The Thirteenth Skull Read online

  I heard the dispatcher say something to someone else like, “Another one from Samson Towers! Yeah, that’s what he says.”

  “Hello?” I shouted into the phone, watching the floors slide by: 15, 14, 13 . . . “You gotta send an ambulance! Samson Towers!”

  “Sir, someone’s already called for an ambulance at that location.”

  “That’s probably for the dude in the explosion. This is someone else.”

  “Another explosion?”

  “No, a shooting.”

  “A shooting! How many people?”

  “One! Just one!” 5, 4, 3 . . . “Penthouse suite. He’s in the inner office, farthest one back through the main doors.”

  The door slid open. I stopped a couple steps past the door to the stairs. He’d fooled me once with the hiding-behind-the-stairway-door trick. Maybe he thought I would think he wouldn’t try it again, but if it were me I wouldn’t race onto a street swarming with cops.

  I kicked open the door and stepped inside. I found the discarded chute and harness, his jacket and, lying on the bottom step, the empty 9mm, but no Delivery Dude. I scooped up the gun and dropped it into my pocket. At some point, Samuel would want it back.

  The lobby was swarming with people. I saw the red flash of emergency vehicle lights on the street outside and the red hulk of the fire engine beside the smoldering wreckage of the car.

  I pushed my way through the crowd and spun through the revolving doors into the freezing air outside. The brown delivery truck was pulling away from the curb as a cop trotted beside it, shouting for the driver to stop. I stood there for a second, unsure what to do. Then the driver pulled into the center of the street and floored the gas.

  The entire block had been roped off, but I didn’t think Delivery Dude was going to let that plastic yellow tape concern him. His front bumper clipped the back of a cop car as he roared forward, sending the car spinning into the curb.

  I didn’t spend much time mulling over the options. My car was in the parking garage two stories below the pavement. I ran to the nearest police car and flung open the passenger door. A young cop sat behind the wheel, writing on a clipboard. I dropped into the seat beside him and shouted, “Follow that truck!”

  He hesitated for a half second before answering, and then he said, “No way, kid.”

  I leaned over and pressed the muzzle of the empty 9mm against his temple.

  “Follow that truck.”

  “Okay!”

  “I’ll take that,” I said, and pulled the gun from his holster.

  “The guy in that truck tried to kill me and it’s important I know who—and why,” I shouted as we lurched from the curb. “Hit the siren!”

  He did, and soon we were clocking eighty up Gay Street. The truck had a four-block jump on us though and I couldn’t see it anywhere.

  “It’s gone!” he yelled over the wail of the siren. He looked only a couple years older than me and scared out of his mind. Maybe this was his first high-speed chase.

  “He turned somewhere,” I yelled back. “Slow down a little. You check left and I’ll check right.”

  He glanced in the rearview mirror. I twisted in the seat and looked behind us. Two cops were giving us chase as cars swung into the curb to get out of their way.

  “Don’t stop!” I yelled at the young cop. “If you stop I’ll shoot you!”

  Of course there was no way that would happen, but he didn’t know that. For all he knew, I was out of my mind. I wondered what he thought when he looked up and saw me sitting beside him, my face and clothes covered in blood and bruises.

  “There, there, there!” I yelled, pointing down a narrow side street. “Turn, turn!”

  He yanked the wheel hard to the right. The back wheels locked and the car slung around. The two cars behind us slammed on their brakes and barely missed us as we accelerated through the turn. The truck made another hard right and I didn’t have to tell the young cop this time; he matched the truck’s arc, getting us so close the bumpers almost touched.

  I rolled down my window.

  “Keep us as close as you can!” I shouted over the sirens, the radio chatter and the icy wind blowing in my face. “I’m going for the tires!”

  “That only works in the movies!” he shouted back.

  I heaved myself through the open window, grabbed hold of the mounting bracket for the lights with my left hand, and opened fire. The truck had led us into a narrow cobblestone alley barely wider than the width of the truck. The brick walls of the buildings beside me passed in a red and black blur, about two inches from my cheek. I was concentrating on my shots, so I didn’t see the big metal bins used for construction debris up ahead.

