Lockwood hit the floor, returning fire, the Smith & Wesson autoloader bucking in his hand. He had twelve rounds, couldn’t afford to waste a single one of them if he was going to survive.
His first shot hit the stranger’s thigh, an inch or so above his right knee, rocking him. The second was a miss, lost somewhere between the target’s legs, but number three ripped through his groin and forced a gasp of startled pain. The bastard kept on firing, though, unloading with the .45s like there was no tomorrow.
And there wouldn’t be, Lockwood realized, for one or both of them.
His fourth and fifth rounds qualified as belly shots. The hit man staggered, his bad leg folding under him. The .45s were way off target as he went down, both blasting at the vaulted ceiling. Lockwood squeezed off three more shots and saw two of them hit, one in file chest, one underneath the chin, before his adversary sprawled out on the floor near Ira Goldblum’s headless corpse.
Lockwood kept the fallen shooter covered as he scrambled to his feet. The guy was dead, but Lockwood took time to disarm him, scooping up each .45 in turn and pitching it across the room.
That done, he made the rounds confirming what he knew already from the silence of the charnelhouse. His friends were dead, clean hits in every instance, and Ira Goldblum’s case had clearly been awarded to a higher jurisdiction than the federal courts.
Clean sweep. The bastards got it all, and only lost a shooter in the process.
Lockwood searched the dead man’s body, turning out his pockets, coming up with lock picks and some lint. The real pros didn’t carry ID on a hit, and this guy clearly knew his stuff, right up until the last.
“You should have checked the bathroom, asshole,” Lockwood told the corpse.
It was the same mistake they made with Dutch Schultz at the Palace Chop House, back in ’35. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.
Next step was to get somebody on the horn, report this mess and pass it on to other hands. Two problems there: the lodge wasn’t equipped with telephones, and while they had three walkie-talkies, to be used for walking circuits of the grounds, the radios wouldn’t reach back to Long Lake, much less to the federal building in Milwaukee.
He swore.
It meant that he would have to drive the eleven miles back into town and use a public telephone to call the cavalry. No choice, but it was still embarrassing. He hated leaving three dead agents in the slaughterhouse while he went off to spread the word of abject failure, but he saw no other way to go. Besides, his friends weren’t going anywhere.
They would be safe enough while he was gone, and he would scout the property before he left, make sure the shooter was alone.
He hoped the hit man hadn’t touched their cars. Eleven miles was one thing driving, but a hike that long would take him three, four hours, easily.
The cars would be all right, Lockwood finally decided. This guy hadn’t planned on anybody slipping past him, getting out alive, and.he’d seen no need for crippling their transportation.
Before he left the lodge, Marsh went around and picked up all the guns—five in addition to his own—and put them in a garbage bag he found beneath the kitchen sink. With his luck, he thought, some psycho hermit would come snooping while he was gone and grab the pieces, start some kind of rampage using service-issue weapons. He would take the pistols with him, just in case.
It was a small precaution, far too little and too late, but Lockwood’s options at the moment were distinctly limited. They would want scapegoats back in Washington, and Lockwood was the sole survivor of a first-rate, triple-A snafu. Not only that, but he had been in charge, responsible for the security arrangements once the safehouse was selected and approved by someone higher up.
My ass is grass, he thought, despondent as he walked toward the garage.
And he could hear the mowers revving up already, getting closer all the time.
Chapter 2
His name was Remo, and he was just killing time. The small city park in Compton, southeast of L.A., wasn’t Sarajevo or Beirut, of course, but it almost could have passed. Even though he was minding his own business, he stood a decent chance of meeting some demented moron who would challenge him, attempt to take his wallet, maybe stick a knife between his ribs.
Some asshole, who would make his day.
He wasn’t really hunting. Not in the normal sense. That is to say, he never had a target picked out in advance when he went out to prowl. He did not follow scent or tracks to find his prey, but rather let the animals find him. They always seemed to. Even on nights like this one when he was, by and large, minding his own business.
So even though he had not come looking for a fight—at least not consciously—he resigned himself to the inevitable.
There could be no mistake when one or more of them approached him with the swagger he had learned to pick out from a distance, with scowls or mocking smiles that were supposed to make the human predators look Bad. He almost had to laugh, sometimes, as they played out the cut-rate melodramas of their lives.
He didn’t have a world of time tonight, but if someone got in his way there would be enough. It was Saturday, a party night, and every creep in the greater Los Angeles area would be looking for an easy score. Not all of them would try this park, of course, but that was cool.
If push came to shove, he only needed one.
If he was riled to action, a group was better, but he wouldn’t quibble. Remo took what he could get in these impromptu situations, and he never looked a gift horse in the mouth.
Well, almost never.
In another life, before he “died” the first time, he had been a cop in Newark. That was an entire continent away, yet didn’t seem too far removed from the urban blight of Compton. Newark was another urban combat zone these days, but Remo seldom visited his old home town. His life had changed, and there was nothing for him there.
It was already dark at 7:20, and his meeting wasn’t scheduled until eight o’clock. It was a short drive up to Los Angeles and the hotel where Dr. Harold W. Smith would doubtless occupy the cheapest room available. The mission must be something, if it brought him clear across the country from his Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, but Remo didn’t speculate. There was no profit in imagining, without the proper tools to make a logical deduction.
Remo entered the small park above the children’s playground, the Alondra Boulevard entrance, moving southward, keeping to the smaller paths and off the drives where bikes and cars kept predators at bay. You didn’t hunt for weasels in a shopping mall, and Remo knew, his potential quarry would be hiding from the lights whenever possible, in search of joggers, helpless drunks or tourists crazy enough to venture down from the safer parts of L.A.
Stay out of any Compton park at night.
No signs had been, posted, of course. Given the city’s reputation the past three decades, no warning signs were necessary. Everybody was supposed to know that Compton was dangerous. The message came across on local news, Charles Bronson-type movies on the late show, romance novels, even stand-up comedy routines. The risks of going out at night in Los Angeles—much less in Compton— were legendary. They were also frequently exaggerated, Remo knew, but only to a point. It was a rare night when at least one rape or serious assault was not reported from the area, and homicides were far too common.
For the past two decades, the authorities had “closed” this particular park from midnight till sunrise, a futile effort at controlling the small patch of wooded acreage featuring a dozen public entrances, labyrinths of winding footpaths and thousands of places to hide. Policing the park had been a great success…if you considered Compton as a whole to be a safe and law-abiding place.