Read Games of the Hangman Online
Authors: Victor O'Reilly
Fitzduane
could smell the gun oil.
He was looking straight
down the black pit of the muzzle; it shook in van der Grijn's hands.
He didn't think van der Grijn could be crazy
enough to shoot him in a room full of witnesses, for no good reason except
machismo, and only a sparrow hop from the Federal Police building.
The he looked into van der Grijn's eyes and
knew that things weren't in control, and that if he didn’t do something soon,
he would die.
He moistened his lips to
speak, and the gun barrel jabbed closer.
All eyes in
the room were fixed on van der Grijn, Fitzduane, and that swaying gun
barrel.
A bearded man standing in the
as-yet-uninterrogated group bent down almost imperceptibly, as if to massage an
aching calf muscle, and with two fingers removed a Beretta from his boot.
Nobody seemed to notice.
Fitzduane
debated making an immediate move but decided against it.
Van der Grijn only had to flinch and
Fitzduane's skull would explode.
But
fuck it, he was going to have to do something.
Van der Grijn and his people weren't going to lie down quietly.
They were high, drunk on power — but they
hadn't seen the bearded man draw the Beretta.
Fitzduane could feel the sweat trickling into his eyes, but he was
afraid to move to wipe it away.
Van der
Grijn's eyes went empty; then he fired.
*
*
*
*
*
The Bear was
looking down at the somnambulant form if Detective Siemann with amusement
rather than anger when he heard the shot.
His feelings of benevolence toward Siemann changed in one split second.
"Wake up, you idiot," he snarled at
him, simultaneously kicking him hard in the ribs.
The large
window of the room on the second floor of the Youth House burst into shards of
glass.
A chair hurtled through it and
smashed on the pavement below, missing the Bear as he ran toward the entrance,
pistol in hand.
Sieman tripped on the
splintered remains, cut
himself
messily on the spears
of broken glass, picked himself up, and, pouring blood, ran after the Bear, who
had by this time vanished into the building.
*
*
*
*
*
Fitzduane felt
a sharp pain as the muzzle blast seared the side of his face.
The bullet cracked past his right ear so
close it drew blood, and it splintered the door behind him before embedding
itself in the plaster of the first-floor landing.
"You stupid shit," cried Fitzduane, shock, anger, and sheer
naked terror combining to pump adrenaline into his bloodstream.
He grabbed van der Grijn's wrists with both
hands and deflected the Dutchman's aim toward the ceiling.
Van der Grijn fired again and again as they
struggled, hot shell casings showering across the room and plaster falling from
the ceiling as the rounds bored their way in.
Knife leaped
forward to help van der Grijn.
Fitzduane
swiveled van der Grijn around as the blade was thrust at him.
He felt van der Grijn jerk and saw the shock
in his eyes as the blade cut effortlessly through his leather jacket and
entered his back.
He bellowed in pain.
The second
Dutchman had his revolver in his hand.
"Police!"
yelled the bearded man.
The voice was
American.
"Drop it,
motherfucker!"
The man had dropped
into the combat crouch and had his gun aimed at the second Dutchman.
Moving with
unexpected speed, the second Dutchman whirled toward the American, dropped to
one knee, and fired two rounds at him, hitting him once in the stomach.
The American's
first shot went over the second Dutchman's head, but then he sagged with the
impact of the bullet in his stomach, and his aim dropped.
The next five slugs from his little Beretta
went into the Dutchman's face and neck.
In
a
bloody
parody of a knight's posture, the Dutchman stayed on one knee for several
seconds, his head bowed, blood spurting from his wounds, his gun still held in
his drooping hand, and then slid sideways to the ground.
The Dutchman
with the knife, appalled and confused by his error, left the knife in van der
Grijn's back and leaped at Fitzduane.
The force of his attack separated Fitzduane from van der Grijn, who
still held the automatic in his hand.
Though half blinded by the plaster dust from the ceiling and groggy with
pain from the knife in his back, he was still just able to function.
He tried to aim at Fitzduane, who was
wrestling with Knife on the floor.
Ivo, who had
flung a chair out the window to attract attention, now flung a second chair at
van der Grijn.
It missed.
He dived under the table, encountering a mass
of arms and legs belonging to people who had beaten him to it.
Van der Grijn, momentarily distracted from
Fitzduane, fired back twice.
One round
gouged into the graffiti on the wall; the second drilled through the table,
hitting a seventeen-year-old runaway from
The door bust
open.
"
Polizei!
" yelled the Bear.
Van der Grijn
fired.
The Bear shot him four times in
the chest, the rounds impacting in
a
textbook
group and flinging van der
Grijn back across the room.
He
staggered, still upright, and the Bear fired again, this time assisted by
Detective Siemann.
Van der Grijn
reeled back against the window, smashed through the remaining jagged edges of
glass, and fell one story onto the pointed tops of the fleur-de-lis cast-iron
railings below.
His vast body arched at
the impact and twitched for a few seconds; then it lay unmoving, impaled in a
dozen places.
The Bear
smashed the one surviving Dutchman across the side of his face with his
still-hot gun barrel.
