Guilty Minds

66

I stood still, the Glock I’d confiscated pointed at the guy.

His weapon was a semiautomatic pistol as well. It was matte black and looked like a Glock, too. He was a young guy, in his twenties, with a military haircut, high and tight. He was holding his pistol two-handed, his grip and stance expert. But he looked tense. He was blinking rapidly.

I didn’t like that. A tense guy with a gun could easily do stupid stuff.

“Put the gun down,” he said. His voice was high and strained.

“You first,” I said.

I was cursing myself for doing this without backup, a team, without at least one other guy. That had been both sloppy and arrogant. Or maybe I was simply being driven by my anger, which made me careless. Because I’d just walked right into a trap.

He blinked some more. “I mean it.” There was a slight quaver in his voice. “Put the gun down.”

“Or what?” I said.

I heard a door behind me open, and in my peripheral vision I could make out a human shape. I shifted my eyes to the right, keeping the pistol trained on the tense guy.

Without turning my head I couldn’t see the new guy clearly, but I could make out enough to know he had a gun pointed at me, too.

“Drop the gun,” the second guy said in a deep voice. He didn’t sound nervous.

I calculated my odds. They weren’t favorable. But it was the first guy, the anxious guy, that worried me. He was likely to have an itchy trigger finger. He looked like he wanted to shoot someone. That someone being me.

I didn’t really have a choice, or at least not one that would end with me alive. I lowered Curtis Schmidt’s Glock and then dropped it onto the floor, where it clattered loudly.

The two men moved in toward me, weapons still pointed, their movements coordinated. I turned to my right, finally able to look at the second guy. I recognized him as Vogel’s driver. A man of multiple talents. He was pointing a semiautomatic at me, too, a Glock 26. I wondered where all the Glocks were coming from, whether there’d been a big sale, and then I remembered that Glocks were the Metropolitan Police Department’s weapon of choice. Their service weapon was the Glock 17, probably the most popular law-enforcement pistol in the world. Off-duty, MPD cops were allowed to carry a Glock 26, the so-called baby Glock.

This guy looked around ten years older than the first guy, a little beefier, with black hair that was short but not military-short. He pointed a finger at the nervous guy and said, “Cover me.” Then he slid his pistol into a holster on his right hip.

Coming closer to me he pulled out of his back pocket some long pieces of white plastic. Flex-cuffs. Disposable restraints. They were planning to cuff me, not kill me. Unless I struggled with the second guy. Then the itchy-trigger-finger guy would get to pull the trigger.

Therefore struggling was probably not a good idea.

“Front or back?” I said to the driver.

“Huh?”

“You want my hands in front or behind?”

“Behind. Let’s make this easy.”

“That’s my plan,” I said.

The driver came closer still and said, “Back up a couple of steps.”

I did, and then he reached down and picked up the Glock. Then he set it down on a corner of the metal desk.

“Turn around.”

I did.

I put my hands behind my back, wrists together.

“Palms outward.”

I turned my hands. I felt him bind my wrists with a flex-cuff, then cinch it tight. I was a bit surprised they were using ordinary zip ties and not the law-enforcement grade ones. YouTube was full of videos showing how to get out of zip-tie restraints.

Then he pointed to a metal chair nearby and said, “Sit, please.”

It was the sort of chair that was made out of aluminum and manufactured by the hundreds of thousands during World War II for navy warships. Rustproof, nonmagnetic, lightweight, and made to survive torpedo blasts. Now you see them in prisons and in chic restaurants.

I sat in the chair, my hands sticking out through the open back. He pulled out some more zip ties and looped each ankle to a chair leg. I think he even zip-tied my wrist restraints to eye-bolts under the seat. So much for YouTube videos. Getting out of this situation would take some time.

“All right,” the guy said. “No trouble.”

“I get it.”

“Okay.” He signaled to the first guy, who slowly lowered his weapon.

“Wait here.”

He left the room. I looked at the first guy, who’d stayed behind. He was still holding his weapon, but down at his side. He glowered at me as if I were a stray dog that might be rabid, and he kept his distance. He didn’t want to get close.

About a minute later a tall, bald guy with a shaved head and cauliflower ears limped into the room.

I smiled when I realized who it was.

Curtis Schmidt was wearing jeans and a black sweatshirt. On his left knee was a complicated-looking orthopedic brace with buckles and hinges and Velcro straps. He had a gun holstered on his hip. His deep-set eyes glittered when he saw me.

I’m fairly sure he smiled, too.

He approached, limping, both fists balled.

“You’re not seriously going to hit a guy who’s tied up, are you?” I said.

He took a few steps closer.

“Isn’t that cheating?” I said. “How about we make this even and you—”

Schmidt assumed a boxer’s stance, his hobbled left leg forward, his right foot back, pivoting. His elbows in, his left hand up by his chin, he threw a right cross directly from his chin to my abdomen.

My adrenaline surged, and in that moment, everything slowed down.

