Kill for Me

by Tom Wood

  I hate them. But I have no choice.

  Victor understood. Jairo had switched sides after all, but he had switched to his own side. He saw an opportunity that he hadn’t seen before. A moment ago, he had wanted Victor to release her—not because he cared, but he was playing his part. Jairo wanted to be on the winning team and he didn’t want to have to justify why he hadn’t acted to ensure victory. But that was then. Now she was bleeding to death. Now Jairo saw a different endgame. No guerrillas tormenting him, threatening him, forcing him to lure unsuspecting gun buyers to deaths for which had no stomach. He saw freedom, and all he had to do was nothing at all.

  Jairo wanted her to bleed to death. He wanted free of the yoke around his neck. He was going to stand there and let her die. Victor didn’t care about his motives, only what that meant. When the commander died, or when it was obvious that she could no longer be saved, the five guerrillas would be grabbing their guns and, even with a head start, Victor wouldn’t make it far.

  “Change of plan,” he had told the woman. He needed a new one for himself.

  When reason was exhausted and emotion failed there was one final card to play.

  Violence.

  • Chapter 5 •

  Six rounds in the Colt and six targets.

  Jairo, with a gun in his hand, was the most immediate threat, so Victor shot him first—a single snap shot, because he didn’t have time for anything else—and let go of the woman as he turned to face the five unarmed guerrillas. The commander dropped to the beach. Her skin was almost without color, but her lips were blue. Her fatigues were drenched in blood, as was the sand around her.

  The five young men were already primed and were reacting without hesitation, going for their weapons. Harder targets now they were moving fast and ducking, squatting, or kneeling. No way to kill them all before one had a rifle up and was firing.

  Victor put a double tap in each of the closest two and dashed for the cover of the pickup, sliding on the loose sand and going down behind the vehicle.

  Bullets were coming his way before he had recovered. They thumped into the truck and blew up chunks of grass and clouds of sand from the dunes, or zipped above his head. A window broke above him. Pebbles of glass rained down over him. He shuffled behind one of the tall, thick tires. A round burst through the rubber and a rush of escaping air hissed across his face.

  A maelstrom of multiple assault rifles roared. This was rage. This was vengeance. They weren’t picking their shots but expressing themselves through firepower. There were far too many bullets flying for Victor to track their rounds; the one thing he knew for certain was the barrage couldn’t last. One long squeeze of an assault rifle’s trigger was all it took to empty the magazine when the mag held thirty and was losing rounds at the rate of several hundred per minute.

  The firing ceased. Not all at once, but the guns went silent within a couple of seconds of one another.

  Victor could swap out a Galil’s mag and be shooting again in under three seconds. Untrained guerrillas dosed up on adrenaline and rage might do the same in five or even ten. Either way, the few seconds he bought wouldn’t matter. He would need at least thirty to make it to anything resembling cover.

  He peeked out around the blown tire, looking beneath the truck’s engine block to see that there were three shooters, all reloading. The other two were prostrate on the beach. His double taps had dropped them both. In the twilight he couldn’t tell whether they were alive or dead, but they were unmoving.

  The three active were reloading, in varying stages of readiness. Victor fired the last round from the Colt beneath the truck, but the angle was too extreme to score a hit.

  It bought him some extra time, however, causing the three guerrillas to flinch and react. The teenager dropped his replacement magazine.

  Victor, still crouched down, shuffled to where Jairo had fallen and where the man’s pistol lay nearby. The truck blocked the line of sight, but not for long. Even untrained enemies knew how to flank when they held a significant numerical advantage.

  A moan told him Jairo was still alive. He was conscious, writhing in slow, pained movements. Victor’s shot had hit him in the face, but the bullet had somehow missed the brain and spine. There was almost no blood. Just a little brightened his stubble. Jairo was conscious, but he was in shock. He could likely stand, but didn’t know how.

