The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series) (10 page)

Read The Bannerman Effect (The Bannerman Series) Online

Authors: John R. Maxim

He nodded. “Shame we have to leave. Won't likely be another time when we got all three of them practically within the swing of a cat.”
“Everything in its time and place, darlin’.” They hurried along the ground floor corridor. “For now, let's get at least an hour away, down toward Italy. Then we can call like we're still here in town and get the bad news about poor— Goodness, what was that?” A loud crash echoed from above. A woman's voice shouted. Sounds of running footsteps.
Her husband looked up. “That's about where Susan is,” he said. “With all that bangin' and smashin', maybe that suppository wasn't as slow releasin' as advertised.”
Caroline frowned. “The suppository was just fine. More likely that big ox, Lesko, tripped over a chair on his way in. Still, we hadn't ought to dawdle.”
“Let's not get careless, either. When things start to go funny, they tend to go in bunches.”
“After you, darlin’,” she said.
Carla Benedict's job, as assigned by Molly Farrell, was to cover the emergency entrance and to cut off any escape uphill toward the town while Molly and Billy McHugh covered the route down toward the railroad station. But Carla, eager to be in on the action wherever it happened, had chosen a position half the distance between the emergency entrance and the main entrance. She and Gary Russo were fifty yards from where they should have been.
Still, when a middle-aged couple stepped arm in arm from behind a row of parked EMS vehicles, Carla spotted them at once. Slowly, her eyes widened. A smile tugged at her mouth. “Well, I'll be damned,” she whispered.
“You know them?” Russo asked.
She shushed him. “I'll tell you later,” she said. She watched them go.
The couple turned uphill but she waited, expecting Bannerman to appear and signal her to close on them. He was nowhere in sight. When she could wait no longer, she had to choose. Either follow them up a street that offered no real cover or try to get ahead of them and contain them until backup could arrive. She and Russo had scouted every street within three blocks of the hospital. The one to her right ran roughly parallel. If she hurried, sprinting all the way, she could intercept them before they reached a street where there was pedestrian traffic. But Russo, she knew, could never keep up with her.
“You follow from here,” she told him. “Stay in the middle of the street where Paul can see you if he comes out. Otherwise, keep them in sight. Do not engage. Don't worry about them spotting you.”

Before he could object, she took off at a lope toward the nearest corner and disappeared from view.

It was Russo's pride that would kill him. If not in five minutes, then within the hour. True enough, Russo would admit, he was not the equal of the others when it came to a field action. Nor had he had any special training in the art of surveillance, although he tended to regard it as less an art than a matter of common sense. And, true enough, he had no great experience in the techniques of silent killing, an aptitude that, in his view, reflected more a personality disorder than a talent. Still, so be it. They had their specialties and he had his. But for Carla to use him in this manner was an insult. She'd as much as said, just stay out of the way, distract them if you can, but let me handle them. Well, he decided, he might not be a Billy McHugh or a Carla Benedict but he'd show them he was easily the match of that middle-aged couple now puffing up the hill ahead of him. And he was damned if he would stroll like a dummy up the middle of this street waiting for one of them to decide to turn and put a bullet in him.
Carla Benedict's eyes were shining. The couple that she'd been told to watch for, middle-aged, well dressed, passports identifying them as a Ray and Caroline Bass from Mississippi, were no more from Mississippi than she was. It had been years, fifteen at least. But she'd have known them anywhere.
The man was Harold Carmody. The woman was Lurene, his wife. She also knew the way they liked to work. Get close in. Get friendly. Pick your time. Then vanish. They always had good paper. Somewhere, she knew, there would be a real Mr. and Mrs. Bass. Probably off on a world cruise or touring India by yak. Some damned thing. Harold and Lurene would leave a trail a mile wide but all it would lead to in the end would be a pair of bewildered vacationers someplace wondering what the hell the arresting officers were talking about.
Last she'd heard, they'd retired. Bought a house in Lubbock to be near the grandchildren. They must have gotten bored. Maybe, she wondered as she ran, they got into a drug habit and it got expensive. Maybe, somewhere in there, was an explanation of why they'd use cocaine as a weapon. It didn't sound like them. They never touched drugs that she could recall. Hardly even drank. Anyway, Harold liked to work with a knife. Cocaine was dumb. Iffy. Too slow. Carla made a mental note, if they got a chance to chat, to ask them about that.
Harold and Lurene, as Carla intended, had spotted Russo.
*Td say we got company, darlin’.” Harold Carmody nudged his wife as they trudged up a crooked street lined with old converted warehouses and an occasional shuttered shop selling plumbing or electrical supplies.
She nodded that she'd seen him. “Real sloppy company if you ask me.”
Russo may have been the only man in Davos wearing a chesterfield coat and a homburg hat. He walked with both hands in his pockets, elbows out, in the manner of Peter Lorre. Worse, he stayed close to the building line, trying to seem casual, pausing now and then to examine the odd window display of toilet mechanisms and drain snakes.
Carla Benedict's intention was to distract them, to make them wonder. Russo made them certain.
“Two or three more blocks,” Lurene said, “and he'll see the car we're driving. We don't have time to idle around so he don't. I suggest we either lose him real fast or you gut him.”
Just ahead of them, the street they were on doglegged about twenty degrees to the left. Half a block farther it veered back to the right.
“Darlin’,” he said, “we round this little corner here and you just zip on ahead. Wait for me ‘round the next one but let that feller see a little piece of you turnin' out of sight.”
“All right, but don't linger with him,” Lurene said sternly. “Never mind asking any questions. You just kill him and be done with it.”
”I wasn't of a mind to socialize, darlin’.”

