Steal, page 23
“Why would you need to do that?”
I had a good answer for him. But suddenly, somebody had an even better one.
CHAPTER 92
Everything went dark all at once. The chandelier overhead in the foyer, the sconces along the walls, every single bulb around us inside the house and out. The power had been cut.
I reached for my Glock. I had Foxx to thank for that. I wouldn’t have been carrying were it not for him. That was a deal breaker, he’d said. If I insisted on bringing in von Oehson on my own, then I absolutely had to be armed.
Of course, guns aren’t of much use if you can’t see what you’re shooting at.
Von Oehson had his phone out before I could grab mine. He hit the flashlight.
I repeat, guns aren’t of much use if you can’t see what you’re shooting at.
My head whipped left and right, my eyes desperately trying to adjust enough to make out any window in my line of sight. It was like Michael Corleone in his bedroom, when Kay asked about the draperies. Only she wanted to know why they were open. I was confirming that they were all closed. That’s why the gunman wanted darkness. So he could see his target light up.
“GET DOWN!”
I dove at von Oehson, decking him once again. This time to save his life. I was in the air, two bursts slicing past my ears overhead. Long-range ammo makes the most sinister sound. It’s like the devil blowing out your candles.
We both hit the ground. I spun, lunging for von Oehson’s phone, which I’d knocked out of his hand. I killed the flash, caught my breath, and proceeded to give him the most obvious set of instructions I’d ever given anyone. “Stay here. Don’t move!”
“The generator,” he said. “It’s going to kick in in a few seconds.”
“No. It’s not,” I told him. This wasn’t amateur hour.
I pushed myself up, slinging my back against the wall alongside the front door. The shots were so clean, the product of steady hands, that there was no sound of broken glass to follow. I had a living room to my left, another living room to my right. The rich are so damn redundant.
I guessed left, edging my way to take a look outside. Kneeling at the first window I came to, I pushed the curtain an inch to see what I expected to see. Nothing. Pitch blackness, no movement. But someone was sure as hell out there. Maybe even a couple of someones.
The sucker’s gambit, otherwise known as trying to elicit fire to locate a shooter, is like randomly checking the coin return on a vending machine. It rarely, if ever, pays off, but you still do it anyway.
I held out my phone just below the window, snapping a curtain selfie with the flash on. Maybe the guy had a twitchy trigger finger.
But not this guy. I listened to the silence. There was no shot, no sound of anything. It was my move again.
Whoever was outside, we needed to keep him there until we had a plan. I aimed, shooting out one of the windows on the far side of the room, then turned and fired across the foyer at a window in the other living room. Two blasts, one message. We’re armed. Enter at your peril.
Maybe a neighbor would dial the police, but it wasn’t going to be us making the call. Not yet. Only if we had to. Scaring this guy away wouldn’t make the problem disappear. Whether it was today, tomorrow, next week, or next year, it was either him or von Oehson. As for me, I didn’t have a choice. I was along for the ride.
I turned back, edging along the wall. I had the plan now, what we had to do. We needed a vantage point. A balcony, if there was one. Otherwise, the attic. As close as we could get to a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of the property, with only one way to reach us from inside the house.
I reached the entrance to the foyer, whispering to von Oehson. “We need to get upstairs,” I said. “The higher up, the better.”
Only he didn’t respond.
He was gone.
CHAPTER 93
You’ve got to be kidding me…
It was bad enough that there was a guy outside who wanted to kill him. Now there was someone inside the house who wanted to kill him, too. Me. If I could only find him.
Where the hell are you, Mathias? Where did you go? And why?
I knew my way to the kitchen from my first trip out to the house. I highly doubted he was just getting a snack, but it was as good of a place to start as any.
Crawling on my hands and knees, I made my way across the foyer and down a wide hallway. Before I even reached the kitchen I heard it. A low rumbling beneath me. An engine starting up. Shit.
I scrambled to my feet, blindly turning every door handle I could see in my path. Bathroom. Damn. Coat closet. Damn. Finally, the winner—the stairs to the basement. I started down, phone out front, the light from the screen allowing me just enough vision to see the steps.
What the hell is this?
The “basement” was only another hallway. Narrower, like a tunnel. The sound of the engine was getting louder, revving. I started to run. A light hit me square in the eyes. Two beams. Headlights. Von Oehson was making his getaway.
Over my dead body.
I’d bolted out from the end of the tunnel directly in front of his path, the curled nose of a Ferrari screeching to a halt only inches from my knees. It was a standoff in the middle of a massive garage with a car collection that would make even Jay Leno jealous. They must have been worth a hundred million dollars, with each car more exotic than the next. At least the ones I could make out against the glare.
Von Oehson lowered his window. I lowered my Glock.
“We both know you’re not going to shoot me, Dylan.”
“Maybe I’ll just shoot out your tires instead.”
His smug face returned. “You’re going to run out of bullets before I run out of cars.”
I truly hated this guy.
But there was no time to dwell. The piercing sound of the home alarm system suddenly kicked in; it was the one thing the gunman couldn’t cut the power to. He was in the house. Great. Peachy keen.
