Deadly in New York Read online

  “They on our ass again,” the driver said, looking in the mirror.

  “Yeah,” said Hawker. “I see that. We’re not too far from Rhinestrauss Avenue, are we?”

  “What’s the address?”

  Hawker told him.

  “Shit, man, that’s the fucking slums! Ain’t nothing in that area but old wornout factories, retired krauts, and Puerto Rican niggers.”

  “Don’t worry about what’s there. How long before we get to it?”

  The black man touched the brim of his hat. He looked concerned. “Maybe ten, maybe fifteen minutes.”

  “Fine. But instead of driving straight there, I want you to drop me off on the backside of the block. Can you do that?”

  “Hell, yes, I can do it. But look, mister, you just a fare to me. I didn’t sign on for no Dukes of Hazzard show. I done been through Korea. I don’t need this shit.”

  Hawker folded a twenty-dollar bill and slid it through the little window. “You get another one when we get there. Okay?”

  The driver checked the bill and jammed it into his pocket. “Hell, I do damn near anything for forty, mister man. Long as I don’t have to kill nobody.”

  “Don’t worry,” Hawker said easily. “I’ll take care of that.”

  The driver began to giggle, but stopped abruptly when he realized that Hawker wasn’t kidding.

  Hawker unzipped his duffel bag and unholstered the .45 Colt Commander he had had customized by the artists at Devel Corporation. He had had them add a wide-grip safety and a Bo-Mar rear sight, as well as increase the clip capacity along with some other shooting niceties.

  He had had no trouble getting the handgun back through Miami customs because he and Hendricks had flown the dark eastern corridor over Cuba to the States alone, in the Trislander.

  The customs men had simply nodded at their sparse luggage and sent them on their way. At Miami International Airport, Hawker had checked his bag through to New York at the TWA counter, while Hendricks made arrangements to have the Trislander stored.

  On their trip to Miami, Hawker and the old English butler had discussed a couple of scenarios for getting at Fister Corporation. Hawker’s ideas tended to be more direct. Hendricks’s plans leaned toward the oblique and outre.

  Even so, Hawker respected the butler’s intellect and British Intelligence training immensely.

  Finally they settled on a combination of two ideas.

  So, with an unemotional “good luck” and “safe journey,” Hendricks had flown off to London, while Hawker took TWA to New York.

  Hawker had expected action, but he hadn’t planned on having to use his Colt Commander so soon.

  From his duffel bag, he took one of the eight-round clips and fixed it snug into the grip. Then he slid a round into the chamber and locked in the safety.

  Hawker glanced out the rear window. The Lincoln was staying a more conservative distance behind them now, trying to blend into the darkness and the traffic.

  Through the hole in the glass partition, Hawker ordered, “Put some more distance between us. When we get to the back side of Rhinestrauss, I want to get out without being seen. After I’m gone, I want you to circle around and stop in front of the address I gave you, as if you’d just let me out. Got it?”

  The driver looked offended. “I look dumb or something to you, mister? Hell, yes, I got it—but I ain’t doing a thing till I get me that other twenty.”

  Hawker smiled and settled back. He wore a dark-blue Cuban shirt and white deck pants. He considered changing out of the pants into something less visible.

  He decided not to bother.

  The driver raced north on the Bronx River Parkway, then swung off abruptly on the Gun Hill Road exit. Five blocks later, he made a quick right, then a quicker left. He skidded to a halt and threw open the door.

  “Your address is straight through those houses,” he said, pointing. “I’ll pull around there just like you said—but I got to hurry. The Lincon ain’t far behind.”

  Hawker stuffed the second twenty in the man’s hand, grabbed his duffel bag, and slammed the door.

  The driver grinned as he skidded away, yelling, “Good luck, buddy. You’ll be lucky if you don’t get mugged before those dudes in the Lincoln catch you!”

  Hawker disappeared into the shadows just before the Lincoln squealed around the corner. He watched the limousine follow the taxi down the block, then turn west toward Rhinestrauss Avenue.

