The Enraged (A Jonathan Quinn Novel) (7 page)

Reaching the top floor, they paused at the stairwell exit and listened for anyone who might have been in the hallway beyond. All was quiet, so Roberts signaled for Moss to open the door.

The stairway exited into a junction between two hallways. Both were empty.

Moss looked at Roberts, silently asking for orders.

Roberts scanned one way, then the other. He hadn’t heard them on the stairs, and they hadn’t gone back down in the elevator—the car was still at the top—so they had to be on this floor somewhere.

“Did you hear that?” Moss whispered.

Roberts nodded. It was a male voice shouting in one of the apartments down the hallway they’d been facing. He motioned for Moss to follow, and moved toward the sound. It didn’t take long before he pinpointed it as coming from the last apartment. A few more steps along the hall and he could make out the words.

“Help! Help me! Please, someone, help me!”

Roberts nodded at the door and mouthed, “Lock.”

Moss knelt down and quietly picked it open.

Taking turns covering each other, they moved into the apartment and worked their way up to the edge of the foyer to get a look further inside. To the right was a large living room, and smack dab in the center was the shouting man. He was tied to a chair, his back to the door. To the left of the foyer was a hallway. Roberts signaled Moss to check it out.

“Help me, please! For God’s sake! I need help!”

Moss returned and shook his head.

Roberts frowned. He’d been hoping the suspects were hiding in back. Now he was beginning to wonder if he and Moss had just stumbled onto some weird sex thing. He took a loud step into the room.

The man whipped his head around. “Oh, thank God! Please untie me!”

Roberts didn’t move. “What’s going on here?”

“These people, they burst into my apartment. They had a gun and—”

“How many?”

“Uh, uh, three.”

“Two men and a woman?”

“Yes. The white guy tied me up, and—”

“They weren’t all white?”

“The girl was. The other guy, I think he was maybe Asian? I don’t know. Please, can you let me loose?”

“Where’d they go?”

The man grunted in frustration. “I don’t
know
. Come on. Come on. Untie me!”

Still not moving, Roberts said, “They didn’t go back out the front door, so where are they?”

“The fire escape, I think. What does it matter? Help me out!”

“Where is it?”

“Where’s what?”

“The fire escape. Where is it?”

Looking exasperated, the man said, “Bedroom.”

As Moss moved back into the hall to check, Roberts touched his radio. “Suspects are out of the building, probably around the back. Girardi, go check. Cruz, reposition to the lobby.”

“Yes, sir,” Girardi replied.

“Heading down now,” Cruz said.

A few seconds later, Moss reappeared and said, “The fire escape’s there, but nobody’s on it.”

Roberts nodded to a window at the far end of the living room. “Check there.”

When Moss ran past the guy in the chair, the man said, “Hey, this isn’t funny. Untie me. I gotta cold. My nose is running!”

Roberts walked over and leaned in front of the man. “I don’t care. Now shut up.”

The man turned away, unable to hold Roberts’s gaze. Under his breath, he mumbled, “He was right.”

“Who was right?” Roberts said.

“What? Nothing. Just do whatever you want to do. I won’t say another word.”

Roberts brought up his pistol and pointed it at the man’s chest. “
Who
was right?”

“The guy from before,” the man sputtered. “The one who tied me up. He…he said you guys would be a lot worse than them.”

Roberts leaned back. Whoever these people were, they knew Roberts’s team would be looking for them. No question at all now. These were the people who’d broken into the apartment.

“I see one of them,” Moss said. “He’s crossing the alley.”

“Take him out.”

CHAPTER
7

Q
UINN JUMPED THE
final few feet from the fire escape to the ground and whipped around, looking for Daeng and Misty, but they were nowhere in sight. Since they could have gone only one of two ways, and the first—heading to the main road—was out of the question, Quinn turned toward the back of the building, and weaved his way around several trash bins before reaching a narrow alley.

A little darkness would have been nice, but the summer sun was still a few hours from setting. Quinn checked both directions, looking for his friends, but the alley was deserted.

