“Won’t tell you that until you’re in the car,” Moore said.
McCoy got pissed, and he snapped, “You think I’d turn on you?”
Moore said, “Keep your voice down. Man, you’re not diggin’ what I’m saying. I’m sayin’ that if things go wrong—and they’ve been doing that since we took the run at Smalls—we could go down for murder. That’s bullshit. With everything that happened, it could be a federal case, and the feds got the needle. I’ve trusted you with my life, but if they said, ‘Tell us about Moore or we’re gonna strap you to the table and give you the shot,’ I’m not one hundred percent sure what you’d do.”
“Thanks a lot, good buddy,” McCoy said.
Moore exhaled in exasperation, and said, “I’ll trust you with one important fact. I’m rolling out of my driveway at eight o’clock tonight. I can’t wait any longer than that if I’m gonna make the drive. I’m leaving all the furniture and everything else I can’t get in my safe-deposit box. If you don’t want to come, set up a new Gmail address, and when I land where I’m going, I’ll drop you a note—if you’re still walking around free.”
“Let me think about it,” McCoy said.
22
Lucas, Bob, and Rae spent the evening in Bob’s room, plowing through the Xerox copies of the documents found in Ritter’s safe-deposit box, as well as the encrypted documents found on his laptop. The docs mostly consisted of bills of lading, along with handwritten notes by McCoy about the contents of the shipments and their recipients. There were also photographs of these people, men in military dress, or partial military dress, which appeared to have been taken surreptitiously with cell phones.
They quit at ten o’clock, and Lucas hadn’t been back in his room for more than the time needed to pee, take off his shoes, and turn on the television, when he heard a knock, but across the stub hall, the room he’d had the first night.
He picked up the PPQ on his way across the room, eased up to the door, plucked the spitball out of the peephole, and peeked out. A dark-haired woman was facing the other door. He couldn’t see much of her because she was short, no more than five-four.
He popped open the door with his left hand; he kept the PPQ in his right, turned away from the door—he didn’t want to frighten her if she was a hotel employee. Startled, she turned quickly, and he realized that she had no mouth or nose, only black eyes and eyebrows. About the time he realized she was wearing a military desert camo face mask, he also saw herlong-barreled pistol coming up, a pistol with a wicked-looking silencer, and he slammed the door, and fell on his back, as the first slugs smashed through it.
He rolled to his right, toward the bathroom door, and fired off a single shot, and three fast shots smashed back at him through the hall door, but now he was in the bathroom and he fired another shot through the door. The incoming shots were loud, silencers reducing the sound of the blasts but not eliminating it. His outgoing shots, on the other hand, were deafening. The incoming shots stopped, and a door slammed, and he thought she was probably running.
He got on his knees, ready to fire, cracked the door, saw that the stub hall was empty. He got to his feet and took three fast steps down the hall and, as he did, heard perhaps fifteen full-auto sound-suppressed shots in the main hallway, then three fast, noisy pistol shots, another brrrp of full-auto, and then sudden silence.
He cracked the door to the outer hallway, and Bob shouted, “Lucas! Lucas!”
Lucas shouted back, “You guys okay?”
“We’re okay. She’s down the stairs.”
Lucas stepped into the outer hallway and saw Bob, barefoot, in a T-shirt and white boxer shorts. He was pointing down the hall, and Lucas looked past him toward the exit sign. Seconds later, Rae, wrapped in a bathrobe, burst into the hall with a gun in her hand, saw the two men, and shouted, “Where’d he go?”
Bob and Lucas shouted at the same time, “Woman.Down the stairs.”
Rae and Bob started running toward the stairwell, and Lucas, running behind them, shouted, “No, no, no, Bob, stop!”
Bob and Rae kept going, and Bob shouted over his shoulder, “She’ll get away.”
“Stop. Stop, goddamnit!”
Bob and Rae, now uncertain, slowed as Lucas caught up to them, and said, “You really want to go into a concrete stairwell with an assassin who has a machine gun?”
Bob and Rae looked at each other, and Rae said, “Maybe not.”
“She’s gone anyway,” Lucas said. “She had a suppressed pistol and a machine gun. She’s some kind of pro, and she’d have a getaway set up. Let’s find out if anybody’s hurt, see if the security people have any video.”
“And maybe call your man Russell and see who’s gonna pay for all this shit,” Rae said, waving down the hall.
Lucas looked, saw the carpeting covered with plaster dust and soundproofing, the walls scarred with bullet holes, with more holes in the wall at the end of the hallway. A man poked his head out of a room, saw three people with guns, slammed the door.
Bob was talking fast, riding the adrenaline wave. “She had an MP9. It’s a rare gun, I’ve only seen one before this. She had it on a sling under her jacket. I saw it coming up and jumped back, and she hosed down the door. I fired three shots down the hall without looking, hoping to hit her.” He looked down at the carpet. “No blood. When she fired that second burst, I heard her kick the door open...”
“Got lucky,” Lucas said. “She thought I was in my original room...”
“Gotta call the cops right now,” Rae said, “or they’re going to show up with their own machine guns, and we’re the only people around they might think worth shooting.”
“Right,” Lucas said. “Let’s do that.”
