Revenge of the Dog Team

by William W. Johnstone

  The fifth member of the squad, Mantee, had come in by water. He was skippering a small, low-slung open speedboat, which now lurked on the other side of the western arm of the Acres’ cove. His mission was to ensure that nobody escaped on Mayhew’s cabin cruiser. To that end, his craft was mounted with a .50-caliber machine gun. Military hardware, sure, but it sourced back to the military of a South American country, so there was no tie-in to the U.S. Besides, if it came to that, Mantee could always dump it overboard, sinking it in the depths of the bay.

  Steve contacted Mantee, alerting him that they were about to make their move. Mantee acknowledged.

  Steve unscrewed the suppressor from the gun barrel and pocketed it. No need for silencers from this point on. He had two pistols, this one and another, which he wore in a belt holster on his right hip. He preferred a shoulder rig, but between the vest and the flak jacket and the sawed-off riot gun on a strap, it would have been too damned complicated. He dropped the pistol in a wide, deep hip pocket. These cargo-pocketed type pants sure were handy.

  The Klondike rolled downhill, gliding to a stop near the front gate. Its lights were dark, Osgood driving by the light of the moon. None of the squad had been equipped with night-vision goggles in order to lower the military profile of the mission and maintain the gangland cover legend.

  The Klondike was a big brute, dwarfing a Hummer. It was the kind of SUV that if you wanted to go on a fishing trip, you could fit a canoe inside the rear compartment with the hatchway closed. There was plenty of room for the four men and their gear, with space left for a couple of prisoners if they managed to take any.

  The machine came with a V-12 engine, but there had been some customizations: bulletproof glass, armor plating, and a reinforced frame, shocks, and suspension. The special heavy-duty tires were solid rubber; they would have to be literally shot to pieces to stop working. A special option was the installation under the headlights of a pair of secret compartments, each fitted with a mounted automatic shotgun. The weapons had drum-shaped rotating magazines filled with shells. A set of switches on the dashboard would open twin panel lids and bring the weapons into play. The modification originated with big-time south-of-the-border drug lords, again buttressing the gang-related legend should the vehicle somehow fall into the hands of the authorities.

  Osgood’s assignment during the assault was the on-land equivalent of Mantee’s on the water: to intercept any potential escapees. He’d lay back and cover the landward avenues of retreat.

  Steve indicated the jeep with a tilt of his head, saying, “Why walk when you can ride?”

  He, Bryce, and Nevins got in the vehicle; Nevins behind the wheel, Bryce on the passenger side, and Steve in the rear. Steve and Bryce unslung their weapons, holding them at the ready.

  Nevins swung the jeep around in a curve, putting it on the gravel road pointing toward the house. He started for it, driving at a moderate pace, not wanting to alarm any of the occupants by signs of undue haste.

  SEVEN

  Mayhew and Piersall were in the big hall of the main house, brainstorming.

  A wide, high-ceilinged space, too grand and overbearing to be called a living room, it suggested the banquet hall of a manor house, minus the long table and high-backed chairs. The fireplace was as big as a walk-in closet. No fire burned there now. Opposite it was an L-shaped, three-piece sectional sofa open on the side facing the hearth. Its plush leather upholstery was cocoa-colored. The coffee table was a highly polished mahogany slab the size of a life raft. Sectional and slab sat on a rectangle of ornately patterned red and brown rug.

  Its south wall fronted on a pavilion overlooking the bay. The west wall featured a built-in wet bar, lined with bar stools and complete with an old-fashioned brass foot rail. That’s where Mayhew and Piersall were, perched on two stools, leaning on the bar facing each other.

  Mayhew was drinking rye whiskey. That gave Piersall a laugh. Just like Mayhew somehow to drink rye. Whoever drinks rye anymore? It was an old man’s drink. Piersall was drinking fine black-label Tennessee sipping whiskey and chain-smoking.

  A big-screen TV was tuned into a baseball game. Piersall didn’t know who was playing and didn’t give a damn. It was just on for background noise, the volume low, but loud enough to mask his and Mayhew’s talk from the underlings, the crew members or caretakers who wandered by from time to time. A radio would have served the purpose just as well.