A BMW, Billy McHugh driving, swung into the street a full two blocks below Gary Russo. Bannerman, holding a bloodied handkerchief to his mouth with one hand, pointed with the other. Russo was approaching a blind
corner
from its near side.

Billy shook his head ruefully. “Hugging that wall's a good way to get his throat cut.”
Bannerman could see that. “Maybe you'd better tap your horn.”
“They'll hear it too,” the bigger man frowned. “Wherever Carla is, she's got something going here by now. We could blow it.”
Bannerman hesitated. But Billy was probably right. “Let's just get up there,” he said.
Russo, approaching the bend, had hesitated as well. But now he could see the next corner. There was the woman. Just disappearing from view. Looking ahead, not back. Gesturing with her hands. The man must be in front of her. Russo cursed. Lose them and he could look forward to about a month's worth of crap from Carla.
Rounding the dogleg, he lengthened his stride. As he passed a recessed doorway, his eyes locked on the corner beyond and his inner brain tried to shout a warning that something was wrong. There was a shape in that doorway. He sensed movement. His head turned to glance over his shoulder but, before his eyes could focus on the shape, a gloved hand clamped over his face. It jerked him backward. An arm coiled round his waist and, with it, the white hot rip of a knife point as it probed for a space between his ribs. Russo was sure he was dead.
”Car-mo-dyyy . . ,”
A distant call. Carla's voice. Then, to his right, the squeal of a car's brakes. The man behind him stiffened. Abruptly, the gloved hand came down from his eyes and grasped him across his buming chest. He could see, through tears of pain, but he could barely breathe. He looked down past the arm and he saw, to his horror, that the long thin knife, blood running down its blade, remained in his chest. He could not tell how far it had penetrated except that he saw no tapering of the blade at all. Only parallel edges of steel.
“You get one chance.” A voice to his right. Billy's voice. “Ease it back out or you're dead.”

He saw Billy, his face dipped low over the barrel of a silenced pistol that was aimed at a point just behind him. And Paul, in the passenger seat, climbing out now. And Carla. Here comes Carla. She's walking with the woman, half-dragging her. The woman's face is smeared with blood.

“Well, I'll be . . .” Russo heard the voice at his ear. There was no fear in it. More a sense of wonder. “Hello there, Carla, honey. Little rough on an old friend, aren't you?” Russo felt himself being dragged deeper into the doorway. The knife twisted. He began to scream but could only gag.

