Killer Instincts v5 (32 page)

“I’ll go up first, you follow. Break left, I’ll take right. They’ll try to pin us at the top, so get ready to open up as soon as you get there and keep their heads down.”

“Got it,” I said.

We went up the stairs swift and silent. Jamie picked up the shotgun, holding it by the barrel, and just before we got to the top of the stairs, he flung it up and against the wall across from the stairway. Immediately, there was a fusillade of shots coming from the right, some kind of high-capacity pistol or carbine. Wood and plaster rained down the stairs as the walls were riddled.

Jamie looked at me and gestured with his hand.
Aim right there
, he was telling me. We both raised our Uzis and cut loose through the wall at the same time, each of us firing a dozen shots on full-auto. There was a man’s shriek, and a body hit the floor. At the same moment, Jamie and I stepped out and fired another long burst at each end of the hallway, sweeping from one side of the hall to the other. Century-old paintings, in gleaming wood frames decorated with gold leaf, exploded into tatters of canvas and tinder as they were with bullets. A small decorative table at my end of the hallway collapsed, one of its legs shot away. A flower-filled crystal vase fell to the floor and shattered, water soaking into a runner that stretched from one end of the hall to the other. Nothing moved on my end.

Glancing over my shoulder, I saw another middle aged, beefy man in a sports coat and slacks leaning against a hall doorway, perforated in half a dozen places. He raised his head with great effort and looked at us, a hand feebly reaching for the nine-millimeter carbine on the floor next to him.

“Nuh-uh,” Jamie said, and popped two slugs through the man’s head.

The mobster’s skull blew apart, and the body slumped back into the room.

“Hose the walls. Try to draw anyone out,” Jamie said.

We both emptied our Uzis, raking the walls to our left and right. I could hear the slugs punching through the interior walls, hear things shattering and breaking inside the rooms. At the end of my stretch of hallway, I heard a grunt.

“Think I heard someone,” I said.

Jamie nodded, then jerked his thumb. On his side of the hallway, there was another flight of stairs, leading up to the third floor.

“You check your room, I’ll cover the stairs.”

I gave him a thumbs up. Swapping magazines, I reloaded as I moved down the hall. The door was closed, at the end of the hall to my left. I had no idea where my quarry might be within the room, but I was fairly sure he was wounded.

It was time to do this the hard way. I reared back and kicked in the door, then flung myself to the side. No shots answered my actions, and after a moment I came around the door jamb, Uzi up and sweeping the room. In the corner, slumped against a opened nightstand, was an elderly man, perhaps in his seventies. His hands were by his sides, and blood pooled around his thigh where a bullet had caught him and brought him down.

It was the Paggiano’s butler, I realized. I wasn’t quite sure what to do with him. I didn’t really consider servants as part of my crusade, despite the fact that this man had worked for decades in a house where he knew exactly what sort of people employed him. My hand still hesitated, though.

“Please, my leg...you’ve shot me!” he groaned.

I took a step into the room, my Uzi lowered a fraction. Maybe if I thumped him over the head -

A shot rang out, and the wall next to me sprayed paint and plaster. The old man had a revolver in his hand, fired from the waist. A simple .38 snub, taken from the nightstand drawer. He had concealed it behind his thigh until he could lure me into the room.

I ripped a burst into him, shredding his heart and lungs. The old man flopped once and died. I put a single slug through his skull, just to be sure.

There was a long, deafening roar of automatic gunfire from the direction of the stairway. Rushing from the room in a crouch, I saw Jamie scramble back down the hallway and pull his body into a tight crouch. Auto fire was tearing up the lip of the stairs and blasting through the walls, coming not from above, but from down below.

“We’ve been flanked!” Jamie shouted.

Someone must have taken a back stairwell, or somehow roped down out of a third-story window, or maybe we just missed someone hiding on the first floor or in the basement. Whatever the reason, we were separated at both ends of the hall, and whoever it was had an automatic weapon, a full-blown assault rifle of some kind.

I put my fist to my mouth, mimicked pulling a grenade pin with my teeth and lobbing it down the stairs. Jamie nodded, dug into his satchel, and produced one of the lethal green eggs. He moved forward, glanced up the third floor staircase, and spun out of the way just before a fusillade of pistol fire tore up the floor and opposite wall.