The Dutchman fell
to the floor, his cheekbone broken, and lay on his back, moaning.
The Bear flipped him over and pressed his gun
into the back of his neck.
"Don't
move,
asshole!"
The Dutchman became quite still; intermittently he trembled, and moaning
sounds came out of his mouth.
The Bear
kept his gun in position and, using his left hand, handcuffed him.
Siemann pulled
the table aside.
Bodies intertwined in a
confusion of limbs, began to separate.
Terrified faces looked up at him.
He held out his hand to help and realized he was still holding his
gun.
He holstered it and tried to say
something reassuring.
They stared at
him, and he looked down at his bloodstained body.
He shook his head and tried to smile, and the
tension on the faces eased.
One by one
they rose to their feet.
One figure
remained unmoving, blood gushing from her thigh.
Siemann leaped forward, ripped the belt from
his waist, and began to apply a tourniquet.
Once the bleeding eased, he unclipped his radio on and put in an
emergency call.
When he finished he
caught the Bear's eye.
The Bear nodded
his head a couple of times and smiled fleetingly.
He rested his hand on Siemann's shoulder.
"That was
good, Kurt, that was very good."
Siemannn
didn't know what to say.
He looked away
and stroked the injured girl's forehead with his bloody hand.
After twenty-five years on the force he no
longer felt he had just a job:
he felt
accepted; he felt like a real policeman.
The Bear
reached down to help Fitzduane to his feet.
"What was that all about?"
"I'm
fucked if I know."
Fitzduane walked
across to the bearded man, who was lying on the floor surrounded by a circle of
people.
Someone had put a folded coat
under his head.
His face under the beard
was very white.
Fitzduane knelt
down by his side.
"You'll be all
right," he said gently.
"That
was some piece of shooting."
The man smiled
weakly.
"It's a paycheck," he
said.
His eyes were going cloudy.
"The agency expects nothing less."
"CIA?"
"No, not those bozos — DEA."
The man grimaced in pain.
"Help's
coming," said Fitzduane.
He looked
down at the man's stomach.
The
large-caliber hollow-nosed bullet must have hit bone and ricocheted.
The entire lower part of his torso seemed to
have been ripped open.
He had his hands
folded across his intestines in a reflex attempt to
kept
them in.
Fitzduane wanted to hold his
hand or somehow comfort him, but he knew if he did so, it could add to the
pressure and cause more pain.
The man closed
his eyes and then opened them again.
They were unfocused.
"I can
hear the dustoff," he whispered.
Fitzduane had to bend down and put his ear to the man's mouth to hear
him.
"Those pilots have a lot of
balls."
The man gave a
little rattling sound, and for a moment Fitzduane was back in
another man die, the sound of the medevac chopper arriving too late.
Then he knew that the sound of the helicopter
was real and that it was circling somewhere outside the building.
The Bear
looked down at the American.
"He's
dead," he said.
As he had with
Siemann, he put his hand on Fitzduane's shoulder, but this time he didn't say
anything.
Fitzduane, still kneeling,
stayed there looking at the man's body, the hands already folded as if in
anticipation of an olive green body bag.
The blue eyes were still open; they looked faded.
Fitzduane gently closed the lids,
then
rose off his knees.
From outside
the Youth House, a heavily amplified voice boomed at them:
"YOU INSIDE, THIS IS THE POLICE.
LAY DOWN YOUR ARMS AND COME OUT WITH YOUR
HANDS UP."
"Assholes,"
said the Bear.
"It's the Federal
Police from the building next door.
They
must be back from their coffee break."
*
*
*
*
*
Examining
Magistrate Charlie von Beck — wearing a large, floppy brown velvet bow tie to
go with his cream shirt and three-piece corduroy suit — was talking.
The Chief thought von Beck looked like a
leftover from a late-nineteenth-century artist's colony.
He wore his fair hair long so it flopped over
one eye.
His father was an influential
professor of law at
had connections in all the right places, and he was sharp as a razor.
All in all, thought the Chief, Charlie von
Beck would have made an ideal person to hate.
It irritated him that he liked the man.
"Well, it
doesn't make the crime statistics look too good, I admit," said von Beck,
"but you have to agree:
it's
exciting."
"Don't
talk like that," said the Chief Kripo.
"We haven't had this many violent deaths in
invasion nearly two hundred years ago — and all you can say is ‘exciting.’
I can see the headlines in
Blick
or some other scandal sheet:
CHAIN OF
KILLINGS EXCITING, QUIP BERN AUTHORITIES
."
"Relax,"
said von Beck.
"
Der Bund
, in its usual discreet way,
will come out with something to balance the scales, like
EXAMINING MAGISTRATE COMMENTS ON STATISTICAL
ABNORMALITY IN CRIME FIGURES
."
"They
don't write headlines that sensational," said the Chief.
"So far, including Hoden, we have seven
dead, two seriously injured, and eight or so slightly injured."
"At least
there's an explanation for the fracas in the Youth House," said von
Beck.
"I'm still poking around, but
we've interviewed most of the parties involved and had some feedback from the
DEA."