Chapter 4

Liz stayed with Helen while I went upstairs to use my cell phone and to wait for my call to 911 to be answered. I was in a hurry for them to get here because I wanted to visit the crime boss before he had a chance to prepare for us. Our questioning had produced an address that was supposed to be the gang's headquarters. If we were lucky, we could end this reign of terror tonight.

The address we had was another of those abandoned manufacturing plants. This one was surrounded by a large parking lot, and we wondered how it had escaped being turned into apartments or a shopping mall. The parking lot was just in too good a condition to be abandoned. Oh, well, I supposed that we would get an answer pretty soon.

We drove Black Beauty as close to the building as we could manage and parked in some deep shadows. Hopefully, that would keep us from being spotted before we made contact with any gang members. We were concerned that we might run into more trouble than we were normally prepared for, so I took along my combat shotgun as well as my pistol.

Okay, so the combat shotgun was pushing the rules a little hard, though there was no specific rule against having one. I figured that the extra firepower would come in handy if we ran into more gang members than we would normally expect. Both of us subscribed to the motto of "better safe than sorry."

We had no trouble gaining entry to the building. There was a utility door not far from where we had parked, and Liz picked the lock with her usual skill and aplomb. We had on our FLIR glasses because the hallway we entered was in absolute darkness. Liz held the door open for me as I entered first with my shotgun leading the way. This was in no way a social call, and I was prepared to shoot first and ask questions later. The shotgun was loaded with 14 rounds of #00 buckshot in a stick-magazine. I had more magazines at my belt loaded with high-explosive shells, but I did not expect to need them tonight. Nevertheless, I had them along to take care of that unexpected situation.

Liz was right behind me as we got even with the first door that opened off the hallway. We were not going to give the enemy a chance to show up behind us, so she opened that door while I kept it covered. The moment she flung the door open, bright lights came on, and an alarm began to sound. The lights were no problem, but that damned siren was a real pain to listen to. Fortunately, somebody cut it off, and the relative silence was a blessing to our ears.

There was nobody in the room, but there was another door opposite the one we opened. Our room was empty, even of furniture, so we had no place to hide if shooting started immediately. With that in mind, we rushed to the closed door, and Liz opened it with me covering it.

This time, there was a man pointing a gun at us. I wasted no time in blasting him into the next world with a shot that caught him in the belly with most, if not all, of the buckshot. His pistol went flying one way, and his upper body went another. His hips and legs just fell where he had been standing. Well, that was one thug that was not going to trouble us again. Fortunately, we had remembered to don our special ear protection because that shotgun blast in the small room might have otherwise burst our eardrums.

There had been only the one crook in the room with us, but there were two doors leading out of the room. Now what? Well, Liz and I had already worked out an SOP (Standard Operating Procedure) for this sort of situation. We attacked the door on our right. She led the way to that door while I kept an eye on the other door. Dividing my attention like that was difficult and might become fatal at some point, but we had no other option.

This door opened into the room. That made it a little more difficult from our point of view, but it had to be checked. Dammit, we almost laughed when she pulled the door open. It was a storage closet for office supplies. Liz left the door open while we made our way to the other door.

We were almost there when it went flying open and a voice shouted, "CHARLIE, ARE YOU OKAY? THE BOSS..." That was the end of that conversation because the speaker ate a load of buckshot into his upper chest and head. All right, so I'll admit it, my aim was disturbed because I was walking when I fired. Nevertheless, I accomplished what I had intended, so I did not sweat the details.

There was a man behind the speaker, and Liz took care of him with her pistol. She had actually been aiming at the man that I had shot, but the force of the impact from my buckshot knocked him out of the way and exposed the man behind him. She just kept firing at her initial aiming point, and the other guy happened to be in the way. Okay, so Liz was lucky as well as good, but I did not complain because my life had been saved by her on several occasions. I couldn't care less whether it was skill or luck that helped me out—I was just glad to get it!

It was at that point that I discovered a minor bullet wound along my side. It was actually down on my hip below the tail of my body armor. I had no idea which of the three men had shot me because I had been so pumped up by adrenaline that I had never felt the bullet graze me. I would probably feel the pain a little later, but currently I was in a zone outside of that world.

The Brewer luck was holding. We apparently had made a good choice of which original door to open. We found ourselves at another hallway, and this one led to a stairway leading up. The other end of the hallway led to an outside door that was much more elegant than the one we had used. In fact, this hallway was paneled and decorated with plants and artwork. That made it look like it was used by some VIP (Very Important Person). I was willing to bet that it led to the office of the big boss, himself. From what that dead crook had shouted, I was also willing to bet that the big boss was still present.

That made it imperative that we get up those stairs. However, there was a problem with that. The top of the stairs was guarded by two men who seemed to be armed with machine pistols. I could not identify which brand they were, but that was a trivial matter at this point. They were almost certain to be 9 mm to cut down on collateral damage, so we could depend on our body armor to protect us in the area covered by the armor. However, that did not include our heads or the lower parts of our bodies—dammit, we had to do something about that discrepancy! Unfortunately, we could not do that at the moment.

Very quickly, the two men upstairs were joined by additional shooters. We never got a good look at them because of the way we and they were dodging back and forth to try to shoot and to stay behind cover as much as possible. However, it did seem like there had to be at least eight men shooting at us at one time.

We responded with Liz's pistol and my shotgun, but neither one were going to decide the conflict before we ran out of ammunition. At least, we appeared to have eliminated all of the gang members who had been on the ground floor so that we only had to worry about those who were shooting at us from the top of the stairs. Nevertheless, Liz and I were just not getting anywhere!

I finally made a decision that I had hoped to avoid. "Honey, we are not going to win this way. The only thing I can see for us to do is for me to switch to the high-explosive shells. The problem is that the shells will probably start a fire. Can you see anything else that we can do?"

"No, Dear, I think that you are right. Go ahead and blast them with a couple of the HE (high-explosive) shells. We don't have anything to lose at this rate."

I switched magazines and let fly with two shots of HE as fast as I could aim and pull the trigger. I aimed at the newel posts at the top of each stair railing. A shooter with an MP (machine pistol) was hiding at those two places, and I figured that they were the most dangerous shooters. The first HE exploded when it hit the newel post on the left, but I missed the one on the right. That round went over the railing and exploded against the wall behind the shooters.

As expected, the two HE rounds started fires that quickly spread over the whole upper stair landing. I switched back to buckshot, as I figured that I had done all of the damage that we could tolerate up there. Not all of the men had been killed by the explosions as indicated by the screams of pain coming from the landing. I don't understand why he did it, but one fool tried to shoot his way out by firing his pistol as he ran down the stairs. I blew him apart with my shotgun as soon as I could get a good target at an area not covered by his body armor.