Suicide Mission (10 page)

 

“You sure they'll be there?” Bailey asked.

“Yeah, yeah, no doubt about it,” T.J. replied. “My information is solid, man.”

Bailey curled his hand around the grips of the heavy revolver stuck in the waistband of his trousers.

“Better be,” he said. “If we're gonna do this, I don't want anything to go wrong.”

“Nothin' gonna go wrong,” T.J. insisted. He bounced up and down on his toes, too full of nervous energy to be still as they stood in the shadows watching the warehouse across the street, not far from the docks.

Knowing T.J., he was probably full of something else, too, thought Bailey. A little chemical courage. T.J. could handle it, though. He had used all the time they were together in the sandbox and hadn't let the unit down once. Not once. He and Bailey were the only survivors, true, but the others getting wiped out in an ambush hadn't been T.J.'s fault, not by any stretch of the imagination.

If anybody was to blame for that “incident,” it was Bailey. He'd been on point when they were clearing the houses in a village. He was the one who'd let the insurgents flank them on both sides and catch them in a crossfire . . .

Bailey shoved that thought out of his mind. He'd been brooding about it for years now, and that hadn't changed a damn thing. Dead was still dead. Those guys weren't ever coming back. So he had to look out for himself, and when T.J. had come to him, first time they'd seen each other in a good six months, with the idea of ripping off the guys in the warehouse, Bailey hadn't had to think about it for very long before he said yes.

“You can make more in one night than you could make in a year working at that club, man. And it ain't like these are good guys we'd be rippin' off. They're assholes, man. Drug-dealin' assholes.”

“So if we steal the drugs and sell them, what does that make us?” Bailey had wanted to know.

A cocky grin had spread from one side of T.J.'s face to the other.

“Robin Hood, man. That makes us Robin Hood.”

“Stealing from the rich and giving to the . . . We're not exactly poor, T.J.”

“Speak for yourself, man. You can't be rakin' it in, workin' the door at some club. And I know I'm not makin' much bartending in this joint.”

They were sitting in a booth in the little bar where T.J. worked. It was late, and they were alone. The bar was closed, and so was the club where Bailey worked.

They were quite a contrast, sitting across the table from each other. The ponderous-looking white guy, so big the other grunts in the squad had nicknamed him The Incredible Hulk, and the frenetic little black guy. But Bailey and T.J. were best buds and had been since the day they'd met, which oddly enough was half a world away, even though they had both grown up in New York City—T.J. in Manhattan, Bailey across the river in Brooklyn. New York was a big place, though, so it wasn't surprising they had never run into each other.

“We're liable to get ourselves killed,” Bailey had objected when T.J. laid out the plan. “The buyer and the seller will each have a crew of hardasses with him. The two of us won't be any match for them.”

“But we'll have the element of surprise on our side,” T.J. had argued. “Plus we'll have some of these.”

He reached into his backpack, which lay on the seat beside him, and took out something that he placed on the table between them. Bailey's eyes grew wide as he looked at the object. A pleasant haze from the alcohol he'd consumed this evening had enveloped his brain until now, but it burned off like fog in the morning sun at the sight of the thing on the table.

“What the hell? That's a grenade!”

“That's right. Ordnance, man. We can blow their asses off if we have to.”

Bailey shook his head and said, “We'll blow our own asses off, more than likely. Where the hell did you get that?”

“I got my sources,” T.J. said serenely. “Look, it's simple. We go in and show them these babies, and they turn the money over to us. Actually, I've been thinkin' about it, and I think we should leave the coke there. It'd be easier to trace than the money will be.”

“You think? Couple mooks like us turn up with a fortune in coke, that'll draw attention we don't want.” Bailey pondered and then slowly nodded. “But the cash is a different story, especially if we're careful and don't make a big splash with it. We'll have to hold it back, though, T.J., and just spend a little at a time. Think you can do that?”

“Sure, no worries.”

Bailey didn't really believe that. T.J. and the concept of impulse control were total strangers. He might intend to lay low for a while with his share of the loot. He might even believe that he could do it successfully.

But Bailey knew better. The cravings would hit T.J. and he'd have to do something to satisfy them, and once he was flying, there was no telling what he might do or say.

Maybe Bailey could sit on him, though, until the heat died down. If the take from ripping off that drug deal was as much as T.J. claimed, it might be worth running the risk.

 

 

“All right,” Bailey had said, that night in the bar. “Let's do it.”

That was how he came to find himself standing in the shadows with a couple of grenades in his pocket on a hot, muggy night. The water was close enough that the air stunk . . . or maybe that was just his own sweat and worry he smelled.

“Ooh,” T.J. said beside him. “Here they come.”

A big, expensive car slid to a stop in front of the warehouse. According to the intel T.J. had overheard in the bar, that would be the Ukrainians with the money. The Arabs with the drugs were already inside the building, waiting for the cash just like Bailey and T.J. were.

