When the Devil Comes to Call (A Lars and Shaine Novel Book 2) (15 page)

Shaine saw it first. Her chair faced the stairs and she gave thanks for being far enough away she didn’t get splashed.

First she saw the body flopping like a bad special effect in a black and white movie. The heap of clothes and body-shaped parts didn’t look like a real human at all. Then it blew chunks all over the entryway.

Her three captors all drew their guns, then quickly covered their mouths at the green cloud of stink that came with the body. She saw Anthony double over at his post near the front door.

Bruno didn’t react to the smell at all.

“The fuck happened?”

He hadn’t drawn his gun and he ducked down a little lower behind the sofa as he looked in the direction of the commotion.

Mark and Luke both looked like they could puke at any second.

“It’s a body,” Mark said from behind his hand. “Leo, I think.”

“He’s here,” Bruno said. His gun finally came out. “Go check it out.”

Bruno stood, but he made it obvious he wanted Mark and Luke to go first. They took their pockets full of diamonds and stepped forward. There was no avoiding the stain. Leo’s stomach had blown wide and everything that used to be inside made it outside. From the middle of the stairs down to the floor looked like a disassembled build-your-own-human kit.

Mark and Luke had a brief standoff to see who would go first. They each seemed to be contemplating the value of the diamonds.

“Let’s go,” Bruno said. He’d reached only a few steps behind them and still didn’t seem to be bothered by the sight. Mark ground his teeth together and put a foot on the bottom step. Luke followed him up, guns out and ready.

Shaine watched Bruno step up to the empty carcass of his father and grab the ankles. Bruno turned to Anthony at the door.

“Watch her,” he said. Anthony nodded.

Bruno got a firm grip with his good hand and pinched his bandaged bad hand around the cuff of his fathers pajamas. Shaine could see him grimace in pain as he knocked around his broken fingers, but he kept at it, staring straight ahead.

“You get that fucker,” he called to Mark and Luke. “You corner him, trap him like the rat he is. I want to see his face before I kill him.” He tugged at his father’s corpse, getting it onto the bottom step. “Feel free to break a few fingers while you’re at it,” he said.

Bruno dragged his father back up the steps. Shaine had to look away. Her eyes were tearing, but she thought it might be from the stench more than any emotion she felt.

She tried to remember the upstairs from when she’d been there. Four bedrooms. Closets, attic access. Plenty of places for Lars to hide. She didn’t know his plan, but she was damn glad he’d arrived. She never imagined hope would smell like the inside of a corpse.

Lars didn’t know his plan. He stepped onto the front landing and tried to see inside. Long window treatments kept him from getting a view of anything. He knew the front door would be locked. He spotted the garage on the far end of the living room space. He vaguely remembered seeing a door at the back of the room. Probably leading to the garage.

He tugged on the bottom of the garage door. It lifted slightly. He pushed harder, heard the gears of a door opener turning. Lars found he could easily overpower the mechanism and lift the door enough to slip under on his belly.

He stood up in the two-car garage and saw one space empty and the other with a large black SUV. Out of the wind he realized how cold he’d gotten. He breathed into his hands several times to warm them. He knew he was running out of time. His distraction would only last so long. And he had yet to see if Shaine was even still alive.

He turned the knob on the door leading into the house. It opened. He found himself in a tiny mudroom, a door on the opposite end he knew would lead him into the larger living area. On the wall by his head, though, he got distracted. A row of tiny hooks, each shaped like a different fish, held keys. One set of keys was to the SUV.

One more distraction couldn’t hurt.

He started the SUV, put it in reverse, and before he slid out, tossed a small flower pot on the gas pedal. The car revved once, the flower pot sliding off almost immediately, but it gave enough gas already. The huge V-8 engine surged and ran the vehicle through the garage door. Lars hugged the wall as the car shattered glass while making toothpicks out of the door. The vehicle snagged on the frame and stopped, the engine still idling but unable to escape the rest of the way out of the garage.

He stepped up and stood beside the door to the mudroom. Soon, a figure moved through and into the garage, a gun leading the way.

Lars lifted his gun, but paused. He recognized the giant shape. A brief flash of hope for Shaine lit his brain.

“Anthony?” he said. “Is that you?”

Anthony turned, saw Lars. He raised his own gun. “It’s me.”

“Shit,” Lars said.

Were it not for Bruno’s instructions to leave Lars for him, Anthony would have shot and taken out most, if not all, the recognizable features on Lars’s face. But he followed orders like a well-trained monkey. Lars knew, though, even a monkey with a gun would shoot when threatened. Lars kept still.

“You’re not here working for Nikki, are you?”

Anthony shook his head.

“Didn’t think so.”

They say shoot first, ask questions later for a reason. Now Lars found himself in a standoff.

“Goddamn it, Ford, I feel like this is my fault.”

Qualls would get little argument from Ford, but now was not the time. “It’s alright.”

“So you have no idea where he was headed?”

“Nope. Kept saying stuff about the girl, how he was gonna save her.”

A flashbulb lit Ford’s office. The FBI extraction team switched roles when they discovered Lars had fled, and now the trio of men gathered evidence Ford figured there was no point to. They damn well knew who had been in the room. They knew how he escaped. Nothing in a few hairs or fibers from his clothes were going to tell them where he went.

“I don’t know, man,” Qualls said shaking his head. “Not many people have stared into the jaws of the beast and lived to tell the tale.”

“Don’t be dramatic.”

“No, I’m serious. You were in a room with a stone killer and he has a gun pointed at you. That’s what you said, isn’t it?”

“Yeah. My gun. You gonna make me relive it?”

“Sorry. I just think it’s amazing you’re alive.”