  Piersall drained his glass and poured another. He was drinking it straight up, without so much as an ice cube added. This was prime stuff, why dilute it? The fact that he was drinking Mayhew’s private stock made it taste all the better. He was drinking it on Mayhew’s dime, too, since Mayhew was paying for his time, and the time of all the rest of the Black Glove Crew. Mayhew had already run up a pretty hefty tab, but that was okay, he could afford it. With Piersall, the meter was always running. This was business, not pleasure. Of course, if he could mix the two by working up a nice glow on Mayhew’s expensive booze while getting paid for it, why, that was a double dividend. Mayhew gave him a dirty look. “Go easy on that stuff. I don’t need you getting sloshed.”

  Piersall said, “I can handle it.”

  “Like you handled that red-hot who gunned down two of your best boys?”

  Piersall refused to rise to the bait. He was used to Mayhew’s sharp tongue; it didn’t cut any ice with him. Mayhew needed him or he and the crew wouldn’t be here now. That was the bottom line.

  He took a taste of the whiskey, savoring its sweet-spicy burn on his tongue before swallowing. “They were a long way off from being my best boys, Greg.”

  “Vane maybe, but that Sandor was pretty sharp. He was no pushover.”

  “The shooter got lucky,” Piersall said. “That won’t happen again now that we’re ready for him. Anyway, that’s your fault.”

  Mayhew’s smooth pink face reddened, his white tufted eyebrows lifting. “My fault? How do you get that?”

  “You didn’t tell me that somebody else had designs on Quentin. If I’d known, I’d have planned accordingly. I can only operate on the information you give me, Greg.”

  “It’s your job to be ready for unexpected contingencies.”

  “I was ready,” Piersall said. “The job got done. I moved on the stranger, too. That he got away was just a bad break, that’s all.” He drank some more whiskey. “Anyway, there’s been no comeback on the Quentin kill. Everybody bought the story.”

  “Except for the stranger. He knows better,” Mayhew said. “Him, and whoever he works for.”

  Piersall tilted his head in agreement. “Which brings us back to the Big Question.” He put special emphasis on the words “Big Question.” He said, “Who does he work for?”

  “Christ! If I knew the answer to that, you wouldn’t be sitting around here swilling my best booze. You’d be out collecting scalps,” said Mayhew.

  “Unh-unh,” Piersall said, shaking his head. “Somewhere inside, you do know the answer. There’s some clue, some tell, some piece of information that points back at the sender. It’s just a matter of sorting through the pieces and putting them together to make them all add up.”

  Mayhew got a little redder in the face, accenting the whiteness of his tufted eyebrows and the bright blue of his eyes. With his head of thick white hair, those brows, and the sharp beak of his nose, he reminded Piersall of a white owl. Mayhew said, “I can do without the lecture on investigative work, thank you very much.”

  In the glow of the whiskey, Piersall felt expansive. “Let’s look at the facts. We know that the guy wasn’t law. Otherwise, the Quentin kill would have gone down as a hit and the cops would be looking for the hitter, and hasn’t happened. Of course, the cops could be pretending to buy into the story to lull the killers—us—into a false sense of security until they lower the boom, but that’s not how it reads.”

  Mayhew shook his head, a flat denial. “My sources in the department, and I’ve got some damned good ones, say the brass and the homicide boys have b
ought into the murder-suicide theory.”

  “Which is one less thing for us to worry about,” Piersall said. “So we know the stranger was no lawman, either local or federal. They’re not so cooperative about covering up kills.”

  “Quentin was into a lot of shit. A lot of people had reason to want him dead. Maybe the stranger was working on contract for one of them.”

  “Maybe,” Piersall conceded. “Whoever he is, he’s a pro. But he’s not Mob. My sources among the wiseguys have told me that. He’s not with the local syndicate and he’s not from any out-of-town branch either.”

  Mayhew frowned, unhappy. “You’d better be damned careful pumping those hoodlums for information. Get them interested, and they’ll have a handle on you,” he said. “On me.”

  “You know me, Greg, I’m the soul of discretion. I don’t tip my hand.”

  Mayhew was thoughtful. “The stranger’s a freelancer then. A hired gun.”

