Hawk, p.9
Hawk, page 9
part #6 of Will Slater Series
Slater almost widened his eyes, but made sure to keep his expression placid. It still shocked him all the same. This man had been beaten into such utter submission that he was aiding and abetting Slater in any way he could. He was offering suggestions, highlighting contingency plans, and doing anything possible to make sure he stayed alive.
What did you expect? Slater thought to himself. This is organised crime. No-one has allegiance to anyone else.
It’s a dog eat dog world.
Slater said, ‘Then don’t be here when they arrive.’
‘Where should we go?’
‘I’m not your babysitter. Figure it out for yourself.’
‘I don’t want to help them,’ the guy said. ‘I don’t want to make you angry.’
‘I’m already angry.’
‘I don’t want to make you more angry. Neither do my buddies. They’re just trying to earn a payslip. We all are.’
‘You would have killed me just before.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Get out of here,’ Slater said. ‘But make sure you call them first. I need them here immediately. Then you can go.’
‘They’ll come looking for us.’
‘Then you’d better move quick, hey?’
The guy simply nodded.
Slater turned on his heel and trotted down the steps. On the way past the two unconscious men he skirted around to the sidewalk near the left-hand side of the stairwell and collected the three Heckler & Koch pistols off the kerb. He gathered them up between his fingers and set off ambling back down the alleyway, following the trail from whence he came.
Leaving devastation in his wake.
18
The address fed to King by the junkie led him to a residential block of apartments near the north of the eighth district, only a few blocks away from the Hungarian National Museum.
The surrounding area was fairly upmarket, with wide paved roads and bright green London Plane trees arching their crowns toward the sky. Pedestrians were sparse, but the few that trickled around the area kept largely to themselves, chatting in their groups or admiring the scenery. King stood alone in front of the residential building, staring into its foyer, wondering if he’d made a mistake.
Wondering if the junkie had given him the wrong address, despite his warning.
There was only one way to find out.
He took the stairs two at a time and pulled the door handle, whereupon he ran into his first problem.
It didn’t budge an inch.
Through the glass he spotted a resident heading for the entrance — a neatly dressed woman in her early twenties, with a small dog in tow on a leash. King stepped back and fumbled in the pockets of his overcoat, feigning irritation over not being able to locate his key.
The woman reached the entrance and thumbed a green EXIT button on the side of the wall.
The door sprang open, and she bustled past with her sausage dog trotting alongside.
King sighed with relief and caught the door as it swung outward.
She turned and offered him a warm smile, flashing brilliant white teeth.
He smiled back.
And then she was gone, and he slipped into the foyer with the most natural mannerisms he could muster. He knew he could turn his charm up to eleven if the situation demanded it.
The benefit of good genetics.
If he’d been stooped and squared away with a desperate, paranoid face, she might not have been so lax to let him in without visual confirmation of a key — especially not in this day and age. But he’d never had much trouble swaying people to help him out.
He should have entered the foyer with confidence, but the woman’s warm smile reminded him of Klara.
So instead, he walked in angry.
He checked the apartment number on his smartphone — the number “705” rested in front of the rest of the address. He strode to the elevators, called one down, and punched the button for the seventh floor.
It whisked him upward.
Do it fast, a voice in his head told him.
The junkie might have found another phone by now. Unlikely, but pay phones still existed. This entire state of flow — from one address to the next to the next — required almost no room for hesitation. Slater had told him that earlier in the morning. Thankfully, that was the only way he knew how to operate.
He brought the adrenalin back, feeling it tickle the base of his spine and work its way up to his neck. He balled his fists again, and breathed deep, and considered the Glock 17 in the rear of his waistband.
He thought, No.
A surefire way to bring the impromptu operation to a screeching halt would be to fire a gun in an upmarket residential apartment complex. The police would be on the scene in minutes, and there’d be no guarantee he could get out of the building. Besides, he’d made it here in under ten minutes. He figured the junkie would sit around in his own misery for at least that long, wondering how he’d been struck by such misfortune.
The man would sit there in a state of analysis paralysis — going over all the possible outcomes. Would this mystery man really go to the apartment? Would he name-drop the junkie? Was his life now over?
King wanted him to sit there and stew. It meant he wouldn’t run to the nearest pay phone and make the call.
So he was banking on that.
But he figured he could improvise if they knew he was coming, too.
He would just beat them to the draw, as he’d beaten anyone on the planet in a game of reflexes for ten years and counting.
The elevator deposited him on the seventh floor, in a corridor he’d seen a thousand times over in various upmarket establishments all over the world. He gave thanks for the plush carpet as it absorbed his footfalls, and he made it to the fifth apartment in the hallway in a few seconds.
Three digits had been stencilled into the dark wooden door.
705.
King backed up to the far wall, took a deep breath, and charged.
Locks were simple contraptions. Put two hundred and twenty pounds of raging muscle mass into the centre of a standard door with the charging speed of an angry bull, and bad things were bound to happen internally.
Either to King if the door didn’t give, or to the lock if the force was too great.
