Authors: Yvonne Navarro
Concrete Savior (7 page)
ight
W
hen his cell phone
rang, Charlie Hogue knew without looking at the screen that Brenda was calling him again. He pulled it out of his pocket and scowled at it, wishing to Christ that she would just leave him alone for a little while, let him have some peace and quiet. After that thought, right on cue and as predictable as the one-hour intervals in which she left him messages, came guilt: she was his wife, she cared about him, she was anxious to find out how his meeting with his birth father had gone. He should
want
to talk to her, fill her in on every detail of this long-awaited excursion into the unknown.
He sighed and pressed the silence button on the side of the phone. He just didn’t feel like explaining the whole, sorry situation. Her questions would be endless, his answers vague because he simply didn’t have all the information he knew she would want, the normal, everyday information like the names of his newly discovered relatives, theddresses, all the family birth dates. All the data that would fit tidily into her address books and computer reminder programs so that her picture-perfect American life could reorganize itself around the new additions and continue without interruption.
Charlie put the phone back in his pocket, ignoring the ring tone a couple of minutes later that signaled a message from Brenda. He’d waited all day yesterday for his brother—God, that was a strange thing to say—to call him, but each time the cell rang, it was only Brenda. By noon today, he’d given up on the idea that Eran would call him and decided to come downtown to Grant Park, check out the lakefront and the sights. He’d gotten only as far as Buckingham Fountain before admitting he wasn’t at all interested in the museums and the water. Lake Michigan wasn’t much different from Lake Erie, and he could visit there anytime back home. It was kind of neat to sit here on the edge of the fountain with the water arcing so beautifully behind him; every now and then the wind would catch the spray just right and bathe him in a fine mist that felt wonderfully cooling in the sticky afternoon heat.
Wow. Charlie would have never imagined he’d be here, watching the people pass while his mind churned over the newfound knowledge of his relatives. This city was so far removed from his hometown of Van Wert that it might as well have been on a different planet. Races, religions, gays and straights, even the way people dressed. If cities were selections in a vending machine, Chicago would be to the left and marked
EXOTIC
, while Van Wert would be all the way to the right under
GENERIC
. Compared to this maelstrom of diversity, where he lived was colorless and boring, utterly bland. Chicago was so exciting to him, so
enticing
. He couldn’t help wondering if he could actually live here, leave his everyday nothing of an existence behind, find work, and immerse himself in a life of nonstop action.
But did he want that? Did he
really
? Charlie watched a gorgeous young woman in a chic designer suit stroll past. She could be anything—a lawyer, a real estate agent, some kind of business consultant. Would someone like her ever be interested in him? He thought about his wife, but it was hardly a fair comparison. Brenda was average height, but her sweet, rather mousy personality always made people remember her as short. Nothing special in the shoulder-length brown hair, brown eyes. Hers was a typical USA-girl’s heart-shaped face, the same one that was on a million small-town girls from coast to coast. Their daughter, Michelle, was probably going to grow up looking and acting exactly like her mom, and Bryan was another average American kid. Jesus, was there nothing at all special about their life?
Maybe not
their
life, but Charlie had found something pretty different, right here in Chicago with brother Eran. Maybe Eran wasn’t being sociable yet, but Charlie was sure he’d come around. After all, the guy had probably been as shocked as he to learn there was a brother. Any inclination to nurture a rlationship with the elder Redmond had disintegrated with the door Douglas had slammed in his face, but Charlie definitely wanted to get close to Eran, to become a part of his life. What Eran had going on here seemed so much better, so much more
interesting
, than Charlie’s existence. Eran was a detective, probably tracking down killers and drugs and God only knew what else. Charlie got up every morning at six o’clock, showered and ate a bit of breakfast, then dropped the kids off at school and was at his desk in his adopted father’s very
un
exciting insurance agency by eight. He’d been working there ever since he’d graduated from college, and although the business would someday be his, it still wasn’t
his
name on the agency sign outside, was it?
