Clawback (37 page)

“I’m not
part
of this!” I yelled, but that was just distraction.

I was twenty feet from Ganderson, and he’d almost finished a reload. I had no weapon and nothing to prove. I ran for the door, crashing into it just as Ganderson finished, recovered and started firing again. Bullets followed me out.

Sprawling into the hallway, I looked left, right. Still just the battery lights, and no emergency responders in view yet. A couple of
people too far away to be any help, even if they weren’t blood-covered and shocked. I remained on my own.

In another second Ganderson would be at the door, with unobstructed sightlines and fresh ammunition. The hallway was barren, empty of anything I might use as cover.

In front of me were the double doors to the room Zeke and I had conferred in. Twenty minutes ago and it seemed like a week. Without hesitating, I grabbed at the handle, pushed it open, and leaped through.

The door closed just as Ganderson came up. I could see his shadow in the crack of hallway light seeping under the door. Inside it was still as dim as before—the emergency light was obscured by one of the exhibitor partitions, casting black shadows.

“Come on in, Ganderson!” I stood to one side of the door, near the dais, out of through-fire range. “I finally found my backup pistol. Let’s see how good you are face to face.”

Pause.

“I don’t believe you.” He kept his voice down.

“Then walk through the door.”

“You’re a dead man, Silas!”

We stood in the standoff for a long moment. I don’t know what Ganderson was doing—reloading again, if he had any sense. For myself, I was frantically going through my pockets. Knife? Pen? Piece of fucking
string
? No, absolutely nothing—I was purely weaponless.

Except for five cheap cellphones.

“Police will be coming up the stairs any second.” I took out one of the phones, punching at the keypad. “When they see you standing
out there? Holding a gun and yelling threats?
You
are the fucking dead man.”

“They’re taking their time.” His voice sounded reasonable, barely audible through the door. “You know how the protocols work. We’ve got all night.”

In fact, true. ESU hated running in blind and unprepared, with so many innocent bystanders waiting around to be shot accidentally. The commanders would have to argue it out for at least ten or fifteen minutes. “It’s your gamble,” I said, “not mine.” I finished with the first phone and pulled out the second. I held my fingers over the top, trying to dampen the beeps. “How long are you going to jerk off out there?”

“If you had a gun you’d have used it already, Silas.” He was trying to convince himself.

“You never gave me time to get to my ankle holster.”

“Bullshit.”

“Your call, asshole.”

I was on the fourth phone now.

“What happened to Saxon?” Ganderson’s voice was almost conversational. “Did you kill him?”

“No.”

“Because maybe you’re the one who should be worried about the police, not me. What are they going to think about you?”

He was throwing my own tactic back at me, trying to start a dialogue, hoping to put me off guard.

Which meant he’d be blasting through the door any second.

“I gave my lawyer all the details!” I shouted. “Recordings, video, witnessed affidavits—if I die, your entire cabal goes down with me!”

Then I ran. Ganderson said something, but I wasn’t paying attention. To the first exhibitor booth—in, out, on to the next. Then to an opposite corner. Back—

“You’re
lying,
Silas!” And he kicked open the door.

He came through in a combat roll, the .45 held close, sliding along the wall and leaping for the scanty cover of a folded table. What I could see of it, in the dim light, was nicely done. If I’d had a weapon of any sort, he’d be dead, of course, but I would have had to work for it.

No matter. I dropped off the fourth phone and slipped into my own hiding place, under the dais. I held the last phone close, concealing the glow from its tiny screen.

Silence.

The door drifted shut on its closer, darkening the room again.

Ganderson shifted, crouched, began to examine the surroundings visible from his position. A red beam sprang into life, from his handgun, and switched back and forth around the room.

The laser.

“All right,” Ganderson said. “You’re hiding.”

I kept quiet.

“It won’t make any difference. I have firepower. You have nothing. I’m going to walk through here, booth by booth, and as soon as I find you, I’m going to start shooting.”