They were getting smart. Someone was down below, firing up the stairs, while someone else was up above, firing down. We were pinned on the second floor, separated from each other. Something had to be done, and fast. I let my Uzi hang from its sling and held my hands out, knees bent, obviously wanting Jamie to toss me the grenade.

He shook his head no, obviously not trusting me with that delicate task, but bursts of gunfire from below, and then shots from above, shredded through the walls and floors in an attempt to keep us away from either stairway. Finally, Jamie nodded. Standing, he gave me a one, two,
three
, and tossed the grenade to me. Bullets tore across the space, but none hit the deadly missile, and I caught the heavy metal egg in my gloved hands.

Remembering every grenade-related war movie moment I could think of, I gripped the grenade firmly and kept the lever under my fingers. I pulled the pin with a hard yank and I looked to Jamie, who mimicked holding the grenade, lifting his fingers to let the lever fly while holding the grenade in his palm with a thumb. He raised one, two, three fingers in the other hand, then mimicked throwing it down the stairs.

I nodded, then did exactly what he showed me. I let the arming lever flip away, heard the striker impact, saw a thin wisp of smoke curl away as I counted. On three, I leaned over and tossed the grenade down the stairway with an underhand throw, aiming to bounce it off the stairway wall opposite me so I didn’t have to expose myself. I heard the grenade thump down the stairs and I saw Jamie frantically gesture for me to back up. I threw myself down and away from the stairs, and just as I slapped my hands over my ears, I felt the whole house shudder from the explosion.

A hideous, keening wail came up through the floor, the sound of someone suffering an unimaginable amount of pain. I sat up from the floor and looked at Jamie. He was changing magazines, and he gestured towards me, towards his eyes, and towards the first floor stairs, then placed his hand low to the ground. Getting the hint, I got down low, then slowly eased my eyes around the corner of the stairwell.

Down at the base of the stairs, I saw who, or rather what, was making all the noise. What was once a man lay in ruins at the foot of the half-destroyed staircase. His legs were shredded by the grenade, his intestines splashed across his lap and a good portion of the floor, his chest a horrific red ruin. But somehow, the wounds hadn’t killed him outright. A short-barreled AK assault rifle with a folding stock lay next to him, the receiver and magazine torn and perforated by the grenade, rendering the weapon useless. The man rolled his head back in my direction, and through the sheet of blood across his lacerated face, I recognized John Paggiano, Pauly’s older brother and next in line whenever old man Dominic gave up his position as head of the family.

So much for that plan, I thought. Drawing my suppressed Glock, I pointed it down at John. The man looked up at me, but I could tell the shock of the blast had rendered him senseless. I fired a single round that caught him above his nose and blew the back of his head away. Then I rolled away from the stairs, holstered my pistol, and picked up my Uzi again.

Jamie and I both heard movement at the top of the third floor staircase at the same time. We tensed and looked at each other, preparing for an assault or a storm of gunfire. Instead, a white t-shirt, knotted into a ball at one end to help it fly through the air, fell to the bottom of the stairs.

“We want a second to talk!” a woman shouted. I guessed it was Mary, John’s wife. Actually, make that
widow.

Jamie shook his head and put a finger to his lips.
Don’t say anything.
We waited.

“We just want to know why you’re doing this! We can work something out before anyone else has to die!”

I had to admire her courage. After the grenade went off, she had to know her husband was dead, but instead of crying or begging, she had the state of mind to seek some kind of parley, to perhaps buy time for someone else to maneuver into an attack position. Seconds passed, and we still said nothing. I looked at Jamie and shrugged. He patted his Uzi and brought it to his shoulder, and I followed suit. Jamie raised three fingers, and closed them one by one. Together, we fired through the walls of the stairway, riddling the top of the third floor landing with a blizzard of slugs.

As soon as we were dry, we both reloaded, and as one, popped around the corners, rushing up the stairs as quickly as possible. Mary Paggiano had joined her husband in Hell, riddled from head to foot. At least twenty slugs had struck her, soaking her white nightgown and pink bathrobe with bright crimson. A nickel-plated automatic was clutched in her hand.

