by Tim Dorsey
“I always do what Madre wants. You did too, until now.”
Guillermo stepped forward.
Ramirez side-stepped to block his path.
“Have any idea what you’re doing?” said Guillermo.
“This needs to end.”
“You’re making a big mistake. If Madre ever found out you-” Guillermo stopped and smiled again, placing a hand on Ramirez’s shoulder. “I understand this isn’t your territory. Like our trip to Battle Creek. Bothers most people…”
“Battle Creek?” said Andy. “What about Battle Creek?”
“… So I’m going to forget about this, okay? Now move aside.”
Ramirez didn’t budge.
An elevator opened at the end of the hall. Serge and Coleman jumped out running.
“Which room is it?” asked Coleman.
“I don’t know,” said Serge. “Andy! Andy! Can you hear me? Just yell!…”
Guillermo stepped chest-to-chest with Ramirez. Half foot taller. He looked down into the agent’s eyes. “This has become tiresome. Last chance to give you a pass.”
In the next split second, events cascaded.
Ramirez’s eyes briefly glanced toward the bed.
Guillermo caught the look and began raising his gun.
Before he could, Ramirez shoved him hard in the chest. Guillermo stumbled as the agent dove for his weapons.
Guillermo’s automatic and Ramirez’s ankle gun came up at the same time.
Standoff.
They stared without blinking. Ramirez carefully walked backward. “Andy and Melvin, get behind me.”
“Put the gun down,” said Guillermo. “Move away from them.”
Serge reached the west end of the floor and turned down another corridor.
“This hotel’s freakin’ huge,” said Coleman. “How many hallways are there?”
“Too many,” said Serge. “Andy!… Andy!… Where are you?”
At the east end of the floor, someone in a fedora ran around a corner. “Serge!… Andy!… Where are you?…”
Andy peeked over Ramirez’s shoulder.
“It doesn’t have to end like this,” said Guillermo.
“I might as well be dead,” said Ramirez. “All those horrible things you got me into. This won’t make up for it, but at least it won’t add to it.”
“There’s more money,” said Guillermo. “We should have talked about that earlier. The kid took a lot of work on your part. It’s only fair.”
“Even if I give him up, you’ll still kill me. Maybe not here, now. But you will.”
Still aiming guns, trigger fingers twitching, getting sweaty.
“Nonsense,” said Guillermo, waiting for the slightest distraction to get off the first shot and not take a slug in return. “Even if you don’t trust me, think about it: We’ve got too much invested in you. How will we replace such a valuable asset?”
“My guess is you already have others,” said Ramirez. “I never should have gotten mixed up with your fucking family.”
Guillermo gritted his teeth. Nostrils flared.
Faintly, from outside: “… Andy! Andy!…” The voice trailing off as it went by. “ … Call out if you can hear me!…”
“In here!” yelled Andy. “I’m in here!”
Chapter Forty-Nine
Serge hit the brakes and ran back a few doors.
Coleman crashed into him. “Is this the room?”
“Don’t know… Andy! You in there?”
“Serge! Quick!”
Serge threw his shoulder into the door.
Ramirez involuntarily glanced toward the sound.
It was a microsecond, but all the time Guillermo needed. He fired, hitting Ramirez in the stomach. The agent shot back, but he was off balance from the gut wound, and the bullet went wide, splintering through the door.
Serge grabbed his ear and looked at his hand. Blood.
Guillermo’s second shot hit Ramirez’s shooting hand. The gun ricocheted off a wall. Guillermo marched forward, continuing to fire at the defenseless agent.
Ramirez’s mind attained clarity. This was why he was born. Anyone else would have gone down long ago, but with whatever strength the agent had left, he willed himself to remain an upright human shield for the two boys.
More shooting, now from two directions: Guillermo riddling Ramirez, and outside the room, where Serge blew the doorknob off.
Guillermo’s next shot struck Ramirez in the forehead, dropping him like an anvil.
