Thirteen Million Dollar Pop (30 page)

He felt a draft, a slight breeze that spread through the family room when the kitchen door was open. He didn’t hear anything over the rain, though …

Behr took the keys from Decker and drove hard north, the direction of both Gantcher’s office and home. They’d called 911 on their way out of the loft, but hadn’t even considered waiting for the response to come. There was no point.

“Scroll my contact list and dial Lowell Gantcher Work,” Behr instructed Decker, handing over his cell phone.

Decker did so, waiting with the phone to his ear.

“Lowell Gantcher,” he said. Then he covered the mouthpiece with a hand and told Behr, “She’s saying he’s not available.”

“It’s urgent, if he’s there, you have to put him on …” Decker continued. “You can’t? All right … Message? You tell him he better watch his ass.” Decker hung up. “She said she couldn’t
reach
him. Not that he couldn’t come to the phone. Tells me he’s not there,” Decker said.

Most people would probably just take Meridian to get up to Crows Nest. It was a straight shot and the main thoroughfare, but because of that it could be slightly slow going. The car had muscle to burn and Behr flew along N. Michigan, which though it angled slightly away from the center of town was free of traffic. He cut right on West 56th, and only hoped he was making up some time.

“You might want to take her easy,” Decker said over rain that sounded like marbles bouncing off the roof, “she’s American so she runs good straight, but she’s not much on the corners.”

Behr’s response was to gun it. He kept his hands on the wheel, his eyes on the road, and did his best to rope down his thoughts, which were jumping around inside his head. Trying the home address first was a gamble, but if they chose not to believe the secretary and went to the office first and he was at home, they’d be too late once again and it’d be over. Of course the reverse was true, too. Decker, for his part, was twisted around backward, reaching into the backseat and coming around forward with a multipocketed tactical vest, which he put on. Behr fought to empty his mind and drive. This was his last chance to get the bastards who’d nearly killed him and his family and who had destroyed Decker’s.

Behr took his phone back and dialed Breslau, who answered on the first ring.

“It’s Behr. Don’t know if you caught the nine-one-one, but Shug Saunders is down.”

Behr wheeled onto Sunset Lane, blazing past the homes of the rich and locally famous. Gantcher’s place was up ahead on the left.

“Fuck, I know it,” Breslau spat. “Where are you headed now?”

“To Lowell—”

Behr stopped talking because his cell phone connection had gone suddenly and completely dead.

“Shit,” Behr said. Glancing at the phone he saw the words “no service,” in the signal readout space. “You have reception?”

Decker checked his phone. “Empty triangle,” he said.

“The weather?”

“I don’t think so …”

“Signal jammer?”

“It’d mean they’re here,” Decker answered.

“Well, we can fall back, call it in, and wait,” Behr offered, pulling over.

“Uh-uh,” Decker said, reaching for the door handle. “Even if you want to, I get out here.”

Behr held the wheel, considering it for a moment, then turned to Decker. “There are two of them.”

“That we know of,” Decker amended.

“That we know of,” Behr agreed. “I’ll go in the front, you go in the back.”

“Front’s a bad approach,” Decker said, appraising the house with an expert eye.

“Choices?” Behr asked.

“None.”

“Hit the doors at the same time and meet inside.”

Decker nodded. “Wish I had my body rifle to cover you,” he said, opening his door gently and slipping out of the car. Behr did the same. “Gimme four minutes to work my way around.” The rain muffled their words.

“Four minutes. I have twenty-five after,” Behr said, crouched below the roofline of Decker’s car.

“Good,” Decker said.

He watched as Decker adopted a stealthy, stooped gait completely unlike his usual one. It resembled that of an Apache on a stalk, Behr imagined. Decker moved lightly and disappeared into the neighbors’ tree line, bending, ducking, and turning sideways, not disturbing a single branch. Within seconds Behr had lost sight of him altogether.

Behr was conscious of the heaviness of his own step as he dropped below the tops of the rhododendrons that ran along the street side of Gantcher’s front lawn and connected the open end of the U-shaped driveway. When he had crabbed across and reached the far side, Behr stayed low and leaped across the opening. He moved along parallel to the driveway, hugging some close-planted Japanese cherry trees. Their trunks were too slender to give him real cover, but he hoped they’d break up his silhouette a bit.

