Killed in Action

by Michael Sloan

  McCall moved silently to the back of the pickup. The man half turned. McCall grabbed him and broke his neck in one fluid movement. Gammon signaled he was going around to the back of the warehouse and disappeared into the shadows. McCall rolled the dead man under the pickup. A boarded-up window was at ground level in the warehouse. McCall climbed onto the cab of the truck and jumped onto the brick wall. His fingers dug into the crumbling mortar. He hung there for a moment, then climbed higher.

  He slipped.

  He fell two feet before his scrabbling fingers caught hold of another line of disintegrating mortar. He held on as his toes found another edge. He stayed still, calming his breathing. Then he climbed back up until he reached a small ledge right under a second-story window. It was black with grime. He heaved up on the windowpane.

  It didn’t move.

  He tried again.

  This time the window raised a couple of groaning inches.

  McCall put all of his weight under it and raised the window just high enough for him to crawl through. He dropped down into a dark corridor. In front of him was one long room with half-glass partitions. The only light source there spilled down a set of wooden stairs at the far right end of the corridor. McCall looked to the left. He could make out a similar set of stairs going down to the warehouse main room.

  One of Blake’s college buddies exited the big long room—the second man from the railing at the first rave party. He was carrying a sheaf of manila folders. McCall ran silently forward, but the man’s sixth sense kicked in. He whirled, pulling his Heckler & Koch 9mm pistol from his belt. McCall kicked it out of his hand and slammed him back through the open doorway into the long room. They fell together onto the floor. The white slaver tried to stab his thumbs into McCall’s eyes. McCall blocked his hand, twisted it, and broke his wrist. He clamped a hand over the man’s mouth, pressing a forearm against his throat. McCall had all of his weight on top of him. He tried to punch at McCall with his left hand, but it was like hitting a bar of steel. His writhing diminished until his body slackened. McCall, still on his knees, went through the dead man’s coat pockets. He came up with a silver flash drive and pocketed it. He dragged the corpse into a corner and moved through the open doorway to the top of the stairs. Below he could hear the sound of movement, intermingled voices. Some of the prisoners were demanding to be set free. Others were crying.

  McCall took out his Glock 19 and started down the stairs.

  * * *

  Detective Steve Lansing was in the lead car that sped down the narrow alleyway. The red light on top was flashing. Two more cop cars were behind him and the SWAT truck behind them. Lansing noted a deserted Prius parked farther up the alleyway. He turned right into a cul-de-sac. Six men, all of them college types, were herding young women handcuffed together toward the backs of two parked SUVs. The cop cars came to a screeching halt. Lansing and three other detectives jumped out, drawing their weapons. The college boys immediately opened fire. Lansing took cover behind his Nissan. Uniformed police officers piled out of the two other cars, firing on the white slavers. One of them shoved two blond girls away and fired at Lansing. One of the blondes, in a blue dress, stuck out her foot and tripped him. His bullets went wide, exploding the glass in the Sentra’s driver’s door. Lansing shot him four times. He keeled over. The handcuffed girls threw themselves down to the ground. SWAT officers poured out of the back of their vehicle with M4 carbine assault rifles.

  * * *

  Mike Gammon entered the warehouse through the small door that Emily had used to escape. He had a Glock 37 in his right hand. More of the young women were in here, all of them handcuffed together. He could hear firing from outside. Cops and the SWAT team had arrived. There was chaos, Blake’s men running through the oblique shadows. One of them pulled out a .44 Magnum from his belt. Gammon shot him through the head. Gammon went through the white slaver’s pockets and came up with a key ring, two sizes of keys on it, one large and one small. The smaller keys were for the handcuffs, the bigger ones for the cages. Gammon heard a scuff of sound behind him. He whirled.

  Chip was standing twenty feet away with a gun pointed at Gammon’s head.

  Gammon was a dead man.

  Two bullets exploded through Chip’s back and he pitched forward. Tara came out of the shadows, holding a Glock 27 Gen4 in her hand.

  Gammon raised a hand in acknowledgment.

