Full Ratchet: A Silas Cade Thriller Hardcover (23 page)

A
1960s motor inn—two stories in one long building, yellow-painted concrete and dark red railings on the balcony. Each unit had an identical door to the left of one square window. It was set back thirty feet from the avenue, just enough for a row of parking spaces and some turnaround pavement.

And at one end a white contractor’s van was parked nose out. Its roof rack held a battered aluminum ladder and two PVC pipes, six inches wide and maybe eight feet long, bolted down. This close I could finally read the logo on the door—
EZ-FLOW PLUMBING SERVICE.

I drove past, not changing speed. Harmony stared intently.

We circled the block, and I stopped well away, up a slight rise. We could look down the street and see the motel’s sign, illuminated by one dim floodlight at the edge of the lot. The van and the building itself were concealed by the body shop between us.

“It wouldn’t be good enough for any kind of warrant,” said Harmony, “but I’m convinced.”

“I agree.” I switched off the pickup’s headlights but let the engine run, thumpy and erratic in neutral. “Now what?”

Harmony pulled out her pistol, a Glock 19 compact. The same one she’d pointed at me three nights earlier. “What do you
think
? We go in.”

I made no move toward my own weapons. “Why?”

“Why?” She glared. “Because they tried to kill me. Because they’re private assassins involved in a secret takeover of an American manufacturer. Because they shot the hell out of a rural hospital and killed at least one policeman. Because they’re fucking
bad guys
and they deserve it.”

O-k-a-a-y. Always nice to see some honest enthusiasm in the troops.

“I get it,” I said. “Totally with you, one hundred percent. But is this the
best
way of going about it?”

“What do you mean?” Harmony held the handgun casually, below the edge of the window, pointed at her door.

I crossed my arms and leaned back against the bench seat.

“Assume it’s them. Assume they’re all inside, playing cards and drinking vodka, as opposed to some of them out doing errands and buying more vodka. Assume that we could walk in and surprise them and achieve tactical superiority—
without
drawing any attention, like with a full-scale firefight, because we’re going to want to talk with them for a while, and having SWAT surround the place with bullhorns and snipers would be a problem.” I paused. “Assume all that, for the sake of argument . . . why in the world do you think they’d tell us anything?”

Harmony set her jaw. The block was poorly lit here—we were under one of the nonworking street lamps—but a globe light over a doorway twenty feet away illuminated her profile. She gestured slightly with the Glock.

“Because we’ll
make
them talk,” she said.

“Uh-huh. Look, it was me?—I’d tell you everything. Stare into your eyes, see the madness, I’d give it up straight away. But these are
Russians
. They probably got counterinterrogation instruction from ex-KGB torturers. They train by fighting bare-knuckled in the snow in Siberia. They’re fucking inhuman killing machines, and they’re just not going to be persuaded by you.” I shook my head slowly. “Or even by you and me together.”

Harmony actually ground her teeth. “I’ll do this myself if you’re backing out.”

Where was this insane determination coming from? “I have a better idea,” I said. “Let’s at least sit and watch for an hour or two. See if anyone comes or goes. Maybe they’ve got another vehicle in the lot. Maybe they’ve been reinforced—to start with, I don’t know that we’ve seen all of the team. They lost three guys on Leechburg Road, but who knows how many others there are? That’d be good to ascertain, right? Before breaking in the door?”

Another minute, but I finally wore her down.

“All right. That kind of makes sense.” A grudging concession but good enough. “We’ll surveil.”

I let out a long breath. “Good decision.”

Cars had been driving past, a few every minute. I hadn’t noticed any pedestrians so far, but that didn’t mean none would show up. Not to mention we couldn’t even see the motel.

“Where do you want to set up?” I said.

Harmony moved her arm and the Glock disappeared. I blinked. That was a nice trick.

“Not here,” she said. “Not in the Escalade, either. I’m not going to piss in a coffee can with you in the car.”

I had to agree with her on that point. “A vehicle post doesn’t make sense anyway. Too visible.” The Russians could do it with their van—probably one reason they were driving it—but endless PI procedurals to the contrary, sitting in a parked car draws all kinds of attention. “One of these buildings might make sense. Maybe the garage.”

