The old man gave a weak, gawking cry.
Blood gushed out of his mouth.
The woman screamed, and the don's finger, tightening on the trigger of the .38 in his death spasm, fired off a shot into the ceiling.
The bullet rocketed into the mirror above the bed, smashing it into a thousand glistening shards. Stone and Hog threw themselves to the side as the deadly glass daggered down from the ceiling.
The woman couldn't move as fast as the trained men. She screamed as one of the shards pierced her left breast.
Her scream was changed to a bloody gurgle as another shard sliced through her throat. Blood fountained up and splashed across her breasts.
Several of the glittering pieces of glass flashed down and punctured the dead don, who didn't mind at all.
Hog looked at the dead whore, shaking his head. "What a fuckin' waste."
"Let's move it," Stone ordered. "Unless those goons downstairs are stone deaf, they heard something. They may be on the way already."
The three men started from the room.
They heard the sound of the bodyguards rushing up the stairs.
Chapter Ten
Wofford's mind was clear, had been for hours. A couple of gorillas had brought him in a meal, watched him while he ate, then taken him to the bathroom.
He knew that he had been taken off the drugs for a reason, knew that they were getting him ready for something, but he had no idea what it might be. After the bathroom, they had brought him back and fixed him on the bed again.
He wondered about his wife, what she must be thinking. He was virtually certain he would never see her again, but he had felt that way once before and been wrong.
Maybe he was wrong this time, too.
The first time had been in Vietnam, in the prison camp. There in the tiger cage, with Creel's rotting body hanging by him as a constant reminder of the nearness of his own death, he had all but given up hope of escape and seeing his own country again.
The major, whose name he had never learned, had tormented him daily, beaten him, kicked him, fed him vile concoctions that made him puke and failed entirely to nourish him. The days had dragged by endlessly, each minute seeming like an hour, each hour seeming like a month.
And yet somehow the days went by, night came, and then the day again. Through it all, Wofford hung on. He never gave in, never kissed ass. It would have been easier if he could have, if he could just have made himself less than he was.
But he couldn't.
Too many people could, and he thought about his brother. The war had not been as hard on him as it had on Jack, yet he was the one who had been changed forever by it, weakened in some way so that the scum who pushed the dope at home could get their hooks in him and finally destroy him. He had cracked, not in war, but in peace.
Jack lay on the bed, his arms and legs stretched uncomfortably and bound to the bed, thinking about the war.
Crazy Charlie, on the floor below, was not thinking about Vietnam. He was toasting the success of his drug raid with those who had been with him at the scene.
Charlie was elated with the way things had gone, despite the fact that he had forgotten the money. What the hell, it was only money. There would be lots of money in the days and weeks to come, when the Colombians saw the light and switched back over to the Lucci family. Whatever the Cubans had left lying out there tonight was nothing in comparison.
He would make his approach tomorrow, telling the Colombians that he had heard about the Cuban double-cross. He would offer to take over the distribution end at a better rate than the Cubans had been paying.
Later they could renegotiate at a rate more favorable to Charlie, if he didn't decide to take over the whole operation. If he could ever find the location of the processing plant, then let the Colombian assholes watch out. He would clean their clock.
Charlie had never been able to cultivate the expensive tastes that were appropriate to his station in life. As he sat and drank the cheap Andre champagne, he thought about the joker in the deck, the D.E.A. man he had stashed upstairs.
The more he thought about it, the more he thought the old man might be right. He hated to admit it, but the old guy still had some smarts left. Handing the D.E.A. guy over to the Colombians as a show of good faith might be just the clincher they needed for the deal to go through, even if the guy didn't know much. After all, how much could he know? He was just a guy who made buys, helped bust the little punks.
Still, and he had to say it, the old man might be right again. Maybe the guy, Wofford, would know something that mattered. They'd question him first, before they turned him over. Wouldn't want to pass up the chance and be sorry later, and they sure wouldn't want the Colombians to find out something the Luccis didn't know.
Charlie slugged back the last two swallows of champagne and left the room. It was too noisy in there, and he needed to get to a telephone where he could have a conversation.
He went into a gleaming white kitchen. All the appliances were white, as was the paint on the cabinets and the tile on the floor. The wall phone, on the other hand, was bright red, as red as blood. That made it easy to find, even if you were half-sloshed.
Charlie picked up the phone and dialed a number.
"This is the doctor," someone answered on the third ring. The voice was deep and authoritative.
"Hey, Doc, this is Charlie. Sorry to call so late, but I got a little job for you to do. Tonight."
Dr. Richard Fox did not mind the lateness of the hour. The kind of work he did was mostly done after the fall of night, and before the next day's sunrise. "What kind of job?"
"Interrogation."
"Ah." Fox liked questioning. He liked it very much. "What type of subject?"
"A guy. About forty. In good shape, but he hasn't been too active the last couple of days."
"I see." Fox was only slightly disappointed. Actually, he preferred to question women, but there was very little call for that. His clients were nearly always men. It never hurt to hope for the best, though. "Let me get my things. I'll be over."