Ford wanted the men out of his house. He didn’t want to explain his experience to Qualls because he knew the man wouldn’t understand. Ford believed every word Lars said. He had come to his house to kill him, but Ford felt no threat from Lars anymore.

He also believed Shaine was probably safer with Lars on the rescue squad than with any of the trained robots combing his office right now.

“Can we wrap this up?” he asked Qualls.

“Yeah, sure.” Qualls called an end to the fingerprint dusting and photo taking.

Ford sat back in his chair, same as when he had Lars in custody. He threaded his fingers and let them sit below his belly jutting out over his pants. He looked at the empty chair across from him.

“We’ll get him again,” Qualls said, seeing the look on Ford’s face.

“Not a chance.”

“You don’t think so?”

“If you see him again,” Ford said. “Run the other way, ‘cause it’s him finding you and not the other way ‘round.”

“You want a detail on the house? I’d hate for Denise and the girls to be around for the next time.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about me. I wouldn’t even worry about you unless you try to find him again.” Ford yawned, ran a hand over his face. “Collect up Pagani Monday morning. Take your winnings and go home. Leave the rest of the cards to the next gambler.”

“You’re satisfied to let him go?”

“Like you said, I’m alive.” Ford gestured around the room, put his hands behind his head and reclined in his chair. “Do I not look satisfied?”

“Are you fucking serious?” Lars asked. “Bruno?”

“He made me an offer,” Anthony said.

Both men stood in the garage, the length of the missing SUV between them. The vehicle had made it nearly all the way through the garage door before it hung up on a shredded plank of wood and stopped. The engine grumbled and Lars wondered if he could wait out the much larger gentleman until he passed out from the fumes.

“Tell me one thing?” Lars said. “Is she alive?”

“She’s fine for now.”

Lars let a long breath out of his mouth.

“So when Bruno knew where to find me, that was you?”

“All I did was tell him when you came and went. Where you went to after that wasn’t my concern.”

Lars had seen a few standoffs before. He could take the shot. He’d clean off the top half of Anthony’s head no problem. But in each of the three standoffs he’d seen, the second shot—the one coming from the dying man’s hand—had been nearly as deadly.

And Lars didn’t trust Anthony’s size. Big guys like him had more control over their shooting hands and went down slower.

Then there was the little tremor in his pinky finger. He’d been noticing it there off and on. He chalked it up to the cold, but inside the garage with the SUV exhaust warming them up, the temperature became quite comfortable. But the little finger on his shooting hand twitched away, and worse, it wasn’t doing anything else he told it to. Like it was frozen in a dance playing to a song only it could hear.

Lars needed more time for the right opening. The guaranteed kill shot, one that came with no death grip shot from his target.

“How much is he paying you?” Lars asked.

“Enough,” Anthony answered. Even. Calm. Lars would have hired this guy too.

“How much?”

“Look, we both know Nikki is on his way out.”

Lars nodded his acknowledgement.

“So am I supposed to ride a sinking ship down to the bottom? Or jump off and swim?” Anthony asked.

“Like a rat.”

Anthony chuckled. “Call it what you want.”

“So if following me isn’t in your job description, is killing me now?”

“Nope. But I can always try for a bonus.”

“So it’s all about the money with you?”

The two men countered each other’s movements, slowly, almost imperceptibly. But they moved in a clockwise circle, making a ring around the oil stain on the concrete of the garage.

“How about I offer you more?”

Anthony chuckled again. “You should know I have a pocket full of diamonds right now. Bruno gave them out and I didn’t even have to say trick or treat.”

“A little party favor for my arrival?”

“You could call it that.”

“How about two million in cash?”

Anthony blinked twice. “From Nikki?”

“From me. Nikki’s money, but I don’t want it if I can’t bring the girl out with me, so you might as well take it.”

“I guess you don’t have it on you.”

“Uh, no. But it’s easy to get to you. Completely clean and laundered. Sitting in an account, worthless to me if I don’t have the girl.”

Anthony thought.

Lars said, “We don’t have much time, Anthony.”

“And I do what for this two million?”

“Just walk away. Pack in your gun and take a drive. I’ll handle the rest.”

Anthony licked sweat off his upper lip.

Lars said, “You know what a nutcase Bruno is, right?” Lars knew he’d scored a direct hit with that one. Anthony’s distaste in working for a relic like Nikki was overpowered by the risks of working for a psycho like Bruno. Lars read it on his face. Head shot, done.

“Two million,” Anthony stated.

“All yours.”

“I’ll wait outside. You leave here and I’m with you until I get the money.”

“Fair enough.” Lars slowly tucked his gun into his holster, held out his hand to shake. He felt like he had a pretty good handle on Anthony and his motivations. He knew he’d left a wide opening by disarming himself, but he had to risk it. Bruno or the other two would be out here any second.

Anthony moved his gun to his left hand and shook with Lars. It wasn’t ideal, but there was no more time for ideal.

Lars pulled Anthony in close and spun his body so the huge man’s back pressed into Lars’s front. The left hand, full of gun, went out, searching for a target. Lars dropped to one knee, his other leg bent and made a shelf of his thigh and knee. He pulled Anthony down. It was a move he hadn’t practiced in twenty years. He hoped he remembered well enough how to pull it off.

Anthony’s gun fired, a cardboard box marked
XMAS
took the hit. Lars brought Anthony’s head down, the back of his neck landing on Lars’s knee. With one hand on Anthony’s forehead and one on his chin, he pulled hard and stretched Anthony’s neck back and then twisted with the hand on his chin. Between the twist and the bend, Lars heard a loud snap and Anthony’s body went limp.

Lars stood quickly, letting the dead body roll off his leg. He drew his gun again and went into the house. The first bullet hit before the door made it all the way open.