The Killing Kind (22 page)

Hendricks stumbled backward, confused and off-balance. He took a clumsy swipe at Engelmann with his ceramic knife. The crowd around them tried to scatter, but chairs and tables got in the way.

Leonwood’s system jolted with the queasy, invigorating prickle of adrenaline as the fight broke out behind him. Before he could react, Hendricks staggered into him, driving him downward onto the tabletop. But Hendricks couldn’t take advantage of the situation—he and Leonwood were back-to-back, and his immediate threat was the man before him with the ice pick.

Which, to the great misfortune of everyone in the room, gave Leonwood a chance to think.

Leonwood had no idea what the fuck the fight behind him was all about. Near as he could tell, it had nothing to do with him. For a moment he even entertained the notion that the guy onstage hadn’t spotted him at all, but had instead been reacting to these two brawling shitbags. Then he realized it didn’t matter—casino security was gonna be on high alert now either way. Which meant if he wanted to get out of here alive, he’d have to shoot his way out. And that was gonna be one hell of a lot easier before security could lock down the perimeter.

Leonwood might not have been the smartest man, but he was cunning, and good at what he did. He knew his odds of walking out of here weren’t stellar. And he also knew deep down that another fall wasn’t an option for him. He’d made a lot of enemies over the years—and at his age, he’d no longer be the toughest, meanest bastard on the cell block.

So okay then, he decided: freedom or a bullet— preferably the former. But either way, he thought, I’m putting Purkhiser in the ground.

When Engelmann and Hendricks engaged, Thompson could sense something in the room had changed—but the details of what was happening were unclear thanks to the sound and fury of the frightened crowd.

“The hell’s going on down there?” chirped Garfield through her earpiece. “Our guy onstage says there’s some kind of scuffle.”

“Honestly, I have no goddamn idea,” said Thompson. “You still in the dark up there?”

“Yup—we can’t see shit past these balloons.”

Thompson heard mounting worry in Garfield’s tone. Worry and helplessness. She peered over the heads of the scrambling, fleeing crowd, trying to figure out what the hell was going on. She saw the arc of Leonwood’s table being upturned, the swing of an elongated barrel brought to bear. Too late, she realized what was happening.

“FBI—everybody on the floor!” she shouted, though in their mounting terror, few listened. Then, to Garfield: “What’s above me?”

“What?”

“In the casino—what’s above this room?”

Someone on Garfield’s end barked an answer, which he relayed. “Nothing. The hotel’s over the gaming floor itself. Why?”

Thompson shot twice into the air—deafening in the enclosed space—and suddenly all eyes were on her. “I said everybody on the floor—
now!
” she yelled. This time, some listened. Thompson caught a glimpse of what looked like two men grappling, and Leonwood pressing his gunstock tight to his shoulder—its barrel aimed not toward her but toward the frozen men onstage.

In the fleeting seconds between Engelmann’s first strike and Thompson’s warning shots, Hendricks and Engelmann were locked in a battle as well-matched as it proved brief. Rare is the knife fight that lasts more than thirty seconds, and even rarer is the knife fight that doesn’t leave both participants bloodied.

This fight, despite the skill of its participants, was not so rare as either.

As Hendricks stumbled into Leonwood and rebounded, the silver tray clattering to the floor, Engelmann struck once more. It was his only play, but not a good one. He hoped to take advantage of his quarry’s forward momentum, to impale him on the ice pick. But Hendricks kept his head. He blocked Engelmann’s jab with an openhanded slap to the rounded side of the pick’s steel spike, knocking his opponent’s arm wide.

The inside of Engelmann’s elbow exposed, Hendricks slashed downward with his ceramic knife, hoping to sever Engelmann’s distal biceps tendon and render his attack arm useless. But Engelmann anticipated the attack and blocked it, his left forearm slamming upward into Hendricks’s in a white-hot flare of bone-jolting pain.

