Spiked (15 page)

There was a noise from outside, like a car door slamming. Red dust burst from a brick in the window arch. A bullet had knocked out a chunk.

A black pistol appeared in Chanthay's hand. She ducked behind a partition.

“Go!” she yelled. “Run!”

Chapter 20

Eddie raced deeper into the old factory, which grew ever darker the farther he ran from the outside light. He gauged the vastness of the place by the distant glow of windows along the far wall. The mill looked as big as a city block. It was like running through a giant department store with no lights. As he entered the shadows, he realized he was running alone. Skidding to a stop on the greasy floor, Eddie looked back. The two men outside held their guns inside their overcoats and marched toward the broken window. They walked with purpose, but didn't seem rushed.

Chanthay held her ground behind an office partition.

She balanced on her toes, her knees slightly bent, poised to spring like a cat. She held the gun by her ear, pointing straight up. She was waiting for her shot, unable to chance a peek at her targets, content to let their footsteps be her guide.

A fool's courage, Eddie thought. In a moment she would be dead.

No, he would not watch that happen. Loping strides brought him back to her.

She grimaced at his presence and shooed him away with the gun. Eddie grabbed a handful of her ski vest and pulled her to the darkness.

A bullet thumped the plywood partition like a kick from a steel-toed boot.

They ran together. Behind them, wingtips crunched on broken glass. Chanthay followed Eddie through alleys, between wooden crates stacked high on pallets, past dark mounds of machinery and oil drums rising into pyramids. The alleys were dark, but the obstacles were darker, and Eddie steered a competent path between them.

Billings Mill was not a modern-day success among the behemoths of the Merrimack. When the Lowell textile industry abandoned its cradle, entrepreneurs invested in the Mile of Mills, with varying degrees of success. Part of Massachusetts Mills was converted to luxury apartments. The old Boott Mill became a museum of culture and history. Lawrence Mills was to be a college campus, before the fire.

In the 1970s, a plan to develop Billings Mill into office space flopped. The next owners tried a warehouse. The pols frowned at the idea, and the business community yawned—no job creation. Billings employed two thousand men and women in 1875, and about nine muscleheads on the loading dock a hundred years later. Warehouse rents offered a low margin, and the place closed within a few years. Much of the crap stored there in the '70s was abandoned, or offered to the owners in lieu of past due rent. It was an indoor junkyard under a pall of dust, a maze in the dark.

The paths through the junk turned and split at random, like the streets in the Acre. Eddie chose a zigzag course toward the center of the warehouse. There, the alley emptied into a straight avenue, the width of a driveway, running lengthwise down the middle of the building.

They slowed to a walk, choosing silence over speed. The pounding of leather shoes, still deep in the maze, stopped moments later. Their hunters had chosen silence as well.

Eddie caught his breath, and then whispered, “If they shoot us here we'll be skeletons before anybody finds us.”

“I could have killed them both at the window,” she answered.

“Don't think so,” he said. “Did you see their puffy shirts? Body armor. Fibrous layers—light but impenetrable. I wrote a story on it when the cops got new vests last year.”

“Then I'd have shot their faces.”

So sure, so confident. Maybe she would have. She was in the shadows; they were in the light. She had the element of surprise—even if they had assumed she was armed, would they have expected her to set an ambush? Then bang, bang. Two head shots from behind the wall, two dead hitmen.

It was possible, Eddie supposed. But he was unwilling to let her risk herself on lousy odds. Not for him, not while he skulked off into the darkness. She radiated an old-world dedication to a purpose at any cost, a quality Eddie had never sensed in such abundance. She was not to be wasted on a long shot.

The bank of windows opposite from where they had entered glowed like sunrise beyond a horizon of junk. Eddie's hand bled and the blood slimed his fingers. “We can head for those windows and smash back out,” he whispered.

“If you think you can take it,” she said.

He smiled.
A sense of humor, too
. “We'll find a crowbar or something this time.” It seemed she had forgiven him for ruining her ambush. Only their escape could have made him happier.

“Can you fight?” she asked.

“I won my first four fistfights,” he said, “but the last one was in fifth grade.”

“I will remember that if those men send children to find us.”

