Killing Kings

by Don Pendleton

  Frowning, Bolan said, “For your sake, Sally, I’ll rephrase the question. Where would Sarmiento take someone for questioning, if he believed that person had betrayed him?”

  “Well—” Their captive saw both pistols rising and exclaimed, “Wait! I do know of such a place, but whether you will find the señorita you are seeking there, I’ve no idea. If Rodrigo took her there, I caution you, it may already be too late.”

  “You’d better hope not,” Bolan said.

  “Because...?”

  “Because you’re coming with us,” the Executioner told him.

  “But I cannot—”

  “Oh, sure you can,” Grimaldi said. “The Mustang has a roomy trunk.”

  “But I am bleeding.”

  “Keep pressure on those nicks,” Bolan suggested, “and they ought to be all right. I warn you though.”

  “Warn me?”

  “It’s only fair. If we arrive too late, and Carolina’s hurt or worse, whatever she went through is happening to you.”

  “I’ve told you, I don’t know if she was taken there.”

  “See, that’s the other thing,” Grimaldi chimed in. “If you’re lying to us, or Rodrigo took her someplace else that you don’t know about, you’re just dead weight. Useless. Comprende?”

  “Sí. Entiendo.”

  “Great,” Bolan said. “Now, for that address, and clear directions if it’s hard to find...”

  “Rodrigo owns a property—well, many properties—but this one is in Los Colores, northwest of the city center. It’s on Calle 54, a former block of shops that you might call—”

  “A strip mall?” Grimaldi asked.

  “Yes.”

  “We need an address,” Bolan said. “Not just the street.”

  Nodding, Sanchez reeled off four digits he had obviously memorized.

  “Let’s go,” said Bolan, rising with Grimaldi at his side.

  “My arms...” Sanchez began.

  “Are still attached, so far,” the Executioner stated, interrupting him. “If I were you, I’d shake a leg and try to keep them that way.”

  Los Colores, Medellín

  A crush of after-work traffic retarded progress on their way to Calle 54, after Bolan and Grimaldi had stowed their hostage in the Mustang’s trunk, securing his wrists behind his back despite protests that it was hurting him. One thing they didn’t need was Sanchez fiddling with their taillight wiring from inside the trunk, the way some other kidnap victims had discovered might be possible.

  A cop car might not stop a vehicle because its taillights blinked and could be shorting out, but on the other hand, it might. And Bolan had no interest in telling a patrolman why they had a wounded member of The Office bleeding in their trunk.

  Throughout the drive, Bolan was worried about Cabrera. Sure, he knew that fretting was a hindrance rather than a help, but logic frequently lost out when it collided with emotion. Long experience had taught him that good people were often lost in war: some of his friends, when he had been a soldier overseas; most of his family at home, while he was off fighting, halfway around the world; and volunteers who went into the fight with eyes wide open, but who never made it out.

  He rarely fell asleep these days counting a roll call of the friendly dead, but they were always with him, even if they didn’t surface in his conscious mind. He’d long since learned that there was no specific loss, standing alone, that would defeat him, break his spirit, but he felt them, nonetheless.

  And if Rodrigo Sarmiento added Carolina Cabrera to that number...well, there would be bloody hell to pay in Medellín.

  Of course the outcome wouldn’t alter much if they found the DEA agent still alive and whole. Whenever Bolan came to town—to any town—the forecast called for pain.

  “Strip mall at two o’clock,” Grimaldi told him, from the driver’s seat.

  “Got it.”

  Bolan couldn’t say and didn’t care why this specific row of shops had failed to prosper on the owner’s chosen block of Calle 54. He knew little of Medellín’s legitimate economy, how some locations thrived, while others seemed to suffer from a curse that scared patrons away and drove shopkeepers into bankruptcy.

  Too bad for them. The only question on his mind right now was whether they’d find Cabrera inside one of the abandoned stores with whitewashed windows turning dead eyes to the street. If so, would they find her alive, dead or stuck at a point between the two extremes, where life meant nothing but extended suffering?