“Get in or get out of the way,” barked von Oehson, hitting a button to open a double-wide garage door that was up a ramp after a quick right turn behind me.
I stood there, still blocking his way, trying to think of another move to make. If there was one, it wasn’t coming to me. Von Oehson revved the engine, forcing my hand. The gunman was surely on his way down now.
I got in.
We sped off before I could even close the door behind me, the tires screaming against the polished pavement as we turned up the ramp.
“Hold on,” he said, as we hit the lip of the driveway, the front wheels going airborne. They landed with a jolt, my head banging against the back of the seat before I could turn to look behind us.
“Where were the keys?” I asked, as we skidded out onto the street.
“What?”
“The keys!” I shouted. “Where do you keep the keys?”
Von Oehson could hear me, although he hadn’t arrived yet at why I was asking. Suddenly, he realized. “Fuck!”
Yeah, that’s what I was afraid of.
CHAPTER 94
The keys weren’t locked up. Some were hanging on the wall, others were literally sitting in the driver’s seat. I was pretty sure that’s what von Oehson was saying. It was still hard to hear him over the engine as we redlined past a twenty-five miles per hour speed limit sign. The trees, other houses, everything was a blur as we approached the end of the street. His right foot was nowhere near the brake. Stop sign? What stop sign?
Also, where the hell are we going?
That question got pushed to the back burner as I leaned forward to catch the angle of my side view mirror. “Here he comes,” I said.
Von Oehson glanced over his shoulder. “Damn.”
“What?”
“He took the Stradale,” he said.
I knew my cars, but not all of them. I gave another look back, staring mostly at high beams. “Is that also a Ferrari?”
“Yep.”
“What model did you say?”
“An SF90 Stradale.”
“What model is this?” I asked.
“An 812 Superfast.”
“Tell me that means it’s faster.”
“Nope.”
Seriously? Not only were we being chased by one of von Oehson’s own cars, it was an even faster one. This wasn’t Ford versus Ferrari. This was Ferrari versus Ferrari.
“Look out!” I yelled.
There were two SUVs crossing in front of us at a four-way intersection. Von Oehson swerved but never slowed, threading the needle as he zipped between them. The only thing louder than their horns blaring at us was the sound of our would-be assassin slamming on his brakes.
“Turns!”
“What?” he asked.
“Turns! Start making turns!”
We’d bought ourselves a gap, a few seconds of spacing. Now it was all about sight lines and geometry. Right and left angles were our friends. Any straightaway was our enemy.
Von Oehson nodded. He got it. He’d also ponied up for a few Skip Barber Racing School lessons, apparently, because his turns were near flawless. Trail brake, late apex, full throttle. One corner after another and then another. Lather, rinse, repeat.
We were losing the guy. But that wasn’t the same as having lost him.
I looked at von Oehson when he bypassed the next turn, continuing straight. “What are you doing?”
“There’s a road up ahead on the right that leads to I-95,” he said, with another glance at his rearview mirror. “He’s nowhere in sight.”
“We need to keep it that way. Hold off on the turnpike.”
“Why? Now’s our chance. We can shake him for good.”
Von Oehson was famous for being able to see around corners. But it was only a figure of speech. Before I could explain, he took the right turn. It was definitely the wrong one.
“Shit!” he said immediately.
Exactly. What makes a professional killer good at his job? He thinks like his prey. Those same high beams that had been right on our tail were now staring us right in the face. He was about fifty yards away, idling right smack in the middle of the road. Waiting.
Von Oehson instinctively reached to put us in reverse but he was wrong again. I grabbed his wrist to stop him.
“What the hell are you doing?”
“It’s what you’re going to do,” I said. “Gun it!”
CHAPTER 95
This wasn’t the movies. I wasn’t Thelma. He wasn’t Louise. If this was a death pact, he needed a harder sell from me. And fast.
“The guy came here to kill you, but he’s not going to kill himself to do it,” I said.
I watched the light flick on behind von Oehson’s eyes. He slapped both hands back on the wheel, squeezing them until his knuckles flashed white. Then he gunned it.
They both gunned it.
We were two Ferraris barreling straight for each other, going from zero to sixty in two-point-something seconds, which meant I had approximately a millisecond to tell von Oehson the one other thing he desperately needed to do. “Duck!”
I knew what was coming at us besides 986 horsepower. Bullets. Lots of them. No sooner did we peel out than they started flying, shards of glass from the windshield raining over us from where our heads were supposed to be. I had one hand on the steering wheel, making sure both of von Oehson’s hands stayed the course. The rest boiled down to an educated guess, a simple calculation born from studying human psychology for more than half my life. Left or right? In what direction was the guy going to bail at the last possible second? Call it Reinhart’s Rule for a Million-Dollar Game of Ferrari Chicken. Steering wheel on the left, bail to the left.
Which meant he was coming right by me.
Unless, of course, I was wrong about everything. It was known to happen from time to time. Maybe this game would have no winners. In which case, von Oehson’s insurance premiums were about to seriously spike.
I powered down my window. Listen for a moment, I told myself. Hear it. Feel it. Just react.
