Rules of Honour (25 page)

‘In a minute. Hold up, will you?’ I jabbed a hand back at the two bruisers. ‘We have to sort
this
first.’

‘They’re done.’ I’d never seen Rink acting petulantly before. It wasn’t an image that suited him.

‘We have to find out who sent them.’

‘Isn’t that obvious? It was Chaney. The frog-gigging asshole . . .’

‘The killer isn’t going anywhere, Rink. Just give me a few seconds with this guy here and we’ll know for sure.’

Rink was shivering with pent up adrenalin. But he relented. ‘You’d best be quick. The racket we’ve made, half the block will be on the phone to the police. We don’t want to be here when they arrive.’

I ignored the man on the settee. He was still out cold, but the one I downed was wide awake. Not that he was fully cognisant, because the agony of his dislocated femur was making him feverish. His face was a pale oval in the dimness, and beads of perspiration poured off him in floods. When he saw me stoop over him, his mouth opened in terror.

If I had considered my actions I would have stopped then and there, but I needed answers and I needed them quick.

Placing one hand on his chest to hold him down, I used the other to dig into his dislocated hip. I could feel where the end of his femur had jumped out of the socket. Even through his jeans I could sense the pulsating heat of his injury. He was already in intense pain; my probing fingers made it grow tenfold. He yowled but I clamped my palm down on his mouth.

‘If you think that hurts, just think what I’ll do to you if you don’t give me what I want.’

His eyes bugged.

‘Who sent you after us?’

He moaned, working his mouth beneath my palm. He wasn’t trying to bite me. I took some of the pressure from his mouth.

‘If I tell you he won’t be happy, man!’

‘
I’m not happy
. Take your pick who you’d rather piss off.’

‘It was Sean Chaney. He offered us good money to sort you out.’

‘And you two were the best he could afford, eh? Why am I not afraid?’ I relaxed a little more. There was no fight left in this man. I let go of his hip and rested on my heels. ‘Why’d he send you here to hurt some old guys? Why not just call us out in person?’

The man looked past me to where Rink stood like a silent shadow in the doorway. ‘It was him, man. The way he treated Chaney that day on the train. Don’t you remember?’ He directed his next words at Rink. ‘You
humiliated
him and he’s got a rep to protect. He wanted to humiliate
you
by beating those under your protection. We saw you that day at the funeral, but it wasn’t the time or place. Instead we hung around and then followed the old guys back to this apartment. We knew it would only be a matter of time before you showed up here. We missed you the first time, it’s why we came back.’

‘You didn’t miss us last time. You gave up the chase, hoping for an easier go at the old guys first. You cowardly piece of shit,’ I said.

Without warning, I hooked my arm around his ankle and bent knee. I twisted savagely. The bruiser howled, but then his face slipped into a calmer state as he realised I hadn’t ripped his leg off entirely. The pop of his joint realigning was horrible, but must have brought him some relief. I dragged him up. Shoved him towards his friend. ‘I’d love to put a bullet in both of you. Wake up your buddy, and then get the hell away from here before I change my mind. And here’s something else: tell Chaney he’d best leave town.’

When I turned to regard Rink my buddy was gone. I glanced back at the shambling thug who was hopping on his good leg as he struggled to waken his colleague. For what they’d planned to do to Parnell and Faulks, they’d have deserved a bullet in the skull, except their corpses would only complicate matters. I thought it best to leave him to it: I wanted them out of here before the police descended on Hayes Tower. There was the more pressing urgency of making sure that neither Rink nor I was tied to the dead man lying at the back of the building and I didn’t trust the thugs not to blab as soon as they were pressed. I thought about offering to help carry the sleeping brute out of the apartment, but saw that he was coming round. I gathered up their dropped weapons and shoved them in a sideboard drawer, covering them with some of Parnell’s belongings. By the time I was done, the two men were stumbling from the apartment. ‘Best you get a move on,’ I said, showing them my SIG. It proved good motivation, as did the approaching police sirens.