  “You know—”

  “I know,” Bolan said, stopping Grimaldi before he could complete his thought.

  “How do you want to play it, Sarge?”

  “First thing is finding out if she’s inside—if anyone’s inside.”

  “I’m down with kicking doors,” the pilot said.

  “Not from the street,” Bolan advised. The strip mall might’ve been defunct for years on end, but traffic still flowed past its blank facade, with drivers ignoring it while painted logos on the shops faded to nothing under the onslaught of tropic sun and rain.

  “Our ride-along said there’s a parking lot in back.”

  “Good place to start,” Bolan replied.

  They went with hidden pistols only, caught a break in traffic, then jaywalked across the street and down a kind of alley driveway at the former mall’s west end. The parking lot was there, as Sanchez had predicted, with three vehicles standing in line: a silver Audi A8, a black Acura RDX and a motorcycle that was stripped down to the bare essentials.

  “Does that look like Rodrigo’s bike to you?” Grimaldi asked.

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Must be the place, then.”

  “Before we do this,” Bolan said, “I don’t want anybody bugging out on us, this time.”

  “That’s doable,” Grimaldi said.

  Moving along the line of vehicles, Bolan first cut the wires that fed the motorcycle’s spark plugs, while Grimaldi jimmied the Acura’s hood and yanked its distributor cap, flinging that vital part across the parking lot and into straggling shrubbery. When Bolan tried the same thing with the Audi, though, a bleating car alarm went off immediately, shrill tones battering between the back wall of the vacant shops and homes above them, on a wooded hillside.

  “Damn! That tears it,” Grimaldi said, reaching for his holstered Glock.

  Bolan had no time to waste on cursing. Hauling out his own pistol, he passed the Stony Man pilot on the run and hit the back door of the nearest shop with a hard kick beside the doorknob, slamming it open and plunging into murky darkness on the other side.

  Chapter Ten

  The first shop’s only occupant was a brown rat that screeched and scuttled out of sight as Bolan and Grimaldi entered through the back. Outside, the Audi A8’s earsplitting alarm kept yelping loudly enough to wake the newly dead.

  Bolan was on the verge of doubling back outside, when he saw a connecting door between the empty shop they’d broken into and it’s next-door neighbor. Rushing it, they paused at the last second, Bolan reached out for the knob—and then a burst of slugs rippled through the door’s cheap paneling.

  “Somebody’s home,” Grimaldi said, “and they’re pissed off.”

  Each passing second heightened Cabrera’s peril, if in fact they hadn’t come too late. Bolan and Grimaldi couldn’t return fire blindly through the door, without a risk of hitting her, assuming she was there and still alive. Instead, risking himself, the Executioner grabbed for the doorknob once again, reached it that time and turned it, pushing as he did so.

  The connecting door swung inward, splintered by more hostile fire from the next shop in line. Grimaldi sneaked a peek around the doorjamb, fired a single .40 Smith & Wesson round, then ducked back as the shop’s defenders fired another volley of their own.

  “I caught a glimpse of long, red h
air,” he said. “Unless they’ve got another woman in there—”

  “Hostile numbers?” Bolan interrupted.

  “Three, at least. There could be more I didn’t spot.”

  Bolan wished they had brought the Steyers now, but there was nothing he could do about it. Each of their pistols held sixteen rounds going in, and they carried extra magazines of fifteen rounds apiece, but they were still outgunned. Say they were only facing three men, with Agent Cabrera trapped in the cross fire. One of the guys next door had brought a submachine gun to the party—a 9 mm by its sound—and Bolan couldn’t even start to guess how many mags the shooters might have in reserve.

  How best to cut the confrontation short, while maximizing Cabrera’s chances of survival?

  Stop thinking and get it done.