What would it be like to live here, to go home to a woman who was something a little jazzier than a housewife? To someone . . . well, like
Brynna
.
Charlie frowned and rubbed his eyes. Funny how close his wife’s name was to Eran’s roommate—which, by the way, he didn’t believe for a heartbeat. No one had a bombshell like that in the house and didn’t try to make things more than platonic. There was something about her that Charlie couldn’t actually describe, something almost intoxicating, and that kept thoughts of her coming back again and again. He’d seen her for maybe ten or fifteen seconds, and yet he couldn’t stop thinking about her. He hadn’t been entirely honest with Eran about not being in this for the money. He wasn’t, exactly, but there had been times—okay,
lots
of times—that Charlie had wondered if his birth mother, or even both parents, were millionaires. That had turned out to be nothing but a stupid fantasy, of course, but at least he could say his dreams had been based on fact, specifically an article he’d read in his wife’s
More
magazine just last year about Elizabeth McNabb, the Jell-O heiress who’d ultimately ended up with a big fat nothing.
Well, Douglas Redmond certainly hadn’t wasted any time shattering that bubble, had he? Nasty right from the start, and if what Eran had said was true, the elder Redmond was more than despicable and had been directly responsible for their mother’s death. Sitting here and thinking about it, Charlie couldn’t help shuddering; he didn’t know much about genetics but he hoped to hell he was nothing like his biological father.
Nah, he’d be okay. Look at Eran—even though the old man had raised him, his brother had turned out fantastic,
better
than fantastic. He had a great job, a beautiful “roommate”—right—and none of the dreary American Dream responsibilities that hung over Charlie’s head on a daily basis. Man, that was the kind of life Charlie Hogue could definitely settle into.
But if he did, he’d make sure that “roommate” status was changed real quick.
ine
G
lenn Klinger switched his
uniform for his street clothes, then bunched up the dirty uniform and threw it on the floor of his locker with the rest of his gear. Normally he would have tucked it into a plastic bag and taken it home for washing, but those days were over. He’d done some long hard thinking since last Friday, when he’d fallen in front of the subway train and that guy had jumped down there and saved his life. Mainly he’d been thinking about whether or not he was actually
worth
saving.
He figured most people would probably get a whole new outlook after a big event like that, doing the happy dance and spouting off about how grateful they were, how they suddenly had all this appreciation for so many of the people in their life, all the little things that meant so much. On the heels of that would be worry over why they’d gotten sick to begin with, would it happen again, oh my God, yadda yadda yadda.
But not him. Not Glenn Klinger.
He wasn’t happy. He wasn’t sad. He was just . . .
there
. Calm. Methodical. Accepting.
He’d been visited by more doctors in the two days following the
Big Event
(he’d begun to actually capitalize those words in his mind) than he’d seen in his entire life. A couple of days in the hospital and, even though he had medical insurance, the only tangible thing he knew he would end up with out of this was going to be a big bill. The doctors all had a lot to say about what had happened to him, but the truth was Glenn hadn’t been paying attention. He cooperated with the exams and nodded through the speeches, but at the end of it all when they sent him home, he hadn’t a clue if the Big Event had been a seizure, a drop in blood sugar because he hadn’t been eating properly, or just a really bad fucking headache. And in reality, he simply didn’t care.
What Glenn
was
sure of was that even as miserable as he was, he didn’t want to die in the subway, alone and face down in some godforsaken puddle of filth. He was going to die, of course—everyone was, sooner or later—but not alone. Not even in his crummy two-room apartment, where his body would only be found when he didn’t show up at work for a week or so and the people who lived across the hall—who’d never spoken to him—noticed a bad smell.
No, not like that.
After the hospital had called his work (not because they thought someone should know, but because they needed to verify his medical insurance), Lenore had never so much as picked up the telephone to check on him. She’d known what happened because her precious Bill was buddy-buddy with Glenn’s boss, and that blabbermouth asshole had told just enough people to spread it all over the place within a matter of minutes. A couple of folks had asked after him on Monday and Tuesday—
“Heard you were sick, Glenn. Sorry about that. Hey, don’t forget that box of trash in the kitchen’s gotta go out, too.”