“Yes,” Harmony said. “The second floor.”

I was looking there too. The body shop was dark, shuttered for the night. “I don’t see any light in the windows up there. Could be an apartment—”

“Doesn’t have that feel.”

“No.”

We drove back to Harmony’s SUV and returned in caravan to park near the motel. After a small amount of argument we put hers on the street, and the truck right behind the body shop. In theory, if we needed to run down and follow someone leaving, our vehicles were situated to go either way.

In reality, we’d go for Harmony’s no matter what, because in the pickup, every single mile was an adventure.

Harmony had returned from the Escalade with a dark nylon bag over one shoulder. “Tools,” she said when I raised an eyebrow. “Plus some feminine hygiene products.”

I let that go.

“Bring your phone,” she added. “I had to leave mine to charge.”

“Yes sir.”

The back of the building had a small iron balcony with a metal door, fifteen feet from the ground. Probably a fire escape—no stairs or ladder to make it harder for burglars.

“Up there,” Harmony said.

“Yup.” I got back in the truck and advanced it to a stop just beneath the balcony. The engine sounded about to die. As I switched it off, there was a loud thump in the bed, then a bang on the metal cab roof above my head. When I got out, Harmony had already pulled herself onto the balcony. In a moment she was back down.

“Medeco deadbolt and a bar keyhole below it,” she said. “How good are you with locks?”

“Excellent, if I can use C-4. Got any?”

We studied the building. The body shop had a row of opaque windows, their frames bricked in. The second floor had the same tall windows, most with original glass, some protected with iron grilles, some open.

“Must have been an old factory or something,” I said. “Back when they needed lots of natural light.”

“Spiderman could get in easy enough.”

“That’s not me. Let’s check the roof.”

We climbed up. At the landing I knelt, let Harmony clamber to my shoulders and stood up, raising her enough that she could pull herself over the roofline parapet. She disappeared for a moment, then came back and leaned over.

“It’s good. Come on up.”

“Catch.” I heaved up her nylon kit—the damn thing must have weighed forty pounds, but she caught it easily. “Give me a hand.”

“I can’t pull you up.”

“I know.” I stepped on the guardrail encircling the landing, which got my hand to hers. We clasped wrists in a climber’s grip, and I used that for balance while I got one foot onto the top edge of the door frame. Then it was an acrobat’s move: swing up, other foot scrabbling on the brick, grab the underside of the pediment left-handed in a counterpressure hold, release Harmony’s wrist and fling my right arm over the parapet. Another few seconds of scrambling and I was over the top.

“Smooth.” She said it deadpan.

“I’m up, and that’s what counts.”

We took a minute to scan the streets below, looking for anyone who might have spotted us. Nothing happened. Harmony led us to the other side, about fifty feet across the flat roof. Two skylights jutted up from the tarred gravel, the seams patched and caulked. A headhouse at the end probably topped an interior stairwell, its sheet-metal walls rusting away at the base. Harmony knelt in its shadow.

“Good view from here,” she said.

Indeed. We could see the motel easily, its upper level lower than ours because of lower ceilings and a natural gradient in the topography. The panel van was still there, along with the same cars. I could hear occasional traffic on the streets around us, the faint noise of a television or video somewhere, and a brief siren, blocks away.

“We can take shifts.”

“No need.” I was at the headhouse door. “You have a screwdriver in that bag? Or a pry bar?”

“Sure.” She unzipped an outside pocket and handed me an eight-inch flathead.

“Perfect.” As is so often the case, the nuclear-silo level of security on the first door we tried was belied by a totally pathetic fastener up here. A cheap padlock hung from a galvanized hasp. It looked like someone had tried to shove their way out, more than once, deforming the hinge. I couldn’t quite reach the screws, but one quick yank levered them entirely out of the rotting wood. The lock flung free, clattering onto the roof.

“In we go.”

“Give me the driver back.”

Inside we didn’t even need a flash. Enough light from the motel’s parking lot came through the wall of windows facing it to illuminate most of the interior. I stepped carefully down the wooden stairs, Harmony five feet behind, and stopped on the floor.

“Wow.”

“No shit.”

