Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal (18 page)

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Authors: Michael van Rooy

BOOK: Your Friendly Neighborhood Criminal
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A
t a quarter to eight Smiley came in from the hotel entrance.
“Waiting long?”
“No. Nice place.”
He looked around and then back at me with a blank expression. “Are we looking at the same thing?”
“It’s honest. Not many places can say that. It’s crude, vicious, and alive. But honest.”
“I suppose.” He swayed back and forth and belched.
“Are you drunk?”
“No, I’m just tired.” He ordered a rye and ginger at the bar and then shook his hands to loosen the muscles. “This is where we’re at …”
The bouncer moved between us and forced us apart with his bulk. He didn’t have to do it but he did it anyway, his way of showing everyone he was in charge. In a strangely high voice he ordered a pink torpedo on his tab and handed it to the girl. Still the place was loud enough that no one could
hear Smiley when he started to talk to me, quietly and with minimum lip movement, which is the second thing you learn in jail.
“Like I was saying, Samantha’s upstairs in a room. She has two guys with her; one’s a boyfriend and one’s muscle. I’ve asked around and I think that both are semi-pro. Sam’ll be carrying a gun and she’s good. The guys might be carrying.”
He said it without passion, without caring, and I knew it didn’t matter to him. I asked, “How do you want to handle this?”
“We go in and kick ass. Are you heavy?”
“No.”
“Me neither. So we bluff. However, I sure do wish your lovely wife had left me a gun. Or anything.”
He didn’t look nervous and I didn’t feel nervous, and when he finished his drink I gestured. “Let’s go …”
I wondered when he was going to betray me and then I wondered if he was going to betray me.
I followed as he went through the doors to the hotel. Once the door was shut behind me the noise level dropped by more than half. The lobby was small and cramped, with industrial carpet a painful shade of blue, and real hanging ivies and spider plants festooning the ceiling. Beside the front desk was a staircase. Smiley went up it without hesitating and I followed.
My hands were loose at my sides, fingers open and spread. Strangely enough I was calm, relaxed, and ready. The situation hadn’t begun to cause me fear or stress and the adrenaline hadn’t kicked in. I was ready to kick, bite, punch, whatever was needed, but I wasn’t looking forward to any of it. At the top of the stairs Smiley turned right. As we moved down the scrubby hallway the noise of the bar beneath our feet became louder and more strident. At the end of the hallway was a fire
door with a large sign stating an alarm would ring if it opened. We were about three metres away when I whispered to Smiley, “So, will the alarm ring?”
“Nope. Fixed it.”
He knelt down to tighten the laces of one of his expensive running shoes and kept talking. “The door will open fine. Head down to the first floor and there’s an exit to the parking lot. I’ve jammed that door. Instead head towards the middle of the building and pop the sealed door into the hallway between the vendor, the lobby, and the bar. Then you can go out the bar front, the lobby back, or the vendor side. Whatever works best.”
“You’ve done your homework.”
He stood up and brushed some dust off the back of his right hand. “Yeah, about an hour ago when I came through the place, just to make sure. Let’s do this.”
He knocked on the last door, which opened immediately, and a thick-bodied man I’d never seen before waved us into a small room full of furniture. From where we stood I saw two double beds, a dresser with TV, a small table with a coffee pot, two chairs, and two bed tables. On the wall were three big pieces of art, crude paintings of twisted trees and rocks, clear water, and bright leaves. One whole wall was blocked with a lime green drape; behind it I supposed was a window. There were also three people: Samantha lying on the bed farthest from the door, a man standing right beside the TV, indeed his hand rested on the box; and lastly the guy who’d let us in; he’d stepped back into the bathroom to let us pass.
“Smiley! And I recognize Mr. Haaviko behind you.”
Samantha was up on one elbow facing us, with one hand under her pillow, and I focused on her. Women were always more dangerous than men; ask any soldier, any cop; for both
groups it was a rule, a mantra: shoot the women first. Women didn’t have second thoughts or fears once they’d decided on what to do. Women succeeded more often in suicide than men, and women were much more likely to shoot if they had a gun. They were less likely to panic and make mistakes. And in the back of my mind was a poem Claire had recited to me once by Rudyard Kipling; a poem about what happened to wounded British soldiers when the Afghan women came out.
Smiley grinned from ear to ear. “We’re here to talk.”
He paused for two heartbeats and I closed the door behind me. The noise from the bar beneath us reverberated in the room. I was keenly aware of where everyone was in the room and what they were doing.
I was keenly aware of momentum and instinct and reflex. I was keenly aware of the dark. I was keenly aware of the potentials in the room.
The two men were nothing special and no one I recognized; maybe Sam was trying to show me how many people she had on salary or maybe she was using disposable guys or maybe this was her A-team.
I still wasn’t impressed.
The guy in the bathroom looked like a hockey tough; the other guy looked like an amateur bodybuilder but nothing really scary. Neither of them had enough scars. I could feel the tension building and the adrenaline started to move. Sam said, “You gents carrying?”
“What do you think?”
Smiley was still smiling. The guy beside me in the bathroom doorway inhaled and exhaled while the guy by the TV took his hand off it and brought it down to his belt. I noticed that he was wearing a badly fitting suede sports jacket over his
blue shirt and that his hand trembled a lot. Sam nodded and gestured, “That’s fine. Let’s talk.”
That was the signal. I was watching Sam and Smiley, focusing on them. I caught a brief look of surprise on her face when he started to move forward.
Apparently that was not part of the plan.
Sam was fastest, drawing a long-barrelled pistol from under her pillow and sweeping it towards me, trying to avoid Smiley.