And King had a hell of a lot of force to give.
It snapped, and the door shot inward at an uncanny speed.
King followed it into the apartment, and found himself in a small hallway, with a doorway at the end leading to an open-plan kitchen, dining room and living area all rolled into one.
He came in with all the momentum he’d built up, and if it had been an ordinary domestic scene he might have given the occupants a heart attack.
But it was far from an ordinary domestic scene.
In fact, his luck ran out almost instantly.
There was a fat bald guy right in front of him, in the entranceway, with a big .44 in his hand. He looked ready to use it. If he was, King didn’t stand a chance — he put that together in the brief microcosm of time where the brain processes vital new information. There were six rounds in the cylinder, and one would go right through his skull and pulverise his brain if the guy had any kind of ordinary reaction speed.
But he wasn’t ready to use it.
Not yet.
He was mid-stride, turning toward the doorway, and red in the face. Wheezing for breath, almost, even though there was barely room to move in this tiny flat.
Which meant they must have just got the call that King was on his way.
King envisioned the frantic burst of motion — running to a drawer, shoving clothes aside, rummaging around for the .44, pulling it out, hustling to the entranceway.
Another few seconds and the guy would have been in position.
So maybe luck was back on King’s side after all.
He kept his pace and kicked the guy in the stomach, doubling him over and almost making him spew his breakfast over the wooden floorboards. King kept moving forward, and he snatched two handfuls of the guy’s shirt and rammed him back into the far wall, knocking the back of his head against the plasterboard.
It hit with a thud.
The guy went wobbly.
Disoriented, but not unconscious.
But in a fight, they were one and the same.
They both rendered you useless.
King reached down and ripped the .44 out of his hands and smashed an elbow horizontally into the bridge of his nose, and he realised he’d put a little too much ferocity into it when the guy reeled back like he’d been hit by a baseball bat and bounced his head off the wall a third consecutive time, which seemed to be the straw that broke the camel’s back, because after that he went down in an ungainly pile that King knew signified total unconsciousness.
It wasn’t a practiced fall that protected his head from further damage.
His hands didn’t fly to his face to absorb the shock.
Instead his legs turned to jelly and he collapsed straight down vertically and splayed across the floor with a grisly bang. His broken nose hit the floorboards next as he faceplanted forward, and the pain woke him back up.
He started howling, curled up in the foetal position, as King advanced through to the next room with the .44 held at the ready.
King hesitated in the doorway.
Something wasn’t right.
Then two new guys, crouching, poised in wait, fell on him with blunt weapons as soon as he stepped foot in the living area.
19
Lukas and Benicio ended up returning with the cavalry.
Slater figured there wasn’t an urgent need for tactical adjustment. He wasn’t dealing with geniuses here. Organised criminals had routines and patterns and systems in place to manage their lifestyles, because most of their time was spent ingratiating with ordinary society.
They couldn’t descend into savagery in the same way that a mercenary working in the jungles or at a remote outpost could.
They had to go to dinners and attend social events and bribe their way to seats at the right tables, so the actual crime had to be reserved for whispers and occasional bursts of violence, but that brought with it a certain reservedness and apprehension to act like the mob thugs they were in public view.
They weren’t ready to flip the switch so easily.
Slater was.
So he stayed where he was, masked by the shadows in the alley, crouching between two dumpsters and waiting for the three sentries he’d beaten down to get their shit together and sort themselves out.
It didn’t take long.
They pulled themselves upright, the second and third guy helping the first to his feet. The first guy was the slowest to rise. Slater had dealt the most damage to him. He looked pale and shaky as he got his legs underneath him, and he gripped the balustrade with white knuckles. It seemed he was fighting the urge to vomit. He breathed in and out, in and out, in and out — like a human statue, frozen in time, except for his belly distending with each breath.
The third guy — the one with the broken nose — turned away from the other two and slid a phone out of his suit pants. He dialled, mumbled a few words, paused a beat, said something else a little more aggressively, and then hung up.
Then he turned back to his two colleagues and urged them to do exactly what Slater had recommended.
He urged them all to walk way.
The information had been passed along over the phone, and now they had to flee. Hey boss, yeah it’s me, no don’t worry everything’s fine — oh and by the way, we just got the shit kicked out of us and we’re getting out of here before it gets any worse. Best of luck with the rest of your life.
Slater saw the first two glance at each other with apprehension, and then the entire trio seemed to collectively shrug their shoulders as they arrived at the same conclusion. They had broken bones and concussions and pain up to their eyeballs. They were in no mood to hang around and test Slater’s wrath. He’d warned them explicitly.
If they were still here when their bosses showed up, they’d just get hit again.
And harder.
None of them were willing to even entertain the possibility.
They all sauntered off with their heads bowed, wondering what the consequences would be. They would probably have to disappear. Lukas and Benicio would sniff them out if they stayed in Budapest. They’d walked off the job at the first sign of adversity. That wasn’t something you did in a field like this.
But I’m a different kind of adversity, Slater thought to himself. I’m demoralising.