The entire floor was open, like the industrial loft it must once have been. Brick pillars were spaced every fifteen feet or so. One wall had a row of benches, old scarred wood, with some scraps of packing and cardboard. In the middle a wooden rail surrounded descending stairs, and crates and cans and closed buckets had been piled carelessly nearby. It looked like the auto shop used this floor for materials storage. But the rest of it was empty, vast and echoing.

“Clean it up and this would sell for seven or eight million in Soho,” I said.

“Not to point out the obvious, but this isn’t Soho.”

I examined the supplies in the middle of the floor. Solvents, paint, cans of filler. A faint, sweetly chemical smell came from below—the miasma of toxic solutions used on damaged cars.

“It’s amazing they don’t all get cancer and die,” I said, studying one label. “Toluene, aliphatic polyisocyanate—it’s like Love Canal here.”

“This is ideal.” Harmony stood a few feet back from the windows—careful, always careful—studying the motel. After a minute she opened up the carrier bag and started pulling out equipment.

I checked the parking lot outside. When I looked back, Harmony had assembled a tripod, mounted a video camera and run a cable from it to a microsized laptop. She adjusted the camera using the manual viewfinder while the computer booted, then made further adjustments until the picture on the screen was just right.

“I’ve got the van and the last five doors of the motel in the frame,” she said.

“Okay.” The rig was impressive, but I wasn’t sure why we needed it. “Are you hoping to get pictures of them?”

“Of course—we can run them against the databases, see if they’ve been flagged anywhere.”

“Databases?”

“CJIS. You don’t have a contact there?”

I ducked that question. “Ah, I knew Justice had a photo repository, not just fingerprints. But I didn’t think it had been digitized and indexed yet.”

Harmony must have seen my expression. She laughed. “I’m kidding. Next Gen ID is the usual billion-dollar clusterfuck—they won’t have a photo database worth using for years.”

Good to know I wasn’t totally behind the curve. “So what’s the point?”

“Motion sensing.” She knelt to the laptop and started tapping keys, opening menus and adjusting settings. “I’ll set some baseline imagery—the doors and the van. Maybe the other vehicles, too. The computer will let us know if anything changes.”

“Huh.” Maybe I
did
need a technical upgrade.

“That way we don’t need to watch the whole time. I don’t know about you, but passive surveillance drives me nuts. I can’t tolerate just sitting and waiting.”

“Right.” I looked at the laptop’s screen, which was now windowpaned into several different close-ups of the motel. “What happens if, I dunno, a pigeon flies by? Or someone goes down the sidewalk?”

“That’s why the images are zoomed in on specific targets.” She glanced up at me. “They use this in the black-ops community now. After your time, maybe?”

Ouch. “When did you take
your
discharge?”

“Who says I was in the service?”

“You weren’t?”

“Maybe.”

Almost anyone with her skill set acquires it in the defense of our country. There are plenty of training courses around—wannabes can spend thousands of dollars on anything from tactical shooting to combat driving. But nothing compares with actual experience in the field. There’s a reason the merc firms like Academi hire guys out of the service, not certificate holders from Joe’s School of Gunnery.

If she wasn’t ex-military, her background was probably even scarier.
Spookier,
so to speak.

“Want to tell me about it?” I said.

Harmony looked at me and smiled. “No.”

It was about six o’clock. Surveillance boredom began to set in. I watched the last of the sunset through the western windows, against Pittsburgh’s skyline. The computer beeped occasionally, always a false alarm—someone passing too close, a car driving in. Once a dog loped across the lot, maybe feral, maybe just out for an after-dinner run. I started to get hungry.

“We should have picked up something to eat beforehand,” I said. “Seems risky to go in and out now, just to get some hamburgers.”

“Oh, sorry, forgot about that.” Harmony went back to the carrier bag and tossed me a couple of granola bars. “I have a liter of water, too.”

I’d found several broad pieces of thick, open-cell foam in the mechanics’ heap of junk. From the cutouts it looked like packing material, something that had been wrapped around bumpers or body panels. Stacked by one of the pillars it made a sort of sofa for us to sit on—low to the floor, but we could still see through the windows, and almost comfortable.