The Pandora Key aka The Hostage Room

9

DJURO BULATOVIC HAD NEVER BEEN TO MY HOME, AND I had never been to his. I didn’t even know if he was domiciled in Boston. I knew we were friends, though, because only his friends got to call him Bo, and there hadn’t been a single time in three years that I had called for help that he didn’t either show up or send a very capable proxy. He was known for his pastel sport coats, but tonight he wore his work clothes-all black.

Bo was an enforcer, a gun for hire, a person who used every tool at his disposal to persuade individuals to adopt his clients’ point of view. The first time we’d met, he had wrapped his big hand around my throat and squeezed until I passed out. But that had been a case of mistaken identity. He had been deeply remorseful about strangling the wrong woman nearly to death, which is how I had apparently established my permanent marker with him.

Through me, he had also met Harvey. Harvey did his taxes for him, which provided me with one of the few interesting personal details I knew about Bo. He earned in the mid-six figures annually from Djuro Bulatovic, LLC, which he described as a “consulting company.”

Actually, I knew a few more things. He was a big man who came from violence. It was obvious in the way he moved, in the way he always seemed to be looking ahead to the next problem or looking back to make sure the last one wasn’t catching up to him. Since he was Bosnian, I suspected he had fought the Serbs as a soldier or part of a militia and probably killed more than his share. He had a soldier’s reverence for duty, and he lived by a strict code of honor. Even if he hadn’t liked Harvey, he would have considered it bad form to kidnap a man in a wheelchair.

He opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat next to me. He turned to the back and reported in to his two colleagues, um…Employees? Accomplices? I never knew who the men were that he brought along. I was sure Timon and Radik were as strong and fast and skilled at the task that lay ahead as the usual crew he brought.

Bo spoke to his guys in either Bosnian or Croat or Serbian. I had asked him one time which he spoke. He said everyone in his country spoke all three, sometimes at the same time. When he was done, he turned to brief me.

“All three are in the kitchen. They just brought food, so they’re eating together. No one is standing post.” He shook his head. “Stupid.”

“Did you see Harvey? Is he in there?”

“He is in a back room on the floor. I saw him through the window.”

“Is he alive?”

“I do not believe that three men with an arsenal would be guarding a corpse.”

The reference to Harvey as a corpse was disturbing, but, as usual, he had a point. I had to calm down or at least find a way to channel the energy. I looked through the dark toward the house. Knowing Harvey was in there got me mentally mobilized. My body followed suit. Everything sped up-pulse, respiration, knuckle cracking.

“What’s the plan?”

“We take them.”

I looked at Bo. “Take them how?”

“Shoot the guards. Find Harvey. Bring him out.”

Shoot. Find. Bring. It sounded so simple. “Why do we have to shoot them? Maybe we should just try to-”

“Hit them over the head and render them unconscious?”

I had been about to say “subdue them,” but that worked, too. I felt the ridiculousness of that idea, the complete, television-informed naïveté. But Bo didn’t treat me as ridiculous. It was one of the things I liked about him.

“To subdue them,” he said, “would require that we get close enough to be killed ourselves. Or it might give them the chance to kill Harvey before we can get to him.”

“But we don’t even know who they are or why they took him. What if they’re, I don’t know, police? Or some other good guys?”

“They are not the good guys. This much I know.” He angled his head and studied me. “You have killed before, killed with your hands.”

“The only person I ever killed was trying hard to kill me back.”

He nodded sagely. “Then you will have no problem. These men will kill you if you do not kill them first.”

“I think I have to know that for sure, Bo. I think we have to give them a warning.”

He sighed deeply. I knew he was the expert, but I didn’t want him to count on me to shoot a man in cold blood if I didn’t think I could.

“We will give them a chance,” he said. “It will be up to them. Only if they shoot at us will we shoot back.”

“Yeah, but you have to tell them they have a choice.”

“Don’t worry.” He turned and said something to Timon and Radik. Of course, he could have been saying, “Bust in and blow their fucking heads off,” for all I knew. I didn’t know what else to do. The situation was what it was.

He laid out his plan, first in English for me, then for the guys in back. It didn’t seem to take as much explaining for them.

“What about the noise?” I said. “There are people in these other buildings.”

“The police will not show up in this neighborhood unless called, and no one will call them over a few gunshots.”

He reached back, and Radik passed him a black gym bag. I could tell it was the weapons bag from the heavy, metallic clank it made when Bo set it on the seat between us. He unzipped it, plunged in, and came out with what I knew were a couple of clean semiautomatics with suppressors. He offered them both to me. One was a Glock 30, like mine. I took it.

