased across the threshold of the shack, Charlie froze dead in her tracks.

  “Not one step,” Sally told her. She brandished a slim steel box, weighing it like it was heavy in her hand, finger poised over a toggle switch.

  Sean Ellis sat in a chair in the middle of the shack, hands bound with duct tape. A leash of piano wire looped around his throat, running to an eyelet in the wall behind him, then up, disappearing into a pencil-size hole. Two more leashes lassoed his upper arms, and another pair pulled taut around his knees. He sat frozen, trembling, a fly trapped in a metallic spiderweb.

  “Please,” Ellis breathed, “don’t let her kill me.”

  “Not planning on it.” Charlie sidestepped, slow, eyes on the older woman and steering clear of the wires.

  Sally held up the box. “I mean it. I push this switch, we all die. I’ll do it. You know I’ll do it.”

  Half of Charlie’s career had been spent learning about bombs. The other half had been learning about bombers. How they thought, how they worked, the difference between the kind of bomber who strapped on a suicide vest and the kind who planned to live and fight another day. She looked Sally hard in the eyes and took her measure.

  “No,” Charlie said, “you won’t.”

  Sally waved the box like it was a crucifix, warding off a vampire. “I’ll do it! I’ll kill us all!”

  Charlie took a deep breath. She was gambling her life and Sean’s, putting it all on a single roll of the dice.

  She stepped forward. Sally fell a foot back, but she didn’t hit the switch.

  “You don’t want to die,” Charlie said. “You want to kill Sean, you want it as bad as anything you’ve ever wanted, but not that bad. No. At the end of the day, you’d give up both Sean and the diamonds if it means you live to see another sunrise. And that’s exactly what you’re going to do, right here and now.”

  As she came closer, and as Sally’s hand twitched, she got a good look at the detonator box. Charlie nodded to herself as the last details clicked into place.

  “I don’t have anything to live for,” Sally snapped.

  “I don’t think that’s true, but honestly, it doesn’t matter if you do or not. The drive to survive is baked into the human condition. We’re hardwired for it. You need a certain pathology to blow yourself up along with the man you hate. You aren’t that kind of woman.”

  “You don’t know a damn thing about me.”

  “Sure I do,” Charlie said.

  She stepped another foot closer. Sally’s shoulders thumped against the shack wall. She was cornered, nowhere left to run.

  “You were up on the wall, arguing with Leon,” Charlie said. “You ran back here as soon as the shooting started, same as I did. I figure you were planning to finish Sean off, from a safe distance, when I interrupted you.”

  “Last chance. Stay back.”

  “Go ahead, flip the switch,” Charlie told her. “I dare you. I double-dog dare you. Do it. Flip the switch.”

  Sean twisted his head as far as he dared, his face glistening u
nder a sheen of sweat. “Charlie,” he croaked.

  “It’s fine,” she told him. “See, that detonator was probably stolen from the same construction yard where Saint got the explosives. It’s an Energex Technology D-model, pretty common gear, same kind the Army Corps of Engineers uses sometimes. You see that little hole in the bottom of the box?”

  Sean stared at the bottom of the box. Sally did too.

  “That’s where the electrical line is inserted,” Charlie said, “at the end of a very, very long spool of det cord. In other words . . . it’s not a remote control. It doesn’t work if you don’t plug it in.”

  Sally wavered on her feet, suddenly uncertain, lost. Then her nerve shattered with a scream of raw frustration, and she darted under the piano wire and lunged for Charlie’s throat.

  FORTY-THREE

  Charlie brought up her hands, squared her stance, and braced for a fight as Sally howled toward her. Sally feinted left, her free hand snapping out a punch that only hit air; then she hurled the detonator. The corner of the heavy steel box cracked against Charlie’s temple, splitting her skin and spattering the dirty floorboards with blood. She went down under Sally’s weight, and they both hit the floor, rolling in a clinch.

