by Jack Quaid
Afternoons were for hand-to-hand combat training. Russell didn’t believe in the Bruce Lee ‘be one with yourself and one with the world’ philosophy behind martial arts. His philosophy was to fuck up the other guy before they fucked him up. With that philosophy, he taught Angus Krav Maga. If there was ever a martial art designed to simply destroy an opponent, it was this. Krav Maga was first developed by the Israel Defense Forces and stole the greatest hits from aikido, judo, may thai, boxing, and down-in-the-gutter fist fighting. If you wanted to put a son of a bitch down quick, Krav Magna taught you to not hold back and go for the eyes, throat, balls, ribs, knees, you name it.
If you knew Krav Maga, you had a black belt in bastardy.
After six months of brutal training, Angus was ready.
His old life was so far behind him that it felt like it was somebody else’s past. Forget high school, pep rallies, and cramming for tests. After firing a thousand rounds a day, who gave a shit about algebra?
There was a V8 engine block chained to his ankle when Carlos woke up. But of course, he didn’t know that. So he took off running, and about fifty feet later, the chain lost its slack, tightened up, and ripped his feet out from under him. Carlos went horizontal for a split second, his arms out in front of him, before slamming down on the hard concrete. The hit took all his breath, and he lay there for a moment, listening to the footsteps coming up behind him.
He rolled over onto his back, felt the pain in his ankle, and looked up at the kid.
‘That didn’t really work out the way you thought it would, did it?’ Angus asked.
No, that did not, Carlos thought.
Manufacturing all across the Midwest had steadily closed over the decades and, in their wake, left industrial graveyards of decaying factories, empty car parks, and faded billboards advertising fifteen-year-old products.
They were in the middle of fuck knew where.
Illinois, Indiana, or Michigan? It could have been any one of those forgotten wastelands. He didn’t even know how long he had been out. They could have been driving for hours for all he knew, days even.
They were on the roof of a six-storey office building, and when Carlos scanned the dark horizon, there wasn’t even one light. Not a car, not another building, not even the warm, fuzzy buzz of a distant fast-food outlet’s neon sign beaming out into the night. Not that he was the yelling and screaming kind, but if Carlos did scream and yell, there wouldn’t be a chance in hell of anybody hearing him.
The kid with the shotgun made him get on his feet and walk back over to the V8 engine block that was sitting on the edge of the building next to the old man he saw on the truck.
Carlos pulled off his shirt as if he were some sort of WWF wrestler. He was all muscle, and those muscles were covered from his neck down to his waist in tattoos. ‘Do you want to know how I got these tattoos?’
‘Nope,’ Angus snapped.
Ignoring him, he pointed to a crude dove on his chest. ‘This one was for the first rata I ever shot. She was the wife of an amigo.’ He pointed to another tattoo. This one, the image of a hammer. ‘This one is for…’
‘Wait, wait, wait. Are you going to do this with every single tattoo?’ Angus asked. ‘Because seriously, you’re covered in these things, and it’ll take all fucking night.’
‘Hey,’ Russell said.
Angus rolled his eyes. ‘All right,’ he said apologetically. ‘It‘ll take all freaking night. Now let’s get down to brass tacks. We want to know where Maria Garcia is.’
‘Fuck you.’
‘The way I see it,’ Angus said. ‘Is that you have one of two options.’ He held up a finger. ‘Option one, you tell us where the Santa Blanca cartel’s head honcho, Maria Garcia, is currently residing, then the old man and I will go pay her a little friendly visit.’ He raised a second finger forming a V. ‘Your second option—and listen up because this part will be important to you.’ He pointed to the V8 engine chained to Carlos. ‘Option two, the old man kicks this engine off the edge of the roof, and if you tell us the location of Maria Garcia, I‘ll cut the rope that’s connecting you to it, with this axe, stopping you from having a miserable death of being dragged off the roof by an engine block, which I imagine would be quite unpleasant.’ Russell handed Angus the axe. ‘What’s it going to be?’
The big Mexican defiantly crossed his arms. He had been on the other side of this equation too many times. You end with the threat of death, but you don’t ever start with it. Because if you start with it and the threat doesn’t work? You’re fucked. You‘ve blown any leverage you ever had. So as Carlos stood in front of these two, only one word came to his mind: amateurs.
‘Okey-dokey,’ Angus said as he peered over the edge into the darkness. ‘I’d say you have two, maybe three, seconds until this V8 hits whatever the hell is down there. Which means that you have two, maybe three, seconds to tell us the information we need, so I cut this rope.’
Carlos coughed up something nasty and spit it at Angus’s feet.
‘I take it you’re not having a change of heart?’
He shook his heavy head from left to right.
‘All right,’ Angus said as he looked over his shoulder at Russell. ‘Would you like to do the honours?’
Without any sort of ceremony or buildup, Russell kicked the V8 engine off the side of the building.
It was then, in that moment, that Carlos realised he had misjudged these maniacs, and he simply blurted out, ‘THE STEVENS HOTEL!’ as loud and as fast as he could. The words all ran together in one thestevenshotel.
The kid should cut the rope.
Shouldn’t he?