“Be sure to give it back,” he said. “Don’t take it home.”

“What about stray shots?” I looked through the windshield up and down the street. We were in a neighborhood. A very bad one, but a neighborhood nonetheless. Our target was in the middle of the block. The house on one side looked like a boarded-up crack den, but there were lights on in the one on the other side. “We could kill someone in the next house over if we’re not careful.”

“We must shoot them before they can return fire. You are a good shot. You will not miss. Aim for the-”

“Center of mass.” I knew that. I knew how to kill a paper target.

He waited for me to think up still more objections. I couldn’t, so I took a breath, adjusted my vest, and gave him the nod. We did a quick radio check. Then the four of us got out and started toward the house. I split off and went toward the back, where I was supposed to watch through the window and make sure they were in the kitchen where Bo’s reconnaissance had left them. I was also supposed to cover the door in case any of them got flushed out that way. It was the easiest assignment, which was fine by me. Timon and Radik were going in through the garage entrance. Bo was going through the front door, right up the middle.

I slipped around and started creeping along the side of the house. I had to go slowly, because it was so dark and I didn’t dare risk using the flashlight. The stink of garbage wafted up as I maneuvered around the trash cans. Where there was garbage there were rats, so I tried to prepare myself for any unexpected movement at foot level. I got to the backyard and cruised along the fence line until I got as far in as the crumbling brick planter Bo had told me about. It marked the far boundary of a cracked and pocked patio, which meant it wasn’t too far out from the back of the house. I had to be careful. I moved in behind it and made myself as small as I could. Then I peeked over the top to look through the back window.

The blinds were closed. Damn. They must have just closed them.

“Blinds closed,” I whispered into the radio. “Moving closer. Hold on.”

I turned the radio down and crawled on my belly back to the fence and toward the house. When I got there, I flattened against the back wall. As I inched toward the window, I could hear them. There were two distinct voices. They were speaking something besides English. It sounded Slavic and guttural. There was a sliver of space between the sill and the lowest blind. I crept close enough to get my eyeball to the window to look inside the house.

There were two in the kitchen, not three. The one closest to me was balding. He wore the long and greasy strands of his remaining hair in a mutant ponytail that sat too high on the back of his head. The bigger man had on a black Judas Priest T-shirt. He was Bo-sized, if not larger. He was talking on his cell phone, holding the tiny silver device against his massive head. Bo had declared him the priority. I could see why.

I crept back to the cover of the crumbling wall, turned up the radio, and gave my report. “Two in the kitchen in the back. Repeat…only two in the kitchen. No sign of number three.”

“Positions?”

“Ponytail is standing…leaning against the sink with his back to the window…facing the inside doorway. Judas Priest is sitting at the table…back to the inside doorway…talking on a cell phone. Both have their hands occupied with pizza, beer, cigarette, or phone. No third man. Repeat, no third man in the kitchen. Over.”

Bo came back. “Third in the front room watching the door and the television. I will take care of this one. On my signal…”

I waited. The next thing I would hear would be the go sign. When it came, it was a short but ferocious burst over the radio that must have been something like Go! Go! Go! in Bosnian.

The shouting started almost instantly. Then came the shooting. I couldn’t see anything, but I could hear. I knew when the bad guys were firing, because all our weapons had suppressors. The blinds crashed back against the window. It must have been Ponytail. Whoever it was, when he fell, he pulled the blinds down with him. From my position, it was like a curtain rising.

Judas Priest was hunkered down beside the refrigerator, clutching what looked like some kind of fully automatic, magazine-fed assault rifle. Timon and Radik were firing from outside the kitchen door. They had him pinned down, but every time they tried to advance, he’d step out and blast away. Judas Priest had only one real chance to make it out of there, and it was through the back door directly across from his position. He knew it, too. He kept glancing that way. The only question was whether they would get him before he ran through it and right into me.

I got ready.

He jumped out again and laid down another barrage, but this time, instead of moving back to the safe corner behind the refrigerator, he crashed toward the door and opened it, firing the whole way. The second he moved onto the small concrete patio, both Timon and Radik advanced through the kitchen toward the door. The way he staggered down the steps made it clear he’d been hit, but he was still coming straight at me, which meant I either had to roll out of the line of fire from the house or stand up and shoot him, but he was still moving with such power and authority that I had real doubts about whether I could stop him. An image flashed of me rising from behind the safety of my wall, emptying a clip into him, only to have him keep coming. But then he saw me and raised his rifle, and the adrenaline surged and instinct took over, and I was standing to take my shot when someone yelled, “Down! Down! Down!”

