Allegiance (Joe Logan Book 4) (7 page)

Della followed Logan’s instructions.  The house was secure and in darkness.  After putting on a thick sweater and jeans, she also donned a padded parka with a quilted lining, and armed with a flashlight, and with her cell phone, a small bottle of water and a pack of cigarettes and her lighter in the pockets, she opened the door to the basement, switched on the light and locked the door behind her.  At the bottom of the steps she walked over to where the breaker panel was fixed to the cinderblock wall at chest height, to open the hinged metal door, seek out the main switch and click it to off.

The darkness was profound.  She gasped, almost panicked, and felt as if the gloom was sucking the air from her lungs.  Surely no blind person could experience a more intense blackness.  It was totally disconcerting.  She thumbed on the flashlight and shone it around.  There was an old wicker chair over by the boiler. She would sit and wait, and hope that it wouldn’t be for too long.  But first she needed a weapon of some kind.  There were no tools, just a few mildew-stained cardboard boxes full of memories that she could not face looking at; that at some point in time she would have to sort through.  All she could find was a sweeping broom with a long beech wood handle; not exactly lethal, but maybe it could be modified.  Placing the flashlight on the chair, Della picked up the broom and held it in what she imagined to be a decent baseball bat grip. Her strike was not at a ball, though.  She lashed out at the corner of the boiler, and with a loud, splintering crack the head of the broom flew off to hit the far wall and drop to the cement floor in a shadow-filled corner.  Inspecting her work, she smiled.  The end of the handle had split and now looked like a pointed stake.  She had a homemade weapon of sorts, which she could utilize as a long club or a spear.

Time crawled by.  Her cell was on vibrate but remained as still as a rock.  She was cold, tired, had smoked at least five cigarettes, and was losing her belief that Joe Logan would come to her aid.  The mind could play tricks when almost all stimuli were removed. 
Of course Joe would come, and soon now
.

The noise was faint, but she knew that it was footsteps above her.  A floorboard creaked and she gripped the broom handle tightly and stood up.  Someone was in the house, and if it had been Joe, he would have phoned.

Dr.
Perry Gifford took the chart from the holder hooked over the end rail of the bed and studied it.  He had been about to end Arnie Newman’s life hours previously, but a nurse had entered the room and asked him to attend another of his patients in the main unit, who had survived a major abdominal surgical procedure but was now hemorrhaging copiously from his anus and had suffered a seizure.  The patient subsequently expired on the operating table and, after a break to grab a shower and a coffee, Perry was once more at the side of Arnie’s bed, all set to inject him with nothing more subtle than a large syringe full of air, to occlude the coronary arteries and cause a massive cardiac infarction, that in his present critical state the patient would not survive.

Perry did not want to do it, but had no choice.

The two men had knocked at his apartment door in Yorkville earlier in the day, just minutes after he had returned home following a round of golf at Randalls Island Golf Center.

On answering the door, Perry was pushed back into the entrance hall, and one of the men pressed the muzzle of a handgun against his forehead.  The other man stepped around him, went through to the lounge and trained his pistol on Perry’s wife and daughter.

“Here’s the deal,” the man threatening Perry said.  “We need for you to do something for us when you go to the hospital later.”

The deal had been simple.  They, whoever
they
were, knew that he was the surgeon that had saved Newman’s life.

“We want the cop dead,” the man said to Perry.  “Your wife and kid are going to be taken and held till it’s done.  If Newman is still breathing in the morning, you’ll get them back in pieces, delivered by FedEx.  You’ll be followed and monitored.  The ball’s in your court, pal.  How you play it is up to you.  Give me your cell phone number, and keep it switched on.”

As Perry now reached into the pocket of his coat for the syringe, his cell rang.  He backed away from the bed and took the call.

“Is it done?” Max said to the doctor, having poured a large measure of Jack Daniel’s over ice as he considered the current situation.

“I…I was just about to do it,” Perry said.

“You just got a lucky break, Doc,” Max said, having decided that whether the cop in the coma lived or died was now irrelevant.  It was some guy by the name of Logan that had information which could prove harmful to Patrick Fallon’s political future.  “Things have changed.  Do nothing.  Your wife and daughter will be returned to you unharmed.  Just forget that any of this ever happened, because you really wouldn’t want to meet my associates again.”

Perry left the room almost on the run and only just made it to the bathroom, where he threw up in the pan.  He would obviously never tell a living soul that he had been on the brink of murdering a patient to protect his family.