I closed Parnell’s door as best I could, then backtracked to close the door I’d left open in the neighbouring apartment. When next I looked the men were piling into the elevator, wary of Rink who stood looking over the balustrade. He was unconcerned by their presence so close by, and didn’t give them as much as a look.

I jogged towards him.

He turned and saw me coming.

‘You said you shot the killer.’ He nodded at a sprinkle of blood on the railing. ‘But did you kill him?’

I had no firm answer, and judging by his face I could tell I wouldn’t like what I found when I leaned over the railing.

The point was, I found nothing.

If Markus Colby had fallen to the earth six floors below us then he’d landed on his feet like a cat, because there was no sign of him.

Chapter 29

‘Let’s get outta here.’

‘Give me another second, Rink. I just want to check down here.’

Sirens were filling the air, echoing back and forth from the high-rise block and the smaller apartment complexes across the way. We were risking being caught red-faced – if not red-handed – though it was necessary to check that Markus wasn’t lying out of sight against the lowest point of the building. There was a pebble drainage gully adjacent to the wall, with a slight overhang formed by the first balcony that butted out over it. When we checked I expected to find that when the killer slammed to the ground, the impact had bounced him against the base of the tower and his body would be found there.

It wasn’t.

There was no sign of where the body hit the dirt either. There was no indentation, no sign of blood. I scanned the building overhead. The lights on each landing threw the outer walls into shadow so I could make out no indication of blood. Unfortunately, now that the sounds of conflict had ended, the residents of Hayes Tower had come out on the landings, hailing each other as they tried to determine what had just occurred. A couple of the more courageous tenants were already scouting out the uppermost corner of the building, calling out to anyone in the rooms that might be injured. Thankfully no one looked down at where we lurked at the foot of the tower, but it was only a matter of time. Rink was correct: we had to get out of there, and quick. My only concern was that Markus was still there somewhere, injured but possibly a danger to the unlucky resident who came across him. We should have completed a check of each landing on our way down, cornered and finished the bastard once and for all. The opportunity was missed. Now we had to get away.

‘Let’s go,’ I said.

Rink led the way, loping across the fallow ground. He moved with a determined ease that I couldn’t match. The battering I’d taken during the car crash manifested itself in aches and pains throughout my body. I ignored them all and jogged after Rink. He reached the tall mesh fence, pausing while I caught up to him. Maybe he could tell I wasn’t working at one hundred per cent because he cupped his hands to help boost me over. I stepped into his palms and experienced a heady sensation as he heaved me up. I grabbed at the top of the fence, swung over and began scrambling down the other side. Rink swarmed over the obstruction like it was barely there. We ran, using the fence as a guide, avoiding obstacles on the fallow ground that would trip us in the dark. Andrew’s car was parked beyond the adjoining book depository stockyard, half a minute away at most. A quick glance back over my shoulder assured me that any responding police cruisers were at the front of the building, and as yet there were no flashlights seeking us out.

‘Our detective buddies are going to suspect it was us,’ I said between breaths.

Rink didn’t respond. I was stating the obvious.

‘Without a body, there’s no sign of a crime. Maybe it’s a good job the killer escaped, considering the circumstances.’

‘I’m glad.’

I shook my head as I ran, fighting to conceal a smile. The only reason Rink was happy the killer had escaped was that he could have his own shot at him.

I reassessed my earlier concern. The cops didn’t know about our connection to Parnell yet. ‘I don’t think we need worry about Jones and Tyler,’ I puffed. ‘There’s nothing in the apartments that they can use against us. We can always deny being there, and if they find prints or DNA we can claim it was from previous visits. Don’t know what we can do about the blood from where I shot Markus, though.’

‘His blood won’t mean a damn thing if he’s not already on record. By the time they can make a match, the bastard will be dead. That’s if they ever find his body to match it to.’ Rink had reached a connecting fence. This one wasn’t as tall as the one we’d climbed earlier, and he went over it without stopping. I had to grab at the wire, shove it down and then straddle it before dragging myself over. I hadn’t felt as sore for months; not since taking a pounding from a lunatic called Samuel Logan who didn’t share my sensitivity to pain.