We made it to the top of the staircase and I rushed past Jamie, into a bathroom at the head of the stairs. I hunkered down at the doorjamb and covered us from the right side of the hall while Jamie held position at the top of the stairs. The hallway extended off to the left of the stairs, with multiple doors along both sides of the hall, and a door at the far end.

Without warning, the bathroom wall next to me disintegrated, a hail of gunfire cutting through the wood and plaster from the room next door. Someone was firing at me with a heavy-caliber automatic, probably a .45, and the toilet’s water tank exploded in a spray of porcelain fragments and a rush of cold water, soaking my pants as I lay on the floor, taking cover behind a cast iron bathtub.  I looked at Jamie, and he leveled his Uzi, ripping off half a magazine into that room at waist height. I rolled over onto my back, brought up my own Uzi, and fired half of my magazine over the lip of the tub and through the wall.

There was a shout and some cursing, and suddenly the hallway door burst open. I heard a man scream “Motherfucker!” before a short burst from Jamie’s Uzi silenced him, and I heard a body hit the ground.

I rolled back onto my stomach and looked at Jamie, crouching at the head of the stairs. He drew a line across his throat. I pointed at his satchel, mimed pulling a grenade pin and rolling it down the hall towards the door at the end of the hallway. At first Jamie shook his head.

“This place has to sound like a war zone!” I hissed. “We need to end this and get the fuck out of here. Someone’s bound to have called the cops by now. Toss it and the door will go away, then we hose the fucking room and charge.”

Jamie let out a muttered curse.

“Get behind that bathtub, and cover your ears!” he said.

I squirmed back on my hands and knees and covered my ears with my hands. I saw Jamie pull his last frag grenade from the satchel, yank the pin, let the lever fly, then soft-pitch it down the hall. He then threw himself back down several steps and out of sight. A moment later, the house shook again from the blast, tiny grenade fragments tearing through the walls above me.

I got to my feet, leaned out into the dust-choked hallway, and burned the rest of the Uzi’s magazine through the doorway at the end of the hallway. Leaning back into the bathroom, I changed magazines while Jamie came back up the stairs and emptied his magazine down the hall. I waited for him to change mags.

“The stun grenade!” I shouted.

My ears rang from the grenade blast despite being covered, not to mention all the gunfire in such an enclosed area.

“I’ve only got the one!” Jamie shouted back.

“Now’s the time to use it! Toss it in and we’ll charge through.”

Jamie took the flash-bang out, pulled the pin, and threw it overhand into the room at the end of the hall. We covered our ears, and as soon as the grenade went off, we snatched up our hanging Uzis and rushed the room, Jamie leading the way.

The room was a spacious reading room or study, bookshelves lining three of the four walls, with the fourth given up to a desk, a small end table, and a standing lamp. A shattered office chair lay on the floor in front of the desk, and a flayed leather recliner stood by the lamp. A low wooden chest had been dragged in front of the door as a makeshift barricade, but the grenade had blown it into kindling. The shelves of books were all shredded, either by gunfire or by grenade fragments, and there was a thick cloud of dust and smoke hanging in the air. A body lay sprawled across the reading chair, no doubt one of the last bodyguards, a short-barreled shotgun in his hands. He must have been waiting for us to charge through, but grenade fragments and Uzi fire had torn his body into pieces of bleeding meat.

I heard the boom of the heavy magnum revolver as I cleared the doorway. I saw Jamie’s body jerk, but it wasn’t until the second and third shots that I realized he was hit. Jamie went down hard, sprawling face first into the room, sliding into a bookshelf. I saw the revolver poking around the corner fire once more, and the Uzi in my hands was torn away by the slug. I threw my body to the left, out of the line of fire, and scrambled for the Glock at my hip. The shooter, thinking he’d hit me and knocked me down, emerged from behind the wall. It was Adam Paggiano, son of John and Mary, youngest member of the family. Fourteen years old, he wore boxers and a t-shirt, and his feet were in slippers.

Adam stepped over Jamie and froze as he looked out of the room and down the hallway. I knew the body of his mother lay there, shredded by gunfire and the blast of the grenade. I began to draw my pistol, but the movement caught Adam’s eye and he turned, bringing the heavy stainless steel revolver, a Ruger .357, in line with my face. His eyes were cold and dead-looking. I thought his expression must resemble how I’d looked when I learned my family was dead. Vengeance had come full circle.