Damage Radius Read online

  Bolan risked another quick beam of light at the fireplace. It was filled with dried leaves and other debris, and didn’t look as if it had been used in years.

  The Executioner turned his attention to the first of the two doors leading into the house from the porch. It was a normal-looking door, and another quick shot of laser light through the windows in the upper half told Bolan it was a long thin room, totally glassed in on the outside of the house, and filled with potted plants and flowers.

  The conservatory, just as the drawing had listed it.

  Bolan faced a Dutch door, next to the fireplace. It was windowless, heavy, and of ancient timber that looked almost medieval in the dim lighting. The lock in the bottom half of the door was of a year gone by as well, and when he shone his flashlight through the hole he could see that an archaic, skeleton-type key was shoved into it on the inside.

  Bolan paused, thinking. According to the blueprints, the room to which this door led was called the family room, and it was directly below the study upstairs where he and Kunkle expected to find the bulk of Dill’s New York Jets collection. He pulled a set of lock picks from his blacksuit, unzipped it, then turned toward Kunkle who was directly behind him. “Get ready,” Bolan said. “As soon as the door swings open, the alarm is going to go off. We’ve got to get inside and find a place to hide before Dill—or one of his employees pulling night guard duty—comes to check things out.”

  “What if they’re already in the family room?” Kunkle asked.

  “Then we’re screwed as far as clandestine entry goes,” Bolan said. “I’d suggest you start shooting.”

  Even in the dim light, Bolan could see that Kunkle was slightly uncomfortable. “Are we sure they aren’t legitimate hired security guards?” he whispered.

  Bolan knew that Kunkle’s newfound religious convictions were giving him trouble again, and it would take time for them to balance. But he felt it was his duty to straighten out the NOPD cop until he leveled off as to “right and wrong” on his own. “Greg,” he said quietly, “does it make much sense for a man who has professional gunmen on his payroll to hire rent-a-cops to protect him at night?”

  Kunkle waited a moment, then nodded.

  Bolan used one of his picks to shove the key back out of the door. Through the thick wood, he faintly heard it land on the floor with a small ringing sound. That meant a wooden floor instead of carpet. And while he had heard the sound, he doubted anyone not actually in the room could have heard it.

  Just to be safe, he waited a full minute before reinserting his picks. When he heard nothing further, he took it as a good sign that not only had no one heard the sound but that no one was in the family room as Kunkle had feared.

  Picking the lock took less than thirty seconds.

  Bolan wrapped a big hand around the doorknob, then looked back over his shoulder. “As soon as I push the door open,” he whispered, “the alarm is going to go off. You go first. Find the best place you can to hide and stay still until you hear from me again. You ready?”

  “As ready as I’m gonna get,” the detective said.

  Bolan twisted the knob, pushed on the bottom half of the split door, then moved to the side so Kunkle could crab-walk through. A low buzz began sounding throughout the mansion, and then a second later the buzz was replaced by a loud, bone-chilling siren that practically shook the whole house.

  The Executioner crawled in through the opening and grabbed the key off the floor.

  The immediate alarm had not surprised Bolan. During the day, there was probably a thirty to forty-five second delay from the first breach to the full blown alert siren. During that time, the low buzzer he had heard first would sound, telling the Dill family and guards that they needed to make their way to the control box and enter the pass number. But at night, this grace time was shortened to almost nothing.

  Bolan turned back to the Dutch door, closed it, then jabbed the key back in the lock. In his peripheral vision, he had seen Kunkle dive behind a huge couch against the opposite wall. He risked the flashlight long enough to run the light over a large-screen television, an elaborate stereo system, two rocking chairs and various other sofas and padded seats. To his right, just inside the closed door that led to the conservatory, he saw a built-in bar.

