Chapter 31
Bloch
Winchester let out a cry of pain as Bloch pushed his face into his hardwood floor and kept it there.
At first, he had resisted.
Then, within a second, the shooting started.
They lay pressed to floor.
The weapons were silenced, but the sound of firing was still audible.
Not as loud as the sound of bullets ripping through windowpanes, wood-paneled walls, and then tearing up the TV in the living room and the crockery in the kitchen beyond.
It was a shotgun house, so-called because you could stand on the front porch, with the front and back door open and fire a shotgun through the house without hitting anything but air.
These rounds were not going out the back door. One bullet must have gone clear through some of the old plumbing as a jet of water burst through a hole in the back wall and sprayed the kitchen floor.
The tinny sound of recoil from the assault rifles was as fast as a beat on a brass cymbal. After fifteen, maybe twenty seconds, the firing stopped.
Bloch heard boots on gravel, working hard and getting fainter.
One of the men, at least, was headed round the house for the back door.
She turned to Lake, but he was already getting to his feet and heading toward the kitchen.
Ducking underneath the spray from the burst pipe, he whipped round, one-eighty, swung to his knees and put his back to the kitchen island.
The back door was behind it. Bloch was still lying flat on the floor at the bottom of the stairs, but she pushed herself forward, left ear to the ground, straining to see into the kitchen.
She could just make out the back door. Bloch and Lake had left it open when they’d come in. The first intruder must’ve come round the front and used a side window in the parlor.
She could see Lake, but she was far enough away, with just her head low to the ground and her eyes jutting past the living room doorway, that anyone coming through the back door likely wouldn’t see her. Not through the spray from the ruptured pipe.
Lake looked at her. Nodded.
She nodded back.
They’d worked together long enough to have an unspoken language. Bloch said so little that it had developed faster than usual.
Silently, the back door opened a little farther. A masked man carrying an assault rifle came into the kitchen, sweeping the weapon left and right, checking the corners for targets.
Military trained, thought Bloch.
She nodded to Lake, and kept her eyes on the man at the back door.
Lake scooted onto his belly, wrapped his arm around the kitchen island, until the Glock was pointed in the right direction, and fired three times in tight angles. He couldn’t be sure, but at this distance, one of those quick shots was bound to hit the man standing in that doorway.
One of them did. The round tearing through the side of his boot.
The man dropped and the back of his head hit the floor. He just had time to look up to see Lake, standing over him now, the Glock pointed at his face.
Lake pulled the trigger.
The back of the man’s head hit the floor again.
This time, it would stay there.
Bloch rolled over, looked toward the front of the house.
Listened.
It was so quiet. So dark.
And then the clouds shifted.
Moonlight drifted through the bullet holes in the front of the house. From the living room to the hallway, shafts of light angled through the holes to cast pools of silver on the floor.
And then one of the shafts of light went dark, way over to her left in the living room.
Then it lit up again, and another shaft was extinguished, like a candle being blown out.
Someone was outside, moving across the front of the house toward the door.
Slowly, silently, unaware that the moon was showing their exact position.
The magnum in Bloch’s hand followed the path of the man outside.
Then, to her right, the shafts of moonlight in the hallway were broken.
Two figures converging on the front door.
Bloch felt around on the floor with her left hand.
Picked up Winchester’s Colt.
She held both guns at arm’s length, pointed at the dark spots where the intruders blocked the moonlight. Holding her breath, her arms got closer together, as she kept a bead on each target.
Closer and closer, her aim converging on the front door.
Bloch pulled both triggers. The magnum kicked, punching through the wall, and then sending a much thicker column of light into the house. She tossed the Colt, brought both hands on the magnum and focused on the second target, firing three times.
She got up, dropped the empty magnum and picked up the Colt, kicked open the front door and saw the two bodies on the front lawn. Both dead. One had his arm severed at the elbow – a stray shot from the magnum.
‘Clear,’ said Bloch.
‘Clear,’ said Lake.
‘Get out of here,’ said Winchester weakly.
She whipped round. Winchester lay on his back. Two bullet holes on his left side from the first barrage of fire through the house. Blood bubbled from one of the wounds. The round had penetrated at least one lung.
‘Call 911,’ said Bloch.
Lake came into the hallway, dropped to his knees and took out his phone.