‘I hope those idiots got clear before the cops arrived.’ I was referring to Sean Chaney’s heavies. If there were a scale for measuring criminal excellence, those guys wouldn’t even hit the lowest level. If they were caught fleeing the scene then they’d immediately do one of two things: concoct a totally ridiculous story demonstrating their innocence or blame everything on us. I trusted it would be the latter. Best-case scenario was that they got well away, but time would tell. I had to stop worrying about them and concentrate on the main issue. Despite my shooting Markus Colby or Peterson – or whichever name he was using – and the man tumbling from the tower block, somehow he had survived. It told me something I hadn’t considered before: that he was more resilient than I gave him credit for. On most counts his victims had been elderly and not exactly a match for an armed man; what was more some of them – in particular Takumi – were infirm and it didn’t take a pro to murder them. I’d been thinking of him in terms of a reckless amateur, who’d managed to avoid capture before now due to his anonymity, Yukiko’s reluctance to speak about what occurred all those years ago helping him, and a healthy dose of luck. Now I had to see him as a dangerous and capable adversary.

Making it to the car, Rink drove. He used a service alley to edge out on to the next street up from where all the activity was. Immediately he looked for another, and he turned into it to take us further across Potrero Hill and out of the cordon of response vehicles. I was thankful that Jones and Tyler were unaware of Parnell’s status as a future victim in their homicide investigation; otherwise the cops would have descended on Hayes Tower en masse. The report would have been of shots fired, of a commotion in an apartment, but when they found no evidence of either the police activity would be scaled down. There was still that damned sprinkle of blood that might cause alarm, but with no assailants, victims or complainants in evidence, I expected the matter would be filed and that was all. There was always the possibility that Markus was still in the vicinity and that the cops would locate him, but I didn’t give it much credence. He was a dangerous and capable adversary, as I’d just concluded, and it wasn’t likely that he had hung around after such a lucky escape.

Hayes Tower would be out of bounds to him for the rest of the night, and in all likelihood the police would be present the following day as officers conducted door-to-door enquiries. My regret was that it was also a no-go area for us and we’d lost the advantage for trapping the killer. I trusted Harvey Lucas would come through for us though, and if our suspicions were correct, in that the killer was Charles Peterson’s firstborn son, then he would find him. Next time we would take Markus in a frontal attack that wouldn’t be messed up by outside interference.

‘What do you propose we do about Sean Chaney?’ I asked.

Rink had directed the car back towards downtown now that we were well away from Hayes Tower. He had tucked in behind a FedEx delivery vehicle on an evening run. Behind us was a taxicab with two female passengers. There wasn’t a cop car in sight. ‘Nothing yet. I think we let his dimwit heavies report back and see if he takes up your advice to leave town. If not, we’ll show him the error of his ways . . . once Markus Colby is squared away.’

‘I can’t help feeling we brought this on ourselves. We went after Chaney first. It’s no wonder he sent his boys after us in revenge.’

‘Cause and effect,’ Rink said. ‘Chaney shouldn’t have muscled Jed Newmark in the first place. It’s his fault. He started this,
we’ll
finish it.’

I didn’t reply. There was an answer for everything if you looked deep enough, and then twisted it to suit purpose. It made me consider who was to blame for the larger picture we were involved in now. We saw ourselves as the good guys, but I guessed that Markus also fancied himself as the great avenger, doling out justice to a group of murderers. Was he acting any differently than Rink, in that each was a son who wanted revenge for their slain father? What Andrew and the others did to Charles Peterson was horrendous, and if the shoe was on the other foot we could have been hunting them down. But the saving grace in all this was that Peterson had kicked everything off when he’d preyed on those innocent girls. Following Rink’s line of logic there was only one person to blame and that was Charles Peterson. His son was his emissary in the here and now, still intent on causing pain to his victims and their families, and – as a result – definitely the bad guy.