by Sam Sisavath
“Your résumé left out a few things about your past,” Dan was saying. “Walter called me post-Jack, told me what you did. Let’s just say we were both speechless.”
She knew he wanted some kind of response from her, wanted this to be an ongoing (walking) conversation until they reached their destination. If there was one thing Dan liked more than loose women, it was hearing himself talk. A part of her wanted to deny him, but she needed answers. Despite everything Walter had already told her, there were still holes, information that she didn’t have.
“You planned this,” she said.
“How much did Walter tell you before…well, you know.”
“Everything he knew, but it wasn’t everything, was it?”
He shrugged. “He probably told you that Gorman and Smith’s days are numbered. It’s been for a while, ever since the feds first started sniffing around, thanks to a few loose lips. Why did you think I hired you? Single, a long way from home, and just the right age. Not too young, not too old. Besides, you’re just his type. Right down to the blue eyes.”
“Why?”
“Because I needed to give Walter a reason. Lucy alone might have done it, but why settle for one when you can have two? The combination of a future with you, and freedom for Lucy, was enough to convince him. He knew as well as I did that when the feds made their move, we’d all be under the gun.”
“Walter told me that he planned it, that all of this was his idea, including the three mercenaries back at the house.”
Dan chuckled. “Of course he did.”
“But it was always you. You planted the seed. And I was a part of it.”
“Don’t be so modest. You were a big part of it, Allie. The hardest part was getting him to reach for the brass ring. You. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Walter can sometimes be a little meek. He needed nudging, and I have very sharp elbows.” He mimed nudging for her. “Of course, it was lust at first sight for him. Like I said: You’re his perfect type.”
Oh, Walter. You never knew, did you? He played you all along. He played us.
She swiped at something dripping down her right eyebrow and flicked it away, purposefully not looking to see what it was. She didn’t want to know.
“You told Jack and the others to kill us when Walter was done, didn’t you? That’s why they showed us their faces. I bet you didn’t bother to tell Walter that part.”
“No comment.”
“You fucker.”
He shot her a warning glance over his shoulder. “Let’s watch the language.”
She ignored him, said, “How are you going to get the money now, genius? Walter’s dead.”
He flashed her a smug grin before turning back around. “You really think I’d tell these boys to pop ol’ Walt if that part was still in doubt? You know me better than that, Allie. I was mirroring everything on the laptop Jack gave Walter from the time it booted up. I recorded every keystroke, every URL, and every account. Walter, bless his soul, was never going to last long after tonight. Even if everything worked out perfectly, he’d break. Either to the feds, or to Gorman and Smith. It’s in his nature. These boys were always supposed to deal with Jack and the other two, but I have to admit, I didn’t know Gorman and Smith would send their goons first. But hey, that’s why they call them contingency plans, right?”
“He trusted you,” she said. “Jesus, he trusted you like a brother.”
“What’s that saying, ‘Bros before hoes’? I like to think of it as, ‘Dough before bros.’”
From the very beginning, Walter. He played you from the very beginning. And you had no idea, did you, you poor, dumb bastard.
“What now?” she asked. “Why haven’t you shot me yet?”
“You anxious to get shot, Allie?”
She didn’t answer him, and he let the silence linger for ten, then twenty seconds, where the only sounds were their footsteps and those of the armed men around them.
“The girl,” he finally said.
She didn’t have to ask him who “the girl” was. Lucy.
“She took off when my men put down Monroe’s guy,” Dan continued. “She’s somewhere in that house, hiding. The problem is, I don’t have all day to tear the place apart looking for her.” He glanced down at his watch, the moonlight gleaming off the gold Rolex. “Help me bring her out of hiding, and I’ll let you go. Tell me that’s not the best deal you’ve gotten all night.”
Bullshit. I was born at night, but not last night, you fucker.
But Allie said instead, “What’s so important about a fifteen-year-old girl? You’re just going to disappear after tonight anyway, aren’t you?”
“Walter.”
“Walter?”
“He pulled a fast one on me, that bugger.”
She felt a smile coming and didn’t fight it, since Dan couldn’t see it anyway. “He outsmarted you.”
“I wouldn’t go that far. More like he wanted to make a point.”
“To you?”
“To Lucy. His way of showing her that all of this was for her, would be my guess. Walter always could get a little hammy from time to time.”
“I don’t understand…”
“He put the money in her name,” Dan said. “She’s the only one who can retrieve his half. All forty million of it.”
*
Apollo, where the hell are you?
The dog hadn’t been present when Dan’s people murdered Walter and Monroe. It was a good thing, as it turned out, because as fast and cunning as the dog was, Allie didn’t think for one second he could survive four men with assault rifles.
So where was he now? And did Dan know about him? He’d said that Walter had called him on the phone, told him about her, but had Walter also mentioned the trouble Apollo had caused Jack and the others? Dan, of course, knew about her dog, but how much did he know—if anything—about what Apollo had done tonight?
