Vigilante Reloaded

by Jack Quaid

  It took three seconds to cruise past the Alina, and that was all Angus saw. He could cruise around again for another look, but if he did that, it might raise some eyebrows, particularly for the smoking folks in the SUV, and after a second time around, they might have a few questions of their own to ask.

  Angus brought the car to a stop in the alley behind the restaurant and looked over his shoulder and out the rear window. No tails, no SUV, no cartel.

  The restaurant had a back door and a couple of small windows, which Angus figured was where the bathrooms were.

  The best way to infiltrate a location, Russell taught him, was to walk straight through the door as if he belonged there. Nobody so much as gave a second look at somebody in the right uniform with the right attitude. It was all about playing a role. Are you a bartender, a delivery man, a housekeeper? The help were invisible. They could go anywhere.

  That night, Angus was a busboy.

  He had a few different outfits in the trunk, and he pulled out a pair of black slacks and a white shirt; the mandatory outfit for busboys serving the rich and famous. Angus got changed in the backseat of the Camero and slipped the Magnum down the back of his pants.

  The plan was simple; walk through the front entrance on Halstead just as if he were a busboy running late for his shift. He would wear a coat—it was cold and would look suspicious if he didn’t—but he would leave it unbuttoned to show off his shirt and slacks so that anybody who looked at him would assume he was just who he was pretending to be: a busboy running late for work. As soon as he was in the door, the coat would come off so he would blend in because nobody wore a coat in a restaurant. He would palm that Magnum and keep it low by his thigh. Thirty seconds would be all it took for Angus to locate Maria Garcia and another few to close her eyes. It would happen so quickly that by the time people finally had the courage to look up after hearing the thunderous Magnum explode, Angus would be out the back door, in the Camero, and half a block away.

  It wasn’t the most thought-out plan, but he didn’t have much of a choice.

  Angus left the Camero unlocked but the keys in his pocket. It was cold, and the wind cut through him as he made his way out of the alley and onto Willow. The weather wasn’t enough to deter the elderly couple walking gloved hand in gloved hand on the sidewalk or the middle-aged man with the dog across the street. Apart from them, the street was pretty quiet, with the occasional car driving in the light fog.

  He took the corner onto Halstead, saw the SUV and the driver still smoking, but kept his head down and eyes straight.

  He was just a busboy running late.

  That was his role.

  Angus pushed through the doors and into the red hallway that led through another set of doors and into the restaurant. The maître d’ was seating a couple at their table when he walked in, which suited Angus just fine. He let his coat slip from his shoulders and drop to the floor so he could move through the joint just like every other busboy.

  He paused, looked. There must have been thirty to forty people on the floor that night. They were eating, drinking. There were laughs and hands held. And there she was—sitting in the corner of the room, all by herself at a table for two. Her guest hadn’t arrived yet.

  Angus passed a waiter on her way over to Maria Garcia’s table who gave him half a confused glance, but Angus did what he was supposed to do, played the role of the busboy, and half a confused glance was all he got.

  He reached Maria Garcia’s table, palmed the Magnum, pulled it out, and took aim square at the cartel boss’s face.

  Then it occurred to him. He actually hadn’t killed anybody before. In the months of kicking in drug dens’ and dealers’ doors all over the city, he had winged a couple of scumbags, and Russell had put the death in a couple but not him. There was that sicario at the Stevens Hotel that was about to shoot Russell, but that wasn’t the same. That wasn’t planned. It was a reaction, almost self-defence by proxy or retaliation. This was stone-cold put-a-weapon-in-her-face-and-pull-the-trigger assassination. That kind of killing was new to him, and in that moment, he wasn’t 100 percent sure he could do it.

  Garcia looked up quizzically. It wasn’t the gun in her face that was curious to her. It was the shooter holding it. Maria Garcia didn’t recognise Angus at all.

  That made the next step easier.

  Angus put two in her chest and one in her face.

  He didn’t feel scared.