No place for Andy and Melvin to hide.
Guillermo pulled the trigger. Click.
“Shit.” He replaced the clip.
Another shot from the hall blew the deadbolt halfway across the room.
Guillermo aimed between Andy’s eyes.
Serge kicked the door open and fired.
The bullet struck Guillermo’s arm from behind, spinning him. He returned fire as Serge ducked out of the doorway.
Serge hit the ground in the hall and poked his gun around the door frame, aiming at an upward angle so if he missed Guillermo, stray lead wouldn’t hit the kids.
He didn’t miss. The second shot hit Guillermo in the same arm. It pissed him off. He switched the gun to his left hand.
There are two distinct types of firefights: police and military.
Police take up defensive positions behind squad car doors and trees. Military strategy is to overrun the enemy. Guillermo favored the latter. He ran for the hall, firing on the way.
Serge retreated, shooting behind him without aim. He turned the corner and joined Coleman, who’d already ducked down another corridor. They pressed themselves hard against the wall. Plaster exploded past their heads.
Back in the room, Andy was paralyzed, staring at a side view of Guillermo in the hall, framed by the open door. Blasting away toward Serge and Coleman.
Andy surprised himself with what he did next. Almost like an out-of-body experience, looking down from the ceiling observing someone else. He dove for the bed, grabbed Ramirez’s nine-millimeter Glock and pulled the trigger. Nothing happened.
He turned the gun over and back in confusion. TV cop shows ran through his head. “Don’t they pull some kind of slide thing to load a bullet?”
Guillermo emptied his gun again. The ejected clip bounced on the carpet as another magazine slammed home.
Andy watched out the door as Guillermo pulled a slide thing. He looked down at his own gun and followed the example.
“He’s changing out clips,” Serge told Coleman. “Now’s our chance!” Serge reached around the corner. A bullet whistled by before he could get off a round. He jumped back. “Faster than I thought.”
Guillermo heard sirens coming up A1A. Then he heard something slam into the wall behind his neck. He looked at the bullet hole, then turned quickly to trace the line of fire to its source: an open-mouthed Andy, stunned that the gun in his hand had actually gone off.
He raised his pistol toward the boy. A bullet ripped into Guiller-mo’s thigh from Serge’s direction.
“Son of a bitch!”
“Is he still up?” asked Coleman.
“Guy’s like a Frankenstein.”
Andy fired again, but Guillermo had disappeared from the doorway, racing toward Serge’s position.
Serge peeked around the corner. “Shit. Run!”
They took off down the second corridor, Serge again shooting wildly behind them.
Guillermo reached the corner in full psychopathic bloom. He fired over and over at the retreating pair, but handgun accuracy delivers rapidly diminishing returns over distance. A hail of bullets from both directions passed each other in the middle of the hall and hit nothing but walls and fire extinguishers.
At the other end of the hall a man in a fedora rounded the corner. One of Guillermo’s last bullets found a target. Mahoney went down, grabbing his calf.
Serge heard the gunfire end. “Why’s he stopping?”
Guillermo turned in the middle of the hall and reversed
field.
“He’s going back for the boys!” Serge crouched for a steady shot.
Click.
“I’m out!”
“Serge!”
He turned.
“Mahoney, what are you doing down there?”
“Catch!”
Serge grabbed a.38 police special out of the air and sprinted back toward the room, where Andy was slapping the side of his gun. Jammed. Actually he’d just accidentally hit the safety. He heard something in the hall and looked up. Guillermo grinned wickedly and took aim. “Good night.” He pulled the trigger.
A ceiling lamp shattered. Andy covered his head as glass rained. Guillermo continued twirling in the hall from Serge’s well-timed slug in his unwounded arm, which had sent Guillermo’s last shot high into the lighting fixture.
“Motherfuck!”
Louder sirens. Then they stopped. Which meant they were here.