  A trickle of hot blood ran into Charlie’s left eye. Sally’s fist cracked across the right, leaving her fighting blind for a few spare heartbeats. She grabbed one of Sally’s wrists, trying to wrench her arm back, and fished out the ASP with the other hand. She fumbled, keys rattling, and Sally snatched it out of her grip.

  Sally screamed again, incoherent, her face a twisted mask of rage as she turned the metal spike and shoved down on the trigger. Spray hissed from the nozzle, blasting Charlie square in the face. She twisted, going fetal and pressing her palms over her eyes, trying to escape the spray.

  “That’s what you get . . .” Sally was half crowing, half babbling, pushing herself up to her knees and pressing the button until the ASP ran dry. “That’s what you fucking get . . .”

  She didn’t even see it coming. Charlie’s rabbit-jab punch pulped her nose, shattering cartilage and dropping her to the floor, out cold and bleeding. Charlie shoved herself up and plucked the ASP from her limp hand.

  “Blue cap,” she panted, tapping the metal spike’s tip. “Training insert. Nothing but water. Actually . . . feels kinda nice, all things considered.”

  She turned her attention to Sean, trapped in his web of piano wire leashes. She reached for one, and his eyes bulged.

  “Don’t! One of them is attached to a bomb!”

  Her hand froze. “One of them?”

  “She said she was going to give me the same chance . . . the same chance those miners in Kentucky had, when the Rockhouse mine exploded. If I pull the right wire, it’ll come loose, and I’ll be able to get myself out. If I pull the wrong one, the whole place goes up.”

  Charlie frowned. Her fingers idly brushed a fresh trickle of blood from her water-misted face. Her scalp burned like a hornet sting, but she shoved the pain into a little box in the back of her mind marked distractions. She studied the wires, how they snaked along eyelets, vanishing into crudely drilled holes all along the shack walls.

  Every bomber had a profile. Every bomb had a signature.

  “Yeah, no,” Charlie said. “She’s lying.”

  He got a glimmer of hope in his eyes. “There’s no bomb?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  She prowled past Sally’s unconscious body, edging to the walls. Her fingertips brushed old rust-caked steel.

  “There’s absolutely zero chance Sally would have given you a way to survive. She was just messing with you.”

  “They’re . . . all attached to the bomb?”

  Maybe. Maybe not. Charlie fell silent, studying the wires.

  Every bomb was a puzzle. A battle of wits between her and its maker. She might have taken Sally down, but their real duel was just beginning.

  A second duel was going down out in the scrapyard, mostly silent, punctuated by the occasional rippling echo of rifle fire. Dom ducked low as a shot tore into a wall of cars to her left, blasting out a drooping side-view mirror and sending silvered shards scattering across the dusty ground.

  She sat with her back to a wreck and chanced a slow lean, open hand straining for a triangle-shaped shard of mirror. She snatched it up and yanked it back into cover like a fish on a line. Then she held it out at arm’s length and turned it from side to side, scanning the battleground in its tarnished reflection.

  There. Forty yards away, Leon hid in the shadows of the compound wall. Huddling behind a girder, he jerked from side to side like a marionette on drunken strings. Popping out of cover in one direction, then the other, as he hunted for any sign of his opponent.

  “Sloppy,” Dom muttered under her breath as she scooted to the opposite end of the wrecked car. “Definitely Negative Bullet Karma.”

  The sun was almost out, dead and down and painting the sky in streaks of cold violet. Dom judged the direction of the last fading rays, weighed the broken mirror in her hand, and gave it a throw. It glittered as it spun, reflecting, but she didn’t see it. She was already bringing up her rifle, bracing it on a rusted-out hood and dropping a bead on Leon. The glimmer drew him like a magpie, and his barrel swung to track it.

  She pulled the trigger. A quarter second later, on the other end of her scope, Leon crumpled in a puff of red mist.

  Charlie darted outside the shack, following the crudely drilled holes. Sean’s piano wire bonds slipped outside, strung through hammered eyelets, wrapping around the back of the building. She traced them to a twisted metal knot where all the strands wound together in a crude clump, fixed to the shack wall with a single jutting spike.

  No bomb.

