Dead Drop

Chapter 17

Lynyrd Skynyrd still played over the park speakers when Quinn pulled open the door to the main office, the electric guitar riff helping to mask his approach. The inner lobby was just as he’d left it, the body of the park manager slumped at the front desk. His assistant, a woman named Tiffany according to Mukhtar, had been shot in the back, where she’d cowered in the corner, curled in a fetal position.

The door to the back hallway stood ajar, the feeble glow of emergency lighting coming from the manager’s office where the public-address system was located. Quinn paused at the threshold before going in, getting his bearings, remembering the layout of desks, doors, and windows from when he’d taped his phone to the handheld radio and placed it next to the PA microphone. More light spilled from the open door on the right side of the hall, less than fifteen feet away. He heard a rustle of movement, footsteps on carpet, and a nervous cough.

“I gave you what you needed,” a male voice said. “And this is what you give me?” It was gruff, and direct, accustomed to being in charge.

“Yeah, well,” a younger voice said. “You know how it is, Uncle Frank. It just looks better this way.”

“Hang on—” Two distinct cracks from a rifle came from inside the room, cutting off the older voice midsentence. It was dark enough that Quinn could see the flash of each shot.

Padding with quiet purpose down the hall, he stopped before he reached the office, stepping sideways inch by inch to get a glimpse of the interior without giving up his position. Cutting the pie, they called it.

The console against the wall across from the door came into view first. Quinn’s phone and the radio were still there, right where he’d left them. He took another half step, revealing the feet and legs of a prone man — the recipient of the recent gunfire. The dead man wore the gray slacks and navy blazer of park security. Blood plastered a thick mop of blond hair and broken skull to the carpet. A Glock pistol lay on the floor, inches from the man’s glazed eyes but too far from Quinn to do him any immediate good.

The squeak of metal from the other side of the desk drew Quinn forward another step. A low whistle followed the squeak, then whispered words Quinn couldn’t quite make out.

Quinn had opened enough safes in his life to know the sound of a door swinging open. A burglary? It was a stroke of cold and evil genius to hide a simple theft in the middle of a massacre of hundreds by religious zealots.

Another step brought the entire desk into view. A young man wearing the black polo of a park employee knelt in front of a box safe by the wall off the end of the desk. He stuffed banded stacks of money into a small black duffel. Apparently satisfied that everyone else in the park was too busy to bother him, Terry Spencer had leaned his rifle against the wall, a good five feet behind him, after he’d murdered his uncle. Focused on the money, he’d set a Russian RGD-5 hand grenade on the desk beside him, obviously intending to use the little green egg to blow up the place and cover his tracks when he left.

Quinn reached the desk in three quick bounds, snatching up the grenade and pulling the pin before Terry Spencer even knew he was there.

The boy spun at the noise and raised his hands as he tried to get a grip on the situation. He cocked his head sideways, then glanced at the rifle he’d left leaning against the wall.

Quinn held the grenade in his fist, the spoon under his fingers rather than the proper grip with it toward his palm.

“What are you going to do with that?” Terry smirked. “You toss a hand grenade and we both die.”

“Maybe so,” Quinn said, his voice low, almost a whisper.

“Those other guys out there…” Terry said, giving a bored sigh. “They can’t wait to be martyrs.” His eyes narrowed at Quinn and he shook his head. “But you don’t strike me as the kind of guy who wants to die.”

“All this for a robbery?” Quinn tamped back the rage. At this point, unbridled anger would only slow him down.

The kid smiled, taking Quinn’s question like some kind of compliment. He kept his hands up but wagged his head as if bragging over some touchdown pass he’d just made. “I know, right? The park’s so deep in blood right now, I get away with a couple hundred thousand cash and no one’s the wiser. Admit it. It’s pretty damn slick. They’d write books about me if they knew who I was.”

“Dozens of people…” Quinn whispered. “You planned all of this in order to cover a theft…” He wasn’t really surprised. Nothing another human did surprised him anymore.

“Two birds,” Terry said. “My friends have a little cause, and I simply jumped on board for my purposes. My uncle had connections to get us a few grenades. He was also nice enough to lend me a few of his guns…”

“And you kill him for it,” Quinn said, suddenly very tired.

“Who gives a shit about an uncle?” Terry scoffed. “Anyway, he was in on it, too. Listen, this has been fun, but I gotta run.” His eyes shifted again to his rifle.

Quinn waved the grenade again. “I wouldn’t do that, Terry,” he said. Cockroaches like these enjoyed darkness and anonymity, and speaking their names out loud often disrupted the loop of their thought process.

The boy gave a slow nod of pride. “You know who I am then?”

Quinn opened his hand to let the spoon fly off the grenade. Terry Spencer’s eyes flew wide at the sound of the muffled pop as the fuse ignited.

“Not really,” Quinn said. He pitched the grenade underhanded, past Terry Spencer and into the open safe, before diving sideways behind the desk, hands over his ears, mouth open.

The thick body of the safe acted like a mortar tube, focusing the force of the grenade’s blast out the open door, directly into Terry Spencer’s face.

Grenades were deadly, but they were nowhere near the massive explosions Hollywood made them out to be. Out of the line of the blast, Quinn was able to roll during the detonation and come up with the Glock. He was stunned and half deaf, but absent any permanent damage.

He turned immediately to cover Spencer but needn’t have bothered. The force of the blast had taken off much of the left side of the boy’s body. White tiles from the suspended ceiling littered the carpet. Bits of charred cash in various denominations fluttered down in the dusty air. The grenade had demolished half the room, but the PA system remained undamaged. Lynyrd Skynyrd played on uninterrupted, and the last few bars of “Call Me the Breeze” twanged away over the speakers.

Quinn now had two working guns, but was too far away to run back to the wave pool. The other terrorists had surely heard the explosion. He needed to contact Jacques before they worked out what had happened, but with the cell jammer still up there was no way to get him on the phone. Quinn staggered to the public sound-system console and stared down at the two-way radio he’d taped to his iPhone, working out the pros and cons of what he planned to do next.