Jack Del Rio: Complete Trilogy: Reservations, Betrayals, Endgames

by Richard Paolinelli

  Shelly delivered that last with a solid kick into Del Rio’s leg. Chee hoped for some kind of reaction from Jack, but there was still no movement.

  “Why did you kill them?” Chee asked, stalling for time for Tso to arrive.

  “I had no choice,” Shelly replied. “Your father was Kinlichee’s golden boy at the time. I knew he’d be in my way even back then. Your mother being there was just an unexpected bonus.

  “I would love to take my time with you my dear,” Shelly continued, “but I assume others are on the way and I still have one last piece of business to conclude before I leave.”

  “You’ll never get away,” she spat.

  “On the contrary,” he replied unconcerned. “I have a plane ready to take off as we speak. A couple of hours flying time to a little strip in Mexico to switch planes and I’ll be somewhere in South America by breakfast tomorrow. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Shelly took aim as Chee braced herself. He squeezed the trigger and the hammer slammed down with a clack. No additional sound followed.

  Misfire!

  With a scream of outrage Chee made her second mistake. Instead of going after her discarded gun, she hurled herself at Shelly. She landed a couple of effective blows, but Shelly was a big man who hadn’t forgotten his military training. Plus, he still had one working weapon.

  Discarding the gun, he shifted the knife to his right hand as he fended off Chee’s frenzied attack. He delivered a crushing backhanded blow that slammed Chee against the wall opposite the nurse’s station. She struck the wall hard enough to rattle the oxygen tanks stored in the room on the other side. Shelly saw one tank wobble through the open door, but it stayed in place.

  Stunned by the double blow, Chee sagged against the wall and it was enough of an opening for Shelly to take advantage of. She tried to block the knife-arm. Only succeeding in deflecting it slightly, she felt the blade digging into her low and on her left side. Grunting against the pain, she reached up to place a hand on Shelly’s chin, trying to push him off, but Shelly twisted the knife savagely; crying out as she involuntarily curled up against the intense pain. In desperation, she clawed at his eyes and scored a hit.

  Shelly bellowed with pain and lurched back, yanking the knife out as he went. Another blast of pain laced through her as she collapsed to the floor. Shelly caught himself against the doorjamb of the oxygen store room and wiped at his injured eye with his left hand. Seeing it come away bloody enraged him. He set himself to deliver a final, crushing blow on Chee with the knife.

  He took a step forward and raised the knife above his head. Chee knew it was coming; that she was not going to be able to stop it. Before he could begin the downswing, Chee heard a loud bang and saw Shelly howl in pain as the knife flew out of his grip. Holding his bleeding right hand, he staggered back against the doorjamb and looked toward the source of the shot that had disarmed him. Chee followed his gaze -- Del Rio.

  Blood trickled down his forehead, his white shirt around his right shoulder was soaked. He was leaning against the counter on the other side, using his casted left arm to hold himself upright, but he was standing and he was shooting.

  He was also angry with himself. He’d aimed for Shelly’s head and had missed so badly he’d luckily managed to strike the knife-holding hand instead. He pawed at his eye, wiping away the blood to try and clear his vision as he sighted on his target again. Ideally, he should try to arrest the man, but he doubted he was going to stay on his feet much longer, Chee was in no shape to make an arrest, and he had no way of knowing if any backup was coming any time soon.

  So as Shelly took a step towards him, Del Rio fired two shots that were direct hits to Shelly’s chest above the heart and watched with satisfaction as the man flew backward and tumbled to the floor in the oxygen storage room. The satisfaction was short-lived as, incredibly, Shelly staggered back to his feet and started back out of the room.

  He’s got body armor on, Del Rio realized and adjusted his target upward. Right there, he thought, right between the eyes on that coyote pelt should do it.

  Del Rio fired twice more and hit his target both times. Even as Shelly was driven back into the room, landing on the floor heavily, Del Rio knew he’d only stunned the man. The pelt must be lined with something, likely Kevlar, as well.