  The SWAT team broke into the warehouse. There was no more shooting. The rest of Blake’s crew threw up their hands, tossing their guns onto the warehouse floor. Gammon caught sight of Emily, no longer shackled to one of the other victims, being shoved by Blake toward the other end of the warehouse. Deep shadows swallowed them up. For some reason Gammon glanced up and saw a shadow turning the corner of the wooden staircase above him.

  Blake dragged Emily along with him, his hand on her shoulder. He had a Smith & Wesson .357 Sig pistol in one hand. He knew there was another exit from the warehouse at this end that they didn’t use. In the confusion he could escape, but he’d taken his insurance with him. He glanced once behind them. No one was following them.

  Blake turned back, looking ahead.

  One of one shadows coalesced into the shape of a man, standing motionless, almost serene, blocking Blake’s path. He had a gun in his right hand, but it was pointed down at the ground.

  Blake jerked Emily to a halt. She was like a rag doll in his grasp, looking as if she would collapse at any moment. He pushed the barrel of the pistol hard into her temple.

  “So your dad is back, eh, Emily? Except he’s not really your dad.” Blake looked at Robert McCall. “Move out of my way or I’ll put a bullet through her brain.”

  “I’ll give you one chance. Throw down the gun.”

  Blake just smiled.

  Emily ground her right heel into Blake’s instep. McCall threw up the Glock 19 and fired at Blake’s head. The bullet drilled a hole through his frontal lobe, carrying into his cerebrum, and burrowing right into the thalamus, which is the relay center for the cortex and handles incoming and outgoing signals.

  The message to fire the gun never reached Blake’s trigger finger.

  He fell back. McCall grabbed the .357 pistol out of Blake’s hand before he hit the ground. Emily collapsed into McCall’s arms, sobbing.

  “I’d given up hope,” she whispered.

  “Never do that,” he said softly.

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later McCall was standing outside the open warehouse doors. The survivors of Blake’s white-slavery ring were being herded into a police van that was now parked in the cul-de-sac. McCall noted Detective Steve Lansing had taken charge. The Feds had also arrived. The SWAT team were packing up. Two ambulances were in the cul-de-sac. EMTs were checking on the young women, all of them out of their handcuffs now. A couple of them were put onto gurneys. The media had also arrived. Emily was talking to an attractive female reporter with a news crew behind her filming the interview. Tara was nearby.

  Melody detached herself from a group of her fellow prisoners, ran over to McCall, and embraced him.

  “I’m so sorry,” he said to her.

  She broke the embrace. “I was pretty scared, but Emily said someone was coming for us. I knew who she meant. So we did it, right? We brought the cobra and his creepy band of snakes down.”

  McCall smiled at the imagery he’d put in her mind. “We did.”

  “I have to make a statement to the police and then talk with some federal agents. Will you come and see me at Dolls sometime soon?”

  “I will.”

  Melody ran back to one of the other victims she’d been talking to. McCall headed across the cul-de-sac to where Mike Gammon was impatiently waiting at the wheel of his Prius. Emily’s interview was over. The news crew were moving to other victims.

  Tara jogged over and fell into step beside McCall.

  “I thought I told you to stay in the car.”

  “I don’t take orders very well. Personality flaw. Besides, I thoug
ht you guys could use some backup.”

  “I’m sure Mike Gammon’s happy for your personality flaw. What did Emily tell the media?”

  “She didn’t mention your name. I’ll go with her to the Seventh Precinct. When they’re done there, I’m going to help her pack her things, leave a note for the landlord breaking her lease, then she’ll come back with me to my hotel. We’re catching a plane to Minneapolis in the morning. I’m going to hand-deliver Emily to her mother.”

  “That sounds good to me.”

  Tara stopped walking, so McCall paused. He thought he might get a new embrace and a kiss, especially after what had happened—or nearly happened—between them, but Tara said, “I’d better get back to her.”

  “I’ll pick you both up at your hotel tomorrow and take you to the airport.”

  Tara nodded and ran back to where Emily was now talking to a couple of federal officers.

  McCall almost made it to the Prius, but Detective Lansing motioned him over. McCall thought Mike Gammon was going to have a fit.

