Saving Jason

ALSO BY MICHAEL SEARS

Black Fridays

Mortal Bonds

Long Way
Down

G. P. PUTNAM’S SONS

Publishers Since 1838

An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC

375 Hudson Street

New York, New York 10014

Copyright © 2016 by Michael Sears

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eBook ISBN 978-0-698-13630-4

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

For
Barb

L
ike a flat rock on a still pond, the first bullet skipped twice across the windshield and flew off harmlessly into the night. The second, aimed just slightly lower, broke through, but deflected by the liquid power of angled glass, merely left a long tear in the brim of Mark Barstow’s Red Sox cap. In the split second before his view was obscured by the spiderweb of sympathetic fissures radiating all across the glass, Barstow saw two dark figures standing on his front lawn, both in the stance of practiced shooters. He aimed the Range Rover at them and floored it.

Mark Barstow was not accustomed to being shot at; he was a businessman, an experienced financial advisor, a husband and father, and a weekend hunter. Two years in the navy, twenty years earlier, had done nothing to prepare him for this situation. However, he had seen enough action movies to recognize that he was at the wheel of a much more lethal weapon than the two handguns aimed at him. And he had expected something like this. From the moment he and his lawyer had left the prosecutor’s office, he had known it was coming.

Bluestone gravel spewed from beneath the rear tires and the big vehicle sped up the driveway. The left front tire hit the raised Belgian-block border at an acute angle, immediately blowing out the nearly bald tire, and slewing the big car hard to the left. The right tire made it over the stone border, but the damaged left wheel acted as an anchor. The car began to pivot.

After an initial panic as the SUV came at them, the two shooters were quick to recover. Both fired multiple shots, shattering both right-side windows. Barstow, his car now sunk into the lawn on the driver’s
side, threw open the door, rolled out, and came up running. Neither of the assassins trusted automatics—sometimes subject to jamming at inopportune moments—for what they had expected to be “detail” work, requiring no more than a bullet or two, and they quickly emptied their six-chambered .38 revolvers, spurring their quarry into an even greater burst of speed. Barstow ran around the corner of the house and out of sight.

The first call to 911 came almost immediately from a woman two doors down who reported that “kids” were “letting off firecrackers” and “knocking over trash cans.” A commotion resulting from either would have been highly unusual in the quiet Great Neck community. Homes were, of necessity, close together, but they tended to be palatial, and a staid quiet was the norm. The second call, three seconds later, from the owner of the house across the street, correctly identified the first sound as gunfire. Nassau County Police Squad Car Number 336, patrolling eight blocks south of Mark Barstow’s house, answered the call.

Neither officer had ever fired a weapon while on duty. That was about to change.

Barstow felt one of the last bullets pass behind his head as he ran for the darkness on the far side of the garage. Not noticing the click of the hammer landing on the empty brass shell of a previously fired bullet, he simply ran faster. He slipped through the side door of the garage, locking it behind him. For once, he blessed his wife’s insistence that no guns be kept in her house. His locked gun safe, containing a .30-caliber hunting rifle and two over-and-under shotguns—one a twelve-gauge and the other a lighter twenty-gauge bird gun—was stored in a locked closet built into the back wall of the garage. He opened it and removed the twelve-gauge and a box of Winchester Xpert 3-inch #2s—lethal on ducks and geese out to forty or fifty yards and remarkably destructive of human flesh at lesser distances. He loaded the gun and waited.

Except for the hum of the freezer on the far wall near the kitchen
door, the house was silent. His wife, Vera, and their daughter, Valeria—still unemployed and living at home, ten months after graduating from the College of Charleston—were, at his insistence, visiting Vera’s mother in St. Pete Beach. They had left that morning and wouldn’t be back until Sunday night. The outside door rattled as someone tried the locked doorknob.

The two gunmen—realizing that their plan for a straightforward assassination as Barstow pulled into his driveway had now gone wildly off script, veering into the dangerous and unpredictable field of improvisation—made one last attempt at fulfilling their mission. They reloaded and followed Barstow around the side of the garage. The backyard was dark but apparently empty, and the side door of the garage beckoned. Rather than take the point and charge into an unknown situation with the hunted on his home turf, Francesco “Little Frankie” Figundio stood to the side of the door and tried the knob first. Gently. It was locked. He gave it a hard shake and was rewarded with the sound of an explosion. A hole the size of a basketball blew out of the top panel on the door, sending jagged wooden splinters flying in an ever-expanding cone across the side yard.

