Dark Men (12 page)

The guard didn’t frisk us, which is unusual but not unheard of in this situation, especially since we’d made contact and been invited here by the man we’re meeting. I wouldn’t have given up my gun anyway and we might have had a problem downstairs, but it doesn’t matter now and I pull out my Glock from the small of my back and I don’t look but I know Risina is doing the same.

Three more feet to the door, and there are voices, but they’re television voices, two idiot anchormen blathering on about some reality star and that seems incongruous with the man in our hotel room, what he’d be watching on a weeknight, just one more square peg that doesn’t fit. So much for not coming in with guns out . . .

I push the door open wider and the bedroom is empty, but there’s an open set of French doors leading out to a deck on the right and maybe he’s out there, but why wouldn’t he have signaled us or had someone show us in?

This is not right and there’s no use for pretense anymore.

“Kirshenbaum?”

No answer. As I move to the deck, I tell Risina to watch the door.

The deck has some patio furniture, the rustic kind of chairs with green cushions surrounding a slat-wood table, and Kirschenbaum is out here all right. He’s wearing a plastic bag over his head, held tightly around his neck by an elastic cord, and his hands are tied behind his back and strapped to his feet. A lit cigar is in the ashtray in front of him.

I hear sirens in the distance headed our way and in that moment it hits me where I know the guard. I’ve seen him twice before, and goddammit, I should have recognized him. I used to be a fucking expert at breaking down a face, noting the eyes and the ears and the parts you cannot disguise, but I used to be a professional contract killer and now I don’t know what the hell I am.

The first time I saw him was in a construction vest on scaffolding outside of the Third Coast Café, except he wore a dark beard and blond hair, and the second time was without facial hair, or any hair at all: the big bald guy who came into Archibald’s office and asked us our business, the guy I fucking let go because I thought he was nobody important.

There can only be one answer. The man who let us in was Spilatro, and he’s been playing me like a violin since I got to Chicago, or maybe before that, maybe since Smoke pulled a safety deposit box out of its slot and caught a flight to find me.

“What is it?” Risina calls from the doorway and I realize I need to snap out of it and move now if we’re going to escape.

“K-bomb’s dead.”

“What?” she asks, alarmed.

“Spilatro’s framing us. Let’s go.”

I take her by the elbow and just poke my head into the hallway when a pistol cracks and bullets pound the doorway next to my head. I feel Risina duck back and I spot blood fly and goddammit, if he hit her . . .

We spill backward into the room and her cheek is scratched to hell but not from a bullet, rather from splinters from the door and she looks angrier than I’ve ever seen her, like the blood on her cheek brought the tiger to the surface for good. Multiple pairs of feet pound up the stairs down the hall, and I catch a quick look at them as I fire a few rounds back, popping the first guy flush and stopping the rest, and maybe they don’t know the boss is already dead, and maybe they don’t hear the sirens as they close in on us.

Spilatro wasn’t with them, though, I’m sure of it. The son of a bitch must’ve planned the whole thing. He framed us with both the cops and the bodyguards, hoping we’d get caught in the crossfire. He bolted out the front door as soon as we went up the stairs—that was the door opening and closing I heard—and he’s probably a mile away by now.

I hear scuffles down the hall and maybe the guards hear the sirens outside, which grow nearer, louder by the second. Risina and I are going to have a chance, but it’s going to be a slim one and we have to do it soon, we have to make our move in those moments of inevitable confusion as the cops make their way on to the scene but don’t know exactly what they’re rolling into.

I see the bubble lights now, a pair of cruisers, that’s it, and they blitz through the gate, knocking it off its hinges, then roar up the driveway, pinning our rental sedan in front of them as both sets of doors fly open and uniformed police officers spill out, guns drawn.

I hear the front door open and one of the bodyguards shouts something and the cops yell back, and that’s what I’m looking for . . . a little contact so I can change the pace.

I bust out the bedroom window glass and fire over the cops’ heads, BAM, BAM, BAM, into their patrol cars, BAM, BAM, BAM and I hear the front door slam shut and a scared guard scream “he’s fucking shooting!” and then the downstairs explodes as the cops retaliate with indiscriminate, panicked firepower.

