Umbrella Man (9786167611204) (37 page)

“What are you going to do, sir?”

“Just do what I tell you, Robbie.”

Then Tay hung up and headed for the
street.

TAY ALMOST NEVER carried a gun. He had never
been much of a shot anyway so he figured it didn’t much matter.

But for the first time in years, he found
himself rethinking his policy as he took the elevator downstairs.
Going into a dark shophouse looking for Vincent Ferrero without any
kind of a weapon wasn’t a particularly appealing proposition, but
what else was he going to do? Kang was armed, but Kang was covering
the rear. Tay could hardly ask him to give up his weapon. No, he
would just have to make the best of it.

The elevator doors opened and he crossed the
lobby, but just as he passed the reception desk he had a
thought.

“Do you have a flashlight?” he asked the
clerk on duty.

The clerk was a young man with a high
forehead and a square, Chinese face. He seemed to find the idea of
a policeman using the hotel for surveillance exciting. Obviously,
Tay thought, he had no idea how boring surveillance really was.

The clerk bent down and fished around under
the counter. When he straightened up he was holding a black
five-cell Maglite.

“Will this work for you, sir?”

The irony of being handed a flashlight just
like the one Dr. Hoi theorized had felled Johnny the Mover and
started this whole mess wasn’t lost on Tay. Maybe it was even an
omen.

He flicked the Maglite on and off just to
make sure it worked, and then hefted it in one hand. It wouldn’t
trump a gun, of course, but in the right circumstances, it was a
fine weapon all the same.

“Thanks,” Tay said. “I’ll take good care of
it.”

The young man snapped to attention and
saluted. He actually saluted. Tay felt ridiculous doing it, but he
offered a half-hearted salute in return and hurried into the
night.

***

Tay moved away from the hotel entrance and
slid into the shadows. Across the street, number 38 was still and
dark. Had he been mistaken about seeing a brief glow of light? No,
he didn’t think he had been.

Taking a deep breath he walked quickly across
the street and took cover behind a silver Toyota van parked at the
curb about twenty feet away from the entrance to number 38. He
could see the red door reasonably well from where he was, and it
appeared to be closed, but the interior of the carport was in such
deep shadow he could make out nothing there at all.

Tay briefly considered what to do next, but
nothing occurred to him other than the obvious. He could either
check the building to see if anyone had gone into number 38, or
not. Lurking in the street behind the Toyota van wasn’t going to
get him anywhere.

Stepping up onto the sidewalk, Tay moved as
quietly as he could up to the red front door of number 38 and tried
the handle. It was locked. He flicked on the Maglite and examined
the doorframe paying special attention to the area around the lock,
but then it occurred to him he had no idea what he was looking for
and flicked it off again.

Then Tay checked the gates in front of the
carport to see if they were locked, too.

They weren’t.

The right-hand gate was open a few inches,
but in the darkness Tay hadn’t been able to see that until he was
right in front of it. He pushed gently at the gate and it drifted
back another foot. Tay slipped inside the carport through the
narrow opening.

***

Moving to the back of the carport where he
was certain he had seen the dim light, he found nothing except a
concrete wall painted the same faded yellow as the rest of the
shophouse. He flicked on the Maglite and examined the wall for some
kind of an opening through which he might have seen a light.

Nothing.

Sweeping the light to the left, he realized
the entry to the shophouse protruded beyond the back wall of the
carport and in the wall of the protrusion there was a narrow door.
It was a way to enter the shophouse directly from the carport
without going back out through the gates to the street and then in
through the front door.

Moving as silently as he could, Tay crossed
the carport to the door and shifted the light onto the lock and
handle. He bent forward to study them holding the Maglite out in
front of him. He focused all of his attention on the scratched gold
doorknob with a single keyhole in the center of it.

When the door suddenly swung inward and the
handle flew out of the circle of illumination, for a second Tay was
too surprised to move.

And a second was all it took.