  But Delivery Dude did.

  The brake lights flashed. The significance of that was lost on me as I frantically yanked on the trigger, coming nowhere near to hitting a tire—maybe it does only work in the movies. An instant later the cop hit his brakes too and we went into a skid.

  We hit the truck, the force hurling me from the car. I landed on a plastic mountain of garbage sacks stacked against the side of the building.

  Delivery Dude threw the truck into reverse and pushed the cop car straight back as its wheels howled in protest. I scrambled to my feet and ran to the passenger door of the truck. I jumped onto the running board and grabbed the metal bar that held the side mirror. At that moment, the truck leaped forward.

  Its nose swung hard to the left to get around the construction bin. I had to press my body against the door to avoid hitting the bins and, as I did, the window shattered. I could see the gun in his hand in the side mirror. Well, of course he would have a gun inside the cab—I know I would have. I ducked down as he kept firing out the busted window, and my feet kept slipping off the step while I hung on to the mirror for dear life.

  We flew through an intersection at the end of the alley and the truck went airborne about two feet. The force of our landing broke my grip and I swung crazily back and forth holding on with just my right hand, my cheek and shoulder ramming into the door as he slung the truck hard to the left in an attempt to dislodge me.

  He floored the gas. My fingers had gone numb from the cold—I wouldn’t be able to hold on much longer. If I let go now, I might be sucked under the carriage and the back wheels would finish me. If I tried to climb into the cab through the broken window, he’d blow my brains out. And if I tried to jump, I’d hit the pavement at sixty or seventy miles per hour.

  The mirror above my hand shattered as he fired at the only part of my body visible to him.

  That helped me decide. I grabbed the door handle with my left hand and let go with my right. My body swung around, and I dangled like this for a few seconds before I managed to gain a foothold again and get both hands around the door handle.

  I saw them coming up fast behind us: three cop cars, lights flashing, sirens blaring. Looking ahead, I saw three more cop cars parked bumper to bumper, spanning both lanes, about four blocks away. They had him trapped.

  Brakes, Delivery Dude, I thought. Now would be a good time for the brakes . . .

  I thought they had him and the cops probably thought they had him.

  They didn’t have him.

  He hit the gas and, as he picked up speed, barreling straight for the barricade, the cops opened fire.

  Maybe they saw me hanging there by the door handle. I doubted it, though. They were more concerned with the two-thousand-pound truck coming straight at them.

  Then he swerved, slamming on the brakes as he swung the nose of the truck hard to the left. The rear wheels locked and the truck went into a slide: I guessed the idea was to crush me against the cop cars.

  Nowhere to go now but up.

  I swung my right foot onto the window ledge, using it as a stepping stool to heave myself onto the roof. At that second, as I threw my body across the top of the truck, Delivery Dude hit the barricade of police cars.

  The impact hurled me across the span of the roof and off the opposite side, right over t
he driver’s window. I tumbled into empty space.

  Lucky for me, one of the cop cars chasing us had rushed forward to box in the truck. I belly flopped onto the car’s hood, my forward motion hurling me straight at the windshield. I flipped off the hood at the instant the front bumper struck the side of the truck. I landed on my butt, sending a searing knifelike pain up my spine.

  I looked up to see Delivery Dude looking right at me, wearing this strange, enigmatic smile. He was holding something in his hand as the cops swarmed the truck, guns drawn, all of them shouting for him to come out with his hands up.

  Delivery Dude was holding a small black device in the middle of which, blinking red, was a button and, over which, his thumb hovered. And he was smiling at me.

  He gave me a little nod as if to say, Touché, Kropp.

  I screamed for them to get down, but nobody heard me. I took cover behind the cop car as his thumb came down.

  The truck exploded in a blossom of boiling red fire. The shock wave knocked me backward and the heat from the blast sucked the last molecule of oxygen from my lungs.

