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The wrapped-tight canvas AK strap cut hard into his forearm as he came silently down the quarter turns of the stairwell. He tried to remember the shooting techniques. Was he supposed to blur the target beyond the front sights? Or was that just for a pistol? Fricking impossible to remember all the training they’d had from the course two years ago. He checked the safety. It was on. He shook his head, clicking at the button.
As he came across the final stair head of the first-floor landing, he caught the scent of gun smoke. A lot of it. The tangy, almost sweet smell, rank as a gun range. He tightened his grip on the gun as he came across the landing to the final turn, his back against the abandoned apartment doors, barrel trained down through the balustrades. There was no one through the posts. No one on the final stair flight, and then he was coming down, his AK sight center-massed on the open lobby doorway.
The first thing he noticed when he peeked through it was that the heavy wrought-iron-and-glass front door of the building was ajar. A triangle of the outside sodium security light spread over the floor’s dirty mosaic tiles. Bits of snow swirling in the yellow beam, a
faint layer of snow already gathering in the grout.
“Rafael!” Pete suddenly called out across the lobby from the other stairwell.
Rafael almost tripped over the bodies as he came through the west wing doorway.
There were two of them. One of them lying flat in a pool of blood on the dirty tile, the other to the right, sitting up against the wall. The chests of their motorcycle shells were wet with blood, and the tinted face masks of their motorcycle helmets were smashed to shit, just riddled with bullet holes.
“Ha-ha! That’s what you get, you fucking amateurs. That’s exactly what you get,” said Rafael as he hawked and spat on both of them. Whoever the hell they were.
He glanced at Nate, also covered in blood, by the bottom of the stairs, the Glock 18 on the tile beside him.
At least the jackass had done something right for once in his miserable life, Rafael thought.
“Rafael! Do CPR! Nate’s dying! Come on, do something!” said Pete, who was kneeling at the bottom of the stairs beside Nate.
“He’s still breathing, I think,” said Emilio, pressing his ear to Nate’s mouth as Rafael arrived.
“And so are we!” said the prone motorcycle guy behind them as he sat straight up like a monster in a horror flick.
Rafael, standing in profile to the suddenly risen figure, had just registered that the man had a suppressed automatic pistol in his hand when Pete’s bald head blew apart as if it had been dynamited. Pete’s instant death was followed quickly by ponytailed Emilio’s as the other reanimated dead body by the wall shot him with a suppressed pistol.
Rafael screamed as he swung the rifle up and then abruptly stopped screaming as a third and final suppressed .45 ACP lead slug instantly carved a brand-new orifice through his temples.
“Is it him? Is it him?” said the rider excitedly as the driver leaped up from the pool of fake blood behind his trusty suppressed Heckler & Koch Mark 23.
Instead of answering, the driver knelt and removed Rafael’s wallet, trying not to look at the hot mess that an ounce of lead makes when it’s sent traveling through a human head at the cruising speed of a 747.
“It’s him,” said the driver, calmly pocketing the target’s driver’s license and checking his watch. “Our work is done here. Time to go.”
Five
They scooped up their brass, left the BMW bike out on 141st, and went out at a quick, steady pace through the back of the building, taking a garbage alley that led out onto Riverside Drive.
Three blocks south, parked alongside Riverside Park, was the preplaced getaway vehicle: a beat-up dingy white work van with the baffling and meaningless words THE BOWLES GROUP LLC poorly hand-painted on the door.
Once inside the rear of the van, the driver finally pulled off his helmet. He was a fit-looking white guy in his late thirties with close-cropped blond hair and light-blue eyes that were striking in his otherwise easy-to-forget plain and pale face.
He scrubbed the sweat from his hair with a towel and then put his pale-denim-colored eyes to his stainless steel Rolex. It seemed like it was last week that they were up on Amsterdam, but the assassination had taken eleven minutes from start to finish. Eleven!
He looked over at the rider getting changed beside him. Then he reached around and cupped her perfect left breast. Her right one wasn’t so bad, either, he felt. She turned and smiled at him, an improbably gorgeous woman in her early thirties, petite yet athletic, with white-blond hair and large greenish-brown doe eyes. His pet name for her ever since they met was Coppertone Girl.
Coppertone Girl made a quick twisting move and then he was somehow down on his back with something hard digging into his crotch. He looked down. It was her .45!
“I’ll do it. You know I will, you pig,” she said, her green eyes cold behind the white-blond shards of her bangs.
Then she kissed him hard.
And they both started to die laughing.
It never got old, this fired-up feeling afterward. They’d walked the rope with no net, and now they were back on sweet, exhilaratingly solid ground.
They kissed again, and then he pressed in her pouty pink lower lip with his callused thumb. She bit his thumb playfully, and then he was jumping over the front seat and turning the engine over.