  “Could be,” Piersall said. “He’s not underworld, though. Otherwise, I’d’ve heard of him. There’s not that many unaffiliated contract killers out there. Pros, I mean.”

  Discovering his glass was empty, Piersall refilled it and took another belt, getting a kick out of the dirty looks Mayhew was giving him. He got a kick out of the whiskey, too. Mayhew really was a grumpy old bastard. If he thought Piersall couldn’t handle the stuff, he had another think coming.

  Prepared to dazzle him with his sagacity, Piersall played his trump card. “Maybe we’re looking at this from the wrong end.”

  “How so?” Mayhew said, snappish.

  “Yours,” Piersall said. Resting a beefy forearm on the edge of the bar, he leaned toward Mayhew to make his point. “You’re into a lot of shit, too, stuff that I don’t know about. Maybe Quentin wasn’t the target. Maybe it’s you.”

  Mayhew was all set to get a grudge on, but dropped it as the import of Piersall’s words sank in. “Keep talking, Donny,” he said, even-toned.

  “It’s simple,” Piersall said. “Maybe this is some kind of comeback from something else you’ve got going on. The stranger was interested in Quentin not for himself, but as an angle to get to you.”

  “I’ve considered it,” Mayhew said. He hadn’t touched his drink for some time; the ice cubes were all melted, leaving a pale, wheat-colored liquid in his glass. The glass was beaded with condensation; it looked like it was sweating. Gripping it tightly, Mayhew raised it to his lips, drinking deep. When he set it down, the glass was empty. His palm and the insides of his fingers glistened with moisture. He wiped them with a cocktail napkin, crumpling it into a ball and dropping it into an ashtray filled with butts of cigarettes already smoked by Piersall.

  Knowing he had scored, Piersall pressed his advantage. “Anybody that you’ve got a beef with lately, or that’s got one with you? A dissatisfied customer maybe. Or a rival. A man can’t do business without making some enemies. Maybe that’s where the heat is coming from.

  “In which case, the solution is simple. Finger the most likely suspect and we’ll dig into him. If there’s something there, we’ll find it. Then we’ll take his head and your problems are over.”

  Rattling sounded as Mayhew reached into the ice bucket, hauled out some cubes, and dropped them into his glass. He poured in a generous splash of rye and took a long, solid pull.

  Knowing that he had the other hooked, Piersall slackened up the line, giving him some wriggling room before reeling him in. Coming at Mayhew at an oblique angle, he continued.

  “Your business is your business, Greg. I’m not one to pry, you know that. But I can do my job better if I’ve got something to work with,” Piersall said. With elaborate nonchalance, he made a show of interest in his drink, sipping it, swirling it around his tongue, and swallowing it, culminating in a softly satisfied “Ah.”

  After a pause, Mayhew said, “Well…”

  Not looking directly at him, Piersall reached for the bottle, refreshing his drink.

  “There is somebody,” Mayhew said, “somebody who might—just might, mind you—have convinced himself that he’s got cause for dissatisfaction with the firm…”

  Piersall said politely, “Oh?”

  “He’s a foreigner, and you know how those types can be. Touchy. Quick to take offense where none was meant, slow to forgive.”

  “Like you,” Piersall said, grinning.

  “Or you,” Mayhew fired back. He took another swallow of rye. “He’s an Iranian. Darius, his name is. At least, that’s what he calls himself.”

  “You sure get around, Greg.” Piersall made his tone admiring.

  “I’m in the information business, in Washington, D.C. You meet all kinds.”

  “This Darius, he’s got a beef with you?”

  “He might see it that way,” Mayhew admitted. “I sold him a piece of, shall we say, confidential information. He got the idea that I sold the same information to someone else.”

  “Was he wrong?”

  “You know how it is in business,” Mayhew said. “Yeah, I sold it twice. To him and some group in the Southwest. Two completely separate interests, totally disconnected from each other. I figured there wasn’t a chance in hell of either party finding out the same goods had been retailed twice.”

  Piersall prompted, “But?”

  “There’s always some lousy complication,” Mayhew said, bitter-mouthed. “A middleman in the same business—information, that is—turns out he knew both parties. Biro Fleck.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Biro Fleck,” Mayhew repeated, annoyed. “That’s the middleman. He sold both groups information about me, that I’d been selling the same secrets to both.”

