The knife wound made him slower, and it took him a second to reorient himself; and in that moment I was across the room, my left hand grasping the wrist of his gun-hand and forcing it out to the side as he fired another shot, my other hand gripping him tightly around the throat, squeezing hard.
I saw the eyes going wide as he struggled to breathe, but then I realized there was something else as well, they were going wide because he’d seen something, something behind me, and that could only mean . . .
I turned hard, pulling Oleg around until our positions were reversed, just as the bullets from Bull’s gun struck home; but instead of hitting me, they struck Oleg in the back, and I felt the impact in Oleg’s body as it shook in my grasp from the first, then felt the hot spray of blood, bone particles and brain tissue explode over my face as the second shot took Bull’s friend in the back of the head.
‘Govno!’ I heard Bull gasp as he realized what he’d done, but I gave him no time to do anything else; with lightning speed, I stripped the .38 out of Oleg’s dead hand and – my vision blurred from the blood spray that had hit me – loosed off the remaining three rounds from the revolver.
I heard a cry of pain, a gurgle, then the sound of a body hitting tables and chairs, then the ground.
I wiped the blood from my eyes with the sleeve of my jacket and stalked carefully forward to examine the damage, not knowing if Bull would be alive or dead.
My shoes hit the pool of blood that was pouring out across the tiles before I saw anything, and I knew my shots must have hit their mark. As I moved round the table, I confirmed it – all three shots had hit the big man in center-mass. He would have died instantly.
I looked around the café – one man lay in front of me, chest ripped open; one lay behind me, a hole in the back of his head and his entire face missing as a result; tables and chairs upended, bullet holes in the walls.
I saw Mary rising from her hiding place behind the counter, followed by the waitress – who must have raced over there during the fight – and then finally her brother Joe, who was still dazed from the punch but obviously recovering.
Their eyes were wide as they surveyed the carnage around them.
‘What have you done?’ Mary asked in breathless horror.
I sighed. Mary was right; what had I done?
I hadn’t wanted to kill these guys, just do something that would get the gang’s attention.
Well, I told myself as I scraped a broken piece of bloody skull from my hair and dropped it to the floor, look on the bright side.
This was definitely going to get their attention.
Chapter Four
I took a long pull from the bottle of Bud and checked the clock on the wall.
Eleven fifteen; just under five hours since I’d killed the two Russians. Well, since I’d killed one of them anyway; the other was actually shot by his friend, if you ignored the fact that I’d turned him into the path of the bullet.
I was sitting at the bar in a place called Croke Park Whitey’s, a dive if ever there was one. But it wore its status on its sleeve, in fact it reveled in it; and the result was a place where I felt right at home, everything you’d expect from a ‘Southie’ bar. There was free pool, beer for a buck fifty, and you could bring in your own Burger King from across the street. There was an old woman in the corner plastered in make-up and the sort of jewelry that would make B.A. Baracus green with envy, holding court with a collection of addicts and drunks. Rum and cokes came in pint glasses, and the Christmas lights were still up. They were either nine months late taking them down, or three months early putting them up.
I’d brought Kane with me for back-up, left him outside the bar, watching the street. It would help if something happened and it spilled outside. He’d been through so much with me, he’d know what to do.
I sipped from my bottle – Bud was three bucks, but there was no way I was drinking PBR, no matter how cheap it was – and I watched a couple of guys hustling some newbies over by the pool tables. I thought about going over to help out, but the hustle was so obvious, the newbies probably deserved what they got; maybe it would wake them up to the real world.
Still, if nobody turned up here soon – either the police or the Russian mob, and maybe both – I figured I might just stroll on over to the tables and try my luck.
It probably wouldn’t get to that stage though; surely someone would be here for me soon enough.
I’d left Mary and Joe at the café, having instructed them to call the cops. I told them to describe what happened, how the Russians came in and I was just a random customer who decided to help out, then fled the scene.
The police would doubtless be on their way anyway due to the noise of gunshots and the reports of the other customers who’d escaped, and it would look odd if the people at the café didn’t report two dead bodies on their premises.
Hopefully, it would also help protect them against mob vengeance; a ‘have-a-go hero’ was a plausible scenario, and – with no other witnesses – could hardly be argued with. Nobody had to know that I’d been hired by Gerry.
I’d also spoken to Gerry via payphone, to the number he’d given me, and we decided that – after the initial police interviews – it might be a good idea for Joe and Mary to take a few days’ holiday, to give me time to straighten things out. It looked like the pressure was increasing, and I would hate for the Russians’ threats to be acted upon.
I finished my Bud and asked for another, wondering again if it would be the cops or the Russians who would show up first. I had no doubts that someone would track me here – after all, it was only a twenty-minute walk from M Street, and I hadn’t really been trying to hide. With the shady clientele in here, and me being a new face, I knew someone – somewhere – would be making some phone calls.
The only thing I didn’t know was whether this place was connected to the Irish mob. Gerry had said they’d all but cleared out of the area, were now raking it in from their real estate deals from the Seaport District redevelopment, but Whitey’s seemed to be the sort of place that still had connections. Would the Russians come here if it did?
