Page 16 of Exacting Vengeance

“Yeah.” Kyle clenched his fist. “And left three children without a mother.”

As Deke spoke with the dispatcher, Kyle kept his eyes pinned on the bank. History would not repeat itself. Not on his watch. “I’m going inside.”

Deke covered the phone with his hand. “Not without backup you’re not.”

He gave his little brother one of his infamous icy looks that said he wasn’t about to be countermanded. “No time,” he shot back. “This could all go down before the troops get here, and these guys have killed before.”

“Yeah, and Morrison’s gonna kill you if you don’t wait for backup again. Then he’ll have my ass in a sling for letting you do it.”

Kyle compressed his lips. If he waited, the body count could double or triple in a heartbeat. With that overriding fear burning a hole in his insides, he pushed from the SUV.

“Kyle, wait––”

“Dammit,” he snapped. “Don’t argue with me.”

Deke continued speaking with the NYPD dispatcher as Kyle made for the back of the Explorer. He lifted the tailgate and reached for his Kevlar vest. Using the SUV as cover, he peeled off his outer shirt, strapped on the vest, then quickly redonned the shirt to cover it.

Kyle recalled the TV footage of a young man consoling three small children who had just lost their mother. The raw pain on their faces had etched deeply into his memory. It was the kind of pain that comes from losing the person you love most in the world. It was a pain he knew all too well. It was one he would never forget.

He shoved the ugly images deep down into the emotional pit where he kept them stowed. Before closing the liftgate, he called out, “If everything goes to shit inside and you hear shots, take down the driver.” He stepped off the curb.

Charging into the bank hadn’t been on the morning agenda. They’d just come off a long night of surveillance in Little Odessa, the Brighton Beach section of Brooklyn, home to the largest population of Russian immigrants in the western hemisphere. But Ilya Sorofkin was at the top of the FBI’s bank robbery task force’s list of suspected bank robbers in New York City. The man was as violent as they came. Waiting around, sitting on his ass, was something Kyle could never do.

Trying to act casual, he maneuvered across three busy lanes of traffic, barely avoiding several aggressive yellow taxicabs hurtling south toward Lower Manhattan. Drivers pounded on their horns. One flipped him off, yelling a string of obscenities out the window. Welcome to New York.

On the other side of the street, he touched the trunk of the suspect sedan, tagging the hot metal with his fingerprints. If things went south, at least there’d be evidence on the trunk. With a sweep of his trained eye, he took in a multitude of details.

The nervous dirtbag at the wheel was indeed the Russian Bratva driver he’d suspected. Smoke spiraled from a cigarette held outside the window. Kyle caught a whiff of smoke as he walked past. Both passenger doors facing the bank were cracked open, allowing for quick entry and an even quicker escape. It also meant there were at least two more perps in the bank.

Kyle pushed open the bank’s heavy glass door, and a blast of frigid air-conditioned air hit him in the face. Dark wood tables dotted the cavernous lobby. Several columns stretched from the marble tile floor to the ceiling. The columns would provide good cover if they were solid. But he couldn’t count on that.

He went to a table in the center of the bank. Blank withdrawal and deposit slips were stacked neatly in slotted wooden boxes. He wiped the cooling sweat from his forehead and pretended to fill out a withdrawal slip. Glancing up now and then, he searched for Sorofkin’s accomplices. The robbery hadn’t gone down yet. The only question, was why.

Three people filled out slips at other tables. Half a dozen more waited in lines. Two bank tellers serviced customers from behind a tall, wood counter with barred windows. The only talking was the occasional brief, subdued conversation at the counter.

With another sweeping glance, he noted the bank’s security guard—an elderly man in a wrinkled uniform slouched on a stool near the main door. The guard could have been asleep, for all his attentiveness to what was happening around him.

Somewhere lurked at least two people who didn’t belong there, and it was his job to find them before they hurt innocent people again.

Seconds later, he spotted the lookout standing at the table nearest to the security guard. That meant the old guard would be taken out first.

The lookout wore baggy khaki slacks and an oversized camouflage coat, easily big enough to hide a rifle or shotgun. Also a tad warm for this time of year, something the guard should have picked up on. The lookout’s chest rose and fell like an accordion. This guy was nervous. It didn’t surprise him that, during the previous robbery, they’d gotten spooked and killed a teller.

Kyle’s gut still clenched at the senseless killing. It shouldn’t have gone down that way. All the perp had to do was wait for the teller to give him the cash, and she would have. That told him something else about this crew––they liked to kill. After the first kill, it only got easier. He knew that from personal experience, but that had been for God and Country.

High heels clicked as a woman approached the table where he stood. A little girl dressed in a frilly pink ballerina dress clung tightly to her skirt. The woman filled out a slip, then headed for the counter with the girl trailing after her.

Kyle narrowed his eyes, methodically dividing the interior of the bank into quadrants, checking each one repeatedly, searching for the other perp. He wasn’t wrong about this. His innate sense of all things bad tingled at the base of his neck. The robbery would go down. It was only a matter of when.

A tall man in one of the teller lines tipped his head discreetly in the direction of the lookout. Sure enough, the lookout nodded back emphatically. Now Kyle knew who the brains of the bunch was. The tall guy was calling the shots.

Protocol dictated he had to wait for a crime to be committed before acting on what could only be articulated as a hunch. But this was a cold-blooded killer.

He had to get closer. No way would he let him kill again.

As he stepped from the table, the perp approached the teller and shoved a gun through the bars. She gasped. Her eyes widened, and she jerked back. The heavy metal chair she’d been sitting on toppled and hit the floor with a clatter that rang throughout the bank.

Customers’ heads turned. The all-but-sleeping security guard leaped from his stool. He fumbled for his gun and took several hesitant steps toward the counter.