The Cult (6 page)

Neil broke to a hard stop in front of a nondescript seven-story apartment block. The sides of the road were lined with ranks of similar-looking buildings, brick-faced monoliths with glass doors at the entrance and rows of small windows offering a view over more rows of windows from the tiny apartments inside. Graffiti artists had made an attempt at decorating the lower outside walls, and trash cans lay scattered on the sidewalks, their contents attracting a variety of buzzing insects.

Jack O’ Kieff didn’t know where the Danny guy lived, he said he had always received his orders via the phone and the money was paid directly into Jack’s bank account. The cellphone company said the phone number was registered to a Mr. D. Gonzales, but he had given a fictitious address. They finally managed to track Gonzales via Jack’s bank records, tracing the depositor’s address to East Vegas.

Neil turned to Alexa. “Sure this is the place?”

She checked the coordinates on her tablet. “That’s what it says.”

Neil swung open the door and climbed out, scanning the road. A heady waft of decomposing food and the stink of piss assaulted his nostrils. “Don’t they collect trash anymore?”
 

Alexa pulled her face. “Sheriff says it’s too dangerous. Gangs have taken over the streets, they’ll hijack anything that has wheels on it.”

“The place looks deserted.”

Alexa slammed the door and walked towards the entrance of the building. “Better lock the doors,” she said, glancing over her shoulder.

They entered through the grimy glass doors, kicking away scraps of paper, cans and beer bottles that littered the entrance hall. A blackboard with small, stick-on white lettering was affixed to a wall, the jumble of incomplete surnames and apartment numbers having lost their informational purpose a long time ago.

Further down the foyer, two lifts on either side of the passage stood with their doors ajar. Neil pushed the buttons but nothing happened.

They passed a dark stairwell that led down to a basement, probably a communal laundry facility. They moved further down the hallway and found a metal door leading to a flight of stairs. “Which floor did you say it was?” Neil asked.

“The top one.”

He bounded up the stairs, taking them four at a time, Alexa following close behind. They walked past a stoned guy, sleeping on the third level, the needle still stuck in a vein in his arm.

Neil cautiously opened the door leading to the seventh floor and peered into the passageway. It was clear. They strode to a door numbered
714
and Neil rapped on it.

They heard someone shuffle inside and the peep hole darkened. “What?” a nasally voice grunted.

Neil flicked open his badge and held it up to the peephole. “Agents Allen and Guerra, Interpol. We have a couple of questions we’d like to ask you.”

They heard a shuffle and something crashed to the floor. They glanced at each other and slipped their Glocks from their shoulder holsters. Alexa nodded. Neil stood back and kicked the door, an inch below the handle, and the locking mechanism ripped from the frame, sending the door crashing against the inside wall. Alexa bound inside, her gun held ready, pointing it from side to side as she checked the rooms. “Clear!”

What looked like a living and dining area led onto an open window and Neil jogged forward and stuck his head out. Someone was clanging up the fire escape stairs.
 

He turned to Alexa. “I’ll follow him. Try and cut him off from the street if he gets past me.”

She nodded and rushed out of the apartment.
 

Neil bound up the fire escape and ducked as a bullet whined and slammed into the wall a couple of inches above his head. “Shit.”

A big guy wearing only a pair of boxers and a vest hauled himself over the wall and onto the roof, stopped and took aim. Nothing happened, he had probably wasted his last bullet. He threw the gun down the stairs at Neil.

Neil leapt up the stairs and inched his head over the low wall leading to the roof. A large man with frizzy black hair and a beard was fiddling with a lock on the door of the rooftop hutch, tugging at the door and glancing nervously over his shoulder.

Neil vaulted over the wall and pointed his gun at the man. “Hold it right there.”

The guy turned around slowly, lifting his hands. He was big, six-four and three hundred pounds, a floppy belly sticking out from between his vest and the boxer shorts. He wasn’t wearing any shoes, black socks pulled up high on slender pale legs.

“Danny Gonzalez?” Neil asked.

The man shrugged.
 

Neil ambled closer, his gun pointed at the man’s chest, then turned sideways as urgent footsteps approached from his left. He twisted around as a teenaged kid with crazy eyes sprinted his way across the asphalt, a broken bottle raised above his head. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

The kid wasn’t going to break any Olympic records, but he was approaching steadily with his long, loping gait.

Neil shrugged and he shot the kid in the thigh. The teenager went down, clutching his leg.

Two pairs of hands appeared on the lip of the low wall, followed by the heads of two Mexican guys. Neil fired a warning shot into the coping stones that covered the wall and the heads ducked back down. “Stay out of this,” he shouted. He walked to the wall, skipping past the kid who was squirming on the ground and peered over the side, pointing his gun.
 

Shit.

The stairwell was filled with men bearing various arms, from machetes to baseball bats. “Stay where you are,” he ordered, pointing his gun.

He turned around as he heard Gonzales charge towards him. He ran in an uncomfortable lope, his gut bouncing up and down as he ran. The injured kid could have been his son.

Neil lowered his weapon as Gonzales stumbled and fell to the ground and started rolling around, shrieking, clutching his foot. Gonzales had stepped in the kid’s broken glass bottle, and the blood was pouring from between his clenching fingers. Neil turned back to the fire escape and fired four warning shots at the men below. “Back off!”
 

Most of the men ducked into windows. He turned to Gonzales and pulled him to his feet. He dragged him, hobbling, towards the rooftop hutch’s door. “Where does this go?”

“The elevator,” the big man whimpered, balancing on one leg.

“They don’t work,” Neil said, scanning the roof and firing another shot as a head poked over the wall.

“I flipped the power switch.”