But my question was answered before my next sip of beer, as the front door of the bar flew open and four guys walked in, eyes scanning the place, bodies tensed, ready for action.
I could see the tattoos peeking out of necklines and sleeves, and knew that these were my guys.
I couldn’t be absolutely sure, but I presumed I wasn’t going to be shot on sight. For one, they couldn’t know that it was definitely me who’d killed their friends back in the café. For another – even if they did know for sure – they still wouldn’t know exactly who I was, who had sent me, who I worked for. And they would want to know.
The most likely course of action was for them to beat me up, kidnap me, and drag me somewhere more discreet so that they could torture the information out of me.
On the other hand, the Russian mafia was known to do some crazy shit, often over-the-top and against its own interests if honor or reputation was at stake, and so I couldn’t entirely rule out the possibility that they might come in all guns blazing.
But, I supposed, a little bit of risk made life all the more exciting.
I felt my heart rate start to climb, managed to control it with my breathing. I raised the bottle to my lips, found that my hands were steady.
I watched as the men looked over to an old guy drinking alone in the corner of the bar. He was dressed in a rumpled wool jacket and a threadbare raincoat, and appeared only half-conscious, surrounded by empty shot glasses; and yet when the Russians looked his way, he carefully raised one finger in my direction and nodded his head.
How the hell the old guy knew, I guess I’d never find out; but I’d been positively identified, and – as the four angry men turned to me – it would soon be clear whether the Russians’ policy was going to be to shoot first and ask questions later.
I let them edge their way closer to me, at the same time as the barman moved away, re
treating to the far end of his counter.
The other customers around me made way for the mobsters but – unlike the clientele of the Thistle Café – they stayed in the bar. If there was going to be action, apparently they didn’t want to miss it, and a lot of curious eyes turned on us.
The four men were uniform in size, all large and muscular but not as big as Bull; they were more like souped-up clones of Oleg, hard as iron but athletic at the same time. Dangerous didn’t begin to cover it.
Still, I wasn’t a pushover myself.
‘You,’ the first man said, pushing a thick finger toward my chest. ‘Come with us.’
His voice brooked no disobedience to the order, but I kept sitting on my bar stool, eyes meeting his. ‘And who are you?’ I asked as I took another sip of beer.
The man’s eyes went wide, not used to his will being defied. I smiled at him, but a part of me was worried – after all, my plan wasn’t especially well thought out. In fact, it barely existed at all. I wanted to move further into the organization, find the bosses so that I could ‘negotiate’ with them; if I let them take me, that would be one way of doing it. However, they might kill me during interrogation before I even had any contact with the bosses, and it wouldn’t be a pleasant way to go. Better, I figured, to get some information myself, and make my own way there.
So that was the plan. I guess my skills in that department have deteriorated somewhat since my time in the Rangers; but if the plan was poor, I would just have to make sure that the execution was first-rate.
The guy taking the lead took another step toward me, jabbing his finger once more toward my chest. ‘I said, you’re fucking coming with us,’ he growled. ‘Now.’
The other men looked around warily, checking out the environment before setting their eyes back on me, hands loose at their jackets, near the tell-tale bulges of their concealed weapons.
Things were about to heat up.
And it was time to earn my thousand dollars.
Chapter Five
‘Okay,’ I said, shifting on my bar stool to face them and raising my hands in the air, Bud bottle still in my right. ‘Okay.’
I hopped down off the stool, head down, apparently resigned to my fate. I sensed the four guys ahead of me relax ever so slightly, a barely perceptible lowering of their awareness brought on by my compliance; they thought the fight had ended before it had even begun.
Two of the men moved to my flanks, to make sure I moved with the group, while the other two – including the guy with the growly voice – turned their backs to me and started to lead the way toward the front door, supremely confident that I would follow. And why would they doubt it? They’d probably never been disobeyed before – and if they had, they’d probably always been able to stamp it out with large doses of physical violence.
Men like these were bullies, plain and simple, all too used to beating up on people who couldn’t defend themselves.
I hate people like that.
I smashed the bottle in my hand over the head of the man who’d spoken to me, sure to get the edge of the heavier base section to connect with his skull. He dropped to his knees as I withdrew my baton and slammed the extending metal length into the side of the other man’s head. I could sense the men on either side reacting and I angled my body away from their grasps, smashing the baton across the face of the thug on my left. His hands went to his bloody, half-crushed face as I swept the weapon back the other way.
The fourth and last guy was fast – after all, he’d had the most time to react – and managed to get an arm up to block the baton strike; I could literally hear the forearm fracture on impact. But at the same time as he was blocking the blow, I was slashing across his throat with the jagged edge of the now-broken Bud bottle. The sharp glass caught his neck just right, ripping a blood-spewing hole from one side to the other.
His hands went to his throat as he made a weak, sickening gargling noise and fell to the floor, body twitching uncontrollably.
