Tick Tock

Chapter 73

CARL WAITED. Watching, listening. After a minute, he heard more police radios and then footsteps going into the elevator one floor below. He heard the elevator door whir to a close, and the car began to ascend with a mechanical hum.

He tightened his grip on the pistol as the car seemed to slow down. But then it was past the second floor and going up.

Excellent, he thought. So far, so good.

When he heard the elevator stop somewhere far above a long minute later, he yanked on the strap of his bag and opened the door onto the elevator shaft. He leapt onto the vertical girder he'd been hanging onto and began laybacking down as silently and quickly as he could. Past the lobby door, he jumped the last ten feet into the well of the elevator. There was a small door in its corner that led into the basement. He pushed it open and climbed out and then closed it quickly behind him.

He pulled out the gun and ran quickly down a corridor alongside dusty storage bins. He made a turn past the boiler room and came to a thick steel door at the end. He banged on the door with his fist once and then again.

Carl stuck his gun in the face of the ugly girl who opened the door. Her stained bathrobe was loose enough at the collar to reveal a tattoo of a butterfly beneath her dirty collarbone.

"What is this? Who are you? You have no right to be here," she said in broken Slavic-accented English as she flinched from the gun.

"I'm an American citizen, bitch, unlike yourself. Now, shut your mouth and move," Carl said.

It had taken Carl six months of living in the building to realize the super had turned one of the basement rooms into an apartment for Eastern European illegal aliens. It was the smell. He had caught a whiff of it when he came down to put away luggage in Lawrence's storage bin. He had smelled the same rank stench of bad sausages when he was in Delta Force and had body-guarded state officials in the Bosnian War.

He knew the building's super was a Serb the moment he first met him. Probably fleeing some war crime, from the way the beady-eyed guy operated. You wanted work done? Garbage taken away? He always got paid first.

In fact, Carl wouldn't be surprised if the girl in front of him was a whore, paying off her smuggling fee on her back. All this in the basement of a Fifth Avenue luxury high-rise, Carl thought with a grin. Economies within economies. Capitalism at its finest. USA, land of the free, where the streets were paved with gold.

All that aside, here was his hole. He had arrived. He would be safe for the next twelve hours at least. The police wouldn't search here. Since his job and his green card depended on it, the crafty mobster Serb super would never allow it.

Carl waved the girl inside with the gun, grabbed the back of her dirty housecoat, and shoved her forward toward the sound of a TV.

Inside the small room, he pushed the girl into a pale, bald old man with a regal-looking gray mustache who was cutting a swarthy teenager's hair with an electric buzzer.

"Drago mi je," Carl said with a smile. It meant, nice to meet you, or something like that, in one of those utterly confusing Yugo languages. It was the only scrap of nonsense he could remember from his boots on the ground in Eastern Europe.

The gray walrus's mouth dropped open. Why not? Shock was probably the appropriate reaction to seeing an elevator grease-covered naked man pointing a gun at you. Carl noticed that a rerun of Full House was on the corner TV. A pre-anorexic toddler Olsen twin was saying something cute and sassy.

Carl waited for the canned laughter to start before he shot the girl in the back of her head and threw her across the lap of the seated teen. It turned out the old man had some fight. He managed to throw the buzzing razor at Carl's face. It missed by only an inch, making a sound like frying grease as it sailed by. Carl smiled again as he shot the feisty old codger right in his proud gray mustache.

Carl watched the man go down in a heap. When he turned, he saw that the teenager was still seated, making a two-handed begging gesture as the dead girl spasmed and bled out in his lap. There was something artistic and powerful about the whole thing, a sense of the tragic here in this single-hanging-bulb-lit shithole basement room, a low-rent La Pieta under way.

"Drago mi je," Carl said again and put a bullet in each of the kid's closed eyes.