“What’s the rush?” Cory said, his deep voice oozing. “We got a lot to catch up on. It’s been twenty years.”
“Put him on, Cory, or I swear I’m hanging up right now.”
Kaufmann spoke, making my feelings temporarily override my brain. His words came out in a rush. “I’m near the lake he’s not alone he has—”
A slapping sound. Kaufmann being hit. It was repeated, and I heard a grunt of pain.
I pushed back the emotion welling up in me, killed it before it could erupt, and pictured myself encased in a block of ice. Cold. Hard.
“You ready to talk to me now?” Cory said.
“Yes.”
Another shotgun blast. The door shook and one of the hinges twisted off, shedding a screw onto the carpeting.
“What was that sound?” Cory demanded.
Focus. Stay focused. Too much happening at once.
I let out a slow breath, falling back on what I was taught.
Process. Evaluate. Segregate. Then take control of the situation.
“I’m having phone problems. I may need to call you back.”
“If you hang up this phone, bitch, I’ll take some tin snips and—”
I tuned Cory out, crawling on my knees and elbows under the window, over to the front door, squatting alongside it.
A third shot rocked the apartment, making the wall shake. As the door fell inward I watched the vid monitor on my kitchen counter. The man was hiding on the right side of the doorway, opposite me, his back pressed to the wall. While the door was reinforced steel, the wall was plain old wood and plaster. Using the video monitor as a guide, I placed the barrel of my Glock an inch from the surface and fired twice. My loads were beryllium copper, and penetrated both the wall and the assassin’s right knee. As he fell forward I was already aiming through the doorway where his head would appear.
My third shot ended him.
“—horrible pain. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I said into the phone.
I went through the doorway, low. My assailant was Caucasian, in his forties, muscular, dressed in a trench coat, jeans, and black leather gloves. His face was hard to make out under the damage my bullet had done, but I noticed a scar trailing from the right corner of his mouth down to his neck. I memorized it.
No use patting the guy down—he wouldn’t be carrying ID. The shotgun wouldn’t be traceable, either. I took it anyway, a Remington 11-87, tucking the warm stock under my armpit and moving in a crouch to the stairwell door. Underneath the gunpowder haze, the hallway smelled faintly of cigarettes. Mrs. Coursey in apartment 912. Someone, probably the elderly man in 914, had burned toast earlier. Animal scents, a dog, from the woman in the apartment above. The pungent stench of blood as the hit man soaked the floor.
“What the hell is going on?”
I whirled, aiming the Glock at my neighbor, Mr. Grant, sticking his head out of 907. This was Chicago, and most people knew when they heard gunfire to not open their doors.
He looked at me, looked at my gun, and slid back inside the imaginary safety of his home. I heard his lock snick into place. Then I held my breath, listening for other sounds. Mr. Knoll in 910 was watching CNN. I was able to make out the words dramatic prison escape. From the stairwell, muted sounds of footsteps nearing. One set, heavy, probably the man from the sedan. From behind me—
“Here are the instructions,” Cory said. “I’ll only give these to you once.”
—the elevator reaching my floor.
I pinched the receiver between my ear and shoulder, freed the shotgun, and held it by the hot barrel.
The stairwell footsteps echoed closer, the man jogging up the last flight. Both of the assassins had to have heard the gunfire and would alter the strategy accordingly. That made me alter mine, and I ran to the right, out of the line of sight of the elevator.
“We want thirty thousand dollars in US currency. Hundred dollar bills, unmarked.”
“Money? You want ransom for Kaufmann?”
“That’s just for starters.”
The lift doors opened and a familiar green pineapple shape arced out and rolled into the hallway. Which is what I would have done. Which is why I was ready.
I stretched the shotgun out. Using it like a mini-golf putter, I swung the stock, tapping the grenade and rolling it back into the elevator as the doors were closing.
I flipped the shotgun, grabbing the grip in the air just as the elevator exploded and the man came charging low out of the stairwell.