It was then that I noticed the noise around us, shouting and crashing coming from all corners of the bar. I could sense movement and mayhem all around, but I didn’t have a chance to look; the talker had recovered by then, and – turning toward me – exploded from his knees and tackled me at the waist. I immediately clubbed down with the base of the baton onto his clavicle, breaking it in two like a twig, raising a knee sharply under his chin a moment later. His tongue caught between his teeth and blood flew out of his mouth as his eyes rolled up into his head.
The second guy I’d hit was pulling his gun, still dazed from the baton to his head but conscious enough to go on the offensive, survival instincts deep-seated. I slipped to one side as I saw the barrel rise toward me, and buried the serrated glass of my broken bottle right through his left eye socket. The man screamed, high and loud, and he squeezed the trigger of his pistol, the round discharging harmlessly into the barroom floor. I moved in and kicked the weapon out of his hands and knocked him unconscious with another strike to the head with the baton.
I saw the third guy then, his own handgun out and swinging in my direction.
My subconscious sent a signal for my body to react but – before I got the chance – I took a hard blow to the back of the head that knocked me to the ground. I turned on the floor and saw the man who’d hit me – he was still holding the bar stool he’d used as the weapon – take a bullet to the chest, the one that had been meant for me.
He collapsed where he stood, the impact crumpling his body, and in the few fractions of a second that it took for me to regain my composure, I took in what was happening around me – a full-on bar fight had erupted. People were punching and kicking each other, hitting their enemies – who they might have been drinking with up until a few moments before – with stools and chairs, bottles and glasses.
I didn’t know how it had happened – maybe one of the guys I’d hit had bumped into someone on their way down to the floor, and that person had then taken out their frustration on the guy next to him, and then the guy next to him, and then . . . well, you get the picture. Croke Park Whitey’s now resembled a Wild West saloon out of a John Wayne movie, an all-out brawl with almost the entire clientele getting involved.
The guy with the stool must have hit me simply because I’d been there, probably hadn’t even realized he was in the path of the Russian’s gun.
Lucky for me; too bad for him.
But I had to get my head back together and move; the Russian still had his gun, and it wouldn’t take too long – even with the ongoing chaos that surrounded us – to reacquire his aim and shoot.
Two men – ensnared with one another in a wrestling hold – staggered in between me and the Russian, and by the time the mobster had barged past them, I was ready.
From my position on the floor, my foot whipped up and knocked the gun out of the big man’s hand; and then as he moved closer in, I rolled over onto my other hip and slammed another kick into the side of his knee. It didn’t break, but the leg buckled and his upper body came closer toward me; I responded by shooting my booted foot up into his face.
It caught him flush, knocking his head back, and I used the opportunity to stagger back to my feet.
I’d lost my weapons when I’d been knocked down, and so I cocked my fist, ready to launch a heavy right into the Russian’s jaw. But a group of young guys brawling next to us knocked me out of the way, and I was literally carried across the barroom in the maelstrom, until I found myself crushed against one of the pool tables.
I pushed away the nearest man and turned back to the Russian, stopping a pool cue swung at my face at only the last moment. The guy holding it was middle-aged, long-haired and ugly; he had no idea who I was, he’d just wanted to hit someone. I stripped the cue out of his hands as he stared at me with wild eyes and I cracked the fat end of the cue down over the top of his head.
The cue broke in half and the man went down; I tried to find the last Russian through the crowd, but I caught sight of a flash of light
in my peripheral vision and turned to the new threat.
I managed to deflect the incoming blade, contacting the man’s wrist with the outside edge of my forearm. At the same time, I drove the broken end of the pool cue through his mouth, smashing most of his teeth on the way in. It was only when he dropped to the floor that I recognized him as the old drunk who’d nodded at the Russians and pointed me out to them.
I looked again for the Russian, saw him staggering toward the bar’s front door in an attempt to escape.
I moved after him, but was caught in a bear hug almost before I’d managed to put one foot in front of the other. The cue was still sticking out of the old guy’s mouth and I was again weaponless; but I whipped my head back into the face of the person who’d grabbed me, and felt their grip weaken. And then I grabbed a ball off the pool table and twisted in his arms, swinging it up into the guy’s face, breaking a cheek bone and causing him to release his hold completely. I hit him with the pool ball again, then grabbed hold of him and bounced his head off the edge of the table, quickly looking around for the running Russian.
He was by the door now, pushing past the other people – the sensible ones, the ones who hadn’t wanted to stay for a full-blown riot – that were in his way; I saw him head-butt a young kid who refused to move. If I’d had one of those guns they’d brought in here, maybe I could have shot him; but with so many people rampaging in here, the likelihood is that I’d have shot one of them instead.
Besides which, I wanted the Russian alive; I needed him to lead me to the mob bosses, get me further up the food chain.
As I chased him across the room, hurling bodies this way and that, I hoped that nobody else would find the guns that had fallen on the floor; given what was already going on in here, a bloodbath would surely result.
The Russian was out of the door now, and I was only a few feet behind him. He’d be out of there before I could stop him, and I wondered if Kane would pounce, bring him to the sidewalk and hold him there for me.
THE THOUSAND DOLLAR CONTRACT: Colt Ryder Is Back In His Most Explosive Adventure Yet! Page 4
