“The Enzo moniker threw me off,” Hauser admitted, “but I know Larry Grimes, alright. Knew him before he left town the first time. Tough, mean bastard. If it’s really Grimes we’re up against, he’s too smart to run somewhere we’d find him this easily. He’d know Stiles would put all of this together eventually.”
“Eventually is probably what he’s counting on,” Loomis said. “Grimes knows Stiles is down here hiding out from Lucky, so he’s banking on the fact that Stiles will be out of touch and won’t be able to put all of this together. And since he needed a place to stash Jack quickly after Chamberlain left, he used one of Stiles’ rooms. Why not? It’s not like Stiles would miss it for a while.”
Hauser chewed that over, but clearly didn’t like the taste of it. I didn’t care. “We’ve got to check the room out anyway, just to be sure.”
Loomis didn’t have the stomach for what was coming next, so I gave him something else to do.
“Floyd, go upstairs and badge the front desk clerk. Ask for the house detective, a guy named Favilla, Andy Favilla, he’s ex-PD. Tell him everything we know so far. Fill him in on what’s happening, then call Carmichael.”
“But do it quietly,” Hauser warned. “If Grimes is still here, he’ll have someone watching the lobby.” Loomis went upstairs like I’d asked him to.
When the door at the top of the stairs shut, Hauser said, “If Grimes really is holding the Van Dorn kid up there, the sooner we go in and get him, the better. He’s mean and he’s reckless, and he won’t go quietly, especially with half the cops in the city running in here to get him. If he’s going down, he’ll want to bring a lot of cops down with him. If we’re going to get him, we’d better do it now.”
I knew Hauser was right, but that didn’t make me feel any better about it. “Kicking in that door is a three-man job, and we both know Loomis doesn’t have the stomach for that kind of thing. We’ll have to bring in your men to help us out, and—”
“We don’t have time,” Hauser said. “Grimes has heard about that riot Chamberlain stirred up by now. He knows he’s got to find another place fast, before Stiles notices he’s short one key. We need to hit that suite and hit it right now before he tries to move Van Dorn. If we wait for backup or try to grab them on the street, a lot of innocent people will get killed, including your meal ticket.” Hauser smiled. “And we certainly wouldn’t want poor little Jack to get himself killed now, would we?”
I wasn’t in the mood for Hauser’s sarcasm. “If Jack dies, Carmichael will pin it on both of us.”
Hauser shook his head. “Not me, angel. You.”
“You know Carmichael. You sure about that?”
Hauser’s smile disappeared. “Come on. Let’s go up and see this Favilla character. After that, we’ll figure out what we should do.”
I’D BEEN in the Roosevelt Hotel several times, but I never paid much attention to the lobby. I never had to. My life had never depended on it.
The lobby was big on marble, with potted green trees and brass fixtures. It was a nice, inviting space where one could enjoy a pleasant afternoon drinking expensive coffee and smoking a cigarette or two. Maybe even a cigar. As fancy as it was, it was just like any other hotel lobby you’d find anywhere in the world: Filled with people on couches and plush chairs, taking tea and chatting and reading the paper while they waited for hotel guests to come downstairs.
But one little guy in the corner caught my attention. He was thin, even thinner than me, wearing a bowler and wire glasses. He looked up at me from his newspaper just as Hauser and I passed by on our way to the front desk.
He didn’t look for long, but longer than he should have. And long enough for me not to like it.
I took my eye off him for a moment when Loomis brought over Andy Favilla, the Roosevelt’s house detective.
I’d worked with Favilla a few times years ago, back before he’d caught a couple of rounds in the leg during a bank robbery. His injuries got him retired from the force, and he’d been working at the Roosevelt pretty much since it opened. We knew each other pretty well, which might explain why we didn’t like each other. Personal feelings aside, he was a good man to have on our side if we had to go up against Grimes. A
fter a quick round of introductions, Favilla got down to business. “Loomis filled me in on everything. My man at the front desk here remembers seeing three men leading in a fourth man about two hours or so ago. The fourth guy seemed a bit worse for wear, but they had a room key, so the elevator man took them upstairs.”