Ears ringing from the grenade, I didn’t hear the next thing Cory said over the phone, nor did I hear the shotgun go off when I pulled the trigger.
The buckshot tore off much of the stairwell man’s face. I never saw the woman in the elevator, but this one was dressed in blue coveralls and white latex gloves. His dead hand still clenched a semiauto with a suppressor screwed on.
I did a quick wipe down of the shotgun with my shirt, then discarded it. Spent gunpowder clogged my throat. I pinched my nose, held my lips closed, and tried to breathe out, forcing my ears to equalize. I still couldn’t hear very well.
“This connection is terrible,” I said into the phone. “You’re breaking up.”
My hip buzzed. I startled, whirling around, then remembered my encrypted cell. I dug it out of my panties.
Now I had no choice. I couldn’t talk to Jacob while listening to Cory’s ransom demands. And Jacob had priority over everything else. I squeezed my eyes shut, hands shaking, and hit the disconnect button on my landline with my knuckle. I’d know in a few seconds how Kaufmann suffered for my decision.
“Is Wanda there?” Jacob asked. I could barely hear him.
I’d already used the Milan code phrase, so I used the follow-up. “She’s visiting her cousin in Nebraska. Can I take a message?”
“Are you out of the building yet? The Carmen Sawyer ID is burned. Word from the Chicago PD is that there are state and federal warrants out on you. I count at least ten squad cars heading toward your apartment. Two of them are pulling up right now.”
Standard operating procedure. Someone higher-up trumped up some fake charges so the feds and local law enforcement would bring me in. But were they trying to save me or bury me?
I shook my head. Think. I needed to think. Kaufmann first.
“I need you to triangulate that call made to my home phone. It’s a…” I groped for the word, “friend’s cell. Cory kidnapped him. I also need a DOD back door and a direct uplink to an ICU satellite in sync orbit over Chicago.”
“Opening back door…now. Diciassettesimo papa. You don’t have time to mess around with Cory right now, Chandler. Wait…what the hell?” Jacob paused, then said, “How did they find me?”
My heart rate jumped up an extra twenty beats per minute, and it was already hovering around 130. “Who found you? What’s happening there?”
“Chandler, they’re blowing the main…”
The phone went dead. Jacob. I let out a breath. Nothing I could do about it at the moment. I hopped over the corpse, tucked away the cell, and stepped into the hallway. My house handset rang. Cory.
“It wasn’t my fault,” I said, trying to keep my breathing steady. “This damn phone connection.”
Kaufmann’s voice was faint, and my hearing still hadn’t fully returned, but his words felt as if they were fired into my head with a machine gun.
“He cut off one of my fingers.”
Everything I’ve been taught—all of my training, all of my experience—slipped away. For a second, I couldn’t breathe. I shuddered, rooted to the spot, alone and afraid. “Kaufmann? Talk to me!”
Cory came on. “Do your best not to lose the connection again, Carmen. Next time I’m not going to bother with a finger. I’ll take the whole hand. You know I’ll do it. Shit, I’ll enjoy doing it.”
Ice, I reminded myself. I was ice. So cool I had antifreeze for blood. I unbunched my jaw, forced back the tears, and looked around the stairwell.
Focus.
No heat in there, making it at least ten degrees cooler than the hallway. Brick walls, metal stairs, eight steps per flight, two flights between floors. Below, I heard footfalls. At least five sets, coming up in a hurry. “I’ll give you the money. Whatever you want. Just don’t hurt him again.”
“Listen closely, babe. I’ll only say this once.”
If that many cops were coming in after me, they must have the exits covered. Getting arrested meant Kaufmann would die. No doubt Cory was planning on killing him even if I paid—Cory wasn’t known for leaving survivors. But I couldn’t help Kaufmann if I was in custody.
Assuming whoever set me up would let me live long enough to be taken into custody.
Down wasn’t an option. So I had to go up.