“Are you sure you can find me?” I said, into my hands, which I’d cupped over the last cellphone……and my scratchy voice seemed to come out of nowhere, emerging from four other phones. All on speaker. Volume at maximum. All four connected in a single conference call. In fact, slight transmission delays, as the signal bounced
among different carriers and different towers, created an odd false-echo effect, disembodying my words even more.

Ganderson spun around, the laser beam swinging wildly across the partitions and tables near him.

“You have no idea
where
I am.”

BLAM!

He fired once, blindly. I winced as the round tore into the wall about ten feet above the dais. Lucky guess.

“Tell me one thing,” I said. “Why did you even hire me?”

“You’re dead.” His voice was almost a snarl. “Terry Plank will be dead soon enough. Too bad you’re going in backward order, but the story will hold.”

Okay, I’m slow. Real slow.

“Son of a bitch.” I finally,
finally
understood. “You set me up.”

BLAM!

Missed by a mile that time, but almost knocked out phone number two. He was figuring it out.

“You wanted me close to the investigation not so I could solve the murders, but to start implicating
me
in the assassinations.”

BLAM!

Ganderson—angrier, or more confident he had my number, or both—strode through the room, turning his head side to side as I talked.

“While meanwhile,” I said, despite that, “you go on minting profit on trades ahead of each event. So let me ask—where’s your money on Plank? Is he going to die or not?”

Ganderson stopped, ducked down and came up with phone number four, which I’d laid on the table in a corner of one booth.

“Tricky, Silas,” he said, then tossed it in the air. As the phone fell, he raised his pistol, the red beam jagging like lightning, and shot it dead center.

From only about a yard, yes, but it
was
moving. The muzzle flash left afterimages dancing in my field of vision.

“Seven point five,” I said. “Moderate difficulty, dramatic execution.”

“I
hear
you,” Ganderson said, and walked straight to phone number one, balanced on the top edge of a partition twenty feet away. This time he simply dropped the phone to the carpet and stomped it with his heel.

“Who else is in it?” I asked. “Is there a whole gang involved? Or just you and Saxon? Oh, by the way, if you didn’t see—Saxon’s down. Dead, maybe. Took a round right in the chest, and emergency services are having trouble getting into the ballroom at the moment.”

He paused. “Silas, you batfucker!—you are a pain in the
ass.
”

“No, I’d—”

“A straightforward deal, and you’ve screwed up every single step of the way. One little thing! Have you done even
one little thing
the way I asked you to? No!”

Another satisfied client. “Oh well.”

By now Ganderson had indentified phone number three, on a stack of chairs off in the other direction. He headed directly toward it, head cocked slightly to track the sound’s origin.

This route took him right past the dais.

It would be nice to say I’d planned it all out—the bread-crumb trail of cellphone speakers, a subtle hiding spot, an improvised weapon at hand. But I won’t even try to pretend. Unfortunately often, it comes down to plain dumb luck.

When Ganderson passed in front of me, I’d already pulled myself into a tight ball of potential energy: feet flat on the floor, back braced against the floor of the dais. It was held together cheaply, with some bent-pipe legs and plastic bolts. The moment I saw his shoes, I lunged upward, putting every last bit of frustration, irritation and pent-up rage into it.

The rear plastic ties snapped. The floorboard—an eight-by-four piece of plywood—rotated up and out, hinged by unbroken connections along the front edge of the dais. The momentum of my furious shove spun the wood like an enormous riverboat paddle: up, around and down. Down hard.
Smashing
down.

Right onto Ganderson.

Not his head. He was too tall for that. But the edge of the plywood caught his shoulder and raked his entire arm. As I followed through, I sprawled onto the board, hammering it all the way to the floor. It scraped down Ganderson’s side, dislodged the pistol from his hand, crushed his foot, and knocked him to his knees.

“Aauugggh!” He sounded hurt.

I tried to stand, lost my balance on the tipping plywood sheet and fell again. I grabbed at Ganderson and took him all the way down with me. The angle may have broken his ankle, which was still trapped under the edge of the board. He certainly screamed, even louder.

The .45 was missing. I couldn’t take any chances.

“Asshole,” I said, and with two
kenpo
power strikes, broke both his collarbones.