While she was doing that the guy by the TV squatted a bit with his legs wide apart, a shooting stance he’d seen on some cop show. He flipped his coat open with his right hand and pulled out a darkly blued pistol from the small of his back. And the guy in the bathroom suddenly had a knife in his right hand as he adjusted his feet and lunged.
But by then it was all too late.
Smiley jumped over the bed towards Sam, moving slightly to the left so she had to reverse the track of her pistol as she tried to target him.
She didn’t want to pull the trigger until she was sure and while she was making sure I took one step forward and kicked the guy with the pistol square in his testicles. The crack of my steel toe slamming into his pelvis made me wince but I was already spinning back towards the guy in the bathroom who was slashing at me with the edge of the knife.
I feinted with my right foot and he turned a little in response. When the knife was pointed away from me I stepped forward and the presence of the grotesque blade made my stomach clench and sped me up.
The knife was right there in front of me, a kind I hadn’t seen in years, a copy of the dumb bowie-style survival knife used by Rambo in that interminable film series. It had a blade
maybe thirty centimetres long and ten wide, with razor-sharp edges along the front and top third of the rear edge, plus a whole whack of saw-edged teeth.
A real toe-stabber, or was it toad-stabber?
I offered my left forearm and the hockey player took the opportunity to slash at it with the blade. He was surprised when the armour in the sleeve did what it was supposed to do and the blade grated down and off. While he was adjusting his grip on the hilt, I reached out and took hold of his wrist. I could have levered him down from there and disarmed him, or used the axis to throw him, but I didn’t. I was hurrying and I twisted his wrist with both of my hands, away from me and then back, like I was wringing out a dishcloth. Both the ulna and radius bone shattered and splintered and his fingers opened and the knife fell. I changed the grip on his arm and his left fist cracked into my temple, enough to give me tunnel vision, but then the guy squeaked loudly and his second punch landed like an aunt’s kiss.
I grabbed his elbow and separated the unbroken top half of his ulna and radula from his humerus and then his eyes went blank and he started to fall. Before he’d hit the ground I was moving towards the bed where Smiley and Sam were still struggling. I was surprised there was no shooting—maybe Sam was a real pro and didn’t shoot unless there was a target?
As I moved forward Smiley took hold of the pistol and wrestled it to the side and she let it go. He was straddling her as she pulled a thin-bladed filleting knife from somewhere and rammed it straight up at his throat.
“Nope.”
Smiley sounded happy as he brought the gun back and caught the blade on the barrel to deflect it. Before she could adjust her aim he slammed the receiver down into her forehead
and she was driven into unconsciousness. The guy behind me groaned and I turned to find him slumped over in the fetal position, still unconscious but with both hands touching the handle of the knife, which had fallen blade first to pin his foot to the floor. I paused and then wrenched the knife out and wrapped his foot in a towel.
“You are a cruel man, Monty.”
Smiley had walked over to the guy I’d kicked and poked him with the barrel of the pistol. The guy was curled up and covered in a great deal of vomit.
He went on cheerfully, “Yes sir, a cruel, cruel man.”
Without hurrying I picked up the man’s pistol. It was a Colt Woodsman with a silencer brazed onto the barrel. I clicked the safety off and then worked the action to seat a round.
He stared at the bullet I’d ejected from the port and then looked down at the gun in his hand before I said, “I am not cruel. They rushed me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“It’s not like I planned it. Really.”
“Uh-huh.”
He stared at me for a few more seconds and then he tossed his pistol onto the bed, flipped Sam over, and tied her hands cruelly tight with shoelaces he pulled from his pocket. Then he did her feet and finally stuffed a wad of cloth into her mouth and tied it into place with another lace. The last one he held up towards me. “Need this?”
“Nope.”
I kept the Colt in my belt while I tied another towel around the hockey player’s foot to stop the bleeding before dumping him into the bathtub. When I picked up his friend he squeaked ultrasonically and I felt his legs shift unnaturally under my arm. For a second the pain woke him up but then his eyes
closed and I put him carefully down on the bathroom floor. I gathered their wallets and threw them to Smiley.
“All done.”
Smiley was sitting on the second bed with the pistol in his lap and a handful of money. I tossed the knife onto the bed as well and he looked up when I said, “Here you go.”
He marvelled at something as he examined the gun. “Look at this; a Charter Arms Explorer pistol. I’ve never seen one of these before. The magazine goes in front of the trigger like on those old German pistols and there’s a spare one in the butt.”
I glanced at the pistol and then at mine and realized they both had home-made silencers attached permanently to the barrels.
Sam was planning on killing someone in this room. Silencers are unreliable and unwieldy, there’s no other reason to use them. And she’d brought two silenced guns and a knife into the room when a shotgun would have been much safer.
The question was, was Smiley in on it. I looked at him and said, “What now?”
“We wait for Sam to wake up.”
“Right,” I said conversationally. “I don’t want to clean this up, do you?”
“Not really.”
“I mean, she started it.”
He nodded in thought; he’d picked up the pistol and dumped the magazine and worked the slide to clear it.
“It’s a nice piece. Ever use one?”
I didn’t take it but I looked it over when he held it out. “Nope.”
He put the pistol back on the bed and we both waited for a little while before I spoke. “I guess no one noticed the fight?”
“I guess. It’s kind of loud downstairs, though.”
“Well, I thought so. Here, you do that pistol and I’ll do this one.”
“Do what?”
He looked quizzical as I filled the small garbage pail from the bathroom with water and brought it in. And he opened his mouth in protest when I swept all the ammo in.
“Hey!”
I stared at him. “Right now the cops walk in and they find us with guns and we each end up with six years in stir. Give us five minutes to wreck the trigger mechanisms and all we can be caught with is toys.”

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