“Paul?” Billy's voice. ”I got no shot.”
Carla was close now. With the woman. He saw a knife in Carla's hand as well, its blade held high against her cheek.
“Lurene?” The voice again. “Lurene, darlin', are you okay?”
“I'll mend,” she said thickly. “Just don't you let go of that hole card.”
“Paul, my friend,” Carmody pressed his back against the padlocked door, “I'd say we got ourselves a stand-off here.”
Bannerman rounded the car, his eyes, with no expression, locked on those of Harold Carmody. He stepped to the driver's side and held out his hand toward Billy McHugh's pistol. “Billy,” he said quietly, “give me that, please, and open the trunk.”
“Darn it,” Carmody clucked his tongue. ”I just knew there was somethin' about you. If you're who I think you are, me and Lurene had a real careless briefin'.” Ruefully, he glanced toward Carla Benedict. Hadn't seen her in fifteen years but he'd sure heard about her. Even worse, the feller Paul called Billy, that'd be Billy McHugh himself.
Ah me,
he thought sighing.
And if they're with Paul Bannerman,
answerin' to him, the Paul must be
. . .
damn. Careless
ain't the word for it.
“Anyhow, Paul, put that thing up. Shoot me and you as good as kill your friend here.”
“Harold,” Carla Benedict said through her teeth. “You stick him any more and you'll watch me core old Lurene's eye like a fucking apple.”
“Paul?” Carmody's voice went higher as Bannerman shifted the silenced Ruger into his left hand and stepped toward him. “Paul, it weren't personal. Fact is, me and Lurene were gettin' real fond of you and Susan.”
”Uh-oh,” Carla gestured urgently with her
chin.
“Paul, on your left.”
Bannerman glanced down toward the hospital. There was Lesko, his face white with rage, charging the hill in their direction. Bannerman did not break stride. He reached for Russo's right hand, which had been hovering, quivering, over the knife as if afraid to touch it. Calmly, almost gently, Bannerman took the hand and raised it to shoulder level. He fired three times.

-8
-

Lesko was the first to retum to the hospital. He came alone. The look in his eyes, thought Elena, was strangely distant.
“Did you find them?” she asked.
Lesko nodded vacantly. ”I want to see Susan/’ He brushed past her and opened the curtain surrounding his daughter's bed.
“The news from the doctor is good,” she said to his shoulder. “She is responding. Her lips have been moving. Coma is becoming sleep.”
“Yeah, look,” he said without turning. “Leave us alone, will you?”

Elena backed out. She closed the curtain. Behind her, a tapping on the glass partition. Molly Farrell was there, her expression anxious.

Elena listened to the events of the last twenty minutes. One man was wounded. He insists that his wounds are not immediately life-threatening but he needs attention where no questions will be asked. Does Elena know of such a place? She did. She and her cousins would take him there at once. She returned to Lesko's shoulder.

”I must go,” she said. “One of their men needs help.”
“Yeah. Go ahead.” He still did not turn.
She brushed against him, reaching to touch Susan, to remove a strand of hair from her face.
“Look,” he snapped. ”I asked you. Leave us alone.”
Elena stepped back. She paused, hugging herself, stung by the unexpected brutality of his dismissal. There seemed nothing to say to it.
“Good-bye, Lesko.”
She turned and walked away.
Lurene Carmody, gagged and tightly bound, one eye swollen shut, watched the preparations being made for her interrogation.

A plastic automobile cover, proof against blood stains, had been borrowed from the basement garage and spread over the carpet of Bannerman's Klosters apartment. She was lifted onto it. Now Billy McHugh was drawing the room's upholstered fumiture close around her. Next, she assumed, would come the bedroom mattress to serve as the roof of a small soundproof chamber. Carla Benedict had Russo's medical bag. She was sorting through its instruments, laying out the set of probes with which Russo normally began. Lurene caught her attention with a muffled grunt, then shook her head slowly. Carla understood. She approached Bannerman, who was in conference with Molly Farrell, listening intently, and spoke to him quietly. Bannerman glanced at Lurene, hesitated, then nodded. Carla stepped to the older woman and loosened her gag, leaving the scarf in place beneath her chin.

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