Читать книгу Night Trap - Gordon Kent, Gordon Kent - Страница 21

The stink of fire and chemicals lay in the damp air even after the fire was out. A police detective, hands plunged into the pockets of his cheap ski jacket, stared gloomily at the building’s doorway as another body bag came down.

“Thirty-one,” the cop next to him said.

“How do you know it’s thirty-one? You’ve put the pieces together, have you?”

“Thirty-one bags.”

“Imbecile.” He crossed the wet street and pushed through the firemen. As an investigation, this was going to be a joke. What the firemen hadn’t bitched up, the bomb squad had. They’d be a week just working out how many dead they had.

“Hey, sir, that’s where they found the old man.” A plainclothes cop he knew pointed toward the floor near the far wall. “Back of the head, close range—typical stuff.”

Typical, my ass, he thought, it didn’t get to be typical until fucking Gorbachev showed up with his freedom and his shit. Aloud, he said, “Ex-mil.”

“Yes, sir.”

The detective trusted the man, knew him to be more or less honest, perceptive when he wasn’t too lazy to think. “So?” he said, bobbing his head toward the upstairs. Water, he saw, had spilled down the stairs and was leaking through the ceiling. Broken pipes.

“I seen it ten times in the last few years. You know. Ex-mil for hire, they’re fucking good at it, fucking Rambos. It’s mafia.” He had been talking to people in the building and could give a quick summary of what was up there—the big room with thin partitions, computers, lots of telephones, some kind of high-tech business. “So they wouldn’t pay off the gangsters, they got hit,” he said with a shrug.

“Computers? Western money?”

“I dunno. This is just what the people in the building say.”

It didn’t click for him. He was slower to reach conclusions but reached sounder ones when he did; maybe that’s why he was a detective. “Let’s have a look,” he said.

“Fucking mess up there.”

“No kidding.” He started up the stairs, keeping near the wall where there was less water.