Guillermo had never taken such a beating before. He emptied his gun in Serge’s direction and limped away for the fire escape.
“Coleman! He left!” Serge ran to the doorway. “Let’s go, kids.”
They all fled through the corridor where Mahoney had been hit.
“You going to be okay?” asked Serge.
“Don’t move,” said Mahoney.
“What are you doing?”
“Guillermo’s gone now, and the kids are safe.” Mahoney aimed his backup piece. “You’re under arrest.”
“That’s fair. I know our rules, but…”-he gestured with an upturned palm at two peach-faced students-“… They’re not safe. Guillermo and Madre are still out there, and who knows who else they have inside. You know I’m their best bet. Another time?”
Mahoney kept steady aim, then lowered the gun. “Get the hell out of my sight.”
The entire building had heard the gunfire. Nine-one-one operators and the hotel’s front desk became swamped with freaked-out calls that placed the shooting on almost every floor. First officers at the scene were spread thin as they responded to a dozen false locations.
Guillermo grabbed a bath towel from a cleaning cart and wrapped it around his shoulders-one of the least noticeable people as he casually escaped out the pool deck in a multi-directional stampede of screaming sunbathers.
Serge’s group caught a break with the service elevator. They ran into the kitchen.
Chefs had armed themselves with their largest carving knives. “What the hell are you guys doing in here?”
Serge, still running, pointed behind him. “Someone’s shooting!”
The trio pushed open a steel door to the loading dock with a box compactor and crates of rotten lettuce.
“What now?” asked Andy.
Serge looked up the alley toward the front of the hotel and the back edge of a growing throng of onlookers.
“If we just can get into that crowd…”
More and more squad cars screamed into the parking lot.
The quartet watched from the rear of the mob, then slowly retreated across the street.
Back up in the blood-soaked room, two hands grabbed a briefcase.
BAHIA CABANA
City and Country were bored, starved and car-less.
They had clicked the remote through all TV channels ten times.
Serge ran into the room.
City jumped up. “Where the fuck have you been?”
“Someplace.” He ran for the sink, stuck his face down and splashed water.
“Holy Jesus! What did you do to your ear?” said Country.
“What the hell happened to Andy and Melvin?” said City.
The pair collapsed on the couch, pale as they come.
“Give ’ em space.” Serge held paper towels to the side of his head. “They just had a close one.”
Andy stared at nothing. Shock suddenly gave way to delayed emotion. Weeping and shaking.
Serge sat and put an arm around his shoulders. “It’s okay.”
“I’m so sorry. Should have listened to you. I almost got us all killed.”
“That part wasn’t good.”
“Swear I won’t screw up again.”
“You can relax-you’re safe now.”
Andy sniffled and wiped his eyes. “But what about Guillermo? He’s still out there.”
“You leave that to me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Andy, I have to tell you something. This might not be the best time, considering what you just went through, but I’d want to know if I was in your shoes.”
“What is it?”
“It can wait till later. Just let me know when you’re ready.”
“I’m good now.”
“You sure? It’s pretty heavy.”
Andy nodded.
“Your mother.”
“What about her?”
“Andy… I’m just going to say it. She didn’t kill herself.”
“Of course she killed herself. She shot-” He stopped and read Serge’s face. “Are you saying she was murdered?”
“Afraid there’s not much of a happy distinction between the two. But you’ve been under the impression all these years that she lingered through prolonged suffering and put herself out of misery.”
“She wasn’t sick?”
Serge shook his head. “Some of the happiest years of her life. And if it’s any consolation”-Serge crossed his fingers behind his back- “Ramirez told me she never heard it coming. Almost like going in her sleep.”
“Ramirez killed her?”
Serge shook his head again. “Like I said, you leave that to me.”
“Guillermo?”
Serge pulled the pistol from under his shirt for a tear-down mechanism check.
Andy remembered something, feeling the bottom of his own shirt and Ramirez’s Glock, which he’d concealed underneath in all the excitement. He decided not to bring it up. “What are you planning to do?”