  Lansing looked at the aftermath of the firefight and shook his head. “White slavery with college guys. Just another facet of the American dream. What did you have to do with it?”

  “I was trying to help two of the victims.”

  “The Feds are pretty pissed that you called me before they were called in. They’re going to want to talk to you.”

  “Tell them I was your man undercover. You can’t reveal my identity.” McCall took the flash drive he’d taken from one of Blake’s college pals and handed it to Lansing. “Give them this. I’d say it has all of Blake Cunningham’s buyers on it.”

  Then McCall walked away.

  “Stay in touch with me about our Equalizer problem,” Lansing called after him.

  McCall said nothing and slid into the passenger seat of the Prius.

  “You took your sweet time,” Gammon said. “I got in trouble in the warehouse. One of Blake’s guys had a gun pointed at my head. Your PI friend shot him in the back.”

  “I’m sure she would have shot him in the front if he’d been facing her.”

  “God bless her,” Gammon murmured. “Let’s get out of here. Manhattan cops might not appreciate help from a retired Brooklyn detective.”

  Gammon drove down the alleyway. McCall looked up in the rearview mirror. He caught a fleeting glimpse of Detective Lansing watching the car pull away, then they were out into the street and heading back toward the Liberty Belle Hotel.

  CHAPTER 33

  McCall picked up Tara and Emily in a cab outside the Hotel Edison and accompanied them to LaGuardia. The women had a 9:05 a.m. flight to Minneapolis, changing planes in Chicago. Emily didn’t say a word on the cab ride. Once they were in the airport, McCall showed a pass he carried to security that allowed him to go to the gate areas. All shadow-executive agents carried them. Emily didn’t say a word until they were at her gate. Then she turned to McCall and said softly, “I was so scared.”

  “Not so scared you didn’t let me know exactly where you were. You saved a lot of lives last night.”

  “You did that.”

  “Not alone.”

  “No one does anything worthwhile alone,” Tara said, more for McCall’s benefit.

  “So I go home,” Emily said. “To everything I ran away from. My mom doesn’t get me. She doesn’t listen.”

  “She will now.”

  Emily slowly nodded. “Yeah, maybe. Maybe you’re right.” Suddenly her mood lifted. “I’m going to grab a few magazines.”

  She ran over to the Hudson newstand and picked up People, Us, Entertainment Weekly, and Rolling Stone.

  “I’m scared to go home too, but I hide it better,” Tara said wryly. “Someone tried to kill you in your hotel suite. You know who it is yet?”

  “I’m one step closer.”

  “I’ll take that as a no.”

  Emily ran back to them, stuffing the magazines into her backpack. The passengers were starting to board. Emily grabbed McCall’s hand. “I liked being in that Mercury Theater with you,” she whispered. “I mean, before you killed a bunch of guys and I got kidnapped. I felt close to you.”

  She kissed him on the cheek and moved into the boarding line.

  Tara looked at McCall with that insouciant glint in her beautiful eyes. “Take care of yourself, big guy. Don’t make me come back here to protect you. I’ll send you a cape for Christmas.”

  She kissed him gently on the lips and joined Emily in line.

  McCall was out of the terminal building heading for the taxi stand when he got the call from Mary. He only had to hear the quaver in her voice to know what had happened. Even though he had been expecting it, the weight of the remorse weighed heavily on him. He should have made more time for the people he cared for.

  There weren’t many of them left.

  * * *

  McCall found Brahms at a model-railway store on Third Avenue at East Seventy-Second Street near the Blumka Gallery. The three-story building looked like it been there since the Central Pacific and the Union Pacific had joined up at Promontory Summit in Utah in 1869. It was full of collectors and train enthusiasts. McCall descended a rickety flight of stairs. The basement room had several railway displays on vast tables with entire towns, scenic mountains, and tunnels with intricate multilevel routes. McCall located Brahms at a post–World War II train layout through the Chicago stockyards. McCall knew that Brahms had dedicated a room in his apartment to his train sets. Hilda had once told McCall you could hear the various train whistles and faint thrumming from every room.

