Angel Face

TWENTY-NINE

Carter was right about everything. Damn him. The minutes are dragging, every second an opportunity for self-torment. Angel’s sitting in the back of the van, in the dark, surrounded by the cop’s useless tracking equipment, her galloping imagination leaping from one catastrophe to another. Just now, her attention has turned to the walkie-talkie, the one strapped to Carter’s belt. Walkie-talkies have a limited range, as Carter explained when he instructed her in their use. If the men inside the warehouse defeat Carter – if they kill him, let’s be honest – the next item on their agenda will be whoever’s on the other end of the walkie-talkie. That would be Angel Tamanaka, thank you.

Angel fishes through her purse, pushing the detritus aside, until she finds the little automatic tucked beneath the dish towel. She takes the weapon out and stares down, the sight of it producing a rueful laugh as she remembers how powerful she felt when she first cradled it in her palm. Now she’s envisioning Carter’s Glock, envisioning his Glock while she imagines the assault rifles and street-sweeper shotguns available to the gangsters inside the warehouse.

Well, she finally decides, the little gun definitely has one practical application. She can put it to her head and pull the trigger before allowing herself to be captured.

Angel’s itching to make a hasty retreat. The van’s key is in the ignition. She need only give it a little twist, need only turn the wheel slightly to avoid the graffiti-covered panel truck in front of her, need only step on the gas and ...

Angel’s train of thought comes to an abrupt stop, as if that train had jumped the tracks to slam into the side of a mountain. Two blocks away, a car turns on to the block, its headlights so bright in the side-view mirror that Angel can’t tell the make or the model. But then the vehicle passes beneath the only working street lamp on the next block and the light bar spanning the roof leaps out at her. Cops.

Angel’s mind kicks back into high gear, the transition between stunned and warp speed too brief to measure. What if Carter shows up right now, a suitcase tucked beneath his arm and who knows how many bodies left behind? What if the cops are responding to a silent alarm inside the warehouse and they catch him off-guard? What if they decide to check out the van? What will she tell them when they find her crouched in the back?

Driver fatigue is responsible for soooooooooooo many accidents. I just had to take a nap.

Yeah, that’d work. Angel can almost feel the cuffs settling around her wrists, almost hear the cops radio for back-up. Which leads her to another question. What if a judge sentenced her to spend the rest of her life in a cage? How would she feel, standing there, listening, her lawyer’s attention already straying to the next defendant on her list? This is a question Carter’s already posed, a question she left unanswered.

Paralyzed by fear, Angel doesn’t move. A good thing, too, because the cops are simply patrolling the sector assigned to them, their mission as innocent as a donut run, and just as routine. Angel hunches down as the patrol car slides past. Now she can see the cops in silhouette, a man and a woman, both on their cellphones. At the corner, they take a right and head toward the Ikea box store on the waterfront.

Angel doesn’t have to check her pulse. Her heart’s thudding against her ribs, the beats coming so fast she’s unable to count them. And the saddest part is that risk is what she signed up for, the great adventure, a walk on a side that’s proving much too wild for the likes of Angel Tamanaka. And still no sign of Carter, no signal from the man who warned her, again and again, that he wasn’t invulnerable, had no super powers, and might not survive his next violent encounter.

Angel extends her wrist into the front seat where there’s enough light to read the hands on her watch. Forty-one minutes. It might as well be forty-one years. She falls back against the seat and methodically surveys her surroundings. All quiet, except for her out-of-control brain, which again poses a series of what-if questions.

What if she panicked when the cops turned on to the street two blocks away? What if she jumped into the front, started the van and tried to flee? What if she signaled Carter and he now believed, wrongly, that the cops presented a threat? What if he aborted the operation? What if he came out shooting?

Enough, enough. Angel covers her ears and shakes her head violently, her hair whipping the sides of her face hard enough to sting. Somehow, a memory surfaces, something a cop boyfriend told her a few months after she arrived in New York. Fight, flight or fright, he’d insisted, are the only possible reactions to a sudden threat. You ran away, or you raised your fists, or you just plain froze. Angel had taken the third path, that was obvious, and she didn’t fault herself. But her cop lover had been wrong. There was a fourth way, a way embodied by Leonard Carter. Fear leads to panic, he’d insisted, and panic is the ultimate enemy. Stay calm, fight well.

Angel’s attention is drawn by movement on the left side of the windshield. Across the street, a wharf rat makes its way along a corrugated fence. The creature slithers a few yards, its back hunched, then stops to raise its snout and sniff the air before dashing forward again. Initially repulsed, Angel watches the animal until it comes upon a small gap in the fence and wriggles through.

