The Professionals (34 page)

“I’m ready.” Sawyer held out his hand. Pender clasped it, and they shook. Then Pender watched his friend creep into the shadows by the side of the road and disappear along the railroad tracks. He waited until he was sure Sawyer was gone, and then he, too, crept forward, casting one glance back at the relative safety of the van before walking quickly down the road, hugging the building that lined the curb and cradling the Uzi like a baby, the weapon heavy and menacing in his hands.

D
’Antonio drove the girl to the drop zone in the Explorer while Paolo rode along in the Tahoe with the three fresh goons from Detroit. The girl was fascinated by his gun, kept sneaking looks, as though staring at it would make the thing disappear.

She made her last pitch on the drive over. “You really don’t have to kill me,” she said. “I’m not going to snitch on you.”

She said it lightly, almost flirtatious. Her nonchalance was still shocking. “How could I be sure?” he asked her.

She leaned toward him, smiling. “I know you have a thing for me. How are you going to pull it together long enough to shoot me?”

“I’ve killed plenty of people before.”

“Never anyone like me.”

“Yeah,” he said. He leaned forward and fiddled with the radio dial. Found a rock station and turned up the volume. “There’s a first time for everything.”

That shut her up. She sank back in her seat and said nothing more. D’Antonio avoided looking at her for the rest of the drive.

It was true he’d killed people before. More often than not, they didn’t deserve to be dead. He did his job well, and he never lost sleep. But D’Antonio liked to kill fast. He’d show up in the shadows when the
mark walked in the door at night, put a bullet in his forehead, and walk right out again. He didn’t spend time with his victims. Didn’t talk to them. He certainly didn’t feed and clothe them while he waited for the right time to pull the trigger.

This girl. He could have killed her already. He realized he was putting it off. Something inside him didn’t like the idea.

D’Antonio found the intersection on the Explorer’s navigation system and backed into the shadows in a parking lot a half a block away. He could see the Tahoe parked on the other side of the intersection and imagined Paolo and the goons spread out in the darkness, their ambush immaculate.

“When the kids come, we’re going to show your face just so they know you’re alive,” he told her. “That way they’ll all come out in the open. When we’ve got all four of them, I’ll let you go.”

She turned to face him. “Really?”

He tried to hold her gaze. “Really,” he said, thinking, you’re getting too damn soft.

She stared into his eyes. “You lie,” she said, and her voice was like damnation.

P
ender crouched low and ran through the shadows, clutching the Uzi and keeping his eyes open for Beneteau’s men. I feel like a Marine, he thought. Urban warfare.

He ran down the side street a couple blocks from the kill zone, expecting to hear gunfire as he made his way forward. But no gunfire came, and he was alone in the darkness. He reached the end of the block and zagged up toward the drop site.

He stopped a block away and stared up toward the spot, searching the distance for any signs of life, any cars in weird places, any assassins with heavy weaponry. But everything seemed normal. Nothing and everything felt out of the ordinary.

He stayed as far off the road as possible, his jeans rubbing against weeds and his sneakers ruffling through the fall’s last moldy leaves as
he crept up the block. They’d scoped the intersection on the Internet and decided that the vacant lot on this south side would be the likely staging ground for the kidnappers, and as Pender approached he scanned the dark hulks of parked cars for anything fresh and out of place.

The whole street was silent, the only noise the occasional rumble and clank from the switch engines in the CSX yard a few blocks down, and Pender tried to fight the panic in his gut, tried to block the terrifying knowledge that there were multiple men out there in the dark whose only purpose was to kill him.

He crept toward the vacant lot, one eye on the road and the other on the first brief row of cars. There were three vehicles that he could see, all rusted and broken and abandoned, and he crouched down and took cover behind the first, holding the Uzi to his chest and wondering what to do.

He was staring through the spiderweb window of the first rusted hulk when he saw the SUV parked hidden in the back of the lot. It was a late-model Ford, and it looked untouched and new, incongruous in the bleak surroundings.

Had to be them. The truck was too pristine to be sitting in this neighborhood more than a couple of hours. It sat about twenty feet away, angled out, facing north toward the intersection with the passenger windows pointed in Pender’s direction.

Twenty feet away. Twenty feet of pure empty space. There was a chain-link fence running the length of the lot and a mostly empty yard behind. No shadow until the other side, where a factory overhang and a row of trees cast camouflage onto the gravel. Twenty feet. A mad dash and a gamble.

He stayed in a low crouch and peered out around the car’s rear bumper. The lot was dark, but anyone watching from the road would see him clearly. No getting around it.

Pender forced himself to take a deep breath, and he let it out slow. He took another deep breath and this time closed his eyes and ran. He stayed low but the noise of his feet on the gravel sounded like gunfire already, and he seemed to be running in molasses; it took an hour to
close the twenty feet before the shadows but he kept running, kept low, every step a prayer.

He reached the back of the lot and the long, safe darkness and crouched down again behind the Explorer, hunched over and daring to hope that nobody inside had seen him. He sat for a minute, catching his breath, listening hard, but there was nothing but the distant rushing backdrop of the city.

Pender peered around the passenger side of the Explorer and out into the lot. Nobody anywhere. Maybe we got the wrong intersection, he thought. Maybe we got the wrong time. Maybe there’s nobody in this Explorer and we’re all running around like idiots. But then he caught a glimpse of something in the passenger-side mirror, a face. A girl’s face. She caught his eye for a second, then looked away.

