Dust Up: A Thriller by Jon McGoran Page B

were local, and he thought he could trust you, so…” She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess he didn’t know where else to go.”
    “You said Ron decided to come to me because he learned something else that scared him. What was that?”
    As she opened her mouth, the music out in the hallway turned off, accompanied by a loud cracking sound.
    I held up my hand.
    The place was suddenly silent, like all the other occupants were holding their breath and listening too.
    “Is there a back way out?” I whispered.
    Her eyes widened, and she shook her head. Then she pointed to a small sliding window set into the wall. I crossed the room and looked out. It was a ten-foot drop to the concrete alley below. Almost directly beneath us was a black Lincoln Navigator. When I put my face up against the window, I could see a heavyset white guy in a brown suit standing next to it.
    I ducked back as he looked up. When I turned to look at Miriam, her face crumpled.
    I put a finger to my lips, then held it up, telling her to wait for a moment. I crossed the room and stood next to the door, listening. A floorboard squeaked out in the hallway.
    I turned and motioned her into the bathroom.
    The guy out back didn’t look like a cop, but you couldn’t always tell. I left my gun in my holster. Then I quietly swung the security latch away from the door. With my back against the wall, I wrapped my left hand around the doorknob and cocked my right fist.
    After a few seconds, I caught a strong whiff of cheap men’s cologne and felt the knob shifting in my hand. I ripped the door open and whipped my body around, putting everything I had behind my fist, and hoping to God there was some kind of bad guy out there.

 
    18
    I’ve never been a fan of the sucker punch. Kind of lacks class—not that I’m a specialist in that area. The sting of shame is lessened when the sucker you’re punching is holding a gun with a silencer—and even more when he’s doused with cheap cologne—but there’s still something douchey about punching a guy in the face before he has a chance to raise his eyebrows.
    Fortunately for this guy, he was shorter than I am and crouching down. I had to adjust my trajectory in midswing, coming down on the side of his head. Fortunately for me, by the time my fist bounced off his temple and he crumpled to the floor, I had gotten over any moral ambivalence. I was hoping pretty hard he wasn’t law enforcement of any kind, but cops don’t use silencers—and they rarely douse themselves with Axe body spray—so even if he was one, it wasn’t my bad.
    Axe-Man was down on his hands and knees, his hand still holding that gun. He was wearing a fancy suit—not necessarily a good one, just a flashy one—and a lot of product in his hair. He was young, which could have been why he went to the trouble of using a silencer and then broadcasted his presence with so much body spray. I stomped hard on his gun hand and slammed my knee into his face. He collapsed to the floor and let go of his gun. I kicked it down the hallway. He was out cold but breathing okay. I cuffed him and went back inside for Miriam. I’d read him his rights later.
    She was hiding in the shower, trembling. She almost collapsed when she saw it was me, her eyes pinned to the gun now in my hand.
    “It’s okay,” I said quietly. “Let’s go.”
    I grabbed her by the elbow and guided her toward the door. She pulled back and said, “Can I get my stuff?”
    I shook my head. “We’ll come back for it.”
    She grabbed her handbag and her wig from off the chair.
    Out in the hallway, she stared in horror at the guy on the floor, trying to get up onto his knees. I thought about grabbing the gun—you never knew when it would come in handy—but I’d sent it pretty far down the hallway, so instead I kicked him in the ribs, twice, then hustled Miriam toward the stairs while he groaned on the floor.
    The kid at the front desk was gone. The sound system was shattered, with a