  As he watched Shelly struggle to get back on his feet, Del Rio wondered how he was going to stop him in his condition. It was then that a conversation he’d had with a terror suspect in Dublin came back to him.

  “I use anything available,” the man had said. “Even every day, ordinary-looking items can be used to get a job done.”

  In a flash, he took in what was in the room with Shelly and knew exactly how he could end this. Down to his last four shots in the clip, Del Rio fired twice into the oxygen tanks, snapping the valves off the top of two as a ricochet damaged a third enough to make it leak. Pure oxygen flooded the room.

  A third shot split the opening between the door frame and the door, striking the weak magnetic plate holding the door open. The impact broke the magnet’s hold and the door started to swing shut even as Shelly made it to his feet.

  Del Rio’s final shot he held until the last possible instant. Just before the door closed, it cleared with no room to spare on either side. As the door slammed shut, the bullet smashed into a desk lamp, breaking open the old-style light bulb. Sparks erupted from the exposed filament and ignited the oxygen in the saturated room.

  Del Rio felt the whole building shudder as he heard the dull boom from the other side of the door. He was losing his grip on the counter, darkness closing in around the edges of his vision. He saw Yazzie standing in the open doorframe of his own room.

  “He walks out of that,” Del Rio said dryly, “and he can have your ass.”

  Yazzie merely nodded as Del Rio lost his grip on the counter and plunged back into darkness, unconscious before his body hit the floor.

  TWENTY-FIVE

  Shelly realized at the very last second what Del Rio was up to, and knew he was doomed. It all seemed to unfold in slow motion after the heavy door had slammed shut. He saw the bulb shatter, the sparks fly, and then everything seemed to erupt into yellow flame as he was slammed into from seemingly every direction at the same time.

  What Shelly did not know was that when the hospital had been renovated, the man in charge of the project had thought long and hard about how and where oxygen tanks were stored. He had moved the storage area well away from its original location on the second floor, next to the women’s and children area, placing it in the opposite, less trafficked, end of the wing.

  He’d also designed the room to contain and redirect away from the people inside the hospital any possible blast should a tank rupture and explode. The three interior walls, ceiling and floor had been reinforced. The door was thick steel. All had been designed to deflect the blast back toward the exterior-facing wall. This wall had been weakened so that it would give way during such a blast, ejecting the explosion and anything else in the room outside to fall down on a seldom-used parking area below.

  None of that mattered to Shelly, whose last brief living sensation was of an intense heat followed by the feeling of flying through cool air.

  ****

  Tso had not waited long at the barn location before following after Chee and Del Rio. He shared Del Rio’s concern that Shelly might make one last attempt on Yazzie before fleeing. The lack of communication from the hospital seemed to confirm their concerns.

  He pulled into the hospital’s parking lot just in time to see the explosion, flames belching out of the wall and what looked like a human body sailing through the air to plummet to the ground below. Knowing that the explosion hadn’t come from Yazzie’s room gave Tso little comfort.

  That body could still be Yazzie, or even one of Tso’s own men. He drove over, getting as close as he could to the rubble-strewn lot, picking his way to the back fence where the falling body had impaled itself on a tall metal fence post. As badly seared as
the body was, Tso was still able to tell, with great relief, that it was Shelly.

  Even though his condition was not in doubt, no one could survive having a two-inch metal pipe shoved through their heart, Tso still handcuffed one blackened wrist to the fence post. Just to be sure.

  He turned away from the grisly sight and ran for the entrance, fearing what he would find once he got up to the second floor. Fire alarms blared loudly in the main lobby as he entered. The elevator doors were open, the cars locked in place to prevent anyone from getting trapped inside during a fire. Several medical personnel had gathered near the stairwell door, but no one wanted to go up into God knew what.

  “Stay down here,” Tso directed as he barged past them. “Leave this door open and I’ll call you up when it’s safe.

  “You,” he added, pointing to a male nurse, “come with me, but stay by the door up there until I say otherwise.”