They were gone only fifteen minutes before Lukas and Benicio pulled up in a 4x4 Mercedes G-wagon, with three burly men in expensive tracksuits in tow. Lukas came out of the driver’s seat, Benicio came out of the passenger’s, and the trio of helpers piled out of the back, one by one. They were European and built like bodybuilders with jaws made of granite and identical buzzcuts.
Your cookie-cutter enforcers, like something out of a bad Mafia film.
The tracksuits indicated they were currently being used for intimidation purposes somewhere else in Budapest, but had been rounded up and carted to the scene just in case things had gone bad. There was nowhere in a tracksuit to store a gun without it being incredibly obvious, so they’d opted to hold the sleek Heckler & Koch 9mm VP9SKs in their hands, keeping them low and pressed to their side in case of civilian observers.
But there was still no-one around.
The five-man procession made for the steps out the front of the townhouse. Their eyes were wide and their gazes were searching for any sign of movement. It seemed they couldn’t quite believe the initial three men had actually run off. The guys in tracksuits were in total disbelief, but Lukas and Benicio seemed a little more understanding.
And it made sense.
They were the only two who had previously met Slater.
They knew what he could do.
Slater stayed in the alleyway for a moment, weighing up when to make his approach, clutching his own VP9SK tight in his palm. They seemed to be the only weapons Lukas and Benicio’s crew had. It made sense. Budapest was the kind of demographic where concealed carry was vital — the mob couldn’t be openly walking the streets with firepower in their hands. They had to be subtle about it.
Slater tested the weight of the gun in his own hand and figured he could put it to good use.
Then he found his opportunity.
An elderly couple out for a stroll toddled across the mouth of the alleyway, just as he was about to emerge from behind the dumpsters. The five-man team on the other side of the street caught sight of the bystanders, and subtle panic rippled through them. The guys in tracksuits shifted their guns into their opposite hands, pressing them tight against their bulky thighs, masking them from view, and all five of them averted their eyes, as if pretending they weren’t there.
Slater came out from behind the dumpsters when the old folks were three-quarters of the way across the alleyway’s mouth.
He moved fast, and by the time they’d passed by, he was right there behind them. He darted out into the street, narrowly avoiding a collision with the pair, but he kept quiet. They barely noticed him on his way past.
Because that was what Lukas and Benicio and their goons had missed.
They’d just seen a couple of pedestrians and panicked. But these geriatrics were pushing ninety, hunched over and supported by walkers, and by the time Slater had stepped out onto the asphalt they were already well out of earshot, slowly following the sidewalk as it curved around down the expensive avenue.
They were wrapped up in their own bubble.
And Slater could use it.
Because the five mob thugs were looking in any direction except the one that mattered. They’d instinctively averted their eyes from the elderly couple. They were focused on the road ahead, or the townhouse’s front door, or the pavement between their feet.
Slater broke into as fast a sprint as he could manage without making a sound.
He flew across the road, screeching to a halt on the opposite sidewalk, and had his arm around Benicio’s throat before any of them realised what was happening. He shoved the Glock into the side of the man’s temple, and stared daggers into the other four.
Their guns didn’t come up.
They stood there frozen, pumped full of disbelief.
Where the fuck did he come from? Slater could hear them all thinking.
Slater said, ‘Guns down.’
He kept his voice low — the elderly couple weren’t out of sight yet. But they were half blind and half deaf, so if they turned around to peer back down the street they would see six blurry shapes standing real close together halfway along the avenue.
Slater said, ‘Guns down, now.’
The trio in tracksuits complied straight away. They had no intention of making a heroic gesture and getting their boss killed in the process. Too much risk. Too much potential for collateral damage. They let their VP9SKs clatter to the pavement, mirroring what Slater had done to the sentries just half an hour earlier.
Lukas was a little more difficult to persuade.
He started to bring his own Heckler & Koch up from where it rested in his palm, pointing at the ground.
Inch by inch, he raised it.
Slater gave him a stare that could melt steel and said, ‘That’s a really, really bad idea, Lukas.’
He shoved his own weapon so hard into Benicio’s temple that the man cried out in anguish.
A shiver ran down Lukas’ spine, and he dropped the gun.
Slater said, ‘All of you inside.’
Lukas said, ‘Why can’t you just fucking leave us alone, man?’
Slater said, ‘Something came up. After I left last night. Now I need your services.’
All six of them shuffled up the stairs. Lukas unlocked the front door, and they went through one by one. Slowly. No sudden movements.
Keeping his eyes on five highly dangerous, well trained men at once, Slater could feel the adrenalin pounding in his veins. When he shoved Benicio forward and scanned all five of them for potential second weapons, he figured he was safe. There was nowhere to hide more firepower. The tracksuits saw to that. And Lukas and Benicio would only have the one weapon each. They were glorified system administrators. Sure, they did mob work, but they weren’t tough as nails. They didn’t carry multiple weapons around like gangbangers. They sat at desks, and if they needed to, called in the muscle to help them out.