“I’m listening,” I said, controlling my breathing. The steps were cold under my feet, and I took them two at a time. I could smell stale beer and vomit, probably courtesy of the college kids from the floor below, and the lemon-scented bleach John the custodian used to clean it up. The footsteps got louder, more numerous. Eight cops…no, nine…coming up fast. I increased my pace.
“The sidewalk at eight seventy…”
The phone hissed static at me.
I’d gone out of range.
I stopped, went back down a few steps.
“Please repeat that. I couldn’t hear you.” My voice went up an octave, a little acting but also some real emotion getting out. “Please don’t hurt him again, Cory. This goddamn phone—”
“Eight-seventy-five North Michigan Avenue,” he said, irritation in his tone.
I didn’t want Cory to be irritated. I knew what he was capable of.
The cops were less than three floors down from me. They’d check my apartment first. But it wouldn’t take long to search, and when they didn’t find me, they’d send a team upstairs. Could I kill innocent police officers to save Kaufmann?
“Got it,” I whispered. “Eight-seventy-five North Michigan. What time?”
“You’ll have the money in a yellow shoulder bag. Wait there for—”
Static again. I wanted to smash the phone against the wall, but instead crept down five more stairs until his voice returned.
“—exactly three hours from now. If you go to the police, I’ll kill him.”
Less than fifteen vertical feet separated me from the police. I could smell the aftershave on one of them—Lagerfeld—and their body heat and movement had raised the stairwell temperature two or three degrees.
“Don’t hurt him again,” I said, low and firm.
Yelling, from my floor below. They’d discovered the bodies.
“Miller! Casey! Check the stairwell!”
Their footsteps tap-tap-tapped up the stairs, about to round the corner and see me.
“That’s up to you, babe.” Cory disconnected.
I wiped the phone off with my shirt, dropped it, and bolted, moving fast as I could, bouncing on the balls of my feet, ascending four flights in seven seconds, coming to the roof access door. I tried the knob. Locked, as expected, and no time to pick it. On the wall was a fire alarm. I pulled it, the siren filling the stairwell, then fired my Glock three times at the lock mechanism.
The door swung outward. I lunged through. My foot snagged a cable—something that hadn’t been there previously—and my body kept going. I pitched forward and threw out my hands, my gun skittering across the flat concrete rooftop just as a supersonic bullet parted my hair and dug a burning trail across my scalp: a shot that would have killed me a millisecond sooner.
I’d made a huge mistake. With everything going on, I’d forgotten about the sniper.
“Use all of your senses, all the time,” The Instructor said. “The brain is a parallel processor, but it dismisses most sensory input as redundant, irrelevant. You must teach your brain to stop ignoring what seems normal, obvious, or mundane. Hyperawareness can often be the difference between a live operative and a dead operative.”
I tucked my arms in to my chest and rolled sideways, coming to rest behind a metal chimney roughly the size and shape of a street corner mailbox. My Glock was ten feet away. Might as well have been a mile. The cable that saved my life snaked across the roof to a new satellite dish.
A bullet punched through the aluminum like a finger through soggy bread, making a hole only a few inches from my nose. I flattened myself against the tar paper, my cheek resting on dried pigeon droppings. Another shot, two seconds later, perforated the chimney five inches lower than the first, burying itself into the rooftop ten meters behind me. The wind whipped through my hair, but the short length kept it out of my face. These were Chicago winds, snaking around buildings, blowing eddies left, then up, then back.
“There’s a sniper up here!” I yelled, hoping it would make the police stay back.
My breath came fast, my heart pumping like a cardio workout, but my mind was focused and clear. The time between shots told me the sniper was using a bolt-action rifle. Calculating the hypotenuse of the trajectory told me he was in the apartment building to the west, roughly one floor above me. He’d either been on the fire escape facing my apartment or in one of the rooms. When the police arrived, he must have deduced my only way out was the roof, so he’d gone up as well. His building was seven stories taller than mine. The higher the sniper ascended, the better his angle, the easier his shot.
I needed to get off the roof.
