Dead Lines [911]

by Grace Hamilton

  “Goddamnit!” Spencer swore. He looked around, muttered, and then turned back to Colson. “Go back and tell them to bring the girl. There’ll be plenty of time, all the time in the world, to play with the girl after the hit is done.”

  “Wise choice,” Colson said.

  “Just get them moving,” Spencer said. “I’ll catch up.”

  Parker remained still as Colson walked back to his group. He didn’t dare risk a look, but he could hear that Finn had stopped crying. That wasn’t necessarily a good thing, though. Parker swallowed down a hard knot of rage. Just feet away, he heard the corrupt corrections officer fumbling with something. Then, to his utter shock, he heard the soft electronic chirp of a cell phone powering up.

  What the hell? he thought. How...

  He stopped. He already knew the answer. The mechanics behind a Faraday cage were simple enough. If you knew something was going to happen, you could protect a thousand cell phones if you wanted to. If you knew something was coming.

  Once again, the warden seemed to be gaining importance in how he figured into the larger events of the evening. Parker felt a deep determination to maneuver himself into position to ask the crooked asshat some pointed questions.

  “It’s me,” Spencer said. “No sir, no problems I can’t handle. Our schedule is only a little behind. There was an altercation with a citizen that took some time. And these guys aren’t exactly Delta Force.”

  There was a pause.

  “No sir, just a random passerby with a hero complex. He’s in the river now.”

  Parker noted how Spencer didn’t mention Finn, or the actual details of losing track of him. The guy wasn’t a stupid field man. Giving his opponent respect didn’t mean Parker was going to go any easier on him, however. If anything, the opposite was true.

  “No sir,” Spencer said. “We’re on the move now; as long as the weapons cache is in the trunk of the car, we’ll be in control of the substation very shortly. I’ll call when it’s done.”

  Spencer hung up, and Parker stopped breathing until he heard the man walk away.

  He heard Finn scream next, and then the now all too familiar sound of a heavy flesh-on-flesh blow followed by the softest of whimpers.

  “I said, on your goddamn feet!”

  Discipline, Parker told himself, feeling another sudden flash of anger. Keep your eyes on the outcome.

  Now that there was enough distance between himself and the group, he risked a slow peek around the corner of the building. Finn was on her feet, sandwiched between two big assholes and being bustled down the street. A convict with the shotgun led the way while both Colson and Spencer brought up the rear.

  Wonderful, Parker thought. There’s the shotgun.

  Something occurred to Parker then that sent a deep shudder of trouble through him, as so much already had this night. Spencer hadn’t bothered to take off his uniform. Parker’s first thought had been that it was a ruse to make people think he was escorting the group, but that didn’t explain obvious convicts being armed. It made him think that any poor civilian who stumbled upon the group might end up as ‘collateral damage.’

  His second thought now was why a warden was wearing a uniform in the first place. Everything about this night seemed to be about adding two and two and coming up with five. There had to be some missing piece of the puzzle, some clue that would work like a Rosetta Stone to help the rest of it make sense. But he didn’t have it.

  He felt a surge of helpless rage. He couldn’t do everything, solve every problem, and be the ultimate hero. But somehow Finn had become his problem. It had been less than an hour since he’d met her, and he carried his obligation to her around his neck like a yoke.

  In order to give the crew time to leave the area for him to follow them, he used the moment to wring out his clothes and check his gear. He’d had the forethought to seal his gear in plastic bags for easy organization, and that was now paying off in spades. Everything was nice and dry. Shivering hard, he stripped his boots and socks off, and wrung them out as best he could. He did the same first with his pants, and then with his shirt. Putting them back on was sheer hell, but he’d at least lost what felt like several gallons of weight in river water.

  Hoping he’d dry quickly, he set off after the escaped convicts and corrupt corrections officer. He’d been trained, at least cursorily, in surveillance techniques as a patrol officer in order to perform stakeouts or shadow suspects as back up to detectives. This was all fine; while on foot, there was only so much evasion trickery the group could use. He gave them their space and erred on the side of caution.

