It sounded, Harrison decided, like Billy Enright. Maybe at the head of the stairs.
The stairs were pretty conventional. They went upward to a landing against the outer wall, then turned 180 degrees and went on up to the second floor, the balcony level. And so on, a landing between each floor, up to the fourth floor. If Ford could gain the balcony everyone above him was trapped. This was the only exit from the higher floors.
He tiptoed up the stairs and stopped on the step prior to the landing. He took out another grenade and pulled the pin. Then he stood, listening and waiting.
“There’s five of us up here, man, and we’re all armed.” It sounded like Billy was right around the corner at the head of the stairs, standing on the balcony. His voice was tense, wound tight. “I think,” he continued, “that you’re only one—”
Ford leaned around the corner and tossed the grenade.
“Fuck! You fuck—”
The concussion of the explosion was intensely painful in this confined space. Some of the shrapnel ricocheted against the wall and bounced off Ford, too spent to penetrate.
Harrison Ronald rounded the corner with the Uzi spraying and charged up the stairs two at a time.
Billy Enright sat with his back to the waist-high balcony rail, trying to hold his guts in with both hands. In the center of his ripped-apart face his eyes widened in recognition. He opened his mouth, but only blood came out. Then he slowly toppled sideways.
Ford heard a laugh. From someplace. Where? He moved back into the stairwell and scanned the balcony, trying to see.
“You get him, Billy?”
Freeman McNally.
“Naw, Freeman. Billy’s lying here trying to hold his guts in. Maybe you got a cheerful word for him. He could use it right now.”
Another laugh. “Well, well, well. If it ain’t our good buddy the fucking stoolie, Sammy Z.”
“I ain’t a stoolie, Freeman. I’m a cop. The FBI put me in to get the goods on you. And I got ’em. Ten fucking months worth. They got it all. You’re gonna be in jail until you’re too old to get it up, Freeman, if you make it through tonight, which is very doubtful.”
McNally laughed again. It sounded like he was somewhere above, maybe on the fourth floor, talking out of one of the interior windows.
“This ain’t your night, Freeman. You get lucky and kill me, you’re going straight to the butt-fuck house. I hear all those homos got AIDS, man. They’ll be delighted to see your tight little cherry ass.”
“Well, you got one thing right, Sammy. I am sure as hell gonna kill you.”
“It’s already been tried tonight, Freeman. I hope you didn’t waste any money on Vinnie and Tony. They won’t ever be able to pay you back.”
Ford heard a noise above him, in the stairwell. Someone was coming down. “I’m gonna kill you slow, real slow,” McNally said, “like I did ol’ Ike. You’re gonna fucking beg for a bullet, boy.”
Ford ascended the stairs, both hands on the Uzi. He was four steps up when the top of a head peeped around the corner. Ford pulled the trigger and held it down.
The body plopped out from behind the wall onto the landing. Brains and blood were scattered all over the wall behind.
“Little hard to tell, Freeman,” Ford called, “but I think you just lost a brother.”
He paused and changed magazines, then stepped over the corpse and kept going. Ahead of him was the glare of the naked bulb on top of the landing. He shot it out. The pieces of glass fell with a tinkle, leaving the stairwell in total darkness. All he could hear was the moans of the guard on the warehouse floor.
Harrison Ronald waited for his eyes to adjust.
Finally, when he realized he could see all he was going to see, he eased his head around the corner and looked. It was like looking into a coal mine at midnight. Nothing. Same the other way.
He got out two grenades. Pin out of one, he tossed it down the hall to his left, then the other to the right. He had no more than got his hand back in when the first one went off. Then the second. Like two thunderclaps.
Silence.
Total silence. Like a tomb.
He wanted to talk, taunt Freeman about Ike, make the bastard suffer before he died. But he knew better. He stood silently, listening and trying to breathe slowly and noiselessly.
He was standing like that when he heard the explosion just behind him and felt the numbing shock of the bullet rip into him.
Harrison staggered. He dropped the Uzi and went to his hands and knees.
Something grabbed his throat and squeezed viciously. McNally had come down the staircase from above.
“I got him, Ruben, I got him!”
His neck — he couldn’t breathe …
Ford reached back, groping desperately. His hand found its target and he grabbed all he could get and pulled with all his strength.
Screaming, Freeman McNally released his neck hold as Ford twisted and squeezed and tore, trying to rip his balls off. Screaming high and loud in unbearable pain as Harrison Ronald filled his lungs and physically lifted the man with his right hand as he levered himself up.
Harrison got his left hand on McNally’s neck and pushed him back against the wall, then smashed his head again as he tried to literally rip the man’s testicles from his body.
The scream was choked off in McNally’s throat. Another smash into the wall and Ford lost his grip. He spun the man to a better angle and drew back his right hand to smash his larynx, just as someone arrived and fired a weapon.
Ford threw Freeman aside and lunged. The weapon flew and his fist connected with something soft. He struck savagely, again and again and again as hard as he could until the man he was pummeling went limp.
He was losing blood. He could feel the wetness. And he was weakening.
Neither of the other two men moved.
He fumbled in his pocket for the little penlight he had taken from Tony Anselmo. When was that?
Ruben McNally was apparently dead, his nose bone rammed up between his eyes.
Freeman’s eyes stared at nothing, refused to focus.
Harrison Ronald felt Freeman’s carotid artery. No heartbeat.
Furious, he rolled him over. A bullet dead center in the back, right between the shoulder blades. Shot by his own brother!
“You … you … you …”
Ford was also hit in the back and he knew it. Unless he got medical attention quickly he would probably bleed to death, hemorrhage into a lung or something.
“You …,” he told Freeman’s frozen face, then couldn’t think of anything to add. A wave of pain and nausea swept over him.
“Oh God, help me.”
He got to his feet and started down the stairs, then tripped and almost fell. The flashlight hit the concrete and broke. It wasn’t much of a light anyway. He kept going.
“God, forgive me for … for … please forgive me.”
He tripped over a body and fell down the last flight of stairs. He lay there in the darkness with death creeping over him.
“No!”
Somehow he got to his feet and saw the light coming through the door to the guard’s office a hundred feet away. He staggered in that direction.
The man behind the equipment box against the south wall was silent. Unconscious or dead. At least Ford didn’t hear him as he shuffled by.
He got the phone off the hook and punched 911. “Sanitary Bakery warehouse,” he told the operator as he threw the switch to electrically unlock the front door.
“The address and your name, please!” she said. His legs were shaking and he was having trouble seeing. “Send the FBI and an ambulance. Better hurry. FBI…” The phone slipped out of his grasp and he was falling. “I’m dying,” he said. Then the blackness swept over him.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE