24: Deadline (24 Series) (25 page)

“This ain’t the army, pal,” came the retort. “I’m not going to stand here and watch this place burn.” He started toward the van, but got two steps before his fellow biker stopped him.

Jack assessed his chances, considering and discarding angles of attack one after the other, trying to find the path of least resistance to the objective he wanted. Namely: three dead men and a way out of this place. Everything about the situation was stacked the wrong way for Jack—he was outnumbered and outgunned, low on time and options. If he waited too long, the fire would do the job for the bikers. He had to move, and chance the odds—

Without warning, from behind Jack there was a sudden, violent crash of breaking glass. Seared by the rising heat from the fire, the skylight imploded and collapsed into the flames. It caught him unaware, and he froze.

The noise caught the attention of one of the bikers, who swung up his gun and caught sight of Jack’s shadow, framed against the roof by the fire glow. “Hey!” he shouted, pointing.

Jack twisted and brought up his pistol. The biker saw the motion and started shooting before he had aimed, sending wild rounds into the lintel and ricochets across the rooftop. The other men reacted the same way, and in seconds the three of them were chopping at the brickwork as Jack dropped behind an air-conditioning vent.

He shot back, blind firing around the side of the vent box.

“Who the hell is that?” Jack heard one of them say.

“Who the hell cares?” shouted another. “Waste him!”

Going flat on his belly, Jack swarmed across the roof toward the top rungs of an iron escape ladder. Bullets lanced through the air over his head, the drone of their passing perilously close, making him flinch. He rolled onto his back, ejecting the M1911’s magazine and slamming a fresh one into the butt of the gun.

It was like lying on a griddle. The fire had its teeth in the building now, and if Jack couldn’t get off the roof in the next few moments he never would.

Got to risk it,
he told himself. But could he take out three men before one of them got off a kill shot at him? Jack didn’t pause to consider the alternative. He could hear a roaring noise getting louder as he rolled to the fire escape. Chase’s voice issued out from somewhere behind him as he came out with the escapees in tow.
No time to think about it,
Jack decided. If the roof caved in, they would all perish.

He popped up from behind the edge of the roof and time seemed to slow, becoming fluid. Jack saw the three bikers, each of them training their TEC-9s in his general direction. Two were close together, and they almost had a bead on him. The third was near the gate, taking aim.

He fired. The first bullet hit one man in the chest, a good kill that took down the target immediately. The second shot was discharged so close to the first that the report of the pistol was a single crashing echo. That round punched through the throat of the next biker, dropping him.

But the third man had Jack’s range and was firing back even as he swung the muzzle around in the last shooter’s direction. Bullets chopped at the roof under Jack’s feet and the roaring sound reached its peak.

He saw a bright flare of white headlights on the backstreet, and from out of nowhere a blocky silver shape collided with the metal gate and smashed it off its hinges. Sparks flew as the Chrysler stormed into the yard, slamming the last shooter aside as he bounced off the front fender. The car skidded and crashed into the rear of the building, the front end crumpling.

“Laurel!” Jack vaulted over the ladder and slid down its length. He sprinted to the ruined car as the driver’s-side door creaked open. The woman rocked back from the safety airbag that had inflated across her, wiping the powdery discharge it left behind from her face.

“Hey,” she managed. “Something caught fire.”

“Guess so.” Jack helped her from the wreck as more figures came down the fire escape, half-falling, half-running. “Thanks for the help.”

“Didn’t do it for you.” Laurel pushed away from him, still unsteady on her feet as she ran to the dark-haired girl who had spoken to Jack a few minutes before. “Trish!” She embraced her. “Are you hurt?”

“Catch up later.” Chase was the last to come down the ladder. “We gotta jet!”

“The van.” Jack ran to the vehicle and found the door was already open. He ducked beneath the dashboard, cracking the plastic casing around the starter cylinder, feeling for the connections to hot-wire the starter. Behind him, a side panel slid open and the van lurched as Laurel loaded the women into the back. He twisted the frayed copper ends of two wires together and the engine turned over, grumbling into life.

