Angel Face

TWENTY-EIGHT

There’s no ductwork beneath the sleeve Carter disassembles. Removed long ago, the metal was undoubtedly sold for salvage. The sleeve and cap might have been pulled at the same time, pulled and sold, but that would have necessitated patching the hole in the roof, an expense apparently foregone.

As Carter anticipated, the resulting hole is just big enough to accommodate his shoulders and the equipment bag. He lowers the bag twenty feet to the concrete floor, repositions the grappling hook and slides down the rope to land in a corner behind stacked rolls of carpeting. Briefly, and not for the first time, he considers pulling the M89 tucked inside the bag, only to decide that the weapon’s more likely to hinder than to help. Handguns, like the Glock with its fifteen-round magazine, offer a distinct advantage in close range battles, increased mobility more than compensating for the loss in firepower. It would be a different story if the M89 was a fully automatic weapon, but unlike assault rifles, it has to be fired one shot at a time, the same as the Glock.

Carter unties the rope, opens the bag and removes the little flash bomb and the ski mask. He tucks the bomb into his shirt pocket, pulls the ski mask over his head, then hefts the bag and carries it to the stairway leading to the basement. The bag’s going to remain behind, at least for the present, and he lays it on the floor before descending. His tread is light, a matter of habit, not necessity. The stairway is made of poured concrete, virtually eliminating the possibility of his footfalls making any sound at all.

At the bottom, Carter takes the flash bomb from his pocket and cradles it in his palm. Then he shuts his eyes for a moment, the better to visualize the sequence to follow, the better to find his own center. He can die here and he knows it. The trick is to replace fear with acceptance, to reach a state of pure purpose, to become a machine designed for battle, a machine indifferent to outcome.

Carter opens his eyes, committed now. He feels nothing inside, not even excitement, his focus too intense to allow for emotion of any kind. A yard away, the flimsy, ill-fitting door between himself and his objective beckons. Carter swivels his right hip back and bends his knee slightly. When his balance is perfect, he comes forward, running the energy from his hip, through his thigh, his calf, his ankle, and into the lock itself.

The door crashes open, the wood around the lock splintering, as Carter knew it would. He slams the flash bomb on to the concrete floor inside, then covers his eyes with his left hand and draws the Glock with his right.

The flash, when the gunpowder ignites, is so intense that it bleeds through his fingers. Darkness follows a split second later and Carter leaps through the doorway. Before coming to an abrupt stop, he takes four running steps into the room, his head swiveling left and right. He first registers a man directly in front of him. The man wears brown boxers and a wife-beater T-shirt and his unseeing eyes stare up at the ceiling. To his right, a second man lies sprawled on a half-inflated air mattress. His hands cover his eyes and he’s muttering the word ‘motherfucker’ over and over again. Behind him, a third man reaches for a semi-automatic handgun lying on a table. Carter shoots this man first, pulling the trigger twice, a classic, center of mass double-tap. The rounds impact the man’s chest within an inch of each other and he drops to the floor, leaving his weapon behind.

The man on the mattress comes next. He’s lowered his hands at the crash of the gunshots, but his eyes are looking off to Carter’s left when Carter again pulls the trigger twice. The man raises a hand to the wounds on his chest, catching the first few drops of blood. Then his eyes roll up into his head and he falls back.

The third man, the man standing directly in front of Carter, has recovered his sight. He appears to be in his early twenties, a tall skinny kid with a mop of black hair that’s standing straight up. The crash of gunfire still echoes in the confined space and the sharp odor of cordite is thick enough to sting his rapidly blinking eyes.

‘Hey, I’m not fuckin’ armed. Take what the fuck you want. Take the fuckin’ building. I don’t give a fuck.’

Carter’s impressed. Four fucks in four sentences. Meanwhile, the kid’s staring at his friends. They’re not moving, not even groaning.

‘Anybody else here?’ Carter asks.

‘Nobody, I swear.’

A door on the far side of the basement flies open before Carter registers the lie. The man who steps out has a gun in his hand and he’s pulling the trigger as fast as he can, Gentleman Jerry minus the part about aiming. As Carter spins to face the threat, a bullet slams into his body armor on the left side, a matter of pure chance. The round doesn’t penetrate the Kevlar fabric, but the pain is ferocious. Carter ignores it, as he’d once ignored the roundhouse kicks delivered to his lower ribcage by a mixed martial artist named Chappy Jorgenson. He raises the Glock, sights in on the man’s chest and fires twice. Both shots strike home and the man sags into the door frame, still holding on to his weapon, an unacceptable result. Carter fires for a third time and the bullet punches a hole in the man’s face just below his right eye. Game over.