He made his way toward the house and paused beneath the last tree, standing very still, thick droplets of water slapping the leaves around him. He saw now that he’d have to cross the courtyard, out in the open, in order to make it to the side of the house and then ultimately a window or the door, or better yet a set of
French doors off what seemed to be the dining room or kitchen. He glanced at his watch. Two minutes. He couldn’t let Decker hit the back door alone; God only knew what he’d be walking into. Behr drew the Bulldog .44 from the holster at the small of his back.

He dropped as low as he could—which wasn’t very, considering his height—and made his move. The gravel crunched softly beneath him. The windows appeared black through the rain, and it was impossible to see clearly inside the darkened house, but Behr thought he detected a streak of movement inside. It caused him to crouch further and raise his gun, but then his feet were ripped out from under him and he was slammed to the ground on his back. He had no air in him and saw white in front of his eyes. The triple hammering sound of three rounds, muted and distant, arrived almost like an afterthought.

Hit
.

When his regular sight returned he saw translucent rain beads falling from black clouds and then he breathed and all the pain in the world concentrated in his chest and shoulder. He was railroad spiked to the ground and the oxygen blew in and out in a stabbing manner, but it was like pumping a ruptured inner tube—things were flapping around and not really inflating.

Get up, Frank
, he urged himself. Nothing happened. He felt his arms swimming against the gravel beneath him, but couldn’t tell if he was moving them or if they were merely in spasm.

The bullet that he’d avoided in the parking garage had finally found him. Other words and thoughts washed through his head, along with images. Decker. Susan’s face. The sonogram image of his tiny son. Breslau’s wide nostrils and clenching jaw. Gina, awash in blood. Kolodnik. The police, politicians, the Caro Group—he was as done with organizations as they were with him.

Family
, he thought,
and friends—if he could ever collect a few, and keep them—were all there was, and he’d hold on tight to that if he could just get up …

But he was down and he was going to stay down, and he wasn’t ever going to see his child, because whether he bled out or was finished by someone standing over him at point-blank range, he was going to die here.

Get up, man
.

It came as a roar.

Three shots smeared together, almost as one, belched out of the ugly black gun in Dwyer’s hands. The kitchen filled with the malevolent stink of gunpowder. It must’ve been a hit because Dwyer stepped away from the shattered window, lowered the weapon, and handed it off to his huge friend.

“Some piece,” the man said.

“Alternated buckshot and deer slugs,” Dwyer said.

“Nasty.”

Gantcher struggled to free his hands, but they—like his knees, ankles, and mouth for that matter—were held fast and painfully with silver duct tape.

“Now where’s the bloody safe—in the study or the basement?” Dwyer asked.

Gantcher didn’t answer. He had no idea how they’d gotten inside. He’d felt a breeze and had stood to investigate and lifted the over/under and was suddenly tackled off his feet and found Dwyer’s knee, like an anvil, on his chest. He saw Dwyer rear back for a punch, glimpsed a piece of black metal in his hand—and had woken up in the chair. He hadn’t even fired a shot.

Dwyer had been asking about the safe just before the tall one with the buzz cut had whistled him over to the kitchen window. They’d seen something—someone—and Dwyer had lined him up and fired. Gantcher couldn’t care less about them finding his
lousy safe, that wasn’t the reason for his holding out, nor was it heroics. It was more his profound feeling that when the safe was open, and Dwyer found it held only three hundred dollars’ worth of paper issued by the American Express Company, it was going to all finally be over and they were going to kill him. And beyond that, Gantcher had suddenly gained the elemental knowledge common to all living beings close to their end: every last second mattered a great deal.

He heard the clatter of steel kitchen implements, but couldn’t turn his head to see what was happening. The information soon came to him, as Dwyer stepped back in front of him, this time holding one of Nancy’s long, stainless steel, two-tined barbecue forks. Dwyer put the points of it maddeningly close to Gantcher’s eye and said, “Now is it in the fucking basement or the study? Or should I take an eyeball to each place to help me look?”

“Basement,” Gantcher said, though the tape muffled it.

“Basement. Grand,” Dwyer said. Gantcher understood another elemental truth, this one specific to him: even close to the end, agony and disfigurement were still frightening propositions. Then Dwyer grabbed a paring knife to cut Gantcher loose at knee and ankle and dragged him out of the chair toward the door that led to the stairway down.