“Outside! Grab the cigar!” I scream at Risina and she dashes out and back in as quickly as a cat, the cigar held out to me.

I snatch it out of her hand, jam it in my mouth as I collect the sheets off the bed, puff, puff, wadding them up, puff, puff, getting the end of the heater to glow red like a coal in a stove, and then I hold it to the end of the sheets and it doesn’t take long, they start to burn, and I toss them to the curtains, which catch fire and go up too as flames curl toward the ceiling and lick the molding.

Confusion is as big a weapon to a professional hit man as a gun, and the more obstacles you can throw at your pursuers the better your chances of survival.

We’re out on the patio as the room goes up. We step past K-bomb’s dead body and I plant both hands on the railing and hop it, drop from the second story to hit the grass and spring up without tumbling, and I don’t have to look back to know Risina does the same.

“Don’t shoot a cop unless you have to,” is all I have time to say, as we reach the front of the house, and I peek around the corner. The cops are out of their cars, and the two in the near sedan have moved up behind our rental to use it as cover. Smoke starts to pour out of the top floor, and the cops have their firearms pointed at the front door, waiting for the men inside to make a move.

I wait, wait, wait, and then I get the break I expect, the front door opens and one of Kirschenbaum’s men shouts, “we’re unarmed! We’re coming out! No one’s firing! It’s a goddamn inferno in here!”

“Keep your hands up or we
will
shoot!” shouts back the closest officer, more than a little distress in his voice.

“Don’t shoot us, goddammit! We’re unarmed! We’re coming out! There are four of us!”

And the door swings open wide, as four hacking, wheezing guys make their way out on to the porch, black smoke trailing them. The cops’ training kicks in right on cue and all of them bolt for the men. Each grabs a bodyguard and shoves him off the porch and on to the grass out in front as the house really starts to go up, a fireball.

The guys hack up smoke and the cops scream at them to stay the fuck down, to get their hands behind their backs and they pull out their plastic ties to secure the men’s hands. It’s now or never. I nod at Risina and we bolt for the near cruiser, the one with the engine still idling. Risina ducks for the passenger door, while I hop across the back trunk and swing around to the driver’s side.

One of the cops, a young kid with a mop of red hair, must’ve caught our movement out of the corner of his eye. He swings around, his eyes as wide as plates, and fumbles for his gun.

In a flash, I aim, fire once, and knock him down, and I’m behind the wheel, hitting reverse, gunning the cop sedan out of there, roaring backwards, down the drive and out into the road.

“I thought you said not to shoot a cop!” Risina screams at me from the passenger seat.

“That applied to you, not me.”

“Oh man,” she starts to say, her hand up on her forehead, so I put a palm on her knee, firm.

“I didn’t kill him. I just hit him in the thigh so he wouldn’t pop a shot off at us as we fled. He’s going to be fine.”

She gives me a sideways look to see if I’m fucking with her, but I’m not and I can see relief wash over her like an ocean wave.

We ditch the cruiser three blocks from a shopping center, but not before we wipe it down. The parking lot is full of cars, and I head to the furthest row, where the employees park and won’t be out until closing time. I pick a small Honda—the make stolen most often—break in, and crack the ignition. Ten minutes later and we roll out of Ridgefield, headed south on Highway 33.

In the passenger seat, I believe I see Risina smile, but I’m already thinking of ditching this car and finding another one.

CHAPTER EIGHT

R
isina and I are in New York, holed up in the St. Regis Hotel on East 55th Street. I have more money than I know what to do with and it might be safer to break my routine and stay somewhere with a little more polish than the usual unkempt inns I frequent when on assignment. Over the years, I collected staggering fees for completing my work. Since the money held no allure for me, I rarely spent any of it; instead, I socked it away in accounts all over the world. My fence kept credit cards up to date for me, and I have safety deposit boxes in over a dozen major cities containing the right plastic and right identities. Holding two of them in my wallet right now reminds me how important it is to find a new fence when this is over if Archie doesn’t come out of it alive.

I like New York and its dense population. It’s an easy city to get lost in; it’s often advantageous to be a needle in a stack of needles.

