Chapter 14 #4
Not immediately mortal, no—but bad. The guy pinwheeled backward, the bat flinging from his hand and barely missing his friend as his hands felt for the metal fletching protruding from his sternum.
“But… but…,” the guy muttered.
“Did you think we were going to play fair?” Joey asked, ducking as the other guy—this one smaller, quicker, and younger—came in with the knife. He toyed with the boy for a few, dodging back, trash talking.
“This what you got?” Joey asked. “You sure you want to die like this? I’m not in the mood to let you walk away.”
“You talk big,” the boy panted, “for a faggot.”
“Do you even know what that word means?” Joey asked, springing from a board to a brick, to off the side of the outbuilding, each move taking him higher and higher until, after running up the side of the building, he executed a little flip over the boy’s head, landing at his back squarely to grab his knife hand and squeeze the ulnar nerve hard enough for the boy to drop his weapon.
Joey jerked the kid’s arm behind him and yanked with enough force to dislocate the shoulder, and unlike with Gail, who was a friend, the pop of cartilage and bone didn’t bother him, and neither did the boy’s scream of pain.
“You’re young,” Joey whispered into the kid’s ear.
God, freshly showered when the other three guys back there had been unwashed.
“So I’m gonna give you the benefit of the doubt.
You can keep this up and I’ll kill you—witness your buddy there.
” Lank, curly-headed guy was down, and Joey had been wrong about the wound not being mortal.
The guy was spitting up blood, his face ashen, wet, wheezing sobs of desperation coming from his sucking chest wound.
“Or what?” the boy mewled. “You let me go, they’ll kill me.”
“This ain’t the only part of the city, boy,” Joey told him. “You take what’s in your pocket, you get the fuck out of here. Grab a bus to Jersey, work as a dishwasher, sleep in a shelter, but get the fuck out. ’Cause the only other way out is in the Hudson River. You ready to die yet? Are you?”
He yanked on the kid’s shoulder, sending pain zinging up his body, Joey knew. He’d done this once. Wasn’t a picnic.
“No,” the boy whispered.
Joey threw him against the wall. “Then get the fuck out of here,” he said. “If I have to fight you again, I’ll slit your throat.”
The kid stumbled on his way out, bent to check his buddy, who wasn’t spitting up blood anymore because you had to breathe to do that.
He glanced behind himself, cradling his arm, and saw that Gideon had dispatched his two assailants, one with a quick flick of his knife to a jugular, and one with a square thrust under the ribs to the guy’s heart.
As the kid watched, Gideon was yanking his knife out of the second guy’s chest, and the kid must have known that guy, because he issued a little moan and ran faster.
“Was that wise?” Gideon asked. He pointed at the body he’d pulled the knife from. “Get his feet.”
Joey did as asked, and together they moved to the edge of the dock, where they could throw the guy off. Thanks to the two outbuildings—and the emptiness of this part of the pier—they were unobserved, although Joey suspected there might be electronic surveillance.
Good. It wasn’t the government kind. He wanted their enemy to see them, know the SCTF wasn’t helpless and it wasn’t weak, and it wasn’t going to let its people get beaten, stabbed, and drugged without retribution.
He and Gideon gave a little extra oomph to their body—and the two that followed it.
Joey remembered to yank the crossbow bolt out of the first casualty. Not many people used one of those, and if Harding said no paperwork, he didn’t want to have to account for it.
“Poor Alex,” Gideon said as they left the bodies to the vagaries of the river.
“Alex?” Joey asked.
“Our civil engineer. His first name is Alex. I suspect he’s going to get a whole whack of bodies in the next few days.”
“As long as none of them are ours,” Joey said with satisfaction. He looked them both over. “I got bloodier than you. You’re going to have to go into the fro-yo place and pick up our order.”
“You ordered fro-yo?” Gideon asked, sounding touched.
“For the unit. You know. Since we didn’t get Shake Shack for Garcia, I figured we could bring fro-yo for the team. For dessert.”
Gideon chuckled. “God, Joey. I wish we were here to make out for real.”
Joey blew out a breath in disgust. “Not me—ew. I wish we were at your apartment making out. Jesus. What a thing to say.”
But Gideon kept chuckling, throwing an arm over Joey’s shoulder and squeezing before letting go so they could get into the car.
They should have been more careful, Joey thought in hindsight. The Sons of the Blood—and he was pretty sure those had been the men who’d attacked them—weren’t the only ones on his tail. He knew that.