Since the sniper was in motion, I assumed he hadn’t any time to secure his mount. That meant each time he fired, he’d have to load another bullet, which would cause an unmoored rifle to jiggle a bit. On a telescopic lens, the slightest jiggle would force him to readjust after every shot. The high wind would make hitting a moving target even tougher.
“This is the Chicago Police Department! Put down your weapon and put your hands above your head!”
I glanced back at the doorway, saw the cops standing there like paper targets, and yelled, “There’s a sniper on the opposite building!”
They followed my voice, training their guns my way. I got up on my fingers and toes, hopped to get my feet under me, and sprinted east.
I registered my mistake immediately, when the tar paper around my feet erupted in weapon fire. The sniper had a fully automatic rifle, not a bolt action as I’d assumed. He was a pro, and he’d played me.
But he’d underestimated how fast I could move and where I would go. I didn’t bother zigzagging or backtracking, which were standard sniper countermeasures. I beelined for the roof’s edge, feet slapping hard for maximum traction.
Ready or not…
Stretching out my hands, I dived off the side of the building.
I soared through the air, bullets cracking the sound barrier all around me. Heights weren’t my strongest suit, and as I caught a glimpse of the street ten stories below—the cars and trees and people looking like toys—every part of me wanted to scream.
Use the adrenaline. Use the adrenaline.
Arms open and reaching, I waited for the fire escape I prayed was still there, the fire escape I hadn’t checked since my long-ago roof reconnaissance when I first moved into the apartment.
My memory was a bit off.
The fire escape was still on the side of the building, but my angle was wrong by about a foot. The railing blurred as I passed over it and out into open sky.
Shit shit shit.
I adjusted, bending into a pike, reaching back around. My elbow hooked onto the iron railing, jerking me backward. I felt sharp pain and heard a pop—my shoulder had dislocated or broken. I clung to the side of the fire escape, my feet dangling above the alley two hundred feet below.
Pain ripped through my arm and down my side. No time to dwell on it now. I had precious few seconds to get my footing and get down to the ground level before the various people after me figured out where to look. I’d have to file the pain away, deal with it later. I reached up with my good hand, did a one-armed pull-up to disengage my elbow, and sought out the rusty iron grating with my to
es. Then I flipped myself over the railing and scurried to the first ladder, trying to process my situation.
The sniper would be vacating. He’d seen the cops and given away his position. I had a whole building between him and me, so he was off my worry list for the moment. The cops were another story. The ones on the roof would take cover, radio for backup. Any units on the ground would be moving into position beneath me.
The breeze was considerable. I had to use my injured arm just to make sure I didn’t blow off the ladder. My muscles screamed at me for relief, but I made them work anyway, pushing my way down the first three floors fast as I could. I chanced a look down, my mind swirling, vertigo tugging at me. A quick flash of memory invaded my brain, a training exercise where The Instructor had made me climb a forty-foot-high pole and traverse a rope leading to another pole. The height had paralyzed me until he’d drawn his sidearm and shot at me to force me to do it.
Goddamn heights.
I swallowed the dizziness and pressed onward. The scent of garbage drifted up from the alley, malted barley from a nearby brewpub, and now there were sirens in the distance, approaching fast.
I descended another ladder—only five more to go. The metal on the fire escape was old and sharpened by years of bad weather. My feet were starting to numb from the cold, but I could still feel the scrapes on the soles of my feet. I took a quick look. Some blood, but not enough to make me slip. I kept going.
The sirens had almost reached my building. The garbage stench grew stronger. I glanced down. The ground was about forty feet below, this part of the alley still clear of police vehicles. Roosting pigeons flapped into the air to my right, cooing their objections. My heart rate shot up at the surprise, and I lost precious seconds prying my fingers off the ladder to continue the descent.
With two floors left to go, a police truck pulled around the corner. A Chevy, white with blue trim, shaped like an ambulance. It moved slowly down the alley. I could see the driver through the windshield, which meant he could see me.
Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels) Page 2