Little Frankie stuck his hand and firearm through the hole and loosed three quick shots. The empty garage responded like a snare drum, the sharp sounds reverberating and rattling the walls, the bullets ricocheting erratically but ultimately harmless.

Barstow saw the hand with the revolver and watched the short-barreled gun flash three times. Ignoring the whine and ping of the bullets as they careened off metal shelving, concrete floor, and the frame of his daughter’s Kawasaki motorcycle, he fired the second barrel of his shotgun at the wall just to the right of the doorway, aiming for chest height. A second hole appeared. A man screamed—a most satisfying sound. Willing to take his victories in small stages, Barstow ran for the kitchen door. He fumbled briefly with the jangle of keys on his chain, cursing in short barks as his panic rose, finally finding the right one and unlocking the door. But before he could squeeze inside,
a second hand pointed a gun through the same hole in the door and fired twice.

Framed in the gray light from the kitchen windows, silhouetted against the blackness of the garage, Barstow was an easy target. The only target. Both bullets hit, the first severing his left pinky finger, the second hitting him in the back, breaking his left scapula before sheering upward and exiting, tearing a golf ball–sized hole through his trapezius. He fell forward, dropping the shotgun and spinning as he fell, so that he landed on his back in the middle of the kitchen floor. Without any conscious thought, he began kicking wildly until his foot connected with the swinging door and he forced it closed. The click of the lock as it fell into place was the most reassuring sound he could have imagined. He was bleeding, in great pain, crippled on his left side, deafened by the gunshots in the confined space of the garage, and still outmanned and outgunned. But for the moment he was safe. He found the gun, reloaded, and aimed at the solid, metal-covered, heat-and-flame-retardant door. In the background, he could hear the measured beep of the security system. If he failed to activate the code in another ninety seconds, help would be on the way.

The two gunmen reassessed. The second shotgun blast had plowed lateral stripes across Little Frankie’s back, destroying his black leather sports jacket and planting wooden splinters, bits of siding, and half a dozen tiny number-two shot-sized BBs in the shallow furrows. The wound was far from lethal, but it was painful and would require professional medical attention. Frankie stopped screaming and began to curse fluently, switching effortlessly from his native English to the mixed Neapolitan Italian of his paternal grandfather and the Sicilian of his maternal grandfather. They would have been proud.

“Fuck’s the matter with you?” the other man asked.

“I’m hit, Gino, you fucking
stunad.
I need a doctor.”

Gino would rather have dropped his less-than-useless partner off the bridge at Captree than take him to a doctor, but he was facing a
full-out disaster. The odds of attaining success had dropped dramatically. Rather than ambushing an unsuspecting, unarmed victim, they were now pursuing a shotgun-wielding, very dangerous opponent in a fortified position on his own turf. The sound of an approaching siren decided the matter.

“We’re outta here. Follow me,” Gino said. He turned around once as he ran for the back of the yard. “And shut the fuck up, or I put a bullet in you myself and leave you here.”

“Fuck you,” Frankie said, but he said it quietly and then stopped talking.

They ran, after a fashion, lurching and limping through the neighboring backyards, tromping through recently turned gardens and tripping over various decorative shrubs and leafless privet hedges. Their car was parked two streets over in the driveway of a darkened house. Though they set off motion sensors in two yards, not one of the three security cameras they passed managed to capture an identifiable photo of them. Minutes later, they jumped in the car and slowly pulled out, avoiding any display of sudden flight. They disappeared into the night.

The two policemen pulled up in front of a dark, silent house. A Range Rover sat half on the lawn, half in the driveway. The vehicle had a flat tire, smashed windows, and bullet holes in the side panels. The only other sign of the recent disturbance was the faint, lingering scent of gunpowder in the damp night air.

The younger of the two called in a 10-34 S2, though it appeared the shooting was over. He added a 10-13, as per SOP. It looked quiet, but backup would be welcome. “We should see if there’s anyone hurt,” he said to his partner.