Somehow, the rat’s manifest caution serves to calm Angel. Though subject to no imminent threat, it had remained supremely vigilant, nose twitching, head turning, as if surrounded by enemies. Angel checks her watch before settling down. Forty-five minutes. Fifteen lifetimes to go.

In fact, only three lifetimes pass, three minutes, before Bobby Ditto’s armored Ford describes the same left turn made by the cops five minutes before. Angel recognizes the car immediately, but this time she manages to check a rising panic. She signals Carter first, then drops the radio on the seat and tells herself to think carefully. There are two men in the vehicle that slides past the van, its sound system blaring, Bobby Ditto and the other one, the one who grabbed her ass as they walked down the street on the day Carter rescued her. The one who spelled out exactly what sadistic games he intended to play with her in the hours preceding her death.

Angel slides the side door open and gets out before the Explorer comes to a stop in front of the warehouse. Her eyes criss-cross her surroundings, evaluating risk and reward. Crouching, she dashes across the street, exposed for a few seconds, until she finally drops to a knee before the corrugated fence previously traversed by the rat. She raises the little gun and focuses on the end of the block, fifty feet distant. If she was spotted as she crossed the street, Bobby and his buddy – the Blade, that’s his name – will have to come around the corner to stand directly in her line of fire. Not that she’s likely to hit anything from this distance with a poorly manufactured .32, but one thing is clear to her. She didn’t freeze and she didn’t flee. That means Bobby and the Blade have to be incapacitated, at the very least, for her and her partner to survive. Fight being the only option still on the table.

Angel gets to her feet, takes a few steps and comes to a stop, the gun held out in front of her, steeling herself against a sudden assault, prepared as Carter might prepare, or so she hopes. She pauses long enough to draw a breath and release it slowly, then continues to advance, in fits and starts, until the sound system in the Explorer suddenly cuts off and she hears Bobby Ditto shout, ‘What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.’

The Blade echoes his boss. ‘What, what, what?’ he asks.

‘Get around here!’

‘Get around where?’

‘Get around here, ya fuck. Just do it.’

Propelled by his boss’s exasperated tone, the Blade circles the car. ‘You wanna tell me what’s happenin’?’

‘Donny’s not answerin’. And don’t tell me he’s not gettin’ a signal. I spoke to him this afternoon.’ Bobby punches Donny Thorn’s number into his cellphone for the second time. He listens through four ringtones, all the way to the faggy message at the end: Hi, this is Donny. I can’t come to the phone right now, but if you’d care to leave a message, I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.

‘Bein’ as it’s four o’clock in the morning, maybe Donny shut off his phone,’ the Blade suggests. ‘I mean, the alarm on the front door is still set. You can see the red light blinkin’ from here.’

Bobby looks at the light, his mind still whirling. ‘What about the roof? Did you lock down the skylights?’

‘Yeah, with case-hardened padlocks, but even if Carter beat the locks some way, there’s still four men protectin’ your money. Unless you think Carter broke through the door in the basement and whacked four men before they could even warn us. I mean, we’re not talkin’ about punks.’

Bobby’s heart rate drops a notch or two, but he doesn’t move. The armored Explorer now stands between him and the warehouse, which is just the way he likes it. Carter might be anywhere, he might be nowhere. Bobby draws the H&K .40 cal tucked into his waistband as he studies the truck yard and the roofline, his gaze intent. But there’s little to be learned, what with the moon having set and working street lights few and far between. The trucks in the yard are parked haphazardly, creating impenetrable shadows, while the ledge on the roof, long in need of repair, is as broken and irregular as the Blade’s teeth after the cops worked him over.

‘Tell ya what, Marco,’ Bobby says. ‘How ’bout you stroll through the front door and check it out for yourself? Here, I’ll give ya the fuckin’ keys.’

The Blade’s face reddens, but he doesn’t take the challenge, in part because he’s not armed. ‘All right, Bobby, I get the point. So, now whatta we do? Wait for somebody to come out?’

‘No, lemme try one more thing.’ Bobby slides the gun inside his waistband, then scrolls through his phone’s call log. ‘I know I called him a couple of weeks ago,’ he tells the Blade.

‘Called who?’

‘Al Zeffri.’

‘I got his number.’ The Blade takes out his own cellphone, runs through his contact list for a moment, then presses the call button. He holds the phone aloft and both men listen to it ring four times before Zeffri’s voicemail kicks in.

‘Shit.’ Bobby again surveys the warehouse. If anything, the shadows are deeper. But it doesn’t really matter. He can’t lose the money, his own or the money fronted to him. If he does, he’s as good as dead.