  Bolan killed the light, leaving the room almost pitch black. Moving quickly but quietly to the bar, he swung open a door in the counter, then pulled it back closed as he dropped to a squatting position. The Beretta 93-R danced out of its holster into his hand as if on its own accord, and he glanced at the numerous bottles of whiskey, vodka, gin and other spirits on the shelf. To his right was an antique Coca-Cola icebox, and to its side was a sink.

  The racket of the alarm was still in his ears as Bolan settled in to wait for the inevitable. Sooner or later, Dill would turn it off, but the alarm itself would have already generated a call to the police. That’s where Kunkle’s “pie-eating” dispatcher, Dirty Ernie Foreman, would come in.

  As he sat back on his heels, Bolan heard the alarm suddenly cease. The search would shortly begin. And if whoever came to this family room conducted anything more than a cursory check, he and Kunkle would be discovered.

  And the shooting would begin.

  Bolan didn’t like that idea. Dill and his men might deserve death for the deeds they’d done, but according to McFarley, the man had a wife and two daughters. They didn’t deserve such a fate. While Bolan had the confidence that if all hell broke loose he’d control his own fire and keep from harming the innocent females, he wasn’t so sure about Kunkle or Dill, or Dill’s bodyguards.

  Angling the Beretta slightly upward, Bolan glanced at the luminous hands on his watch. And waited.

  Two minutes later, the door leading into the conservatory opened and the overhead light switched on. Bolan huddled lower, the 93-R still angled toward the height at which a man’s head would be if he looked over the bar. He was surprised to find the fumes of bourbon infiltrating his nostrils, and his first impulse was to glance at the bottles in front of him to see if one had cracked. Then he realized that the smell came from outside the bar.

  Which had to mean it was the breath of whoever had opened the door.

  Was it Dill? Or one of his men? Not that it mattered much. Either party would be armed and ready to shoot an intruder.

  Bolan heard the man on the other side of the bar take several steps on the hardwood floor, then stop. From where he was, Bolan could see the top of the door. A few seconds later, he heard footsteps again and caught a brief glance of the top of a head exiting the room.

  “Nothin’ in here, Frank,” came a voice as the light was switched off and the door closed again. “Must have been the wind shaking the windows again.”

  That simple statement told Bolan several things. First, it wasn’t likely to have been Dill who had performed the cursory search of the family room. And the searcher had called to a man still outside the room. That meant at least two bodyguards—likely more—were inside the house, men whom he and Kunkle would have to slip past.

  Or kill.

  The second thing Bolan learned came from the last words out of the bodyguard’s mouth. “Must have been the wind shaking the windows again.” From where he still sat, Bolan could see the tiny green lights near the ceiling. The house was equipped with both sound and movement sensors aimed at the windows and doors. And such sensors sometimes went off if a strong wind shook the glass panes hard enough.

  Last but not least was a partial guess on Bolan’s part. The tone of the man’s voice insinuated that the family room was the last room the guards had searched. They were likely to be headed back toward wherever they were stationed.

  But Bolan had not survived his innumerable battles by taking unnecessary chances. So he waited a good fifteen minutes more before standing up in the darkness. Then, slowly and quietly, he swung the bar door back open, aimed his flashlight toward the wall above the large couch and flashed it on and off three times.

  Kunkle stood up slo
wly, his SIG-Sauer in his hand. “That was close,” he whispered.

  Bolan nodded.

  “Could you see who it was who came in?” the detective asked.

  Bolan shook his head. “Only caught a glance. But I don’t think it was Dill.”

  “Even if it wasn’t,” Kunkle said, “we’d better wait a while for him to get back to sleep. You can be sure that the alarm at least woke him up.”

  “And don’t forget that there are at least two guards on duty. The one who came in here reeked of booze.”

  Kunkle nodded. “I could smell him from behind the couch.”

  The soldier didn’t bother commenting further.