Tay had a momentary awareness that the beam
from the Maglite was now resting on a leg wearing blue jeans when
the flashlight was suddenly wrenched from his grasp and his arm was
jerked forward into the darkness of the shophouse. He felt the
heavy Maglite crash down on the back of his neck, and after that he
was aware of nothing at all.

***

When Tay came to, he was lying on a concrete
floor. His head hurt like hell and his mouth was dry. His first
thought was to wonder how long he had been out.

“Only a few minutes,” a voice told him in a
tone so low it was almost a whisper.

For a moment Tay wasn’t certain anyone had
spoken at all. Perhaps he had only imagined an answer to the
question he was asking himself. He pushed himself up into a sitting
position.

“I didn’t hit you very hard, Sam. I didn’t
want to hurt you. I just wanted to shut you up until you were
inside.”

Then Tay knew what he was hearing wasn’t just
in his imagination. And he knew who it was talking to him.

“August?”

“Your humble servant, Inspector.”

It was too dim wherever they were for Tay to
see clearly, but he had no trouble expressing himself clearly.

“What the
fuck
is going on here?”

“Shhhhhh. Keep your voice down.”

“Why should I?” Tay asked, but he lowered his
voice to a whisper anyway.

“We’re in a storage area with concrete walls
and the door behind us is steel, so I’m pretty sure we can’t be
heard inside, but you never know.”

“Who’s inside to hear us?”

“Vince Ferrero.”

“How do you know?”

“Because he was asked by a man he trusts to
meet me here. Well…not
me
exactly. He thinks he’s meeting
somebody who has a job for his company.”

“Do you have a job for his company?”

“Of course not.”

“Then why are you meeting him?”

“So I can kill him.”

The silence that followed seemed to Tay to
last an hour or so, but of course he knew it was only a few
seconds. August squatted close to Tay so they could talk without
raising their voices.

“The thing is, Sam, I thought I needed to
keep you in the game when I was looking for him. You’re a better
detective than I am and I figured you’d find Vince pretty quick if
I goosed you up a little bit.”

“But you found him without me.”

“Yeah…I like to have several things working
when I’m trying to solve a problem. Eggs, baskets, like that.”

“So why did you keep warning me off?”

“Because I know you, Sam. The harder I pushed
you to give up, the harder you’d work not to. I needed you to find
Ferrero. Or for Ferrero to find you.”

“You mean I was your bait?”

“No, you…well, yeah, I guess you were.”

Tay thought about that as he shifted himself
into a more comfortable position.

“I can’t just sit here while you kill him,
John.”

“So…what would you do if I gave Ferrero to
you? Arrest him?”

“Yes.”

“And put him on trial for Johnny’s
murder.”

“That’s not my call, but I’m sure. Yes.”

“You have the evidence to convict him?”

Tay said nothing.

“I didn’t think so.”

“I’ll get it.”

“You know, of course, the US would ask for
extradition. They’d call it a terrorist act against a US citizen or
something.”

Tay shrugged.

“Could be a nasty jurisdictional tussle. The
result is hard to predict.”

Tay said nothing.

“Here’s my thought, Sam. A bullet in the
brain brings absolute certainty.”

“I can’t let you do that, John.”

August cleared his throat and consulted a
spot on the floor somewhere between them.

“That makes it sound like you’re part of my
problem now, Sam. Another detail I’m going to have to take care
of.”

If Tay had heard that from anybody other than
John August, he would have taken it as a threat. But surely August
meant something else, Tay thought. Didn’t he?

“I can’t let you mess this up, Sam.”

Maybe he
didn’t
mean something
else.

“We can’t take a chance that Vince starts
shooting off his mouth,” August said. “And if you jam him up for
killing Johnny, he might do that.”

“Who’s this
we
you’re talking
about?”

August didn’t answer, but then Tay hadn’t
really expected him to.

“I can’t sit here and let you commit a murder
in Singapore, John.”

