Gavin Holder Series

Chapter 4

Chapter 4

If you've never heard a man being tortured to death, let me tell you this – you will never have a good night's sleep again after you hear that sound. Bobby Bullet was not a good man by anyone's definition. In fact, he was basically the lowest known form of human life. But the shrieking I heard through that motel window was not the voice of Bobby Bullet the terrorist bank robber or Bobby Bullet the snitch. It was the sound of an animal in mortal terror and inconceivable pain. Some nameless thing desperate for help of any kind.

I took a glance back at Duffy and shouted “I'm going in!” then kicked the door below the lock, counting on the poor condition of the hinges to send it flying open if not knocking it right off the wall. Instead the damn thing broke halfway off and hung there from the frame like Christ on the cross, blocking my view and keeping me from charging through into the room.

“FBI!” I yelled, “Get your hands up!”

They opened fire before I even got all the words out, and I had to duck back out of the doorway so fast I didn't quite know why I'd done it until I was already out of the line of fire. The windshield of our parked car cracked around the three holes that suddenly sprouted in it, and my ears rang from the god awful noise of the UT gunman's huge .45.

“Holy s**t!” said Duffy. “I'll call for back-up! Keep your head out of that doorway, Holder!”

Instead of listening to my more-experienced colleague, I darted in and shot three times through the broken door, hoping to open up a clear line of fire. They answered that with their own barrage, and I caught a glimpse of the shooter before I ducked back out of the way. Age between 30 and 35, head shaved, cold gray eyes. Behind him I saw another man sliding a magazine into a submachine gun with an ominous click, but there wasn't much I could do about that at the moment.

Duffy fired three shots from beside the car, using the mass of the engine for cover. The motel window exploded, and someone yelled something from inside the room. Whatever it was, it was not an offer to surrender. The submachine gun opened up, and the fish sandwich in the parking lot splattered everywhere, little white flakes of half-rotten fried fish and soggy bread exploding in all directions. They must not have been able to see clearly from inside the room, forcing them to fire blindly out the window at everything. A line of little holes ran up the side of our car as the submachine gun rattled.

I waited a second this time before I fired again. The guy with the revolver was shooting three round bursts, but he might have had time to reload while the submachine gun was shooting up the parking lot and stitching holes in our car's frame. I wanted to give him a chance to fire another burst. He kept me waiting.

“This is the FBI!” I yelled again. I heard sirens in the distance, and some part of my brain was probably aware that help was coming and that it might make sense to play for time. There is always at least the possibility that the other guy will just give up, when he realizes you have the full weight and authority of the Federal government behind you.

“f**k the FBI!” the gunman replied, and pulled the trigger three times. So much for that theory. Some people don’t actually care very much about the full weight and authority of the Federal government. The sound was monstrous, and Duffy swore as one of the rounds went right through the car and blew a crater in the parking lot beside him. I knew this was my moment, and I took it. I stepped into the doorway, aimed my gun directly at his center mass, and shot him dead. The irony was that he had a bullet-proof vest. I could see it lying on the motel bed, but he wasn't wearing it. It really does pay to take precautions, but this guy was never going to get the chance to learn from his mistake. That’s just how it works sometimes.

I had just enough time to see the look of surprise on his face before I ducked back out of the door and behind the wall. The guy with the submachine gun howled out loud, and held the trigger down until his clip was empty. I have to admit, it was fairly awe-inspiring. The submachine gun clattered like a hail storm. The window frame splintered and fell apart. The bullets blew dozens of holes in the pavement. Our vehicle slowly sank on a flat tire, collapsing like a wounded animal dropping down to its knees before going to sleep for the last time. But then his weapon was empty and he was out of options.

Blue and whites were rolling into the parking lot at last, and local cops were pouring out of them with their guns drawn. I couldn't turn around and look long enough to tell how many, but it was clear that the odds had just turned in our favor in a big way.

“You're s**t out of luck, asshole!” yelled Duffy. “You'd better come out of there or you're about to die!”

The guy must have agreed with Duffy's assessment of the situation, because he suddenly called “Hold on! I'm throwing my weapon out! I give up!”

Out came the submachine gun, clattering on the sidewalk empty and useless.