Serge reassembled the gun. “I’m foreclosing on his karma.”
Chapter Fifty
THE NEXT MORNING
Six A.M.
Dawn on the way. But still half-dark.
Headlights from pickup trucks bounded onto the construction site of a new downtown Miami condo.
The trucks stopped and doors opened.
Work boots, lunch boxes, hard hats.
A foreman began unfurling blueprints, then heard a sound that wasn’t supposed to be there. He looked back at his crew. “Someone leave that thing running?”
Seven A.M.
Crime scene tape, police, TV cameras.
The head of homicide arrived. “What have we got here?”
“One twisted bastard,” said the case detective. “Nobody hot-wires these things.”
They watched as paramedics passed what was left of Miguel out the hatch of a cement mixer.
“I’ve heard of death by a thousand cuts,” said the detective. “This was death by ten thousand blunt traumas. All minor enough to let him last for hours.”
“Wouldn’t he just roll around and get dizzy?”
“Most people might think, but the foreman explained that these trucks have blunt stirring blades to mix the cement-much like laundry dryers-and once the victim kept tripping and couldn’t get up, those blades continued lifting and tumbling him over and over.
“Who would do such a thing, let alone think it up?”
Eight A.M.
South of Miami. A Delta 88 sat in the driveway of a nicely kept hacienda with barrel tiles.
Only one person home.
The shower was running. A bottle of Jack Daniel’s hung in the soap caddy. A diluted pink mixture of water and blood swirled down the drain.
The leg wound had been a pass-through in the meaty part of the thigh, and another bullet had just grazed the right shoulder. That left two in his favored arm.
Guillermo screamed.
A twisted piece of lead bounced on a rubber shower mat. Guillermo hung tweezers from the caddy and grabbed the bottle of sour m
ash. Some went in his mouth, the rest over an inelegantly gouged-out wound. Another scream.
He set the bottle back and grabbed the tweezers again.
Drain water turned darker red.
Nine A.M.
Ice cubes fell in a crystal rocks glass, followed by two fingers of Jack Daniel’s. A first-aid kit lay open. Two pools of spilled whiskey on the dining room table and more dripping off Guillermo’s fingertips from the limp arm hanging by his side.
He cringed and gently eased himself into a chair at the table, gauze bandages bleeding through. Guillermo unwrapped the worst and tossed the wad in a trash basket next to his seat.
He reached in the first-aid kit and took another slug of whiskey, then tore off a fresh stretch of white tape with his teeth.
A Mercedes pulled up the driveway. The front door opened. Juanita hummed merrily, a bakery sack in her arms. The foyer filled with the aroma of just-out-of-the-oven Cuban bread. Then she smelled liquor.
Juanita came around the corner to the dining room, only seeing his back and the bottle. Uncharacteristic.
“Guillermo?” She slowly set the bag on a counter. “Are you… drunk?”
“Not yet.”
“Guillermo, I’m surprised…” She took a few more steps. “Oh my God! What happened to you?”
The bottle poured. “Ramirez double-crossed us.”
“He’s a dead man.”
“Right.”
“You’re in no condition.” She picked up the phone. “I’ll take care of this Ramirez. Almost makes me cry what he did to you.”
“No, I mean, ‘right,’ as in he’s already dead.”
She put down the phone. “You handled Ramirez?”
A boozy nod.
She patted him on the head. “Good boy… What about Andy?”
He shook his head. “There were like a million of ’em. I was ambushed.”
“You didn’t take care of Andy?”
“No, but I’ll find him.”
Another pat. “You rest.” She grabbed the phone again. “I’ll send someone else.”
“Who?”
She opened her mouth to say “Pedro,” then stopped. She thought of Raul. Stopped again. Miguel. A longer pause. “Is anyone left at all?”
“Just me.”
Juanita took a seat at the table and stared down in thought.