  Which didn’t mean there wasn’t one. She grabbed hold of the spike with both hands and braced one boot against the shack wall.

  “Sean,” she called out, “you’re going to feel a pull on the wires. It’s me. Do not get out of that chair, okay?”

  She wriggled the spike until it started to slide, then gave it a heave. It came loose with a grating squeal. She untwisted the strands of wire mechanically, her hands in motion while her mind was working the angles. There was a bomb. Sally still had explosives left over from the stash they’d bought from Saint, and there was no chance she would have left Sean alive. Charlie built a profile, working fast.

  Sally was technically capable, just barely. Her wannabe-supervillain routine with the wires was a scare tactic; she hated Sean enough to torture him, but she wasn’t clever enough to actually rig the contraption like she’d said she had. Back when she’d planted the first bomb in Sean’s office, she’d rigged up a pressure switch with all the finesse of a first-year mechanical engineering student: solid, functional, but not fancy.

  Charlie darted back inside. Sean was flexing his sore arms and wriggling out of the wire leashes. She snapped her fingers at him.

  “Stay put. Don’t move. Don’t breathe more than you have to.”

  She took a knee and checked the obvious culprit, but the seat of Sean’s chair was barely a quarter inch thick, and the underbelly was bare. All the same, she didn’t dare move him, not until she figured out what Sally had been planning. With every breath she took, Charlie felt the hourglass running out.

  There was one other piece to Sally’s profile. She knew how to rig a pressure switch. She also knew how to rig a timer.

  Brock Kozlowski’s arm was a noose made of meat and muscle, slung tight around Beckett’s throat. Beckett’s air was gone, his vision flooding with spots of gray, then red, as he fought to stay conscious. The grunting hulk was dragging him toward the junk pile, toward the jutting spear of a twisted doorframe. Beckett’s feet slid out from under him and stole his balance as his heels kicked up dust. He threw punch after punch, his knuckles glancing off Brock’s chest. Brock didn’t even seem to notice.

  Panic swelled in his chest along with his bursting lungs. The roar of blood in his ears took on the world-s
wallowing echo of mortar fire. As he struggled on the edge of passing out, the familiar sound brought him back to another time, another place.

  “Beckett. Stay with me. You hear me? Stay awake.”

  He tried to speak and coughed up a gout of blood for his trouble. A woman’s hands, sheathed in tactical gloves, held his shoulders tight as another mortar round shook the earth.

  “You’re going into shock,” she told him. “Your body is trying to tell you that you’re dying. Your body is a dirty fucking liar, and you’re going to prove it, right now, by walking out of here with me.”

  “There’s too many of ’em,” he managed to croak. “They’ve got every exit covered—”

  “Remember what I taught you,” she said. “Rule number one: Amateurs die because amateurs panic. A professional stays cool, and a professional finds a way.”

  He wasn’t going to die here.

  As Brock hauled him toward the killing spear, Beckett spent his last fleeting seconds of thought on a physics problem. He couldn’t get his feet under him at this angle. He couldn’t muster the force to hurt Brock, no room to throw a solid punch, and the giant didn’t seem to register pain. That was his mistake; he’d been wasting his energy on a losing battle when he needed to change the terms of engagement.

  He grabbed onto Brock’s belt with both hands. Then he dug deep for one last burst of strength and bucked his hips, heaving his legs off the ground. As his feet rose up, pointing to the overcast sky, his center of balance shifted with them. Brock lost his grip and stumbled. He went down, crumpling to one knee. Beckett sprang backward, landing on his feet in a crouch, and took a deep gulp of air as his lungs screamed in relief.

  He had time for only one breath. Brock was already lumbering to his feet with his brow furrowed in confusion and rage. Still crouched low, Beckett’s fists fired like pistons, and he used the giant’s left kneecap for a punching bag. Something snapped, a wet, crackling sound. Brock grunted and reeled a step backward. Beckett rose, pivoted on one foot, and lashed out with a brutal kick. A rib broke under his heel, and Brock fell, arms flailing as he lost his balance.