Noble Warrior (32 page)

R
ed numbers glowed from the face of the black digital clock hanging on the wall. 3:15 a.m. A time for sleep. Unless, of course, a trap was being
set.

Stanzer and Puwolsky, alone in a soundproof room, readied their attack.

“Think he'll show?” Puwolsky asked, a Glock 9mm in his right hand.

Stanzer, his weapon holstered, crossed to pick up a bar stool.

“Yep,” he answered.

“How can you be so sure?”

“'Cause I have the only thing he cares about.”

“The girl?” Puwolsky asked, sliding his finger from the barrel of the Glock down to the gun's trigger.

“Naw,” Stanzer replied as he moved the stool into the center of the room and calculated the optimal spacing between the seat and some folding chairs off to the left. “My guess
is he already slayed that dragon.”

Puwolsky considered Stanzer's words and then moved his finger off the Glock's trigger.

“Good answer,” Puwolsky said. “You pass.”

“Didn't know there was a test.”

“Indeed there was,” Puwolsky said. “'Cause there ain't no way you grabbed his girl.”

“Yeah, why's that?”

“Because I did.”

A surge of adrenaline rushed through Stanzer's veins, but he long ago mastered the art of not reacting outwardly to disturbing news. Calm, poised, and patient he moved a small table from
the center of the room to the far wall without missing a beat.

“As an insurance policy,” Puwolsky continued. “And if you would have lied to me just now, it would have told me you were in cahoots with the kid.”

“Cahoots, huh?”

“With you fuckin' military guys a fella never knows who's lying, who's telling the truth, and who's setting the stage for a double cross.” Puwolsky raised his
weapon. “A wrong answer and you woulda had to meet the Double T?”

Stanzer wrinkled his brow. “The Double T?”

“That's what I call her,” Puwolsky said, kissing his Glock. “The Terminal Terminator.”

“What a coincidence,” Stanzer said. “That's what I call my cock.” Puwolsky glared then cracked a grin. “Very funny, Colonel. But one call from me and the girl
eats a bullet.”

“Well, I hope you already made it, because I just jammed all the phone lines. Whole network is down. Wi-Fi. Cell towers. Everything.”

Puwolsky looked down at his phone. No signal.

“Gotta keep everything within a hundred yards offline for at least six hours,” Stanzer said.

Puwolsky tapped a few icons on the phone's screen. Nothing.

“Why?”

“What do you mean, why?” Stanzer said. “To a soldier like the one we are about to do battle with, a cell is a weapon. Probably more useful to him than a gun at this point.
Can't risk it. Who knows what he's cooking up.”

“Well, if Larson doesn't hear from me in the next forty-five minutes,” Puwolsky said, “he's gonna pop the little lady.”

“Tough shit for her then, isn't it?”

Puwolsky stared. Was Stanzer serious?

“You gotta open the phone lines,” Puwolsky said.

“Nope, can't risk it.”

“Look, I ain't above a little collateral damage when an operation goes sideways,” Puwolsky said. “But icing an innocent teenage girl for no good reason? We even took the
precaution of having the Priests grab her so she doesn't know who's behind it all. My hope is, softy that I am, to get her back home safely when this is all said and done.”

“That's your problem, not mine.”

“Open the phone lines.”

“Nope.”

“Open the goddamn phone lines, would ya?”

“I told ya,” Stanzer said. “We need a wide circle of blackout coverage on the front end of this operation as well as on the back. No telling what crazy cyber-scheme he might
have created. The kid could be out there stalking us right now for all we know.”

Puwolsky tapped his phone again but to no avail.

“You don't understand. I gotta get in touch with Larson. He's not like me, he's a lunatic, he lives for breaking heads. Me, if I have to take a life, I do it with
remorse. Him, he's a stone-cold killer.”

Stanzer thought about it.

“I'll give you sixty seconds,” he said. “Tell your boy we need a safety net after the scheduled rendezvous time because we have no idea what traps might be waiting. Just
to be sure, tell him he might not hear from you again until noon.”

“All the way till noon?”

“If he's that trigger-happy, let's give ourselves some latitude,” Stanzer said. “And by the way, I am only doing this once. That's nonnegotiable.”

Puwolsky shook his head. “You spooks and your fucking tech. Me,” he said. “I just stick with regular old e-mail.”

“Could be your downfall,” Stanzer replied.

“Doubt it,” Puwolsky said. “I'm pretty good with computers and passwords and shit.”

Stanzer reached into his pocket, pulled out a small black device, a militarized version of a mobile phone, and tapped in a code.

“You've got one minute and then all wireless devices are back to being paperweights, so be efficient.”

Puwolsky called a phone number. Larson answered.

“Yeah, it's me,” he began. “Look, change of plans.”

As the two talked Stanzer stared down at his device's screen. A phone number appeared. The number Puwolsky just dialed.

He did a location search. A map popped up, GPS tracking. Larson's exact coordinates.

Stanzer waved at Puwolsky and gave him the signal to hurry up. He now had what he wanted.

W
ith the furniture properly situated and the space locked down, Stanzer and Puwolsky sat in beige folding chairs on opposite sides of the room
laying in wait. A violent confrontation seemed inevitable, but with more than an hour to go before M.D.'s arrival there was little to do but remain patient.

Puwolsky played a game on his phone, a silly little flying pig app where the point was to swim around dropping anvils, no Internet required.

“Hey, Puwolsky,” Stanzer said. “Let's you and me clear the air a minute. Man to man.”

“What?”

“I don't like you very much,” Stanzer said. “In fact, I think you're a prick.”

Puwolsky lifted his eyes from the screen. “You ain't the first,” he replied.

“But we're sort of partners now. Wouldn't ya say?”