Lennox picked the lock of the kitchen door at the rear of the house, but there was a bolt on at the top.  At least that showed that someone was at home.  He used a cutter to remove a circle of glass from one of the small upper panes in the top half of the door, put his hand through, felt for the bolt and drew it back smoothly and slowly.

Frankie followed him in, his gun drawn, just in case.  While New York had one of the most restrictive gun laws in the nation, it didn’t harm to be prepared.  Some folk took home security very seriously, and did have firearms.

They searched the house.  “The bitch isn’t here,” Frankie said.  “What do we do now?”

Lennox wanted to look for signs of recent habitation, or for something that could give them a clue as to where she might have gone. He switched on a light, but the darkness was not illuminated.  He went through to the kitchen and tried another with the same result.

“The power’s off,” he said to Frankie.  “She must have gone on a trip.”

“Seems a little timely,” Frankie said.  “What if she got scared when you phoned her and pretended to be a cop?  She could have checked.”

“So what’re you sayin’?”

“That she could still be here, hiding.”

“I don’t buy that, but let’s check the loft.”

“And the basement.”

She wasn’t in the loft.  They went back downstairs and found the door to the basement.  It was locked.  Foregoing any attempt at finesse, Lennox kicked it open.  The darkness was deeper.  He hesitated.  The meager light from a street lamp shone through a window and weakly penetrated the gloom.

Frankie fitted the silencer to his gun, although he would have bet the farm on there being no one in the basement.  If the woman had for some reason felt in danger, then surely she would have fled the house.

“Remember, we need her alive,” Lennox whispered as he began to descend the flight of wooden stairs.

As he reached the third step from the bottom, a portion of the darkness seemed to detach itself from the rear of the underground room, and he made out the outline of a human shape rushing toward him.  He had no time to react, and was totally surprised at the sudden impact. The pain hit him a couple of seconds later; deep, jagged and excruciating.  He fell back and felt a tearing sensation in his stomach as whatever he had been stabbed with was twisted and withdrawn.

Frankie was knocked off his feet, to wind up sitting on a step with the back of Lennox’s head sandwiched between his legs.  “What the fuck,” he said, having seen nothing and believing that Lennox had slipped and fallen.  “Are you okay?”

Lennox didn’t answer.  His mouth had filled up with blood and he couldn’t breathe, let alone speak. He began to shudder violently and lashed out at thin air with his arms and legs, as if attempting to fight and win against the unbeatable opponent that was death.

As Lennox’s frantic, jerky movements ceased and he became still, Frankie realized that something was seriously wrong.  He remained sitting, but raised his gun and pointed it into the murky depths of the basement.  “That was a stupid thing to do, Della,” he said, now believing that the woman was hidden down here and had just attacked Lennox.  “I want you to come out where I can see you.  If you don’t I’ll start shooting.  You’ve got five seconds.”

Della had acted out of fear for her life, without any conscious thought to run the man through with the sharp end of the broom handle.  It had been a spontaneous result of the fight or flight response, activated by adrenaline and launching the mechanism in the body that enables both humans and animals to mobilize energy rapidly in order to cope with life-threatening situations.  Attack was her only option, due to being trapped with nowhere to run.  Now what?  For some reason she had thought that if someone did come to the house, he would be alone.  But there had obviously been two of them, and maybe more.  The sense of hope that Joe would turn up and rescue her from any harm had now evaporated.  She would most likely die in this damp, dark underground room, but she would not go meekly, like a lamb to slaughter.  The stygian darkness was in her favor.  From where she had retreated to at the side of the boiler, she could make out the barely visible shape of a man as he stood up and became an inky silhouette against the charcoal gray from the open door behind him.  He wouldn’t shoot blindly, or so she hoped.  It struck her that if he did, then the muzzle flash from his gun would illuminate the basement for the fraction of a second he would need to see her.

When he had spoken, Della stealthily used the sound of his voice to mask her movement.  She was now crouched behind the wicker chair.  If he approached her she would do her best to spear him like a fish in a barrel.

Frankie stepped over Lennox and paused to feel for a pulse, but his partner was as dead and gone as yesterday. He picked up the gun from where it had fallen from Lennox’s hand onto a step and tucked it in his belt.  He had no intention of taking the bitch alive now, as per his orders.  He was going to make her suffer, kill her, and then call Dusty and tell him that Lennox had whacked her.

Della’s knees were aching, and a cramp tightened her left calf muscle, causing her to gasp

Frankie heard the sudden inhalation of breath.  It was from his left at the back of the basement.  He slipped his leather loafers off and kept his back to the wall as he silently moved in for the kill.

