The Four-Night Run (11 page)

There it was, the litany of his choices before he took his first step through the portals of the law. No, the Contessa must have gotten it wrong in telling him to look to the choices of his past, because in his past there was no choice that could have led him here. Nothing. Unless . . .

Tinkle, tinkle.

Scrbacek froze on his stool as the diner door opened. He didn’t want to look, hoped it was just another lonely soul heading to a booth for a late-night breakfast. But the footsteps came right up to his stool, and then something slapped down beside his pudding on the counter.

A newspaper. With Scrbacek’s picture in full color beneath a banner headline that tightened Scrbacek’s throat so he could hardly breathe:
MURDER SUSPECT STILL AT LARGE
.

And beside the picture, in smaller type, two tombstone headlines:
SURWIN WIDENS SCRBACEK PROBE TO INCLUDE ARSON
and
BREEST LAWYER CONSIDERED ARMED AND DANGEROUS
.

“Early edition, Tom.” It was the smallest of the red-suits, the Worm, his hat tilted back on his head, his ugly grin ungainly and dangerous. “I knew I seen your face before.”

Scrbacek said not a word, just stared at the paper.

“There’s lots of folk looking for you,” said the Worm.

“Just leave me alone,” said Scrbacek.

“Offering lots of money.”

“Get the hell out of here,” said Scrbacek, and he said it loud enough for the waitress to take a step back. She glanced at the window to the kitchen.

There stood Ed, in the red glow of the heat lamps, looking with mute interest at the goings-on at the counter, the double barrel of his shotgun just visible in the window.

The red-suit raised his face to the window and grinned at Ed as he said, “What the hell kind of name is Scrbacek, anyway?”

“French.”

“French? I never would have figured. Fucking Frogs. You know, that Jerry Lewis thing I can understand—that smile of his cracks my ass too—but Mickey Rourke? Fuck me with a crème brûlée, why don’t you? We’ll be outside, Tom. We’ll be waiting.”

And then the Worm slapped Scrbacek hard on the back and stepped out of the diner.

Tinkle, tinkle.

19

M
ICKEY
’
S
H
ARD
B
OYS

He sat on his stool and closed his eyes, let the terror ratchet through him, felt it escalate until it filled every space, constricted every breath, twisted every thought. He let the terror run through him until he found an equilibrium between the terror outside and the terror in his heart, and in the center of that equilibrium he felt the first stirrings of a calm. Where it came from, he had not the vaguest idea, but with his eyes still closed he concentrated on that calm, tried to expand it as far as it would go, which wasn’t much, but it was something—enough to let him take a full breath, enough to let him open his eyes, enough to let his mind turn to something other than the fear.

They were waiting for him outside, the bastards in the red fedoras, ready to turn him over to whoever would pay the most. And he held little doubt that the price had a dead-or-alive tag attached to it, maybe even more for the dead. He had to get out of this diner and past the bastards in the red fedoras and find a place to hide.

He turned around and saw the Worm grinning at him through the window. He turned around again.

The newspaper was still on the counter. He looked good in the picture, his cheek unbruised, his jaw clean-shaven, his hair coifed. The face of what he had been just two days before, when he still had an office and a career and never had to pay before being served. He pushed the pudding aside, spread the tabloid out before him, and read the article as if reading about someone else.

Noted criminal attorney J.D. Scrbacek, a named suspect in the bombing murder of Ethan Brummel, is still at large. Once considered a possible target of the bombing of his Ford Explorer behind the county courthouse, Scrbacek is now thought to have set the device himself. This comes on the heels of a fire that destroyed his office and home late last night. After putting out the blaze, firefighters discovered in the basement of his building, protected by a tarp and undestroyed by the fire, a cache of illegal weapons, along with three blocks of plastic explosives of the same type used to destroy Scrbacek’s truck. Because of the weapons, Scrbacek is to be considered armed and dangerous.

A motive for the murder has only been hinted at by the County Prosecutor’s Office, but one theory holds that Ethan Brummel, Scrbacek’s intern, had discovered something incriminating in his boss’s files and Scrbacek murdered him to stop him from talking to the police. Supporting that theory is a call from Ethan Brummel, logged the day before his death, to the State Bureau of Investigation, a record discovered only after Scrbacek came up missing. Also, in what has been described as a strange visit to the victim’s family after the murder, Scrbacek allegedly sought to determine if Brummel had disclosed to his family anything he had learned about Scrbacek’s practice. According to sources in the police department, the victim’s mother assured Scrbacek that her son had told her nothing, which may be why her life was spared.

Caleb Breest, Scrbacek’s former client, recently released from jail, issued a statement through his new attorney, Cirilio Vega, claiming that Breest knew nothing about the killing of Ethan Brummel or why his former lawyer might have turned so brutally murderous. In the statement, Breest sent his deepest, heartfelt sympathies to the murder victim’s family.

