Slow Burn (28 page)

“You’re looking at them,” I said. Favilla didn’t look pleased. I couldn’t blame him.

“Grimes has already been here for a while,” Hauser noted. “He might be getting ready to make another move by now, especially since it’s rush hour. They’d blend in better on the street that way.”

“If we meet him out in the open,” Loomis added, “it’ll get messy.”

“That means we hit him now, in the suite,” Hauser said. “Keep it contained. The little guy didn’t get Grimes on the phone, so they don’t know we’re coming.”

“Agreed,” Favilla said. “The sooner, the better. Take the bastards by surprise.”

And that’s how you got yourself shot, I thought, but arguing with Favilla wouldn’t get me anywhere.

“All right,” I said. “We go now.”

I saw the look on Loomis’ face and decided to rescue him again. “Floyd, call Carmichael. Tell him we can’t wait for backup, but to send the cavalry anyway. Then keep everyone out of the lobby until this is over.”

Loomis looked relieved. “How will I know when it’s over?”

“Trust me,” Hauser said. “You’ll know.”

F
AVILLA RECALLED
all of the elevators back down to the lobby and ordered the operators to keep them there. That cut down on the number of escape routes if Grimes and his men got past us. Smart move. When all the elevators were locked down, Hauser, Favilla and I took one up to the fourth floor. The kid running the elevator looked almost as scared as Loomis.

When the elevator doors opened on the fourth floor, a middle-aged couple shoved past us as we got out of the elevator. “Such shouting!” the woman huffed. “There’s no reason for such shouting. And the language! Civilized people aren’t supposed to behave like that.”

The elevator doors shut behind us and the three of us pulled our weapons. The shouting was muffled by a closed door, but clearly coming from down the hall. Around the corner, to our right, a gold plaque on the wall said 1411 was just ahead.

The three of us crept down the hall; guns drawn in front of us, the green carpet muffling our footsteps. I was in front on the left, Favilla limping on the right, with Hauser covering the back.

The yelling from 1411 grew louder. Angrier. From what I could make out, they were arguing about whether or not they should make another ransom demand or make a break for it.

A glass shattered, followed by someone yelling, “Goddamn it! I said enough!”

We were about a quarter of the way down the hallway when the door swung open. The three of us pressed ourselves flat against the nearest doorways. We’d come too far down the hall to double back now.

A stocky man with thick black hair stormed into the hallway. He was trying to button his shirt with one hand while he held an ice bucket in the other. I noticed his shirt was not tucked in.

He froze when he realized we were there. He looked straight at each of us, but it was as if he couldn’t see us. Or couldn’t believe what he was seeing. We all just looked at each other for a few, long, calm seconds.

And then he threw the ice bucket at us as he reached for something under his shirt in his belt. I don’t know which of us fired first, but all of us fired once. Two rounds hit him in the chest, one in the head. He was probably dead before his body hit the carpet.

Hauser, Favilla and I hit the deck just as another man burst into the hall and opened up on us with a Thompson.

Dozens of rounds tore into the walls and doors all around us. Bits of wood and plaster kicked into the air. The roar of the Tommy gun boomed loud in the narrow hallway.

Hauser and I fired back through the gun smoke, unable to see what we were aiming at. There was no way of knowing if we’d hit anything. The gunfire was still ringing in my ears when Favilla yelled,

“They’re in the stairwell! The bastards are in the stairwell!”

I scrambled to my feet and ran through the gun smoke into Room 1411. Sweeping the room with my .38 in front of me, I saw there was nothing to aim at, just a lot of furniture. I went toward where I thought the bedroom would be, but the door was closed. I pushed it open.

Bathroom. Empty. Favilla called to me from the other side of the suite. He was standing in front of the bedroom. He waived me over to join him.

The door was open. It felt like the longest walk of my life.

I walked in and found Jack Van Dorn tied to a chair by what looked like bed sheets. A sock had been stuffed in his mouth and held there with a rope. His nose was crooked and swollen, just like it had been broken. His eyes were half open and still. I couldn’t tell if he was dead or alive, but as I got closer, he slowly lifted his head.

Then he blinked. Twice.

Jack Van Dorn was alive.