“Hope you’re feeling better. By the way, we’re out of paper towels in the ladies’ room.”
—but most cared as much about him being sick as they cared about him being well: if it didn’t involve cleaning something up or that juicy little saga about his ex-wife and Bill, it was exactly nothing in the scope of their much more interesting lives.
Now, standing in front of his locker and staring into it, Glenn felt better than he had in a long time. Unfortunately, he wasn’t going to be able to sustain that equanimity unless he took some measures. There had been some soul-searching involved, but he’d finally decided that it would all be worth it. His world had gone gray, as dull and colorless as the industrial floors and trash cans that he spent so much of each day cleaning. No amount of scrubbing or waxing or
care
would change their color or make anyone notice them. His life was like that now. Lenore had been the one who’d put the color into his life, not only by the thousands of little things that she’d done throughout their marriage but just by her presence. He had loved her so much, would have done
anything
for her, but she had taken it all away, had drained his entire existence of every bit of beauty. And for what? A handsomer face? A bigger paycheck? Better sex? He’d never know, and at this point, he didn’t want to.
But then, it wasn’t entirely Lenore’s fault, was it? She couldn’t exactly take
herself
. No, someone
else
had taken
her
, and Glenn knew who that someone was, all right.
Bill Cusack, that’s who.
And he hadn’t been satisfied with ut sng Glenn’s wife and his happiness, and even his dog. He’d had to destroy Glenn’s
pride
, too, talk about him behind his back, undermine him to the same guys Glenn had once considered his friends. Glenn had never heard the rumors firsthand, of course, but he’d come in at the end of enough conversations to read the guilty looks and flushed faces, caught enough words to definitely get the gist of things—
“. . . said he didn’t even fight it, didn’t have the—”
“. . . gave her a much better—”
“. . . wanted a baby but could never afford—”
—on and on, all that shit flying fast and furious, building on itself until Glenn knew that whatever grain of truth might have once existed, that elusive thing that he himself didn’t even know, finally disappeared forever.
When he’d pulled himself out of bed this morning, Glenn realized he was tired of all this. Not just tired—that was too gentle a word for what he felt. Exhausted, spent to his very bones. He couldn’t bear to go even one more day of wading through the looks and the innuendo, and if he couldn’t do that, how on earth was he going to face it again tomorrow, and Friday? And next week, next month, next
year
? He had seventeen years put in toward his pension at this plant, and for a man with nothing but a GED under his belt and no other skills, he’d built up to making a decent buck over those nearly two decades. Was it fair that he should have to give it up, have to find another job—and in this crappy economy that in itself was an iffy proposition—and start
over
just because that damned Bill Cusack had ruined it all?
No, it wasn’t.
Glenn had been perfectly happy the way he was before Lenore had left him, but that avenue was forever out of reach. She wasn’t coming back, no matter what he did, but he simply couldn’t go on the way he was. He just couldn’t
stand
it. So Glenn had decided this morning that although he was going to be forced to change his life, he wanted to do it in an entirely different manner. And while he was at it, those who had steered him along the path that had made him this miserable would share in his revelation, in his
change
. In fact, Bill Cusack, his boss, and all the others who had smirked and talked about him behind his back, they would all change with him. If he was going to lose everything that he had worked so hard to get . . .
So would they.
Even Lenore, oh you betcha. A man didn’t stay married to a woman for as long as he and Lenore had been together without getting to know what Glenn called the
unchangeables,
those things that someone could not,
would
not, alter for anyone. For his ex-wife, one of those unchangeables was going out to dinner on Wednesday, her middle-of-the-week break from cooking and housecleaning. Because Mr. Bill had more cash than Glenn, Lenore had taken to coming down to the plant to meet him so he could take her to one of the pricey yuppie places downtown, maybe Lawry’s Steak House or Wildfire over on Erie Street—both places he’d talked about trying when they’d been together but had never been able to afford. She’d be here at four-thirty sharp so that her and Billy-boy could get to the restaurant and snag a table before the after-work crowds started to build. That made Glenn have to wait it out for an hour, but what was an hour when you were planning as spectacular an event as he was?