That was the deal, Carlos thought.
Fuck.
Each second lasted for hours.
Cut the rope.
Cut the rope!
CUT THE FUCKING ROPE!
And still the kid didn’t move.
Then Carlos heard the thud of the V8 engine hitting the concrete car park in the darkness below.
He looked down and saw the rope still tied around his ankle. The rope was longer than the drop.
The kid was fucking smiling.
He could have wrapped his fucking fingers around the kid’s throat.
They left Carlos on the roof, chained to the V8 engine block. It was winter. He'd die of exposure before anybody would find him, and that was just the way Russell wanted it.
The Santa Blanca cartel bought the Stevens Hotel five years ago to launder money. It was a hundred-year-old, twenty-seven-storey, fifteen-hundred-room hotel on Michigan Avenue. Back in the twenties, it was hailed as a city within a city, with its own bowling alley, barber shop, movie theatre, three restaurants, and a miniature golf course on the roof. Chicago folklore said Al Capone lived there before he went to jail in 1931. Then the depression hit, and those with money to stay at the Stevens Hotel no longer had money to put food on the table, and a couple of years later, the Stevens went out of business.
Over the next five decades, it changed hands a number of times and had been known as the Hallberg, the Barron, and the Bowden until it eventually closed for good and lay dormant for decades. Then sometime in 1992, the Focus Investment Group purchased the property. The city was keen to have something done with the eyesore and rushed through the purchase without many questions asked. If they did bother to ask even a couple of questions, they would have discovered that the Focus Investment Group was made up of hundreds of shell companies, and if they had dug a little deeper and asked a few questions about those, they would have found that all those little shell companies all belonged to the Santa Blanca cartel.
Despite the dubious ownership, the Santa Blanca cartel did pump a hell of a lot of cash into the property, restoring the vast majority of it back to its former glory. The bowling alley was gone, and so was the miniature golf course on the roof, but the lobby looked exactly as it did on its opening day, and five hundred of its fifteen hundred rooms were renovated and operational. The rest of the rooms were to be restored in a
stages. That was what the public thought anyway. The reality of it was that there were ten floors that were officially empty. But one of those floors was used for something else entirely. That extra floor was the Santa Blanca dock for all its product that was smuggled from Honduras, through Mexico, across the border, across the country, and into Chicago. It was in that hotel that the product was broken up into smaller packages and shipped on to Canada, New York, and the thirty safe houses and dealers scattered across the city of Chicago, where it was pushed out on the streets. Nobody ever questioned the movements of Mexican deliverymen coming and going in a busy hotel in the middle of the city.
Russell and Angus sat parked in the Nissan Skyline over the road and looked out the window at the Stevens Hotel. After three days of surveillance and bribing employees, they had learnt three very important things.
1) Maria Garcia was staying in a suite on the twenty-fifth floor for the next twenty-four hours. After that, she was getting the hell out of dodge and heading back to Mexico. If Russell and Angus wanted to hit her, twenty-four hours was their window. After that she was as good as gone.
2) At any given time, the Stevens Hotel had at least fifteen to twenty cartel guns inside. Some were scattered in the lobby, just keeping an eye on things. A couple masqueraded as bartenders and bell boys. There were three out by the loading dock, playing guard to the shipments of coke/heroin/ice coming in and out of the hotel, and most likely there were even a few under the guise of being guests.
3) Getting into the hotel wasn’t as much of a problem. People were coming and going all the time. If they kept quiet, there was a very high chance of sneaking in undetected. In the event that shit got noisy, and given the situation, there was a very real possibility of shit getting noisy, every single Santa Blanca with a sidearm would converge on them.
Walking straight through the front door was a Goddamned suicide mission, Russell thought.
He ran every single option through his twenty-five years of experience and was coming up short. He thought of camping out with a .50 cal and sniper-blasting the hell out of her, but there was no chance of Maria Garcia walking out of the lobby and onto Michigan Avenue. She would drive out and, most likely, drive out in an armoured vehicle, making it extremely difficult to get off a clear shot. He could plant an explosive on her car. Getting into the underground parking structure wouldn’t be a hell of a problem, but finding her vehicle would be, with over five hundred spaces down there. He could just call the whole thing off and follow her down to Mexico, but who knew what the hell he’d be walking into down there?
Going in quietly and coming out hard was the only way.
But even that was optimistic.
Russell slipped his hand into the pocket of his leather jacket, produced a pair of handcuffs, slipped one loop around Angus’s wrist and the other around the steering wheel of the Skyline.
‘What the hell are you doing?’ He yanked at the cuffs; he wasn’t going anywhere. ‘Dad!’
‘You're staying here.’
‘What?’
‘You heard me.’
‘This is bullshit.’
‘Hey,’ Russell snapped. ‘Watch your mouth.’ He had two Kimber .45s strapped to his hips. He checked the rounds in each. ‘You're not coming. Not now, not this time.’
‘This is what I’ve been working for. This is what you’ve been training me for. What the fuck is this?’
‘Twenty cartel guns isn’t exactly a walk in the park, kid.’
‘That’s why you need me.’
‘You go in there, and you're not coming out.’
