The Darkness hp-5 Read online

  Ramos said. “And if you do not write this for me, I will take your woman, Amanda, and I will make her scream so loud that even if you do make it to heaven, Henry, her cries will pierce the ears of God himself. I will grind her bones to paste, and coat the walls of this room with her blood. And I will make sure you are alive when all of it takes place. And only when you have no screams left to offer will you join her.”

  I sat there, my whole body cold. Amanda.

  “You see, when I kill a person, their death must not be in vain. It must represent something. Your brother’s death was a sign that even our highest-earning lieutenants were not invulnerable. Kenneth Tsang’s death was a warning to new employees as to what could happen if you weren’t trustworthy. Brett Kaiser’s death showed that we can reach anybody, anywhere. To me, blood and bone are like paint and a brush. With the right artistry, one can create a work of art that speaks to people. Your family, Henry, would be a message that our reach does not stop within our organization, but that we can touch even the smallest, most insignificant lives.”

  “You wouldn’t…”

  “I wouldn’t?” Ramos said. “Your mother and father live in Bend, Oregon, on a sunny little street called Eastview Drive. I can have a man there tonight. Your parents could be dead before the evening news. Your parents are insignificant, which is why their deaths would be all the more glorious.”

  “You’re a monster.”

  “I’m only a monster because this involves you, Henry.

  How many monsters do you see, day in and day out, in your line of work? Proximity heightens emotions.

  Things could be different. You could have been down on your luck, penniless, and come to work for me. And then, like so many of these young men, you would have understood.”

  “I don’t know anything besides what Paulina wrote,”

  I said. “There’s nothing more to the story.”

  “That’s not true,” she said. “You’ve been quite an explorer. Tell me what you know.”

  I looked up at her, and if looks could kill Eve Ramos would have been dead several times over. “I know that you and Rex Malloy were in Panama together, and that your troop was attacked and Chester Malloy was killed. I also know that it was in Panama that you learned how to synthesize Darkness, and you managed to smuggle it back to

  America. I know that all your drug mules are young men, and you’re using their debts to get them to work for you.”

  “Great thing about those young men,” Eve said, “is that they have something to lose. You see, when a man has pride, he will do things he knows are wrong to prove his worth. These men were born with nothing, but worked their way into high-paying jobs. When those lives were taken away, that ambition, that pride, left a gaping hole.

  I simply offer to fill that hole. I will not use men from the slums, poor urban souls who have nothing to lose.

  Dealers are nothing more than hungry animals. You feed them, throw them an extra bone here or there, they’ll do anything for you.”

  “Even die for you.”

  “Not by choice, but yes.”

  “Why 718 Enterprises?” I asked.

  “Ha! That’s simple, Henry. I was born in Queens.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  There was a knock at the door behind Ramos. She went and opened it. A man stood there. He was wearing a suit, brown hair neatly combed. And he was holding a legal pad and pen.

  “Leonard, come in,” she said. “Meet Henry Parker.”

  “Mr. Parker, it’s a pleasure.” He didn’t offer a hand.

  Just as well.

  “Leonard Reeves,” I said. He looked at Ramos with evident discomfort.

  “How much does he know?”

  Eve chuckled softly. “Apparently more than I thought.”

  “Leonard Reeves,” I said again. “Graduated from

  Princeton in 1993. Former executive at Morgan Stanley, and liaison to the Department of Finance.”

  I watched as Reeves’s eyes widened, rage drumming up inside of him.

  “How do you-”

  “Which leads me to this question,” I said. “How much is Eve Ramos paying you to sell out our government?”

  Now it was Ramos who couldn’t contain herself, laughing hysterically. Reeves looked at her. His rage seemed to subside as he saw how unperturbed she was by my knowledge.

  “Henry, you have this all wrong,” she said. “We’re not selling out the government. Hell, we’re working for them.”