He checked his watch and was surprised to find he had only five minutes before the half-hour mark. The time had passed more quickly than he thought it would. He’d expected to be scared and nervous, pounding heart, sweaty palms, the whole menagerie of physical side effects that a thousand movies and books proclaimed. Instead, Glenn felt overcome by a deep, almost numbing calm, like what he imagined he’d experience standing on an empty beach and staring out at a still, silent ocean that stretched away as far as he could see. It wasn’t just calm. It was
acceptance
.
He reached inside his locker for the last time and pulled out his jacket, then tugged it on. It was heavy and bulky around the pockets, uncomfortably hot in the overheated employee locker room. Glenn zipped it up to the middle of his chest anyway, then closed the locker door and made sure his collar was straight. As an afterthought, he opened the locker again and tossed his wallet and his car keys on top of his dirty uniform.
Then he went to say farewell to Lenore.
BILL CUSACK’S OFFICE WAS
on the second floor of the plant, at the start of a long hallway and just past the only stairwell. There were nine other offices down that hall, with the biggest and best being the plant owner’s at the far end.
Glenn met his ex-wife as she was coming out of her new husband’s office at precisely twenty-two minutes before five o’clock. Bill was hot on her heels, his hand resting somewhere on her back in a pride-of-ownership gesture that, combined with the way his upper lip and eyebrow lifted in simultaneous arrogance when his gaze found Glenn’s, really said everytng about how furnishing his life had vampirized everything good from Glenn’s.
“Glenn,” Lenore said. His presence on the second floor outside his normal working hours surprised her just enough to make her pause, then she tried to recover. “What are you doing up here?”
“I came to say goodbye,” he said. He pulled out his gun and shot her in the face.
The rebound from the pistol, a not very well maintained Sig Sauer P226 that he’d lifted from his father’s nightstand during a visit the previous weekend, was harsher than Glenn expected, but it felt good. Lenore’s head exploded and her feet came forward and up like someone had yanked on an invisible rope around her ankles. Her body’s momentum slapped Bill’s hand hard enough backward to nearly spin him sideways. His eyes went so wide and round that for one long moment Glenn could see white all the way around the man’s light blue eyes. Bill opened his mouth but since Glenn didn’t want to hear anything the guy had to say, his next shot went into Bill’s throat, nearly decapitating him.
“Wife stealer,” Glenn said. His gaze cut to the right, where the plant manager and his boss, he of the scream-at-your-employees-daily mentality, had run to the door of his own office and was now trying to scramble back into it. Glenn stepped over the two bodies and followed him, watching with vague amusement as the older man tripped and went down, then scuttled along the paper- and box-strewn floor—his office was just as dirty and cluttered as the manufacturing areas he oversaw—as he tried to find a place to hide.
“Where do you think you’re going, Paul?” Glenn was rather pleased that his voice was clear and still unflustered, with no hint of stress in it. Yes, he was definitely meant to do this today. His boss was a fairly big man with an iron-colored crew cut and a double chin; even so, he was moving around on the floor with the agility of a scared cockroach so it took three shots to finally take him out. Glenn’s first one got Paul in the leg, and he missed on the second try, probably because the old fuck started screaming like a baby and startled him. Paul was bleeding nicely as he tried to wedge himself between his desk and the wall, so it was easy for Glenn to walk over and shoot him between the eyes. Glenn was definitely liking the head shots—they did a very satisfying job of obliterating everything about these people from his memory, starting with the way they looked. For this man, it was also an excellent way of ensuring the son of a bitch would never again scream at some luckless employee.