  Brahms walked over to another table with a Christmas train layout, bathed in moonlight, two separate trains thundering past the houses and the Christmas trees. McCall joined him.

  “Hilda liked to visit the Polar Express with me.” Brahms’s voice was a little hoarse. “You got the steam locomotive and tender, a passenger coach, observation car, twenty-four curved and eight straight tracks, authentic train sounds, bell, a whistle, and a working headlight. Look at the craftsmanship. You can see the silhouettes of the passengers through the passenger-coach windows. You can even make it snow by using a light effect. Hilda always wanted to buy me a Polar Express, but I wanted a New York Yankees LionChief subway train. You got three Yankees players on the cars, a batter, a pitcher, and a player sliding into base, maybe Mickey Mantle, he stole twenty-one bases in 1959. But Hilda said the Polar Express was special, and when Yogi Berra died, so did the Yankees. She liked his Yogi-ism ‘When you come to a fork in the road, take it.’”

  McCall didn’t say anything. Brahms looked at him as the Polar Express sped through the snowy countryside toward the North Pole. “I don’t know which fork to take now,” Brahms said softly.

  The old spy suddenly collapsed against McCall’s shoulder, wracked by soundless sobs. McCall held him tightly. No one came near them. Brahms finally straightened up. “It happened at a little before four p.m. In her sleep.”

  McCall nodded. Didn’t speak.

  “You need a favor.”

  “I do.”

  “It couldn’t wait?”

  “It’s about Control.”

  “You’ve got tonight. I am sitting shivah tomorrow after the funeral.”

  * * *

  It had taken six days to get the furnace working at the apartment building. Norman Rosemont had paid for it, careful not let the super of the building—who was a fat fuck, as Sam Kinney had described—know who had authorized the repair work. Rosemont didn’t know if bringing heat back to the apartment building violated his deal with whoever this maniac was who was keeping him a prisoner in his own building. Rosemont had climbed the stairs to the third floor and felt the radiator. It was lukewarm. Better than nothing. The door to apartment 3B had opened and Mavis and Elliott Weinberger had invited Rosemont in for tea with a little something added to warm them up. Rosemont had met them on his second night in the apartment building. Mavis Weinberger was a frail sparrow of a woman who had lived sixty years in the same apa
rtment. She had retired from Macy’s department store, where she had worked she since was sixteen. She spent her days watching the news shows and was an outspoken critic of anyone who wasn’t a Republican. Her husband, Elliott, was a bull of a man who looked like he could crush Mavis if he gave her one good hug. He’d been a foreman at the Eastern Steel Corporation in Brooklyn who had retired in 2008. He was soft-spoken and read voraciously from beautiful leatherbound books with spines of twenty-two-karat gold that filled his bookcases from the floor to the ceiling. Right now he was reading The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in two volumes. Rosemont only read The Wall Street Journal. The Weinbergers had welcomed him into their home the same way that Sam Kinney had greeted him, with hospitality and warmth. It was as if Rosemont had been visiting the Weinbergers for a lifetime. Both of them were suffering from emphysema. Right now Mavis was debating politics with one of the CNN anchors, even though the conversation was one-sided and Elliott was saying how Rome had succumbed to barbarian invaders due to the gradual loss of civic virtue. Mavis had rolled her eyes and said the tea needed more sugar and more Johnnie Walker Black. Rosemont offered to get it.

  Rosemont noted two big garbage bags were in the Weinberger kitchen to be taken down for recycling. He looked in the cabinets for a sugar bowl and spilled sugar all over the floor. Rosemont cursed, knelt down with a dustpan and broom to sweep it up, and saw that the cabinet beneath the sink was ajar. He took out his Apple iPhone 5S and lit up the interior. Black mold was around the sink so thick Rosemont could scrape it off with a knife. He was sure it was probably the same in the bathroom. He brought the Weinbergers more tea, properly sweetened, with splashes of Johnnie Walker Black and mentioned the mold. Mavis said it had always been black under the sink, and Elliott said they didn’t have the money to fix the leaks. That most of the apartments in the building were the same.