McConnell nodded.
“You be careful,” Jenn said. “All of you.”
“Don’t worry,” I said. “I didn’t spend all this time looking for you to get myself killed.”
“Does Daggett know that?” she asked.
CHAPTER 39
We came to the main foyer where all the bodies were. Frank knelt beside Victor and touched his cheek; placed two fingers against the side of his neck, feeling for the pulse he knew would not be there. Then he stuck his pistol in his waist and picked up Victor’s Uzi. “Fucking Victor,” he said.
Ryan put his hand on Frank’s shoulder. He shrugged it off. “He was the late mistake, born fifteen years after me, when my parents didn’t think they could still have kids. I was the oldest of six, so I practically raised him. I never should have brought him along. I don’t mean tonight, I mean the life, but it’s all he ever wanted. All he could do. He was useless at anything else. And not even so good at this.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I was. But we had Jenn back; the gravity of other losses couldn’t hold me back.
“You have any burning need to take Daggett alive?” he said.
Ryan and I looked at each other. I said, “No.”
“Good. Let’s get him.”
“I’ll go out where he went out,” I said. “Come back in the side door. If he’s inside, that’s where he entered.”
“You actually see him go back in?” Frank said. “He could have made a run for the street.”
“And do what?” Ryan asked. “Hail a cab?”
“I don’t know, hijack a car?”
“Wouldn’t try that around here.”
“His knee is wrecked,” I said. “He was hobbling pretty badly. I don’t think he could have made it to the street.”
“Okay,” Frank said. “I don’t want to leave Victor. See if you can flush Daggett out. I’ll be here if he comes down either hallway.”
“I’ll check the offices,” Ryan said. “He could have made it into one of them.”
“Go in shotgun first.”
“Never mind me,” he said. “Don’t you try any humanitarian shit. No trying to wing him. Aim for the centre mass.”
“I know.”
I looked at both men. Frank’s face was grim and clouded over, his eyes black as wet stones. Ryan looked bright and alert, the hunter in him unleashed. We nodded at each other and went our separate ways.
I went out the garage door and made my way around the building to the side door. Now that I knew Jenn was safe, my head felt better than before. It hurt where Daggett had elbowed me, but I felt no nausea and my vision was clear. I had survived contact. I could do this. I opened the door slowly, sweeping the Colt barrel side to side, and went down the carpeted hall. I saw wet footprints ahead, but they faded after a few steps and told me no more. Portraits of company founders lined the walls: the first two generations that had built it up and the third that had run it into its present bankrupt state. A men’s room on my left, women’s on my right. I put an ear to each door and listened. Nothing. I eased the door to the men’s open and looked in the mirror over a pair of sinks. Nothing. Knelt down and looked into the stalls. Pushed open each door in case he was perched on a toilet. No one there. Same routine in the women’s. No one there either.
Back down the hall. No sound except my own feet rubbing against the grain of the carpet, my breath whistling through my nostrils, my heart beating a dull tattoo. The hallway took me back to the foyer; I knew I was getting close when I could smell gunpowder and coppery blood. I pressed myself against the wall as I got closer to the open space. I could see the man Victor had clubbed, lying beside his tipped chair. Then Victor himself, Frank standing over the body. His Uzi on the ground and behind him Sean Daggett, a gun pressed to the back of Frank’s head, his face twisted in an ugly sneer.
“That’s right,” he snarled. “I got your man. I know this place like none of you. He was looking the wrong way when I come up behind him. So what you gonna do, pal? Watch me blow his head off or lay down your gun?”
Just beyond him I saw Dante Ryan coming down the hall across the foyer. Daggett caught sight of him too, stepping back and pulling Frank with him so neither of us had a clear shot.
“You too, dago,” he said. “Lay it down.”
If we did, we were dead, all of us. And with our more powerful weapons, Daggett could storm Prep Room A and take out Jenn, Marc McConnell and everyone else. It would be a bloodbath, wholesale slaughter, and we all knew it.
“Don’t do it,” Frank said. “Shoot the fucker.”
Daggett said, “Shut up.”
Frank said, “Go to hell,” and bucked his hips back hard enough to force Daggett back, twist out of his grasp and throw himself forward. Daggett fired and blood sprayed up from Frank’s head and into the air as he fell face first. That was all Ryan and I needed. His shotgun bucked and blasted Daggett’s right shoulder and spun him toward me. Two three-round bursts from my Colt ripped his chest from lower right abdomen to left collarbone.
There was no need for more. His gun fell to the floor a second before he did. Ryan kept his shotgun levelled as he stalked over to him. I ran to Frank. Blood was streaming from his scalp and running down his neck. I dug my fingers into his carotid artery and felt a faint pulse like a faraway drum.
I said. “Grab his legs.”
“One sec.” Ryan put his shotgun down and knelt at Daggett’s side.
“Forget him,” I said. “He’s dead.”
Ryan took his Glock out of the shoulder holster and screwed on the suppressor. After the torrent of gunfire we had just unleashed, what could be the point of that?
“Dante. Now.”
“Shh.”
He stood, backed up a step and fired two shots into the centre of Daggett’s forehead, just missing getting hit by the spray. “Done.”
We got Frank to the surgeons in half a minute. Ryan ran to free Dr. Reimer from the trunk of Stayner’s car while the rest of the team started prepping Frank. Stayner told us to clear out, that the sterility of the room had already been compromised a thousand times over, but that he would do what he could, no guarantees. We retreated to the chapel. After the roar of shotguns and automatic fire, it was incredibly peaceful.
“Won’t someone call the police about all the shooting?” Marc McConnell asked.
“Maybe in your neighbourhood,” I said. “I believe the motto around here is, Don’t snitch. But if you’re worried about being found here, take off.”
“Not yet.”
“Honey,” Lesley said, “maybe we should. If the police do come, how would we explain this?”
“Soon,” he said.
We sat along the front pew facing the dais where ministers and family members would have delivered eulogies for the dead over the decades Halladay’s had been in business. With all the men who had died tonight, it seemed someone should have been up there speaking. But we just sat in the dim light, all of us wearing latex gloves as if we feared catching something from the very air. I had my arm around Jenn, holding her tightly. Ryan was on my other side. At one point he leaned in and whispered, “I can’t believe of the two of us, you got the centre mass.”
“Only because you hit his shoulder first. You made him a good target.”
“The shotgun jumped,” he said. “A Mossberg. I’m a little upset about that.”
He could dismiss it so easily. Not me. Brooding is a skill Jews learn early and perfect all their lives. I sat there soaking in the fact that I had killed again. And with a gun, again, the first time I had fired one at a man since that ambush in Hebron when I had shot the man stabbing my friend Roni. But I would change nothing of what had happened to Daggett. He was a murderer many times over. In the last few days alone he had ordered the killings of David, Carol-Ann, his own two thugs. Had caused the death of Victor and so nearly of Frank. Had tried to kill Ryan and me. Would have killed my best friend and partner in the most callous and gruesome way possible.