They crept along the center aisle. Eddie scanned to his right for a promising passageway toward the windows. Chanthay was a silhouette against a wall of crates. Her hands were folded before her, as if in prayer. In them she held her gun. Eddie could feel what her tiny weapon meant.
Those men must risk their lives to take ours
. The odds favored the pursuers—they had two guns—but the fight was fair, the stakes equally lethal.

Another pistol wouldn't have done much to level the odds. Not in Eddie's hands. He had never fired anything more potent than a BB gun. The kids in his neighborhood used to take turns shooting squirrels in the Dracut State Forest. Oh, how those rodents ran, ricocheting like rubber balls from a cannon. Eddie shot and shot, never could hit one. After a while he started to miss on purpose, and wondered later if he had done so all along.

Could he kill a man? Chanthay could, and with just one gun that was all that mattered. But could he? If he had to? He could shoot back, perhaps, into the darkness at an unseen foe. What the bullet found in the shadows would be its own business.

Eddie inched along on his toes, breathing silently through his mouth. He kept watch to the rear and looked for passageways. There was no fear, just hair-trigger alertness. Where was Fear? He had felt her presence when the first bullet struck blindly at the brick. But in the rush through the maze, he had run right past her. She was lost out there, too, somewhere in the junk.

Few passageways led toward the windows. One aisle started in the right direction, but soon veered off. Another path dead-ended after thirty feet.
What about a direct route? Straight over the junk
. The crates along the aisle were stacked about nine feet high. It was hard to tell if there was an easy way up there.

Something hit Eddie's chest and crashed him to the floor.

He yelped in surprise.
Am I shot?
Chanthay clamped a hand over his mouth. She had shoved him down in mid-stride. He nodded that he was all right and she took away her hand.

Somewhere in the junk the footsteps pounded again. The men were running.

Chanthay pointed at Eddie's left leg. It had vanished beneath the knee. He flexed the leg and it returned. His eyes trained on a square on the floor, twelve feet across, darker than the space around it.

“A hole,” Chanthay whispered.

Eddie yanked a button from his shirt and dropped it in. Several seconds passed before it rattled off something metallic. This was not an option for escape. Straight above, in the ceiling, was another hole of the same size.

Eddie leaned to her. “Probably an elevator,” he said. “Retrofitted into the building, and then torn out.”

The footsteps seemed louder than before. Echoes made it hard to tell from which direction they came. Eddie and Chanthay stepped around the hole and hurried down the corridor.

They passed an aisle to their left and someone yelled, “There!”

There was a white flash. Even with a sound suppressor, the noise shook the air. The slug popped against a crate above their heads. The shot sent Eddie running like a starter's pistol for the hundred-meter dash. He had not trained much since college track-and-field, but muscles have amazing memories; his thighs pumped to top speed in three steps.

Another man yelled, “Kill her, grab him!”

Or was it, “Kill him, grab her?” Eddie did not wait to find out.

The end of the corridor came quickly. One staircase went up, another went down. Eddie bounded up the stairs three at a time. At the first landing, he looked back. Chanthay had just reached the bottom.

“Split up!” she yelled. And she vanished down the stairs.

Eddie kept going. Heavy footsteps banged up the stairs behind him. Just one set, he thought. They sounded clumsy.
This guy's in worse shape than me
. Eddie flew up two more flights and ran out to the fourth floor. Its layout was similar to the first level below—a main corridor straight through the junk, with side paths snaking off. He ran down random paths—left, right, left, left, right. He threw himself behind a pallet stacked with wooden crates, and panted for breath. His left hand, still bleeding, was in a glove of blood and dust. He pressed his right palm on the cut, and held his hands over his head to help stop the flow.

Climbing the stairs had lengthened his lead on his pursuer, but now Eddie was too high up to jump from a window.

The stomping on the staircase stopped on the fourth floor landing.

Funny, Eddie thought. Before his ice ride down the canal, nobody had ever tried to kill him. And now, days after being left to drown, he was hiding from a professional murderer. The backbeat of his heart pounded in his inner ear. Sweat ran down his face. He thought about Nowlin, and wondered if Danny knew he was about to be murdered. Did he have flashbacks about what he had done in his life? Or visions of what he would never do?