I kept one eye on the little guy in the bowler hat while Favilla kept talking.
“The drunk could be Van Dorn, though my man at the desk didn’t get a good look at him. He said he hasn’t seen any of them since. As far as we know, they’re still up in the room.”
Out of the corner of my eye, I caught some movement to my left. More like a lack of movement, really. The little guy in the bowler and wire rims wasn’t in his chair anymore. His newspaper was lying on the seat.
I spotted him about a hundred feet away, standing at a long table with several house phones on it. He had his back to me, and a phone up to his ear.
I pulled my .38 as I ran toward him across the lobby. I buried the muzzle in his ear and slammed down the cradle with my hand. He dropped the earpiece and started to shake.
“D… d… don’t hurt me.”
“Who were you calling just now?”
“A… a guy,” he said. “In Room 1411. A couple of hours ago, he gave me twenty bucks to watch the lobby for him. S… said he was upstairs with a woman whose husband might come looking for them. He even gave me a picture of him. Look.”
Favilla, Hauser and Loomis came over just as he handed it over.
It was the picture of me getting out of the car in front of the Van Dorn house. The same picture that had been on the front page of the newspapers that afternoon.
I crumpled the picture and tossed it on the table next to the phone. “You couldn’t tell that was from a newspaper?”
The guy shrank away from me. “What do I care? Twenty bucks is twenty bucks, and—” I smacked him in the back of the head and put my gun away. “Did you talk to him just now?”
He rubbed the sore spot where I’d just hit him. “No.
The operator was putting me through to him, but you hung up before I reached him.”
Hauser poked him in the head. “How many of them are up there?”
“I… I don’t know,” he said. “I only saw the guy who paid me. I thought he was up there with a girl. Honest!”
Favilla shoved him toward the table, patted him down, then cuffed him. He called over one of the bellmen and told him to lock him in the storage closet until the cops showed up.
Favilla asked, “Now that we know he’s up there, how do you boys want to play this?”
“How many men do you have working now?” Hauser asked.
“Just me. At night we have three, but it’s pretty quiet during the day, so we only have one. How many men do you have?”
“You’re looking at them,” I said. Favilla didn’t look pleased. I couldn’t blame him.
“Grimes has already been here for a while,” Hauser noted. “He might be getting ready to make another move by now, especially since it’s rush hour. They’d blend in better on the street that way.”
“If we meet him out in the open,” Loomis added, “it’ll get messy.”
“That means we hit him now, in the suite,” Hauser said. “Keep it contained. The little guy didn’t get Grimes on the phone, so they don’t know we’re coming.”
“Agreed,” Favilla said. “The sooner, the better. Take the bastards by surprise.”
And that’s how you got yourself shot, I thought, but arguing with Favilla wouldn’t get me anywhere.
“All right,” I said. “We go now.”
I saw the look on Loomis’ face and decided to rescue him again. “Floyd, call Carmichael. Tell him we can’t wait for backup, but to send the cavalry anyway. Then kee
p everyone out of the lobby until this is over.”
Loomis looked relieved. “How will I know when it’s over?”
“Trust me,” Hauser said. “You’ll know.”
GOIN’ TO TOWN (SUITE 1411)
FAVILLA RECALLED all of the elevators back down to the lobby and ordered the operators to keep them there. That cut down on the number of escape routes if Grimes and his men got past us. Smart move. When all the elevators were locked down, Hauser, Favilla and I took one up to the fourth floor. The kid running the elevator looked almost as scared as Loomis.
When the elevator doors opened on the fourth floor, a middle-aged couple shoved past us as we got out of the elevator. “Such shouting!” the woman huffed. “There’s no reason for such shouting. And the language! Civilized people aren’t supposed to behave like that.”
The elevator doors shut behind us and the three of us pulled our weapons. The shouting was muffled by a closed door, but clearly coming from down the hall. Around the corner, to our right, a gold plaque on the wall said 1411 was just ahead.
