Without remorse - Tom Clancy [336]
'Settle down. Henry,' Piaggi said as calmly as he could manage. This is one very serious boy we have out there. He's done six of my people. Six! Jesus. This is not the time to panic.
'We have to think this one through, okay?' Tony rubbed the heavy stubble on his face, collecting himself, thinking it through. 'He's got a rifle and he's in that big white building across the street.'
'You wanna just walk over there and get him, Tony?' Tucker pointed to Bobby's head. 'Look what he did here!'
'Ever heard of nightfall, Henry? There's one light out there, right over the door.' Piaggi walked over to the fuse box, checked the label inside the door, and unscrewed the proper fuse. 'There, the light don't work anymore. We can wait for night and make our move. He can't get us all. If we move fast enough, he might not get any.'
'What about the stuff?'
'We can leave one guy here to guard it. We get muscle in here to go after that bastard, and we finish business, okay?' It was a viable plan, Piaggi thought. The other guy didn't hold all the cards. He couldn't shoot through the walls. They had water, coffee, and time on their side.
The three stories were as close to word-for-word identical as anything he might have hoped for under the circumstances. They'd interviewed them separately, as soon as they'd recovered enough from their pills to speak, and their agitated state only made things better. Names, the place it had happened, how this Tucker bastard was dealing his heroin out-of-town now, something Billy had said about the way the bags stank - confirmed by the 'lab' busted on the Eastern Shore. They now had a driver's license number and possible address on Tucker. The address might be bogus - not an unlikely situation - but they also had a car make, from which they'd gotten a tag number. He had it all, or at least was close enough that he could treat the investigation as something with an end to it. It was a time for him to stand back and let things happen. The all-points was just now going on the air. At the next series of squad-room briefings, the name Henry Tucker, and his car, and his tag number would be made known to the patrol officers who were the real eyes of the police force. They could get very lucky, very fast, bring him in, arraign him, indict him, try him, and put his ass away forever even if the Supreme Court had the bad grace to deny him the end his life had earned. Ryan was going to bag that inhuman bastard.
And yet.
And yet Ryan knew he was one step behind someone else. The Invisible Man was using a .45 now - not his silencer; he had changed tactics, was going for quick, sure kills ... didn't care about noise anymore ... and he'd talked to others before killing them, and probably knew even more than he did. That dangerous cat Farber had described to him was out on the street, hunting in the light now, probably, and Ryan didn't know where.
John T. Kelly, Chief Boatswain's Mate, US Navy SEALs. Where the hell are you? If I were you ... where would I be? Where would I go?
'Still there?' Kelly asked when Piaggi lifted the phone.
'Yeah, man, we're having a late lunch. Wanna come over and join us?'
'I had calamari at your place the other night. Not bad. Your mother cook it up?' Kelly inquired softly, wondering about the reply he'd get.
'That's right,' Tony replied pleasantly. 'Old family recipe, my great-grandmother brought it over from the Old Country, y'know?'
'You know, you surprise me.'
'How's that, Mr Kelly?' the man asked politely, his voice more relaxed now. He was wondering what effect it would have on the other end of the phone line.
'I expected you to try and cut a deal. Your people did, but I wasn't buying,' Kelly told him, allowing irritation to show in his voice.
'Like I said, come on over and we can talk over lunch.' The line clicked off.
Excellent.
'There, that ought to give the fucker something to think about.' Piaggi poured himself another cup of coffee. The brew was old and thick and rancid now, but it was so heavily laced with caffeine that his hands remained