THIRTY-EIGHT

The Russian had given it his all, that was obvious. The building looked as if someone had come through with a wrecking ball, intent on causing as much damage as possible. The hall was trashed, the apartment they’d just come from was trashed, and there was blood everywhere.

“Hey, Mr. Glass.” Cutter pointed to the floor. More blood. A trail. Leading down the hall toward the one apartment they hadn’t checked yet.

Glass motioned for Cutter and John to back off. He took the point with Lincoln this time.

“On three,” he said, ready to kick the door down, but didn’t even bother to start the count. Once he took a closer look, he saw that it was open already.

Glass tapped it with his foot, and it swung wide.

This was definitely Castle’s apartment; he knew that right away. It was in even worse shape than the others—looked like a freaking tornado had hit here, never mind a wrecking ball.

“Give it up, Castle!” he shouted into the wreckage.

No answer. Not that he’d expected one; just because he was outnumbered, Castle was going to surrender? Not a chance in hell. He was going to keep coming after them until they were all dead, or he was. That was the only way this could end.

There was a lot more blood on the floor in here, Glass saw. He wondered if maybe the Russian hadn’t gotten to him after all, if maybe Castle hadn’t crawled back into his hole and died here.

He had a funny feeling they weren’t going to be that lucky, though.

“All right.” He motioned the others forward. “Let’s take it nice and slow. Shoot anything that moves, even if it’s just a rat.”

They moved into the apartment then, he and Lincoln first, John and Cutter a half-dozen steps behind.

No one in this room. They moved on to the next one.

Two guys—a fat one, and a geek with a ring through his nose—were sitting on a couch, looking up at Glass and the others as if this sort of thing happened to them every day.

“What the fuck . . .” Glass frowned. “Who are you?”

“Hi.” The fat one smiled. “I’m Stanley.”

“Dave. What’s going on?”

Glass looked at the geek and shook his head.

“What’s going on? Unbelievable. Lincoln,” he motioned the man closer, “you and Cutter check the other rooms. You see anything suspicious, do not touch it. Call me. Understood?”

“Yes, sir, Mr. Glass. Understood.”

They left. John stepped up alongside Quentin.

“Who are these clowns?”

“Who gives a shit?” Glass raised his gun again and leveled it at the fat man. “Where is Castle?”

The fat man blinked. “Castle?”

“That’s right. Frank Castle. Who lives here?”

“Uh . . .”

Glass put the gun right up against Stanley’s forehead. “I asked you a question, fat man.”

“Maybe this fat fuck ate him,” John said, poking the man in the belly with his gun. “That what happened, buddy? You get hungry, eat the guy we’re lookin’ for, huh?”

“Hey. Leave him alone.” The geek stepped forward. “He doesn’t know anything.”

“Oh? Is that right? He doesn’t know anything?” John asked.

“Yeah. Yeah. That’s right.”

“Okay,” Glass said, swinging the gun so that it pointed at the geek’s chest. “Then I’ll ask you. Where is Castle?”

The geek swallowed. “Uh . . . he’s . . . not here. Definitely not here.”

“Really?” Glass pulled back the trigger of the gun ever so slightly. The hammer clicked. “Are you sure about that?”

“Oh. Well. I don’t . . . actually . . . I mean . . .” The geek was shaking his head, eyes wide, just staring at the gun, and Glass knew he was going to crack in one more second. At that point they’d have Castle, and he, Quentin Glass, would be the one to kill him, lay his dead body in front of Howard Saint so that whatever bug had crawled up his boss’s ass these past few days would go away, and the two of them would go back to how it was.

Oh, yeah. He’d kill the fat man and the geek, too. Or maybe let John do them, so the kid wouldn’t be too pissed when Quentin did Castle.

That was how it was going to go; Glass could see the whole wonderful course of events laid out before him.

And then the geek stopped shaking, set his jaw, and announced: “I’m not saying shit.”

“What?”

“I’m not saying shit.”

Glass glared. “We don’t want shit. We want answers.”

Lincoln and Cutter returned then, shaking their heads. No Castle. This was unacceptable: The Russian dead, Castle gone without a trace . . .

Glass looked around the room then, and his eyes fell on a long metal table against the wall, tools scattered across the top of it.

He turned back to the geek and smiled.

“Tie this fuck up,” he said, his eyes never leaving the geek’s face. “We’ll see what he does and doesn’t know.”

Joan couldn’t watch.

And yet she couldn’t look away.