“Come out with your hands over your head!” I told him. “Do anything else at all and I will shoot you!”

He came out slowly, a short but wiry man with a little brown goatee and a tear tattooed in blue ink just below his right eye. Both hands were clasped tightly together over the back of his head, and he was very careful indeed to avoid provoking us. He didn't exactly look beaten, though. If anything the look on his face was kind of smug, like he knew something we didn't know. He pretty much always looked that way, as we soon found out.

The motel room was basically destroyed by the gunfight. The door hung on part of one hinge over the dead body of the man with the revolver. He still looked surprised. The pillows on the bed had all been shredded, and the bed itself was slumped over like it was about to melt into the floor. In a chair beside the bed there was a busted lamp, resting in two shards over the open, staring eyes of Bobby Bullet.

When I remembered those eyes later I thought of Johnny Rotten's trademark stare, but right at that moment they didn't look anything like that. They looked like the eyes of a man who had just seen the worst thing in the whole universe and was damn happy not to be alive anymore. He was wrapped up in gray duct tape to keep him from getting out of the chair, but they hadn't gagged him. His tongue stuck out of his mouth like it was trying to crawl away to a better place, and there was a thin switchblade stuck right through it and hanging there like a Christmas tree decoration.

Bobby Bullet was dead, and with him our inside source on Ultima Thule. I had killed the man who had just been torturing him, and even though that man had been trying to kill me too it was a lot to take in. I paused for a moment to take my bearings, and little details jumped out at me. There was a calendar on the wall, but nobody had changed the page since last September. It showed a big-haired blonde woman in a one-piece American flag swimsuit, with a wet splatter of fresh blood rolling slowly down her perfect teeth. There was blood all over the place, much of it pooled up in the carpet all sticky and dark.

I shook myself to clear my head, then leaned over to get a closer look at the dead man in the chair. I searched his jean jacket, found a passport with his picture and someone else's name in it. I found a burner phone in his left jeans pocket, slick with blood and filth from whatever they'd been doing to his genitals before the gunfight started. I found a ballpoint pen, a Zippo lighter, a pack of gum.

And one more thing – an antique brass pocket-watch, the kind you can open and close. I think I knew what it was as soon as my hand brushed against it, even though I know that's impossible. I remember feeling this thrill of recognition as my fingers closed around the watch, although there's really no way I could have known what it was that quickly. But I pulled it out and there it was, the scuff marks on the lower left side were exactly the same. The Victorian floral design was the same. It even smelled the same, a faint hint of jasmine.

My mother's pocket-watch. I remembered the exact moment when she first gave it to me, the way her hand felt when it brushed against mine. I'll never forget it, and I could never mistake it for anything else. It was the only thing I had from her in all those foster homes, the only thing I was able to hold on to for a while, the only thing I took with me when I ran away. But I hadn't seen it in fifteen years.

Duffy came into the room a fraction of a second after I slipped it into my suit pocket. Or was it a fraction of a second before? He had a funny look on his face when I turned around, but I wasn't sure what the look was about. It could just as easily have been the awful sight of Robert Hitchcock, staring up at heaven but looking straight into hell.

Duffy swallowed awkwardly. “Well, that's, uhhh... that's pretty horrible. You and I are in deep s**t, Holder. This was not supposed to end in a bloodbath. It wasn't really supposed to be anything at all.”

“Alvin will understand,” I said. “We didn't have much choice.”

“The CI is stone dead. He's not just dead, they damn well butchered him. You really think you can spin that somehow? We f****d this up.”

“We didn't have any way of knowing they'd made him. And we couldn't hear what was going on.”

“Tell that to Antie Em,” he said, using the office nickname for our boss. “And that's just to start with. This is going to be a big deal, Gavin. Do you get what I'm saying? Investigations and so on.”

I started walking toward the doorway but Duffy stopped me, putting a hand on my arm to hold me back. He gave me a questioning look, like he was trying to figure something out about me. But all he said in the end was “Be ready when you go out there. The media's already here.”

“Don't worry,” I said. “I won't say anything.”

“It doesn't matter whether you say anything or not, they're going to find out who you are. Get ready to be a local celebrity, Holder. Hope you don't have a past to come back and haunt you.”

I gave him a weak little smile. But the thing is, I did.