Bailey leaned toward his friend and said in a low, urgent voice, “Maybe we should hit them out here, leave the Arabs out of it entirely. They're just something else than can go wrong.”

“Out in the open? No, man, we can handle it better inside. Those camel humpers, they'll stay out of it once we tell 'em we ain't after their coke. They'll still have their merchandise, and they can always sell it to somebody else.”

The plan still seemed a little sketchy to Bailey, but what the hell. A man had to run a few risks to get ahead. He wouldn't ever do it working the door at some club, letting in a bunch of rich kids who had more money than sense.

Two big men got out of the car, one from the passenger seat in front, the other from the seat behind the driver. The driver stayed where he was for the moment, and so did the other man in the backseat. The two big guys looked around but didn't seem to see anything threatening. Not surprising, since there was nothing to see in this neighborhood at this time of night. All the buildings were dark.

One of the men nodded to the second guy in the backseat. He got out carrying a briefcase. Bailey's eyes fastened on the case. According to T.J., there would be 1.2 million dollars in there.

The driver emerged from the car as well and reached back into it to retrieve a pump shotgun with a pistol grip. He walked beside the money man toward the door that led into the warehouse's office area. The other two men fell in behind them.

The door opened before they got there. All four of the men disappeared inside.

“Time to go to work,” T.J. said, still bobbing on his toes.

Bailey reached up and pulled the rubberized ski mask over his head. On a night like this the thing was hot and stifling, and for a second he felt a surge of claustrophobic panic. He shrugged into the cheap Windbreaker he had brought with him and worked tight-fitting gloves onto his hands. The only skin visible was around his eyes, and he had worked lampblack into it earlier.

The goal was that nobody would be able to tell if he and T.J. were white, black, brown, yellow, or whatever. If somebody started looking for a big white guy and a little black guy, there was a chance the trail would lead back to them sooner or later, and they didn't want that.

Bailey tried to take a deep breath, but the ski mask made that difficult. He said, “Screw it, let's go.”

A few days earlier, after they had decided to pull the job, T.J. had asked him, “Whatchu gonna do with your share, man?”

It was a question Bailey hadn't really considered. When you got a bunch of money, you had that money. That was as far as his thinking had gone. Bailey had forced himself to ponder the matter for a moment, then said, “Go to the mountains, maybe.”

“The mountains? Why? Most guys, if they rich, they wanna go sit on a beach somewhere.”

“I've been where it's hot and sandy, remember?” Bailey had said. “Didn't care much for it. But I've never really seen any mountains.”

“All that snow? I dunno, man. I'm not much for the cold.”

“What do you think the weather's like here all winter? At least if you're some place up high where there's a lot of snow, it'd be . . . I don't know . . . cleaner somehow.”

“Maybe so, man, maybe so. You gonna be rich enough you can do whatever you want, that's for sure. One point two mil, baby, that's what we gonna split.”

Those snowcapped mountains Bailey imagined might as well have been a million miles away from this squalid New York street. He put all thoughts of them out of his head to concentrate on the job at hand.

T.J. had scouted the place ahead of time, once he knew where the deal would go down, and had found a way in, a window in an alley that had been boarded up. He had pulled all the nails except a couple in each board, so Bailey with his great strength had no trouble wrenching them loose. He had to do it carefully, though, and not make too much noise that might alert the men inside. The window was so narrow that his shoulders barely fit, but he made it.

Once they were in, T.J. led the way, finding a path through a maze of hallways the same way his instincts had led him through streets like rabbit warrens in those dusty towns on the other side of the globe. He had an instinct for such things that made him valuable despite his drug habit and his jumpy nature.

If it had been T.J. on point that day instead of him, maybe the rest of the squad would still be alive, Bailey had thought more than once.

They reached the open area of the warehouse. The huge, high-ceilinged room was like a cavern. It was empty except for a folding card table that somebody had set up.

The two crews stood facing each other across that card table. Two briefcases sat open on the table. The glare from a bare lightbulb overhead shone down on clear plastic packets of white powder in one case and tightly banded bricks of money in the other.

In the shadows, T.J. licked his lips and whispered, “Maybe we'll take just a little bit of the coke, okay?”

“No, just the money,” Bailey said.

“Okay, okay,” T.J. muttered.

The boss of each crew stood slightly ahead of his companions. The two men talked in heavily accented English, the Arab promising that the cocaine was high quality goods, the Ukrainian saying that it had better be.

Bailey took one of the grenades from his pocket and pulled the pin. As long as he held on to the arming lever, nothing would happen. He slipped the pin in his pocket so he could replace it once they were out of here . . . assuming, of course, that he didn't have to use the grenade. Then he drew his revolver.