She sneaked a look around her—first left, then right, then even slightly behind her by pretending she was spitting—but there were no signs of Apollo. Either the dog had taken off or he was hanging back. Despite the two years since the animal had come into her life, Allie had to admit she hadn’t known what he was fully capable of until tonight. Maybe he was a lot smarter than she gave him credit for, and she thought he was plenty smart already.
He had to be out there somewhere, doing…what? If one of the mercenaries had shot him, wouldn’t Dan have mentioned it? Maybe.
After what seemed like hours of walking and listening to Dan crow, they finally stepped out of the woods and into the clearing around the familiar two-story house. There were two extra vehicles parked around Monroe’s black SUV, both minivans, along with two more men in black military uniforms. One of them was standing on the front porch while the other one was moving around on the other side, looking into the shadows.
“There was another man,” Allie said. “Inside the house, on the second floor.”
“Someone already put him out of his misery before we showed up,” Dan said, “so no fair putting that body on me, too.”
“What about Lucy?”
Dan led her to one of the black minivans with its side hatch open and nodded at one of his mercenaries. “Tell her.”
The man slung his rifle and pulled a bottle of water out of the van. “Window on the second-floor master bedroom was open, but I think that’s a trick. She’s still in the house but wanted us to think she jumped down. I had men in the back at the time, and they would have seen her.”
“You know she’s still in the house, but you can’t find her,” she said.
The man nodded and took a sip of water. “That’s correct. We’ve searched all the rooms. Every closet and pantry, but it’s a big house. It’ll take all day to find all the cracks and secret rooms, assuming there are secret rooms.”
“Unfortunately, I don’t have all day,” Dan said. “Gorman and Smith already knows about Walter, and they probably know about me now, too. As soon as their boys fail to report in, t
hey’ll send more people. I’d rather avoid that, so that’s where you come in.”
Allie didn’t reply right away. The truth was, she didn’t know where Lucy could be. While she’d spent some time in the house, they’d kept the lights off and she was more concerned with Jerry coming after them than going around exploring. But Lucy had that luxury after she left the teenager alone, so it wasn’t out of the question the girl might have found one of those secret rooms the hired gun was talking about.
“I’ll have a better idea inside the house,” she finally said. “By myself.”
“No can do,” Dan said.
“Your men will scare her from coming out of hiding.”
“Womack will go inside with you while the rest stays out here.” He glanced at his watch again, before adding, “Make it fast.”
“What’s the hurry? I hear prison can be fun for a dandy like you.”
He snorted. “It’s not the feds I’m worried about, Allie. If you’re smart, you’ll make a run for it too when this is all over.”
“Are you telling me I’ve been working for a company that launders money for organized crime, and never knew it?” she had asked Walter.
“And they’ve been perfecting the façade for ten years before we showed up,” he had said.
She looked over at Womack, “Can I have some of that?”
The mercenary handed her his bottle and she took a quick swig, then used the rest to wash away Walter’s blood (and other things) that had refused to be scraped off her face on the walk over.
“Give the lady another bottle,” Dan said. “She looks like she can use it.”
Womack reached into the van and brought out another bottle. This time she drank the whole thing, all the while trying to come up with a plan that would keep both her and Lucy alive to see morning.
Two girls against six men with assault rifles.
Yeah, no sweat.
Chapter 21
The house looked different with all the lights turned on. Of course, she’d been running around in the dark for almost the entire night, so maybe that had a lot to do with how bright everything seemed. As she stepped back inside the house, Allie couldn’t help but feel overwhelmed and out of her depth. Most of all, though, was the reality of being so outgunned.
For a moment, she thought she’d gained the upper hand. She’d outsmarted Walter and Monroe when they thought they were hunting her, and all that was left was to come back here and gather up Lucy and leave in the SUV. Walter’s betrayal stung, but she had to admit, it’d been awhile since she had felt so alive.
And then Dan showed up.
You had no idea what he was capable of, did you, Walter?
Neither did I, as it turned out.
She stepped over a man in a suit and tie lying in the middle of the living room, careful not to get his blood on her shoes. He had two bullet holes in his chest and a third in his forehead. She recognized him as being Monroe’s man, who had been left behind with Lucy. She had been reasonably confident she could have dealt with him if she needed to when she got back to the house. Apparently, someone had beaten her to it.
Womack led her through the house, then up the stairs. They passed puddles of fresh and dried blood on the way. Jerry’s, Monroe’s man, and who else? Not that it mattered. She stepped around them and focused on her surroundings, on where everyone was, and her distance to all the exits.
Too many, and too far.
“How old is she?” Womack asked as they went up the stairs.
He walked in front of her, his rifle slung and his holstered handgun—a Colt 1911 model—with its handle facing her. She measured the distance between them and came up with three feet. Close enough, but she didn’t go for the gun because the problem wasn’t just Womack; it was also the five others, not counting Dan, surrounding the house.
Five against one was bad odds, even if she could somehow take Womack’s pistol and assault rifle off him. That was already an iffy prospect. The man had at least a foot and a solid hundred pounds of lean muscle on her, never mind his probably hand-to-hand combat training. She had some of that, too, but Allie wasn’t delusional enough to think she could take a man of Womack’s size in a stand-up fight.