‘I gotta go in,’ he says. ‘Simple as that. I gotta go in.’

‘I’m not armed, boss.’ The Blade’s gaze is intense, but his tone is apologetic. ‘We were just supposed to dump the freak tonight. I didn’t know we were comin’ here.’

Bobby instantly corrects his lieutenant. ‘What we were supposed to be is ready for anything.’

‘What can I say? You get caught with a gun, it’s three years minimum. And it wasn’t like the freak was gonna put up a fight.’

Bobby drops the cellphone into his pocket and fishes for his keys. He’s thinking that his life has been a battle from the day a federal judge sentenced his father to a sixty year bit. Bobby had been what? Fifteen years old? Yeah, fifteen years old and responsible for a morbidly obese mother who cried from morning to night, and a dimwit brother who got beat up every other day.

‘Boss?’

‘What, Marco? What the fuck do you want now?’

‘It ain’t what I want. It’s what she wants.’

Despite everything, despite even the gun in her hands, Bobby Ditto is taken with Angel Tamanaka’s beauty. The teardrop eyes, the glossy black hair, the rounded mouth and the determined little chin. Too determined. The gun’s moving between himself and the Blade, and her hand isn’t shaking.

Bobby Ditto knows the difference between a genuine threat and a bluff. Angel will not only pull the trigger if attacked, she’s only a heartbeat away from pulling the trigger right this minute. That’s OK with Bobby. He feels better now that there’s an enemy standing in front of him, and better still when the little gun settles on the Blade.

‘Remember me?’ Angel asks.

‘Yeah, I remember you.’

‘Remember all those things you said you were going to do to me?’

The Blade’s mouth opens, closes, opens again. ‘I was only tryin’ to scare you.’

‘Scare me into doing what?’

‘Into telling me where your partner was.’

‘Ah, so that means you weren’t going to tie my wrists to a ceiling beam? And that thing with the pliers? That was an empty threat? You were planning to let me go?’

Bobby’s measuring the distance between himself and Angel, maybe fifteen feet, two strides and a leap. The little automatic’s not a man stopper. Unless she gets real lucky, it won’t even slow him down. Of course, she doesn’t have to get lucky if he’s standing still when she pulls the trigger, which is why he intends to move on her when she finally shoots the Blade.

The Blade straightens up and draws a long breath through his prow of a nose. Old school to the max, threats from a whore don’t appeal to him, as Bobby knew they wouldn’t. If he was armed, his piece would already be in his hand.

Angel smiles. ‘Nothing to say?’

‘Yeah, I got something to say. Go fuck yourself.’

The conversation having come to a dead end, Angel pulls the trigger, surprising Bobby. Nevertheless, he moves before the echo dies off, his head down, hands reaching for the gun even as the Blade falls backward. He puts everything he has into the charge, but he’s not fast enough. A bullet whizzes by his ear when Angel fires a second time. Then he’s on her, slapping the gun away, pulling her into a bear hug, overwhelming her with his bulk and his strength. When he hears the little automatic clatter on the sidewalk, he knows he’s won. Not so the Blade. He’s lying on the ground with his head propped against the Explorer’s front door, one hand clutching his throat in a futile attempt to stem the blood gushing from a little hole beneath his Adam’s apple. He looks at his boss and tries to speak, but there are no words left for the Blade, only a trail of bubbles that spray from the hole to hang for a moment in the darkness.

‘Tell me your fuckin’ name.’

Bobby’s dropped into survival mode, a core space hollowed from a mountain of ice. He’s thinking it’s tough shit about Marco, but he can’t take his eyes off the blood streaming down the side of the SUV. In the dim light, the blood appears as black and thick as motor oil.

‘Louise,’ Angel replies, her tone quavering just a bit.

‘That’s not your fucking name.’

‘Sue me.’

Bobby Ditto’s massive left arm tightens around Angel’s chest as he draws the .40 cal with his free hand. He pushes the barrel into the back of Angel’s head and pulls her in close to the Explorer. They’re now standing in a little pool of the Blade’s blood.

‘You think I won’t kill you because you’re a woman?’

Angel manages a tiny laugh that’s very distant from the guffaw she hoped to produce. ‘Tell me something, Bobby. Are you still hoping your men in the basement are only asleep?’

‘Hear this, bitch. I die, you die.’

‘And vice versa.’