  Victor scooped up the man’s dropped weapon and almost smiled. It was an FN Five-seveN. Something of an unexpected bonus. Not an easy thing to acquire, even on the black market. Jairo had made a special effort for his personal weapon. He knew his guns, after all.

  “Good choice,” Victor said to Jairo, who could only moan in response.

  It didn’t have the government-only-issue twenty-round magazine, but ten bullets were ten bullets. After checking there was a round in the chamber, Victor turned back. He pictured the three gunmen on the far side of the truck, spreading out. Two circling one way, while the third went the other. They wouldn’t be rushing. Even with the numerical advantage, they would be scared. They had lost their commander and were down to half their number. There was a good chance this was their first proper firefight. Shooting paper targets all day long and the occasional ambush couldn’t prepare them for what it was like to have someone shooting back. They were learning the hard way that they were out of their depth.

  Still, bullets were bullets, whoever fired them. The only difference between getting shot by an amateur instead of a professional was the indignation.

  Victor shuffled back behind the blown tire and reached up. His hand found the handle of the passenger’s door and he eased it open just enough to enable him to slip inside the cab. He kept low, lying across the seats on his shoulder. No rounds were coming at him, so they hadn’t seen him. They were too focused on what lay on the other side of the vehicle to think about what could be going on inside it.

  He had left the keys in the ignition in case he needed to make a fast exit. The fob was metal—nickel or some alloy—that was shaped like a naked woman. Cheap and tacky, but shiny enough to catch what little light there was to help Victor locate it without exposing himself any more than he had to do. It had belonged to the truck’s previous owner.

  He heard footsteps crunching on sand. The three gunmen were close. One had circled around the back, while the other two were in front of the truck. Perfect.

  Victor twisted the ignition key.

  The starter motor spun and the engine revved and the headlights came on as twin intense beams of white that washed over the two guerrillas in front of the truck.

  With pupils dilated to capture as much of the twilight as possible, the men were blinded as well as startled. For a moment they froze in place, unable to see and unable to move, and perfectly illuminated.

  Victor sat up only as much as he needed to and shot them both through the windscreen.

  He didn’t have the time or angle to aim properly, so he put four rounds in each to make sure they went down and stayed down.

  The guy at the back of the truck opened fire in response, shooting his rifle on automatic, bullets plugging holes in the rear windscreen and ripping through the roof above. Victor dropped back down, letting the truck protect him until the gunman had wasted his magazine.

  Once the firing had ceased, Victor slid out of the truck’s cab, expecting to find the guy four seconds into his five-second reload, surprised and vulnerable and easy to kill. But instead he saw a Galil on the sand and a figure sprinting away in the red gloom of the truck’s rear lights. He had tasted his first firefight and found it not to his liking.

  The guerrilla—the teenager—was fast and increased the distance with every passing second, energized by fear, thinking he had enough of a head start. But he didn’t know which gun Victor was armed with; he didn’t know it had an effective range of fifty meters. He was even running in a straight line along the crest of the dunes,
a sharp silhouette against the darkening sky.

  Victor aimed the Five-seveN and squeezed the trigger twice.

  It should have been over then, but one of the other guerrillas was still alive.

  • Chapter 6 •

  He was one of the two guys who had taken a couple of bullets from the Colt at the start of proceedings. He had gone down, he hadn’t been moving, but now he was awake, alive, and angry. The bullets had hit him at the top of his chest. They hadn’t hit his heart, because he was alive, and they hadn’t hit his spine, because he could stand. Victor was disappointed with his poor shooting, even for snap shots. The hydrostatic shock of overlapping waves of energy from the double tap had put the man down and knocked him out, at least, so it was a lesson in protocol if nothing else.

  The guerrilla had a rifle, pale with caked-on sand, that he raised and pointed at Victor. The Five-seveN hung by Victor’s side, barrel cooling and the scent of cordite mixing with the salt air. The guerrilla gestured to it, and Victor dropped the pistol. It was empty, anyway.

