Joseph Finder - Guilty Minds

“What’s next?” I said. “Your kneecap?”

I lowered the Glock and pointed it at his knee.

“Okay!” he said. “Okay! Jesus!” He glanced over my shoulder for just an instant, and then something came from behind my right side. A sudden movement, a shift in the quality of the light.

And in that same moment something long and cylindrical — I could just make out its shape — cracked into my right arm, causing me to drop the gun. My arm exploded with pain. I stumbled.

It was a baseball bat, wielded by someone who’d stolen up behind me.

The bat came up again, and I threw myself at my attacker, grabbed at the baseball bat. It cracked against my hands, a hot stinging, immensely painful, as I tried to wrench it from his grasp.

Out of the corner of my eye I could see Vogel moving away. But I was too preoccupied to stop him. The attacker roared, like a battle cry, as we struggled over the bat. Both of our hands were on it. He pushed it at me, and it cracked against my skull, causing a starburst of pain. With one great lunge, I shoved the side of the bat into his throat. I could hear the crunch of cartilage. He dropped to the floor, both of his hands grasping his throat, gagging, his eyes rolling up in his head.

I knew he was down, permanently.

I turned, saw the spatter of blood in the carpet where I’d shot Vogel. He’d left a trail of blood, which I followed down the hall and then to the right, along another hall, and then the spatters got denser and more profuse.

Right in front of a white-painted windowless steel door.

The safe room.

He was inside.

Vogel’s voice rasped over a loudspeaker mounted high on the wall. “Backup’s on the way, Heller. It’s over. Go home.”

“It’s over when Mandy’s released. Make the call, Vogel.”

“Was I not clear about the terms of the deal? Go back to Boston, and Mandy walks free. Not till then. Enough of your games.”

I saw a CCTV camera mounted next to the loudspeaker and realized that, though I couldn’t see him, he could see me. I thumbed the magazine release on the lanky guy’s Glock and saw that the magazine was empty. It was a Glock 17, the standard MPD service weapon, and its standard magazine had a capacity of seventeen rounds. With only one round in the magazine. And I had just fired it. At Vogel’s shoulder.

Vogel must not have seen that the gun was empty, because he said, “Don’t waste the ammo, brother. The walls are ballistic fiberglass and steel. You’re going to need a howitzer.”

He was telling the truth, of course. He was safe from bullets in there.

“Are you really going to hide in your steel box?” I said.

“You’re locked out.”

“Yeah? I think you’ve locked yourself in.”

“You’re wasting your time.”

“Make the call,” I said again. “Here’s how it’s going to work. Your guys bring Mandy to whatever intersection you want, in DC or wherever you say. I have a guy who’ll pick her up and confirm she’s okay.” Balakian, a.k.a. Kombucha, was standing by, waiting for my call.

He gave a dry chuckle. “Or what?”

“Make the call.”

“See, Heller, that’s where your plan falls apart. You have no leverage and you never did. In about ten minutes, five of my most capable employees will be here. They’re going to see an armed and dangerous intruder who’s obviously just wounded several men and set off a firebomb on my property, and they’re going to do what the law permits them to do: take you down. At that point, Mandy Seeger will be irrelevant.”

I shoved the Glock into the waistband of my UPS uniform pants, as if it were loaded and could come in handy at any moment. Then I folded my arms. “Beautiful house,” I said. “You build it yourself?”

“Most of it.”

“The woodwork is extraordinary. It must have taken you years. It’s a real shame.”

He said nothing.

I took out my cell phone and held it up for the camera. “There’s a phone number programmed into this phone,” I said. “As soon as I hit the speed-dial, it will detonate the second gas bomb. Which is sitting in your living room. It’s gonna turn your house into a fireball. The house that you built so lovingly. Within an hour all that beautiful woodwork is going to be charcoal.”

Another long pause. I was about to resume speaking when he said, “I make one phone call and Mandy Seeger is dead.”

“And here’s the thing,” I said, ignoring him. “Here’s the best part. You’re sitting in a ten-by-twelve-foot steel box. In the middle of a roaring house fire. Now, the average house fire burns at eleven, twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit. And steel’s a great conductor of heat. Your steel coffin will rapidly reach around two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. And you know what’s going to happen to you?”

Silence.

“Well, first you’ll start sweating. It’ll be really uncomfortable. Then blisters will start breaking out all over your skin. By then you’ll be in excruciating pain. If you’re lucky you’ll go into shock. It’s probably the worst way to die.”

Silence.

“Ever roast a pig in a box? That’s what’s going to happen to you. You’re going to roast like a pig. Only you’ll be roasting alive. Vogel — that’s a German name, right?”

Silence.

“What does Vogel mean in German?”

Silence.

“It’s been a while since high school German, but I’m pretty sure that Vogel means bird. So maybe it’s more accurate to say you’ll roast like a bird. Like a barbecued chicken. Human cremation takes place at between fourteen hundred and eighteen hundred degrees, so you’re probably going to end up as just ashes. They probably won’t be able to identify you by your dental records.”

“You’re full of shit, Heller. You’re not going to do it.”

“How’s your shoulder?” I said, and I smiled. “You know about the blood on my hands. You know what I’m capable of.”

“You’re not going to do it, Heller. Because Mandy Seeger is being held in the basement. Right below me. And I don’t think you’re going to want to burn your friend alive, too.”

I have a knack for recognizing lies. And I knew he was telling the truth.

I wanted nothing more than to run. To find the basement door and get down there immediately.

But I forced myself to backtrack down the hall to Vogel’s office. There I looked around quickly and yanked the power cord from the desktop computer. The cord was six feet long and sturdy. Then I grabbed a couple of USB cables.

I returned to the safe room and looped the power cable around the door lever and looped that up to the mount for the CCTV camera. Pretty quickly I’d knotted the cables securely.

He wasn’t going to get out of that safe room any time soon, and not without help.

I turned and raced back down the hall in the general direction of the front door. I flung open door after door, finding closets and bedrooms and bathrooms.

And finally the right one. The basement. I dropped the empty Glock and descended the stairs.

The air felt cooler. I smelled a dank odor as I descended the dimly lit wooden stairway. Lights were on downstairs. I heard low voices.

The basement appeared, on first glance, to have roughly the same footprint as the floor above. Bare concrete walls segmented it into a number of open rooms. It seemed to go on forever. It was, for a basement, relatively high-ceilinged: around nine feet. On the ceiling were soundproofing tiles.

The voices were a little louder, and I could tell they were coming from a TV in one of the open rooms. In the closest alcove were steel shelves that held white boxes marked with dates and letters. The Centurions’ client files, probably. All along one wall were garden tools, neatly hanging from hooks on a long expanse of pegboard.