Gamma Blade Page 5

  She saw the gleam of light off the cropped scalp.

  Oh my God.

  It was Venn.

  Chapter 9

  It was like a rerun of the procedure Beth had gone through a few minutes earlier.

  She slipped her fingers across his jawline and down his throat, feeling for the carotid pulse on either side.

  At the same time, she peered at the dark blotch on the curve of his occiput, just above the nape of the neck.

  There was a smear of blood there, and a growing contusion beneath.

  A smear, and a bruise. Not a crater.

  After a heart-stopping second, Beth felt the throb of a pulse against her fingertips on both sides.

  And, an instant later, she felt pressure against her hands as he reared up and back.

  He groaned, long and low, like a crypt door opening after centuries of being sealed.

  Venn slumped forward once more, his head not quite meeting the concrete.

  Beth slid her hand down and across his chest and grabbed him. Hugged him close. Pressed herself against his back, not as a doctor, but as a woman discovering the man she loved was alive, when she’d been convinced he was dead.

  He was alive.

  Through the surge of relief that threatened to paralyze her, Beth felt Venn tense, the muscles of his chest and abdomen harden.

  His head turned a fraction to the side.

  Quickly, she said: “Venn. It’s me. Beth. I’m here.”

  He twisted, pulling free from her grasp, turning on his knees to face her. For an instant, in his eyes, she saw something she’d seen before, long ago, during that terrible period when they’d first met. It was a frightening look, a stare of implacable, ruthless calculation.

  It was the look of a cornered animal, coiled and ready to do anything, anything, to preserve its own existence.

  The look winked out like a candle flame being extinguished.

  And the Venn she knew, she loved, was back.

  His gaze was unsteady, his eyes blinking and peering and seeming to have trouble focussing. But he recognized her, all right.

  He scooted closer and grabbed her face, one hand on either side.

  “Beth. You okay? What have they done?”

  She didn’t pull away. But she said, confused: “They? Who do you mean? Are you all right?”

  Venn leaned in, pulled her close, tightening his grip across her back almost painfully, crushing her against him. She felt his face against her neck and her hair. They squatted awkwardly like that for a few seconds, on the floor of the alley.

  At last, Venn drew back, his hands on her shoulders. She watched his face. He stared into her eyes, then looked away, his lids hooded. As if he was recalling.

  “Son of a bitch,” he said through his teeth.

  “What happened?”

  Venn stood. He swayed a little, but kept his feet. His hands slid down along Beth’s arms and he drew her up with him.

  “The son of a bitch,” he said again. “He didn’t shoot me.”

  “What -?”

  Venn looked down one end of the alley, then the other, as if orienting himself.

  He took Beth’s hand.

  “Come on.”

  *

  By the time they rejoined the ambulance and the police patrol car on the street overlooking the marina, Venn had filled her in.

  About the man who’d gotten the drop on him in the alleyway, and the words they’d exchanged, and the sudden loss of consciousness which in the final instant Venn had assumed to be the work of a bullet blasting away his life, but which turned out to be a blow to the back of his head. Enough to knock him out, but not to kill him.

  “It takes a special talent,” Venn said.

  “What does?” Beth looked at the ambulance, wondering why it hadn’t pulled away yet. Then she saw the uniformed cop talking to the first paramedic, who was standing by the open door of the vehicle, ready to jump up, and realized the cop was taking a brief statement.

  “To hit somebody hard enough to knock them unconscious, without killing them or turning their brains to mush.” Venn was talking in his normal bass-baritone growl, Beth noted. His speech wasn’t slurred. Which suggested he was okay, that the blow to his head hadn’t caused any significant neurological damage.

  Beth squeezed his hand. “Venn, what were you thinking?”

  He looked down at her, blinking, as if registering the tightness of her grip. Or maybe it was the tremor in her voice.

  “Running after that guy?” The words came pouring out of her, unstoppably. “You could have been shot. Or stabbed. Why’d you do it?”

  Emotions wrestled for dominance on his face. She saw truculence there, but also compassion for her. And guilt, too.