The three of us crept down the hall; guns drawn in front of us, the green carpet muffling our footsteps. I was in front on the left, Favilla limping on the right, with Hauser covering the back.
The yelling from 1411 grew louder. Angrier. From what I could make out, they were arguing about whether or not they should make another ransom demand or make a break for it.
A glass shattered, followed by someone yelling, “Goddamn it! I said enough!”
We were about a quarter of the way down the hallway when the door swung open. The three of us pressed ourselves flat against the nearest doorways. We’d come too far down the hall to double back now.
A stocky man with thick black hair stormed into the hallway. He was trying to button his shirt with one hand while he held an ice bucket in the other. I noticed his shirt was not tucked in.
He froze when he realized we were there. He looked straight at each of us, but it was as if he couldn’t see us. Or couldn’t believe what he was seeing. We all just looked at each other for a few, long, calm seconds.
And then he threw the ice bucket at us as he reached for something under his shirt in his belt. I don’t know which of us fired first, but all of us fired once. Two rounds hit him in the chest, one in the head. He was probably dead before his body hit the carpet.
Hauser, Favilla and I hit the deck just as another man burst into the hall and opened up on us with a Thompson.
Dozens of rounds tore into the walls and doors all around us. Bits of wood and plaster kicked into the air. The roar of the Tommy gun boomed loud in the narrow hallway.
Hauser and I fired back through the gun smoke, unable to see what we were aiming at. There was no way of knowing if we’d hit anything. The gunfire was still ringing in my ears when Favilla yelled,
“They’re in the stairwell! The bastards are in the stairwell!”
I scrambled to my feet and ran through the gun smoke into Room 1411. Sweeping the room with my .38 in front of me, I saw there was nothing to aim at, just a lot of furniture. I went toward where I thought the bedroom would be, but the door was closed. I pushed it open.
Bathroom. Empty. Favilla called to me from the other side of the suite. He was standing in front of the bedroom. He waived me over to join him.
The door was open. It felt like the longest walk of my life.
I walked in and found Jack Van Dorn tied to a chair by what looked like bed sheets. A sock had been stuffed in his mouth and held there with a rope. His nose was crooked and swollen, just like it had been broken. His eyes were half open and still. I couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive, but as I got closer, he slowly lifted his head.
Then he blinked. Twice.
Jack Van Dorn was alive.
I tucked my gun back in my holster and started working on his gag. I pulled the sock out of his mouth and he wretched right in my face. He reeked of stale booze and worse, but it was the best thing I’d ever smelled in a long time. Jack Van Dorn was alive! I’d been right all along and nothing — NOTHING — Carmichael could do to me would ever change that.
A long roar of a Tommy gun echoing from the stairway brought me back to reality.
“Hauser went after the other two alone,” Favilla told me. “What do you want to do?”
I thought about it for longer than I’ll ever admit. And longer than I should have. I saw the flashbulbs popping as a crying Mr. and Mrs. Van Dorn held their spoiled little bastard in their arms again. I saw the flashbulbs pop some more as Mr. Van Dorn pumped my hand and promised me the world. Me, the guy who’d brought their son back home. Alive.
I thought about Carmichael’s threats, and how Jack being alive didn’t change anything. I wondered why I should stick my neck out for Hauser, or Loomis, or anyone else. The bastards didn’t even like me, and the feeling was mutual.
And then I heard another short blast of Tommy gun fire and realized that finding Jack alive had changed something after all. It had changed me. I hadn’t gotten mixed up in any of this for them. I’d been doing this for me from the beginning. And that’s how I was going to end it.
For me. For my own self-respect.
I left Jack with Favilla as I headed toward the stairwell. I reloaded my .38, opened the stairwell door and ran downstairs. Toward the gunfire.
RUNNIN’ WILD
I JOINED Hauser two flights down, crouched on the upper landing just above the first floor. The gunfire had stopped, but sounds were coming from the stairwell below us.
