The Killing Kind (5 page)

Bashkim looked to Thompson, as if to ask if this was enough. Thompson removed her headphones—her hands trembling slightly from anger and adrenaline. The moment was three months in the making. Three months spent canvassing homeless shelters, arresting pimps and street thugs, and chasing wire transfers—all to connect a dead runaway from Duluth to the men who used her until there was nothing left to use.

Thompson gave the order.

In moments, the sidewalk was alive with agents, armed for battle and wearing body armor head to toe: FBI SWAT. They moved into position with silent precision. The three men inside had no inkling and no chance.

When the battering ram connected with the door, Petrela and his men scattered. Purple Tracksuit broke left, diving behind the faux-mahogany bar as if three-quarterinch medium-density fiberboard was going to protect him from a fully automatic Heckler & Koch. If he hadn’t fired on the agents as they fanned out through the dining room, he wouldn’t have needed protecting. But he had, and was quickly silenced.

Lime-Green Tracksuit had better instincts, if not more smarts. He took off for the back door at a sprint. Why the idiot thought a team of highly trained federal agents would neglect to cover the alleyway behind their intended target, Thompson had no idea. Maybe she’d ask the guy someday, since he was apprehended without a shot.

Petrela, though, was another matter. He didn’t stick around to shoot it out. He didn’t flee. True to his reputation, when the SWAT unit made its move, he beelined for the girls, determined that if he was going down, he’d take as many of them with him as he could.

“Ma’am,” the call came over the radio, “Petrela’s retreated into the basement! The door’s reinforced steel; it’ll take a sec to cut through!”

Thompson swore. “He armed?”

“Affirmative!”

But by the time the answer came, Thompson didn’t need it. The distant
pop-pop-pop
from somewhere below street level was answer enough.

Thompson dashed from the van, the other agents close behind. She leapt onto the street, the stiffness in her limbs momentarily forgotten, and wheeled around, frantic to find some way to reach the girls while there were still some of them left. Her eyes lighted upon the sidewalk basement door.

The door comprised two dented, rust-streaked panels of checkered steel, set into the sidewalk a few feet from the front entrance—intended to allow direct basement access for deliveries. There were no handles or other outside access points, but thanks to frost heaves and foot traffic, the seam between the panels was far from flush.

“Hey!” Thompson shouted to one of the tactical agents nearby. “You carrying a Hallagan?”

The man removed the tool from his belt and tossed it to Thompson. Hooked at one end like a fireplace poker, with a flat, forked end like that of a pry-bar, a Hallagan is a favored tool of SWAT and firefighters both. Thompson jammed the hooked end into the space between the panel doors and yanked. Rusted hinges shrieked, and one panel moved, but not enough to get a man through. Two SWAT agents joined her, wrapping gloved hands around the ex

posed edge, but the damn thing wouldn’t budge.

And that’s when the new guy had a bright idea.

Hank Garfield had only been with the Organized Crime Section a couple weeks—he’d transferred over from the MS-13 Task Force, where he’d been working undercover. He’d spent the past two years trying to infiltrate the brutal Mara Salvatrucha street gang, followed by six months rehabbing from a shoulder through-and-through after someone loyal to the gang spotted him meeting with his handler at a sidewalk café two hours north of the gang’s turf. It was a wrong-place, wrong-time bit of bad luck that illustrated just how far Mara’s reach extended, and it nearly cost him his life. Garfield’s handler wasn’t so lucky—he wound up in the ground. Word was that the two of them were close.

It probably would have been better had Garfield asked—or, failing that, warned her at least. But he hadn’t; he just yanked a flash-bang grenade off one of the SWAT guy’s belts and lobbed it through the narrow aperture of the jammed sidewalk door. Thompson barely had a chance to shield her ears and turn away before the thing went off, loud as a firework and bright as the goddamn sun. Even though she’d closed her eyes, a ghostly green afterglow danced in Thompson’s field of vision for a good five minutes afterward.

“Garfield, the fuck was
that?
”

Garfield grinned. “It stopped him shooting, didn’t it?”

Thompson strained to listen over the ringing in her ears. I’ll be damned, she thought. The crazy bastard’s right.

Moments later, SWAT breached the inside basement door to find Petrela lying unconscious in the middle of the concrete floor, both ears bleeding, his eardrums blown.

Turned out the shots they’d heard hadn’t been directed at the teenaged girls held captive there, but at the padlock fixed through the walk-in freezer’s latch. In his haste to get downstairs, Petrela’d forgotten to grab the key; it hung on a hook just outside the basement door. Once SWAT popped the lock, they found the freezer wasn’t so much a freezer as a holding pen—sweltering and smelling of human waste— full of very frightened and very
loud
teenaged girls. They were destined for the sex trade, or white slavery. But with time, Thompson hoped, they’d be all right. The human mind and body were more resilient than they were given credit for.

What a sight it must have been for them, these goggled, helmeted, armed men streaming into the walk-in after weeks of cramped captivity and ushering them upstairs, where ambulances waited to take them to St. Joseph’s for treatment.

It was no wonder they wouldn’t stop screaming.

Thompson stood in Little Louie’s squalid kitchen, massaging the bridge of her nose with thumb and forefinger to soothe her aching head as one by one the girls came up the stairs. Garfield was inspecting the pots bubbling away on the massive cooktop, seemingly oblivious to the filth and the girls’ racket.