  “The same reason you stopped to help that guy on the gurney over there.” He nodded toward the ambulance. “It’s what you do. Your instincts kicked in.”

  “Except my job doesn’t put me at risk. Not in the same way.” Her eyes were welling up. She didn’t mean to rebuke him, to accuse him. She realized that what she felt wasn’t anger, as she’d thought at first. Rather it was a desperate, wrenching relief.

  Venn didn’t say anything. Just put an arm around her shoulders and pulled her close.

  They walked together over to the cops at the ambulance. One of the patrolmen started toward them, as if to tell them to move along. The female paramedic said: “That’s her. The doc who first attended to the guy.”

  The cops were both immediately interested. They turned to Beth, eyed Venn up.

  He held up his shield, which he’d already taken out so that he didn’t have to reach into his pocket and thereby arouse suspicion. “Lieutenant Joseph Venn. NYPD. I was the one who called, when I saw the group of men on the pier watching the yacht.”

  One of the cops peered at the ID. His eyes switched back to Venn’s face.

  “What you doing here?”

  “Enjoying a weekend in Miami,” said Venn. “At least, trying to.”

  He and Beth told the cops what had happened. As they related their story, another cop car showed up.

  The officer in charge spoke on his phone. Then he said: “We’ll need to take a formal statement. And we need some info on that guy in the ambulance, too.”

  “Any ID on him?” said Venn.

  “Driving license,” said the cop. “His name’s James Harris, from Colorado. We’re checking on the home address right now. Got to tell you, though, this doesn’t look like a routine mugging. Not with what you saw, the guys lined up alongside the yacht.” He jerked his head at one of the patrol cars. “You guys ride with us. We’re following the ambulance to the hospital. Our lieutenant’s going to meet us there. You can talk to him then.”

  Beth said, “I want to ride in the ambulance. He’s my patient.”

  The cop looked at the paramedics, who shrugged. “No problem,” said the male one. “Won’t hurt to have a doctor riding along.”

  Beth was reluctant to let go of Venn, and he was hanging onto her, too. But she patted his arm.

  “See you there, okay?” She prized herself free and got on board the ambulance.

  *

  Brull waited till he’d turned four corners and was six blocks away before he broke into a run.

  His instincts had told him to run first, then slow down once he’d put distance between him and the scene. But his instincts were wrong, and he ignored them. Running out of the alleyway when he knew there were witnesses, and cops, would have painted a target on his back in neon colors.

  Six blocks away, there was nobody following him. He was certain of it.

  But he started running then, because he had work to do.

  He’d parked his car along a tree-lined avenue which ran alongside a park. There were a few late-night strollers on the avenue, he noted, couples and small groups of friends walking off their evening meal. Nobody looked at him for long. He might have been a jogger - though oddly attired for such an activity - or simply late for an appointment or a d
ate.

  Brull’s car was a two-year-old silver Dodge Challenger. Some people might have considered it an overly conspicuous set of wheels for a man in his position to be driving, but here in Miami, muscle cars were a dime a dozen. And in some ways, paradoxically, the car gave him added camouflage. It was the last vehicle you’d expect an otherwise cautious gangster to be driving.

  Naturally, he had no chauffeur. He wouldn’t let anybody else behind the wheel. Brull dropped into the leather front seat and gunned the engine and took off, at the same time flipping open his cell phone.

  It was answered on the first ring.

  Brull said: “Talk to me.”

  Elon, one of his enforcers, was on the line. “It’s off, boss,” he said. “The guys faded fast. Before the cops got there.”

  “Before the local cops got there, you mean,” said Brull. “That guy who chased you...”

  “Yeah, I know,” said Elon. “You kill him?”

  “No.” Brull didn’t explain. He didn’t need to. Elon would guess why his boss had left the cop alive. And in any case, it wasn’t his business what Brull chose to do.

  “He was from New York,” Brull continued.

  “NYPD?”

  “Yeah. His name’s Joseph Venn. V-E-N-N. A detective.”