That must be Haley, he thought. Perfect. He slouched back behind the truck and tried to figure out a plan. If he snuck up along the driver’s side, he’d be spotted in an instant. He could sneak up the passenger side, but then he put Haley in between the Uzi and the target.

Pender crept back around the passenger side and stared at the girl’s face in the mirror, trying to catch her eye again. After a minute or two, she glanced in the mirror, and Pender held up his hand. How many, he mouthed, holding up one finger. The girl nodded, quick and almost imperceptible. Pender nodded. Distract him, he mouthed. She frowned. He held up his free hand and made like a talking mouth. Pender watched as she turned to the driver and started to talk. Then he crept around the other side of the Explorer and slowly made his way up to the front of the vehicle.

T
he girl leaned over toward D’Antonio. “I’m bored,” she said. “Where are these guys?”

D’Antonio scanned the intersection. “They should have been here by now.”

She put her hand on his leg. “Can’t we do something while we wait?”

D’Antonio let himself enjoy her touch for a few seconds. When this
is over, he thought, when these kids are nothing but gristle and shell casings, I’m going to go back to Detroit and I’m going to take a long nap. Then I’m going to have Rialto send over a couple girls, and I’m going to forget all about this crazy bitch. He shook his head. “Just wait.”

D’Antonio saw the gun before he saw the man. Just outside his window, a submachine Uzi with an extended clip. Hard-core hardware. Then he saw the shooter. It was one of the kids, and for a second he was confused. How did those little punks get their hands on artillery like that, he wondered.

“Don’t make a sound,” the kid told him, keeping his gun trained on D’Antonio’s head. His voice came muffled through the glass, but D’Antonio could sense the kid’s nerves, his false courage. “Open the door, slow.”

The kid stepped back to give him room, and he let the Uzi drop just enough that D’Antonio saw his chance. Slowly, he reached down with his right hand until his fingers met the steel of his Glock. He wrapped his hand around it, and then he moved quickly, bringing the gun up and spinning to jam the weapon hard against the girl’s throat.

“Hey!” The kid jumped forward, shoving the muzzle of the Uzi against D’Antonio’s neck. “The fuck do you think you’re doing?”

“You shoot, I shoot,” D’Antonio replied. “Think about it.”

The kid went silent. D’Antonio could hear him breathing hard, trying to keep it together. “All right,” D’Antonio said, his voice smooth as butter on toast. “Now drop the weapon before I drop this girl.”

“I’m not dropping anything.” The kid’s voice was shaky. “You even move and I’ll put a whole clip in your head.”

D’Antonio smiled. “This isn’t the movies, kid.” With his left hand, he reached up to the steering wheel and punched down on the horn. The noise echoed around the abandoned buildings, loud as a jet airplane in the silence of the night. “I’d say you have maybe a minute until the cavalry arrives,” D’Antonio told him. “You want to make a decision, make it fast.”

S
awyer crept down the spur line, keeping to the weeds on the side of the right of way and trying to stay in the shadows as he headed toward the intersection. He kept his head on a swivel, trying to imagine where Beneteau’s goons were hiding.

This is just like Xbox, he thought. On some Call of Duty shit. He made his way slowly up toward the level crossing and peered out from around the side of a warehouse toward the intersection. The streets were deserted.

Somewhere out there, Pender is running around with an Uzi, he thought. That’s a scary idea. He listened close, straining for a cough or the snap of a twig, something to give away the bad guys’ locations, but he heard nothing.

Christ, he thought. Where the hell are those guys? He kept listening, hardly daring to breathe, searching the shadows for any signs of life.

Then he saw it. So brief he thought he’d imagined it. A little chuff of condensation, hot breath in cold air. It came from a shadow on the other side of a loading dock, about halfway between the tracks and the intersection. Sawyer stared at the spot, and a couple seconds later he saw the cloud reappear.

Sawyer flattened himself against the wall and slunk forward toward the loading dock, trying to pick the guy out in the darkness. He reached the dock, a five-foot shelf that jutted out toward the road, and he crouched down below it. The man was on the other side, barely ten feet away, and now Sawyer could hear his muffled breathing, the shuffle as he shifted his weight. Bingo, he thought. Now we see whether it’s possible to be stupid
and
lucky.

He stayed so low he was almost crawling, inching around the loading dock until the man was maybe two feet away. He peered around the side of the dock. The man was facing away from him and dressed all in black. He was huge. Probably six foot six, a real heavyweight lunkhead. The man cradled a machine pistol in his hands, and he was staring out toward the empty intersection.

Sawyer crept back to the other side of the loading dock and felt around in the weeds for something big enough to use as a weapon. After a minute or two of searching, he got his hands on a length of four-inch-thick cast-iron piping, and he picked it up, testing it. A little short, but it would do.

He made his way back around the base of the loading dock. This time, something made him hesitate. The man was right there, waiting to be taken down, but something wasn’t right. Sawyer waited. He could hear the man breathing, heavy, and then he knew: The thug had turned away from the intersection. He was facing Sawyer now, so close Sawyer could have reached out and tied his laces together.

Shit, Sawyer thought. He stayed crouched, silently begging the guy to turn around. Then he heard the car horn, and he knew he had his chance.