I dropped to my belly behind the wall and rolled. Five straight shots followed, presumably into the back of Judas Priest. The sound of the shots was subdued, like someone blowing five quick darts through a long pole, which is what a suppressor is supposed to do. Make death quiet.

I didn’t hear him die. I didn’t hear him gurgle or cry out. But he was dead, lying in the yard, facedown with the rifle still in his hand and blood soaking into his black T-shirt. Bo was the one who had shot him. He was coming toward me now.

“Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I said, staring down at the corpse. “You?”

“Good. Everything is good. Go inside and find Harvey.” He looked around. There was one house that backed up to the alley from which someone could have seen the show. “Go. Go now.”

Inside the house, the light that bathed the room was too warm for such a cold scene. Radik was standing over Ponytail. Judging by the blood smears, he must have been blown back against the window, turned, grabbed the edge of the sink, and slumped to the floor.

“We need to turn off the lights,” I said. “Anyone can see in here from the back.”

Radik didn’t understand, so I pulled out my flashlight to show him and flipped off the overhead light. He got it.

With my flashlight in one hand and the Glock in the other, I started toward the side of the house where Bo said he’d seen Harvey. It was a rambling floor plan that didn’t make any sense to me. All I knew was that the doors were all closed, and every time I cracked one of them open, I expected to find something bad behind it-either someone coming at me from out of the dark or, worse, Harvey’s body. By the time I got to the last door, my heart was pumping out of control and my lungs straining for breath. It was controlled, but it was still panic. I had to stop. With my back to a wall, I leaned over and put my hands on my knees. Generous drops of sweat rolled from my forehead and dripped onto the floor. When I felt a little less likely to collapse, I opened the last door, shone my flashlight across the room, and found Harvey.

He was lying in a heap in the corner, still wearing the suit jacket he’d had on that morning. I stumbled into the doorway, but something stopped me there. It was the sight of him, so still and crumpled, that kept me from rushing to his side, because if I did, if I reached down and turned him, I might find his eyes fixed in a death stare. I might find his skin long cold. Maybe not even murdered, just dead from the stress on his weak system. I was so afraid that I was too late. But when I saw his chest rise, fall, and rise again, I went and knelt beside him. I put my hand on his shoulder and felt the life still in him. He moaned when I turned him. It was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard, and when he opened his eyes, it was a smile that he saw and not just the tears.

“Harvey, it’s me. We’re taking you out of here. We’re taking you home.”

He blinked at me, and I knew he recognized me. “Leave me alone.” He tried to roll away from me. “Let me go. Let me die.”

Not what I expected. It ticked me off. “Goddammit, Harvey, you are not giving up. Not here and not now. Die at home if you want, but right now we’re getting out of here.”

I grabbed his other arm and pulled him up into a sitting position. His head and shoulders flopped forward. He was in full rag-doll mode. I slid behind him, put my arms under his, and locked my hands across his diaphragm.

“Help me as much as you can,” I said, hoping he could-and would. When I finally got him upright, he wasn’t steady on his feet, but I needed only a second or two. All in one maneuver, I let go with one hand, slipped under one of his arms, and draped him over my back. I huffed and puffed a few times and lifted. He wasn’t as heavy as he used to be, but he was still deadweight, and I staggered until I found my equilibrium. Then I carried him out of there.

When I got to the front room, Timon was gathering weapons into a pile on the floor. Bo was there, standing very still over the body of the third man, the one he must have dispatched when he came through the front. He was looking at the corpse with an expression I had never seen, and I wondered if he knew his victim. Slowly, he crouched and pulled at the man’s shirt, baring his chest and an amazing webbing of tattoos that covered him practically from head to toe.

Bo called for Timon. He walked over and looked where Bo was looking, but he didn’t say anything. Then Timon crouched, too, pulled out his knife, and did something really strange. He grabbed the dead man’s pants at the knees and sliced them open. Timon stepped back, and Bo said something, and there was a rushed exchange that I didn’t need to understand to feel the deep concern.

“Bo?”

He seemed almost dazed when he looked at me. “Give me the weapon.”

“What? Oh.” He wanted the Glock back. “What’s going on?”

“You must leave here,” he said. “You must take Harvey and leave at once.”