He removed a lid, dipped a spoon into a stockpot, and fished out a meatball covered in red sauce. Though it was piping hot, he stuffed the whole thing into his mouth, sauce dribbling down his chin.

“The hell you think you’re doing?” snapped Thompson.

Garfield chewed and made a face. “Hey, gimme a break—ain’t like a meatball’s evidence
.
Besides, I’m starving; we’ve been in that van all goddamn day, and I ain’t had so much as a bite to eat since dinner last night. Which—no disrespect to Petrela here, ’cause he seems like a real good guy and all—is the only reason I could even choke that fucking thing down. No wonder the poor bastard turned to a life of crime—his meatballs taste like ass.”

“Bold play back there with the flash-bang,” was all she could think to say.

Garfield shrugged. “It worked.”

“This time,” Thompson amended. As far as she was concerned, Garfield was dangerous, stupid, and too cocky for his own good. His swagger no doubt served him well going up against street thugs, but it could prove a liability chasing down the more established crime families their unit covered. Those families didn’t survive on guts and brutality alone—they were businesses, and they ran like multinational corporations. They had deep pockets and long reaches, patience and subtlety. Going up against them required patience and subtlety, too. “But what if the girls hadn’t been locked up?”

Garfield nodded toward the storefront windows, through which Thompson could see Petrela—strapped unconscious to a gurney and flanked by armed agents—being loaded into one of the waiting ambulances. The girls were loaded into the others in twos and threes. “Guess then they would’ve been easier to carry out.”

“Hey, boss?” It was Littlefield, the equipment tech from the van. In his hand was Thompson’s phone. “This thing’s been going nuts for twenty minutes straight.”

“It’s just my sister,” she said. “She’s been texting me all day.”

Littlefield shook his head. “Nope. These were calls— from HQ, it looked like.”

“You were snooping around my phone?” Thompson asked, a bit too sharply.

“I glanced at it, is all,” he said defensively. “Figured it might be important.”

He handed her the phone. Five calls, all from Thompson’s supervisor, Assistant Director Kathryn O’Brien. Five calls, and not one voice mail.

Thompson called her back. Told her the op went fine.

“I’m glad,” O’Brien replied, “but I’m not calling about the op. There was a shooting two nights ago in Miami. I want you and Garfield to go down and check it out.”

“Yeah, I saw it on the wire. Some old guy gunned down in broad daylight. But why me? If it’s federal, I’m sure the Miami office can handle it. Shootings in Miami are a dime a dozen.”

“This wasn’t some random shooting, Charlie. It was a hit.”

Thompson felt a tingle of excitement—the kind of rush that meant a case was on the verge of breaking. “And the vic?”

“A Corporation enforcer by the name of Javier Cruz.”

“You’re kidding.”

“I’m not.”

“Any witnesses?” Thompson asked.

“You tell me, Special Agent—that’s kind of your job.”

“We’ll be on the next flight down.”

“I thought you might be,” O’Brien said.

Thompson was smiling when she ended the call.

“What was that about?” Garfield asked around a mouthful of God knows what.

“We’re headed to Miami,” Thompson replied. “It would seem my ghost has struck again.”

6

The bell that hung above the entrance of the Bait Shop clanged as the door swung open and a gust of chilly salt air blew in from the streetlit night, rattling bottles and settling atop the scuffed copper bar. Just a couple miles inland, it was a stultifying summer night in Maine— windows thrown open, fans on high—but the city of Portland was blanketed in fog, the bank extending the length of Casco Bay.

The fog had put a damper on the night’s business. Like any of the bars in Portland’s Old Port—a historic district of renovated fish piers and nineteenth-century architecture— the Bait Shop was usually hopping all summer long, Sundays included. It wasn’t as swanky as the tapas place around the corner, or as much a mainstay of the bar-crawl scene as the Irish pub just down the street. And unlike half the places in town, it didn’t have a deck, ocean-view or otherwise. But it did have Lester Meyers behind the bar, and the man was known to have a heavy hand with the drinks— which made the place a hit with locals if not tourists.

Tonight, though, the place was so dead that Lester closed up around ten thirty, ushering a couple shitfaced lobstermen out into the night, where they were forced to make their way home with exaggerated care over the old paving stones. Then he’d killed the neon in the window, and locked the doors—which is why it was odd to hear that bell clang.

Lester, who’d been behind the bar breaking down his garnish station, craned his neck to see over the bar and past the chairs that sat upturned atop the tables. But try as he might, he couldn’t see the door from where his wheelchair sat. The bitch of being four feet tall, he thought. After twenty-eight years, four months, and thirteen days of being a solid six-two, his brain had never quite adjusted to the change.

“Sorry, pal,” he called, “we’re closed.”

Lester sat and listened for a moment, but if there was anyone there, he couldn’t say—and after six years with Special Forces running black ops throughout the mountains of Afghanistan, his ears were as attuned to subtle cues as anybody’s could be.

He gripped his wheels and rolled himself backward just a hair to see if he could get a better look. As he did, he could have sworn he heard a rustle of fabric.

He stopped.

It stopped.

He rolled another couple inches, and there it was again.

“Look, this ain’t funny,” Lester said. He put on some speed—whipping a quarter-spin as he passed the end of the bar and drawing the Beretta M9 Velcroed to the underside of his chair, so that when he came to a halt, he was facing the door head-on, his gun sight trained on...nothing.

He sat like that a moment, lungs and limbs searing from the sudden exertion, but then a sound behind him made him start.