  Brull listened to silence as Elon pondered this.

  “Get on it,” said Brull. “Find out what New York’s interest is in us.”

  Elon said, “Boss, this Venn looked like a bystander. Walking along with his girl when he saw me hit the guy. It might be coincidence.”

  “Maybe.” Brull saw a patrol car in his rear-view mirror, its cherrytop flashing, but it was headed away from him and he relaxed. “I don’t want to take any chances, though.”

  “About that guy. The one I hit,” said Elon. “I don’t know what happened to him.”

  “He was alive. I saw him being loaded on an ambulance, and his face wasn’t covered up.” Even as he’d emerged from the alleyway, Brull had considered boosting a random car and following the ambulance to see which hospital it went to. But that would have been too risky, with the cops in the area. He went on: “We need to find that guy. Start checking all of the hospitals. You can probably narrow it down to the closest ones. Post guys at each one. Tell them to be discreet.”

  “Got you, boss.”

  “You get a look at his face?”

  Elon sounded proud. “Better than that. I got a photo of him. Hold on.”

  His voice disappeared. A few seconds later, a text message announced itself on Brull’s phone. He looked at the attached photo, keeping his eye on the road ahead as he drove.

  The picture was a grainy, typically night-time one. It showed a man from the back, his face in profile and turned to the right. Beyond him was the marina, bright and blurred. Brull guessed that Elon had taken the picture as he’d crept up behind the man, who was standing in a waiting pose.

  Elon had been smart, taking that photo. Brull wouldn’t forget it.

  The man was wearing a lightweight sports coat, the color unclear. He was white, with dark hair, still full despite his age, which was probably around Brull’s own, or maybe a little older. Forty, possibly. He was clean-shaven. A strong nose, taut lips.

  Brull got back on the phone to Elon. “He doesn’t look familiar,” he said. “Send that picture to all the guys staking out the hospitals. Anybody who’s even a vague match, let me know immediately.”

  “Done.” Elon paused. He said, matter-of-factly: “I screwed up a little, boss.”

  Brull didn’t think he had. Elon had been holding back, away from the pier, and had spotted the stranger watching the Merry May boat. Watching it not like a boat-lover admiring a fine specimen, but like a guy poking his nose in where it didn’t belong.

  So Elon had acted quickly and decisively. He’d slugged the guy, and would have taken him captive, and brought him to Brull for questioning. It was Elon’s bad luck that the big cop, the NYPD officer, happened to be walking by at that very moment. Elon had done the right thing by running. And he’d been smart enough to lure the cop down the alley where he knew Brull himself was hanging back.

  No, Elon hadn’t screwed up at all. But Brull believed one of the techniques of an effective leader was never to show your subordinates that they were being too hard on themselves, but rather always to make them worry that they’d disappointed you.

  So Brull said: “Whatever. It’s happened. Make it right.”

  “Boss.”

  Brull hung up.

  He had another call to make.

  But first, he allowed himself a few moments’ reflection.

  *

  Should he have killed the cop?

  Brull had been on the point of doing so. He wondered if the cop, Venn, understood how close he’d come to death. Brull’s finger had begun squeezing back on the trigger of the Glock, and a couple of millimeters more would have sent the bullet smashing through the guy’s head.

  In the final nano-second before he completed the action, Brull had become aware of two things.

  He hated the big man on his knees before him. Hated him with a fury as incandescent as a phosphorus bomb.

  And he had a hard-on.

  It was the tightness in his pants more than anything else that stopped Brull’s finger from pulling the trigger back those last two millimeters.

  His tumescence meant that his body, as opposed to his rational brain, was calling the shots.

  And that, in business, was never a good idea.

  The orgasmic thrill he’d get from blowing the New York cop’s brains across the floor of the alleyway would be intense. Ecstatic.

  But it would be short-lived, like a drug high.

  And the hangover would outweigh the trip.