Carter spins on his heel to face the last man standing. Or the next to last, if he includes himself. The kid’s eyes are wide enough to pass for headlights. Though his lips tremble and his jaw hangs open, he doesn’t make a sound.

Carter lets the silence build for a moment, then wags a finger and says, ‘Liar, liar, pants on fire.’

‘What, what?’

Out in the field, on capture or kill missions, prisoners were never taken, nor witnesses left behind. But Carter’s got work ahead of him, physical labor, and he’s pretty sure at least one of his ribs is cracked, if not broken. Every breath produces a jet of pain that he’s struggling to mask.

‘Cat got your tongue?’ he says.

‘Don’t kill me.’

Carter likes that, a simple plea, with no excuse offered for the lie. ‘What’s your name?’

‘Al.’

‘OK, Al. Walk to the foot of the stairs, sit down, put your hands under your ass and cross your legs. Don’t make me ask you twice. Do it now.’

Al Zeffri’s a simple man. Certainty appeals to him and he’s happiest when he only has to think about one thing at a time. Right now he believes, with all his heart and soul, and quite correctly, that his life is hanging by a thread. If he does anything at all to antagonize the man with the gun, his parents will be forced to bear the costs of a funeral they can’t afford. He obeys Carter, retreating to the foot of the stairs, assuming the position.

Carter lets the Glock fall to his side as he moves from one fallen enemy to another, checking for a pulse, pronouncing each man dead. That task complete, he approaches Al.

‘You’re in over your head,’ he explains. ‘I’m better than you, better trained and better prepared. Do you understand that?’

Zeffri glances at his buddies as he performs a simple calculation. Four men assigned to guard the basement, three of them dead, one attacker who’s calm as a fuckin’ robot. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I get it.’

Carter touches the Glock’s barrel to the top of Al’s head as he skirts the man to climb the stairs. He retrieves his tool bag and half-drags it back down, finally dropping it into Al’s lap.

‘You’re going to break into Bobby’s office.’

‘The Bunker?’

‘Yeah, the Bunker.’ Carter’s ribs are on fire, but his tone conveys certainty. ‘If you do a good job, if you work real hard, I’m going to let you live. You want to live, right?’

‘Yeah, I do.’

‘Good. Now carry the bag to the office door, put it down, then kneel down beside it. Understand? Carry the bag, drop the bag, kneel. Do it now.’

Carter follows Al across the basement. The kid’s shoulders are slumped and his head’s slightly bowed. He’s apparently surrendered. Carter finds himself annoyed. Keeping his promise will entail logistical problems – there’s no convenient place to confine the gangster and there are guns everywhere – problems he doesn’t have time to resolve. Carter glances at his watch: eighteen minutes.

When Al drops to his knees, Carter issues a series of commands, pausing between each until the task is completed.

Take the rifle out of the bag and hand it to me. Take the propane torch out of the bag and place it next to you. Take the pry bar out of the bag and lay it next to the torch. Take the hammer out and lay it next to the pry bar. Take out the chisel and lay it next to the hammer.

Al obeys each command. He doesn’t protest, doesn’t ask any questions, doesn’t say anything until Carter instructs him to close the bag. Then he manages a wistful, ‘OK?’

‘Yeah, so far, so good. But it gets a little tricky now. Have you ever used a torch?’

‘Yeah, I used to work demolition.’

Carter tosses him a cigarette lighter. ‘See, what we’re gonna do is burn away the wood around the lock so the door will open with the lock still in place. But what I want you to do right now is run your finger around the lock. Do it.’

Al’s right forefinger traces the edge of the lock. Then he looks up, his dark eyes reminding Carter of a puppy’s.

‘Good, Al, very good. That’s the part you’re going to burn. Only there’s a problem. Can you guess what it is?’

‘You’re afraid I’ll try to burn you?’

‘No, that’s not it. If you move on me, I’ll kill you without hesitation. I think you know that. The problem is that the door might catch on fire. See, there are no windows in the basement and the dinky ventilation system won’t handle the smoke, so we can’t have a fire. You with me so far?’