As Glenn had expected, the hallway was filling with screams and the sound of running footsteps, people heading toward the stairs then drawing up short when they were confronted by the messy double-stack of corpses. It would be only seconds before someone got up the nerve to step over the bodies. He needed to get out there again before any of them got away.
Three long strides took Glenn out of the plant manager’s office and back into the hallway. The black Sig felt heavy and warm in his hand, but comfortable; the pad of his right thumb was tingling from the shock of firing it, but even though Glenn hadn’t fired a gun in years—the last time was in his early twenties when he’d gone to the range with his father—his hand wasn’t sore. All the years of scrubbing and cleaning up after the dirty fuckwads in this building had toughened up his skin. Right now he felt like he could handle fire and walk away without even a blister.
What was left of the wife stealer and his lovely and extremely dead bride were on Glenn’s left. He turned to the right and looked smack into the horrified gaze of . . . gosh, he didn’t even know her name. She was the typing pool secretary and hadn’t been here long, maybe two weeks—she probably didn’t even know his history. Unfortunately for her, Glenn wasn’t feeling particularly benevolent; to his current thinking, just working up here with the rest of the white-collars made her one of
them
, and if she hadn’t been whispering about him behind his back already, it was just a matter of time. She spun and ran, careening from side to side in the hallway like one of those tiny colored balls in a child’s handheld game. Her forward motion took her past the first two doors, but when she tried to leap through the next door on the right, she crashed into one of the longtime salesmen, Ricardo, as he was trying to peek into the hall. She cried out and pushed at him at the same time he tried to pull her inside; the result was the two of them stalling just long enough for Glenn to bring up the pistol and squeeze off four rounds. The noise from the gun was atrocious, much worse than even the subway train rolling over him last Friday because it was so loud and so confined. Other people were still screaming in the other offices, and Glenn could hear voices shrieking words that were almost incomprehensible, probably calling the police. That was to be expected, but the noise . . . ouch. He’d never fired a gun without protective gear over his ears and this was a lot worse than he’d anticipated. For the first time since this all started, Glenn frowned as he felt the first tiny jab of a headache poke at one temple.
The nameless secretary leaped into Ricardo’s arms, but it was hard to tell whether it was because she was hit or she was trying to jump out of the way. They both tumbled to the gray tile floor and Glenn headed toward them, then paused. To get to them he’d have to walk past the doorways to two more salesman offices. The doors faced each other across the hall, and it was a great place to get ambushed by a couple of jamokes thinking they were going to be the heroes of the day. Derailing that notion was easy; Glenn just fired a couple of shots into the walls on either side, aiming at random spots and knowing that unless there were studs in the way, the bullets would go right through and into the rooms beyond. The office on his right stayed silent but there was a distinct crash from the one on his left as someone gave up a hiding spot and tried to find another.
Glenn smiled. He took two steps forward, leaned into the office, and fired. He didn’t hit anything, but there was a distinct scrambr hound from beneath the desk, which itself was no more than a cheap pressboard kit from an office supply store—nothing but the best for the salesmen, it seemed. He squeezed the trigger again but got only a loud, empty click. Glenn squeezed the trigger again reflexively and the second click was enough to bring Isaac Hunt up from where he’d been crouching in the foot well of his desk. Hunt was a big guy who’d gone to college on a football scholarship and who would’ve made the pros if he hadn’t blown out his knee in his senior year; two decades had seen a lot of his youthful muscle go to flab, but the fury in his eyes now would more than make up for that.
Glenn released the P226’s empty clip, slammed a full one into place, and Hunt was dead before he could stand fully upright.
Back in the hallway, the secretary was moving on the floor. Glenn took aim at her, then realized she was dead—Ricardo was trapped beneath her dead weight, trying desperately to get free. For a moment Glenn thought how stupid that was, because if he’d been still, he could’ve played possum and maybe survived. But no—that would’ve never worked. He was still really liking the absolute efficiency of the kill shot to the head. Ricardo blathered something at him but Glenn neither understood nor cared what the guy said as he put a bullet into the man’s forehead. The office worker looked dead—her eyes were closed, she was limp and she had blood all over her back—but just to be sure, he shot her in the side of face.
