Allan Leverone - Postcards from the Apocalypse

“It’s human nature, junior, he’ll figure he got the drop on the dimwit old man trying to put one over on him and he’ll let his guard down. Trust me.”

I wasn’t convinced, but what could I do? It was too late now to worry about it, anyway.

The Mercedes hugged the road as I concentrated on maintaining a three to four vehicle interval behind the big Caprice. The farther we drove, the more I became convinced we were heading to the same building in Chinatown where Martin Saunders had met his untimely demise last week. In fact, I became so certain this was the case that when we got close, I pulled to the curb right around the corner from said building and watched as the Caprice did the same directly in front of the entrance.

The level of arrogance of the people running The Little Devilz was astonishing. Did they really expect anyone to believe two separate people who had never met would each decide, within a matter of days, to end their lives in precisely the same manner, by throwing themselves off precisely the same roof?

Apparently that was exactly what they expected, because there was my uncle, marching up the sidewalk to the front door, head held high, engaging his presumptive killer in a conversation about what I could not imagine. Hopefully he was getting the evidence we would need to put these people away if we somehow managed to survive, a prospect which I was beginning to think was remote.

The man with the gun reached around Uncle Brick and slipped a key card into a lock, pulling the front door of the apartment building open and shoving Brick inside. The odd-looking pair disappeared inside and I reluctantly climbed out of Brick’s Mercedes, noting with appreciation how solid and reassuring the CLUNK of the door sounded compared to the tinny noise made by my Subaru upon completion of the same task. It’s strange how our minds work under pressure. Or maybe it’s just mine.

I slouched toward the door, feeling exposed and conspicuous—like everyone could see the gun under my jacket—and wondering how out of place I must look to anyone peering out a window. In this area people probably saw worse all the time; it was the sort of neighborhood where if people knew what was good for them, they didn’t see anything; even if they saw everything.

To the right of the door was a panel filled with white plastic call buttons. Next to each button was a small card listing the apartment number and the last name of the associated tenant. I shrugged and picked one at random, pressing it and waiting, hoping someone was home. Fifteen seconds went by and I began to sweat. I had no idea how long it would take for Brick and the guy with the gun to reach the roof, or how long the man would wait once they got there before throwing my uncle to his death.

Finally a tiny speaker under the buttons erupted to life with static. It seemed to be on its’ last legs, a conclusion you could reasonably arrive at about the entire building, and I jumped even though I had been expecting it. My nerves were thrumming. “Yeah?” a disembodied voice demanded.

“Uh, this is Tommy in 3B,” I answered. “I went to the store and locked myself out; could you please hook me up?” I wondered how many of his neighbors this guy actually knew and was counting on the natural tendency of most city dwellers to keep to themselves and mind their own business. It was the first rule of city living and one I followed religiously when I shared an apartment with Allison in L.A. A second later the buzzer sounded, followed a half-second after that by the barely audible CLICK of the door’s lock disengaging.

I breathed a sigh of relief and walked into the building.

Access to the roof was gained by walking up a short stairway and stepping through a dilapidated wooden door. A rusting sheet metal entryway protected the door from the elements, although how long that would continue to be the case was open to debate. The entryway canted precariously to one side and long strips of peeling brown paint hung from both sides.

From the roof I could hear my uncle chatting with his abductor as if sharing coffee and a cinnamon roll at Beekman’s Deli. I pulled the Browning out of its leather holster and slipped off the safety, gripping the weapon in both hands like I had seen done on TV a million times. My hands were shaking and I had a sudden terrifying vision of the gun slipping from my hands and shooting me in the groin as it bounced off the roof. I took a deep breath and peered around the entryway.

Standing maybe five feet from the edge of the roof, five stories above the cement and pavement below, stood Brick and the gigantic man from The Little Devilz. The man held Brick’s voice-activated recorder in one huge paw and was turning it over in his hand, looking at it with undisguised amusement.

“So lemme get this straight,” the man said, smirking at Brick. “You’re a friend of that idiot lawyer and you decided you were just gonna march into the club and get me to implicate myself and my bosses? You didn’t think it might occur to me to frisk you? Just how friggin’ stupid do you think I am?”

“Is that a rhetorical question or do you actually want an answer? Because, after all, you did admit everything before it occurred to you to search me. And if you’re waiting for specifics, I fail to see what will be gained by discussing your lack of intelligence.”

The man’s face tightened in annoyance and I wondered briefly why Brick was pushing the guy, but it was a fleeting thought because I was focused most intensely on his hands and what he was holding in them. Or, more specifically, what he wasn’t holding. The gun he had pressed doggedly into Brick’s back as they left The Little Devilz was nowhere to be seen. He had apparently decided he could handle a lone octogenarian without benefit of the weapon and holstered it somewhere on his massive body.

He slid the tiny recorder, roughly the size of an MP3 music player, into his breast pocket and reached for Brick, placing one beefy hand on my uncle’s shoulder and roughly shoving him toward the edge of the roof. It happened so quickly it almost caught me off-guard. I had been waiting for some big speech from the guy about what he was going to do to Brick, like the ones the bad guys always seemed to make on TV.

Apparently this particular bad guy wasn’t bright enough to come up with such a soliloquy, or maybe he was just unmotivated and wanted to get this unpleasantness over with so he could get back to the club and all the naked women. In any event, he began pushing Brick toward his death. To my utter amazement, my uncle still looked completely unruffled.

I stepped through the door and made sure I cleared the sheet-metal entryway before training the gun on him and demanding, “Stop right there!” My voice sounded strong and confident and I wondered where the hell that was coming from. I certainly didn’t feel strong or confident.

The man froze and for a long moment nothing happened. Far off in the distance I heard a siren wailing and I wished it was headed here although I knew it wasn’t. The man swiveled his head and looked over at me, surprise etched in his eyes and maybe a little regret, too, as it dawned on him, much too late, that he hadn’t been up against just one octogenarian. He had been taken down by one octogenarian and one mostly out-of-shape divorced accountant from L.A.

Brick removed the man’s hand from his shoulder gently, almost apologetically, and straightened his jacket. I could see the man calculating the odds of grabbing my uncle and using him as a human shield in a desperate attempt to regain the advantage. “Don’t even think about it,” I snapped as I pointed the gun at his chest. Incredibly, my hands had stopped shaking.