The Games (Private #11)(84)

“What the hell is going on?” Rafael said.

“We don’t know. Nate just radioed up from the lobby,” Emilio said, thumbing nervously at his beard. “A bike—a motorcycle or something—just wiped out into Louis on the sidewalk, and he said two dudes in helmets jumped off it and were fighting with Jaime and Jesus.”

“And now no one’s responding,” said Pete, shaking his head. “Nate won’t answer his radio or his phone.”

Nate again! Rafael thought. He was Josefina’s cousin and a pothead total screwup, the weakest point in his armor by far. That’s it. He was going to fire him. Right after he personally kicked the living shit out of him.

“Where are they?” Rafael said, scanning the screen’s security grid. “Jaime and the rest of them. I don’t see them. They’re not in the street.”

“We don’t know,” said Pete.

“Did you scope out the front door?” Rafael said.

“Of course, bro. That’s just it. No one came in, or we would have seen them,” said Emilio.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“We know,” said Emilio, wide-eyed.

“Jackass—come in,” Rafael called down on the Motorola. “Nate, you there? Hey, jackass!”

He unkeyed the radio and listened. The rasp of static. No Nate. No nothing.

What the hell is this? he thought.

“What are you guys doing just standing there?” Rafael cried up at the towering Lopez brothers. “I sent you to that training course why? For exercise? Shit is going down now! Get out the vests and choppers now.”

“You think it’s the Romolos, maybe?” said Emilio. “Over that thing with that girl who got killed? Or is it the cops?”

That’s when it happened.

In a silent instant around them came darkness.

The lights, the monitor, all the juice—all of it was suddenly gone.





RAFAEL FELT PANIC arrive, a cold petrifying pulse of it that began in his stomach and radiated out. To his balls and knees, to his chest and brain.

“Holy shit! What is this?” cried Pete in the dark.

Rafael bashed down the welling panic and finally, with a shaking thumb, got the flashlight going on his phone. He went out of the count room to the apartment door and cracked it.

No. F me. Not good.

The hall was dark. The entire building was out. Someone had shut their whole shit down!

He almost wet himself as the gunfire suddenly started up. Thundering up the dirty worn marble staircase came the sudden deafening blasts of a Glock 18 going off in a long magazine-emptying, full-auto burst. A faint flicker of muzzle flash accompanied the sudden jackhammering, the pulsing glow of it against the cracked stairwell plaster like firelight on the upper reaches of a cave wall.

Think, Rafael thought as he quickly closed and bolted the door.

Do not panic. You are intelligent. You have a plan. Do the plan.

“Who is it? Cops?” said Emilio as Rafael came back into the count room.

“You hear any bullhorns? It ain’t the cops!” said Rafael, opening the gun closet and reaching for the second shelf. His hands passed over the tube of a flashlight until he found what he was looking for.

The night-vision goggles.

He had all kinds of shit in there. Dried food, a portable propane generator, enough ammo to outlast Judgment Day.

Now, apparently, it was here, he thought as he pulled the strap of the goggles over his head.

“You want to play blindman’s bluff in my house?” he said as he clicked on the goggles and everything was suddenly illuminated with a pale-green light. He unclipped the Kalashnikov from the wall rack.

“Then you got it, bro. Let’s do it. Come out, come out, wherever you are, you son of a bitch.”





RAFAEL SENT PETE and Emilio up and over the roof to come down the west wing while he went down the east wing stairs.

The wrapped-tight canvas AK strap cut hard into his forearm as he came silently down the quarter turns of the stairwell. He tried to remember the shooting techniques. Was he supposed to blur the target beyond the front sights? Or was that just for a pistol? Fricking impossible to remember all the training they’d had from the course two years ago. He checked the safety. It was on. He shook his head, clicking at the button.

As he came across the final stair head of the first-floor landing, he caught the scent of gun smoke. A lot of it. The tangy, almost sweet smell, rank as a gun range. He tightened his grip on the gun as he came across the landing to the final turn, his back against the abandoned apartment doors, barrel trained down through the balustrades. There was no one through the posts. No one on the final stair flight, and then he was coming down, his AK sight center-massed on the open lobby doorway.

The first thing he noticed when he peeked through it was that the heavy wrought-iron-and-glass front door of the building was ajar. A triangle of the outside sodium security light spread over the floor’s dirty mosaic tiles. Bits of snow swirling in the yellow beam, a faint layer of snow already gathering in the grout.

“Rafael!” Pete suddenly called out across the lobby from the other stairwell.

Rafael almost tripped over the bodies as he came through the west wing doorway.

There were two of them. One of them lying flat in a pool of blood on the dirty tile, the other to the right, sitting up against the wall. The chests of their motorcycle shells were wet with blood, and the tinted face masks of their motorcycle helmets were smashed to shit, just riddled with bullet holes.