  He needn’t have bothered. The crew took no precautions, left no rear guard. They didn’t even turn around and check behind them, except for incidentally as they crossed streets. He grew more worried about Finn, however, as they were obviously not being gentle about hauling her around. Still, he remained afraid that if he tried a guerilla-style series of sniping hit-and-runs, they’d simply double-down on using her as a hostage or, even more likely in his opinion, they’d kill her for being an inconvenient witness and dead weight.

  Three blocks later, they pushed out of the small business district and into a series of neighborhoods of impressive modern houses fronting the river. Parker surveyed the area as he waited, crouched in the concealment of a car, for the crew to make their way a little farther down the street.

  This zip code was prime real estate, he realized. The views of the river and rolling hills beyond the edge of the city were first-rate. At night, the lights of Louisville to the south would be scenic. These weren’t Civil Engineer or Airline Pilot well-off houses; these were the houses that the top two percent of lawyers or surgeons purchased, or maybe the owners of hugely successful car lots—the kind of houses that said “our money may not be old, but it sure as hell spends.”

  In other words, the houses were big, and on property.

  The group moved two more blocks and the houses grew less ostentatious. Still upscale, but more in line with those of a well-off CPA. Then they were at La Salle Avenue.

  Rene’-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle had been the first European to cross into Indiana after reaching what was now South Bend on the Saint Joseph River. As a result, the name ‘La Salle’ was on a plethora of streets, parks, and buildings around the state. La Salle Avenue, however, was a major arterial in the city.

  Directly across the four-lane thoroughfare was the Stapleton Mall. Beyond that, where the low bluffs overlooked the Ohio River, was the old TV station Finn had told him about. He stopped as he watched the convict crew cross La Salle, drawing his mouth out in a hard, flat line.

  Stapleton Mall.

  His daughter had been there. Then she’d been gone, and it had been his fault. Now, on this night of fire and darkness and blood, he was returning. More immediately, Stapleton Mall was where Ava had warned ‘it’ was happening. Now, here he was, and the circumstances could hardly be worse. His heart sitting like a cold stone in his chest, Parker followed the convicts.

  People milled about the mall. He could see that not every window was broken and only a single car was on fire, which made the place look positively civilized compared to some of the scenes Parker had come across in recent hours. Despite this, from where he stood unobtrusively among the stalled cars on La Salle Avenue, he saw that the front doors of the mall were shattered and a security gate lay next to the opening in a twisted, crumpled heap.

  There was a good-sized crowd wandering around, too, and everywhere he looked, people carried armfuls of items or pushed shopping carts crammed full. Some of it was stupid—not clothes, or tools, or bottled water, or other useful gear, but Plasma screens, and Xbox 1 gaming systems in their display boxes.

  People were acting as if things were going to get better. And after everything he’d seen, Parker was no longer sure he shared in their optimism. He watched from a slight overpass as the crew moved with purpose toward the back of the sprawling building where, in normal times, sanitation trucks made their gar
bage pick-ups and trucks parked at loading docks to unload their deliveries.

  After walking half-a-block up the quiet, dark street, the crew stopped in front of one of the loading zone roll-up doors. The man he knew as Warden Spencer walked up to the trunk of a blue, four-door sedan and, using keys off of his uniform belt, opened it up. He immediately began handing out weapons.

  Parker felt his mouth go dry.

  This was crazy. How could a spur of the moment jail break allowed for by a sudden power outage already have a target and a logistical supply cache sitting in place? And why would a group capable of orchestrating such an operation use a crew of low-level thugs and street punks as shooters?

  He took in a deep breath, held it for a moment, and then slowly let it out. It didn’t matter. Not really, not to him. Not at the moment. He had one goal, and he realized, to achieve that goal, he was going to have to out-gun a crew of well-armed criminals. This wasn’t a movie, and he couldn’t dial 911; he was simply going to have to kill them all or let Finn suffer her fate. There was no in-between here.