‘No fire.’

‘Exactly. Use the propane torch to char the wood ...’

‘Char?’

‘Blacken. Use the propane torch until the wood turns black, then use the hammer and the chisel to gouge the black part away. After you gouge out as much as possible, use the torch to blacken some more.’

Carter positions himself fifteen feet to Al’s left and slightly behind him. Now he can watch the kid and the stairway at the same time. If there’s to be an intrusion, it will have to come down those steps.

‘Start now, Al. Light the torch.’

The process is slow, as Carter expected even before he came down the stairs. Perhaps three inches thick, the door is made of seasoned oak. It shows little tendency to char, much less burn, and Al’s forced to wield the hammer and chisel again and again. Five minutes pass, then ten, then fifteen, with Carter urging his captive to work harder. The pain in Carter’s ribcage has eased off, but he’s not all that confident about his ability to re-climb the rope and haul up two heavy bags afterward.

‘OK, Al, you’ve done good work. You’re almost through. Now, stand up and kick the door in.’

Al’s as slow and uncoordinated as he is big and strong. The remaining wood around the lock splinters, but doesn’t break on his first, second or third kick. Carter decides to motivate him.

‘If you don’t break through that door, and I mean right the fuck now,’ he declares, his tone matter-of-fact, ‘I’ll kill you and do it myself.’

Al launches himself at the door, slamming his shoulder and his head into the wood. Somehow, he misses the lock, which remains attached to the frame when the door crashes open, offering next to no resistance. That leaves Al to land in a stunned heap on the brown carpet in Bobby’s office.

Carter glances at his watch: forty-two minutes. He follows Al into the office, flips the light switch and looks around. There’s nothing – no suitcase, no box – large enough to hold the sort of money he’s hoping to find. That leaves the room’s two closets.

‘Get up, Al.’

‘I think I hurt my head.’

‘Get up, Al.’

Al presses a hand to the right side of his head and staggers to his feet. ‘I did what you asked me. I did it.’

‘True enough, but you’re not quite finished.’

Carter’s reminded of the game show, Let’s Make A Deal. Is the prize behind door number one or door number two? In this case, he’s allowed to try both, which doesn’t mean, of course, that he won’t be zonked. Which doesn’t mean that he hasn’t killed three men for nothing.

Carter points to the closet door furthest away, the smaller of the two, and says, ‘Open that door.’

Al complies, a half-assed smile on his face. His usefulness has pretty much come to an end and he knows it. Shelves dominate the closet’s interior, from top to bottom. There’s a mop, a bucket and a vacuum cleaner jammed between the shelves and the door, but no suitcase.

‘The other one now.’

Despite his outward calm, Carter releases a held breath when Al pulls the door open to reveal a suitcase next to a bag of golf clubs. That it should be unprotected seems impossible at first glance, at least to Carter, but there’s a simple explanation. Bobby never kept money in his office because his office would be the first place searched by the cops if he became the target of an investigation. Carter’s emergence forced him to bring the money where he could protect it with muscle, a perfectly rational decision. If he’d left the money in the Bronx, it would already be gone.

‘Take out the suitcase, lay it on the desk and open it.’

Carter half-expects the suitcase to be locked, but it’s not. Opened, it reveals stacks of banded hundreds and fifties. Carter looks down at his watch: forty-six minutes.

‘I need you to move a little faster, Al. First, close the suitcase. Then put the tools back in the bag and carry the suitcase and the bag to the stairs. Do it now.’

‘Please ...’

‘Do it now, Al.’

Al’s expression is glum, but he doesn’t protest. He repacks the tool bag, picks up the bag and the suitcase and walks toward the stairwell. Carter’s now thinking that his night’s work is almost over, but it’s not to be. As Al lays his burdens down, the radio strapped to Carter’s belt clicks twice. Bobby Ditto’s come to play. He’s come to play and he’s brought a friend along, hopefully the Blade.

Carter waits until Al turns to face him. In combat, this kind of decision, whether to kill a prisoner, was beyond his pay grade. Now he displays the enlisted man’s first instinct, which is to cut through red tape. He puts a bullet into Al’s right knee, then silences the kid’s scream by slamming the Glock into the side of his head.