Neil turned the key in the lock and yanked the door open. A short entrance led to the lift shaft beyond. “Where?”

The man pointed to an electrical distribution board with his chin, an accusing scowl on his face. “You better get me to a hospital, man.”

Neil shook his head, exasperated, and flipped on all the switches. A light on a button with an arrow pointing down lit up. Neil punched the button a couple of times with his thumb and the metal cables whirred into life. The open box of the lift slowed to a halt in front of them and stopped twenty inches below the entrance, a boinging bell announcing its arrival.

Neil shoved the man inside and pushed the button to the ground floor. The elevator vibrated and lurched, then made its way down, the entrances to the various floors flashing by as the lift shuddered its way toward the ground floor.

The lift vibrated to a grinding halt and Neil dragged the guy out by the elbow, bouncing him along.

 
“Who are they?” Neil asked Gonzales as he shoved him out of the glass doors.

Three men carrying baseball bats were leaning against Neil’s car. They wore bandanas on their heads, and had leather jackets, the sleeves cut off at the shoulders.
 

The guy on the right pushed himself away from the car and sauntered forward, tapping the bat in his hand. He was taller than the other men and walked with a confident swagger in his step, chewing gum with an open mouth. Probably the ring leader.

“Come on guys, those outfits are so nineties,” Neil said.

“Let go of Danny and we might kill you quickly,” the guy said with a smirk.

Neil had had enough of this. He pointed his Glock at the man’s head and blew his brains out.

The other two guys looked at each other sheepishly before turning around and scampering away, running in a zig-zag pattern along the blacktop, probably thinking that was going to make them more difficult to hit.

“Next time remember to bring appropriate weapons,” Neil shouted as they scampered away.

Gonzales stared at the man on the ground, his mouth agape. “What the hell—“
 

Neil opened the back door and shoved the man inside. “Shut up.”

He turned around and scanned the road. “Now, where the hell are you, Miss Guerra?”

Alexa charged down the stairs, preparing to sidestep the stoned guy on the third floor when his arm shot out and he grabbed her leg with a gnarled hand. “Hey, man, what’re you doin’ here?”

Large pupils in heavily-lidded eye sockets darted to and fro, like someone waking from a perplexing dream. Alexa yanked herself free and strode past the man, not bothering with an answer. He pushed himself up, holding onto the railing for support before bellowing at the top of his lungs. “Intruder alert, intruder alert, third floor.” He stumbled up the stairs and crashed through the doors to the fourth floor.

Alexa slowed down, glancing over her shoulder. She shook her head. “Strange.”

She stopped dead in her tracks when she heard the announcement. “We have an intruder on the third level stairwell. All tenants to battle stations,” the man’s voice crackled loudly over a PA system. “One month’s free rent to the killer.”

Alexa placed her hands on her hips. “What the hell?”

She shook her head again and continued skipping down the stairwell when the door to the second floor burst open. A motley crew of men bearing an assortment of weapons started piling into the flight of stairs, forcing Alexa to turn around and make her way up again. They whooped and cheered behind her as she made it past the third floor and halfway to the fourth when the door above her burst open as well and another dozen lowlifes piled into the stairwell above her.
What the hell?
She needed to get into open space, there was no way she was going to fight her way through this ragtag bunch.

She yanked open the door of the third floor. The tramp was still standing beside the entrance, holding the PA system’s phone to his mouth. “Thanks, pal,” Alexa shouted as she bolted down the passageway.

He shrugged.

She turned left, heading towards a window to the back of the building, hoping to make her escape that way.

She passed a dozen doors to her left and right, finally skidding to a halt in front of a window at the end of the passage. A window that led to the exit and to her freedom. A window that had been welded shut with metal bars.

Shit.

She glanced back as the men poured out of the stairwell and approached her slowly. The first guy charged and she finished him off with a bullet to the head.
One.

She looked around again, weighing her options. Three men stormed her way, and her gun barked as she fired a quick volley of shots. Two went down and the third stumbled as the bullet grazed his shoulder. He glanced at his wound and charged again, his machete raised above his head and a blood-curdling scream erupting from his throat. It faded into a burbly rasp as Alexa shot him in the neck.

Five.

More men charged. Rent must have been a bitch if they were all willing to die for a free month.

She fired five more shots, killing three men and wounding a fourth. She shoulder-charged a guy that got through and rammed the butt of the Glock up, catching him flush on the chin. She finished the wounded guy up by crunching a boot into his head. The passageway was piling up with bodies, and Alexa stood, panting, trying to catch her breath.

Ten.

Her phone rang and she slipped it from her pocket, trying to catch her breath. She checked the number, it was Neil. “Hello?”

“Alexa, what’s keeping you?”

“I’m kind of busy right now.”

“Why? What’s wrong?”

She cursed. “Look, I’ll phone you back,” she said and disconnected the call.

She had six more bullets left. The gangsters stood back, taking cover behind corners, peering around, being more careful now. Alexa ducked as a hand holding a pistol appeared around the corner and a salvo of bullets exploded into the window above her.
 

She glanced around again, assessing her options and made up her mind. She stood back and kicked the door closest to her, the impact jarring through her leg. It was never as damned easy as Neil made it look. She fired four shots at the door lock and kicked again. It swung open easily and banged against the inside wall.

She cautiously entered the room, scanning it, her weapon held ready. A young woman stood in the living area, her lips trembling with fear. A boy stood in front of her, the woman’s hands on his shoulders, his eyes squeezed shut and his hands over his ears.

Alexa grabbed a plastic chair from the dining room table, a rickety looking thing, slammed the door shut and wedged the chair below the door handle. That would give her two seconds, max.