His arms open, his chest vulnerable, Hendricks was exposed. Engelmann released his ice pick and grabbed at Hendricks’s knife hand, held aloft as he tried to drive the knife down against the resistance of Engelmann’s block. Engelmann’s fingers closed around Hendricks’s wrist, and he twisted with all he had, spinning Hendricks around and wrenching his hand upward into a hammerlock.

Hendricks’s shoulder dislocated with the sickly pop of a drumstick separating from a turkey, and he screamed. His knife clattered to the floor as his hand went slack.

Engelmann forced Hendricks facedown onto a nearby table, trapping Hendricks’s good arm beneath him. He kept pressure on Hendricks’s injured shoulder with one hand and held him fast by driving his knee to the small of Hendricks’s back. With his free hand, he reached through the open-bottomed pocket of his trousers and slipped his combat blade from its leg sheath.

Engelmann released Hendricks’s wrist and grabbed a fistful of Hendricks’s hair, yanking back his head. His blade dimpled the tender flesh of Hendricks’s neck, its stinging pressure against his Adam’s apple heralding the killing blow Hendricks had expected—even, on occasion, wished for—for so long. In that moment, Hendricks realized he’d been mistaken. Much as he’d loathed himself for the things he’d done in the name of God and country, he didn’t want to die. Not without balancing his accounts. Not without saving more lives than he had ruined. It was ironic, he thought, that such a revelation only came—maybe only could come—in the instant his demise was certain.

“Goodbye, Cowboy,” Engelmann said.

Then, as he began to draw his blade across Hendricks’s neck, Thompson fired into the ceiling, and everything Engelmann had worked for went to shit.

25

When Engelmann heard Thompson’s warning shots, he tensed. His knife bit at Hendricks’s neck, spilling blood across the tablecloth, but neither severing arteries nor puncturing windpipe. Engelmann’s head jerked toward the sound, and Hendricks made his move, twisting his body beneath Engelmann and using Engelmann’s startled reaction against him. Momentum rolled Engelmann sideways, and he fell backward—one leg still on the floor, the other flashing shoe-tread Hendricks’s way.

Hendricks flopped over onto his back, and planted a sharp kick on the side of Engelmann’s load-bearing knee. Something snapped, and Engelmann crumpled. As Engelmann headed for the floor, Hendricks snatched a rocks glass from the table with his good arm. Scotch, soda, and chipped ice sprayed a comet trail behind as Hendricks swung the glass with all he had at Engelmann’s stunned face. Engelmann tried to throw his hands up to protect himself, but the trajectory of his fall carried his face toward the glass, and his flailing limbs failed to cooperate.

The base of the glass smashed into Engelmann’s left eye with a crack of glass and bone. Blood gushed from his eye socket. Hendricks’s hand welled red as well, the glass shattering in his grip. Engelmann’s one good eye showed nothing but white, and he went down, dead or unconscious, Hendricks didn’t know.

That’s when Leonwood opened fire.

Thompson heard the muffled
pop pop pop pop pop
of Leonwood’s suppressed automatic, and hit the floor. The podium exploded into a thousand wooden shards. The heavy drapes along the wall behind it were sprayed with blood. The crowd—which had instinctively contracted when Thompson fired into the ceiling—now struggled to get away from Leonwood, pushing in every direction but his.

The guard who’d ID’d Leonwood went for his weapon. Leonwood cut him down. The civilians onstage who were too slow or too stunned to hit the deck took rounds to their heads, their chests, their necks. The two guards who flanked the stage tried to draw on Leonwood, too. Both were dead before their guns cleared their holsters. His magazine was empty before the first shell hit the ground.

Her senses alive, Thompson heard the thud of Leon-wood releasing his spent magazine, and then a click as he replaced it with a new one. Her nostrils prickled with the smell of the thick carpet scorching beneath the ejected casings.

“Jesus, Thompson—what the hell is going on down there?” Garfield said, worried. “We can’t see a goddamned thing!”