  “Shit,” he muttered. “Why the hell is this happening?”

  His heart sped up and adrenaline coursed through his body. He no longer shook from the cold. He felt locked in, focused and ready.

  At the roll-up gate to the loading dock, Spencer handed the largest convict a six pound sledge on the end of a framing hammer handle. The man, who looked prison-yard big and prison-yard strong, took the sawed-off sledge in both hands while another thug held his gun for him. The big boy stepped back, wound up, and then released.

  The sledge struck the lock on the stamped metal and knocked it open with a short, sharp pop. Immediately, Spencer drove the crew through and they went in with weapons up, dragging a now very quiet Finn after them. Parker watched them disappear into the property, and then in the corner of the building directly above them, a security camera rotated around and focused on the breach. The Mall has some power, Parker realized. Whoever that merry band of killers, rapists, and thugs was going in there after, the sonofabitch had power.

  Why the fucking Stapleton Mall? he thought.

  Parker took stock. There was nothing left to do. Rising out of his crouch, he began making his approach.

  14

  What followed next was pure horror.

  Finn’s experiences up until the moment they’d entered the back areas of the mall had been terrible, the fear of assault and violence almost overwhelming. But the mall quickly became a grotesque carnival ride of bloodshed and wanton viciousness.

  First, there’d been the people—looters, she guessed. Sure, what they were doing—using the tragedy to enrich themselves—was hardly noble behavior, but having said that, she didn’t think being mowed down like… like she didn’t know what, just mowed down… was right. But that’s what had happened.

  The crew of killers, with the cop or jail guard or whatever he was coming up behind them, moved through the rear of the building like a battering ram. They had weapons, many of them outfitted with what she realized from watching movies were silencers, and they used them indiscriminately. People stumbled through doorways, arms filled with boxes of Nikes or bales of NFL brand gear, and the killers shot them.

  Everyone—men, women, and teenagers saw them and ran screaming. They were gunned down, as well. She stopped struggling, stopped crying, as the horror of the mass shooting began sinking in. Real blood, real bodies, real brains. People whose only worry a moment before had been whether to loot a TJ Maxx or a Footlocker first were suddenly confronted by senseless, indiscriminate death.

  Then they’d cut across the food court and hit the offices. Things changed there, as well. She was shoved hard to the floor and held in place with a knee in her back as the crew exchanged gunfire with several men. She’d felt herself slipping away by then, becoming untethered from everything.

  The men the convicts fought weren’t like the looters. They were tall, lean, in business suits and with hair so short that it seemed military. They didn’t fight back with pistols like she’d seen on some security guards or armored car drivers, but with weapons almost identical to those carried by the convicts.

  One of the convicts went down, face like a shattered saucer from the bullet impacts, but there were only a couple of the young, fit men in dark suits, and the convicts carried the battle simply by force of numbers.

  The last person Finn saw die was a middle-aged woman in a pencil skirt and an Anna-Karin Karlsson blouse. She wore a headset and sat at a computer station. Even with her mind dulled, Finn was surprised to see that the PC station was apparently up and running. The woman screamed as the warden himself killed her before shoving her out of the way and slamming a flash drive into a USB port.

  “Keep the fucking civilians away from me,” he snapped. The cold, indifferent eyes fell on her. “And get the girl the hell away from me, too.”

  She’d heard the men mentioning drugs, especially the one the others called Washington, but the offices weren’t swamped in bodyguards the way drug compounds were on Narcos or Breaking Bad when she binge-watched Netflix. There’d only been the three men in dark suits and the woman. From out of a wall safe that had been hanging open before they’d arrived, the convicts pulled neat bricks of tightly packed powder and passed them around.

  Now that the murdering was apparently over, the killers broke open the packages, which were filled with something they laughingly called ‘East Coast number four.’