I saw his fist coming at my stomach and I knew I had to relax my abdominal muscles, not tense them. I exhaled sharply through my mouth at the same instant that his fist slammed into my stomach. Schmidt grunted loudly.

The pain was staggering.

Everything went white and sparkly. I gasped. For a long moment I couldn’t breathe. My diaphragm spasmed, paralyzed.

I heard Schmidt chuckle.

When I finally was able to draw air into my lungs, I panted a few times. Then I said, “That all you got?”

But it came out in a high whisper, almost inaudible. Schmidt couldn’t make out what I was trying to say.

He leaned in, close enough that I could smell his rank breath. “Huh?”

I whispered again, “That all you got?”

But it was still hard to understand, and he cocked his head, moving in close, listening, smiling. “Trying to say something, Heller?”

What I did next required every last bit of my remaining strength, and there wasn’t much of it left.

I clenched my teeth, tucked in my chin, stiffened my neck muscles. Leaned back and abruptly snapped my head forward, crashing the crown of my head into his nose.

The crunch was audible.

All of a sudden there was blood everywhere. Blood streamed down his face as if someone had opened a faucet. It was a curtain of blood. He roared with pain and staggered backward, then crashed to the ground, his left leg straight out like a toppled bowling pin.

His hands flew to his face. He screamed, surprisingly high in pitch. Sprawled on the ground, he howled in pain, but I think it was something more than pain. It was humiliation.

Then he drew his Glock and, as he crabbed unsteadily to his feet, he pointed it at me.

The door opened and a second later I heard a voice barking: “Stand down, Schmitty!”

It was Thomas Vogel. He was still wearing his navy suit and red tie, and it looked like he’d freshened up. With his gray-flecked black hair, parted sharply on his left side, and his brushy mustache, he looked officious. He could have been a maître d’ at an expensive restaurant or the manager of a Mercedes dealership. But there was something in his swagger, something about his barrel-chested physique that bespoke the confidence of someone physically imposing, someone who was used to getting his way.

Schmidt lowered his gun at once. His left hand gripped his ruined nose. The blood kept flowing.

“Can I have the room, please?” Vogel said. His voice reverberated, adenoidal and powerful.

He looked at me, shaking his head slightly, while the two men exited, Schmidt trailing blood. Vogel looked amused and maybe a little embarrassed.

When the door closed, he said, “My apologies. I really should send Schmitty to anger-management school.”

I had a headache, and I was still finding it hard to get air in my lungs.

“So you’re Nick Heller,” he said.

“I’d shake your hand but...” I managed to say.

“I know all about you. You’re an interesting guy.”

I took a few shallow breaths, the best I could do.

“A man of paradoxes, I’d say. I’m familiar with your army records. I know what you did at Kunduz. The blood on your hands.” He shook his head again, and I couldn’t tell whether it was with disapproval or admiration.

He was talking about an episode in my past that I never discussed and preferred to forget.

“You do what you have to do,” he said. “You understand that, I can tell.”

“What do you want?”

“Just a little talk. We’re both busy men. We’ll keep this brief.”

“Okay. How about getting these cuffs off me?”

He nodded. “Sure. Soon.” He scuffed the toe of his brown calfskin brogue at the edge of a little creek of blood that was already starting to dry. “You know, in our line of work, there’s the sheep and there’s the shepherds. Guys like us, we’re the shepherds. We take care of the sheep. We protect them and make sure they live quiet, safe lives. Isn’t that really what they pay us for?”

I looked at him and said nothing.

He went on, “You and me, we don’t have an issue here. You may think we do, but we don’t. We’re like Germany and France — mortal enemies during the Second World War, and a few years later they’re trading partners. History of the world.”

“Do you have a point?”

He smiled. “We may do things differently, you and me, but ultimately we’re on the same side. The problem comes when clients — civilians — distract us. Set us against each other. There’s no reason for us to be at each other’s throats.”

“Is that right.”

“Look, Heller, you have your soft targets. We both know that.”

I just looked at him.

“There’s that woman who works for you, Dorothy something. There’s that nephew you’re really close to. The reporter from Slander Sheet. Hell, there’s even your mother, back in Boston. Soft targets.”

“Don’t even think about it, Vogel.”

“Man, I hate like hell to be talking like this. We should be working together, what I’m saying. Keeping the sheep safe.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don’t want to be on the wrong side of me, Heller. We work this out, same time next year I’ll be sending you clients.”

“Uh-huh.”

“We don’t? Get yourself a black suit. You’ll be going to a lot of funerals.”

His cell phone rang, and he took it out of his pocket. “Vogel,” he said. “Yeah. Got it. I’m on my way.” He turned around, called out, “Rafferty, let’s go.” Then to me he said, “I’m sorry, I’ve got a meeting.”

He took out one of his metallic business cards and slid it into my shirt pocket. He waved vaguely at me, at the chair and the zip ties and everything. “We’ll give you some time to think it over.”