  Hawker made his way down an alley squeezed between two deserted tenements. Someone had strung across a chain-link fence and posted a city proclamation of condemnation.

  Hawker vaulted over the fence and sprinted toward the street where, between two somber brownstones, he could see the taxi slowing. He got to Rhinestrauss just before the Lincoln did.

  He stood in the shadows, waiting.

  The black taxi driver made a show of slamming the trunk shut—as if Hawker had just exited into the brownstone across the street.

  The Lincoln slowed behind the taxi, then stopped.

  Hawker assumed the men inside would wait until the taxi was gone, then go into the brownstone, looking for him. He planned to follow them in and take them from behind.

  He didn’t want any gunplay—not this soon. Hopefully, he would be able to take them alive and slap some information out of them before turning them over to the cops.

  But Hawker’s assumptions were all wrong.

  The men in the Lincoln didn’t wait until the taxi had pulled away.

  Instead, three of the four doors swung open, and the men who exited stood facing the taxi driver.

  The three of them wore dark suits, with hats pulled down low on their heads. All held automatic weapons.

  Hawker watched the taxi driver’s face tighten. “What the hell you dudes think you’re doin’, pointing them guns at me?” he bluffed, putting on a brave front.

  “Where is he?” one of the men demanded.

  “If you mean that dude I just brung from LaGuardia, he done went into that there house. I don’t know nothin’ more.”

  “You’re lying!” the man snapped. “Where’d you let him off?”

  The taxi driver tilted his hat back on his head. “It’s just like I told you, mister man—”

  Hawker thought they’d give him one more chance to tell the truth. He thought they might grab him and slap him around—and, by that time, he would be in position.

  It was Hawker’s second lesson in Fister Corporation diplomacy.

  The three men didn’t wait. They opened fire at once. Their weapons were outfitted with silencers. The silencers made the automatics sound like hydraulic staple guns.

  The taxi driver jolted backward into his taxi, slapping at the slugs as they plowed into his body.

  The three men moved toward the driver as they fired. It gave Hawker the opening he was looking for. The Colt was a fine handgun, but he had to be within fifteen yards of his targets to do any kind of sharpshooting.

  Hawker sprinted toward the back of the car, hoping to take cover there.

  He had almost made it, when one of the Fister Corporation’s three hit men saw him. The man swung his automatic around, firing. Asphalt at Hawker’s heels screamed behind him.

  Hawker dove headlong onto the street behind the Lincoln.

  He could hear the shoe leather slap as the men ran toward him. He rolled beneath the car and fired at the first set of legs he saw.

  A man swore violently and collapsed on the street, rolling over and over in agony, holding his right shin.

  Hawker immediately popped up and squeezed off two shots in rapid fire. A second man gave a hideous scream and pressed a hand to the gore that was now his face.

  He fell to the earth and kicked his legs wildly for a moment, then lay still.

  The third man released a long burst of fire, and Hawker ducked for cover again.

  He looked beneath the car—just in time. The third man, following Hawker’s lead, had dropped to his belly, trying to get a shot at Ha
wker’s legs.

  Hawker didn’t hesitate. With one long stride, he jumped onto the trunk of the car as slugs sprayed the asphalt. But, instead of stopping on the trunk, Hawker ran up over the roof of the car and down onto the hood.

  As Fister Corporation’s hit man struggled to his feet, the Colt Commander jumped twice in Hawker’s big right hand.

  The man was slammed backward onto the pavement, as if his legs had been chopped from under him.

  His head hit with a terrible thud, and he did not stir.

  The left lapel of his jacket began to glisten with black seepage from the two holes in his heart.

  Hawker jumped down from the car and walked toward the man he had shot in the leg. The man’s automatic—a 9mm Uzi, Hawker could see now—had been knocked away when he was hit.

  Now the man was crawling toward his weapon.

  He left a bright trail of blood on the street.

  Calmly Hawker kicked the weapon even farther, away. The man looked up. He had a pinched, feral face and dark eyes.

  “Don’t kill me,” he pleaded. “Please don’t kill me. I been hit. I been hit bad.”

