Loose Cannon: The Tom Kelly Novels (64 page)

“
Tom
,”
the woman said.

It was too late to matter because Kelly was half through the doorway already and the hand-held spotlight that switched on was as blinding to him as it was suitable for sighting whatever guns were arrayed behind it. For a moment he thought of the P-38, but a voice from behind the screen of light said, “Try it, fucker.”

It was Doug Blakeley’s voice, and Kelly was in no doubt as to what would happen in a fraction of a second if his pistol didn’t drop on the gravel.

As the Walther slipped from Kelly’s fingers, an automobile engine spun to life with a whine and a rumble. There was nothing sinister in the noise—but every unexpected sound was a blast of gunshots to Kelly’s imagination, and he almost dived after the pistol in an instinctive desire to die with his teeth in a throat.

“Assume the position, Tommy-boy,” called Doug in a hectoring voice. Rectangular headlights replaced the spotlight even more dazzlingly. Doug and whoever he’d brought along had driven through the open gate and poised there, waiting for their quarry to exit. Now they were using the car’s lights for illumination, the way somebody in Diyarbakir had lighted Mustapha and the alien the night they were gunned down.

Kelly turned to the “warehouse” wall and gingerly permitted it to take some of his weight through his arms. The structure was less stable than it appeared—a roof contributed more to strength than any amount of bracing in the plane of the walls could do. To judge from the amount of weathering, however, this construct had survived at least a decade of wind and storms, and the wall only creaked when the veteran leaned against it.

Chances were that Doug Blakeley had gotten everything he knew about body searches from cop shows or watching other people do the work. Kelly took a minor chance, spreading his legs and angling his body—but not so much that he could not spin upright by thrusting himself off with his hands. The P-38 lay at his right foot, throwing its own flat shadow across the gravel to the base of the wall.

How many were there behind the lights? If Doug were alone, this was going to end
real
quick no matter where Gisela decided to stand in the business.

Which was an open question in Kelly’s mind right now, because the woman had sidled a few steps from his and was shielding her eyes with an uplifted forearm. She looked disconcerted, but not nearly as shocked by this as she had been by the fact that her friends had gone off and left her.

The situation made reasonable sense to Kelly, waiting for a frisk or a gunshot, if Doug Blakeley was one of the dancer’s friends.

The asthmatic wheeze of a turbocharged engine at low rpms masked but did not hide the sound of footsteps. Kelly’s eyes were adjusting to the glare. Without shifting the position of his limbs or body, he turned his head and squinted over his shoulder.

There were two of them approaching, one from either side, their shadows distorted by the corrugations of the metal wall. The man to Kelly’s left said, “Peter here told me I should shoot you right off, Tom-lad. Blink wrong and we do just that.” It was Doug.

Kelly snapped his head around to center it between the lines of his shoulder blades. Peter has good sense, motherfucker, he thought, but not so good that he doesn’t take orders from you.

Gisela moved unexpectedly closer to the American. “I hadn’t thought you would arrive like this,” she said pleasantly, in English.

Peter, the bull-necked professional to the right, knelt and picked up the Walther without removing his gaze or the muzzle of his weapon from Kelly’s chest. He and Doug both carried compact submachineguns—Beretta Model 12s whose wire stocks were folded along the receivers. Beretta 12s were easily distinguished from similar weapons by the fact that they had handgrips both before and behind the magazine well. Given his choice of wraparound bolt submachine guns, Kelly would have picked an Uzi or an Ingram, where the magazine in the handgrip facilitated reloading in a tight spot.

But given his choice, Kelly would have held the gun instead of being at the muzzle-end of two goons who were at least
willing
to blow him away.

Peter handed the P-38 to Doug, the shadow of the transfer warping itself across the beige metal wall. Both men carried their submachineguns in what was to Kelly the outside hand: he could probably grab either of his captors, but not both, and he could not grab either of the guns.

The engine of the car suddenly speeded up. It was an automatic response triggered either by the headlights’ load on the alternator or the block’s need for greater cooling than the fan could provide at a low idle. Peter snarled something in Bulgarian toward the vehicle, however, indicating both that he was jumpy—as Kelly would have been, forced to hold a gun on Peter—and that there was at least a third member of Doug’s present team.