AND WORSE, the run-in had made Joey and Gideon cocky. After the meeting at Garcia’s house—and God, it was hard to see Crosby that weak; it pissed Joey off all over again—they told Harding they were going back to the same place.
Something about the way the men had moved, the way the kid had wept as he’d taken off in a completely different direction than the one he’d come, told them this was their stomping grounds.
Some of the intel they’d covered at the meeting had niggled at Gideon, he said.
It hinted at a warehouse, and a bunch of the guys Crosby had gotten tight with worked at a warehouse.
And that warehouse had proximity to where all the bodies were being dumped into the river.
Harding had given them permission, told them to check in with him. This time Joey drove.
“You think they’ll be waiting for us?” Joey said.
“They might be.”
“Should we park farther away, maybe surveil from the roof?”
“Yeah,” Gideon said. He shuddered. “Joey, you heard from your old man?”
“No,” Joey muttered. “Yeah, gives me the creeps too.”
“How do you think he’s mixed up in this?”
“I think he’s blackmailing the top brass involved is what I think,” Joey said. “But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have his fingers in the pie. The old man’s a control freak. I should’ve taken pictures of his house. You and your pointy brain would have had a field day profiling him.”
Gideon snorted. “You’ve learned a lot since you got here. What do you think?”
Joey was quiet for a moment. “I think the first night I slept there, he had all these toys—Legos, Lincoln Logs, shit he grew up with as a kid—and a tablet. Back then, it meant we were rich, that he’d bought his kid a tablet.
Anyway, I went up to my room after dinner, and I remembered my grandfather teaching me how to camp in the wild, particularly if there were bears or mountain lions around.
Lights were scary. Big noises were scary.
So I was eight years old. I missed the shit out of my grandfather, and I didn’t like this white motherfucker who took me away.
I made traps—rigged a jump rope to trip somebody walking into the room, and if he stepped over that, he stepped on rubber balls.
And I moved the bookshelves and put jacks and Legos on them so if you tripped and put your hands down, you made a racket, and I rigged the bookshelves to fall down and clatter, and on top of all of that, I rigged the tablet so that any bit of jiggling would make it screech speed-metal music at the drop of a hat. ”
“Oh my God,” Gideon said, sounding stunned “What happened?”
“I didn’t count on the fucker having put video cameras in all the stuffed animals—the one toy I wouldn’t touch. I woke up, and he had a knife to my throat, but I’d slept with my own knife, so I held it to his balls.”
“Jesus,” Gideon muttered. “What’d he say?”
“He smiled, backed out of the room, and said, ‘I’m locking the door. I hope you don’t have to take a piss in the night.’”
Gideon blew out a breath. “Did you?”
“Yeah. I found a teddy bear with the camera on it and pissed on that. It was like a signal, you know? Let the games begin.”
“Oh Jesus.” Gideon leaned back in his seat and shuddered. “Baby. I’m sorry you had to grow up like that.”
“Me too,” Joey said. “Especially because, you know, all that training, growing up with a sociopath, it’s told me the same thing you already know.”
“What’s that?” Gideon asked, but he didn’t sound like it would be a shock to him.
“You and me tonight? We’re walking into a trap.”
Gideon was good—so good he didn’t check his rearview mirror, although he must have seen their tail for the last six blocks. Joey had shaken the first one, and the second, and the third, but it became obvious they weren’t getting out of here without some sort of confrontation.
“What do you want to do about it?” Gideon asked, just as an SUV with a reinforced grill and no lights T-boned them from out of fucking nowhere.
Apparently, the trap was already sprung.
THERE WAS confusion then, rough hands on his person, the pain of being dragged and restrained.
Joey fought. He heard swearing and knew Gideon was fighting too.
Loopily, he pushed to his feet, started swinging, disoriented but pissed.
They’d both worn seatbelts, but his neck, his shoulders—they’d be in a world of hurt the next morning.
Hands on his shoulder, hauling his hands behind his back, and the rip of duct tape.
He lashed out with a kick that landed solidly in somebody’s groin, and behind him he heard a pop and a howl and thought, Hey, Gid dislocated a knee. How cool is that?
But there were a lot of “them,” and only two of him and Gideon, and eventually they were in the center of a panting, sweating, angry bunch of men and one unpleasant, bitter-looking woman, all of them dressed in battered jeans, denim jackets, and hoodies—the unofficial uniform of dock workers without coveralls.
“What do we do with them?” came the question. “I’d just as soon shoot ’em and shove ’em off the dock.”