Logan put the Taurus in park after driving the length of the street looking for anyone suspicious sitting in a vehicle.  Knew that it was a pointless exercise, but stuck to old tried and tested procedures.  If they had come for Della they would now be gone, with or without her. “Stay in the car,” he said to Benny.  “If I’m not back in fifteen minutes, leave.”

“And do what?” Benny said.

“Go back for Margie and get the hell out of New York.”

Benny said nothing.  He knew that the woman Logan had come for would be alive, or dead, or gone, and he didn’t particularly care which.

Making his way around to the rear of the house, Logan approached the back door.  It was closed, but he saw the large, circular hole in the glass.  He was immediately disheartened.  A part of his mind told him that he was too late.  He drew the Glock from the right-hand pocket of his fleece and entered the house slow and easy.  For a man so big he was light on his feet, and took one careful step at a time as if he was walking on rice paper, to reach the open door to the basement and stop at the side of the jamb to listen for any sound.

Frankie caught his shoulder on the metal box that encased the circuit breaker.  He opened the small hinged door with his left hand and felt for the main switch.  Found it and thumbed it on.

The house lit up like Coney Island on a Saturday night.

Della narrowed her eyes against the sudden glare, pushed up into a crouch, rounded the chair and lunged forward with the pointed broom handle gripped in both white-knuckled fists.  The thick beech rod was coated in blood, as were her hands.

Maybe if she had been nearer to the man it would have been possible to skewer him in the same way she had dealt with the other, but there was ten feet between them, and he was pointing a gun at her.

Frankie smiled, but there was no humor in the mirthless expression, just a cold and maniacal grimace; fixed like that of reptiles that cannot show any emotions, should they have any.

“Go for it babe,” Frankie said.  “See if you’re faster than a bullet.”

Della froze and stood in place like one of the waxwork figures in Madame Tussaudes on West 42
nd
Street.

This was it
, she thought. 
Another second or two and I’ll be in oblivion or reunited with Ray
.  The crushing fear that she had endured for hours suddenly evaporated.  She just stared at the man and waited to enter heaven or nonexistence.

“Turn round and kneel on the floor,” Frankie said.  “And if you’re religious, say a prayer, but make it quick because in five seconds I’m going to blow your fucking brains out.”

“Bad idea,” a voice said from above.  “Shoot her and you’ll die down there.”

Every muscle in Frankie’s body tensed.  He kept his eyes and his gun on Della and shouted, “Who the fuck’re you?”

“My name’s Logan.  And you have a choice to make.  Toss your weapon to where I can see it at the bottom of the steps, or be stupid and die.”

“That isn’t going to happen, Logan,” Frankie said.  “Come down here with your hands on top of your head, fingers laced.  You give me what we want and I’ll let you and the broad live.”

“If you knew me, you’d know that I don’t deal with lowlife’s like you,” Logan said.  “Lose the gun and walk over here where I can see you, or I’ll call in New York’s Finest to join the party.  You’re armed with a hostage, and there’s a body covered in blood on the stairs.  Do you think that a SWAT team is a better way to go?”

Frankie wasn’t the brightest candle flame on the alter, but he knew by the firm resolve in Logan’s voice that he was trapped, and that the only way out of the concrete pit he had entered was blocked by a guy that was prepared to wait him out until the cops arrived.  Whacking the woman was now an obsolete idea.  He’d played enough cards to know when to fold and walk away from the table.  You win some, you lose some.  “Okay”, he said.  “If this crazy bitch puts the homemade spear she stabbed my partner with down, I’ll give up my gun.”

“Can you hear me, Della?” Logan called.

“Yes, Joe.”

“Has he hurt you?”

“No.  You got here just in time.”

“Better late than never.  Put whatever you’ve got on the floor, then walk over to the steps.”

Della swallowed hard, dropped the broom handle and skirted around the man who had been about to kill her.  Once passed him she felt a sensation of ice crystals forming along the length of her spine.  Would he let her go, or shoot her in the back before she could climb the staircase?

Ascending the stairs was a nightmare.  She had to step over the body of the man that she had killed.  Stabbing a person in almost pitch blackness had been a traumatic incident, but to now see the result of what she had done was even more harrowing.  The expression on the corpse’s face was almost identical to the horrific death snarl she had seen on a couple of raccoons that her grandfather had baited with poisoned meat, back when she had been an eleven-year old living in Hoboken.  The critters had moved in to her grandparents’ to pay the ultimate price for trespassing and taking up rent-free residence.  She had suffered from nightmares for months after seeing the bodies, which her granddad had held by their bushy tails and swung in front of her face, before depositing them in a dumpster he’d hired to fill with the rubble from a brick-built outhouse he had demolished.