Glenn stood in front of his latest kill and considered. His ears were still ringing from the shots and he felt a little deaf, but he could still make out crying somewhere in one of the five offices he had yet to visit. He had perhaps twelve shots left in this clip and fifteen in the last one in his pocket. There were a couple of people that were absolutes on his to-do list before the cops got here and took him out—he wasn’t so stupid he didn’t know that was also an absolute. Things would have been a lot clearer cut had he been able to get his hands on the other two clips that went with the gun, but his bastard old man, even drunk on his ass, had started calling out for Glenn after only a minute or two; although the loaded weapon had been right where his father always kept it, Glenn had managed barely enough time to grab it and the two clips. God only knew where the old bastard had hidden the other two. They were probably empty and stuck on a closet shelf somewhere since ammo was expensive.
So, decisions, decision. What was next—Data Entry, or Personnel? Oh, definitely Personnel. Now there was an old bitch who needed to learn a lesson about what could happen when you betrayed someone’s privacy. She’d blabbed to everyone who hadn’t had a hearing aid—and maybe those who did—about how she’d had to “. . . change all those records because Glenn Klinger’s wife was now Bob Cusack’s wife.” There were laws about that stuff, and since the law wasn’t going to step in and right this wrong for him, Glenn was going to open his arms to the vigilante way.
The noise level in the building had dropped, but that wasn’t surprisinwhen Glenn figured he’d eliminated more than half of the people in this area of the plant. The owner of the company, Carter Swenson, never let anyone below executive level—that being himself, Billy-boy Cusack, and Paul Remsley—go home early; Glenn had counted on that old-fashioned caste attitude to virtually guarantee almost everyone would be up here. He’d been right on the mark, too. Ten offices, eleven people. He was even willing to bet Ralph Atzbach, the salesman who had the office next to Paul’s, had been down in Swenson’s office when Glenn had started shooting, brown-nosing the big boss and making plans for the future. Next to Glenn, the other nonsecret around the place was that Ralph was dating Kiki Swenson, Carter’s only daughter, and planning on marrying his way into the office at the end of the hall when the old guy finally retired.
Glenn hadn’t been keeping track of time—obviously he had other priorities on his mind—and although he felt things had gone smoothly and quickly so far, he still caught the faintest scream of a siren through someone’s open office window. There wasn’t any way to barricade himself up here, so he didn’t have a whole lot of time left. Even so, he ought to be able to finish up well before the police got here.
He stuck his head into the Data Entry office but it was empty. Hiding in here wasn’t an option since Swenson had modernized the department a year ago and gone for glass and metal-framed desks that gave the two computer clerks zero privacy—they didn’t even have modesty panels to cover their legs. There were three servers against the far wall, green lights blinking cheerfully. Glenn stared at them for a long moment, then put two bullets in each one, taking methodic aim and not at all startled by the smoke and sparks that exploded from each one. Maybe the place would burn down. In fact, he’d like that.
There was a sound behind his last shot and Glenn tilted his head, trying to identify it. A . . . whine, maybe. Yes, that was it—like that of a trapped dog. He turned back to the hallway and made his way down it, glancing quickly into both the secretarial offices on his right. Empty, of course—even the dumbest person would’ve realized immediately that the tiny rooms were nothing but death traps and headed into Swenson’s office at the end. Safety in numbers? Not at all; it just meant Glenn wouldn’t have to work as hard to aim.
Finally, the Personnel office, or as it had apparently recently been renamed,
Human Resources
. The door was closed and locked, just like it would be after hours to give the illusion of security. Except it wasn’t after hours, it was still business hours, and Glenn wasn’t a bit fooled. Nor was he stupid enough to believe that no one was in Swenson’s office, even though that door was also closed and, when he tried the handle, just as locked. The question was, who and how many people were in each place?