“Grimes has the Thompson,” he whispered. “I don’t know who the other guy is, or what he’s packing, but the bastards keep heading downstairs. I think they’re heading down to Stiles’ joint to make a break for it through the train tunnel.”
But I knew the layout of the Roosevelt well. There was only one way down to Stiles’ casino — and this wasn’t it.
They were heading someplace much worse. It was the reason why Grimes picked Suite 1411 over the nine other keys in Stiles’ desk. “They’re heading for the porter’s tunnel,” I said over my shoulder as I ran downstairs.
Hauser scrambled after me. “What porter’s tunnel?”
“The tunnel that leads straight into Grand Central Terminal.”
I threw open the door at the bottom of the stairs leading to the porter’s tunnel to the terminal. People were screaming and shouting, running for their lives — the panicked sounds people always make when they see two men with guns running toward them.
I bolted into the tunnel with Hauser right behind me. It was more of a hallway than a tunnel. Carpeted and well-lit, it even had some paintings on the wall, just like the rest of the hotel above us. People were crouched against the walls, and uniformed porters hid behind loaded luggage racks.
Grimes and the other kidnapper were a hundred or so feet ahead of us, heading into the terminal. There were too many damned luggage carts and scared people in the way for us to get a clear shot at them, so Hauser and I ran after them.
The bastards burst through the doors into the passageway that led into Grand Central. A new chorus of screams rose up around them. When we hit the passageway a few seconds later, men and women cutting through the shortcut on Forty-Fifth and Madison screamed and dove for cover as Grimes pointed the Thompson at everything in their path. The flock of panicked people running through the passage made it impossible for us to get a clean shot.
Hauser and I were gaining on Grimes and his accomplice, but not before they broke into the western end of the terminal. Now the screams and yells of terrified commuters echoed as hundreds more people saw the two gunmen running straight at them.
We were more than halfway through the passageway when we heard one shout rise above all the others. A commanding shout: “STOP!” That’s when the roar of the Thompson echoed loud.
Screams and yells doubled, tenfold. A stampede of terrified people flooded into the passageway, just as Hauser and I broke through and reached the terminal. We dodged the panicked herd as th
ey ran as far and as fast as they could away from the gunfire.
As Hauser and I broke into the clear, I saw three railroad cops on the terminal’s floor, damned near cut in half by the Thompson. Only one of them had had time to clear his weapon before he’d been hit. Poor bastards never had a chance.
Hauser and I followed the screams as Grimes and his partner ran through the main concourse of the terminal. We’d just gotten to the western staircase when I saw two more railroad cops crouched behind the circular information booth in the center of the concourse. Grimes was already heading toward the Forty-Second Street exit. But his partner had noticed the cops, too. He stopped short, walked back to get an angle on them, and leveled his shotgun. The poor bastards were sitting ducks.
I brought up my .38, aimed, and fired once. The bullet caught the man low in the back on the left side, spinning him around. My two other shots skipped wide of the target.
More screams rose up as Hauser took him down with two shots in the chest. I’ll never forget the sound of the shotgun skidding across that marble floor. We ducked back behind the staircase just as Grimes turned and opened up on us with the Thompson from the ticket windows near the entrance of the main waiting room on Forty-Second. The rounds kicked up chunks of marble flooring all around us.
The shooting stopped. Grimes was reloading, if he wasn’t running toward Forty-Second Street already.
Hauser and I used the lull and sprinted toward the railroad cops pinned down behind the circular booth. But as I reached the booth, I realized Grimes was nowhere in sight. I figured there would’ve been more screams if he’d run out onto Forty-Second Street. That meant he must be reloading in the waiting room off to the right. And Thompsons were tough to reload quickly. I knew I had time if I went after him now.
I didn’t care if he killed me. All I cared about was ending this goddamned thing once and for all.
Not for Carmichael, or Mr. Van Dorn. Not even for the other people in the terminal.
For me.
Slow Burn Page 18