“Leonwood just opened fire!” came Thompson’s shouted reply.

“You got a shot?”

Thompson crawled toward the nearest table. Its floor-length tablecloth hid her from view but would do nothing to protect her from gunfire if she were spotted. She peered over the tabletop at the melee beyond: the upturned furniture, the broken bodies and shattered glassware, the writhing mass of people trying to flee. She couldn’t even
see
Leonwood from where she hid.

“No,” she said, despondent. “I’ve got nothing.”

“I’m trying to clear the stage,” Garfield said, the strain evident in his voice, “but there’s no response on the comm.” He shouted to someone off-mic, and then said: “Local SWAT is five minutes out. Hold tight. Stay safe. Help is on its way.”

Thompson cringed as Leonwood loosed another volley of gunfire. “These people are sitting ducks,” she said.

“Hang on,” Garfield replied. “I’ve got an idea.”

Thompson’s mind flashed back to North Philly, to the flash-bang grenade. He’d gotten lucky that day.

“Garfield, whatever you’re thinking, don’t—”

“Relax,” Garfield interjected. “I got this.”

And then two thousand balloons in every color of the rainbow descended from the sky, blanketing the destruction below.

26

Leon Leonwood hadn’t the faintest idea if he’d hit Purkhiser or not. He knew he’d put the three guards down—not the only ones in the room, but the only ones with a line of sight on him, and therefore his biggest threats—and through the bouncing mass of multicolored balloons, he could see a couple bodies facedown on the stage, but he couldn’t swear any of them were his target. Which meant he’d have to check.

He had two mags left. Sixty rounds, plus the nine in the throwaway pistol he wore tucked into his pants at the small of his back—a dinky little .25-caliber eight-plus-one that was handy in a pinch but worth shit in a firefight. Suddenly, what seemed before like overkill now threatened to fall short. At this point, a standoff seemed likely—if not inevitable.

He ejected his empty magazine and slid another into place. Then he toggled his weapon to semiautomatic. Sixty rounds shot one at a time would last way longer than the same count sprayed indiscriminately across the room—long enough to finish Purkhiser, maybe get himself out of here alive.

The balloons were nearly waist-high, or would have been, if they had stayed put. They lighted on furniture and one another, only to take flight once more thanks to the flailing of the frightened and wounded beneath them. They bounced off Leonwood with his every movement as he headed toward the stage, and reduced his visibility to inches. All around him he heard movement—a shift of fabric, a sharp intake of breath. Those fleeing him, he ignored. But some, by either confusion or design, shuffled ever closer or maneuvered themselves directly between him and the stage. Problem was, thanks to the balloons, he couldn’t tell if they were security or bystanders until he was right on top of them—and if they proved to be the former, that was too late to react. He’d be caught or killed for sure.

So—his heart thudding and acrid flop sweat beading on his meaty, furrowed brow—Leonwood decided he’d just have to shoot them all.

Michael Hendricks had no idea what the fuck was going on. Last time he saw a mission go so FUBAR so fast, he lost his squad, his fiancée, his whole damn life.

He collapsed, exhausted and bleeding under a layer of balloons, trying to catch his breath. His right shoulder rang with pain, his left hand bled. His face smarted from getting slammed into the tabletop. He tried to put together what the hell had just transpired, but the edges of the pieces didn’t seem to match. He’d had Leonwood in his sights.

He’d been blindsided, attacked. That smacked of a setup—but if that’s the case, who the fuck discharged their firearm into the ceiling?

And he had
no
idea what to make of the balloon drop.

So where did that leave him? His assailant hadn’t stirred since Hendricks had taken the guy down, but that didn’t mean he’d stay down; from where Hendricks lay, he couldn’t see him past all the damn balloons. He knew he should finish the guy—eliminate the threat, in the parlance of his former military life. But Leonwood was still on the loose. And the place would soon be surrounded by local PD and Feds, if it hadn’t been already. God only knew if Purkhiser was still breathing.