Brisco Waters, Private Eye (Part 4) (standard:mystery, 2459 words) [4/5] show all parts
Author: Red Storm	Added: Jul 26 2001	Views/Reads: 2513/2028	Part vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
All hell breaks loose in the Brisco Waters saga as our hero is kidnapped and held against his will at the docks. Finally, everything becomes crystal clear...but is it too late?

Click here to read the first 75 lines of the story

man was standing directly in front of me now, smoking a cigar and 
laughing to himself. His suit was silk, and his shoes were genuine 
Italian. 

“Big Al.” This was all I could manage at the moment. 

“Brisco, what in the hell brought you out into the night asking
questions and trying to pry yourself into my operation here?” He shook 
his head with genuine disappointment. 

“You know why.” I muttered. 

“Of course, Natalie Schillaci. A beautiful woman, but a deadly viper
also. She came to me a year ago, with plans to make a fortune from our 
foreign friends. They wanted guns, and we had the means to supply them. 
You see, she had made friends with a German officer in the nightclub 
that her husband owned. He was actually a spy, trying to steal weapon 
technology from our government, but landed a better deal with Natalie. 
She offered him a contact that would supply these weapons that were 
otherwise unavailable to them, in exchange for two million greenbacks. 
Hard cash, my friend. She told me her husband would blow up and tell 
the cops if ever he found out about her betrayal of the country that he 
had worked so hard to immigrate to, so I told her I would make sure he 
never knew.” Al laughed cunningly. 

“So she hooked up two people who frequented the nightclub for a
high-price deal. You supply weapons to the German army, who was killing 
American soldiers only twenty years ago, and kill a woman’s husband so 
he wouldn’t rat you out. You slimebag.” 

Big Al waved his hand with indifference. 

“What they fail to understand is that their army will never gain the
strength to rise against their enemies again. They are wasting time and 
money with these guns, but they don’t know it, and I ain’t gonna tell 
them. Schillaci is making a big buck with this connection, and I’m 
making a little more with the shipments themselves. Everyone’s happy 
but you, Brisco. Why did she get you involved?” He took a long hit on 
his cigar and shot the smoke into my eyes. 

“She didn’t know you were going to kill her husband, did she?” I wasn’t
asking at this point, I was accusing. “She couldn’t tell me that she 
was involved with you on this, that would point the blame in her 
direction too. She wanted me to figure it out on my own, without making 
the connection, and do you in myself. Revenge for her, I guess. She 
must have made that second hit up, though. The one where you tried to 
have her killed also.” 

“No, I actually did put a hit out on her. Just to be sure that she never
talked either. But it missed, and I decided that it wasn’t worth 
another shot.” Big Al’s smug pride was sickening. The fact that he was 
getting pleasure from revealing this scheme to me was utterly 
grotesque, but the bragging made him all warm and fuzzy. 

“Waters, I was starting to like you. You owed me money, but who
doesn’t.” He laughed, a gargling, threatening gesture. “Well, this 
means the end of the road for you, I fear. Time to go swimming with the 
fishes.” He shot two of his henchmen a look, and they immediately raced 
toward me with a large metal block-mold. The mold was placed at the 
base of my chair, and one of the thugs dropped my ankle-bound legs into 
it. As it was being filled with liquid concrete, I swore at myself for 
not figuring any of this out earlier, when it could have saved my neck. 
The mold was filled, and I could feel the tightening of the concrete as 
it set. My ankles were beginning to ache, but the gun to my head 
persuaded me not to move them around. 

“Only a few minutes, Brisco. Sorry to keep you, but that’s how it goes,
sometimes.” Everyone laughed but me. 

Suddenly the garage door imploded, with a lightning-quick flash of TNT
charge, and the room began to fill up with the boys in blue. Whistles 
were blowing and people were shouting, the result being utter chaos. 
Immediately cops started firing pistols and mobsters started firing the 
machine-guns that they were handling. I was caught in between, with my 
feet turning into a concrete block. 

“Brisco! Hold on, pal, we’re coming in!” It was Chuck Mallard, crouched
behind a crate and firing his pistol rounds off in the general 
direction of the multitude of bad guys. 

“Chuck, get me the hell outta here!” I screamed, realizing that my
concrete weight was already solidified. Too late. Big Al himself darted 
out into the open, grabbed my chair by the ropes holding me seated 
tightly, and dragged me outside onto the dock before anyone could act. 