"I'll be waiting on you," Charlie told him.
Jack Wofford's head was reeling again.
American troops had finally overrun the VC prison camp and Jack had been set free. He had no idea how long he had been there, but he was able to figure out later that it must have been something like three months.
It had seemed like a lifetime, and in some ways it had been.
For some, like Creel, it had been longer.
He remembered the first sounds of the firing, the sound of the M-16s, the chattering of M-60s. He had hardly dared to hope that he was really hearing them.
American weapons.
He lay on the floor of the cage and wept.
The major had come for him then. "You will not leave alive, Yankee shit! They will never take you from here!"
He opened the cage door and aimed a pistol at Jack's head, and Jack performed what he considered the only heroic thing he ever did. He did not think of the time he had entered the village as heroic. He thought of that as doing his job, but this was different. This time, he was a physical wreck. He had hardly eaten in weeks, and hardly slept. His eyes were sunk into his head, and his flesh hung off his bones like loose rags. If anyone had offered him a million dollars to get off the floor of the cage, he would have turned it down. It wouldn't have seemed worth the effort.
But seeing the major with the pistol, hearing his hateful voice, did something to Wofford. It sent a current through him, bunching his muscles, forcing him to act.
If he had thought about it, he would have considered it impossible and so would never have tried it. However, he didn't think. He simply acted, coming up off the floor in a furious rush, teeth bared, lips pulled back, hands clawed, mouth screaming incomprehensible obscenities.
The major certainly wasn't expecting an attack. He thought that the American would lie there and simply accept his death. After all, he was more than half-dead already.
Wofford slammed into him, smashing him back and onto the ground, clawing at his face with ragged nails.
The major tried to slam Jack in the head with his pistol. If he hit him, Jack never felt it.
Jack got one hand around the major's throat and squeezed, still clawing at his face with the other hand. The major was thrashing around under Jack, but Jack had clamped his knees to the major's sides. He could not be dislodged. He felt cartilage crackle under his hand, but he kept on choking.
He was still doing it when they found him. The major had been dead for several minutes. There was hardly anything left of his face at all.
Dr. Fox hummed cheerfully as he packed his medical bag. He was a man who enjoyed his work, and he put everything neatly in its place.
Sodium Amytal.
Hypodermic needles.
Gloves, both leather and surgical. While Fox believed in the efficacy of chemicals in extracting information, he knew that chemicals alone did not always work effectively. Things generally went best when there was a mixture of pain with the chemicals, and he was the man who could administer both equally well. He had worked with Charlie before, and he knew that Charlie didn't mind what the method was, so long as it worked. Charlie liked to be modern and keep up with the times, but he knew that there were those occasions when the old ways were the best.
Fox smiled and closed the bag, taking pleasure in the solid sound of the clasp snapping shut.
Carol Jenner was getting antsy.
Of course she had no way of knowing just what kind of obstacles Stone and the others might have run into in the storm drain, but they had already been gone slightly longer than she thought was right.
She looked at her watch. Almost an hour. Well, be fair, she told herself. Fifty minutes. Nevertheless, she was worried. She didn't like to be left behind, out of the action. It made her feel helpless.
Besides, she had already had to move the car once. Although it was quite late and the neighborhood was quiet, it didn't look good for a car to stay out on the street too long in one spot. Someone might get suspicious and call the police. Carol had seen enough of the police for one night.
There was nothing she could do.
She resigned herself to the wait.
Lucci's goons were determined to make up in ferocity what they had lacked in vigilance. They charged up the stairs with drawn pistols, ready to deal in blood with whoever was in the house.
Stone nailed the first two with his Beretta. Coming up the stairway side by side, they were punched backward into the men behind them, upsetting the general balance and sending everyone falling back down the stairs in a flurry of flailing arms and legs.
"The rope!" Stone yelled.
They might have been able to gun down every man on the stairs in the confusion, but the stairs were the only way down besides the rope. If they tried the stairs first, and didn't make it, there would not be another chance at the rope.
They ran swiftly to the bedroom, ignoring the corpse, which still stared blindly upward.
Stone turned to face the door, his back to the balcony. "You first, Hog!"
Wiley tossed the rope over the railing, followed it with his leg, and began to descend.
"Terrance!"
Loughlin followed Hog, just as four men burst in through the bedroom door.
Stone fired, a projectile catching the first man in the bridge of the nose, flattening his features and coring out the back of his head.
The second hood pushed the first aside as he fell, unable to avoid being splattered with his blood, and fired at Stone. The bullet ripped through Stone's fatigues and sailed on into the darkness outside.
Stone shot the man twice in the heart. Blood pumped out, staining the man's shirtfront darkly.
The fact that Stone had two men in front of them to deal with allowed the next two to get farther into the room. They came in together, one keeping low and to the left, the other jumping immediately to the right, vastly increasing their odds by giving Stone widely separated targets.
They fired, and Stone heard rounds thud into the balcony rail.
He fired twice, but they were too close now. One of them smacked into Stone and pushed him back onto the balcony, almost forcing him over the rail.
