by Jonas Saul
“Holy shit,” Aaron yelled as the van picked up speed.
Heart racing, covered in a dull sheen of sweat and rain water, Aaron sat up and placed both hands on the wheel when they were more than a block away. Unless there were more than one gunman, or they had a car and were about to give chase, the immediate danger had ended.
Over his shoulder he saw Clara curled up in a ball on the van’s floor. Daniel held Benjamin, his face white in the darkened van, blood oozing out of his pant leg.
Something knocked on the back door.
Aaron checked his mirror, ready to slam on the brake or the accelerator depending on what was needed.
Alex clung to the outside of the van. Aaron turned the corner a block away and slowed to a stop. A moment later Alex hopped on the van.
“Find him?” Aaron asked.
Alex shook his head.
“Fuck.”
He turned back in his seat and performed a U-turn, aiming the van at the hotel, then pulled to the side of the road and stopped.
“Daniel, park at the hospital. Carry Benjamin inside. Explain the shooting in front of the hotel. We had just checked out and someone shot at us. They killed this man. The police will come. That gives me a half hour head start.”
No one replied. Benjamin groaned at the pain in his leg and Clara sobbed.
“I’m going back,” Aaron said. “I can’t let Ansgar get away. We’ll always wonder when he’ll just show up if I don’t deal with him now.”
“That takes me out of this fight,” Daniel said. “Cops’ll keep me for a day or two. You sure about this? Gunshot wounds come with questions.”
“They’ll keep Clara, too. She’ll be safer with the police. Don’t leave her side. And Clara, if the cops let you go, wait for Daniel.”
Clara nodded quickly. With part of the driver’s head missing, his body slumped at her feet, she seemed cowed into doing anything Aaron said without question.
He bounded down the steps and hit the pavement running. Behind him, the Park ’N Fly van did another U-turn and started away in the other direction.
Another set of feet ran close.
He knew it was Alex. Silent Alex. Sneaky Alex.
There was no way Alex would ever let Aaron face an armed hitman on his own. Aaron knew Alex would take a bullet before he ever let Aaron get hurt.
That’s just who Alex was and he loved him for it.
Aaron ran toward the hotel with Alex at his side, prepared to kill a hitman with his bare hands.
Chapter 26
Ansgar Holm watched them as they exited the front of the hotel. They were stupid. Why not use a side door? Why not have a taxi meet them at the front? He’d kill the cab driver and then fill the car with lead, but they had to be smart to avoid him and they weren’t. They were just stupid kids.
They must think he was at the hospital to deal with his nose. Or completely out of commission after what that fucking girl did to him.
He allowed himself a smile as he breathed through his mouth. Their night was about to end abruptly.
Fifteen cars away, near the edge of the grass that lined the perimeter of the parking lot, Ansgar—The Clock—had waited and now the waiting was over. He flexed his legs with slow measured squats, then twisted on the spot to ease his back.
When the group stopped to talk by the street, Ansgar raised his Glock in front of him and watched the group through the reflex sights. The reflex sights allowed him to watch them with both eyes open. All he had to do was superimpose the red-dot reticle over the target and fire. Providing he had proper trigger manipulation and the sight had been adjusted accurately, it would result in a hit on his intended target. Since he’d adjusted the sights himself, there was no doubt of its accuracy.
The group started walking as one, Aaron leading the way.
Ansgar acquired his target. Aaron’s chest would be perfect. Blow the man’s heart out with one bullet. His weapon steady, arms resting on the trunk of a car, Ansgar squeezed the trigger as a vehicle pulled away from the street lights to his right.
Aaron hesitated on the sidewalk. Then he spun around. He didn’t fall though. And his chest was still intact.
Ansgar had missed his target.
“What the fuck?” Ansgar said under his breath, his voice nasally.
Aaron’s friend had dropped out of sight. Another man tended to him.
Ansgar brought the Glock up to bear, aimed the red-dot on Aaron’s face, and fired again.
The entire group dropped out of sight.
“Shit.”
Bent over, he scurried three cars closer. A quick check of the sights showed they needed adjustment. It had to have been knocked in some way when he was fighting with that girl in the hotel room. He remembered landing on the Glock, the weapon digging into his back, but he didn’t think to check it.
Worried the group would scramble back into the hotel and disappear from sight, Ansgar ran five cars closer. He racked a round into the chamber, slammed his arms onto the trunk of a Buick and took aim at whatever was moving.
An airport van was driving by. Aaron ran out in front of it, waving for the driver to stop.
What the hell is he doing?
Ansgar aimed the Glock skyward and watched from seven parking spaces away. When Aaron came back into sight, he would die.