Directly across from him was a twelve-foot-high brick wall that extended for a dozen yards in either direction. To the left, it butted up against another building, but on the right there seemed to be an opening to a passageway.

Quinn eased down the alley, keeping as tight to the structures on his side as possible. Reaching the point opposite the end of the wall, he confirmed there was indeed a path that went clear through to the next street over.

He checked both ways again, saw that the alley was still empty, and raced across. Just as he entered the passageway, one of the bricks at the corner exploded from the impact of a bullet. He turned on the speed.

Ahead at the next street, he could see a sidewalk and cars parked along a curb, but between him and them was a tall, wrought-iron gate—chained closed.

Knowing the path behind him would not remain empty for long, he could neither turn and go back nor stop and pick the lock.

Without slowing his pace, he assessed the gate. At the top, the vertical bars ended in pointed spears that could not be ignored. Other than that, all Quinn had to worry about was the cracked, uneven cement on the other side, waiting to twist his ankle or break his leg.

He was fifteen feet from the gate when he heard a bullet whiz by his head and strike the side of the building to his right. What he hadn’t heard was the gunshot itself.

Suppressors. Not surprising, but it did confirm that the men shooting at him weren’t part of some average, everyday security team.

He angled toward where the fence met the wall, and leaped, grabbing the gate as he planted his right foot against it. Using his momentum, he scrambled up the V-shaped junction.

A second bullet hit the fence where his foot had been seconds before, then a third smacked into the wall, sending shards of brick onto his back.

He reached the top and flung his legs over, barely clearing the tips of the deadly spears. He dropped onto the broken pathway, and rolled as he hit the ground to avoid injury.

A double
clang
as more bullets hit the gate.

Getting to his feet, he could see one of the suited men preparing to take another shot. Quinn raced down the remaining few steps of the pathway and turned down the main sidewalk. Thankfully, there was more traffic on this street than there had been on Peter’s. He moved onto the road and shot through a gap between the cars to the other side, and then sprinted down the block.

As he turned onto the new street, he glanced over his shoulder. The suits were nowhere in sight. He knew it would be a mistake to stop, so he ran for two more blocks before allowing himself to slow down.

Not much farther on, the residential area gave way to businesses fronting sidewalks peppered with pedestrians. Just ahead, he spotted a bar and grill with a substantial happy-hour crowd both inside and around tables out front. He took a spot behind a group of twentysomethings, and used them to shield his presence as he watched the street.

“What can I get you?”

The waitress was a tall brunette dressed in jeans and a red T-shirt that was too small for her.

He donned an easy smile. “What do you have on tap?”

As she went through the list, he returned his gaze to the street.

“…also, um, Speakeasy Big Daddy, Blue Moon, uh, Rolling—”

“Speakeasy? That’s a West Coast beer.”

“Is it?” She didn’t really seem to care.

“I’ll take that,” he said.

“You got it.”

Quinn watched the road for another few minutes before finally pulling out his phone and sending Daeng a text.

Think I’m clear. You?

Ten seconds later, Daeng called.

“We’re okay,” Daeng said.

“Where are you?”

“In the basement of a building a few blocks from Peter’s place. You?”

“I’m in a bar.” Quinn looked around. “I didn’t catch the name. They chased me down an alley, but I seemed to have lost them.”

“A bar? I should have thought of that. Has to be a lot more comfortable than here.” Daeng paused. “So what would you like us to do? Stay put? Go to the townhouse?”

“No,” Quinn said quickly. “The townhouse is out. If Peter’s apartment was being monitored, then I’m sure the townhouse is, too. Just stay there for now and let me know if you have any problems. I’ll call you in a little while.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Find out who our new friends are.”

__________

“S
ON OF A
bitch,” Roberts mumbled to himself.

His team had searched the area around the apartment building, but the brown-haired man and his two companions had eluded them.

