Don Pendleton - Killing Trade

“Does that go all the way across the front of the building?” Bolan asked sharply.

She thought about it for a second. “Yes,” she said, as Bolan got to his feet, his Beretta in a low two-hand grip. “It connects all the apartments on this side.”

“Stay low,” Bolan told her. “Don’t go out until the shooting stops. And call 9-1-1!” He was moving before she could say more, throwing open the window and stepping outside. Wind tugged at his hair as he crept along the rusted metal fire escape. From the apartment two doors down, more gunfire erupted. It was the unmistakable chatter of an Uzi, punctuated by more of Burnett’s shotgun blasts.

Wincing as his combat boots rang on the metal fire escape, Bolan slowed and dropped to his knees as he neared the window he wanted. Then he threw himself on his back, using his legs to shove himself forward as he stared skyward, concealing himself between the window ledge and the floor of the fire escape. Below him, New York City continued to bustle, temporarily oblivious to the slaughterhouse within the unassuming fifth-floor walk-up on the Upper West Side.

There was another lull in the automatic gunfire. Bolan popped up, his pistol held compressed against his chest in both hands. He fired twice, punching spidery holes in the window glass, then lowered his shoulder and dived through. He came up, still targeting the shadow he’d seen through the glass—a single, relatively small man with a submachine gun in his fists. The gunman was shoving another stick magazine into the grip of the weapon.

“West!” Burnett called from the hallway. “Stop!” The small man charged the door. Bolan dived aside as a shotgun blast from the doorway peppered the rear wall of the apartment. Then Burnett was down, tackled as the Uzi fell to the floor. The two rolled into the corridor. Bolan closed on the doorway, his Beretta leading, unable to get a clear shot.

“Cooper!” Burnett called, wrestling for his shotgun.

As Bolan approached he could see blood soaking the khaki shirt the small man wore. Burnett’s blast hadn’t been a complete miss. The cop used his size advantage to muscle his way to his feet, shaking the smaller man back and forth as the pair fought each with both hands on the Remington.

Bolan aimed the Beretta two-handed, trying and failing to acquire his target. He lowered the weapon, then raised it again as first Burnett, then the small man moved into his line of fire. “Down!” he shouted.

Burnett took the cue and dropped onto his rear, falling back and slapping his arms. The small man, who had been pushing against Burnett’s resistance, flew forward with the shotgun in his hands. Bolan fired once, low, catching the gunman in the thigh. The man grunted and stumbled over Burnett down the corridor, out of Bolan’s view. The shotgun fell from his fingers.

“Stop!” Burnett called. From the floor he clawed for the gun holstered on his hip. Bolan reached the doorway as the wounded gunman rammed the door of the woman’s apartment two doors down. It opened and the woman screamed.

“Shit,” Burnett cursed, pushing to his feet with a .40-caliber Glock in his fists.

“Back! Get back!” the gunman shouted. He reappeared in the corridor, one arm around the young woman’s neck. He held a folding knife to her face, the serrated S-curved blade just barely below her right eye. His face was ashen. A pool of blood was forming where he stood.

Bolan advanced, the Beretta high in his line of sight. Burnett backed him as the two men crept forward.

“I said stop, damn your eyes,” the small man said. He spoke in a clipped, British accent. “Come any closer and, I swear, I’ll carve this bird’s eye out.”

The woman’s eyes widened at that, but to her credit she remained still. Bolan’s gaze found hers and her expression hardened with resolve.

“You’re going into shock,” the Executioner said. “You won’t be on your feet for long.”

“Get back, I said!” the wounded man shrieked. “I’m walking out of here, you lot, and little missy here is coming with me. If I start to go, I’ll cut her throat as I do. Now, drop the hardware!”

Bolan nodded, almost imperceptibly.

The woman jerked her head to the side, away from the knife. It was just enough. Bolan’s shot drilled through the man’s eye. The body collapsed, a puppet with its strings cut, the folding knife still clutched in one dead hand.

The woman screamed.

“Easy,” Burnett said, holstering his Glock. He went to her and put one arm around her shoulders as she started shaking. “Easy,” he said again. “It’s okay. We got him. We got him.”

Bolan stepped around them and leaned over the corpse. There was a lot of gore, but most of the face was still visible. He took his phone from the inside pocket of his windbreaker and checked the photo viewer, examining the small image on the color screen.

Burnett, still calming the distraught woman, caught Bolan’s frown. “Is it him?” he asked.

“No,” Bolan said, steadying himself on one knee. He activated his phone’s built-in digital camera, snapping a couple of shots of the dead man. “I’ll transmit these—”

“To where?” Burnett queried.

“I’ll send these,” Bolan said evenly, “for analysis.” He nodded to the woman. “Get her back to her apartment and call in before we’re buried in units responding to the gunfire. I’m going to check West’s apartment.”

Burnett nodded and ushered the crying woman past the body and through her doorway. Bolan backtracked, unclipping the SureFire combat light from his pocket. With the Beretta and the light together in a Harries hold, he swept the cluttered and dim studio, wary for West or someone else hiding in ambush.

The studio was a wreck. Apart from the bullet holes just added to it, and the litter of empty pizza boxes, soda cans and other bags of garbage, what little furnishings it held had been torn apart. The sofa cushions had been cut open, as had the mattress sitting without a box spring in one corner. A set of bookshelves had been knocked over and many of the books torn up as whoever had tossed the place—probably the dead man in the hallway outside—searched for hiding places. A rolling computer desk bearing a state-of-the-art desktop unit was relatively unscathed, but the computer itself had been gutted.

Bolan checked near the desk and found the hard drive on the floor. It was badly damaged. No computer technician himself, Bolan was not sure if its data was retrievable or not, but he placed the drive in a pouch of his blacksuit nonetheless.

Behind the desk, on the floor in the far corner of the studio, Bolan found Jonathan West.

The image in his phone’s data file confirmed it. It was Jonathan West and he was quite dead. The smell hit the Executioner as he examined the body, finding nothing in the man’s pockets and discovering a small-caliber wound behind the dead man’s left ear. Judging from the condition of the corpse, West had been murdered at least a few days previously.

The Executioner frowned again. The gunman he and Burnett had intercepted hadn’t been here to kill West, at least not that day. That meant he’d had some other purpose in mind. Bolan’s eyes fell on the gutted computer again. He would have the hard drive couriered to a mail drop for the Farm, where Aaron “The Bear” Kurtzman and his team could take a crack at it. Stony Man’s wheelchair-bound computer expert and his assistants had worked similar miracles in the past. If anyone could manage it, they could. It might be nothing, of course. But it might just be the case that the dead man in the corridor had come to destroy the computer, which meant the information on it might be valuable.

Bolan was no cop and he had no interest in playing detective. He did, however, need to find the source of the DU ammunition. Without West, there was no telling where it might be, where it was coming from, or how much more of it could be waiting to hit the streets and turn them red. If West could not tell the Executioner his secrets, perhaps West’s computer could.