“I
never asked,” said Johnny, as we drove through the dark tunnels of the Northeast Kingdom at dusk. “Did he pay your bill?”

“Ganderson? Hah!”

“Chiseler.”

“Well, I got about half, in progress payments, before everything blew up. And I’m not giving it back—I did what I was hired for, after all.”

“I guess small claims is out.”

I smiled.

An hour past sunset—which wasn’t that late, this far north in Vermont—impenetrable forest crowded the remote county road on either side. Peak fall foliage had come and gone, and most of the leaves had fallen. The blacktop twisted and curved, uphill and down, yellow warning signs reflecting our headlights. We hadn’t seen another vehicle since Drakes Mill, seven miles back.

“I appreciate your helping drive,” I said. “In case I forgot to mention.”

“Oh, I always take a vacation around now.”

“Late October? In northern New England?”

“One tires of the same old Riviera beaches year after year.”

We were getting close. I examined the map one more time. Paper, not GPS—this wasn’t the sort of trip where I wanted even the faintest electronic trail.

“You have to give him points for style.” Johnny, the permanent contrarian. “Sets up a foolproof scheme, whacks a few Masters of Doom, starts banking 5x returns—and then hires
you,
just to goose the publicity.”

“Not publicity. Or not only. He was already planning ahead. I was the fall guy.”

“Which makes a little more sense, I suppose. Kind of underestimated you, though, huh?”

“Yeah.” And I have to admit, it was that part that rankled the most. I thought I had a solid reputation, but Ganderson treated me like a Fishkill loser on parole—like a wino you’d hand a gun to, point at the bank branch, and say the getaway car would be around the corner. What the fuck did Ganderson
think
would happen? I was smarter than that!

Wasn’t I?

“Don’t worry about it.” Johnny sounded like he was reading my mind, but it wasn’t too hard because I’d been repeating the same complaint since we’d left the city. “He was a vastly overpaid investment banker. Those guys think they can tell the sun when to set. If you’re bothered by pathological overconfidence, you need to find another set of clients.”

“The problem is, they pay the best.” I sighed. “Even worse, though, they’re all apparently armed to the teeth now. I still can’t
believe the shootout at the conference. It was like an Afghan wedding in there.”

“It wasn’t all random, is what I heard.”

“Huh?”

“Once the guns were out, people realized they could start settling scores.”

“No way.” I had to laugh. “Really?”

“You know—old grudges, resentments over past deals, that sort of thing. I think the whole event was cathartic for everyone.”

We slowed to a stop at an unmarked crossroads. I checked my notes.

“Go right. Two-point-eight miles.”

Johnny glanced at the odometer and got us moving again. “And Hayden, never part of it. That’s still hard to believe.”

“He was a thief and an embezzler, and he tried to kill me more than once.”

“But not connected to Ganderson.”

“Nope. Just another hard-charging dealmaker. Not much more than business as usual.”

I opened my window, breathing the cold night air. It had that early-frost smell, the snap of winter. We passed an unlit sign, something about firewood and beer.

“How’s Clara?” Johnny asked.

“Out of the hospital.” They’d only kept her for a day. “Hammering the blogosphere. Callouts all over the internet. She writes really well, did you know that? I mean, digging up dirt, that’s one thing—but her stories are just great to read. That job offer from CNBC ought to be arriving any day now.”

“You haven’t
talked
to her?”

“Can’t.” I looked out at the dark forest around us. “She doesn’t need the kind of trouble I’ve got stuck all over me.”

The headlights illuminated the trees and brush along the road, creating a tunnel effect. The car ran almost silent on the smooth pavement.

“Did you ever call up your brother?” Johnny asked.

Dave. “No.” I’d thought about it, but after all the near-death excitement, the possibility of family I never knew I had was a straw too many to deal with. “Someday I will.”

A minute later Johnny coasted, braked and stopped. A slight widening of the dirt verge was the only indication we’d arrived. He popped the trunk release and we stepped out into the night, closing both doors to turn off the dome light.

At the car’s rear I pulled out my small pack. I was still carrying an extra water bottle, which I drank off and dropped into the trunk before slamming the lid.