The phone continued to ring. He held the receiver away from his head and glanced at it, then trudged into the kitchen.
“That damn phone broke already?” proclaimed Rhythm. He was half dancing now, bending deep at the knees, lost in shtick. “I just bought the motherfucker.”
Tim noted shadows moving beneath the front door, approaching from the knob side.
The doorman disappeared from view. The mike barely picked up the fragile sound of tinkling glass. The sniper bullet.
Then the front door flew open, the handle punching into the opposing drywall and sticking. Mitchell stormed in, heavy off the kick, both hands tight on his. 45.
Rhythm stopped bouncing. White boy’s hands, still clutching the bags of coke, shot up and out wide. Without hesitation, Mitchell double-tapped him, and he moved back in a half stagger, half slide, bouncing off the bathroom door and falling facedown like a plank. The bags of coke he’d dropped at first impact slapped the floor with chalky poofs.
His too-wide face rearranged in an expression of blind rage, Rhythm lunged forward at Mitchell, his old-school Nikes slipping on the spilled cocaine just as Mitchell swung the sights. Rhythm’s legs went out from under him, and he fell forward, three hundred-plus pounds of flesh colliding with dingy floorboards.
Mitchell was across the room in a flash, sliding on a lead knee, his other leg bent and trailing, elbows flared, both hands locked on the. 45, which seemed to coast through the air until it stopped against Rhythm’s forehead.
Rhythm grunted once, loud, and quivered, beached-whale immobile. His eyes rolled up, wide and fearful, crescents of white cupping the bottoms of his irises.
“Rhythm,” Mitchell growled down at him, “meet the blues.”
His arms jerked with recoil, and Rhythm’s head pulsed once and threw spatter. Mitchell was up, moving backward to the door, gun covering the room.
The bathroom door, jarred from white boy’s collision, continued to creak open. Mitchell’s head and pistol locked on something, probably the scrawny black kid inside. A second later the kid slowly emerged, pants unbuttoned, arms held up, showing off his empty palms.
The kid tamped down his evident terror. “I didn’t see nothin’. I’m gonna turn around, and I’m gonna walk away. Real slow.”
He turned and walked out of the camera’s view, down the far hall. Mitchell watched him go. The. 45 dipped, then snapped back up and fired twice.
“Good for you, bud,” Mitchell said.
A faint screech announced a vehicle pulling up to the curb. Mitchell grabbed the dummy security tape, backed up, and disappeared out the front door. His entire appearance had taken less than two minutes.
The rev of the unseen vehicle rose and died.
Tim hit “stop” on the VCR and popped the tape. When he turned, a young salesclerk, maybe seventeen, was at the end of the aisle, her eyes on the now-blank screen. She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Her hands gripped and pulled at each other, pressed against her stomach.
She and Tim faced each other for an excruciating moment.
“I’m sorry,” Tim said.
He left her standing there, her mouth working on nothing.
•The back door, featuring a panoply of graffitied street tags, had been kicked in so often it sat crooked in the frame. When Tim shoved it, it swung open, leaving the doorknob and a surrounding patch of wood stuck to the jamb.
The apartment building smelled of urine and ash. Part of the interior had been burned out, but the structure still held. Where the flames had burned hottest near the entrance, a semicylindrical gap reached up all four stories to the roof. A heap of human feces awaited Tim on the stairs to the second floor. Each floor had three rooms to the rear, facing the stash house. Keeping his flashlight pointed at the floor, Tim moved through them, searching out the best angle on Rhythm’s kitchen window over a hundred yards away. A wrecking-ball crane in the deserted lot broke the center rooms’ views to Rhythm’s window, so Robert would have been forced to chose right or left. The fourth floor provided too elevated an angle, giving very little vantage into Rhythm’s kitchen, so Tim returned to the third floor and gave it a closer perusal.
He knew he wouldn’t be so lucky as to find a shell, since. 308s were manual action-one had to jack the bolt to kick out the shell after firing. Robert had fired only a single shot, Tim assumed-no need to fuss with the bolt at all. And even if Robert had reloaded, he was too much of a professional to have left anything behind, especially a . 30-caliber shell with a nice thumb spread across the brass.
Nothing caught Tim’s eye in the two end rooms on the third floor. He thought about how quickly Robert had showed up at Rhythm’s in the getaway vehicle-less than two minutes. The second floor would have put him that much closer to his vehicle downstairs. Tim headed down another flight and crouched in the doorway of the room on the right to get a better angle with his flashlight. The pan of dust near the window, darkened with stray ash, was scuffed up in two points.
A bipod.
He eased over to the window, sat where Robert had sat, and breathed awhile. He thought about what he knew.
If given a choice, Robert took the sniper position offset right from a frontal view.
He preferred the tactical advantage of the elevated position.
He used a bipod. Sitting stance versus prone.
Mitchell liked a knob-side approach on a kick-in.
They weren’t leaving behind witnesses.
Tim closed his eyes, thought about the shot, the dash downstairs, the quick drive to the house to pick up Mitchell. He turned the Masterson strategy over in his mind, working at it like a tough knot.
Robert and Mitchell knew they didn’t stand a chance on a dynamic entry with the AK-47-toting doorman there and waiting. All windows to the front of the stash house were blocked by the stucco wall. The only sniper angle was on the kitchen window.
How do you move the muscle to the kitchen?
The doorman had picked up the front telephone, his usual telephone, and found it broken. He’d had to move to the kitchen to get the second-nearest phone, which had brought him into the crosshairs.
Not just a lucky break.
Tim thought of Mitchell’s entry, how he’d moved into the room confidently, aggressively. Not even a split-second hitch to get a read on the space.
Robert and Mitchell had broken in earlier, disabled the front phone, and gotten the lay of the pad. The stash house’s back door was triple-barred, so they’d picked the front-door lock.
Tim felt a tingle of sweat springing up on the back of his neck when he thought about what that meant.
He walked downstairs, around the block, through the front gate of the stash house. The door remained slightly ajar, as he’d left it. He squatted and eyeballed the doorknob lock-a Medeco double cylinder, six tumblers waiting inside to ruin your day. There was no way Robert and Mitchell could get through a lock like that without help from a pro.
Tim ran a gloved fingertip over the keyway, and it came away shiny with spray lubricant.
36
“THE DEAL’S ON.” Tim leaned against the payphone interior. He’d contacted Bear through the operations desk. “I’m still offering my cooperation. I don’t need yours.”
“Good, because you’re not getting it.” Bear’s voice sounded cracked and dehydrated. “Excuse my irritation, but I just finished vomiting.”
“You can be furious with me later-and you’ll be right to. But for now grab a pen and listen.” Tim talked quickly, alerting him to the mess awaiting him at Rhythm’s stash house and to the Stork’s involvement. The Stork would be better hidden than a Nazi in an Argentine forest; he wanted the service on it full bore.
When he finished, Bear said, “Listen. I’ll deal with you, like this, but you gotta understand something. Tannino ain’t gonna play ball on this one. He wants you, and the boys are tracking hard. I’m Tannino’s deputy. When he says fetch, I fetch.”