  Tso carefully opened the door to the second floor, his gun drawn, and scanned the area. There was no movement anywhere on the floor. Motioning the nurse to stay put, Tso started toward the end of the hallway. As he passed the door to Respiratory, he paused in dismay. His men, the nurse who’d been at the station and a man whose ID badge read Bates, were all lying on the floor. He checked for a pulse on all four, found nothing.

  Swearing softly, he resumed his trek and found Yazzie kneeling next to Chee, trying to staunch the flow of blood from her wound. Del Rio was down, also bleeding badly, but still breathing.

  “Get some help up here fast, we’ve got wounded,” Tso yelled back to the nurse. To their credit, the medical people moved quickly. Swarming up to the second floor, they started to work on Del Rio and Chee. Tso directed a couple to go and double check the four bodies, just in case, and walked over to Chee.

  “Jack,” she croaked hoarsely as an intern went to work on her. “How is Jack?”

  “Still alive,” Tso replied, an eyebrow lifting as his only comment on her choice of names for her temporary partner.

  “Good,” she said, her relief plain to see. “Shelly?”

  “He’s dead,” Yazzie said. “Del Rio got him.”

  She closed her eyes and nodded. She opened them again and looked at Yazzie, his hands covered in her blood.

  “He killed my parents.” She gasped out. “Tell Jack I…”

  Then her eyes went wide and she said nothing else. The intern began CPR after they lifted her up onto a gurney and wheeled her toward the far elevators to take them to the ER. Del Rio had also been moved to a gurney and was close behind.

  “She’s in cardiac arrest,” the intern shouted as he tried to restart her heart. Then they were swallowed up by the elevator and were gone.

  What she had wanted Yazzie to tell Del Rio, they would never know, Tso was certain of that. He’d seen enough dying people to know that Lucy Chee’s spirit had already departed.

  TWENTY-SIX

  Baker Collins had often been teased about his “kids” as the other deputy directors in the FBI called his agents. He and his wife Sharon had tried in vain for years to have a child of their own, and had even tried the surrogate and adoption routes without success. They had soon discovered, after Collins had made it into the Bureau’s management levels, that they had unofficially “adopted” each and every agent that worked under Collins. It was a rare weekend when Sharon wasn’t cooking for a group of her “children.” She followed their careers with the devotion of any natural mother.

  Even Del Rio, who Sharon often called her Prodigal Son, fell into this group despite being posted overseas for such a long time. The celebration thrown at the Collins’ house the day Del Rio returned to the States was legendary.

  Nearly half of the agency based in D.C. put in an appearance; even the Secretary of State and Great Britain’s Ambassador to the United States briefly dropped by to welcome Del Rio home. Inevitably, even though of everyone present only Del Rio and Baker Collins knew of the knighthood, the topic of conversation turned to Del Rio’s one man stand on the rooftops of London.

  Retelling the story around his fair share of the menu, Sharon had insisted on serving an all-American meal of burgers, hot dogs and steaks off the grill, Del Rio walked his fellow agents through those few minutes that had seemed to last hours without embellishment. The field agents in earshot converted every glass, bottle, book or any other free standing object to set up a reenactment of the London attack area to run several alternate scenarios.

  It was Sharon, once the party had wound down and Del Rio was the last remaining guest in the Collins’ country home, who had divined that Del Rio had some unfinished business regarding his time in London, which had nothing to do with the job.

  Those two hours over a snifter of Baker’s favorite brand of Cognac while Del Rio talked about the beginning and the end of his relationship with Laura had done more to help him deal with the sense of great loss that hovered over him like a dark cloud. Their kindness and advice that night, especially Sharon’s, would be cherished forever. It was then that Del Rio realized Baker and Sharon had truly become a second set of parents to him.

  So when Collins had received the report of the first shooting involving Del Rio, it was all he could do to keep from leading the charge to New Mexico. Had Del Rio not plead his case so strongly, Collins might have gone west anyway.