He walked back over to where his men were waiting for him by the team’s vehicles, and said, “Moss, Cruz, you’re with me. We’ll take one of the cars and widen the search area. Girardi, we’ll leave you the other. Stay here and keep an eye on the building in case any of them shows back up. Questions?”

There were none.

__________

I
T TOOK QUINN
ten minutes to discreetly work his way back to Peter’s street. The encroaching evening was finally playing in his favor. Though the sun was still above the horizon, the shadows had grown dark and wide.

Somehow the men in the suits had found out Quinn, Daeng, and Misty were there. A watcher perhaps, but unlikely, given the time lag in their response. What seemed more realistic was an alarm somewhere in Peter’s place had been tripped.

Whatever the case, he knew it was highly probable that most of the men were long gone now, and he hoped at least one had been left behind to keep an eye on the building in case Quinn and the others returned. It’s how he would have handled it.

Where, was the question. A watcher could be almost anywhere—in a car, a building across the street, one of a half dozen rooftops. He could be in Peter’s building, maybe even in Peter’s apartment, looking down on the street. If Quinn had to bet, he’d have put his money on either a car or a roof. Those were the quickest to set up.

The shadows were deeper on the opposite side of the street from Peter’s place, so Quinn entered the block there, and stepped into the recessed doorway of the first building he passed. From the slightly elevated position, he could see almost the entire street without fear of being spotted.

One by one, he examined each parked car he could see into, first on his side, then the other. His gaze stopped on an Audi A4 parked along the opposite curb, approximately halfway between his position and Peter’s building. A man was sitting in the driver’s seat. Given the deteriorating light, he wasn’t much more than a shadow.

It could have just been someone listening to the radio, or maybe a guy who’d arrived early for a date and was waiting for time to pass.

Or it could have been one of the suits.

Quinn mentally marked the car before scanning the rest of the vehicles. As far as he could tell, the others were all empty. Next he searched the rooflines of the buildings on Peter’s side. The sky was still bright enough that any silhouette would stand out, but he didn’t spot so much as a suspicious bump rising above a retaining wall.

The only things left were the rooflines on his side. He’d have to cross the street to check them.

He looked back at the Audi. The driver’s arm was up, his hand either on the side of his head, or in front of his face. It was impossible to tell from Quinn’s angle. A few seconds passed, then the hand lowered. Quinn could see it was holding a box or…

…
binoculars.

There was no way to know for sure, but his instincts told him he was right.

He slipped back down the short set of steps, and snuck along the sidewalk in a crouch so that the watcher couldn’t spot him over the other parked cars. When he was across the street from Peter’s building, he cut between a sedan and SUV, and walked deliberately out into the road. Keeping his pace slow, he looked up and down the street as if checking to make sure he was alone. After several seconds, he jogged the rest of the way to Peter’s building. Misty still had the key, but his picks worked quickly enough.

Once inside, he raced down the hallway that ran along the side of the elevators. As he’d hoped, it went all the way to a rear exit on the alley side. He slammed through the metal security door, and ran back up the same passageway where the fire escape had deposited him earlier, not stopping until he was only a few feet from the front corner. Pressing himself against the stone wall, he ease forward until he could peek around the edge.

What he saw didn’t surprise him in the least. The driver’s seat of the Audi was now empty, because the man—the
suited
man—who’d been sitting in it was walking cautiously down the sidewalk toward Peter’s place. His eyes were trained on the entrance, and while he wasn’t holding a gun, he did have a hand hovering near the buttons of his coat.

You radioed your friends the second you saw me, didn’t you
? Quinn thought.
What did they tell you to do? Can’t imagine it was to try to take me yourself. Keep an eye on me? Wait for them to get here?

The man’s pace continued to slow as he neared the steps up to the building. When he reached them, he stopped and craned his neck, attempting to get a look through the glass door into the lobby.

One step up. Another look. But it still wasn’t enough, and he kept going until he was standing right in front of the door. He leaned in, moving his eyes as close to the window as possible, his attention fully focused on the lobby.