  13:19:21:48

  They took me to the emergency room first. Multiple lacerations and contusions. A broken nose. Twenty-five stitches on my forearm where he sliced me with the dagger. Bullet removed from my shoulder. And an X-ray of my butt to see if my coccyx was cracked.

  After the doctors were done with my body, a couple of cops came by and took it to the police station. I asked for my phone call. I called the attorney for my father’s estate, Alphonso Needlemier. He told me not to talk to anybody until he got there.

  I was alone in one of the interrogation rooms. There was a mirror along one wall. It had to be one of those two-way setups.

  I wondered who Delivery Dude was, who had sent him, and why. I had my suspicions. At the hospital, I took the Ring of Solomon from my finger and slipped it into my pocket.

  At least thirty minutes passed. Nothing happened. No one came in. The big clock hanging on the wall behind me clicked. My nose itched under the bandages. My butt was sore and I couldn’t find a comfortable sitting position. I had a very bad feeling about it—not about my butt, but the situation in general. Where were the cops? Why had they dumped me in this room? Where was Mr. Needlemier? Who was Delivery Dude, why was he after me, was Sam okay, and why had they arrested me? I was the victim here.

  Finally the door opened and two people came in, a man and a woman. He was older, with a huge bald head and a fat red nose; he might look like Santa Claus if he grew a beard. She was young-looking, with dark hair and even darker eyes.

  She introduced herself as Detective Meredith Black. His name came out as a grunt, but it sounded like Kennard.

  “Why did you arrest me?” I asked.

  “How about reckless endangerment, kidnapping, willful destruction of property, assault and battery, and attempted murder?” rumbled the big-bellied Kennard in a voice about as far from Santa Claus’s as you could get.

  “That’s a lot,” I said.

  “You a smart guy?” he barked at me.

  “Not by any standard I can think of,” I said.

  “Let’s see how smart you are after twenty years at Brushy Mountain,” Kennard said.

  “Here’s what we know, Alfred,” Meredith Black said, placing a hand on Kennard’s hairy forearm. “A car collides with an SUV in front of Samson Towers and blows up. A minute later, a John Doe is shot at point-blank range in the penthouse suite of the building. Ten minutes after that, a high-speed chase that results in the deaths of five Knoxville police officers and an unidentified suspect who appears to have committed suicide by means of an improvised explosive device.”

  “How is Sam?” I asked. “The John Doe. They wouldn’t tell me at the hospital.”

  She ignored me. “And now we have you. And you seem to be the common denominator in all of this, Alfred.”

  She pulled a small tape recorder from her purse and set it on the table between us.

  “We’d like to hear what you have to say.”

  “I’m supposed to wait for Mr. Needlemier.”

  “Who’s Needlemier?” Kennard asked.

  “My attorney. Well, actually he’s my dad’s attorney. Or he used to be.”

  “Your dad fired him?”

  “My dad died.”

  “Bernard Samson,” Meredith Black said. It wasn’t a question.

  “That’s right. That’s why I was in that office when the car blew up. I guess that was all a setup so the phony delivery dude could get upstairs without running his package through security.”

  “What package?” Meredith Black asked.

  “The package containing the shotgun. I guess you found the shotgun. He said he had a package and Samuel said ‘I’ll take it,’ and he said something like, ‘Okay,’ and then he shot him.”

  “Who is Samuel?” Meredith asked.

  “The John Doe. He’s alive, isn’t he?”

  “So Samuel shot the delivery dude?” Kennard asked.

  “No, the delivery dude shot Samuel.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. Then he tried to shoot me.”

  “Samuel?”

  “The delivery dude! Samuel’s my guardian; why would he want to shoot me?”

  “Why did the delivery dude want to shoot you?” Kennard asked.

  “I don’t know. He didn’t say, but I didn’t ask either. He ran. I ran after him. He did this to my arm and this to my nose and then he parachuted down the stairwell.”

  Kennard gave a belly laugh. Meredith shot him a look and said, “We found the chute.” She turned back to me. “So you followed him outside, hijacked a police car, and forced the officer to give chase.”