  The man held his leg and groaned, as if to prove it was in bad shape.

  Hawker stood above him, with the stainless-steel Colt pointed at the man’s head. “Talk to me,” he whispered between tight lips. “Who sent you? How did you know I was coming?”

  The man shook his head violently. “I don’t know nothing … can’t even think. The pain’s too bad.…”

  Hawker dropped to one knee. He grabbed the man’s shirt collar and shook him. “Renard was sent to the Caribbean to kill me. How did you people know he didn’t? Damn it, talk! You won’t get another chance.”

  The man’s face contorted as if in great pain. “For God’s sake, leave me alone,” he moaned. “I don’t know nothing. I just do what they tell me.”

  “Who’s they?” Hawker demanded. “Blake Fister? Did he send you?”

  The sudden change in the man’s expression told Hawker that Blake Fister had, indeed, sent him.

  The man rolled away from him and huddled against the pavement.

  Hawker snorted in disgust. How in the hell had they known he was coming? Hawker wondered. Samuel McCoy was an old friend of Jacob Montgomery Hayes, and he certainly wouldn’t have tipped off the Fister people.

  And Renard was dead … or was he?

  Hawker remembered what Hendricks had said about the scorpionfish being fatal 90 percent of the time when the victim received no medical attention. But Hawker had pulled the French assassin into the water himself.

  Even if the poison hadn’t killed him, he would have certainly drowned.…

  As Hawker lost himself in thought, he momentarily lowered the Colt.

  It was a mistake.

  The wounded man’s right hand was a blur as it arced toward Hawker’s face. The stiletto glimmer of steel told him, in that slow-motion microsecond, that the man had drawn a knife as he huddled close to the pavement.

  Hawker got his left hand up just in time. He caught the man’s wrist and diverted the power stroke away from his body, into the pavement.

  Hawker clubbed the man twice in the face with the back of his right fist, but lost control of the knife in the struggle.

  With a final effort, the man swung the knife at him again. Hawker managed to knock it away, then put all of his weight behind an overhand right that crushed the man’s throat closed.

  The man gagged and floundered on the pavement, clawing at his own face, desperate for air.

  Hawker stood away from him and watched as the man’s face slowly darkened, turning blue. The man gave a final convulsive heave, then lay still.

  Hawker retrieved the Colt he had dropped in the struggle. He weighed it reflectively in his hand, then looked around at the silent black Lincoln, the taxi, and the four corpses.

  When the taxi driver had been shot, he had fallen back into the cab. The door of the cab was open, and the dome light showed the driver’s face as a black mask frozen in pain.

  Hawker noticed there were more lights on in the row of brownstone houses now. People peeked out from behind curtains.

  In the distance, he could hear the anxious scream of sirens.

  James Hawker shook his head wearily.

  Shit, he whispered.

  six

  Detective Lieutenant Scott Callis usually worked undercover. He worked narcotics, homicide, and sometimes even vice.

  But tonight, he was on conventional duty, working the streets.

  Like all the other precincts in The Bronx, the Pelham Station was overworked and understaffed. Their precinct was a war zone, ripe with teenage thugs, lunatic rapists, and professional crooks, murderers, and hookers.

  The one place they rarely had trouble in was the Rhinestrauss Avenue section, an area of older German immigrants.

  But lately, even the Germans had been getting their share—and Callis had a good idea why. Like tonight. A hysterical call about gunshots and multiple homicides on Rhinestrauss.

  If it was true, it might be time to do some serious checking. He had heard the street talk, and he knew a little bit about Fister Corporation.

  But rumors were one thing, and proof was something else.

  It took time to get evidence. It took time and money and manpower—luxuries his precinct didn’t have. Pelham Station was little more than a fort among savages, and few cops lasted more than a year or two there.

  But Callis had lasted.

  Callis had lasted eight years, going on nine. And in his years, he had seen every brand of crooked scheme, every form of human suffering.

  The years had taken their toll. Callis had been shot once, stabbed three times, and, bizarrely, he had been infected with gonorrhea after being bitten and scratched by a Gun Hill whore.