  Piersall shook his head, bemused. “Your waters run deep, Greg.”

  “If I could’ve gotten a line on Fleck, I’d have sicced you on him, Donny. But he’s a smart bastard who knows how and when to make himself scarce. He may not even be in the country, for all I know.”

  “Never too late.”

  Mayhew shook his head. “It’s not Fleck that concerns me, it’s Darius. A hard and unforgiving man. The Southwest group I’m not worried about. They’re a bunch of Iraqi humps that are here illegally. I’ve got enough on them to sink them and they know it, so there’s no danger of comebacks from that department.”

  Piersall said, “Iraqis, Iranians…you mix with the damnedest people.”

  “Business is business, you take it where you find it.” Mayhew’s features took on a stubborn cast, defensive.

  “Hey, I’m not casting stones. I’m no flag-waver. Like I give a shit,” Piersall said, snickering.

  The tautness in Mayhew’s face slackened. “Turns out Iran and Iraq have got no use for each other. In fact, they hate each other’s guts. Which was another thing I was counting on when I sold them both the same intelligence. If it wasn’t for that damned Fleck…”

  “Sure, sure, but what about this Darius?”

  “Him being Iranian, he didn’t take any too well to the knowledge that the Iraqis had the same supposedly exclusive info he did. Neither did the Iraqis, but they’re a long way off and in no position to kick about it. But Darius, that’s another story.” The tension returned to Mayhew’s face. “Darius is here, in D.C. And I don’t have the hold over him that I do over the Iraqis. He’s a secretive bastard and I’ve never been able to learn much about him: his background, home address, friends, loved ones, associates. I know enough about him to know that he’s the type to come looking for some payback. Maybe the stranger is working for him.”

  Piersall shrugged. “If he’s in D.C., we can get to him. You must have a way of contacting him; after all, you did business with him.”

  “I only met face-to-face with him once or twice, always in public places,” Mayhew said. “He usually worked through other people, cutouts.”

  “No problem. We get hold of them, squeeze ’em, and find out where Darius is. He winds up on the bottom of the Potomac and all your troubles go away.”

  Mayhew fretted. “If
it is Darius who’s putting on the heat…I’m not sure. But if I had to pick the one person who might be gunning for me, he’s the one.”

  “If it’s not him, no big deal,” Piersall said. “You can cross him off your suspect list and you won’t have to worry about him in any case.”

  “I’m not worried,” Mayhew said, getting huffy, his neck cords quivering. “I fear no man, and don’t you ever forget it. I buried better men than him when I was just a rookie cop in uniform, and I’ll put a bullet in his guts without batting an eye if it comes to that.”

  “Don’t get yourself in an uproar. Nobody’s casting any aspersions on your manhood,” Piersall soothed. “I just meant that whether or not he’s the problem, we’ll fix him.”

  “And collect a nice fat fee for yourself in the process, eh, Donny?”

  “Like you said, Greg, you take your business where you find it. And if this Darius is the guy, I’ll make sure that he gives up the name of the shooter who burned down Sandor and Vane,” Piersall said. “I’ve got a score to settle with that guy.”

  Mayhew said, “I’ll drink to that.”

  Refilling their glasses, they clinked them together in a kind of toast. Before they could down their drinks, though, the shooting started.

  The gravel road forked as it neared the main house, one branch curving to the left to form a driveway that swept up to the front entrance before continuing to the building’s northeast corner, then rounding it to continue to the rear of the house. The other branch followed a straight course paralleling the house’s west face; at the southwest corner, it forked again, one branch swinging left behind the back of the house into a yard between the outbuildings, the other following its straight course toward the pier on the bay.

  No ordinary gray gravel would suffice; no, the pathways were made of white gravel, fine small white stones that made the straightaways and forking branches glimmer pale and ghostly in the moonlight, against the dark body of the ground.

  Nearing the first fork, Nevins slowed the jeep to a crawl so Steve could hop out without the vehicle stopping. Steve peeled off to the left, toward the front of the house. The jeep, with Nevins and Bryce, continued straight, gliding past the mansion’s west side, then forking left into the yard between the back of the house and the outbuildings.