  He didn’t feel sick, ashamed, or sad.

  The only emotion Angus felt was relieved.

  Then reality kicked back it.

  There were screams and cries, and although a couple people rushed to get the hell out of the restaurant, most of them were in shock, and others were in disbelief and sat frozen at their tables with their bodies crouched down as if that was going to help them.

  Out in the street, four sicarios rushed out of the idling SUV, Glocks out, held low, ready to rock ‘n’ roll.

  In the movies, the assassin would always casually walk away. Fuck that, Angus thought, and he ran. He made his way down the hall, through the L-shaped kitchen, and to the back door that led out to the alley, but when he got through the number of cowering busboys, dishwashers, and chefs, he couldn’t find the door to freedom. A bricked-up wall and an industrial freezer took up the entire space.

  Angus turned, looked. There was no other way out. Not a window, not a door, nothing.

  He was trapped.

  The only way out was the way he came in, and that meant going through the four sicarios who were no doubt in the restaurant standing over the corpse of their boss at that very moment. Once they get over the initial shock, they would be in hunting mode.

  Angus peeked around the corner of the kitchen and into the hall. A sicario with his Glock up worked his way down the hall. He saw Angus, but he saw a busboy first and a killer second, and that was his mistake.

  Angus squeezed the trigger and unleashed two rounds at the shooter. The first pegged him in the neck, but the monstrous Desert Eagle had so much kick that the second round went wild and buried itself in the roof.

  He hit the deck.

  Angus re-aimed at the sicario coming up right behind him and squeezed. A round hit him square in the chest, but he was a big bastard, and he had so much momentum that he kept moving forward.

  Angus re-aimed and blasted another round into his belly… that put the son of a bitch down.

  By that point, the other two sicarios knew there was trouble coming from the kitchen and didn’t follow their two fallen brothers. One took a knee and found cover by the maître d’ reception, and the other took a few steps back and around the corner into the dining room.

  Fear ran through Angus. He took long, deep breaths to try to avoid slipping into a full-on panic attack. ‘Pull yourself together,’ he said over and over again until an idea hit him.

  He had two shooters.

  One in the dining room, behind a wall and out of range.

  The other, in range and behind the maître d’ desk.

  A plastic maître d’ desk.

  Angus stepped out into the hall, took aim at the desk, raised his .44 Magnum, and blasted three rounds into the poor excuse for cover. Two bullets passed straight through, but the third pegged the sicario in the back of the head and put him down.

  All the excitement cased the fourth shooter to step out and get in on the action.

  Rookie mistake.

  As soon as he stepped out, Angus was ready. He put two in his chest, and he was gone.

  Angus took a breath. The fear and panic had left him, but he was still filled with adrenaline.

  Angus ejected the magazine, slipped it into his waistband, and slammed in another.

  It was time to get the hell out of there, get to the Camero in the alley, and drive as fast as he possibly could out of the state of Illinois and keep on running until he was as far south as he could possibly be. And that was just what Angus did. By the time Chicago PD pulled up to the scene, Angus Sullivan wa
s long gone.

  For a couple of years, he lay low. He stayed off the grid, and he had enough money and fake identification that he could do so. He did a lot of thinking in that time. He thought about his mother, his father, but most of all, he thought about what he had become. For better or worse, he was a killer, and when he thought about that, he didn’t like it one little bit.

  Not long after his seventieth birthday, Angus paid for the best fake identification money could buy. He drove into Michigan and filled out an application to join the Detroit Police Department.

  He was going to take everything his father had taught him, and he was going to use it to make the world a better place… that was the idea anyway.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Now all those years later Sullivan found himself way back where he started.

  On the run with a gun.

  Sullivan stole a car and drove out to Rosemary. The house was a three-bedroom bungalow, which lacked the freshly painted charm of its neighbors. All that was left of the yard was dry and dead, and one of the front windows had a crack that ran vertically from one edge of its peeling frame to the other.