“I got the gear,” Chase shouted, sprinting across from the wrecked Chrysler, dragging Jack’s bag behind him. He slammed the door closed as he clambered inside. “Floor it!”

“Hold on.” Jack stamped on the accelerator and the black van lurched forward, the rear end skidding as he aimed it through the wrecked gate and out into the darkness.

In the rearview mirror, the Crankcase was wreathed in orange flames, stark against the black sky.

Mission accomplished,
Jack told himself. But the fact was, the night’s work had only just begun.

*   *   *

“Oh shit,” breathed Sticks, panting as he tried to get his breath back. “Oh shit oh shit oh shit.” Outside the burning strip club it was mayhem, as Night Rangers shoved aside the few truckers who had escaped the club with them, wheeling their motorcycles out across the street in a ragged pack. Fights had already broken out over who had started the fire, and in some places brother bikers helped other chapter members stagger away, all of them gasping to get fresh air in their lungs.

“That’s … that’s right,” wheezed Fang. He had grabbed a bottle of beer on his way out and now he dropped to his haunches on the road, upending it over his head. He let the cold beer pour over the fresh burns down the side of his face, hissing in pain through gritted teeth.

The roof of the Crankcase gave a strained, crackling moan, and as Sticks watched, the upper floor of the building slowly caved in. Wood splintered and metal twisted, catapulting plumes of red-hot embers up into the night. The big neon sign, now dead and unlit, quivered and began a slow tilt forward. There were still people trying to get away from the club as the sign came apart and collapsed across the front entrance. Sticks saw a handful of bikers and bikes alike vanish under the twisted framework, flames coiling in the displaced air.

“Too slow,” Fang offered. “Poor chumps.”

“Kansas City charter,” Sticks said coldly. “Who’s gonna miss ’em?” He shook his head at the destruction before him. “But this … oh, man. Rydell is going to bust a nut.”

“Those guys. It hadda be them.”

Sticks nodded, suddenly remembering the phone he was still clutching in his hand. “You think they’re still in there?” The wind carried a faint scream from somewhere inside the burning building, but no one was making any motion to venture back toward it.

“Would
you
be?”

He gave a woeful shake of the head and tapped the speed-dial button. “Lance,” he grated, swallowing a cough as the line connected. “We have a big problem.”

*   *   *

Rydell sat in a crouch, holding the big gold-plated Desert Eagle in his hand, waving the muzzle of the .50 caliber pistol around to illustrate his points. “Have I made the situation clear?” he asked the man in front of him.

The man was around the same age as Rydell, probably in his mid-to-late forties. There was only a few years between them, but while the biker was big, broad-shouldered and hard-faced, this guy—this
civilian
—was out of shape and flabby. Rydell sneered. It never ceased to amaze him how so-called stand-up folks like this maggot seemed to think that the world was going to be even with them. After all that this idiot had suffered, losing whatever crappy office cubicle job he had and being reduced to taking a chance on the cash-in-hand gig offered by the MC’s recruiters, he still believed that there was such a thing as fair play. That he was somehow
entitled
. Rydell had learned that kind of thing was a fantasy a long time ago. The world was a hateful place, and a man either used it or got used by it. He rolled the Desert Eagle around in his grip, like a gunslinger.

This guy, he had been complaining a lot. About the food, the work, about every damn little thing. Enough that when Rydell had gotten wind of it through one of the brothers minding the works, he had to come see for himself. To set an example.

It was important, Rydell reflected, to make sure that these chumps understood their place in things.
Cattle gotta be branded,
his daddy had once said.

The flabby guy was trying to talk, but he couldn’t manage it. He’d be dead soon. A .50 cal round in the gut would do that to you. Rydell crouched there and watched him bleeding out into the cracked, overgrown asphalt of the old parade ground. “I’m gonna leave you here,” he told him. “So the others can see how whiners get dealt with.”

He pointed with the gun, toward where the tumbledown barracks stood. There were faces at the windows, all the other civilians, the other
cattle
who might have been listening to the crap this mouthy prick had been spouting. They might have been getting ideas, but that wouldn’t go any further, not now.