“What’s ETA?” the older man replied.

“Car Three-Two-Seven in four minutes. The security company sent an alert.”

“We wait.”

“Someone could bleed out in four minutes.”

The older cop thought for a moment. The decision was all his. “All right. I take point.” He drew his Glock and started for the front of the large house. He went up the front stoop—a granite structure that would have been more at home in front of a college library—and attempted to see in through the large bay window. Though the curtains were light gauze, the room was too dark. He looked back at his partner and shook his head.

The younger cop was crouched by the abandoned SUV. He motioned for searching around behind the house. His partner shook his head. He preferred waiting. Backup would be there in another minute or two. He held up a hand for caution, but the younger man was already moving.

“Aw, hell,” he whispered. He followed around the far side of the house. “Hold up,” he hissed as they reached the rear corner.

“There’s no one here,” the other man replied aloud, giving up altogether on trying to communicate silently. “Whoever was involved here has vacated the premises.”

“We don’t know that. Now, do as I say. Follow me.”

He stayed low and moved slowly, ducking below the windows. A wide, unfenced wooden deck, only a foot and a half off the ground, covered a portion of the yard leading down to a pool, hidden beneath a winter cover. On the far side was a small pool house and a mammoth stone-and-steel construction that seemed to combine a barbecue grill, a sink and countertop, and a built-in pizza oven. On the deck were tables and chairs in various arrangements, with white cushions that gleamed in the half-light of the quarter moon. Sliding glass doors gave entry into the rear of the house. The garage was on the far side. It was all very quiet. Leading with his gun, he stepped up onto the deck, hugging the wall of the house, and peered in through the glass doors. Darkness. Faint shapes. A long dining room. Then a kitchen. Nothing moving. He moved on.

Mark Barstow didn’t see him at first. He had been staring into the
blackness, his ears still ringing from the shots inside the echoing garage, waiting for that door to open and for the two shooters to make another attempt at him. The last two shots had punched holes through the door, which now looked to him like a pair of unblinking black eyes observing him indifferently as he sweated and bled, barricaded behind the working island in the center of the kitchen. He kept the shotgun aimed at the door. His back was soaked with his blood, but shock was already taking over and he barely felt the wound in his back. The missing finger, however, stung like a thousand wasps all attacking at once. He wrapped the hand in a dish towel and for a moment saw explosions of stars behind his eyelids as he almost passed out. He shook his head. He wanted water. The faucet was only a few feet away. As though entranced, he found that his thoughts were focused solely on reaching that sink. He could wash the blood from his hand and the cold water would help kill the pain. And he could drink. If he could just drink a little cold water, he knew that he would live. Keeping the shotgun aimed at the door, he rose up and took a step toward the counter.

The older cop was already on the far side of the deck when he heard his partner yell, “Freeze!” The word was picked up quite clearly by his chest microphone, as was the next. “Police!” He looked back and saw the younger cop in the approved firing-range stance. He was aiming at the gray glass doors to the kitchen.

It was unlikely that Barstow heard the words. No doubt he heard a sound, but what he saw was a man with a gun stepping into the thin shaft of moonlight that made it down through the stand of tall cypress trees in the backyard. He did not register the uniform; he saw a threat.

“Damn!” His mind returned to crystal clarity. He should have known they would try to flank him—to surprise him again. He whirled and fired once, barely aiming, firing from the hip like some TV hero. He was surprised to see that he had apparently hit his target. The glass exploded outward, the whole sliding door shattering at once, and the tall man—or the shadow of the tall man—fell to the ground.

The policeman felt the blast of the pellets go by and, too late, leapt out of the way of the shards of glass. They ripped through his shirt and sliced the side of his neck, missing the carotid artery by millimeters. The pain was sharp, biting, acidic. He hit the ground and rolled onto his back, too much in agony even to think about returning fire.

The other cop relied on his extensive training. His partner was down, hurt, and vulnerable to further attack. The suspect was still armed and had, despite a warning, fired and hit a police officer. By law and by training, he was allowed—expected—to use whatever force he deemed necessary to defend himself and other police personnel and to subdue the shooter. He fired three times, placing all three bullets in the center of Barstow’s chest.