There’s nothing to be gained by arguing and Bobby keeps his thoughts to himself as he weighs his options. He’s telling himself that he should force the whore into the Explorer – the armored Explorer – and get the fuck out of Red Hook. The Blade’s lying in his own blood, his blank eyes sightless, and the minutes are ticking away. How long before somebody comes driving down the street, somebody with a cellphone? How long before Carter shows up? One thing is certain, with the alarm still set, Carter won’t be comin’ out the front door, which means he might be comin’ from anywhere. No, the thing to do is take the whore and bargain for the money later on. Only Bobby can’t make himself believe that any sane man would pay $497,000 for a whore. Bobby Ditto wouldn’t pay that much to get his mother back from heaven.

‘I die, you die,’ he repeats. ‘But I’m not leavin’ without my fuckin’ money.’

Carter’s greeted by the crack of a small caliber handgun when he finally hauls himself on to the roof. His first thought is of Angel, a thought he puts to one side. Both bags, the tool bag and the money bag, are attached to the other end of the rope on the floor of the warehouse. First things first. Carter slides the M89 off his shoulder, lays it on the black tar roof, then pulls up the bags, his ribs throbbing with the effort. The tool bag comes through easily, but the hard-sided suitcase wedges in the hole. Carter has to lie over the opening and yank it through with his bare hands, which does nothing to ease the pain. Still, he doesn’t hesitate. Spurred by the sound of voices in the distance, one of them Angel Tamanaka’s, he picks up the M89 and scans the roof in search of cover.

He notes, first, a low wall topped with red tiles at the edge of the roof. Most of the tiles are missing now, individual bricks as well. The broken pattern suits Carter, presenting an advantage compounded by the deep shadows on the roof. Forty feet away, a small air conditioning unit casts an even deeper shadow between itself and the wall. Carter’s nylon ski mask is soaked with sweat. It clings to his face like a suction cup, but he’s glad for it now. In the darkness, with only the top of his head exposed, he’ll be a shadow within a shadow, for all intents invisible.

Carter takes the last few yards on his knees and his elbows. He’s not unmindful of the need for haste. Gunshots tend to attract attention. Nevertheless, he remains calm as he lifts his head a few inches above the ledge and surveys the field of battle. At the other end of the block, Bobby Ditto’s standing behind the Explorer. He’s holding Angel tight against his chest and he’s pointing a gun at her head. Just behind Bobby, the unmoving legs of a man Carter assumes to be the Blade project on to the sidewalk.

Carter doesn’t drop the M89’s folding bipod. The ledge is too irregular, and he settles for laying the rifle’s stock on a patch of smooth brick. He finds himself admiring Angel, at least on one level. She definitely has pluck. But her leaving the van was a bad mistake and she’s compromised the operation. Carter’s able to recall a time when war was personal. He was a gung-ho soldier boy on his way to Afghanistan, prepared to do his bit, proud to serve his country. But Carter doesn’t have enemies now. He has competitors. Like Roberto Benedetti, who needs to be removed, post haste, from the game.

In the military, Carter almost always operated with a spotter. The spotter calculated distance, elevation and windage, matching each to ambient temperature, barometric pressure and angle of aim, upward or downward. Carter’s on his own here, but he’s far from handicapped. Mounted on the M89’s telescopic sight, a BORS optical ranging system does, in less than a second and with far greater accuracy, what took his spotter minutes to accomplish.

After allowing for all the variables, the effective distance between himself and the top of Bobby Ditto’s skull, according to the BORS unit, is 127 yards. Carter turns the elevation dial on the scope until it reaches the 127 yard mark and that’s it. The system has compensated for every other factor, including the downward angle. All he need do is train the scope on his target, squeeze the trigger and put a bullet in a two-inch circle. Without flinching, of course.

Eliminate the brain and the body stops. No message from the brain to the finger and Bobby will never pull that trigger. There’s even room for error. Bobby’s head is about four inches across. An inch either way won’t matter, not given the energy of a 7.62 mm hollow-point round. Bobby Ditto’s brain will literally explode.

Two inches off, on the other hand, and Angel Tamanaka wakes up on the wrong side of the grass.

Carter lays the butt of the rifle in the hollow of his shoulder, lays his cheek against the carbon fiber stock. He’s at home now, at rest in the safest place he’s ever known, his weapon cradled in his arms, his child, his baby. He dials up the magnification, peers through the sight, lays the cross-hairs dead-center on the top of Bobby’s head. Then he slips his finger through the trigger guard to caress the trigger, an old habit that’s become ritual. Still unhurried, he brings the trigger to the point of release and holds steady while he centers himself, breathing in, breathing out, seeking the quiet space between rest and action, between life and death. Only when he finds that emptiness inside himself does he squeeze the trigger.