Beside him, T.J. had armed one of his grenades and drawn his own gun, a Glock 9mm that he had gotten hold of somewhere. T.J. was a champion scrounger and always had been.

But Bailey suddenly found himself wondering about the grenades. T.J. swore they were the real thing, but you couldn't exactly test that out, could you? What if they wound up tossing the grenades at the feet of those ruthless killers, and the damn things just thudded to the floor and lay there, harmless?

In that case, he and T.J. would wind up very dead, very quick, Bailey thought.

But he couldn't back out now. He didn't want to, and anyway, it was too late, because T.J. had just stepped out into the open, waved the Glock, brandished the grenade where the men couldn't miss it, and yelled, “Don't move or we'll blow you all to hell!”

Bailey stepped out behind him, moving to the right and waving his own grenade in the air so they couldn't miss it. He pointed his revolver at the Arabs while T.J. covered the Ukrainians. The man with the shotgun started to raise it, but T.J. waggled the Glock at him and said, “Uh-uh, man, don't do it. This baby'll turn you into hamburger if I toss it over there.”

Bailey felt himself trembling a little inside as he looked over the barrel of his gun at the Arabs. T.J. hadn't been sure where they were from—he thought maybe they were Syrians—but it didn't really matter to Bailey. The swarthy faces, the beard stubble, the mustaches . . . after his time in the sandbox, they all looked the same to him.

They all looked like the enemy, and he had to control the impulse to start blowing them away.

“All we want's the cash,” T.J. went on. “You babies pick up your coke and back on outta here, do you another deal some other day,
capisce
?”

The head Arab was the only clean-shaven one of the bunch. He said, “You men are very foolish to be interfering with our business.”

The bald-headed boss of the Ukrainian crew said, “You think we let you walk out of here with our money?”

“I don't think you got any choice, man, long as me and my partner got these grenades.”

T.J. could have at least tried to disguise his voice, thought Bailey. He didn't plan to speak at all unless he had to. There were plenty of guys in New York City who were as big as he was—well, maybe not plenty, but some, for sure—so that was all he was going to let them know about him.

All the gunmen had started to reach under their coats for their weapons at the first sign of trouble, but the sight of the grenades had stopped them from completing their draws. Bailey didn't know how long that would keep them frozen, so he wanted to get this over with. He was glad when T.J. went on, “Close the case with the money, put it on the floor, and slide it over here.”

“Go to hell,” the boss Ukrainian said, adding some colorful and anatomically improbable suggestions. He finished by saying, “You can't throw those grenades at us. You'll blow yourselves up, too!”

“Not when you're over there and we're over here,” T.J. said. “Anyway, it's a chance we're willin' to take. Are you?”

The Arab said, “Leave us out of it,” and reached for the briefcase full of coke.

“Don't touch that!” the Ukrainian snapped. “Our deal was concluded.” He glanced toward Bailey and T.J. “The cocaine is ours now, as per our agreement. So if anyone is to lose the money, it is you.”

“Lies!” the Arab responded. “The deal was not finished. That is still our cocaine!”

Bailey saw T.J. glance over at him uneasily. This argument was something they hadn't anticipated. When you're ripping off crazy foreign gangsters, any complication is a bad one, Bailey realized.

T.J. said, “Look, you guys can hash that out after we've got the cash and gone.” He giggled. “Hash it out. Only that's coke, not hash!”

The two groups ignored him. They were glaring at each other now. The Ukrainian pointed at the case with the coke in it and said, “Those are my drugs.”

“No, those are
my
drugs,” the Arab insisted.

T.J. said, “Hey! We're the ones with the grenades!”

Both leaders lunged for the coke at the same time. As they did, the men with them clawed guns from under their coats and started shooting at each other. Flames flickered from the muzzles of machine pistols as lead spewed from them. The shotgun boomed.

T.J. yelled, “No!” and ran forward, probably intent on grabbing the briefcase full of money from the middle of the firefight. Bailey made a grab for him with the hand holding the grenade but missed.

The grenade slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor, bouncing once and then rolling. The arming lever had spun away as soon as Bailey let go of it. Bailey's eyes bugged out as his brain automatically started counting down the seconds.

He sure as hell wasn't going to throw himself on the grenade to protect this warehouse full of scumbags. Instead he took a fast step forward and kicked the damn thing, sending it scooting past T.J. as it slid straight toward the table over which the Ukrainians and the Arabs were blazing away at each other.

The grenade detonated just as it went under the table.

Bailey had already thrown himself flat on the floor when the explosion rocked the building. With his head down, he couldn't see anything, but the image in his mind's eye of what had to be happening was pretty clear.

The blast blew the table into a million pieces. A cloud of smoke mixed with cocaine billowed toward the ceiling. Deadly shrapnel sprayed through the air and shredded the flesh of the men standing nearby. Tiny pieces of money swirled around and floated back to the floor like snowflakes.