Stone could smell the man's breath. He'd been eating onions.
The second man joined his buddy and they began forcing Stone backward, bending him over the railing farther and farther.
The first man had his hands on Stone's chin, straining as if trying to stretch Stone's neck to twice its length.
The second man was hanging on to Stone's arm, trying to take away the Beretta.
Stone felt a wetness against him. The first man had been wounded by the shot. Stone still had one hand free, so he raised it and forced his fingers into the wound, twisting and gouging.
The man screamed and released the pressure on Stone's neck. His friend dropped Stone's gun arm and brought his own gun up, pointing it at Stone's face.
Stone shot him first, in the middle of the chest, knocking him back into the bedroom.
Stone kicked the other man in the face, reached for the rope, and went over the balcony rail.
Wiley and Loughlin gained the trees, knowing that Stone would be right behind. But Lucci's security men, now that they were stirred into action, proved to be smarter than they had seemed.
Not all of them had gone up the stairs after the first futile attempt. Most of them had left the house to cover the grounds, and they spotted Stone's team immediately. They began firing round after round, but being armed only with revolvers they lacked accuracy.
Loughlin and Wiley went down, rolled, and returned fire.
Stone reached the bottom of the rope and began firing from his position. Lucci's men sent a few rounds in his direction, chipping chunks of stone off the side of the house.
Stone began to close on the men. Two of them dropped like rocks.
The problem again was numbers. "Holy shit," Hog yelled. "Now I know how Custer felt!"
Stone could not risk firing, afraid that he might hit his men, so he ran to join in the fracas, pulling one man off the writhing pileup and smashing him in the face with his big fist.
Blood spurted from the man's nose, and he swung at Stone with a roundhouse right, which Stone easily knocked aside, moving in with two quick jabs of his stiffened fingers to the man's sternum.
The man moved backward, bent almost double, catching his breath. Then he surprised Stone by coming out of the crouch with a quick kick at Stone's kneecap.
Stone kicked the flying foot aside and countered with a kick of his own, half turning his body and kicking upward. If the man's head had been a football, it might have gone fifty yards. As it was, it stayed attached to his body, but the sound of the man's teeth clicking together was audible for fifty yards anyway.
Meanwhile Hog was engaged in trying to hold off two men, neither of whom was quite his size. Taken together, though, they added up to quite a pair, and their desperation drove them to fierce kicking, biting, spitting, and whatever else they could do to attack the big East Texan.
To Hog, they were like two annoying mosquitoes. He could keep them off, but they kept coming back. One kicked at his stomach. The other clasped both hands together and swung at his chest.
Hog easily parried the blows and aimed a kick of his own, but the men hustled back out of range. As soon as Hog's foot touched down, they were back swinging again.
Hog was quick; for a big man, he was enormously quick. But these two were quicker. If they had been trained, they might even have amounted to something. As it was, they didn't do too much harm. They were simply incredible pests.
Hog was exasperated. As one of the men charged in, Hog reached out and grabbed a handful of the man's hair. Getting a good grip, he lifted the man off the ground.
The man screamed. To him, it felt as if his scalp was being torn off his skull. That wasn't Hog's plan, however. He spun around, holding the man out at arm's length, letting cent
rifugal force carry the man to an almost horizontal position.
The man's feet connected with his buddy's head with a resounding crack. Hog spun twice more and then released the man he was holding, almost like a discus thrower.
The man's screams abruptly died when his head came in contact with the ground twenty yards away. There was a popping sound, and the man lay still, his head twisted at an impossible angle.
While this was happening, Loughlin was tangling with the biggest of the goons, who had managed to bring the Brit to the ground and straddle him. He had his hands on Loughlin's throat, slowly squeezing the breath out of him. His knees ground into Loughlin's arms.
Loughlin tried to arch his back, but the man was too big. He must've weighed close to three hundred pounds. Though much of the weight was fat, the fat didn't matter. It weighed as much as muscle.
Loughlin flexed his right arm and gave it a sudden twist, managing to snap it from beneath the man's knee. He brought his hand up, covering the man's face, trying to find his eyes.
The man threw his head back, and Loughlin's fingers missed their goal. Instead, they felt the man's nose, and Loughlin without hesitation thrust his fingers in the nostrils, gouging and ripping as hard as he could.
The man yelled and released his grip on Loughlin's throat. The Brit sucked air into the bruised passages and heaved his body upward from the hips, throwing the big man off to the side. Getting to his knees, Loughlin chopped the man in the side of the neck three times, his hand sinking into the rolls of fat until it met resistance.
Finally, the man groaned and lay still.
Now that the shooting was over, Stone and his men could hear another sound through the pounding of blood in their ears—the sound of sirens.
Someone had set off a silent alarm in the house, and now the minions of the law were swooping down to protect the good citizens of Coral Gables.
"Let's get down that drain," Stone yelled, and they moved off to the trees, glad to be out of the floodlights. Soon they were dropping through the opening and into the galvanized tunnel.
M.I.A. Hunter: Miami War Zone Page 9