Scrbacek slammed the counter with the flat of his hand and felt the delicious slap of pain within the wound on his palm. Cirilio Vega, that bastard. He had been a friend. They had shared together their dreams and aspirations. And now, the betrayal: Vega taking over Breest’s representation and bad-mouthing Scrbacek to the press. How dare he? He slammed again his hand upon the counter.

Stop, he told himself. Keep calm. Cirilio was only representing his new client; Scrbacek wouldn’t have done any differently. It wasn’t Cirilio that was framing his ass, it was someone else. And it wasn’t enough just to try to kill him, no. Now there were enough clues planted to make him the prime suspect in his own attempted murder. How insanely clever was that? And with Scrbacek considered armed and dangerous, a cop could shoot first, plant a small silver pistol in his deadened fist second, and no one would be the wiser.
A righteous shooting,
they all would say as they shook their heads over his riddled corpse.
Totally righteous.
With the magician grinning in the background.

He slammed shut the paper and turned it over to hide his picture. The back of the tabloid told him the Phillies had won. How nice for them. He turned again to look out the window. They were still out there, the red-suits, waiting with patience for their quarry, laughing and cracking wise, and perhaps not paying as close attention as before.

“Is there a way out the back of this place?” he asked the waitress.

“Not for customers, hon.”

“It’s a special case.”

“Everyone thinks he’s a special case, believe me. Every damn one.”

He pulled out his wad, rolled off another hundred, slid it across the counter. “For you and Ed if I can go through the back.”

She held it up to the light, checking its security features, and then leaned into the window to the kitchen. “One to go out with the garbage,” she said.

Ed nodded.

“Do me a favor,” said Scrbacek. “Fill up my coffee cup and then stand in the doorway to the kitchen for a moment, like you’re having a deep philosophical conversation with Ed.”

She cocked her head at Scrbacek as if he had just asked for ketchup with his pie. “A conversation? With Ed?”

“Give it a try. You never know. I need to hit the head.”

Scrbacek stood from his stool, leaving the newspaper on the counter. Without looking to the windows, he headed for the restroom as the waitress filled his cup with coffee. He left the door slightly open as he went inside.

He immediately dropped to the floor. On his elbows and knees he
slithered out the open door and scooted behind the counter where he was hidden from the windows. His left arm screamed in pain, but he
ignored it as he crawled through the open door to the kitchen, brushing the waitress’s legs as he crept by. The door closed shut behind him.

He crawled into something large and immovable and looked up. There stood Ed, in his dirty whites, a slab of a man with a cleaver in the tie of his apron, his heavy arms cradling a shotgun. Ed stared down at Scrbacek with disapproval.

“The back door?” said Scrbacek.

“I done heard about you,” said Ed, his voice a rumble so deep it shook the pots hanging over the stove.

“Good things, I hope.”

“Not necessarily.” Ed frowned down a moment more before reaching out and opening the back door.

“Thanks,” said Scrbacek, crawling toward the opening. “By the way, dinner was marvelous.”

Then he was outside, falling down a set of cement stairs, rolling into the side of a large trash bin. Lit by a bare bulb sticking out from the back of the diner, he looked around.

Nothing.

He darted to a shadow by the edge of the Dumpster and looked around again.

Nothing.

He was in a narrow alley between the diner and the solid brick wall of a low, long building. The smell of a week’s garbage caused his full stomach to churn. There was a gap at either end of the alley, and so the question was which way to run—to the right or to the left.

And then he heard a call, dark as the night, deep as his troubles, soft as a shiv in the gut.

“Oh, Tom,” came a calm voice from the left. He peeked out from his shadow, peered down the length of the Dumpster, and saw the silhouette of a man in a fedora standing at the end of the alley, his legs spread. “We’re waiting for you, Tom.”

Not to the left, he decided quickly. Definitely not to the left.

Staying close to the brick wall, keeping the Dumpster between himself and the man, he headed to the right, skittering forward as fast as he could while still brushing his side tight against the brick. He looked behind him, saw that the sight line of the man was still blocked by the Dumpster, and then hurried on, turning forward, only to see another, bigger silhouette standing in his path.

Scrbacek froze.

“I see the sucker,” said the bigger silhouette.

Before he could think it through, Scrbacek was headed back to the Dumpster, back to the yellow light of the diner. But instead of stopping and cowering, he charged forward, gaining speed, running past the Dumpster, running toward the smaller of the silhouettes, running right at the silhouette, lowering his right shoulder into a collision of pain that sent the silhouette tumbling and Scrbacek flying through the air.

He landed on his back, sprawled on the asphalt.

The moon was full in the sky overhead. The walls of the alleyway were gone. The ground felt soft on his back, soft like a feather mattress. He was sinking into the soft, lovely asphalt until he reached the bottom, which was hard and full of pain.

