He slammed a new magazine into his Kel-Tec Sub-2000 and tore out of the cockpit.
CHAPTER 41
The rooftop steel door was locked! “Sookin syn!” screamed Viktor Popov as he spun away from his means of escape. Son of a bitch!
He had a weapon, but it was inside his flight suit and he couldn’t remember which pocket he’d put it in. The valise felt heavy as he stumbled off the steel stairway and jogged toward the roof’s edge.
From the corner of his eye he saw Bennings and Petkova running toward him. Damn, I’m getting old. No, be honest: I am old. Too old for these kinds of games anymore. Oh, well, it almost worked. I can only blame myself for the curse of Bennings.
“Stop right there, Viktor.”
Popov slowly turned; he stood less than two yards from the roof’s edge. The garish glow from billions of watts of light below shone dim now as the Strip sucked its juice from emergency generators. Likewise, his own hopes had dimmed considerably, and like much of the city right now, Viktor was reduced to operating on a backup plan.
Regrettably, he couldn’t hold on to the valise and still do what he had to do. A simple bungee cord would solve his dilemma, but he didn’t have one.
Bennings had the subgun pointed at Viktor’s heart. “I have no problem killing you.”
“You have shown me, Major, that, like me, you have no problem killing, period.”
“You kill innocent people. That’s just one of the differences between you and me.”
“If you had taken my generous cash offer, nothing would have happened to your family.”
“This might not be a good time to remind me of what has happened to my family.”
“We all have to die sometime. Better to die rich,” said Popov as he flung the valise at Bennings, then turned and ran the two yards and dived off the edge of the roof into the dimness below.
Yulana gasped, but only because she didn’t understand he was wearing a parachute.
Kit ran to the edge and looked down toward Sands Avenue. In the subdued illumination he caught a fleeting glimpse of a floating black shadow that quickly disappeared around the corner of the building. Kit folded and holstered his subgun, then spoke into the two-way radio as he picked up the black valise.
“Buzz, Viktor has—”
Kit and Yulana were suddenly bathed in the beam of a ten-million-candlepower searchlight from a Metro PD police helicopter overhead.
“Freeze! Police!” came a disembodied voice over the helicopter’s public address system.
They stood still, but Kit took his finger off the radio’s transmit button.
“Sounds like you have company,” said Buzz, over the radio.
Kit looked to Yulana and made a slight gesture with his head toward the MD 530F. They both took a step toward the helicopter, but then half a dozen Metro coppers charged through the steel rooftop door that Popov had been unable to open and pointed pistols at them. The cops couldn’t see as Kit pressed the transmit button on his radio.
“Don’t move. Just drop the bag!”
“Okay. Please hold your fire.”
Kit dropped the bag.
“The man you want just jumped off the roof, and he was wearing a parachute,” yelled Kit.
“Drop the radio!”
Kit knew Buzz had heard the exchange of key information. “Okay, I will. Don’t shoot. Looks like it’s time to go to plan B.”
He dropped the radio and faintly heard Buzz say, “Copy.”
The Vegas officers closed in quickly. “You’re the man we want. Now get on your knees!”
CHAPTER 42
The wall-mounted air conditioner for room 314 droned on as Ron Franklin gingerly approached the door and grabbed the trash bag sitting outside. He retreated with it to the end of the walkway, where Bobby Chan stood waiting.
Franklin held the bag open while Chan routed through it.
“Three empty drink containers, three nearly empty bags of fries, and three burger wrappers.”
“Unless Blondie is pregnant and she’s eating for two, I’m betting there are three people in there,” said Chan.
“And one of them is Staci Bennings.”
“We’re exposed here. Let’s go downstairs and I’ll call Metro for backup.”
Just then, the power went out and the whole neighborhood went dark.
“What the hell?!”
There were no backup generators in this neck of the woods, just moonlight and spillover from headlights on West Tropicana. Chan pulled out his cell phone and used it as a flashlight. The detectives took a couple of steps toward the stairs.
Then the door to 314 opened. Lily Bain looked down. There was enough light for her to see that the trash bag was gone. She then looked over to Chan and Franklin, who still held the trash bag.
It’s not that cops have a certain look to them, but many of them do have a certain vibe, a certain presence. The way they walk, the way they carry themselves, the look in their eyes. When Lily’s eyes met Chan’s, she slammed the door shut.
“She made us!” said Franklin.
“Forget backup, we’re going in now or she might cap the girl!”
They charged forward, and Franklin slammed his full weight into the flimsy, warped door, which popped right off its hinges. He went sprawling onto the floor of the small front room.
Staci Bennings screamed a bloodcurdling, torturous scream of pain as Lily Bain dragged her deeper into the room toward the bedroom doorway. The scream sent chills up Bobby Chan’s massive arms as he stepped inside.
As time stretched into slow motion, muzzle flashes lit up the kitchen area with what Chan instinctively knew to be brief tableaux of the last moments of life and the first moments of death. But for whom?
He swept the room with a short burst of incredibly bright, blinding light from his SureFire. Franklin lay on the floor dazed, maybe shot.
Gregory held a smoking pistol as he stood at the kitchen table, so Chan drilled him with three rounds from his .40 caliber Para Ordnance P16.
Chan saw Staci Bennings elbow Lily Bain in the face, then spin away. He lit Lily up with his light as she raised her pistol in Staci’s direction. Strangely, the blonde flashed something of a cutie-pie smile.
It wasn’t him shooting in the dark, it was some other being, some vengeful angel of justice that pulled his trigger seven times, sending all seven rounds home to center mass, but since she just stood there, motionless, the angel fired Chan’s weapon three more times, head shots this time, and Lily Bain’s mutilated corpse collapsed into a twisted heap in the first seconds of death.
Chan knew he’d been shot—it was hard to miss a big fat guy standing in a doorway—but he walked in shadowy light toward the sounds of sobbing.
“It’s okay, Miss Bennings. We’ve come to take you home.”
“I’m sorry I screamed. Can you help me stand up? My knee is destroyed.”
A light came on behind him. Franklin stood holding a small LED, shining it to the floor and not in Staci’s face—a face the coppers could see had two black eyes, a broken nose, smashed lips.
“My wrist is broken, too.”
“Blessed Mary, mother of God, what did they do to you?” asked Chan, bending down. He felt the burning now, in his left side, and his shirt felt sticky with blood, but he ignored it.
“This is Detective Franklin, we need an ambulance at…”
Chan tuned out Franklin, who was calling in the shooting. He glanced around the room shrouded in inky blackness. “You want to wait for the paramedics, or you want me to carry you out of this dump right now?”
“Can you please take me now?”
The big man lifted her as easily and gently as if she were a newborn. And maybe, somehow, she was.