One shot vaporized the lock and the door handle to Human Resources, leaving in its stead a gaping, jagged hole. The door slammed inward of its own accord, then rebounded agat the wall and bounced forward again, stopping its back and forth motion only when Glenn jammed his foot in front of it. With the shot still making his ears ring, he scanned the room, his gaze taking in the filing cabinets, the bookcases with all the manuals and volumes about the right way to run a personnel office—Glenn didn’t believe for a minute that Ava McBride ever paid attention to any of
that
—the prissy framed florals on the wall, and finally the desk itself. Unlike the ones in the Data Entry department, Ava’s was cream-colored metal, something that looked good but came nice and cheap out of a mega-office supply catalog. That cheapness was going to be the end of bitchy Ava McBride, because even though she was hiding beneath it—Glenn could see her shadow in the narrow space between the bottom of the modesty panel and the area rug she’d put there—the panel itself was ridiculously flimsy. He took three steps into the room, pressed the muzzle of the gun firmly against the panel about a foot from the left-hand side—about where he thought her upper body would be—and squeezed the trigger.
Maybe it was because the gun was pressed against the metal, but more than any of the previous ones, this shot was
loud
. Glenn heard Ava scream, but it was reactive rather than proactive. Proof of that came an instant later when Glenn heard a soft thump and saw her hand fall into view, palm up, within that telltale space under the edge of the panel. As it hit the floor, blood slipped off the edge of the metal, forming an exquisite line of red from the metal to her fingers. Not bad for a single shot.
Ava’s had been the open window, and the sirens—at least three of them—were louder now, probably no farther away than the next block. If he wanted to finish this, he had to hurry.
When Glenn stepped out of the HR office and turned toward Swenson’s door, it took him a second to realize it was open. And in that second, something hard and metallic crashed against the side of his head.
He staggered backward, hitting the doorjamb at the same time he swung outward with the gun. Someone—Ralph Atzbach? Swenson?—grabbed at the P226 then cried out as flesh met the blisteringly hot barrel. Glenn’s assailant let go of that and snatched at his wrist, trying to pry the gun free, but hell would freeze before Glenn would let go of this weapon. Once, when he’d been five years old, his mother had sent him to the store with money for a gallon of milk and a trio of neighborhood bullies had beaten him senseless trying unsuccessfully to get it. Glenn hung on to his Sig Sauer with that same desperation, knowing that the consequences—back then, his father; now, the end of his vengeance—would be worse than what he faced now.
Everything was happening quickly now, but in one of those flash-frame instances Glenn knew his attacker was Swenson himself, the old fuck finally trying to protect himself now that almost everyone else had been sacrificed. He brought his left hand up and clawed at Swenson’s eyes, knocking the older man’s glasses askew he siaking a gouge out of his cheek for good measure. Out of the corner of one eye, Glenn registered Atzbach, half crouched, half cowering, just waiting for a chance—but it had to be a safe one—to jump in and save the big boss. Glenn couldn’t let that happen, because even with a pistol, a two-on-one situation would probably mean the end of everything.
Time for spray and pray.
He wasn’t sure how many bullets he had left in the clip and he didn’t have time to guess. He just started squeezing the trigger, again and again. He didn’t care where they went or who they hit, or even if they hit him. He just wanted Swenson to let
go
of him, he wanted Atzbach to get the fuck away, and he wanted to finish this business once and for all. By the time the chamber clicked emptily, he and Swenson were covered in blood and the older man had careened into Atzbach; both the men and the two data processing clerks who’d been hiding in Swenson’s office were shrieking loud enough to crack the windows. They were so hysterical they didn’t even realize when Glenn dropped out the empty magazine and calmly loaded his last one.
“Shut up,” he said.
Only two of the four listened—Swenson and one of the clerks—so Glenn raised the Sig and shot the other clerk in the chest. Her ongoing scream was cut off as neatly as if someone had punched the
OFF
button on a car radio; her corpse slammed against the wall behind her and she slid down and stopped in an almost prim position, eyes open and staring at nothing she would ever be able to relate.