Burke's War: Bob Burke Action Thriller 1 (Bob Burke Action Thrillers)

by William F. Brown

  Greenway held Patsy Evans in front of him and pulled Ellie Sylvester in front of her, with his right forearm wrapped tightly around Patsy’s throat. A large-caliber revolver dangled from Greenway's right hand, pointing down at Ellie’s head. In his left dangled a big, leather briefcase. At first glance, Burke recognized the revolver as a .357-Magnum Colt Python, which squared with the sounds he had heard from the three earlier gunshots into the stairwell door. Greenway looked down the corridor, saw Burke looking up at him from the floor of the stairwell, and saw the Beretta in Burke’s hand, which was now pointed at him. Greenway bent even lower, now almost completely hidden behind them.

  “Greenway, give it up,” Bob shouted at him. “My men are outside, and the only way you’re getting out of this building is through me.”

  “I don’t think so,” Greenway shouted back. “Tony Scalese and his men should be here any minute.”

  “They’re dead, Scalese and all the rest of them. Stop now or you’re going to join them.”

  Greenway blinked as he realized the magnitude of what Burke just said. Dead? All of them? This couldn’t be happening, he thought. His eyes flared as he pointed the Colt revolver down the hallway and fired a shot in Bob’s general direction. The .357-Magnum handgun sounded like a cannon in the tight hallway, and both Patsy and Ellie began to scream. Bob pulled his head back as he heard the counter inside his head speaking to him, “That was four ― four down, and two to go.”

  True to his character, Lawrence Greenway immediately ducked back down behind Patsy and Ellie. Bob was a crack shot with a pistol, but he couldn’t risk firing at the doctor, as much as he would dearly love to. However, Greenway was in an equal bind. He needed to get into the elevator and the hell away from here, so he bent down, set the briefcase on the floor next to him, and reached his left hand out toward the elevator button. His eyes were locked on Bob Burke, as his fingers ran up and down the wall, trying unsuccessfully to locate the elevator buttons. Finally, he took his eyes off the emergency stairwell, turned his head, found the Down button, stretched his arm out even further, and pushed the button.

  As he did, the muzzle of the big Colt turned away from Ellie. Bob immediately took careful aim with the Beretta and fired off three 9-millimeter rounds. At least one tore through the back of Greenway’s left hand, and all three rounds smashed into the elevator’s control box, putting the machinery out of operation.

  “Ah!” Greenway screamed and pulled his shattered hand back, but it no longer mattered. That elevator wasn’t going anywhere, not tonight, and neither was Lawrence Greenway. Only then did Bob pull his head back into the stairwell and look up at Linda standing over him. “Don’t worry,” he told her. “We have him trapped up here now and that bastard’s not going anywhere.”

  “But he has Ellie!”

  “Not for long.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Lawrence Greenway raised his shattered left hand and his eyes went wide as he saw the large, ragged hole in the center of the back of his hand. He was a doctor. He had finished in the top ten of his medical school graduating class. In the abstract, he knew the human hand was a prehensile organ with one of the most complicated physiologies in the human body. He could name the twenty-seven bones it contained, not to mention the numerous muscles, tendons, nerves, veins, and arteries around them, even without having one of his med school cheat-sheets tucked up his sleeve. Fortunately for him, the bullet struck his left hand, not his right; but even a high school dropout could see the jagged bones and pieces of flesh protruding from the hole and the blood running down his forearm, and know it would require extensive surgery and a goddamned miracle if it was ever to function properly again.

  It usually takes a few seconds for the excruciating pain from a wound like that to travel from the injury to the brain. However, with a half dozen shattered bones, torn muscles, shredded tendons, and raw nerves, this pain immediately began at the tips of his fingers, shot up his hand to his arm, up his spine, and intensified as it blew through the top of his head. He pulled the hand away and ducked down behind Patsy again. He screamed. Patsy screamed, Ellie screamed, and he screamed again as murderous waves of pain washed over him. “Burke, you bastard! I’ll kill you; I’ll kill you!”