  48

  “Working for them,” I said. “You mean the city is making money off of you. That’s why I found a money order made out to Morgan Isaacs for fifty grand from

  Leonard Reeves. Reeves works for 718. You set your drug cartel up as a legit business, and the government is making millions of dollars in taxes off of dead people and blood money.”

  “Millions right now, maybe. Soon it’ll be hundreds of millions,” Ramos said. “And once the Darkness spreads to other metropolitan areas-Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago-it’ll be in the billions.”

  “How can they let this happen?” I said. “Don’t they know these drugs are killing people? Don’t they know who you are?”

  “Know who I am?” Eve said. “Not only do they know who I am…they’re the reason I’m here.”

  “Panama,” I said. “The Hard Chargers-you were one of them?”

  “Yes and no. I certainly did my share of hell-raising down there. Nothing helps sell a war like violence against our troops. But those bastards weren’t supposed to kill me. And it’s their fault Chester died.”

  “Hollinsworth said you found a way to synthesize

  Darkness,” I said. “So why would the government still work with you if you stole this from Noriega?”

  “Oh, they didn’t know,” she said. “In fact, they trusted me so much that when the CIA-backed cartels in the eighties got out of hand, guess who they put in charge to oversee things?”

  “That’s why you’re the Fury,” I said. “They installed you as a watchdog because their money was at stake. With you there, they could make sure the money was going to fund the Contras.”

  “Yeah, but that stopped being fun after a while. Why be a watchdog when you can be the top dog? Those cartels made billions, but the leadership had more balls than they had brains. They were more than happy to let someone take over who could handle distribution on a nationwide basis. Unfortunately word got out and that reporter Webb found out about it. The CIA tried to pull the plug. But when you’re running a covert operation, pulling the plug doesn’t mean ending things so much as pretending they never happened.”

  I said, “So they left you in charge of the largest drug cartel in North America.”

  “Your tax dollars at work. And Mr. Reeves here was kind enough to set up a deal where not only could we work in peace, but we’d benefit the city of New York as well.

  Thousands of federal employees laid off due to a lack of funds, and that’s exactly what we’re giving them back.”

  “Makhoulian,” I said. “He was the mole in the NYPD.

  He knew everything we were doing.”

  “More or less. I am a little surprised by how persistent you are, Henry.”

  “So why this?” I said. “Why now?”

  “Well, the truth is we weren’t able to perfect the mixture until recently. But if you believe in fate-like I do-then everything came together for a reason. Look at this city, Henry. Its infrastructure is crumbling. It’s billions of dollars in debt. Millions of people have lost everything, and the people who pump the most money into this economy-the rich-are losing their jobs. The pipes have been rotting for years. With the Darkness, I managed to build the greatest cherry bomb the city has ever seen, and dropping it into those pipes now will cause the whole system to come crashing down. Cities burn from the ground up, not the top down.”

  “All because you think you were sent to die in Panama.

  This isn’t about money. It’s abou
t payback.”

  “Call it what you want. Truth is, I’m doing this city a favor. New York will have a chance to bring itself back from the wreckage. Twenty years ago this city teetered on the edge, and it was brought back. When a city comes so close for a second time, it needs a little push. That’s where I come in.”

  “No matter how many people die in the process.”

  “I read somewhere that over a hundred billion people have died since the earth was created. Am I really supposed to shed a tear for a few more?”

  “You’re settling a grudge,” I said. “You feel you were sent to die, so you’re taking revenge.”

  “Not to mention a handsome profit,” she said. “If there is a better feeling than seeing the same fat, stupid men who sent you to die line your pockets, I don’t know what it is.”

  Reeves came over and placed the pad and pen in front of me. Then he stepped back and folded his arms behind his back. I could tell he wasn’t happy about this, wasn’t

  happy I knew the depth of his involvement. But Ramos kept him fed. And that was good enough.

  “You write your article, including the facts I’ve told you. Once it is written, Leonard and I will go over it to make sure it doesn’t contain anything that we don’t approve of.