  Of the five wounds, the gonorrhea had been the most difficult to explain to his wife.

  Now his ex-wife.

  Like most cops who worked violent crime, he was divorced.

  Callis was a third-generation New Yorker of Greek immigrant stock. He had the wavy black hair, the prominent nose, and thick stature of most men from the ancient island. He was 5’ 10” and weighed 195, with wide shoulders and massive olive-tinted hands.

  As he forced his unmarked car, with siren blaring, through the 10 P.M. traffic, he touched his sports jacket mechanically to make sure his weapon was there.

  It was. A stainless Smith & Wesson .357 in a quick-release holster.

  Out of all the cops in America, fewer than eight percent ever had to draw their guns and fire in earnest.

  But all the cops in America didn’t work Pelham Station.

  In his eight years, Callis had already been forced to shoot six men. Four of them had died.

  Callis turned right onto Rhinestrauss and skidded in behind the patrol car from which now exited two uniformed cops.

  Three bodies lay in the street in plain sight. Blood had pooled beneath them, black as oil in the white glare of the street’s vapor lights.

  A fourth body was thrown over the seat of a yellow cab.

  Callis paused while he called in his location, carefully surveying the area to make sure some lunatic wasn’t waiting to drop him the moment he stepped from his vehicle.

  Finally he drew the Smith & Wesson, got out of his car, and left the door open.

  seven

  In the five minutes before the cops arrived, James Hawker tested and discarded a number of plausible lies to tell them.

  Finally he decided just to tell the truth.

  Some of the truth, anyway.

  When the two squad cars arrived, Hawker left his Colt on the hood of the Lincoln and held his hands out to show that he was unarmed. He felt sheepish and disgusted.

  This was exactly the kind of trouble he wanted to avoid—especially at the beginning of a mission. But it had happened, and he would have to deal with it.

  The first two cops were uniformed. Stupidly, they both jumped out of their car before they
even took time to draw their weapons. Had the situation been different, they both could have been blown away before they had a chance to reconsider.

  The third cop was a plainclothesman. Hawker noted that he handled himself carefully and professionally. Hawker ignored the rapid-fire questions of the two uniformed cops and waited for the detective to arrive.

  The detective approached slowly, then stopped two body lengths in front of Hawker. He held the stainless .357 skyward, but ready.

  “What’s your name?”

  Hawker told him.

  “Did you kill these men?”

  Hawker nodded. “The three guys in suits, I killed. They killed the taxi driver.”

  “Why?”

  “They were trying to kill me.”

  “Real bad boys, huh? They just up and decided to kill you? Or maybe you just up and decided to kill them.”

  “Before I say anything else …?”

  “The name’s Callis. Detective Lieutenant.” The Greek cop’s eyes never wavered from Hawker’s as he spoke. Hawker knew the look. He had handled himself the same way once upon a time; a million years ago, it seemed, when he had worked the streets of Chicago. Callis was carefully surveying him and the situation. And from that look, Hawker knew that Callis wouldn’t hesitate to blow his head off if need be.

  “Before I say anything else, Detective Callis,” Hawker continued calmly, “why don’t you have these two guys holster their weapons.” Hawker held his hands out again, slowly. “If you look closely, you’ll see I’m unarmed. And after watching the Chinese fire drill they put on getting out of their squad car, I just don’t feel comfortable with their pointing thirty-eights at me.”

  “You don’t give the orders around here,” one of the cops hissed, taking a step toward Hawker.

  Callis stopped him with a look. He gave Hawker a long stare of appraisal, then nodded slowly. “Where’s your piece? The one you used to waste these guys?”

  Hawker motioned with his head, but did not move his hands. “On the hood of the pimpmobile.”

  The detective motioned with his .357. “Davis, spread the guy against the squad car and frisk him.”

  When Davis had finished, Callis nodded, his eyes still locked on Hawker. “Okay, boys. Put your guns away. The guy’s right, I’m afraid. I’m going to have to have a long talk with you when we get back to the station about how to approach a hot zone.”