  “Let them go and I’ll let you try. Come on, I'll even stand up and let you take a free shot at me,” Burke shouted back, but Greenway was not listening. Like a wounded animal, every fiber of his being was now concentrated on survival. The elevator controls had shorted out and that escape route was closed to him now. Somehow, though, he had to get away from this maniac Burke and out of the building. That was his only hope, so Greenway tightened his grip around Patsy Evan’s neck and dragged her away down the hall toward the other emergency stairs.

  That was when he heard voices in the open atrium below. “Ghost, you okay up there?” he heard another man call out.

  “We’re fine,” Bob Burke answered. “You and Vinny block the other staircase. Greenway’s headed that way.”

  “Roger that,” still another voice answered.

  “You hear that, Greenway?” Bob called out to him again. “Those guys are two of the most talented killers our government has ever produced, and they’ll drop you in your tracks before you even know they’re there. So let the girls go, and I’ll let you live. Jail’s a whole lot better than dead.”

  Greenway growled and ignored him. Jail was not better than dead! Not to a man like him. He pulled Patsy and Ellie down the hallway toward the emergency door, careful to stay behind them. Burke might be lying about the skills of the other two men; but he had already proved he was a crack shot with a pistol, and Greenway was not about to give him a second chance. When he reached the door at the end of the hall, he pushed his butt against the panic bar to open it. The hand throbbed with a murderous pain now. Ah!” he groaned as he stepped through the door onto the third floor landing, keeping the two girls behind him.

  “Ghost!” he heard that voice call out again, even louder now as it echoed up the stairwell. “Someone’s in the west stairwell above me. If I get a shot, you want me to take him out?”

  “Only if it’s ‘can’t miss.’ He’s got the two girls with him.”

  Greenway did not dare look over the side to see what he was dealing with, but he knew in his gut he could not go down. For the past few years, he heard Salvatore DiGrigoria’s thugs and paid gunmen talk and yell amongst each other, but Burke and his men were strangely different. There was no loud bravado or threats here. The tone of their voices was so terrifyingly calm and matter-of-fact that they might be tailors fitting a suit, statisticians delivering a report, or morticians measuring a man for a coffin. As Burke said, however, these men were killers — real killers — and Greenway knew they were his worst nightmares.

  With no other options left to him, Greenway shoved Ellie and Patsy up the stairs, keeping himself pressed against the outside wall until they reached the first landing and turned the corner. “Go, go, faster!” he prodded them on with the revolver. Running and stumbling, their footsteps scraped and echoed off the bare metal stairs and concrete like an invading army. Finally, they turned the final corner, and found themselves on the small landing in front of the roof access door.

  It was strangely ironic how life sometimes looped round and round in little circles, Greenway thought. Only three days before, he had run up these very stairs and through this door, chasing that bitch Eleanor Purdue out onto the roof. It was three days and a lifetime ago, he thought, all because of that damned O’Malley. If he hadn’t goaded Eleanor into stealing still more documents, none of this would have happened — Eleanor would still be alive, there would have been nothing on the roof for Burke to see, his airplane would have landed quietly at O’Hare, and Doctor Lawrence Greenway, MD, would have continued on with his comfortable life, complete with its foibles and minor peccadilloes. How unfortunate, he thought.

  He pressed against the panic bar to open the door to the roof, as he did three days before, but nothing happen
ed. The door did not budge. Below him, he heard the third floor door open and knew Burke was down there, hot on his heels. Greenway backed off a half step and kicked the door again, even harder, but the damned thing still would not open. In the dim light, he looked down and saw that someone had installed a hasp and thick Master padlock on the panic bar, no doubt some ‘eager beaver’ in maintenance, to keep people like him and Eleanor Purdue off the roof. Well, it was a little late for that, Greenway concluded, as he placed the muzzle of the colt Python against the lock where the semicircular shackle entered the body of the lock, and pulled the trigger. The sound of the .357-Magnum going off at the top of the narrow confines of the concrete stairwell was more deafening than before, but the bullet blew the lock apart.