‘You don’t know that.’
Russell looked Angus square in the eye. ‘Yeah, I do.’ Thirty-five years of experience had told him so.
It must have been the way he said it because the fight slipped from Angus. All he did was watch as Russell slipped his coat off and strapped a shoulder holster on, then leaned over the back seat and pulled two more .45s from the gym bag and slid them into the holster. Then the coat came back on. He was ready.
A tear rolled down Angus’s cheek and jumped off his chin. ‘You can’t leave me,’ he said. ‘Everybody leaves me.’
Russell paused. ‘Do you remember the story I used to tell you when you were little?’
He nodded. ‘About the cat and the mouse.’
‘The cat was catching all the mice in the house,’ Russell said. ‘And there was only one family of mice left. They were scared and didn’t know what to do. If they didn’t do something, the cat was eventually going to catch them too. It was just a matter of time.’
‘And then the little one…’
‘And then the little one,’ Russell said. ‘The little one, he had an idea.’
‘He said that they should put a bell around the cat’s neck so that they would hear him coming.’
Russell nodded. ‘That’s right, and do you remember what the old mouse said?’
‘He asked who was going to put the bell around the cat’s neck, and all the mice held their breath.’
‘Well, I’m going to put the bell around the cat’s neck,’ Russell said.
Russell climbed out of the car before Angus had a chance to say something to change his mind. With each step, he fought the urge to glance over his shoulder and take one last look at his son, but if he did and saw his face, he might not have the courage to walk into the Stevens Hotel and do what needed to be done.
The doorman opened the door as he approached, and by the time Russell was in the middle of the art deco lobby of the vintage hotel, he had pushed any thoughts of Angus or Genevieve out of his mind, just like he had in the war-torn corners of the world when the shit was about to hit the fan and he had to focus.
This was Russell in war mode.
He reached the reception and gave the woman behind the desk his most charming smile. It was somewhere between Kevin Costner and Dennis Quaid. She smiled back, and he knew he had her. The best bullshit didn’t appeal to people’s intellect. It appealed to their heart. Russell told the woman behind the desk that twenty-two years ago, he and his wife had stayed at the Stevens Hotel, back when the place was derelict and on the verge of closing down again. It had been their honeymoon, and they hadn’t had much money. Now it was their anniversary, and Russell wanted to surprise her with a night in the same exact room that they stayed in all those years ago.
The receptionist sighed and even blushed a little. ‘I’m not really supposed to do this,’ she said. ‘We’re supposed to keep those rooms empty unless we’re really busy. But I guess it really doesn’t matter.’
She took his stolen credit card details and fake driver’s licence and gave him the exact room that he wanted. A suite on the twenty-fifth floor, right next door to Maria Garcia’s suite.
She handed him the key card, wished him a romantic night, and Russell headed over to the elevator to go and murder her boss.
Up on the twenty-fifth floor, Russell had to pass by two Santa Blanca cartel guards who weren’t even bothering to blend in. One of them had a stool. The other leaned against the wall, and both of them wore cowboy boots in the middle of winter. Poor choice in footwear aside, the two guards told him that Maria Garcia was in her suite. He walked passed them, gave a slight nod, and continued on to his room. A moment later he was inside, with the door locked behind him. The rooms up on the twenty-fifth floor were the luxury suites with spas in their bathrooms, separate bedrooms, a bar, and a living area with a view of Lake Michigan. It was four pm and windy as hell out there on the grey lake. In an hour, it would be dark and the lake black.
He scanned the room and found the door that joined his suite to Maria Garcia’s and put his ear up against it. Besides the muffled hum of the television, he couldn’t hear much else. No voices, no movement, nothing.
He pulled a small lock-picking kit from the back of his jeans pocket and got to work. Hotels didn’t usually pump a whole lot of money into internal locks. The Stevens Hotel was no exception, and it would only take Russell a few minutes to
disable the security and be inside Maria Garcia’s suite.
With any luck, he would sneak into the suite, put a silenced bullet into the cartel boss, exit through his room, nod to the guards on his way out, and be gone. It could be hours before anybody knew she was dead, and by that time, Russell would be long gone.
There was an almost inaudible click, and the tension in the handle disappeared. Russell was in.
He packed up the kit and slipped it back into the pocket of his Levi’s. Then out came the .45 and the silencer that he gently screwed in.
Russell’s ear went up against the door again, and again he heard nothing but the television. With his fingers wrapped around the doorknob, he very quietly and very slowly and very gently turned until it had no more give left, and Russell pulled the door open just a crack.
The television was on CNN. Apart from that, the half of the room he could see was empty. He opened the door a little more and got an angle on the rest of the room. Empty.
His rubber boots were almost silent on the carpet as he took a couple of careful steps into the suite. He closed the door behind him and moved through the room with the silenced .45 leading his way.
Except for the suitcases, the first bedroom came up empty. The bathroom was next. The door was closed, but light shone between the door and the floor.
Russell took a step back and drew in a lungful of air as quietly and as calmly as he could.
Genevieve had been gone almost a year, and in the next five seconds he was going to make things right.
He gripped the .45.
Took a step back.