  The young man with the rifle was bigger than his dead companions. He was better fed, better nourished. He hadn’t been in the jungle for as long, or was stealing food from the others. Sweat gleamed on his face. There was no triumph in the young man’s expression, and he said nothing. He enjoyed the moment, though, the anticipation. Victor waited.

  The guerrilla squeezed the trigger and nothing happened.

  “Sand gets everywhere,” Victor said. “Weapon maintenance one-oh-one.”

  The misfire did little to change the guerrilla’s mind-set. He wasn’t done yet.

  He charged Victor and swung the rifle like a club, gripping the barrel housing in both hands and using the stock as the business end. Which made a certain kind of sense, because the stock was the heavier end; it would generate more force on impact. But there was little chance of impact with a weapon that slow. Holding it the other way around would have reversed the balance, making it hit lighter, but the attacks would be faster. They might have a chance of connecting then.

  He reserved his earlier assessment—the rifle-club was never going to hit him—because the guerrilla didn’t have a clue how to fight. He put all of his effort into the first blow. When it missed, he couldn’t compensate for all the force he had generated that hit nothing. He swung himself off balance. It left him defenseless. He hadn’t even attempted to test his opponent’s speed.

  Victor slipped the clumsy attack and waited for the next. He was in no rush.

  The guerrilla kept swinging and missing. He had zero skill, but he had determination. He had will. Sometimes that was enough. Most enemies would have given up by now, but Victor could see in the man’s eyes that the corpses nearby had been friends. Victor understood the strong bonds of brotherhood that were forged by living and fighting alongside comrades. It created an unrivaled loyalty and an unequaled ferocity. Victor had almost died trying to save his teammates. He had been willing to die.

  Within seconds, the guerrilla was exhausted.

  Victor hyperextended the man’s closest knee with a kick to the outside of the joint. The leg didn’t quite collapse into a sideways V, but it was close enough.

  The guerrilla lost the rifle as he hit the beach on his back, and Victor moved on top of him, knees pinning the guy’s upper arms in place. A soft landing thanks to the sand, but the guerrilla would have fared better on concrete, because Victor grabbed a handful of sand and threw it into his face on the end of an open-palm strike. It didn’t just get into his eyes, nose, and mouth, but was also driven into them with power. The coarse particles scratched his eyeballs and caked the sockets; it filled his nostrils and naval cavity; it coated his tongue and blocked his throat.

  He went into a fit of sneezing, coughing, and retching.

  He couldn’t see Victor, let alone have enough control of himself to fight back. He was desperate, however, and one arm came free in the thrashing, working its way out of the loose sand. That arm rose to flail in front of him, searching for a target. More an annoyance than a danger, but Victor batted it aside and used his advantage of position to throw a couple of downward elbow strikes. Bones broke. Blood mixed with the sand and mucus covering the guerrilla’s face.

  Victor stood and flipped him onto his stomach, then used the heel of his shoe on the back of the guerrilla’s head to force his face into the sand. It bloomed around him. He writhed beneath Victor’s foot.

  Victor heard the gulls above and the feral dogs scuffling in the distance. He gazed at the black waves lapping on the beach. A beautiful place, even in the darkness, so isolated it was almost otherworldly in its serenity. Victor liked isolation. For him, peace was a challenge impossible to realize, but the farther away from other people, the more chance he had of finding if not peace, then contentment.

  He breathed in the sea air and was content.

  The guy beneath his heel struggled for a few fruitless seconds. When the struggling achieved nothing, he screamed for a few, muffled seconds more.

  Five Weeks Earlier

  • Chapter 7 •

  There were some things in life that money couldn’t buy, but Luis Lavandier had yet to find one of them. He was a wealthy man, rich by any reasonable standard, but compared to his employer he was but a pauper. She paid him handsomely for his services, and bestowed upon him all manner of lavish gifts and generous bonuses. In return he gave her words of wisdom. It was a scam, he knew, because he was no wiser than she, but he was able to project erudition and he was a patient man who kept his cool—or at least the appearance of cool—at all times.