  Fifteen minutes went by, then a half hour, then an hour. Finally, Bolan whispered, “Let’s do it.” But before he started toward the rustic door leading to the conservatory, he added, “Keep in mind that bodyguards are likely to pop up at any time.” He had drawn the Beretta 93-R with the sound suppressor threaded onto the barrel. “I want everything quiet for as long as we can pull it off.” He glanced at the SIG-Sauer in Kunkle’s hand “So unless it’s absolutely life or death, let me handle any surprises with this whisperer.”

  Kunkle nodded, and the two men started toward the door.

  And whatever waited behind it.

  13

  In the moonlight coming in through the glass wall of the conservatory, Bolan could see that the floor was made of unusual mosaic tile. No two pieces were the same size or shape, and the hues ran the spectrum of the color chart. Dozens, if not hundreds, of plants were potted in vases along the glass wall, and they varied as widely in size, shape and color as the tile on the floor.

  The Beretta held down at his side, Bolan crept slowly toward a set of double doors to his left, halfway through the long thin conservatory. From the floor plan drawing he kept folded in a pocket, Bolan knew these doors led into the house’s large formal living room. Peering slowly around the corner of the open doors, he saw a baby grand piano to his left. Two love seats faced each other and another large couch—this one in leather—took up the right-hand wall. Farther into the huge room, just inside the front windows of the house, was another pair of facing love seats.

  The room had the feel of one that was rarely used.

  Looking beyond the living room to his right, Bolan could see that light burned in what appeared to be the foyer. According to the drawing, the main staircase started just out of sight, behind the opposite wall. A back staircase could be accessed if he walked down the conservatory, past a downstairs bathroom and through the kitchen. But the kitchen was a likely place for the guards to congregate during the night, and since Bolan knew there were at least two inside the house, he didn’t want to risk gunfire breaking out while they were still downstairs.

  The soldier knew for certain that there were at least two guards on duty, but more importantly, his gut told him there would be more. So the front staircase was the one he needed to take. He doubted that more than one man would be there.

  As he pulled back around the corner, Bolan saw a glimmer of movement in front of the stairs. It came almost at lightning speed, and as best he could make out it was the shoulder of a white shirt.

  The glimmer of white told Bolan his instincts had been correct. There was at least one man at the foot of the steps, but that was the way he needed to go.

  “Stick your gun back in the holster,” Bolan whispered to Kunkle. “And follow me. Quietly.” He turned the corner off the mosaic tile and stepped onto the thick carpeting of the living room.

  Bolan walked past the piano and moved into the shadows of the wall to his left. Slowly and silently, he slid his feet across the carpet to get an angle of fire into the foyer. After only a few short shuffling steps, a strange smacking sound met his ears. Then the white shirt he had seen moments earlier came into view.

  One of Dill’s night guards was sitting on the front steps. A sport coat was folded sloppily on the stair next to him, and over his white shirt Bolan could see a vertical shoulder holster that carried some sort of automatic pistol.

  The smacking sound came from the apple the man was munching on.

  The Executioner raised the sound-suppressed Beretta to eye level then fired from the shadows. The 93-R coughed out a single 9 mm hollowpoint round that drilled through the center of the guard’s chest just as he took another bite of the apple. The half-eaten piece of fruit fell to the step beneath which the man sat and rolled up against the front door of the house. The man fell backward, sprawled out dead on the steps.

  Bolan waved for Kunkle to follow him again as he crossed the darkened room into the lighted foyer. Temporarily holstering the Beretta, he grabbed one of the bodyguard’s arms. Without being told to, Kunkle grabbed the other and they dragged the corpse back into the shadows of the living room, dropping him out of sight behind one of the love seats.

  Bolan led the way again, entering the foyer and walking backwards up the steps, the Beretta 93-R held above his head. He had gone less than three steps when he saw another guard just outside Bill Dill’s bedroom.

  And at the same time he saw the guard, the guard saw him.

  The man drew a four-inch Smith & Wesson Model 629 from his hip holster. But before he could fire and awaken the house, Bolan put a double-tap of quiet 9 mm rounds into his chest. The man toppled forward against the railing that surrounded the staircase on the upper level, then fell over it.