“Go make sure that fuck in the driveway is finished,” he instructed his friend, leaving the big shotgun with him, as he pulled Gantcher along.

I’m going to die in the basement
, flashed through Gantcher’s brain as he stumbled down the steps.

Behr freight-trained through the French doors into the kitchen, splintering them in a shower of wood and glass, and landed on his face. Images flickered in front of his eyes as if played by an old film projector with a bad bulb. What was once a high-tech kitchen was destroyed. The table was upended, same with the chairs. Water sprayed out of a small sink, its faucet snapped off. A heavy black shotgun and shells were scattered across the floor. Bullet holes in the Sub-Zero refrigerator and a shotgun blast pattern in cabinets on the opposite side explained the popcorn sound Behr had heard as he entered. Somehow he found his way to his feet again, just as he had in the driveway. If this was the end of it, at least he kept getting up.

Decker was there, having arrived after the first gunshots, and was fighting on the ground with a tall man whose hair was buzzed military close. Both were bloodied, climbing to their feet and squaring. The tall man had a pair of round holes, a tight double tap, torn into his T-shirt, which revealed personal body armor underneath. Decker’s Glock was nowhere to be seen. The tall man’s hand went to his belt buckle in the instant before they lunged at each other with near simultaneous Superman punches. Decker’s landed hard, stunning the man. But the tall man’s landed too, and caused a geyser of blood to spray from Decker’s throat. A glint along the metal loop around the man’s knuckles revealed a HideAway knife, a razor-sharp two-inch point that had been
camouflaged as a belt buckle. Decker sagged for just a moment and the man yoked him behind the head, raising his fist for a carotid punch with the blade. Behr blinked away the blood, sweat, and rain running down his face and emptied all five .44 special rounds from his Bulldog into the man, who went down bucking, like a sledgehammered farm animal.

All bloody fucking hell had broken loose upstairs from the sound of it, and Dwyer ran for the stairs.
Had that big fucker managed to stand and trade shots with Rickie?

Dwyer had popped the safe with the combination Lowell Gantcher had generously volunteered and then saw, with much disgust, what it contained. He’d ripped up the lousy traveler’s checks right in front of Gantcher’s eyes, while they were still open, though the paring knife was already lodged in his liver. It was a German make, a Wüsthof, a damn good high-carbon steel, laser-edged blade that did its work efficiently. Gantcher had gone crying softly, something mumbled about a wife and kids through half-chewed duct tape, not much fight left in him, but nothing too unmanly.

Now Dwyer charged the door leading to the kitchen, the Česká drawn, and rammed his way through. Behr was on a knee, hit and bleeding badly but not dead, and currently stuffing shells into a revolver. Other bodies were visible on the floor in the corners of his eyes as Dwyer lined up his shot: Rickie twisted in a heap and another fellow on his back, weakly pulling a small-framed concealed carry auto from an ankle holster. Dwyer redirected his sights to the armed man, who in turn fell back and fired, peppering the doorframe around Dwyer’s head.

Dwyer had a poor angle but zeroed in on the man’s skull and squeezed just as Behr hurtled into him from across the room.
His shot flew high and wide and Dwyer gave up the gun, letting it clatter away in order to grab Behr under the shoulders and whipsaw him into the kitchen island. Behr crashed into it with a thud, but rolled and faced Dwyer and they locked eyes. Before any physical movement, whether it’s conscious or subconscious, the intent forms in the brain, and if one is sensitive or experienced enough, one can see it in the opponent’s eyes. Most of the time it’s infinitely subtle, but what Dwyer saw in Behr’s right now, despite his being half bled, was the intent to kill him. Dwyer imagined the same message was flashing like neon in his own.

He charged Behr, dropping for a double leg, which the larger man somehow stuffed by sprawling. Dwyer felt a hard elbow thump into the back of his skull and he dove down toward unconsciousness, but managed to fight through it and stand and wedge a forearm beneath Behr’s throat as he put him into a guillotine choke. Behr pumped his legs and found a reserve that Dwyer hadn’t banked on. He stood up through the choke, snaking his arms around Dwyer’s lower legs and churned forward. They left the kitchen, careening through a doorway into a butler’s pantry, where they both hit the ground in a crash and clatter of cabinetry, dishes, and serving implements.