  Such cool and patience were tested on a regular basis.

  Today, for example, had been most trying for the Frenchman. He was shaken, though he didn’t look it and didn’t act it. He kept his stress and anxiety buried down inside him to maintain his unflappable exterior. He stood with his arms folded before him while he observed Dr. Flores examining Heloise. Flores was composed but concerned. Heloise was the epitome of composure. Whereas Lavandier’s was a front, Heloise was the real deal. He had seen her enraged many times, but he had never seen her scared. Lavandier had never known anyone so fearless. It made him want her all the more.

  The clinic was the most exclusive in Guatemala City, maybe in the whole of Central America. It occupied a six-story building on a quiet street in one of the city’s most desirable neighborhoods. Heloise had been a patient of its owner and chief practitioner, Dr. Flores, since she had been a little girl. Flores had treated her father, Manny Salvatierra, for most of his life, as well as his wife and daughters. Now he treated only Heloise. Lavandier wasn’t sure why he had chosen her over Maria, and he didn’t want to know.

  Flores was old but healthy. He didn’t act his age. He moved with the vigor of a man half his years. He had more energy than Lavandier, who liked to consider himself fit. Although a kilogram or five off the waist wouldn’t hurt, he thought as he drew in his stomach.

  “I know what you’ll say, so I hesitate,” Flores said as he concluded his examination of Heloise.

  She sat on the end of a medical cot, still and poised, gaze fixed on the wall ahead. She neither complained nor showed signs of discomfort as Flores made sure she was okay. He had checked her pulse, her breathing, her blood pressure. He had cleaned her wounds—shallow cuts from broken glass. He could do nothing for the contusions, but they were minor.

  “Just say it,” she said.

  He was already shaking his head in readiness for her response. “I think a neck brace would be a good idea.”

  “Impossible.”

  “You see? I knew you would ignore my recommendation. I’m only your doctor, after all. What do I know? I wonder why you even came here when you know so much more than I do.”

  Lavandier watched the exchange with silent amusement. Flores was unique, but he didn’t know it. Heloise never tolerated such impertinence from anyone else. He could stray int
o outright rudeness and Heloise would show no reaction. She would feel no wrath. Yet even her worst enemies were unfalteringly polite to her, even in threats. Her temper was equal only to her cruelty.

  “Why do you want me to wear one?” she asked.

  “You’ve had some whiplash from the crash. There is a little tenderness at the back of your neck. We could x-ray to be sure, but I believe you may have some bruising around your C-four and C-five vertebrae. It’s not showing through the skin, but we shouldn’t ignore it. It wouldn’t take much of a knock to make it worse.”

  “But why do you want me to wear a brace?”

  Flores said, “I think you’ll find I just explained why.”

  “No, you explained why I require one, not why you want me to wear one.”

  Flores was confused. He was an excellent physician, a clever man, but Heloise’s world was not his own. Its rules, its perils, were beyond his understanding.

  The Frenchman decided to help out. “You want to keep her safe, yes?”

  Flores nodded. “Of course. But—”

  Heloise interrupted, “If I’m seen in a neck brace, I’m hurt. I’m weak. It sends a message that they came close, that it won’t take much to finish the job. How long will the neck brace keep me safe if it inspires further attempts on my life, if it shows my men that it’s only a matter of time before I fall? Will they fight so hard for a lost cause?”

  Flores didn’t know how to respond.

  “I appreciate your concern,” Heloise said as she stood from the cot. “I assume there is medication I can take?”

  “Yes, for the pain.” He filled out a prescription form, but Heloise would take no pills, Lavandier knew. She played along so Flores would not worry about her. Lavandier took the form because he was not only adviser, but also personal assistant. He had never agreed to this, of course, but he would never mention such activities were beneath him. He would never argue the terms of his contract. The only term that mattered was that Heloise was his employer—his goddess—and she could make him do whatever she desired.