Grimm - The Icy Touch (27 page)

He could see the pipes in the back, and one of them was already leaking water around the join. If he could get the water flowing and the pipes broken enough to cut flesh...

Nick gave the small sink another strong heave, summoning more strength, and with a creaking wrench the main pipe snapped off. Water gushed onto the floor— and the edge of the broken pipe looked sharp.

He pressed the back of his left arm against the broken edge of the sink’s pipe, and began sawing it back and forth. After about ten seconds, the blood started to flow.

He kept sawing.

It hurt. It hurt a lot.

* * *

Chance Weems felt like this Nicholas Burkhardt was
his
prisoner, as much as anyone’s, and he was going to make sure no one screwed up and let the Grimm get over on them. He owed that to his son Jody, who had been killed by Burkhardt’s mother.

And Weems had far more experience with Grimms than the others did. He knew they could be more dangerous than they looked. Faster. More deadly.

So Weems was appalled when he got down to the cell in the basement and found the sentry was gone from the door.

“What the hell!” Weems burst out, as the young Hundjager, Roger, came around the corner, shotgun in hand, whistling to himself.

“Where
the hell
have you been, you damned fool?” Weems demanded.

“Whatya mean?” the young man retorted sullenly. “He can’t get through those walls or that steel door. Boss said I could go for a dinner break, so I did. He said a half hour, I’m back in half an hour!”

“Denswoz said you could go off without there being someone to replace you? Then he’s a fool too!”

“You better not let him hear you say that,” Roger said, looking over his shoulder.

“You were supposed to get someone to spell you.” Weems nodded at the cell holding the Grimm. “You hear anything from him?”

Roger shrugged. “One time he sounded like he was going kinda out of his gourd. Said he was going to kill himself if we didn’t let him out. I just laughed at him. I told the boss about it, said not to believe a word the Grimm says.”

“Wouldn’t bother me if he killed himself. Then I could feast on him all the sooner. Denswoz better keep his promise.”

Weems noticed Roger looking intently at the bottom of the steel door.

“There some kind of flood?” the sentry asked.

Weems looked. The low horizontal space they used to push a food trays in was bubbling with water.

“This ain’t good. You better...” But when he saw the blood it startled him into a momentary silence. The unmistakable red liquid was swirling with the water, and there was quite a bit of it. The blood was running out from the cell, under the door, and onto the stone flags of the corridor...

“You go get the boss,” Weems said. “I’ll keep an eye on this.”

“Oh shit. I hope nobody blames me if he’s dead. Boss’ll be mad. He wanted that guy kept alive till he was ready for him. We’re still waiting for people for the party.”

“Just go get the... Dammit Roger, what are you doing?”

Roger had stretched his key out on the chain that attached it to his belt. To Weems’ amazement he was unlocking the door.

“Don’t—!” Weems said.

But Roger swung the door open and stepped back, pointing the muzzle of his shotgun toward the cell.

“It’s okay, I got it covered. Safety’s off, gun’s loaded.”

Weems shook his head. He drew his pistol—he was still carrying the Smith and Wesson they’d taken off the Grimm—and moved to follow Roger into the cell. He had to admit, he was curious himself...

The Grimm was lying on his back to one side of the fallen, cracked sink. There was blood all over Burkhardt’s neck and wrists. His arms were flung out, and he seemed limp, his chest motionless, eyes closed. His mouth, trailing blood, was slightly open. Blood-streaked water bubbled and flowed around him.

“Look at that!” Roger said. “He’s dead! He must’ve cut his throat on that busted piece of metal!”

“If you’d a been here you’d have heard him busting that washstand down!”

“I did hear something—but I figured the guy was having a tantrum, kicking the walls or something.”

Roger went in for a closer look.

Then Weems noticed the cot. The wooden frame had been pulled apart, the lumber twisted free of the bolts.

Wait. Oh no...

“Boy, stay back—” Weems warned.

But Roger was already bending over the body of the Grimm. And then Weems spotted the sharply broken-off piece of wood, about the length of a baseball bat, lying next to the Grimm’s outstretched arm.

“Get back!” Weems yelled.