Elaine might possibly speak Bulgarian, but it wouldn’t be the gunman’s choice of a language in which to address her, even at the present tense moment.

“He didn’t have a gun,” said Doug, “and then he’s got this to use on us. How do you suppose that happened?”

Kelly was so focused on himself and his own problems that he did not realize he was the subject of the sentence, not the question, until Gisela said, “He took—” and Doug slapped her alongside the jaw with the butt of the pistol.

Had the weapon fired, it would have punched a nine-millimeter hole down through Doug’s belly, pelvis, and buttocks, a good start on what the fellow needed. . . . But Walthers, save for those churned out with bad steel and no care in the last days of the Nazis, were about as safe as handguns could be. The wooden grips cracked loudly on Gisela’s jawbone, and the wall rang as the blow threw her head against it.

The veteran turned a few degrees to the left, enough to give him a direct view of what was happening without providing an excuse for Peter who had backed a step away.

Doug flung the P-38 toward the darkness. The fencing, thirty yards away, rattled angrily when the pistol struck it. “Oh, ‘I just made a mistake’?” shouted the blond American as he hit the woman again with his open hand. The blow had a solid, meaty sound to it, and this time Gisela collapsed as her legs splayed. The black gloves which Doug was wearing probably had pockets of lead shot sewn into the palm and knuckles, giving his hand the inertia of a blackjack.

“Did you expect to get
away
with that shit?” he screamed to the woman who toppled onto her face, away from the wall, when her hips struck the ground.

Facing the wall squarely so that nothing in his stance would spark anger, Kelly said, “Look, Mr. Blakeley, maybe we all oughta sit down with Elaine and see about—”

Doug hit him, and the question of whether the blow was backhand or with clenched fist was beyond the veteran’s calculation. The blond American wasn’t just big—he had real muscle under that fine tailoring, and he put plenty of it into the blow.

The roar to which Kelly awakened was real, not his blood; Peter was shouting something in anger to his employer. Kelly knelt on the gravel, his palms and forehead against the painted steel wall. All his senses were covered by a screen that trembled through white and red, attenuating the sights and sounds of the world. His skin was hot, sticky hot, with the exception of his left cheek and jaw where something cold had gnawed all the flesh away.

Kelly had blacked out for only a fraction of a second, but for moments longer he had no idea of where he was or what was happening. “Don’t
point
that thing at me!” Doug shouted over Kelly’s head. “You
hold
him like I tell you!”

“I—” Kelly found as he tried to look up at Doug that his neck hurt and his tongue was thick and fiery. A hand gripped his left shoulder from behind, grabbed a handful of fabric and lifted. Doug punched him in the ribs.

Kelly’s breath sprayed out with blood from the tongue and cheek, cut against his teeth by the previous blow. The veteran sagged back, his knees brushing the ground, but Peter’s strength was enough to hold him.

“Higher,” ordered Doug, breathing heavily himself.

Kelly didn’t think his ribs had cracked that time, but his whole chest felt as if it were swelling, bursting. He knew where he was now, being beaten by a hotshot American who had finally found a way to assert his authority—while a Third World thug waited to blow holes in him if he didn’t sit and take it.

Stand and take it. Peter dragged Kelly fully upright and Doug punched him again.

He aimed at the veteran’s face, but the lead-burdened fist moved slowly enough that Kelly was able to duck so that Doug hit the point of his forehead instead of the nose. Even though the blond man was wearing a sap glove, the result was more likely to break knuckles than to do Kelly serious injury.

The veteran blinked against the jumbled dazzle of light caused by his brain bouncing within the bone. He went limp again, at least partly by volition, and his weight forced Peter back a step.

The Beretta was short for an automatic weapon but still, at seventeen inches, much longer than an ordinary handgun. In order to point the weapon at Kelly without letting the muzzle touch him, Peter had to hold the veteran out at arm’s length with his left hand. The gunman was strong, but Kelly’s solid weight was an impossible load under those conditions.

“Get Tomashek!” Peter growled in English.

“Big, bad man who thinks he can shoot my people,” Doug said as he panted. He had been trying to keep his Beretta muzzle-up as he swung at Kelly with his right hand alone, but the eight-pound submachine gun pulled itself down toward the gravel as the blond man tried to catch his breath.

