Philadelphia Noir - Carlin Romano [13]
Richard climbed the gate and fell on the sloping grass, wincing at the pain in his leg as he rolled to the bottom of the hill. He looked up and saw the man who’d shot at him climbing the gate about forty yards away. Then he heard footsteps running around the bend.
He’d lost the phone and the second gun in the water, but there was no time to lament. Richard got up and hobbled across Reservoir Drive, heading toward the old mansion at Smith Memorial Playground. He crouched as he passed orange construction barriers near the massive house that was buttressed by scaffolding.
Richard’s limp was more pronounced than it had been just seconds before, and when he reached the mansion, bullets struck the metal scaffolding. Richard aimed his gun at the lock on the door and fired a shot of his own. A second later, he was inside.
He could see the dim outlines of tricycles and hobby horses strewn about the floor, and the shape of a giant sliding board in the back. The newly painted walls bore pictures that were barely visible in the darkness.
Richard crouched low and ducked into a room thirty yards ahead, knowing that the trail of blood from his wound would lead them to him. But he wanted them to find him now. He wanted it to be over.
The doorknob twisted and three men moved in, spreading out to either side of the room.
“We’re here!” said the leader. “Are you?”
Richard recognized the voice now. It was Joe Miller, the same man who’d led the CIA team in the mountains of Tora Bora. Miller was the kind of man others followed. It wasn’t because he was especially intelligent or threatening. Nor was it the fact that he’d been a Special Forces major prior to joining the agency. There was just a force about him—a feeling. He had only to speak in that world-weary, cynical growl, and it was enough to make lesser men submit.
Richard was not a lesser man, and he had no intention of submitting. “You know I’m here, Miller,” he said as he slid along the wall, his legs even weaker than his voice. “And you know all of us won’t be walking out.”
Miller used hand signals to point to the area where Richard’s voice had come from and his men moved in that direction. “It’s hard to know anything when it comes to you, Richard. We thought we knew where you were in the mountains, and we were wrong, weren’t we?”
Richard moved toward an opening in the wall that led to another room. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said as his pursuers moved closer.
“I’m talking about Afghanistan, Richard. I’m talking about the reasons you kept going back.”
“I wanted to fight,” Richard said, sliding down the wall and easing the gun around the corner.
“That’s what we all thought at first,” the squad leader said as he got down in a prone position and turned on his weapon’s laser scope. “And with all the intelligence we gathered and got to you guys in Delta Force, we figured the fight would be easy.”
“It should’ve been,” Richard said. “But it’s hard to fight a war with the CIA in the way.”
“It’s even harder when one of your best soldiers is a traitor,” he said in an effort to hold Richard’s attention. “I have to admit, it took us awhile to figure out how you did it. The simplicity of it was pure genius.”
Suddenly, one of the men flew around the wall. Even with his bleeding leg and dimmed senses, Richard was too fast to be caught off guard. He turned and fired one shot from the silenced gun, hitting the agent in the temple. The man was dead before he stopped moving.
Another flew around the wall and was upon Richard, who grabbed his arm and twisted it until it broke. There was a scream and a muffled gunshot, and the agent’s last breath came out along with the contents of his bowels.
Richard pushed the body away with a grunt, and when he did so, Miller was standing over him with his gun pointed at Richard’s head. His face was just as Richard remembered it—red and pockmarked with a bulbous nose and a mouth that was fixed in a scowl.
“Drop the gun,” Miller said, his tone low and angry.
Richard did as he was told. With the blood