Crammed into the little freight elevator next to a now-unconscious Castle, she had no choice but to look up through the floorboards at the scene unfolding above her.

She hadn’t even known about the little elevator, though in retrospect it made sense the building would have one, some way of hauling freight up from the garage into whatever sort of business the loft had once held.

Whatever the business had been, it couldn’t have used much equipment. The cage was tiny: squeezing the two of them in had been the hardest part of the process, had made the effort they’d gone to prying open the recessed metal doors in the floor and hauling the old, rusty elevator cage up seem like child’s play.

Now Joan was staring at the crazy man with the goatee and wishing they’d all tried to squeeze in.

He scared her even more than that Goliath who’d torn apart the building. The tone of his voice when he’d ordered the other men to tie Dave up; the way he kept squeezing the exercise grip in his hand; the cold, calculating look in his eyes . . .

She didn’t want to think about what he might be capable of.

“How’s your memory vis-à-vis our friend Mr. Castle?” the man asked. “Getting any better?”

Dave shook his head.

“Answer my question, please.”

Silence.

Joan wasn’t sure what to feel. Proud of Dave, absolutely. Terrified of what was going to happen next, for sure.

The man looked over at Stanley.

“Your friend here is about to have a bad day. You can save him by talking.”

Stanley shook his head, too.

“We’re wasting time, Quentin,” one of the others said. “Let’s shoot the fat one, see what that does.”

“John, please.” The man with the goatee—Quentin— held up a hand. “I know what I’m doing.”

He turned back to Dave. “You’re sure about this? You understand I have no interest in hurting you or your friend? That all I want is Frank Castle’s whereabouts and then I will leave and never darken your doorway again?”

Still no response.

The man sighed.

“Okay. Bear in mind it didn’t have to be this way.”

He pulled up another chair then, and sat down right in front of Dave, blocking Joan’s view of her friend for a second.

He raised his hand, the hand he’d been holding the exercise grip in, only now Joan saw that she’d been wrong; it wasn’t an exercise grip, it was a pair of pliers. Old, rusty, steel pliers.

The man leaned forward and clamped the pliers tightly onto Dave’s nose ring.

“We’ll start with this.”

The man twisted, and he yanked, and somewhere in there, Dave began screaming.

“Jesus, that was a lot of blood.” Cutter shook his head.

“I never seen so much blood off a guy who didn’t croak afterward.”

“Head wounds,” Lincoln said. “You always get a lot of blood off head wounds.”

It had been a lot of blood, Glass reflected, coming down the stairs behind the two men, John Saint another step behind him. Toward the end, he’d had to stand well back to avoid spattering his clothes, but there had been no avoiding the stains on his hands. He wiped his palm with a handkerchief, and made a mental note always to have two cloths with him whenever he went out on business. This one was already soaked through.

Though he doubted he would ever meet another subject with quite so many facial piercings and, consequently, so many . . . opportunities.

“If they knew, one of them would have talked,” he said, following Lincoln and Cutter outside.

“That’s for damn sure,” John Saint said. “So where do we think he is?”

“Don’t know. But that’s his home base—no doubt about it. At some point, he’s coming back.” The pictures of the wife and kid had clinched it for him—this wasn’t just some place Castle had set up from which to spring a trap, this was where he lived.

“Okay.” John Saint turned to Cutter. “You stay. If— when—he shows up, kill him.”

“Got it, boss. I’ll be here.”

Cutter nodded, and headed back inside the building.

Glass stared after him, frowning. Something about the situation suddenly bothered him—all that blood, how far could Castle really have gone? Even if the fat man and the geek hadn’t been helping him, someone else in the neighborhood might be involved. What they ought to do, he thought, was knock on a few doors. See if anyone had seen anything.

Except it was already getting dark. Even he didn’t want to be around this neighborhood in the dark—especially if Castle was out there, watching them. Christ, the man had anticipated their every move so far; it wouldn’t surprise Glass in the least if he was a step ahead of them now.

“Quentin?” John Saint was looking at him funny. “You all right?”

Glass nodded. “Yeah. Fine.”

“All right. I’ll see you back at the club.” Saint climbed into his Cobra then, and roared off.

Quentin got in the backseat of the BMW, still thinking.

Castle was up to something now, he knew it. What that something was—

“The club?” Lincoln asked, turning in the driver’s seat.

Glass frowned. “No. Take me home, will you? I’ll catch up later.”

What he really needed to do, Glass decided, was go home and get a shower. Get cleaned up, get his head on straight again, and get ready for what he sensed was going to be a long, long night.