Bloch put both hands on the wounds, leaned down, applying pressure. Blood spewed from Paul’s mouth and a coughing fit took him.
Lake began dialing.
‘S-stop!’ said Winchester. ‘Too late.’
‘Help me,’ said Bloch.
He was bleeding too fast. She couldn’t stop it. A large pool of blood was already getting bigger beneath him.
‘Don’t call anybody. I won’t make it,’ said Winchester. ‘And I don’t want either of you here when Landry arrives. Give me my gun and get the hell out of here. If you don’t, Landry will make sure you both go to jail for this. I know it.’
Bloch and Lake exchanged a look.
‘Take . . .’ He tried to speak again, but another bloody coughing fit cut him off. His breath gurgled, but with great effort he managed a whisper.
‘Take my phone. It has all the files on the Jane Doe and the . . . the security feed from tonight. Get him. Get Vanderpool. Take it, take it and get the . . .’
His eyeballs turned upwards, and his head lolled to one side as the last breath left his body.
Lake looked around, then ran upstairs and came down again quickly with Winchester’s cell phone in his hand.
‘We’ve got to go,’ he said.
Bloch rocked back onto her heels and stood.
‘Are you hit?’ she asked.
‘No, I’m good. You?’
‘I’m not hit. But I’m not good,’ she said, and looked at the blood on her hands. It was almost black in the moonlight.
‘He’s right. Let’s go. If they want to cover this up, they won’t want to advertise that two possible perps escaped. Right now, it looks like Winchester took out his attackers.’
‘My slugs don’t match his gun.’
‘Landry will know we were here. If he comes after us, we’ll deal with him. But right now let’s not get caught at a multiple homicide scene in his jurisdiction.’
‘Check the bodies,’ said Bloch.
Lake went into the kitchen, Bloch turned over the man in the hallway: no wallet, no ID. No cash. She pulled down his black sweater from the neck, checked his shoulders.
A tattoo of an inverted dagger surrounded by a laurel wreath. She snapped a picture on her phone. No point taking a photo of this guy’s face. He no longer had one.
‘Check their arms for tattoos,’ she said.
She checked the two bodies on the front porch.
No IDs, and one of them had a tattoo on his right forearm of what looked like multiple stars from a compass laid on top of each other.
She took a pic of this and their faces. These guys had MP5s, small military sub-machine guns.
Bloch made her way to the Land Rovers, checked the glovebox.
There was a single file in there, and in the trunk an extra bag of magazines for the MP5s, and nothing else.
She took the file, and together they left the same way they had come, through the field at the rear of Winchester’s property to Bloch’s Jeep. She used what was left of her water bottle to wash her hands, and within ten minutes they’d found the highway and were pointed in the direction of Manhattan.
‘Did the guy in the kitchen have any tattoos?’ asked Bloch.
‘None. How come you asked me to look?’
‘The way they moved. They were ex-military. Take a look,’ she said, and handed him her phone.
Lake examined the tattoos, took out his phone and began searching.
‘The inverted combat knife in the laurel wreath is a pretty generic special forces tattoo, but this one, the compass rose, this is more specific. Wait, here we go – it’s South African Special Forces.’
‘Dekker is South African. He was US military, but I’d bet in his merc days he made plenty of connections with his home military special forces,’ said Bloch.
Lake said, ‘Mind if I look in the file?’
Bloch nodded and he took it from the back seat.
There were only a few pages.
The first was an old photo of Paul Winchester, ten years and twenty pounds ago. It listed his current age and address and had a list of his weapon permits. The other two pages, Lake didn’t need to read too carefully.
‘It’s us,’ he said.
‘We’re targets too?’
‘Maybe,’ said Lake, ‘or maybe we’re just persons of interest. One thing is clear.
Paul Winchester died because we went to see him and Captain Landry was responsible.
He tipped off Dekker, or his boss, but Dekker is the one who arranged the hit team.
He probably served with at least one of those men back there.
At some point I should probably kill Dekker. Just to be on the safe side.’
‘I don’t think you should do that,’ said Bloch.
‘How come?’
She glanced at her hands on the steering wheel, dark ridges of dried blood still visible in the fine creases of her skin.
‘Because I want to kill him,’ said Bloch.