  I nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Why?”

  “I wanted to know the same thing you guys do: why?”

  “You don’t know why someone would want to kill you?”

  “No,” I lied. I had been working on the list before they came in. There was Mike Arnold, the rogue OIPEP agent who had sworn to kill me. There was the remnant of the private army of Mogart, the black knight exiled from the Order of the Sacred Sword, who might want a little payback for my killing their leader. And, finally, OIPEP itself, which wanted the ring in my pocket. I wasn’t sure OIPEP should be on the list, mostly because I liked and trusted Abigail Smith, the director, but like Samuel said, the Company could be ruthless.

  “You never saw this delivery dude before?” Kennard asked.

  I shook my head. “Never.”

  “Okay, Alfred,” Meredith Black said softly. “So far you haven’t told us anything we couldn’t figure out for ourselves.”

  “You’re a step ahead of me, then,” I said.

  Kennard came over the table toward me, biceps bulging in his tight white dress shirt. His breath smelled bad, like stale coffee and cigarettes.

  “Look, punk, five brothers of mine died today because of you—cops who had wives, families ... a nd they ain’t goin’ home to see them tonight because some oversize kid wanted to act out a scene from Grand Theft Auto!”

  Meredith grabbed his shoulder and eased him back into his chair. “Louis, come on. He’s just a kid ...”

  “I didn’t know he rigged the truck to explode,” I cried. The remark about the dead policemen had hurt. “I swear I didn’t! And I don’t know who he was or who sent him to kill me or even why they sent him to kill me! I’m trying to stay out of crap like this.”

  I stopped myself. Kennard was sitting back in his chair trying to catch his breath. Meredith was staring at me. I glanced down at the tape recorder.

  “You’re trying to stay out?” she asked quietly.

  “You bet. Yes.” Don’t say any more. Wait for Mr. Needlemier.

  “Stay out of what?”

  “Stuff.”

  “Stuff like—what?”

  “Like what happened this morning. I’ve got enough blood—” I was going to say on my hands, but in a situation like this, you don’t want to
use phrases like I’ve got enough blood on my hands.

  “I could relieve you of some, if you want,” Kennard growled.

  I took a very deep breath. “I really don’t think I should say anything else until Mr. Needlemier gets here.”

  “We know who you are,” Kennard said. “We ran you through Interpol. Didja think we wouldn’t think to do that?

  “No, because I don’t even know what Interpol is.”

  “A year ago. Stonehenge and several thousand pounds of explosives. Ten Most Wanted list. Ring a bell?”

  “That was all a mistake,” I said. “A big misunderstanding.”

  “Uh-huh,” he sneered.

  “They took me off the list, didn’t they?”

  “Alfred,” Detective Black said. “We want to help you, but we can’t help you if you keep refusing to help us. You know more about what happened this morning than you’re letting on. We already have you on the kidnapping and carjacking. The truth can only help you now. Tell us.”

  I chewed on my bottom lip. I really didn’t know what the right thing to do was at that moment. How much should I tell them? Should I tell them anything at all? And even if I did tell them just a little of it, would they believe me?

  “I think he was an assassin,” I said slowly.

  Kennard laughed. “You think?”

  Meredith leaned forward. Her breath smelled as good as Kennard’s did bad. Like cotton candy. “Who was an assassin?”

  “Delivery Dude.”

  “Do you have any idea why someone would want to kill you?”

  Should I tell them? And if I did tell them, what was going to happen to me? I couldn’t prove anything and they probably wouldn’t even believe me. But they were cops, even this nasty Kennard dude, and Meredith Black had a kind face and she gave off the attitude like she liked me and wanted to help me. And I had a feeling the only way to get out of this mess was to rely on the one thing you’re supposed to rely on when things get really messed up: the truth.

  So I said, “OIPEP.”

  “Oypep?”

  “What’s an OIPEP?” Kennard wondered aloud.

  “The Office of Interdimensional Paradoxes and Extraordinary Phenomenon,” I said. “OIPEP.”