the 13th Hour (2010) by Doetsch Richard

Author:Doetsch, Richard [Richard, Doetsch,]
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria
Published: 2011-01-14T19:18:22.125000+00:00

THE REAR DOOR of the Taurus was open, Dance sat in the backseat, his hands cuffed, barely able to contain his anger.

The young National Guardsman stood outside the car, his M-16 in one hand, his cell phone in the other pressed to his ear, waiting for his superior officer to answer.

Dance's mind was working on overtime, looking about, weighing his options before a contingent of weekend warriors came to haul him away. He hadn't come this far to fail.

Dance looked at his missing ring finger: They called it a down payment on his life.

No one knew it, but he had until midnight tonight or he would be dead. And that just didn't fit into his schedule.

Dance had moonlighted on many jobs that were contrary to his profession. The sixty-thousand-dollar salary of a detective wasn't enough to live on, not in Westchester, among the wealthy who looked to the police for protection but treated them as second-class citizens.

Little jobs supplemented his income--the thefts here and there, the shakedown and blackmailing of the young drug dealers, the kids whose millionaire parents would disown them if they knew what Biff and Muffy were selling to fourteen-year-olds.

Dance had robbed, stolen, committed arson for hire, and on two occasions, killed. Ten thousand a head, drug-related hits down county. He wrapped the bodies in nylon reinforced feed bags, wrapped them tightly in chains, and with hundred-pound iron weights strapped to the corpses, tossed them into the East River beside Manhattan. Secured tightly, they wouldn't be found for years, if at all.

No one was wise to his dealings except for Shannon, who knew better than to talk, and Horace Randall, his mentor, who was three months from retirement. Goods were quickly fenced, evidence never found, and if legal suspicions arose, he would use his police knowledge to direct investigations in another direction.

But not all jobs went smoothly.

Fourteen months ago, he had been running a small crew of punks, teens he had arrested and blackmailed into working for him in order to avoid jail.

Two of them had hijacked a panel trunk filled with computers on East Tremont in the Bronx and had driven it to a warehouse in Yonkers where Dance was waiting. The buyer of the stolen notebooks and high-end desktop models paid him forty thousand in cash, five of which he gave to the two teens, ensuring their silence and loyalty until the next job.

A week later the two punks were found dead in an alley, shot through the head, execution style.

The following day, two wide-shouldered enforcers grabbed Dance as he exited his car in the driveway of his two-family house and drove him to a machine shop in Flatbush where they tied him to a heavy wooden chair.

He sat there in the darkened shop for three hours under the silent gaze of the two enforcers before he heard someone enter.

"You stole my truck." The heavily accented voice came from behind him.

Dance sat still, staring straight ahead. He didn't need to see the man, he knew his voice.

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