Bailey was untouched. With his ears ringing from the explosion, he lifted his head and looked around. The single high-intensity bulb fastened to one of the rafters overhead still burned, casting its harsh light over the scene. Bailey saw huddled lumps of bloody flesh and torn clothing lying on the floor near the site of the explosion. He looked for T.J. . . .

A moan made him turn his head. T.J. lay to one side where the force of the blast had thrown him. He was still alive. He had been farther away from the grenade, so it hadn't killed him—yet—but he had caught some shrapnel. Bailey saw blood on T.J.'s Windbreaker.

As Bailey tried to gather his wits, T.J. rolled onto his side and started struggling to his feet. Bailey knew they had to get out of here. The explosion would draw the cops, and they didn't want to be here for that.

The coke and the cash were gone, destroyed in the blast, but at least maybe they could escape with their lives, Bailey thought as he got his hands and knees under him and tried to lever himself up off the floor.

A thought struck him. Where the hell was T.J.'s grenade?

Still on all fours, Bailey looked around wildly, thinking that T.J. must have dropped the grenade when he was knocked down. It might go off at any second.

Then Bailey spotted the ugly thing lying on the floor a few feet away. His heart slammed against his chest and then tried to crawl up his throat. The terror that gripped him was stronger even than anything he had experienced during the war.

But as he stared at the grenade, he realized that the pin was still in it.

T.J. had never pulled it.

Either T.J. had forgotten to pull the pin, or he had been running a bluff he'd neglected to tell Bailey about. Anything was possible where he was concerned. But the important thing was that the grenade wasn't going to explode. Bailey's muscles were limp with relief, and that kept him from getting up for a moment longer.

T.J. staggered toward the blackened crater in the floor where the table had been.

“T.J.,” Bailey croaked. “What are—”

“Might be some money left,” T.J. mumbled without looking back. Even injured, he wanted the payoff. “Might find some—”

One of the lumps on the floor moved then. Something lifted and pointed toward T.J., and Bailey didn't even have time to shout a warning when he recognized it as the shotgun carried by the Ukrainian driver. Somehow, the man wasn't dead yet.

Flame gouted from the weapon's muzzle. The buckshot caught T.J. in the chest and flung him backward. He hit the floor right after the shotgun, which had been torn from the wounded man's hands by its recoil.

Bailey scrambled over to T.J. on hands and knees. He sat down and pulled the limp body into his lap. T.J.'s head lolled loosely on his neck. His chest was a bloody mess where the shotgun's blast had struck him, not to mention the shrapnel wounds scattered around his body.

He might have survived the shrapnel if Bailey had been able to get some medical attention for him. The buckshot had killed him, though. His eyes were wide open, staring sightlessly. They were all Bailey could see of his face because of the ski mask. Sobbing, Bailey took hold of the mask and peeled it off.

“T.J., I'm sorry, I'm sorry, buddy, I should have stopped him, oh, God, I'm so sorry . . .”

The words poured out of Bailey in a river of sorrow. He cradled T.J.'s bloody form against his chest and rocked back and forth. They had been through so much together, and now suddenly, shockingly, it was over. It couldn't be, it couldn't be.

Bailey wasn't thinking about the cops anymore. There was no room in his brain for that. Instead it was filled with grief, and then slowly, anger began to filter in and replace some of that sadness. He reached up and pulled his own ski mask off, gulping down deep lungfuls of air between sobs. After a few minutes, he eased T.J.'s body to the floor and staggered to his feet.

The revolver he had dropped lay close by. He scooped it up and walked toward the Ukrainian who had wielded the shotgun. The stubborn son of a bitch
still
wasn't dead, although he was so close now he was too weak to lift the weapon or even reach for it. All he could do was lie there, his body a wreck where the explosion had torn into it, his face a bloody mask with grotesquely staring eyes.

Bailey stood over the man and pointed the revolver at his face. He couldn't tell if the Ukrainian actually saw him or not. It didn't matter.

Bailey pulled the trigger.

Then he pulled it again and again until the hammer clicked on an empty chamber. The Ukrainian's head looked like a pumpkin somebody had dropped from the top of a ten-story building.

Bailey lowered the empty gun and let it slip from his fingers. It thudded to the floor beside his feet. He turned away from the gory mess, not really thinking about anything, just allowing the primitive instincts inside him to move his muscles.

The door into the warehouse office crashed open. Heavy footsteps pounded on the cement floor. Uniformed shapes flitted in front of Bailey's eyes. Dimly, he heard a lot of strident, shouting voices telling him to get down on the ground.

He fell to his knees, but not because anybody ordered him to. He was just too tired to stay on his feet anymore. Something hit him in the back and knocked him forward onto his face. The rough concrete scraped his face. He didn't care.

He just didn't give a damn about anything anymore.