  When the report of the second severe injury to his protégé arrived on his desk, Collins didn’t hesitate a second. Calling in a favor from an old Air Force friend, and grateful he’d stayed in the Air Force reserve all of these years, Collins caught a ride in a jet already scheduled to fly out to Luke Air Force Base in Arizona. The pilot made a quick stop in Gallup, staying on the ground only long enough to unload Collins and his go-bag, before taking off for his final destination. In less than six hours from the shootout in the hospital, Collins was standing at Del Rio’s bedside getting an update on his agent’s condition.

  “He’ll probably wake up pretty soon,” the doctor, the same one who had treated him after the first shooting, reported. “He could use the rest I imagine. He’s had a pretty rough time of it.”

  Collins nodded his head in agreement. Aside from the fractured left arm, which he knew about, Del Rio had a badly bruised right shoulder and some abrasions above his ribs from the incident on the roof and Collins had not known about them until his arrival on scene.

  “He got lucky again with regards to the knife wound,” the doctor continued. “It was a clean in and back out with no damage to anything vital. An inch either way, he might not be here anymore since his right arm would have been useless. The head wound looked worse than it was because heads bleed like crazy. He’s probably got a whale of a headache; a slight concussion at the very least. He should make a full recovery.”

  “Thank you, doctor,” Collins said, shaking his head at the injury report as he looked down at the sleeping Del Rio. It wasn’t the only report related to this case either.

  The shockwaves from what had happened here had stretched out far beyond the southwest region of the United States. As he held his vigil at Del Rio’s bedside, Collins had been informed of several arrests in Uruguay. Cops across that country were starting to tie Shelly to several of their cases as well. The scope of Shelly’s criminal activity was starting to make Capone look like a small-time hood by comparison.

  Collins heard a small squeak behind him and turned to see his college friend wheeling himself into the room in a standard hospital wheel chair.

  “How is he?” Yazzie asked, stretching a little to look over the edge of the bed.

  “Doc says he should be okay,” Collins said. “He’ll need to take it easy for a few days though.”

  “He’s earned it,” Yazzie said. “I should have told him about the Hopi deal right off. I guess I didn’t make it easy for him to do his job, did I?”

  “Probably not,” Collins replied tersely, then relented a little. “Hell Ben, who knows? Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. Shelly didn’t own any of the land involved and hadn’t said m
uch in public on the issue. Who knows if he’d have made the connection any sooner if you had told Jack about it right off? It worked out and the guy got stopped. That’s really all that matters right now.”

  “But at what cost?” Yazzie asked quietly. “All those poor people. All dead. How do you two do it? Dealing with people capable of such things every day?”

  Collins thought it over for a second or two and then smiled slightly as a memory came to him.

  “There’s something that Jack here said a few years back,” Collins explained. “He’d just graduated and an old agent, a real ball buster, was working him over pretty good about his coming from money. Kept saying Jack was just a “playboy” Agent and questioning why he’d joined up. This old bull looks Jack square in the eye and asks, ‘Why do you want to be in the FBI boy?’ Jack just stared right back at him and said, ‘If not me, who? Who am I to ask someone to stand on the line in my place?’”

  “What did the old agent do?” Yazzie asked.

  “He just looked at Jack for a good twenty seconds, stuck out his hand and said, ‘Welcome to the FBI Agent Del Rio.’ I guess that’s the only answer I have for your original question Ben. We do it because if we don’t, will there be someone else who will?”

  Del Rio was slowly becoming aware of a world of dense grayish fog where occasionally muffled voices would swirl through. He couldn’t quite make out what it was they were saying; kept trying to work his way through it. The fog gradually started to clear out until finally it resolved itself into a bare, white hospital room and the concerned face of his boss hovering above and to the side.

  “Aw, damn,” he muttered weakly, the pain from the injured areas of his body announcing their presence now that he was awake enough to feel them. “Sister Malone was right. There is a hell.”

  Both Collins and Yazzie, who Del Rio was just now registering as being near the foot of the bed, chuckled at the quip.