  He knocked on the door and asked for Con Taylor.

  ‘The cunt’s not here, and fuckin’ why should I tell you anyway?’

  ‘Come on, Trisha. I just want to know where Con is.’

  A dog barked from somewhere inside the house, a large bastard by the sound of it. ‘Shut the fuck up!’ Trisha snapped over her shoulder. It did as it was told.

  She leaned against the doorframe. ‘Christ, I’m sorry, Sullivan. Con just gives me the shits, that’s all. You want a coffee?’

  Sullivan followed Con Taylor’s widow down the hall. Twenty years ago she was something to look at, but two decades of hard drinking had left her haggard and sagging in all the wrong places. Her hips hung over the edges of her jeans, stretch marks accented by fake tan. She wore a G-string.

  Families were always the last to know when a cop was gunned down. Sometimes they found out while they were sitting in front of the television watching a news update of the shooting. Trisha hadn’t turned hers on yet, and Con Taylor wasn’t liked enough for anybody to pay her a personal visit.

  They sat in the kitchen. Trisha pulled a pack of cigarettes from the top of the fridge, lit one, and poured him a cup of coffee from the percolator. She collapsed into a chair and swung her grubby feet up on the table.

  Sullivan took a sip.

  ‘How is it?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Don’t suck my dick, Sullivan. It’s yesterday’s shit.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to say anything.’

  She coughed up a wheezing chuckle. ‘So you wanna know where Con is, huh?’

  ‘Or who he’s with.’

  ‘He owe you money? Fuckin’ owes every cunt money, that cunt does.’

  The dog started up with its barking again.

  ‘Shut up, you fuckin’ piece of shit!’ she yelled, turning back to Sullivan. ‘Fuckin’ kill that cunt, I will.’

  ‘The thing is, I need to borrow one of his CIs for—’

  ‘Yeah, yeah, whatever.’ She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together. ‘What’s it worth to you?’

  ‘Doesn’t Con look after you?’

  ‘Yeah, he looks after me real fuckin’ well. That’s why I live here in this big beautiful mansion and wear all this expensive-type shit.’ She butted her cigarette in the ashtray and immediately lit another. ‘So, cashola?’

  Sullivan dug around in his pocket and pulled out a twenty. He laid it on the table.

  She looked at the crumpled bill as if it had just taken a shit on the rug. ‘You pigs are all the same.’

  He pulled another twenty. She rolled her eyes but snatched up the notes anyway. ‘He’s with Mick Evens. The two are like a couple of fags. You find one, the other’s not far.’

  ‘Mick Evens . . . Ex-cop?’

  She nodded. ‘Con don’t take a shit without Mick standing by with a shit roll on hand. Runs a joint now, called Dreams or something.’

  A couple of knocks rattled the front door. The dog started up again.

  ‘Fuckin’ hell. Hang on, I’ll be right back.’

  Sullivan knew it would be uniforms armed with the news of Taylor’s death. He looked at the shitty room around him, then pulled three fifties from his wallet, all the money he had, and left them on the table for her. By the time Trisha was halfway down the hall, he was out the back door and gone.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  The sign on the door said, ‘Dreams.’ The name promised too much. Wedged between a couple of accounting firms, it was the kind of place you had to look for. Just another titty bar in a city full of them. When Mick wasn’t running the club, he was running illegal whores out the back for twenty bucks a fuck. Cheap, but you got what you paid for. He worked SWAT for twelve years before the DPD bumped him over a handful of brutality charges. The loss wasn’t mourned.

  Sullivan descended the filthy staircase into the neon hell. The inner doors were manned by a bouncer who was missing a couple of teeth and a substantial IQ. He held up his hand and managed to string a couple of words together. ‘Ten bucks,’ he slurred.

  Sullivan badged him.

  The brick shithouse stepped aside. ‘You gonna need this,’ he said, holding out a rubber stamp with an inverted number seven on it. The same rubber stamp Taylor and Rayburn had been branded with.