“Fifteen,” Allie said as they passed framed photos of a large family along the wall to her left. She hadn’t seen them before because the whole place was dark when she was last here. The people in the portraits looked happy, but then, what family didn’t when the cameras were pointed at them?
“You have any ideas where she might be hiding?” Womack asked.
“I don’t know. It’s a big house.”
“Give me a hint.”
“I want to see the master bedroom first.”
“Why?”
“You said she didn’t go out the back window.”
“She didn’t.”
“It’s only a ten-foot drop. She could have jumped down and run into the woods.”
“No,” Womack said, with all the confidence in the world. “There were no tracks, nothing to indicate she’d reached the ground. And, like I said, I had men all around the house at the time.”
“She’s a smart girl.”
“She may be, but she didn’t leave through the window.”
“So you keep saying.”
He grunted, but didn’t press the issue.
They reached the second floor, where Allie caught her breath for a moment.
Jesus. How did I survive that?
It looked worse in the light—a long, jagged string of bullet holes along the wall and chunks of plaster of all sizes covering the floor. There was so much damage—there were a few bullet holes in the ceiling, too—including along the wooden railing on her right, that she wondered if this wasn’t all just a dream, that maybe she hadn’t actually survived Jerry’s barrage after all.
“What happened here?” Womack asked.
“Someone tried to shoot me.”
“You look in one piece to me.”
“I guess I was lucky.”
Womack chuckled. “You must have nine lives.”
Eight now, she thought, before correcting herself: Or seven, now. Beckard claimed one of them, remember?
The master bedroom where she had marched Jerry to earlier was open, and they stepped inside. The king-size bed was a mess, the blankets covered in blood, and Jerry himself was lying on the floor nearby. Coagulated blood pooled around his head, leaking out from the razor-thin cut that stretched across his neck where he had been garroted.
“Who killed him?” she asked.
“We’re thinking the guy downstairs,” Womack said. “Saved us the trouble.”
“And you took care of him in turn.”
“That’s the job.”
“How much is Dan paying you?”
Womack didn’t answer her, and instead crossed the room to the back window.
“A lot?” she pressed.
“Enough,” Womack said, and stood next to the open window, as if to say, “Well, you wanted to see it, so see it.”
She walked over, stepping around a fallen pillow smeared with blood.
The room, like downstairs, looked larger with the lights on. The closet and bathroom doors were open, and there were signs that the place had been thoroughly searched very recently.
So where was Lucy?
“She didn’t jump down,” Womack said as Allie leaned out the open window and peered down. He pointed at a pair of bushes directly below them. “They were undisturbed, no signs of anything—least of all a human being—having landed on top of them.”
Something moved in the backyard, in the darkness, and she thought, Apollo!, but when she looked over, she saw that it was just one of Dan’s mercenaries standing guard between the house and the surrounding woods. The man was wearing night-vision goggles, the device like an elongated third eye jutting from his forehead.
She pulled back from the window and saw Womack eyeing her carefully. “Where else could she be hiding?”
“You
checked every room?”
“My men did.”
“Maybe they missed something.”
“Anything’s possible,” he said, shrugging. He obviously didn’t believe it. “Try calling her.”
“I don’t have to.”
“Why not?”
“Because I know exactly where she is.”
He cocked his head slightly to one side, not quite understanding. “You know where she is exactly? Why didn’t you say that earlier?”
“Because you won’t like the answer.”
He narrowed his eyes. “Come again?”
“Now.”
She was afraid of a loud pinging! sound as the baseball bat connected with the back of Womack’s head, but that would have happened only if the bat clutched in Lucy’s hands was aluminum. But it was solid oak, and there was just a dull thump as it made contact against flesh and the skull underneath it.
The strike dropped Womack like a sack of meat. The girl stood over him, shaking, both hands still choking up on the bat that was now stained with blood and patches of hair.
“Oh God, did I kill him?” Lucy whispered.
Allie didn’t answer her. Instead, she glanced out the back window again, at the mercenary. He was facing the woods, oblivious to what had just happened in the master bedroom behind him.
“Allie?” Lucy said, her voice still barely rising above a whisper.
“You did good,” she said, and pulled the curtains closed.
She crouched next to Womack and drew his 1911 from its holster and slipped the Kalashnikov off him. The man was heavier than he looked, and a part of the strap was trapped under his body. Allie had to grunt to get it free. She opened the pouches around his waist and grabbed two spare magazines, shoving them into one back pocket each. She took a moment to feel Womack’s pulse. He was alive, if just barely, the bloody patch on the back of his head staring at her.
She glanced up at Lucy, the bat looking heavy as it hung from her hand. She’d seen the girl sliding out from under the large king-size bed while she was at the window and Womack was talking. His back was turned to the teenager, and she had been amazingly quiet as she crept up on him, even if Allie could see her trembling with every step. It had been all Allie could do to keep Womack’s attention, to keep those eyes of his focused entirely on her.