  She knew enough to know this meant heroin, and that it could be snorted instead of shot up with needles. Her street knowledge had mainly come from Ava through her parents, but they were sort of subject matter experts. And snorting it was what everyone except the corrections officer immediately began doing.

  The bodies of the people in the computer center were left lying on the floor where they’d been gunned down. Pools of black, congealing blood spilled out from their bodies, and the killers casually walked through it, leaving wet footprints wherever they passed. Finn felt numb, like she was watching the scene from a balloon trailing very far above her head, like this was happening to someone else.

  She felt herself slipping away. She was strong, she told herself, but this horror was something else, something too dark to comprehend. She missed Ava so hard that it made her want to cry, except she didn’t have any more tears. Instead, she watched the killers grow increasingly languid and erratic as they snorted more and more of the heroin.

  She lost track of the corrections officer.

  The one called Washington, eyes glassy and wild, his gait unsteady, eventually jerked her to her feet. Finn realized she wasn’t quite as numb as she’d thought then—she still had enough emotion to feel a new round of terror. What was about to happen was obvious.

  “Come on, girl,” he slurred softly. “Top dog goes first and work time is over.”

  She tried to struggle, but she was tiny, and he half-carried her out of the room. He stopped once to bounce her head off the wall, and then continued pulling her after him.

  In the gloom, she got muted impressions of her surroundings. Offices, short hallways, sprawled bodies. She smelled pungent smoke floating in the air. It didn’t smell like any pot she’d ever been around, and she realized she must be smelling burning heroin.

  The smoke grew so thick it made her momentarily lightheaded. She again stumbled in surprise at the sudden, perfumed intoxication and pulled herself straight. Behind her, Washington tripped into a wall, almost knocking what looked to be an Employee of the Month picture from its cheap, golden frame.

  She knew Colson was the shot caller because the others seemed to defer to him, but he was apparently letting Washington, the biggest of the convicts, rape her first. She assumed that had to be a sort of scumbag badge of authority.

  The redheaded man she’d heard called Oliver came out of an office buckling his belt and, grinning, held open the door.

  “My man,” Washington laughed. “You keeping a shortie in there?”

  “The good t
imes were never so good,” Oliver smirked. “These government assholes had quite the nice crib built up in this mall.” He grinned, revealing a mouth full of steel fillings and a dead front tooth. “I just ate Mexican; found her hiding in the JC Penny’s when we did that sweep. I love getting spicy spic on me!” His laughter, perhaps foreseeable, sounded like the bark of a bull seal.

  Washington looked down at Oliver. “I’m fucking half-Mexican, fucker.”

  Oliver looked panicked. “Aw, shit, Washington, I didn’t mean nothing— ”

  Laughing, Washington cut him off. “Just fucking with you, man.”

  Oliver gave a nervous little chuckle and quickly walked off.

  “Ginger, peckerwood motherfucker,” Washington muttered to the man’s back.

  Turning, he then pushed Finn through the doorway. Inside the room, she stopped, disbelieving. Five or six candles burned on a desk next to a half empty bottle of whiskey, a sofa bed sitting beside the set-up. With numbed disassociation, she realized she recognized the scented candles. She’d seen them on sale last week in this mall, at the Hallmark Store. The room was a big office, belonging to the property manager or building administrator, someone of status in the building. A window, tightly shuttered, sat behind the desk.

  With all this space, Finn thought, someone is doing all right for themselves. Or was, she corrected. She doubted anyone was doing very well for themselves tonight.

  The soft light revealed a wisp of a girl, raven hair hanging down to her waist, body marred by bruises and teeth marks, cowering in the room, and Finn gasped upon seeing her. The convict had done a brutal number on her.

  Washington pushed in hard behind her, shoving her towards the big, high bed. He slammed the door behind them. She felt like crying all over again as she heard the lock turn over. Apparently, Washington didn’t intend to be disturbed. Numb with fear at the rapidity with which her life had taken such a turn for the worst, she let herself be shoved across the office. She noticed russet smears of dried blood on the sheet and her mouth went dry.