  The little girl screamed even louder now, as Greenway shoved her and Patsy out of the small stairwell penthouse and onto the roof. “Shut her up! Shut her up, or I swear…”

  As Bob Burke passed the elevator, he saw blood splattered all over the control panel, and followed a long trail of it to the fire door and up the emergency stairs. It was easy to see that Greenway had already lost a lot of blood and must be in pain. He held Linda back to keep her behind him on the third floor landing, as he peeked around the door frame and up the staircase. But he could only watch helplessly as Greenway disappeared around the next turn of the stairs with Ellie and Patsy. Again, he couldn’t risk taking the shot. He hoped Greenway would finally decide to quit, but the good doctor appeared to be a tough sell on that point.

  He started up the next flight of stairs toward the roof, when he heard a booming gunshot in the stairwell above him. He pulled back, but quickly realized the shot wasn’t aimed at him. Nonetheless, the counter inside his head told him, “That’s five! Five down and only one left in the cylinder,” — unless Greenway brought some extra ammunition along and reloaded — leaving Burke to wonder how long it would be before the law of averages and his luck would run out.

  “Ghost. What’s going on up there? You okay?” he heard Ace’s voice in his earbud.

  “That was Greenway, but he wasn’t shooting at me,” Bob explained. “From the sound, I’d guess he shot the access door. Maybe it had a lock. Anyway, he went up on the roof, and I’m going on up with Linda. You follow and provide backup. Vinny, stay down on the first floor and cover the lobby and the other stairs,” Burke ordered.

  “Roger that, Ghost,” Vinny answered. “But be careful; that body armor you’ve got on might be bullet proof, but large parts of you ain’t.”

  The last time Greenway was on this roof it was late afternoon. The sun was setting, but there was plenty of daylight as he closed in on Eleanor. Then, Greenway was the hunter. Tonight, he was the hunted, and the dark roof was his dead-end. It was flat and rectangular, with a three-foot high parapet wall that ran around the outer edge to screen the jumble of standpipes, risers, air conditioning ducts, water cooling tower, elevator equipment room, and the two emergency stairwell penthouses from the ground. This jumble of walls, pipes, and ducts might provide a myriad of wonderful hiding places for a child playing hide and seek; but if you are an adult being chased by men with guns, the mechanical equipment only got in the way.

  Worse still, every step he took and every move he made caused the shattered bones in his left hand to move and scrape together. The pain was excruciating. He groaned and watched helplessly as the blood flowed even faster. Ordinarily, Lawrence Greenway had a very high threshold for pain. In fact, some thought he was a masochist. Tonight, this bullet wound dominated his every thought and sensation, and he knew he was no longer thinking clearly. The only way he could stop the broken bones from moving was to press his hand against his chest with his right forearm, while he continued to hold the Colt in his right hand. That stopped the left hand from shaking and moving, but he could feel his blood soaking into his shirt and running down his chest.

  Greenway slammed the roof access door shut behind him with his shoulder, knowing full well he had just stepped into trap of his own making. The only way down now were the two flights of emergency stairs. Burke was waiting in the one behind him, and that was out. That only left the stairs at the far end of the roof, the ones Burke had come up from the lobby. The roof was dark. If Greenway could get across the roof to that other staircase, they might think he was still hiding up here in the jumble of ducts and pipes. He could run back down the stairs and get to Tony’s car before they knew he was gone.

  Patsy and the little girl stood huddled together in the thick gravel a few feet away. “Go! Go!” he screamed and waved the pistol at them, tying to get them moving, only to have his shattered hand explode in pain again. “Ah!” he moaned

  “I’m glad it hurts!” Patsy glared at him as she picked Ellie up and shielded her, shuffling away through the slippery pea gravel. “And I hope he shoots you again you, you… bastard!” she screamed at him again. “When he does, I’m going to laugh.”

  In a rage, Greenway pointed the big Colt at her again, but stopped and pulled his arm back to cradle his left hand before the pain got worse. “When I finish with you, you won’t be laughing at anything. Now move!”

  Burke took the stairs two at a time, with Linda close on his heels. When he reached the door to the roof, he paused to listen and then turned toward her. “Linda, I want you stay here in the stairwell, but I know you won’t do that.”

