Lynne Heitman - The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

“What?”

“What about Harvey?”

“Not yet.”

He hung up.

My phone was still in my hand when it started ringing. I checked the caller ID and answered.

“Felix?”

“Hey, Miss Shanahan, guess what?”

“What?”

“Someone just turned on Harvey’s phone. Do you want to know where he is?”

DJURO BULATOVIC HAD NEVER BEEN TO MY HOME, AND I had never been to his. I didn’t even know if he was domiciled in Boston. I knew we were friends, though, because only his friends got to call him Bo, and there hadn’t been a single time in three years that I had called for help that he didn’t either show up or send a very capable proxy. He was known for his pastel sport coats, but tonight he wore his work clothes-all black.

Bo was an enforcer, a gun for hire, a person who used every tool at his disposal to persuade individuals to adopt his clients’ point of view. The first time we’d met, he had wrapped his big hand around my throat and squeezed until I passed out. But that had been a case of mistaken identity. He had been deeply remorseful about strangling the wrong woman nearly to death, which is how I had apparently established my permanent marker with him.

Through me, he had also met Harvey. Harvey did his taxes for him, which provided me with one of the few interesting personal details I knew about Bo. He earned in the mid-six figures annually from Djuro Bulatovic, LLC, which he described as a “consulting company.”

Actually, I knew a few more things. He was a big man who came from violence. It was obvious in the way he moved, in the way he always seemed to be looking ahead to the next problem or looking back to make sure the last one wasn’t catching up to him. Since he was Bosnian, I suspected he had fought the Serbs as a soldier or part of a militia and probably killed more than his share. He had a soldier’s reverence for duty, and he lived by a strict code of honor. Even if he hadn’t liked Harvey, he would have considered it bad form to kidnap a man in a wheelchair.

He opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat next to me. He turned to the back and reported in to his two colleagues, um…Employees? Accomplices? I never knew who the men were that he brought along. I was sure Timon and Radik were as strong and fast and skilled at the task that lay ahead as the usual crew he brought.

Bo spoke to his guys in either Bosnian or Croat or Serbian. I had asked him one time which he spoke. He said everyone in his country spoke all three, sometimes at the same time. When he was done, he turned to brief me.

“All three are in the kitchen. They just brought food, so they’re eating together. No one is standing post.” He shook his head. “Stupid.”

“Did you see Harvey? Is he in there?”

“He is in a back room on the floor. I saw him through the window.”

“Is he alive?”

“I do not believe that three men with an arsenal would be guarding a corpse.”

The reference to Harvey as a corpse was disturbing, but, as usual, he had a point. I had to calm down or at least find a way to channel the energy. I looked through the dark toward the house. Knowing Harvey was in there got me mentally mobilized. My body followed suit. Everything sped up-pulse, respiration, knuckle cracking.

“What’s the plan?”

“We take them.”

I looked at Bo. “Take them how?”

“Shoot the guards. Find Harvey. Bring him out.”

Shoot. Find. Bring. It sounded so simple. “Why do we have to shoot them? Maybe we should just try to-”

“Hit them over the head and render them unconscious?”

I had been about to say “subdue them,” but that worked, too. I felt the ridiculousness of that idea, the complete, television-informed naïveté. But Bo didn’t treat me as ridiculous. It was one of the things I liked about him.

“To subdue them,” he said, “would require that we get close enough to be killed ourselves. Or it might give them the chance to kill Harvey before we can get to him.”

“But we don’t even know who they are or why they took him. What if they’re, I don’t know, police? Or some other good guys?”

“They are not the good guys. This much I know.” He angled his head and studied me. “You have killed before, killed with your hands.”

“The only person I ever killed was trying hard to kill me back.”

He nodded sagely. “Then you will have no problem. These men will kill you if you do not kill them first.”

“I think I have to know that for sure, Bo. I think we have to give them a warning.”

He sighed deeply. I knew he was the expert, but I didn’t want him to count on me to shoot a man in cold blood if I didn’t think I could.

“We will give them a chance,” he said. “It will be up to them. Only if they shoot at us will we shoot back.”

“Yeah, but you have to tell them they have a choice.”

“Don’t worry.” He turned and said something to Timon and Radik. Of course, he could have been saying, “Bust in and blow their fucking heads off,” for all I knew. I didn’t know what else to do. The situation was what it was.

He laid out his plan, first in English for me, then for the guys in back. It didn’t seem to take as much explaining for them.

“What about the noise?” I said. “There are people in these other buildings.”

“The police will not show up in this neighborhood unless called, and no one will call them over a few gunshots.”

He reached back, and Radik passed him a black gym bag. I could tell it was the weapons bag from the heavy, metallic clank it made when Bo set it on the seat between us. He unzipped it, plunged in, and came out with what I knew were a couple of clean semiautomatics with suppressors. He offered them both to me. One was a Glock 30, like mine. I took it.

“Be sure to give it back,” he said. “Don’t take it home.”

“What about stray shots?” I looked through the windshield up and down the street. We were in a neighborhood. A very bad one, but a neighborhood nonetheless. Our target was in the middle of the block. The house on one side looked like a boarded-up crack den, but there were lights on in the one on the other side. “We could kill someone in the next house over if we’re not careful.”

“We must shoot them before they can return fire. You are a good shot. You will not miss. Aim for the-”

“Center of mass.” I knew that. I knew how to kill a paper target.

He waited for me to think up still more objections. I couldn’t, so I took a breath, adjusted my vest, and gave him the nod. We did a quick radio check. Then the four of us got out and started toward the house. I split off and went toward the back, where I was supposed to watch through the window and make sure they were in the kitchen where Bo’s reconnaissance had left them. I was also supposed to cover the door in case any of them got flushed out that way. It was the easiest assignment, which was fine by me. Timon and Radik were going in through the garage entrance. Bo was going through the front door, right up the middle.

I slipped around and started creeping along the side of the house. I had to go slowly, because it was so dark and I didn’t dare risk using the flashlight. The stink of garbage wafted up as I maneuvered around the trash cans. Where there was garbage there were rats, so I tried to prepare myself for any unexpected movement at foot level. I got to the backyard and cruised along the fence line until I got as far in as the crumbling brick planter Bo had told me about. It marked the far boundary of a cracked and pocked patio, which meant it wasn’t too far out from the back of the house. I had to be careful. I moved in behind it and made myself as small as I could. Then I peeked over the top to look through the back window.