He tried to bring the pistol into play but Roger was in the way—and then there was a blur of motion, and the Grimm had thrust the spear of broken frame up, angling it past Roger’s ribs and into his heart.

Roger screamed and, half impaled, twisted to fall on his side, writhing on the wood as he died.

Weems stepped to the left and snapped off a shot. But the bullet struck the wall just above Burkhardt as the Grimm pulled the shotgun from the dead sentry’s nerveless fingers.

Weems stepped back and tried to aim—but the Grimm was fast, just too fast.

It was almost as if the shotgun, when it went off, was silent. But the truth was, Weems just never heard it blow his brains out.

* * *

Nick was hoping the noise of the pistol and the shotgun wouldn’t carry past the thick walls. But the door to his cell was open. The Icy Touch Wesen could be coming.

He picked up his Smith and Wesson, stuck it in his waistband, and then turned to the still gushing water pipe, bending over to thrust his cut forearm under the water, trying to clean the wounds a little. The long shallow cuts he’d made had produced enough blood to spread around his body for a good theatrical effect—and enough to run under the door with the water, getting their attention. But the cuts weren’t severe enough to do him much harm.

He straightened up, pumped another shell into the shotgun, stepped over the bodies to the door. He stopped at the threshold, and glanced back. Two bloody bodies, water flooding around them. Entrails dangling from the younger one, drifting like seaweed in the outflow from the broken sink.

Quite a mess.

He stepped into the hall and listened. He heard no voices, no sound of anyone coming. He’d had the impression the cell was in a subbasement, under a large building. Maybe it was deep enough down they hadn’t heard him. Especially if there were intervening doors. He returned to the cell, carefully leaned the shotgun against the wall, and removed the keys from the younger Hundjager’s body. Not a pleasant task, but there was a whole ring of keys. That could prove useful. He was surprised to find no cell phone on the sentry.

He turned to Weems, searched him for a cell phone. He didn’t have one either. Must be that Denswoz restricted them, when the men were out here.
Information hygiene in all things
.

Nick pulled the old Hundjager’s jacket and shirt off, and stuffed them into the broken pipe end where the sink had been. It took some adjusting, but he got it plugged up pretty well, stopping the water flow.

He went back to Weems’ body.

“Sorry, Weems, don’t like to be disrespectful to the dead, but...”

Nick pulled the dead man’s pants off, and used them to wipe up the floor outside the door as best he could. Then he tossed the wet, bloodied pants inside, retrieved the shotgun, and went into the hall. He locked the cell door, hoping another sentry might not look inside before taking up his post. The guy would be standing sentry over two dead men.

Nick started slowly up the stone stairs, under naked light bulbs in the ceiling, going as quietly as he could. His shoes and socks were wet, and water dripped down his back.

He climbed six steps, stopped and listened, then went up to the next flight. He listened again. Then he moved on. Two more flights, the rest of the way to the closed steel door at the top of the curved stone staircase.

Nick pressed his ear to the cold metal of the door. He heard nothing. He tried the handle. Locked.

He got the keys from his pocket, looked at the lock, and tried the most likely one. It turned easily.

He gradually opened the heavy steel door, stopping to listen with each small movement. Now he could hear voices, down to his right, too far off to be intelligible. Someone laughing; someone else making a remark.

He peered round the doorway. At the far end of the hall a little light spilled out from a partly open door. They were probably in there.

The voices didn’t indicate any alarm. Apparently the thick walls and steel doors had muffled the gunshots.

Nick stepped into the wood-floored hallway; a Persian-style carpet runner went its length. There were pastoral paintings on the walls, and elegant amber-colored light fixtures on the ceiling. He turned, quickly locked the cellar door, then moved down the hall to the left, away from the voices he’d heard. He wanted to keep moving until he was away from whoever was talking behind him.

He kept the shotgun at the ready, willing to shoot almost anyone he encountered, if he had to, but hoping he could bludgeon them from behind instead. A silent kill would be better.

Only... Suppose he killed an ordinary, clueless security guard, or a startled cook? Someone innocent...

