Jeff Abbott - Collision

“No,” Jackie said. “Pilgrim killed my brother. I kill him.”

“No. We are used to working together as a team. Not with you.”

“I’m going with you.”

The leader shook his head. “Three of us, one of you.”

He could let these dumb oafs do the dangerous work. As long as Pilgrim died, did it really matter who killed him? The thought shamed him. He started again to stand.

The leader produced a smile of slightly crooked teeth and a Beretta aimed at Jackie’s chest. “Plenty of hate for this Pilgrim. He’ll die badly. I promise. You guard the woman.” Jackie could hear the sting of an implied insult in the words, as though Jackie were capable of nothing more than watching an unconscious fifty-year-old.

The gunman with the wraparound sunglasses took pity on him, squeezed Jackie’s shoulder. “We’ll give this Pilgrim a bullet for your brother.”

Jackie swallowed his rage and he nodded. Let them go do the work. He didn’t like that they’d seen his face or ordered him about like he was beneath them. He still had the knife strapped to his pants leg and he was hungry now to use it. He thought how the knife’s handle might shine, buried in their throats.

He kept the smile and shook their hands to wish them luck.

The Waterloo Arms presented a tactical nightmare. Fences, guards, in the middle of an urban setting. Pilgrim drove past the renovated building three times and stowed the Volvo in a nearby parking garage off Second Street. Barhoppers and music lovers crowded the evening streets. Stages, with bands playing blues music, towered in two intersections. More music spilled out from nearly every bar. Pilgrim wished he could go into one of the bars, order a cold Shiner Bock, let the heat of the music flow over him, and not dwell for a moment on violence or guns, unless it was inside the lyrics of a jealous lover’s song. Instead he found a vantage point, a table at an outside jazz bar, and drank a Coke. An older woman who was attired as though for church, complete with floral dress and pink hat, pounded the piano’s keys with vigor and precision and sang about a no-good man that she couldn’t give up, necessary as air.

He took a sip of soda. He wore a burnt-orange University of Texas Long-horns cap and a windbreaker he’d found in the stolen Volvo. The cap was pulled low on his head; the jacket was too roomy for his lanky form, but it hid his gun.

He studied the hotel lot. He didn’t even know for sure that Teach was inside. A sign on the fence said this was a McKeen property, soon to be the Waterloo Arms Court, with several thousand square feet of office and retail space and a Blarney’s Steakhouse. All opening in about two more months.

Blarney’s. The name of the same Dallas steakhouse he’d found on a matchbook in one of the dead gunmen’s pockets. Couldn’t be coincidence.

He’d watched two men in suits circling the fence, one always staying in visual range of the building’s back entrance. On guard.

The suits didn’t look like the other kidnappers. These two were Anglos, tall, heavy-built, military burr haircuts, wearing jackets that were no doubt hiding rigs. They looked like high-end rent-a-cops.

The two guards didn’t wander as a pair. One took a clockwise orbit around the chain-link lot; the other headed in the opposite direction. They roamed out of each other’s sight for at least a minute, on the edge of the fence. The south side of the empty building fronted the busier Second Street; the east abutted a jewelry store and design firms; the north side was Third Street, and the west faced another construction site, also fenced. A narrow passageway cut between the construction sites.

He flipped Barker’s phone to his ear-he didn’t turn it on-and started a pretend conversation with an imaginary friend, pacing back and forth, just another guy in a self-made cellular bubble.

“Yeah, absolutely I’m gonna kill the bastards,” he said to himself. “Then I’m gonna make Teach buy me a steak dinner and accept my letter of resignation. Yeah, yeah.”

He nodded, holding the silent phone, and watched the guards continue their orbit. He could not shoot either of them on the street; too many people around. And if they were reporting back into the hotel via phone or wire, taking them out might alert the others inside. So he had to get past them.

The wooden fence on the adjoining lot wasn’t concertina-wired. It was the route of least resistance. He waited until the walking guard closest to him rounded a corner. Pilgrim hurried to the fence of the stripped lot. The fence loomed, and he tucked the phone in his pocket, got a running start, and took a leap. His fingers just caught the tip of the fence, and he grunted hard as he pulled himself up and over, his arms aching with the effort. He slid down on the other side of the fence and ran to the east side. He stopped to listen.

Pilgrim heard a guard amble along the fence line. At first he thought the guy was talking to himself, but then he realized the first guard was using an earpiece communicator:

“Yeah,” the guard said. “It’s a hell of a lot better than Baghdad. I made ninety thou but the wife bitched incessantly, cried herself to sleep every night. I only want to do domestic now, or maybe Africa except for Somalia, those people are crazy. Yeah…”

Pilgrim checked his watch. Listened for either the approach of the next guard or the return of the one he’d heard. They held true to their schedule, once a minute, give or take ten seconds.

Those ten seconds might be life or death to him.

He surveyed the empty lot. A trailer sat on one side, near the middle of the lot. A forklift squatted next to it like a stout guard. He took a lockpick from his pocket and had the trailer open in five seconds. No alarm sounded.

The office was cluttered. He spotted the keys to the forklift hanging on a hook by a desk.

He listened for the clockwork steps of the guard, and as they passed he ran to the forklift, lurched it into life, aimed it at the sweet spot in the fence that bordered the hotel lot. Stopped it short and killed the engine. The music festival drowned out the noise he’d made. He checked his watch; ten seconds to spare.

Twenty seconds later he heard the guard pass.

Pilgrim clambered onto the forklift’s roof, lying flat on his stomach. He peered over the fence, which was now about two feet higher than the minilift’s roof. He saw the guard walking away from him.

Four feet separated the two fences. He powered himself over the gap.

Just enough and his feet cleared the wire of the hotel fence. He slammed into the ground and sprinted for the closest door, which stood in a shaded alcove.

He tried the door. Unlocked.

He opened the door, gun ready. He stepped into a service hallway, lit only with the faint gleam of fluorescent lights dangling in a straight row from the ceiling.

He closed the door. He listened to the silence. No sound of an alarm.

He tested doorknobs. The third door opened into a stairwell’s ghostly light. Halfway up the concrete stairs, he heard the footfall behind him. He spun, and one of the suits, thick-necked, stood in the hallway, leveling a gun at him. “Freeze!”

Pilgrim thought: I’m not going to be taken down by a rental cop. “May I raise my hands?”

“Lock fingers together, palms up. Off the stairs, to the ground.” The rental cop didn’t sound like a rental. A bite of authority lay in his tone.

Pilgrim stepped off the stairs. “Where is Teach?”

“On the ground. On your knees. Last warning. Then I shoot.”

Definitely not a rental cop. Pilgrim started to kneel. He bent his knee until he had the right amount of leverage, and then barreled hard into the man, gunning his head straight into the guy’s stomach as they slammed into the concrete wall.