  After that we will e-mail it to your boss, Mr. Langston.”

  “And then what?”

  “And when it runs, we can assure you that Amanda

  Davies will live a long, happy life. Well, a long life at least.”

  “And me?”

  “Having saved a life, you can go to your grave with the nobility many men do not.”

  “And you get to promote the Darkness even more.”

  “The New York Dispatch is only read by half the city,” she said. “With your paper we’ll get the other half, too.”

  I eyed the pen, wondering if there was a way I could use it. Not that I’d been trained in any Bourne-esque dojo where they taught you how to kill two people with a single pen.

  “Mr. Reeves here will watch you. I don’t expect your finest work, Henry. Time is of the essence.”

  I didn’t know what to do. Amanda’s life versus thousands of people who would read about this drug and be tempted to buy it. I pictured Amanda, sitting at home, while the city burned around her. Then I pictured her grieving at my funeral, not knowing I’d given my life for her.

  What the hell could I do?

  Before I could do or say anything, there was another knock at the door behind Eve Ramos. It startled her very briefly, and I took a step forward.

  She opened it, and standing there was Rex Malloy.

  “Eve,” he said. “We’ve got a problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Sheffield and Parker,” he said. “They didn’t come alone.”

  Ramos stood there, unsure what to make of what

  Malloy had said. We had come alone. What the hell was

  Malloy talking about?

  Suddenly I heard a loud noise come from outside the compound. A second explosion, then a third, rattling the floor, reverberating. Somebody was shooting at the warehouse from outside. Eve Ramos’s eyes narrowed as she stared at me. I had no answers.

  They didn’t come alone.

  Had somebody followed us?

  “Get up, Parker,” Ramos said, her voice gone to steel.

  She marched over and grabbed me by the hair, pulling me up. I stood, wrenched away.

  “Get off of me.”

  Then I realized where the gunfire had come from. We weren’t being shot at from outside. Somebody inside the compound was firing at someone outside.

  Then it dawned on me.

  We had been followed. By Jack O’Donnell.

  49

  The first volley of gunfire drove them to dive behind the police cars, bullets strafing the metal, punching quartersized holes in every car. Jack O’Donnell felt a pain in his arm as he hit the ground, dirt kicking up around him.

  He was surrounded by two dozen of New York’s finest, and now that the level of violence had escalated there was sure to be SWAT and helicopter backup. But for now it was just this ragged old journalist and a bunch of cops who’d walked into a buzz saw.

  “Is this normal?” Jack shouted when the gunfire stopped.

  Chief of Department Louis Carruthers, his back pressed up against a blue-and-white, shook his head. “Not in the least. It only means one thing, so you’d better keep your head down.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It means they’re not planning to be arrested.”

  Jack slowly picked himself, peeked over the hood of a car, just in time for another round to rip up the car and force him back to the ground.

  His heart was beating a million miles a minute, but something besides fear coursed through the old lion.

  Neither Henry or Curt knew Jack had followed them all the way from Parker’s apartment, and it gave Jack a slight bit of pride to know he still had a little left in the old oil can. But when he saw the two men force Henry and Curt to follow them at gunpoint, he knew the time for hideand-seek was over.

  It was less than ten minutes before the cavalry arrived, and it took less than one to tear open the gated entrance and force themselves inside. Jack didn’t know what to expect, but when he saw the massive warehouse and the sentry guards, the fence barricading the area from both trespassers and onlookers, he had a feeling they’d stumbled onto the very heart of where the Darkness was produced.

  “Do we just wait until they run out of bullets then?”

  Jack yelled above the storm.

  Carruthers looked at him and shook his head.

  Then he yelled to the rest of the cops perched outside,

  “There are two innocents in there, including one of our own. Let’s get them the hell out of there!”

  Then a barrage of gunfire strafed the outside of the warehouse, shattering glass, shredding brick, smoke and dust pouring from everywhere.