But hiring ordinary humans to work in a place like this didn’t seem like Icy Touch style. Denswoz was clearly one of the organization’s chiefs. He’d be surrounded by Wesen. Probably everyone in the building was a Wesen.

But that brought up another problem. Some of the Wesen recruited into The Icy Touch had been forced into the crime cartel. Did he have the right to kill them? If not—how could he tell one from another?

He couldn’t think about that. He had to find the girl, if she was here, and get her out of this place. But along the way, there were other little tasks he could see to...

About twenty strides down the hall, he reached a corner, and stopped to listen. The only sound he heard was the beating of his own heart and the soft click of central heating coming on.

Nick stepped around the corner, coming to a corridor that ran along a series of dark-wood paneled doors.

He stopped and listened at the nearest door. No sound.

Maybe there’d be a phone in there...

He reached down, tried a couple of likely keys before finding the right one and unlocking the door. He found himself in a bedroom. He saw no landlines, no phones at all. No luggage to search. The bed was made; the room seemed unused. There was a curtained window, across from him.

He walked quickly across the braided rug, and moved the curtains aside just enough to get a look.

It was night. Security lights and cameras were posted along a high black metal fence beyond a neatly trimmed side yard. He was on the ground floor. On the other side of the fence a large man in a rain coat and baseball cap walked sentry. He carried an AR15, and looked bored. Beyond the sentry was what appeared to be a wood.

Nick figured he could wait for the guard to move on a ways, then escape through the window.

But there was a good chance that Lily Perkins was in this building. And somewhere there had to be a phone, or some other method for contacting Renard and Hank.

He let the curtain drop before the sentry looked his way, and returned to the door. He listened, still silent. He returned to the corridor, softly closing the bedroom door behind him.

Nick tried the next door on the right—same thing. Empty unused bedroom. No phones.

The third door was unlocked and turned out to be a bathroom.

The next door was locked. And there was a sound coming through it—the sound of a girl crying.

Renard was driving down SE Sandy on his way home from the office, when the call came from Internal Affairs. He put the call on speaker.

“Renard.”

“Lieutenant Jacobs at IA. About your man Burkhardt...”

“Investigation done?”

“Not quite. A lot of odd stuff in his files. But... I tried to call him, couldn’t get him on the line. No answer. Then somebody just told me his car was impounded?”

Renard felt a cold breeze when there wasn’t one.

“Really? First I’ve heard of it. Impounded where and how?”

“Deputy was driving out in the boonies, saw it through the brush. Stuck off a fire road. Somebody had tried to cover it with cut brush but the weather exposed it. Deputy checked the registration, found the car belonged to a Portland cop. He gave the department a call, and we told him to bring it to impound.”

“Sounds like someone wanted to get rid of it... I can’t see Burkhardt hiding it in the woods, out in the middle of nowhere. Where was this?”

“A few miles from the Columbia, east of The Dalles. Nothing much there. No houses. Nearest business is a bar called Joey’s River Snag. Burkhardt taking vacation time out that way?”

“Not a chance,” Renard said. “He was waiting for word from you. He might go out there for a few hours, but vacation, no..”

“Any possibility he might be despondent over the investigation and... a suicide risk?”

Renard snorted. “Last guy in the world to commit suicide. Way too tough.”

“So where is he, then? Any theories, Captain?”

“I don’t know, Lieutenant, but it’s... it’s worrying. He was investigating a crime cartel and he crossed them up good.”

“Yeah. In the tunnel by the docks. More shootings. But your guy’s got too many shoots in his jacket.”

“He’s a good man, Lieutenant. Stopped a lot of ugly stuff going down.”

“Seems like a good guy. But a magnet for weird cases.”

Renard wasn’t going to get into that.

“Any sense of where his Internal Affairs case is going?”

“Can’t discuss it yet, Captain. Sheriff’s department has some rangers looking for him in the woods. I’ll let you know if they turn up anything.”

If they turn up anything out there,
Renard thought,
it’ll be Nick’s dead body.
“Okay. I’ll get his partner out that way, see if he can locate him.”

“You think the cartel took him out?”

“I don’t know. It’s a possibility. Any blood in that car?”