Then the Texan was trying to pound and shoot his way through the locked side door. He was still yelling like an uprooted banshee. The door resounded with the thumps of his shoulder and fist against it. The pistol shots clicked and whistled off the metal of the door lock.
Remo sighed. Why did cops always think you could shoot off a door lock? It didn't work that way. And this silly bastard would probably stand there all night, yelling and shooting and thumping, unless something was done.
"Balls," Remo said. He propped the girl up over a small table, and moved back through the darkness toward the door that still had not yielded to the policeman's assault. Have to hurry. The other two nit-nats would probably be moving for the front door.
He waited behind the door for another unsuccessful thump as Texas' shoulder slammed against Georgia pine, then reached down and turned the lock. It would open now when the handle was turned. Eventually, even Jim Bowie would have to give the handle a try.
Remo returned to the girl, slid open the window and moved up onto the sill. A moment later, he heard the door give. At almost the same time the front door gave way, and the downstairs was flooded with light from the searchlighted front yard.
In came the police and out went Remo, onto the ground. He hurriedly pulled the girl's unconscious body after him.
He carried the girl to the bank of trees and gently placed her down behind a tree, then tapped her alongside the temple to make sure she would stay out. With luck, she'd wake up after the three policemen had gone; she would get her clothes, leave, and that would be that.
Remo returned to the house. As he got to the back wall, the inside lights clicked on.
"Whoooeee," he heard the Texan yelp. "The sonabitch done fainted on us."
"That's right. He's just out," came the authoritative Southern voice. "Let's finish him off and get out of here. You didn't see any woman?"
"No," Texas answered. "Weren't no one else in here. If there was, theyd'a plunked me coming in the door."
Remo headed for the main gate. As he reached the wall, he heard a muffled shot behind him. So much for one dishonest lawyer. Then he was through the gate and running along the roadway back to his parked Cadillac, disgusted with the three policemen behind him.
They just didn't make cops like they used to.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Remo slipped into the building on Twentieth Street and took the stairs three at a time. He hadn't really pressed it driving back and if the three policemen were coming back, he had only a few minutes lead time.
At the top of the second floor landing was a large metal double door, under the sign M.O.T.S. That would be Men of the Shield, the badge Captain Milken had displayed at his home.
Remo pressed an ear to the door and heard nothing. He tried the handle. It was unlocked. Quickly, he slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind him. He was in a small foyer, still separated from the main room by wired glass fire doors.
There was still no sound, but now he saw a sliver of light from an almost closed door across the room from him. Remo moved inside and found himself in a big open room that he recognized as a onetime gymnasium. Anchors for ropes were still mounted high up on the walls, and there were cleats in the floor where heavy gymnastic equipment had been bolted. At the far end of the room, he saw the vague outline of what at first appeared to be a man; then he saw it was a firing dummy.
Remo crossed the room and peered through the slightly open door. A phone rang.
Two rings and then a girl's voice said, "Hello, M.O.T.S." It was Commissioner O'Toole's daughter. Remo recognized the soft, almost hesitant tones of her voice.
"No," she said, "Inspector McGurk isn't here right at this moment. He's gone for coffee but should be back any moment. Can I have him call you?"
"Thank you," she said after a pause. "I'll tell him."
Remo peered around the door. The girl sat at the side of the room at a desk, a large accordion-folded computer print-out in front of her. She looked down the list, occasionally jotting down a few words on a yellow pad. On the other side of the room, there was another office. The door was open, and enough light from Janet O'Toole's office seeped into the room to illuminate a nameplate on the desk:
"William McGurk."
Remo's ears picked up the sound of voices outside the door to the hallway. Someone was coming in. At that moment, Janet O'Toole rose and went to a filing cabinet behind her desk. Her back was to Remo and he slipped into her office, moved noiselessly across the linoleum tile and entered McGurk's office.
Behind him, he could hear McGurk's powerful ho-ho-ho voice booming, echoing through the empty hall. He heard another voice answer, a softer Southern voice. It was the police officer who had led the hunting expedition.
Remo looked quickly around the office. Nowhere to hide. Just a closet. He opened the closet door and a moment later was up on top of the shelf, his legs bent, his neck resting against the wall. He heard the two men enter McGurk's office and then the door close.
"Pretty girl," the Southerner said.
"Yes. O'Toole's daughter. She's a big help to me. Actually, the brains of the operation. Sit down, Brace, and tell me how it went."
It was too warm for coats. They wouldn't be at the closet so Remo relaxed and let his weight down onto the closet shelf and listened as Inspector Ransom of Savannah, Georgia, explained how he had just assassinated a lawyer in New Jersey.
"Funny thing," Ransom said. "He pegged some shots at us and then… hah, he fainted."
"Fainted?"
"Yup. He was out like a light when we finally got into the house. All cuddled over, still holding his gun."
"Did you?"
"We took care of him. But there wasn't anybody else there. No girl or anything."
"Well," McGurk said, "that's just too bad for him. Couldn't even celebrate his own departure with a bang."
The two laughed together in the easy way of policemen who know everybody else in the world is crazy.
"Good job, then," McGurk said. "You be leaving soon?"
"Right away. The men are checking us out of the hotel. I'm going to pick them up and 'get back to the airport. So… what's next?"
"Well, next week, we're going to publicly announce the formation of the Men of the Shield. A new national police organization."
"Maybe I'm just stupid, Bill, but I don't really understand where we're going."
"Where we're going, Brace, is we're going to make this a national pressure group for policemen… to fight for law and order. My retirement papers should be back in a couple of days and I'll be able to give it full time. You, me, the forty men we got on the inside with us, we're all going to be the nucleus. But before long we're going to get every policeman in the country in it. Can you imagine the power we'll have?"
"Be a helluva lot of votes if you ever decide to run for president," the Southerner said, chuckling.
McGurk paused before answering. "Don't discount it, Brace. I might just do that."
"What about our… er, assignments?" the Southerner asked.
"Well, for the time being we're going to put all that on a shelf. We're going to go public; we're going to start solving crimes in public. Think about it for a minute: we've been getting rid of some bad apples, but we've also been exposing the public to a wave of violence. You've seen the headlines. More killings. Gangs at war. All that crap.
"Well, soon, now, we're going to have every cop in the country with us. Every policeman whose hands are tied by grafting politicians, by spineless brass… all of them pumping information into us. And we're going to start tying up loose ends and we're not going to be afraid to act. We'll start filling the jails. We'll be bigger than the FBI."
"And what if we bomb out?" the Southerner said.