Peter swore bitterly.

The cold patch on Kelly’s forehead was probably blood cooling, but it felt as if the blow had lifted off a patch of skin. Flashes of light moved across his vision like the rotary shutter of a movie camera, but through them he could see Gisela still slumped where she had fallen. Kelly couldn’t be sure, but he thought one of the dancer’s legs flexed minutely when the blond man’s shoe brushed it.

“Straighten him up,” Doug ordered, wiping his forehead with the back of his gloved hand.

“Look, I said get Tomashek,” Peter said. “I’m not—”

“
Listen,
you bastard!” the blond American roared. “You want to spend the rest of your life in a cell in Buca, you just give me lip once more.
Lift him
!”

Peter grunted in a combination of anger and effort as he obeyed. He bent his left arm at the elbow and half knelt, then used his leg muscles to jerk the veteran into place for another punch.

Kelly hurt in more places than the glove had touched him directly, signals scrambled when his brain jounced, but the inexpert beating had not thus far made him nonfunctional. He’d been in worse shape after a night drop into steppe country once—and that hadn’t kept him from blowing up hardware that somebody else shouldn’t have left behind and trekking out again himself.

He wasn’t a boxer, but neither was Doug, and the fist the blond man aimed at Kelly’s face was slow and clumsy. The veteran jerked his head to the side instinctively, even though part of his mind knew that it might be better to accept the punch than to piss off Doug further by dodging it. The fist touched the lobe of Kelly’s left ear before momentum carried it into Peter’s shoulder.

Peter blurted a curse, again in Bulgarian. Doug screamed incoherently and swung the Beretta at Kelly’s head.

The looping sideways blow was beyond Kelly’s ability to dodge, but Peter’s own flinching reaction gave the veteran enough slack to avoid the worst of it.

The submachine gun’s stock glanced off Kelly’s skull, just above his right temple, and the shock jarred the gun’s heavy bolt off the sear. The bolt clanged forward and fired the top round in the magazine.

The muzzle blast of the nine-millimeter round was deafening to all three men; gas and unburned powder bloomed simultaneously from the muzzle in a yellow-orange flash, stinging Peter’s cheek as the bullet itself gouged a long slot through the wall. Sparks flew, and the howl of the unstabilized bullet cut through the echoing crash of the sheet metal.

“You have pig shit for brains!” Peter shouted as he grabbed Doug’s weapon by the magazine and twisted until the muzzle was safely skyward. Kelly, sprawled on his back, tangled the feet of the two men who had been beating him a moment before. “Either yougoing to get more help here or you’re going to do it
alone
, I swear to you!”

Kelly reached under himself as his heels and shoulders lifted the small of his back from the ground.

The Beretta’s wire stock had flexed enough on impact to keep the veteran’s skull from cracking, but there was still a four-inch pressure cut in his scalp, and blood had begun to mat the black hair before his body hit the ground. It felt as though he had been struck by an ax, laying his brain open to the chill night air, and a part of him was quite sure that he was dying.

“
Watch
—” one of the men above him shouted as Kelly lifted the aluminum snubbie and shot twice, close enough to Peter’s belly that the shirt caught fire.

Kelly’s vision was sharp, though he had no color sense at the moment. Both submachine guns were still pointed up, but Peter had started to lower his to cover the man on the ground when the bullets hit him like punches in the solar plexus. The gunman doubled up, clamping both elbows to his wounds. The muzzle blasts had jerked the front of his shirt out of his pants, to smolder over the oval entrance holes just beneath his rib cage.

The cup-pointed bullets had perforated the diaphragm and meandered upward through the gunman’s right kidney and lung. Neither nicked his heart, but the blood vessels they destroyed before they lodged under the skin of Peter’s upper chest were sufficient to pour his life into his body cavity in a matter of seconds.

Hunched over and mincing because his knees were bent, Peter tried to run along the front of the warehouse to escape the glare of the car’s headlights. Doug had stumbled back a pace when his employee released the Beretta. The blond man’s mouth was open in a snarl of disapproval. Kelly, still on his back, aimed for the center of Doug’s mass and fired twice more.