“This is your fault, Waters, you ass!” He summoned great strength and
shoved me, chair and all, over the pier and into Lake Michigan. Things 
went into slow motion as the black water covered my body and 
high-pitched screeching filled my ears. I held my breath, but the 
adrenaline was forcing my chest to pump at an accelerated rate. I would 
gasp soon, and then it would be over. The weighted chair sunk to the 
bottom, a full ten feet where I had gone in, and came to rest on the 
floor. Everything was motionless and dark, eerily quiet. My last 
thought was of Natalie Schillaci, an innocent woman who had made a bad 
business choice and gotten her husband killed. She wanted revenge, but 
not the association, so she manipulated me into taking her case to do 
the work for her. Now she had gotten not only her husband killed, but 
this old bum too. 

A loud overhead splash brought me back to my senses. Something was
moving in on me, and I could feel the weight of the chair lighten. I 
was moving upward, to the surface. Another splash and I was above the 
waterline, gasping for air. 

“Hold on, buddy! You still with me?” 

“Yeah, Chuck, barely.” 

Chuck pulled me back onto the pier and cut through the ropes with a
pocketknife, only taking a surprising few seconds to do it. I would 
have objected to his next move, but didn’t see it coming until it had 
passed. Chuck pulled his pistol and fired a round into the concrete 
block around my feet, shattering the block into small fragments. My 
feet were free, covered only in small bits of the dried material. 

“Jesus, Chuck, I owe you my life.” I was breathing hard. 

“Right now we gotta get back in there, Brisco, we haven’t neutralized
the enemy yet!” He was talking like the army-trained individual that he 
was. I nodded agreement. 

Kicking back into the action, the gunfight was just hitting its peak. We
were in the middle of it, with Chuck firing his pistol and me picking 
up one of the Tommy guns lying on the floor. 

“Pry open the crates you’re perched behind,” I yelled to the officers,
“they’re full of these machine-guns!” They did so, relieved to be 
evening out the odds. Tommy gunfire erupted from both sides as the 
police took charge of the crates. I lifted my own Tommy gun and found 
my first target. One of the men who had stuffed me into the back of the 
black sedan was halfway exposed from behind a wall of crates, shouting 
orders to his men. I took aim and sent one round from the machine-gun 
flying into his left arm. He shrieked in pain, spinning around and 
falling into plain view. I followed the initial shot with a barrage of 
bullets on the fully-exposed body. Most landed in his chest, but he 
turned and a few hit him in the back. Blood splashed onto the light 
crates, and his body slumped against them. 

I saw the man who had driven my kidnapper’s sedan climbing a narrow
metal staircase, trying to escape the assault, and heading for an exit 
door. I lifted the gun and pulled the trigger, sending round after 
round into the area. The Thompson shook wildly in my arms, and it was 
all I could do to keep the weapon’s sight trained on my target. Sparks 
flew all over the metal casing of the stairwell, but I hit my intended 
target with deadly precision. He hunched over, holding the massive 
wounds in his abdomen, and fell all the way back down the stairs. 

The gunfight lasted for around fifteen minutes, ending only when one of
the police officers remembered the extra stick of TNT he had saved from 
the garage door detonation. He lit the stick, tossed it into the mix, 
and ducked. A few seconds later a horrendous explosion sent cries and 
bodies echoing off the solid walls of the warehouse. There were a 
handful of survivors on the mob’s side, with little casualties to the 
boys in blue. 

Big Al’s body wasn’t registered among those that were shot down, and he
wasn’t arrested with the handful of men that surrendered their arms at 
the end of the siege. He had escaped, but I didn’t think he would 
surface again for a long time. The police questioned me for nearly two 
hours, and I let them in on the whole operation except for the fact 
that Schillaci had ever been involved. I had had enough, and if they 
wanted to take the credit for the raid, so be it. After the initial 
questioning, I learned that Chuck had risked his own life to save mine. 
After Big Al made his move and dragged my chair out of the warehouse, 
Chuck had leapt from behind his cover and ran across the line of fire 
to follow, nearly being mowed-down by machine-gun fire. Had he not done 
so, or been shot and killed in the process, I would never have survived 
the whole ordeal. 

It was a lot to think about, but not right now. I needed some rest,
because I had a hard job to do tomorrow nig--, hell, later tonight, 
since I could now see the sun beginning to rise. 

The Conclusion of Brisco Waters, Private Eye Coming Next Week...(If this
part's ratings are high)


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