The sound that a Ferrari SF90 Stradale makes when swerving on a dime at more than one hundred miles per hour turns out to be no sound at all. It’s like a black hole, sucking in all the air around it so nothing gets out. A silent scream.
I turned and fired. There was little aiming. Just keep it low and keep ’em coming. I had thirteen rounds left in the fifteen-round KCI mag in my G19, and I was unloading as many as I could. They were 9mm lottery tickets. Only one had to hit. C’mon!
Turns out, the sound that a 315/30ZR20 rear tire spinning at twenty-two revolutions per second makes when blowing out is anything but silent. The blistering pop! was matched only by the violent twisting and smashing of metal, carbon fiber, and glass against the pavement as the Stradale rolled over and over until it landed on some other Darien rich guy’s lawn.
Von Oehson straightened back up over the steering wheel. His body was shaking, probably from the relief and shock of still being alive. What he wasn’t doing, however, was stopping.
“Brakes!” I yelled. They weren’t locked, but he was. It was more like a daze. He wasn’t blinking. “BRAKES!”
He snapped out of it. The car screeched to a halt, the smell of burning rubber rushing through my open window as I threw my hands against the dash lest I go flying through our shot-up windshield.
“Holy shit!” said von Oehson.
That about summed it up. “Yep. Holy shit,” I said. I sounded calm but my heart was still beating out of my chest.
“Wait. What are you doing?” he asked.
I was opening the door. “What do you think I’m doing? Checking on him.”
“Checking on him? The guy was trying to kill us.”
“He was only trying to kill you,” I said. “I was just collateral damage.”
“What if he’s still alive?”
“We keep him alive.”
“Why the hell would you want to help him?” he asked.
“Because right now that’s the only way to help you.”
CHAPTER 96
There was no time to explain why. That much, in the moment, von Oehson could figure out.
I had him quickly turn the car around but not get much closer. “Engine off, lights on,” I said. “Not the brights, though.”
“Got it.”
“Now the keys.”
“You serious?”
But we both knew he’d already tried to bail on me earlier. Fool me once. I held out my hand. “And keep the doors locked,” I said.
He reluctantly surrendered the keys and hit the lock button behind me. Off I went, gun drawn, my eyes locked on the flipped-over Stradale as thick smoke, black as the night, billowed from its undercarriage. My lungs could feel the burn with every breath, every step. Damn, it was cold.
With von Oehson’s lights at my back I was already playing this all out in my head. I’d be giving Landon Foxx an early Christmas present. The gift would be wrapped in gauze and bandages, and maybe even placed in a medically induced coma for twenty-four hours to prevent further swelling around his brain (or something like that), but he would still be alive. And if he remained alive, what was inside that brain would be the gift that kept on giving.
Dollars to donuts, the guy behind the wheel—now presumably upside down behind the wheel—was the one who killed Frank Brunetti. He was a contract killer, and clearly big-time if he’d been hired by a foreign government. There was no telling how many other hits he’d done or for whom. That is, until Foxx and some special guests fresh up from Langley got their hands on him. I could picture this guy turning Chatty Cathy real fast, telling the agency everything.
And all I’d be asking for in return from Foxx was a clean-up job rivaling the Exxon Valdez. No big deal. Just make the local police pretend as if this night never happened, put von Oehson and his family in protective custody, and then convince the prime minister of Hungary and his intelligence arm to let bygones be bygones once they get their fifty billion back from von Oehson. After all, it was Christmas. The season of giving. Why not some forgiving, as well?
I was twenty feet from the tail of the car. There was still no movement. I started to angle around, stepping sideways, my elbows locked. A few more steps and I’d have a view of him.
“If you can hear me, place your hands at ten and two on the steering wheel,” I said. “You’ve got three seconds to do it.”
Only I wasn’t counting to three. The exact moment when someone is making up their mind is the exact moment they’re most vulnerable.
Springing to my left, I ducked into a crouch and stared down the barrel of my Glock straight into the driver’s-side window. There were no hands on the wheel.
“Can you hear me?” I repeated.
If he could, he wasn’t saying. Dead, unconscious, or setting a trap—it was one of those three. I saw the car flip. I saw it flip again and again. The force of the impact. He wasn’t answering because he couldn’t. That was my bet. It just wasn’t a sure bet.
I got up from my crouch, slowly walking toward the car. I’d given him his chance, twice over. If he could move, he could talk. In other words, I was shooting on first movement.
But there was no movement. I edged up close to the car, peering in through the smashed-out window on the driver’s side.
He wasn’t dead.
He wasn’t unconscious.
He wasn’t there.
My head whipped back up the street. I was staring into headlights, but I could see just enough of the silhouette, as the panic shot through me like lightning.
He was heading right for von Oehson.
CHAPTER 97
He was five feet from the car, and I was fifty yards away. I might as well have been on Jupiter.
I burst into a sprint, shouting as loud as I could. “DROP IT!” Over and over. “DROP IT! DROP IT!”
He was still just a silhouette, but the arm was outstretched, right at the window. Right at von Oehson. I was a split second from firing.
I was a split second from making the biggest mistake of my life.