  With the speed of a jungle cat, Bolan holstered his weapon and reached up, catching the falling man in his arms and cushioning the sound as his body hit the steps. Without words, the soldier handed his burden to Kunkle, who nodded and then dragged the man out of sight into the living room with his partner.

  Bolan took two more steps up the staircase, then stopped. From where he was, he could see the door to Dill’s bedroom as well as one of the girl’s rooms directly across from it. According to the drawing, a long hallway led from the two rooms. But the door to it was closed. Bolan also knew from the drawing that this hall led to two more bedrooms—one of them over the garage—and between them, the back staircase.

  The soldier paused, thinking. He suspected there had to be at least one more guard in charge of that wing of the house. The closed door told him whoever, and however many, they were, had not been alerted to what was going on in the front. So, moving slightly faster, Bolan backed on up the steps to the second floor.

  Kunkle still had his SIG-Sauer in its holster as he reappeared and followed.

  The light in the upstairs area was on, but Bolan turned it off as soon as he reached the switch. He seriously doubted that Dill would want a guard inside his and his wife’s bedroom. Opening the door and letting the outside illumination in might well awaken one or both of them. And while the Executioner had no qualms about killing Dill if need be, he had no intention of harming his wife.

  Bolan could barely hear Kunkle’s feet as the man climbed the steps behind him. He moved next to the darkened bedroom door and pressed an ear to the small crack between the door and the frame. Inside, he could hear two different snores. One was loud and throaty. The other was more quiet and peaceful.

  Both Dill and his wife were asleep, and the loud snore led Bolan to believe it was a deep sleep. The other snore he wasn’t so sure about.

  The creak the bedroom door made when he opened it was negligible. But to Bolan, it sounded like a giant timber being felled. He stopped with the door cracked and continued listening. But the snores didn’t change.

  With the door open just enough to squeeze through, Bolan entered the bedroom. In a dim light that came through the window facing the front of the house, he stared at the two sleeping forms on the bed. Kunkle left the door where it was as he slipped through sideways, and then Bolan began leading the way past the bed into what the crude drawing promised was a short hallway from the bedroom, past Dill’s private clothes closet, and into the study where the New York Jets collection was kept.

  The bedroom was carpeted like the hallway. But the hall, closet and stu
dy had the same hardwood floor that he had found in the family room. There was no way to keep it from creaking as Bolan and Kunkle moved slowly on.

  As soon as Kunkle had stepped out of the bedroom to the hall, Bolan closed the door behind him as quietly as possible. It still creaked. But Bolan heard no signs of Dill or his wife awakening. The house was elegant but old, and probably settled fairly noisily every night. Which meant the two figures sleeping in the bed were used to such noises.

  With the door to the bedroom closed again, Bolan turned on the hall light. He crept past the huge walk-in closet into the study, switching the overhead light on in this room as well. The walls were lined with bookshelves. A huge desk faced him and was cluttered with papers. Several other pieces of furniture were scattered around the room, and two small closets, angling down with the contour of the house’s roof, were just to his right.

  Bolan saw everything one might expect to see in the home office of a criminal: computer, printer, fax and adding machines. Even a money counter. But he saw absolutely nothing green or pertaining to the New York Jets.

  Bolan turned toward Kunkle and saw the confusion on the detective’s face as well. The drawing of the house had been accurate so far, but McFarley’s belief that the Jets collection was kept in the study had been wrong.

  Slowly and silently, Bolan lifted the latches to both closets. One was packed with old clothing and blankets. The other was stuffed with empty suitcases. Bolan turned to Kunkle again. “Let’s check his clothes closet,” he whispered.

  The detective nodded.

  Bolan led the way back into the short hallway, then turned to his right and switched on the closet light. To his left hung dozens of suits, slacks and sport coats. To his right was a built-in bureau and mirror.