“For the next few hours at least,” he said. “Yeah, sure.”

“Then tell me something,” Stanzer said. “I know why I need the kid to vanish. It's his ass or mine. And I know why you now need the kid to vanish. 'Cause if you
don't hunt him down, he's gonna hunt you.”

“Pretty much,” Puwolsky said.

“But why'd you even target him in the first place?”

Puwolsky lowered his eyes and returned to playing his game. “I told ya,” he said dismissively. “To take out D'Marcus Rose, the High Priest.”

“But you just snatched McCutcheon's girl last night, and the High Priest bit the bullet five days ago,” Stanzer said. “To me, this means that the Priests were never
really after his girl in the first place. Otherwise, they'd have taken her out right after D'Marcus Rose had his final chip cashed in as payback against M.D.”

Stanzer raised his eyes again and smiled. “You'd make a good detective.”

“Don't flatter me, fuckwad,” Stanzer said leaning forward. “We're about to conspire to kill an undercover operative together. This isn't dating; this is
marriage, and I need to know who I'm sharing a bed with. You know my story, now what's yours?”

Puwolsky closed out the flying pig game and put his phone back in his pocket.

“D'Marcus thought I betrayed him in a drug deal gone bad between some Canadians and South Americans,” Puwolsky said. “My unit was greased to provide security, make sure
no cops showed, but cops did show. The feds. My team had no idea. Whole thing turned into one big clusterfuck, and D'Marcus saw the bust all over the evening news.” Puwolsky spread his
hands across the sky. “D-town nabs huge cocaine shipment!” he said. “Was on every channel, like a ‘score one for the good guys' type of story. The High Priest thought
I set his associates up.”

“Did you?”

“Not at all. I have no idea who tipped the feds off. But D'Marcus was crazy. He blamed me, and this whole ‘Priests always pay' shit sent him over the edge. One of my
partners died at the scene, they took out another, and they tried to ice both me and Larson twice. We figured our only play was to find a way to whack his ass before he got to us, and then broker a
new deal with the next in line to become the High Priest.”

“So you picked McCutcheon to do the dirty work?” Stanzer asked.

“First, I struck a deal with a thug named Puppet. We agreed to go back to the way things always were, cops playing nice with gangsters, and he agreed to call off the green light on me and
Larson, if I could manage to get someone who could punch D'Marcus's ticket in lockup for him.”

“A coup d'état?” Stanzer said. “With this Puppet character lying in wait?”

“Exactly,” Puwolsky said. “The way D'Marcus dined off the carcass of the people in the Detroit projects didn't sit well with a lot of the Priests. I mean these were
their cousins, sisters, and brothers that were having the screws turned on them. Of course, we knew there could be problems with future Priests if things didn't break Puppet's way,
'cause when a gang leader falls you never really know who is going to be the next in line, but hey, we were desperate. Worth a shot, right?”

Stanzer considered the information. “But how'd McCutcheon even bubble up on your radar?” Stanzer said. “He'd vanished. Gone underground.”

“The girl.”

“The girl?” Stanzer said. “You mean Kaitlyn Cummings?”

“Yep,” Puwolsky said. “This chick, I tell you, she became like the running joke of every detective on the DPD. First month your man was gone she showed up every hot-damn day
wanting to file a missing persons report about her cage-fighting boyfriend, who mysteriously disappeared into a white van with some guys in suits. The second month she still showed up, five days a
week barking the same fairy tale. Month three, too.” Puwolsky chuckled. “Hell, she still shows up every Wednesday at four forty-five p.m. like clockwork after all this time. I got no
idea what your boy did to this little honey, but wow, she spiraled.”

“What do you mean, spiraled?”

“I mean she tanked,” Puwolsky said. “On her way to becoming a Rhodes scholar, bound for the Ivy League, then fears that the love of her life didn't really dump her, but
instead fell into some sort of grave danger, and she just loses her shit. Started to mope. May or may not go to college, decided to take a year off and shovel lattes at Starbucks while waiting for
her knight in shining armor to return. Rich girl like that with the world at her feet gets doinked by Cupid and the princess entirely collapsed. I kid you not, she came in every single day for
months.”

Stanzer scratched his head. “I still don't see the connection. Where's the link?”

“Larson.”

“Larson?” Stanzer said. “How?”

“He's got a brother named Oscar who works for the New Jersey Office of Homeland Security. That's where all the funding is these days, fighting America's
boogeymen.”

“And?” Stanzer asked.

“And so he's on this stakeout trying to catch some Al-Shabaab techno kid and the shit is just boring. Day after day of just sitting in a room filled with screens for weeks. The
Larson boys, they're the type that like to go out and bust heads.”

“So?”

“So one day on the phone Oskee and Larson are catching up, telling one another about what they're each up to, and Oskee gripes about how he's on the world's lamest
stakeout, one that supposedly revolves around some kid, a youngin' from Larson's part of the world, Detroit, who's turning into some kind of urban crime fighting legend. Some
underage MMA cage fighter from the projects that's been recruited to secretly hunt terrorists, like a myth.”

Stanzer nodded his head, finally seeing it. “So that's when it clicked?”

“I figure it's got to be the same kid, right?” Puwolsky said. “And my reasoning goes that if a girl like this is so hot for him, he's gotta be twice as hot for her.
I mean this little honey was just WAY out of his league so that's the card we played. The threat of danger to her was just bait to lure him in.” Puwolsky laughed. “Never
underestimate the stupidity of teen love, right?”

Stanzer didn't respond.

“So I go on a little fishing expedition to discover more of the facts. After that, you know the story. A payoff to Krewls, I bait a nice hook on the assumption the kid still cares about
her, he bites, takes the mission, and voilà! My problem's solved.”