Through the side window of the van, he watched Aaron talk to the driver. The driver looked at something on the ground beside the van—out of Ansgar’s sight line—and looked back at Aaron.
Ansgar knew what Aaron was doing. The driver of the van had glanced at Aaron’s group where they hid from his Glock. Aaron was getting them a ride out of the area.
Without using the red-dot as an aiming reference, The Clock aimed his weapon at the driver’s head with all the experience of an expert sniper in his past and fired with confidence. As expected, the driver slouched in his seat.
Ansgar raised the weapon skyward and waited.
What are you going to do now, Aaron?
From where he hid, it was easy to see Aaron drag the driver out of the seat. Aaron’s group ran around the van before Ansgar even knew they were on the move. There were simply too many cars between them for him to see when they crawled away.
Then the group was in the van and out of sight.
He dropped the Glock into position and fired at Aaron’s head in the driver’s seat. At that second, the van pulled away and the bullet went wild. Only the familiar tinkle of glass shattering let Ansgar know he hit something.
A moment later the van disappeared from view. An odd sound accompanied its departure. The soft rapping of feet pounding the pavement. He tried to see what had made that noise but couldn’t. The flutter of a shadow ran along the far sidewalk, but that was nothing more than his eyes playing tricks on him.
He slipped the Glock away and covered it with his bulky shirt. The night was silent as he stood to his full height. A quick scan of the hotel rooms looming over him revealed dark windows. Only two had their lights on at this early hour, but no one was standing in their windows.
“Hello?” someone called.
Ansgar turned to the voice, his hand reaching for the Glock. The hotel clerk had come out on the front steps and was looking right at him.
“Did you see that?” the clerk shouted.
“Yeah,” Ansgar said, then winced as shouting flared the pain in his nose.
“I’m calling the police,” the clerk said as he turned to reenter the hotel.
“Wait.”
The clerk turned back. Ansgar headed toward him.
“What was that all about?” Ansgar asked. “Did they have guns?”
The clerk’s head bobbed frantically, his eyes wide.
“They were part of the trouble earlier on the tenth floor. They tried to check out in the middle of the night. I saw what they did. I saw the whole thing.”
Ansgar was getting closer. Twenty feet separated them.
“What did you see?” he asked, then took a deep breath, the pa
in making his eyes water.
“They hid themselves over there.” He pointed. “Then waved that Park ’N Fly van over. That guy went on and shot the driver. He dragged the body out of the seat and then called for his friends to join him. I saw the whole thing. They’re murderers.”
Ansgar removed his hand from the butt of the Glock. “That’s what I saw, too. It scared me so much, I hid behind those cars back there until they drove away.”
Ansgar started up the steps to the lobby. He stopped beside the clerk.
“I don’t blame you,” the clerk said. “I would’ve hid, too. Now I’m going to call the police and tell them the names of the people who were in that room. They’ll find them. Not many people driving an airport van around at this hour.” The clerk stopped talking while he studied Ansgar’s nose and the tiny bandages around it. “Were you the one who was attacked and chased out of his room earlier today?”
Ansgar tried to smile. He held out his hand. “Name’s Peter Ford.” They shook hands. Ansgar shrugged. “I don’t know if they wanted to rob me or just beat me up.” He pointed at his nose. “But they did a good job. Spilled my wine, too. I have to be honest when I say that I might try another hotel in the future.”
“I’m so sorry about that. We’ll fix it. I’ll talk to the manager myself in the morning.”
The clerk jerked away and hustled through the doors as they slid open. After he disappeared inside the hotel lobby, Ansgar stared out into the night, looking across the roofs of the cars where the moon reflected back. He breathed in deeply through his mouth. Contemplation over, he turned around and entered the hotel. He needed to overhear the phone call to the police so he could mentally record all the names the clerk had for the hotel room Aaron had been in.
A moment ago he had almost killed the clerk. Now the clerk was an ally after having seen his own version of the incident. Ansgar would have to leave the clerk alive. The police would hear that Aaron was a fugitive. For Ansgar, people were either allies or victims. Those were the only two categories he slotted people into.
Aaron would be found and killed within hours. If not, it wouldn’t be more than a day. Then he would retake Clara Olafson. Or he would kill her. It didn’t matter to him anymore. All that mattered was how this job ended.
It would end on his terms now that he was emotionally invested.
After all, anger was an emotion.
He clenched his fists as he listened in on the clerk’s version of the sordid tale to the 911 dispatcher.
Chapter 27
Parkman ran along the path by the edge of the lake in semi-darkness as the sun had dropped behind the horizon. The screaming had only been brief, but the moaning and gasping for breaths led him forward until he came upon the two girls. One of them was rolling in the thick grass, wheezing in and out while she wiped at her face. The other girl was in a foot of water to his right, dumping her face in the lake, then coming back up gasping.