I need to work out my thoughts. Usually, I’ll just talk to myself, but it’s nice to have someone to bounce ideas off of. “I think Spilatro put the wheels in motion by kidnapping Archie and then watched them turn. He marked Smoke the whole way, and everything played out how he hoped. I get summoned out of hiding, delivered to his door. He doesn’t want to negotiate though, doesn’t want to talk, just wants to kill me. Hence the collapsed scaffolding. But that didn’t work.”

“Then why didn’t he pop you with a bullet when we walked through Kirschenbaum’s front door? When he could’ve surprised us?”

“You think I’d’ve let him? I don’t get surprised, Risina. I was prepared for a bodyguard to pull a gun. I just wasn’t prepared for that bodyguard to be Spilatro.”

She considers that for a moment, then, “But why? Why does he want to kill you? You’ve never encountered him before. He hasn’t been linked to any of your past jobs, has he?”

“I don’t know yet. If I had a good fence like Archie, or even a half-decent one like Smoke, at my disposal, he could be gathering information on Spilatro right now to help me figure out the connection between him and me. But I don’t.”

She runs her hands through her hair, a habit that gives away when she’s stumped. She opens her mouth but I interrupt, “There is one thing we have to do now . . .”

“What?”

“In response to a kidnapping, the family usually follows a playbook. They get a ransom note and focus on what the kidnapper wants. They look at the ask and the risks and make a decision whether or not to give the kidnapper his demands, hoping for some sort of break after the exchange, after their loved one is returned safely. But they’re looking at it backwards.

“If Archie is still alive—and that’s a big ‘if’ as far as I’m concerned—then giving me up isn’t going to get us anywhere. He’ll kill me, then kill Archie. There’s only one way to take down a kidnapper . . . you have to find something or someone
he
loves and take it from him. Flip the game on his head.”

Her eyes track and her head nods as she sees it. “We kidnap something of his right back.”

“That’s right. Then see if he wants to talk to
us
about making an exchange. Not Archibald Grant for me. Those are his terms, his playbook. We take something or someone Spilatro holds precious and make the exchange about that. We have the leverage. Not him.”

“We stay on offense like you said before.”

“Exactly. But listen to me, Risina, this is going to get worse, much worse. It’s going to get brutal, it’s going to get ugly, and we’re probably going to have to spill some blood in order to get Archie back. If Archie’s already dead, we’re going to destroy whomever or whatever Spilatro holds close to him, and then we’re going to have to kill him.”

She swallows, but nods, then nods a second time as though to reinforce her acceptance. “Remember that he brought us into this, he struck us first, and whatever we have to do is because of him. We didn’t ask for this but we’re damn sure going to end it. Messages are written in blood in this business.”

“A tiger is a tiger.”

“That’s right. And he should have left me, should have left
us,
sleeping in the jungle.”

I go back to that final file, the fourth hit, that had Spilatro working a tandem with the woman named Carla, the same woman Archie then used later for his personal contract. When professional killers work a tandem sweep, when they’re working together to accomplish a single hit, it usually indicates a certain closeness. The killers either came up together, or partnered for convenience purposes, or split the fees because they each had a specialty or strength that was necessary for the most effective hit. Rarely are they complete strangers. A degree of trust has to exist in order to execute an effective tandem.

Since all I have on Spilatro is his face, I’m going to need whatever information off of Carla I can get. I struck out with Kirschenbaum, so she’s going to have to do.

She won’t be on the lookout for me unless they’re still tight, which I doubt based on those last three files, the hits Spilatro worked alone, plus the one she worked solo. They went their separate ways, and maybe the reason behind it will help me build a strategy for taking on the son-of-a-bitch who came after me.

Finding Carla is going to require calling in a favor. Looking at the clock, I’m going to have to wake up a fence in Belgium.

A shell game of pre-paid phones and intermediaries and appointment times and coded messages finally lands me a secure connection with Doriot, a Brussels-based fence I’ve crossed paths with a couple of times in Europe. Once when I went to his office so he could evaluate me, and a second time when I reached him in a prison in Lantin, where he thought he was safely hidden.