  ‘I’ll pass.’ Sullivan pushed through the doors.

  The place was busy for 10:30 on a Friday morning. Music pumped out of the speakers. Sleazy girls swung around the dirty poles, while others gave lap dances and flaunted their fake tits in the faces of those with nothing better to do at 10:30 in the morning than stare at fake tits.

  Sullivan found Mick Evens sitting in a booth along the rear wall. He was enjoying a steak, a beer, and a stripper with a lobotomised stare, shuffling her feet on his table. Evens looked about ten years younger than what he was, wore his hair to his ears and too much gold around his neck. The rings on his fingers tapped against the fork in his hand as he ate.

  Sullivan slid into the booth opposite him.

  ‘Wudda yer want?’

  ‘I want to know who Hailstrum is?’

  Evens wiped his mouth with a dirty napkin and looked up at the stripper. ‘Fuck off.’

  She let out a sigh, shuffled her way off the table, and disappeared into some other dark corner of the bar.

  Then he fixed his gaze on Sullivan. ‘I don’t have a clue what you’re on about.’

  ‘So why send the girl away?’

  He shrugged.

  ‘I want the fifteen mil you, Taylor, and the others knocked off three days ago.’

  ‘I haven’t been a cop for a long time, haven’t seen Con or any of those cunts for years. So why don’t you walk out of here while you’ve still got all your fuckin’ teeth?’

  Mick Evens didn’t see it coming.

  Sullivan pulled the fork from his plate and slammed it through the top of Evens’s hand.

  Blood across the table.

  Evens let out a squeal so Sullivan slapped him.

  ‘Who’s Hailstrum, Mick? Where’s the cash?’

  It took Evens a couple of moments to catch his breath, but he eventually managed to spit a few words. ‘You’re gone, pig,’ he said. ‘Point of no fucking return.’

  His gaze shifted over Sullivan’s shoulder. The bouncer was coming up fast. Sullivan turned and pulled his piece, aiming it at the bouncer’s groin. ‘No skin off my nose if your balls exit this world.’

  The bouncer froze.

  Sullivan turned his attention back to Evens. ‘You got something you want to tell me?’

  Spit flew out of the gaps between his clenched teeth. ‘Get fucked.’

  ‘You know what you did, I know what you did.’

  ‘They’ll kill me.’

  ‘What do you think I’m going to do: run you a hot bath?’

  Sullivan yanked out the fork and slammed it back i
n again. The tips dug into the table.

  Evens went pale. Sweat soaked his shirt. ‘No one knows who Hailstrum is. And, and the cash. It’s safe,’ he hissed. ‘I don’t know where. You think they’re going to tell me?’

  Sullivan hit him with the weapon, breaking his nose. Pulled back. Pushed the barrel in his face. Hammer back. Blood rolled over the muzzle.

  Mick Evens pissed his pants.

  Sullivan’s finger squeezed the trigger.

  ‘Wait!’ he squealed. ‘I swear, I don’t know who Hailstrum is. Nobody does, but I know who, who . . .’

  ‘Spit it out.’

  ‘I got ’em a guy. Planted him in the truck, had him working legit. A driver.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You’re not going to like it.’

  ‘Let me be the judge of that.’

  Evens took a couple of run-ups at stuttering the name, then eventually the whole thing came out. ‘Jay Franks.’

  Sullivan sized him up then lowered his gun. He could have been lying, but nobody lied after they pissed their own pants.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Sullivan stripped the weapon. Cleaned it. Put it back together. When he was finished, he lit a cigarette and scanned the underground car park through the windshield: a mother wheeling a stroller, a couple of kids blowing off school, an employee collecting shopping carts. Nothing to worry about.

  A beat-up DPD issue pulled in, circled the car park, and came to a stop. Winter climbed out, scanned the area. Sullivan flashed his headlights. She caught the signal and headed over. Just before she reached the car, he slid the .45 into the back of his jeans.