Rydell stood up. “Don’t feel you gotta die quiet.” He kicked the man in his wound, making him whimper. “Best for me if you scream and howl some. Sends a message.”

Lance was coming his way, jogging across from the ruined blockhouse that had once been the officers’ quarters building. A lot of the infrastructure across the derelict Fort Blake army base had been “abandoned in place,” as the military liked to call it, and that had worked out just fine for the needs of the Night Rangers MC.

“What now?”

“You need to hear this, prez.” Lance held out his cell phone. “Sticks called back.”

Rydell didn’t like the look on the face of his burly master-at-arms, and he snatched the phone from him, annoyed that he wasn’t going to be able to watch the dying man breathe his last. As he raised the handset to his ear, for the first time he noticed something off in the distance toward the town. A plume of smoke, black against black, climbing lazily into the sky.

His anger kindled. “What was the last thing I told you, you dumb asshole?”

“
Boss, no,
” said Sticks, and with those words Rydell knew the worst had happened. He gripped the gun tightly, and if the other biker had been standing there before him, he would have become the second person to bleed out here tonight. “
Wasn’t my fault, it was those guys—
”

“Where’s Brodur? Where’s Sammy? I want to talk to them, not you.”

“
Brodur … don’t know where he’s at. But Sammy, boss. Sammy’s gotta be dead.
” Before Rydell could ask another question, Sticks was spilling it all out. “
The ’Case is all burning up! They set it alight! The guys from Chicago, they hadda be the ones!
”

“They’re not from Chicago,” Rydell grated. “Idiot. What about the girls?”

“
Not sure. They might have got out with them
.” He paused. “
I gotta picture,
” Sticks insisted. “
On the phone!
”

“Send it.” Rydell stabbed the “end call” button angrily and gripped the phone so tightly that the plastic case gave off a popping, cracking sound. A few seconds later, it buzzed and he glared at it.

“Who we looking at?” Lance hovered at his shoulder, trying to peer at the images. They were blurry and off-angle, but by luck more than judgment, Sticks had captured a shot of two men in the Crankcase’s back corridor.

“This is what I get when I try to delegate,” Rydell growled. For a second, he wanted to smash the phone on the ground and grind it to pieces under his boot heel. He took a breath through his gritted teeth and glared at Lance. “You see them? Find these two and bring them to me.”

“They could be anywhere, boss…”

Rydell turned and shouted into his face. “
Find them!
There’s only three roads in or out of this town! You know how the cops do it, block them off! Whoever those two fools are, they’re messing with MC property. That don’t get to happen.”

Lance nodded and set off at a jog.

Rydell felt something touch his foot and he looked down to see the man he had shot trying to grab at his leg. He brought his boot down and hastened the end of his object lesson.

15

Toward the edge of town, where the landscape began to drop back to wide-open spaces and endless dark horizons, the road threaded past an overgrown steel-and-concrete barn as big as an aircraft hangar. The remnants of colorful signage across it were green with mildew and decay, and weeds coiled around everything.

It had been what modern urban planners would call a “retail park” when they first broke ground in the 1980s—a site for a big-box store surrounded by the flat expanse of a parking lot, where locals and soldiers from the army base alike would have been able to get cheap consumer goods and cheaper groceries. But that never really came to pass, and Deadline’s one and only mega-mart suffered a slow, lingering death that eventually left it vacant and empty. In retrospect, it had been the first sign of the town’s impending collapse, although no one living there wanted to accept that.

Some of the worst storms of the century had punched holes in the sheet-metal roof during the bitter winters a few years back, and now nobody dared to venture inside the empty shell. The place was shuttered up, each great patch of thick fiberboard across the doors and windows emblazoned with a sun-faded sign warning that the building was unsafe.

Jack drove the van clean through one of them, smashing the way in through the back so anyone passing on the road wouldn’t see signs of disruption. He killed the engine and stepped down from the driver’s seat, kicking up the thick dust on the floor as he went.

Laurel and the women held their collective breath as he and Chase walked back to the broken doors and listened. Somewhere out in the night, a motorcycle engine throttled up, but it was moving away, fading. After a while, there was only the dull moaning of the wind.