I tucked my gun back in my holster and started working on his gag. I pulled the sock out of his mouth and he wretched right in my face. He reeked of stale booze and worse, but it was the best thing I’d ever smelled in a long time. Jack Van Dorn was alive! I’d been right all along and nothing — NOTHING — Carmichael could do to me would ever change that.

A long roar of a Tommy gun echoing from the stairway brought me back to reality.

“Hauser went after the other two alone,” Favilla told me. “What do you want to do?”

I thought about it for longer than I’ll ever admit. And longer than I should have. I saw the flashbulbs popping as a crying Mr. and Mrs. Van Dorn held their spoiled little bastard in their arms again. I saw the flashbulbs pop some more as Mr. Van Dorn pumped my hand and promised me the world. Me, the guy who’d brought their son back home. Alive.

I thought about Carmichael’s threats, and how Jack being alive didn’t change anything. I wondered why I should stick my neck out for Hauser, or Loomis, or anyone else. The bastards didn’t even like me, and the feeling was mutual.

And then I heard another short blast of Tommy gun fire and realized that finding Jack alive had changed something after all. It had changed me. I hadn’t gotten mixed up in any of this for them. I’d been doing this for me from the beginning. And that’s how I was going to end it.

For me. For my own self-respect.

I left Jack with Favilla as I headed toward the stairwell. I reloaded my .38, opened the stairwell door and ran downstairs. Toward the gunfire.

I
JOINED
Hauser two flights down, crouched on the upper landing just above the first floor. The gunfire had stopped, but sounds were coming from the stairwell below us.

“Grimes has the Thompson,” he whispered. “I don’t know who the other guy is, or what he’s packing, but the bastards keep heading downstairs. I think they’re heading down to Stiles’ joint to make a break for it through the train tunnel.”

But I knew the layout of the Roosevelt well. There was only one way down to Stiles’ casino — and this wasn’t it.

They were heading someplace much worse. It was the reason why Grimes picked Suite 1411 over the nine other keys in Stiles’ desk. “They’re heading for the porter’s tunnel,” I said over my shoulder as I ran downstairs.

Hauser scrambled after me. “What porter’s tunnel?”

“The tunnel that leads straight into Grand Central Terminal.”

I threw open the door at the bottom of the stairs leading to the porter’s tunnel to the terminal. People were screaming and shouting, running for their lives — the panicked sounds people always make when they see two men with guns running toward them.

I bolted into the tunnel with Hauser right behind me. It was more of a hallway than a tunnel. Carpeted and well-lit, it even had some paintings on the wall, just like the rest of the hotel above us. People were crouched against the walls, and uniformed porters hid behind loaded luggage racks.

Grimes and the other kidnapper were a hundred or so feet ahead of us, heading into the terminal. There were too many damned luggage carts and scared people in the way for us to get a clear shot at them, so Hauser and I ran after them.

The bastards burst through the doors into the passageway that led into Grand Central. A new chorus of screams rose up around them. When we hit the passageway a few seconds later, men and women cutting through the shortcut on Forty-Fifth and Madison screamed and dove for cover as Grimes pointed the Thompson at everything in their path. The flock of panicked people running through the passage made it impossible for us to get a clean shot.

Hauser and I were gaining on Grimes and his accomplice, but not before they broke into the western end of the terminal. Now the screams and yells of terrified commuters echoed as hundreds more people saw the two gunmen running straight at them.

We were more than halfway through the passageway when we heard one shout rise above all the others. A commanding shout: “STOP!” That’s when the roar of the Thompson echoed loud.

Screams and yells doubled, tenfold. A stampede of terrified people flooded into the passageway, just as Hauser and I broke through and reached the terminal. We dodged the panicked herd as they ran as far and as fast as they could away from the gunfire.

As Hauser and I broke into the clear, I saw three railroad cops on the terminal’s floor, damned near cut in half by the Thompson. Only one of them had had time to clear his weapon before he’d been hit. Poor bastards never had a chance.

Hauser and I followed the screams as Grimes and his partner ran through the main concourse of the terminal. We’d just gotten to the western staircase when I saw two more railroad cops crouched behind the circular information booth in the center of the concourse. Grimes was already heading toward the Forty-Second Street exit. But his partner had noticed the cops, too. He stopped short, walked back to get an angle on them, and leveled his shotgun. The poor bastards were sitting ducks.