The smell of pepper spray grew in intensity the closer he got to them. Both girls were fully clothed. The one on the ground still had a tiny purse on her. This wasn’t an attempted robbery or a sexual assault. It looked like the guy had just walked up and sprayed the girls in the face for no apparent reason.
“Det gør ondt,” the girl in the grass said.
Parkman knelt down beside her.
“Do you speak English?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said. The word came out in a wheeze.
“Was it the man with the thick jacket?”
She nodded.
“Which way did he go?”
“Toward Kvickly,” she said. “I cannot see. I heard him run that way.”
“Did you recognize him?”
The girl shook her head.
More people were coming along the path now.
“Okay, these people will help you. I’m going to find this man. I’ll be right back.”
Parkman got to his feet as two other men came up. He told them he got a good description of the man who did this and that he was going after him. One man pulled out a cell phone and called for help as Parkman left them with the girls.
He followed the path to the back of the Kvickly parking lot, then ran toward the street. Checking both ways, he saw nothing. The man in the thick coat was gone.
He ran back through the parking lot of the Kvickly and jumped down onto the path by the water. To his right, half a dozen people milled around the girls. The one in the lake was being helped out of the water now.
To his left, the path vanished in darkness. He started that way. At the edge of the building where the parking lot lights lost ground and the dark grabbed a foothold, he slowed down and eased up to the building where he waited a few breaths until his eyes adjusted.
This had to have something to do with Sarah. Why else was he in Skanderborg hours before Sarah was meant to arrive? He was directed to be here by Sarah’s sister, no less. This attack had to be attached somehow to the purpose. The man with the thick coat was the connection. But where did he go? He could have gotten anywhere in the time it took Parkman to reach the girls, pause to talk to them, then continue past the grocery store.
He started along the beaten-down path, going slow to avoid tripping over an errant branch and end up sprawled in the lake. The water lapped the shore softly to his right, darkened houses to his left. He steered closer to the water to a get around a thicket of bushes. After passing several houses, he came upon a small dock where a couple of small boats were moored. The building to his left had a sign that was barely legible. The Skanderborg Rowing Club. He left the path and walked around to the front of the building where he stopped and listened. Other than the sound of a distant vehicle, the evening was silent. He waited for a full minute, eyes closed, ears open. A distant rumbling moved closer. The train was entering the station up on the hill. As far as he was concerned, the man in the thick coat could already be at the train station.
Parkman headed back to the path and wended his way by the Kvickly until he returned to where the girls had been attacked. Half a dozen people lingered around the girls using water bottles to flush the remainder of the noxious substance from the girl’s faces. People spoke Danish to one another which kept Parkman out of the conversation.
It was late. The man in the thick coat had gotten away and there was nothing else he could do. He wasn’t here in an official capacity. It was time to leave them to their own law enforcement. He could stay and offer a description of the man, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to find the man before the authorities did. The man in the coat was the connection to Sarah, to why Vivian sent them to Skanderborg. From what he discovered online, Skanderborg is a relatively crime-free city. To be that close to an attack on two teenagers meant he was in the right place at the right time.
He only hoped that he didn’t screw up whatever it was he was here for. If he was supposed to nab the man in the thick coat and didn’t, then he had already screwed up.
Screw ups cost lives.
And Sarah was on the way to Skanderborg.
He walked away from the crowd on the path and headed back toward Kvickly.
Determined to locate the man in the thick coat, Parkman decided to walk the area, street by street, until he found him or until the sun rose in the morning.
Chapter 28
Aaron and Alex slowed as they neared the front of the hotel. Near the corner of the building, before stepping out into the open, Aaron heard men talking, then silence. He stopped and listened.
“Alex,” he whispered. “Head around the other side?” He gestured behind Alex. “We’ll meet at the front.”
Alex nodded and took off sprinting.
Aaron waited a few moments, thoughts of Benjamin’s wound fueling his anger. Ansgar would end up in the hospital when they were through with him. Aaron’s teachers had saved his life once before. Years ago a man had kidnapped him and flew him to Greece where he shot Aaron. If it wasn’t for his three teachers, Aaron would be dead. He owed them his life, yet every
time he turned around, they were risking their lives for him and Sarah.
After a couple of deep breaths, he stepped out of hiding and made his way to the front of the hotel. He surveyed the cars in the parking lot for any sign of movement. The chances Ansgar was still out there ready to shoot him were slim. Once the airport van pulled away, Ansgar would’ve come out of hiding, hence the reason for doubling back.
He stopped at the edge of the window and glanced inside the lobby. The clerk was behind the counter, a phone to his ear. Ansgar was walking away from the counter toward the elevators.