He shook his head to clear his brain. Slowly, painfully, he rolled onto his front and fought to climb to his feet. He rose to his hands and knees, but when he tried to rise higher something stopped him, something kept him down. His mind still fuzzy, he wondered what it could be until something hard as a boot stomped him to the ground. He rolled again onto his back and saw two faces staring down at him, their sharp-brimmed fedoras neatly in place.

“Now what have we caught ourselves here? Our own Tom Jefferson. Lift him, Luther.”

The largest of the men sucked noisily on his toothpick before stepping behind Scrbacek, grabbing his torso, and effortlessly lifting him to his feet. He slipped his hands beneath Scrbacek’s arms and up behind Scrbacek’s neck and kept lifting until Scrbacek’s feet dangled above the asphalt.

Scrbacek’s shoulder screamed in pain, or was that his mouth? He struggled to escape, and failed, miserably. The breathing of the giant was loud in his ear.

Another red-suit strode up to Scrbacek, swayed for a moment, and then flicked out his wrist. A blade appeared like magic in his hand, the metal glistening dully in the moonlight. Scrbacek stared in horror as the knife drew closer, when suddenly he heard, “Let me at the Frog bastard.”

The two red-suits standing in front of Scrbacek split apart, and between them, bent at the waist, left arm tight to his side, bareheaded but still grinning, came the Worm. The small man laughed wildly before burying his right hand in Scrbacek’s stomach.

Scrbacek’s legs pulled up as he let out an “Oof,” but Luther held him firmly in place.

“Mark him, Felix,” said a red-suit with a beard.

The man with the switchblade stepped forward and placed the edge of the blade on the bridge of Scrbacek’s nose. Scrbacek pulled his head away from the blade until he was stopped by a great amount of pressure from Luther’s hands.

“Why?” gasped Scrbacek.

“Because we can,” said the man with the beard.

“How’s your breathing, Tom?” said Felix, putting pressure on the blade, letting it slide through the flesh of Scrbacek’s nose. “Maybe I’ll help things along.”

“Not so much he can’t be recognized,” said the man with the beard. “Mickey already worked out a deal for the head.”

“I’ll be gentle-like,” said Felix as he pressed the blade further into Scrbacek’s flesh. The pressure was growing unbearable, the sharp edge of pain slipping deeper, when suddenly Felix flung himself back and raised his arms like a dancer.

It was a lovely bit of ballet, that move, graceful and slow and inexplicable to Scrbacek, even as the knife flew in an arc through the air, even as a darkness bled across Felix’s narrow yellow tie.

Luther released his grip on Scrbacek and spun around. Scrbacek dropped to the ground and rolled away just as the huge man’s knee collapsed in a mist of red and he tumbled to the ground, letting out a loud, inhuman howl.

The two red-suits still standing looked around, puzzled, amidst the huge man’s cries. One of the men reached into his jacket, but before he could pull a weapon, something came out of the sky and slammed into his jaw, dropping him cold to the ground.

And now, crouched beside Scrbacek’s heaped body, was the Nightingale, her gun aimed at the Worm’s head.

The Worm backed away, still showing his teeth but no longer grinning.

“Say you’re sorry,” said the Nightingale over the huge man’s shouting.

The Worm backed away farther. Scrbacek, understanding suddenly what had just happened, staggered to his feet.

“Who’s looking for me?” said Scrbacek to the retreating man.

“Fuck you, Tom.”

“That’s no apology,” said the Nightingale as she reached to her boot, pulling out her huge, jagged blade. “And his name isn’t Tom.”

“Whoever the hell is after me,” said Scrbacek, “you tell him I’m coming.”

The small man backed away even farther.

“And you tell him I’m not coming alone.”

The Worm took one more step back and then turned to run. The Nightingale smoothly took hold of the blade of her knife and cocked it behind her ear like a baseball catcher about to nail a runner stealing third. Before she could spin it forward, Scrbacek placed a hand on her elbow.

“Let him go,” he said.

“Why?”

“Because he’s running.”

“Just makes him a smaller target is all.”

“Let him go,” said Scrbacek. “Let him tell the bastards who are after me that I’m not defenseless.”

“You looked pretty damn defenseless to me,” she said.

He turned his head to look at her. She was smiling, and her smile was positively incandescent. “Who are you?” he said.

“Just a girl with a gun.”

“Aren’t you a little young?”

“Not too young to save your ass.”

“Yeah, well, I would have muddled through on my own,” said Scrbacek. He could still feel the pressure of the blade on the bridge of his nose, and his utter helplessness at that moment. But he could also feel the strange calm he had mustered just moments before at Ed’s counter. He wiped at the bridge of his nose, and his hand came away slick with blood. “I was just getting ready to make my move.”