“As I remember—”

“I don’t want to talk about that. I’m not
proud of it. It’s not going to happen again. It’s not going to
happen tonight.”

August exhaled heavily. “You sure about
that?”

“Absolutely sure about that.”

“Then I guess there’s nothing else for us to
talk about.”

Before Tay could react, August launched
himself forward and pinned him against the floor on his back.

From somewhere August produced a piece of
what felt like duct tape and pasted it over Tay’s mouth. Then from
somewhere else he came up with a pair of handcuffs, jerked Tay over
against the wall, and cuffed both of his hands around a pipe that
ran up the wall and into the floor above.

“I’m sorry, Sam. But Vince needs to be dead
or we’ll have all kinds of problems you don’t even want to know
about. I can’t let you get in the way.”

August pulled himself into a standing
position. Then he bent down and shifted Tay’s body around and made
him as comfortable as he could under the circumstances.

“I’m going upstairs now and getting this
done. Then I’ll come back and release you if you promise to stay
quiet until I’m gone. If you don’t promise, I’ll have to leave you
like this until somebody else comes around and releases you, and I
really don’t want to do that.” August gave Tay a tired-looking
smile. “Think about it while I’m gone.”

Tay tried to say something, but all he could
manage behind the duct tape was a kind of strangled gargling sound
so he stayed quiet.

“There you go, Sam,” August said. “You’ve got
the idea now. No need to waste a lot of breath over nothing.”

***

August turned around and knelt in front of
the steel door. Tay watched him take something from his pocket and
work it in the keyhole until the sound of a click was clearly
audible in the small room. Then August pushed himself to his feet
and returned whatever he had used on the lock to his pocket. Tay
continued to watch as August reached under his shirt and produced a
handgun which Tay recognized it as a Glock 9mm. August worked the
slide slowly and deliberately, chambering a round.

Slowly turning the handle of the steel door
and pushing it open about a foot, August slipped through. The door
swung closed behind August, but not completely. Tay strained his
ears to focus on the tiny crack it left, listening for any sound
from behind the door.

***

At first Tay heard nothing at all, not even
footsteps.

Then he did hear something. He just wasn’t
sure what it was.

It sounded like August had stumbled into
something, making contact with whatever it was twice and causing
two separate noises from the two impacts. After that, there had
been a metallic clicking sound followed by a muffled thump as if
August had shoved the obstruction out of the way. Had August
stumbled over a table with first one leg then the other and shoved
it aside? No, he wouldn’t have been nearly that clumsy.

Tay suddenly realized what the metallic
clicking noise had been. It was the cycling sound of the action of
an automatic pistol.

Then, all in a rush, he knew exactly what he
had heard.

Two shots had been fired from a handgun with
a noise suppressor on its muzzle and a body had hit the floor. And
Tay knew whose body it had been.

He had gotten a clear look at August’s Glock
when he had pulled it from under his shirt just before he went
through the steel door.

There hadn’t been a noise suppressor on
it.

TAY WAS PRETTY sure there weren’t any guests
at this little wingding other than the three of them: August,
Ferrero, and himself. Well, to be fair, he wasn’t really a guest.
He was more of a party crasher.

He ran the sounds he had heard back and forth
through his mind several more times, searching for a less ominous
explanation. He couldn’t think of one.

Vincent Ferrero had shot John August. Any
other possibility was too remote to consider. And from the ensuing
silence and the absence of any return fire, it seemed likely that
August was dead.

If Ferrero discovered he was here, this was
going to end badly for him, too. Here he sat on the concrete floor
of a storeroom, his hands cuffed around a pipe. If Ferrero came
through that steel door, what was he going to do? Either fighting
or fleeing was out of the question. Ferrero would be free to put a
bullet in his head if he wanted to, and Tay had no doubt he
did.

Tay pushed himself away from the door and
tried to make himself as small as possible, but it was a foolish
reaction to his circumstances and he knew it. There was nowhere to
hide. If Ferrero came through the door, he was dead. It was just
that simple.