  The hangover would consist of the entire Miami PD up Brull’s ass, like a troop of weekend hunters from Hicksville hell-bent on bagging themselves the only bear in the woods. The cops wouldn’t stop. They’d bend, and break, the rules. They’d come down hard on every stool pigeon, every low-level contact that Brull had in Florida. And sooner or later, one of those deadbeats would crack. They’d give up a name, which would lead to another name, until Brull found himself cornered.

  Brull didn’t like cops. He thought most of them were as dumb as a sack of mice, and he had no personal qualms about killing any of them. One night he’d had a dream that he’d weaponized a mutant strain of the Ebola virus, which targeted only law-enforcement officers. He walked the streets of Miami in his dream, watching uniformed cops dissolving into leaking bags of blood. He’d woken up laughing.

  But there was one thing he respected about cops. One thing only.

  They were loyal. They looked out for their own.

  And an injury to one really was an injury to all. Even the laziest, most lard-assed of pigs would get up off his sweaty butt to join the hunt for a cop-killer.

  So Brull’s finger had frozen on the Glock’s trigger, and slowly he’d let it slip back to its resting position.

  He’d hit the New York cop hard, across the nape of the neck, making sure the sight of the gun gouged his shorn scalp. Brull was practiced at knocking men unconscious with a single blow, and this guy was a sitting duck. He’d watched the burly torso slump forward across the knees, and for good measure he’d kicked the guy square in the ass afterward, though he didn’t think the cop felt it because he was out cold already.

  He hoped the son of a bitch woke up with the headache from hell. And with a sudden desire to terminate his weekend vacation down here in the south and board the next flight back to his candy-ass New York City, with its stupid accents and shitty winters.

  But as Brull took the Dodge deeper into Miami, leaving the flashy waterfront high-rises behind for the darker, meaner streets, he understood that there was a downside to his decision to spare the cop’s life.

  As he’d gazed down at Venn’s face, the closed eyes, he’d seen that this wasn’t just some pumped-up muscleman who was all image and no substance.


  Even unconscious, the cop looked mean.

  He was a detective lieutenant, not some asshole patrolman. He’d just been humiliated, and had his lights punched out.

  He was probably a racist, too, and he would have detected from Brull’s voice that Brull was Cuban.

  All of which added up to this: there was a hard-nosed bastard alive in Miami, who was a senior law enforcement officer and likely a bigot, and who’d heard Brull’s voice before Brull had knocked him senseless.

  If Brull were in the cop’s position, he’d walk through hell itself to settle the score.

  *

  Brull pushed all thought of Joseph Venn from his mind and speed-dialed one of the first six numbers on his phone’s list.

  Unlike Elon a few minutes earlier, Popok answered after a full five rings.

  “Yes?”

  The man drew the single syllable out so that it sounded like three. Brull had no idea where the guy had learned his English, but he spoke it like he was trying to sound like a British stage actor performing Shakespeare. Unfortunately his dense, guttural accent let him down, so he ended up sounding like he’d either had a stroke or was slightly retarded.

  Brull had never met Abdu Popok. He’d spoken with him many times over the last year, via satellite- and encrypted cell-phone, but although he’d searched for the man online, he’d never found his picture. He had a fair idea, though, what the Turkmen looked like. Brull imagined a fleshy, jowly guy in a cheap suit, the armpits stained with sweat. Probably small eyeglasses perched on a piggy nose, and sparse hair plastered sideways across his scalp with Brylcreem, or whatever brand of hair product they used in Turkmenistan.

  Brull had Googled Turkmenistan, too. It looked like an utter shithole, squashed into the middle of Asia next to the Caspian Sea, with a human rights record that put it in Amnesty International’s basement. Kind of like Brull’s own Cuba in Castro’s heyday, but without the sunshine and the terrific music.

  But what it did have, was natural gas reserves. A ton of them. And that meant that there were a whole lot of rich people in Turkmenistan. Rich people who were looking to branch out internationally, and who were putting out feelers into locations such as Beijing and Bangkok and London and Toronto and Miami, where businessmen like Ernesto Justice Brull were offering a niche product.