  Jack covered his ears, felt dirt and gravel raining down around him, stinging his face and neck. And below the pain in his arm, the rapid pace of his heart that scared the hell out of him, Jack had a feeling this was just the beginning.

  50

  When the gunfire first erupted, Eve Ramos went into the stairwell to find out what was going on. I could see her and Rex Malloy talking. Malloy was animated, pointing somewhere I couldn’t see, gesturing like mad as

  Ramos stood there impassively, processing it all. Behind them, still in the room with me, was Leonard Reeves.

  And unlike his two comrades, Reeves’s eyes betrayed him. He looked nervous, the kind of man who might dish out violence but never expected it to come back to him.

  Whatever Rex Malloy was saying, it was frightening

  Leonard Reeves something bad.

  While they were preoccupied, I picked up the pen and quietly walked over to where Reeves was standing. He was not an especially large man, about five foot ten, not fat but without much discernible muscle definition.

  Sometimes you could take one look at a person, the way they carried themselves, and know how brave they were.

  What kind of fight they would put up. In Leonard Reeves,

  I got the sense of a man who talked a big game but once cornered, would piss his pants faster than an eight-yearold with a tiny bladder.

  So with little time to decide my course of action, I took a chance that could lead either to my freedom, or my death.

  Gripping the pen in my fist, the point sticking out two inches, I wrapped my left arm around the front of

  Reeves’s neck and jammed the pen right under his jawline on his carotid artery, hard enough that I felt the tip threaten to pierce skin. Reeves was surprised and struggled, crying out, but I whispered into his ear, “Move once more and you’ll see your blood all over Malloy’s nice blond hair.”

  Reeves relaxed. His hand was still on the arm that held his neck in place, but there was no strength in it.

  I could feel the gun ag
ainst my hip, and holding the pen I quickly grabbed it and swapped the writing utensil for the pistol. Not a bad choice. I flicked the safety off.

  I’d only held a gun once before, and even then it was out of self-defense. I didn’t want to fire it.

  Right now, though, I was certain that if need be I would use it. I wasn’t sure who was more frightened: me knowing I could be forced to end a man’s life, or Reeves knowing his life was in the hands of a man who had nothing to lose.

  I led Reeves into the stairwell where Ramos and

  Malloy were standing. Windows opened onto the front of the compound, but Ramos and Malloy were blocking my view. I couldn’t see who or what was out there. Whoever it was clearly had their attention.

  Eve Ramos turned around. Rex Malloy did as well.

  They both stared at me, Malloy seeming more pissed off while Ramos smiled at me like I’d just built a nice big house of cards.

  “Take me to Sheffield,” I said. “As soon as we’re outside, I let Reeves go. If not, he’s a dead man.”

  “Henry,” Ramos said, cocking her head to the side, that smile still spread on her face. “I give you credit for keeping your balls intact. But you have gravely overestimated Mr. Reeves’s worth to me. Especially in light of his less than stellar reflexes.”

  With that, Eve Ramos pulled a gun from her waistband and put a bullet right in Leonard Reeves’s head.

  He dropped to the floor, his body becoming dead weight in less than a second. I felt sticky blood on my hands. I looked at Ramos. She seemed oddly disappointed.

  “Sometimes,” she said, “you don’t have time to paint a picture.”

  I held Reeves’s gun out, pointed it at Ramos.

  “Let us out of here,” I said.

  “Or what? You shoot me and end up looking like something the butcher threw away? Put the gun down, Henry, before you get hurt.”

  And just like that, the window behind Ramos shattered, gunfire riddling the stairwell. Sparks cascaded all around us at the bullets ricocheted off the metal bars.

  Whoever was outside was now firing back.

  We all ducked, covering our heads as glass came pouring down around us. Ramos knelt on the floor below the window, her back against the wall. She held a hand up to her cheek. It came away slick with blood where she’d been cut by an errant shard. Malloy was on his stomach, and crawled over to see if she was all right. And right there I saw my one chance to live.