  “You got that right,” she quickly answered as she tightened her grip on the Beretta. “He has Ellie and I’m going out there.”

  “Linda, have you ever even fired a big handgun like that?”

  “I hate guns, especially handguns.”

  “Then stay behind me. He’s only got one bullet left. If you go up there waving that big 9-millimeter around, you’re as likely to hit me or one of the girls as you are to hit him. So, let me handle it. All right?”

  Reluctantly, she lowered the Beretta. “Get Ellie back, Bob,” she said as she reached out and touched his arm. “And don’t go getting yourself shot; I couldn’t handle that either.”

  Bob nodded and pushed her back a few paces behind the sidewall before he shoved the door open, and dove through the opening. He executed as good of an acrobatic somersault as a tired and badly out-of-practice, middle-aged ex-Ranger was likely to do, rolling over and coming back up in a solid kneeling position with his Beretta extended in front of him, seeking a target. As he expected, some thirty feet away he saw Lawrence Greenway heading for the other stairwell. Greenway was close to the narrow, center section of the building, a few feet from the perimeter parapet wall, but he had a long way to go before he reached that other door. The sound of the fire door slamming against the outer wall provided all the warning Greenway needed to turn and hide behind the girls again. His right arm was draped over Patsy’s shoulder and the Colt revolver was pointed down at Ellie again. On the dark roof, that left Bob with no shot.

  “Give it up, Greenway” Bob called out to him. “The building’s surrounded, and you’re not going anywhere. Better to be a one-armed doctor, than a dead one.”

  “That’s not going to happen, Major Burke,” Greenway glared back at him, grimacing in pain. “This is a monstrously large pistol and it will blow a very large hole in little Ellie if you don’t let me get out of here.”

  “Doc, there’s two problems with that,” Burke answered as he got to his feet and began to walk toward Greenway at a slow but steady pace, his Beretta straight out in front of him, aimed unwaveringly at Greenway’s head. “First, you’re bleeding to death and you need a hospital. You’re a doctor, and you know that. Second, that’s a revolver you’re holding, not an automatic. It only holds six bullets and you’ve already fired five — three into the fire door, one at me, and one back there into the door lock. That only leaves you with one bullet left.”

  Greenway blinked, and that was a dead giveaway. He dipped back and forth behind Patsy, so as not to give Burke a clear shot. As he did, Bob could almost hear the little wheels going around inside the doctor’s head as he also counted the
shots he took. Unfortunately, he kept coming up with the same number Burke had. There was one bullet left in the big Colt, and they both knew it. That was why Burke continued walking slowly toward him, closing the gap to twenty feet and then fifteen. Behind him, he heard Linda’s footsteps in the gravel, and in his earbud, he heard Ace’s reassuring voice tell him, “I’m in the doorway at your Seven, Ghost, ready when you are.”

  Burke was close enough now to see that the front of Greenway’s white shirt appeared dark and shiny. So did his pants. At night, everything wet appears black and shiny, especially blood, and Greenway was covered with it now.

  “Look at your shirt, Doc. You’ve lost a lot of blood,” Burke told him. “As I see it, you have two choices. If you use that last bullet to shoot one of the girls, I’m going to unload the nine rounds I have left into you, one soft painful body part at a time.” As he spoke, he closed the gap to ten feet and then five, drifting slightly to the right, and causing Greenway to turn with him, exposing more of himself to Ace. “Don’t worry, though. I’ll make sure none of those bullets actually kill you; but if you think one bullet wound hurts like hell, you have no idea what eight or nine new ones are going to feel like.”

  Burke saw the sweat running down Greenway’s forehead. “Or, you can use that last bullet and take a shot at me!” Burke shouted at him as he lowered his Beretta, tossed it aside, and threw his arms out wide. “It’s your last bullet, Doc. If you shoot me, you can make a run for the other stairs and maybe make it down to your car. Come on! That’s your best chance; hell, it’s your only chance.”

  Greenway stared back at him, blinking even faster as he began to wobble.

  “Come on, Doc!” Burke shouted at him again as he spread his arms even further apart. “Take the shot!” he shouted and stepped closer. “It’s your big chance, take it!”