Eddie shook those thoughts from his head—it was too soon to give up. But he needed a plan.
Stay alive until Chanthay gets here with that gun.
A fine concept, but a few details short of a plan. He had options. Assuming the building was symmetrical, he could negotiate the junkscape and find stairs back down on the other side. That would bring him closer to Chanthay. But the stairs down also headed toward the other gunman. And if the one already on his tail were to follow, Eddie would be in a sandwich. He would be meat.

Or he could head for the windows. Yes, it was too high to jump, but he could attract attention somehow. He could heave crates out the window.
Real subtle.
He'd be on me in a minute
.

That left hiding. Yeah, hiding sounded good. Eddie crept around, looking for a crate to slip into.

The man with the gun yelled out, “This don't gotta be so hard!”

The words soared over the junk and died to silence in the far reaches of the room. The sweat on Eddie's face ran cold. The low voice with a New York City accent was raw and phlegmy. It sounded so close. Eddie had run at least a hundred feet through the twisting passages before he stopped to rest, but the hitman wasn't half that far away in a straight line.

The man yelled again, “What's your name?”

Eddie was silent.

The man waited a few seconds, and then shouted, “You won't say, so I gotta give you one. I'm gonna call you Carl, 'cause you ran like Carl Lewis up them stairs.” The man laughed as if this was the funniest thing he'd heard in a month. Eddie heard the flick, flick of a cigarette lighter.

“You a smoker, Carl?” the man yelled. He let the words die out, and then added, “Don't ever start—these fucking things will kill you.” He chuckled again.

Then the man began to walk. His footsteps progressed down the center aisle.

“Lemme tell you how this works, okay?” He spoke in a polite, unhurried manner. “You listening Carl?” Silence, then, “We could say that I'm on the clock right now, except I don't get paid by the hour, see? I get paid by the job.” He coughed and cleared his throat. “Don't ever work salary if you can help it, Carl.”

Career advice? From a hitman?

“People take advantage of you—they don't care, they just screw ya. Christ—what I wouldn't give for a half-decent union.” The man chuckled some more. “Hey! Do they let Republicans join a union? I've been Republican since Ford. I like a guy who knows how to grant a pardon.” He laughed again. “Nixon fucked it up for Ford, the poor bastard shoulda beat Carter.”

The voice drew closer. The man with the gun had started down the same left turn Eddie had chosen. He got back to the subject at hand. “Now, your girlfriend downstairs—she gotta be whacked, and that's that. And we're all real sorry because she's a great piece of ass, but we got no options with that broad. I guarantee that Mick ain't even talking to her down there, the way I'm talking to you right now.”

Eddie caught a whiff of tobacco. He didn't know the brand, but it was foul.

“But you're another story, Carl. We ain't getting paid to do you, and we don't usually do stuff for free. But you can't blame us for being curious. Right? We wanna know who you are, who you're working for—that kinda shit.”

The man with the gun hacked a wet cough. Then he stepped slowly down the same right turn Eddie had taken.
He guessed right again!

“Now lemme remind you that I'm being paid by the job here. The longer it takes, the less it works out per hour. Get my drift? What I'm hinting at, Carl, is I don't want to blow my afternoon in this pisshole, because that's not smart business.”

The man with the gun came to another intersection, and again chose the path Eddie had taken.

“So what I'm saying is, you can come out. And then we can sit down together and have a chat. You tell me what you're doing with the foreign chick, and if you're truthful to me, we both can put this behind us. You hear me, Carl?”

Eddie never considered his offer. Not for one second. The man was curious—that part Eddie believed. But he would never let him go, not while Eddie could identify him. Put this behind us?
Yeah, put a slug behind my ear, you mean.

The man's voice grew closer.

“The problem we have here, Carl, is that after a finite period of time, I'm gonna get pissed. I got this temper, all right? The wife nagged me to get some pills for it. But they make me sleepy—ask Mick. He gets bitchy 'cause he has to drive all the time when I'm too sleepy. So I don't take them sometimes. And you know what? I don't think I took them today.”