  Instead of warning his partner, a nod had to suffice, and then Bolan pushed off from his combat crouch and dived headlong across the threshhold between long-abandoned stores. In motion, he had an impression of three men—one sprinting away from him, the others standing fast—and a nude female form reclining on some kind of autopsy or operating table. Landing on his belly, sliding, seeking target acquisition, he could only see the woman’s long red hair, as Grimaldi described, spilling over the table’s end nearest to Bolan.

  Was it Cabrera? Who else would it be?

  There was no time to think about it now.

  His fleeing enemy had reached the next connecting door in line, pushed through it, and had disappeared from view. The men he’d left behind were both firing at Bolan now, one of them with a pistol, and the other—balding, grossly fat beneath a rubber apron he was wearing—with some kind of compact SMG. Thankfully both of them were in a hurry, with bullets from their weapons striking faded walls, peeling up strips of drab linoleum, but missing their live targets.

  At the same time, Grimaldi managed to fire a double-tap around the door frame that concealed him, but his shots struck no one, even though they made the two remaining shooters duck and dodge.

  Bolan took full advantage of the brief distraction, firing two rounds at the nearer of his human targets, the gunman whose own weapon was swinging back around to track Bolan. The Executioner’s first round took out one of the shooter’s knees and wrenched a howl of pain, his lips drawn back in a rictus of suffering. The guy squeezed off another shot before Bolan’s second incoming round punched through his upper chest, off-center to his left, and knocked the target down.

  He wasn’t dead yet, as he was still squirming around, still clinging to his piece and struggling toward an angle that would let him use it. But Bolan’s attention strayed to the sick sadist still upright and on the move. He’d ducked behind the operating table, ducking low to make himself the smallest target possible. His flabby bulk defeated that effort, at least in part, but he triggered another submachine-gun burst below the table, making Cabrera twist and writhe.

  Grimaldi dived through the connecting doorway, squeezing off another round that passed through the embattled former shop and flying through its other open door in roughly three-tenths of a second. His spent cartridge tinged and rattled on the outdated linoleum before the fat man using Cabrera as a human shield tried hitting the ace pilot with a short burst from his SMG.

  Those had to have been the last rounds in his magazine, for he was grappling with the old one, jerking it and fumbling a replacement from a pocket somewhere underneath his apron. Grimaldi rose, shifting into target acquisition, with Bolan rising on the other side, doing the same, when suddenly the naked woman on the operating table came alive.

  * * *

  Carolina Cabrera was slipping toward unconsciousness and thankful for it, any respite from the pain she’d suffered, when the shooting started. It confused her, and nearly deafened her, but she made out Sarmiento firing first, then Omar Roldán joining in. A heartbeat later, Mauricio, the Butcher, had produced a compact submachine gun and blazed off a few rounds of his own.

  What for? At whom?

  Another moment—seeming long to Cabrera, but perhaps only a few seconds—elapsed before a door she couldn’t see slammed open and another pistol joined the strange, one-sided fight. She cringed atop her cold table, afraid of moving too much, being shot by one side or the other.

  Who was even on the other side? By any stretch of the imagination, could it be the two Americans, Gaynor and Cooper? If it was them, how could they have traced her to this anteroom of Hell?

  Sarmiento blurted, “Fuck this!” and ran off somewhere, quickly passing out of her view. She knew at least two other empty shops lay in the general direction he was fleeing, and she might have heard another door open, but she couldn’t say for sure, her ears ringing, her other senses sending out their own alarms from the Butcher’s cruel treatment.

  He had started out with slaps and punches, fingertips like pliers twisting tender flesh until she sobbed and screamed, part of her mind wondering whether any passersby might hear her and alert the police.

  Were the shooters who’d burst in upon them uniformed patrolmen? Had her silent plea been answered somehow, before any lasting damage to her body could be done?

  Or might her would-be saviors shoot her now, by accident? Might Roldán or the Butcher silence her for good, eliminating one witness to their sadistic game?

  She hadn’t broken yet, when the intruders came, but Cabrera knew she had been close to it. Granted, there wasn’t much to trade off for her life, and she knew that Sarmiento wouldn’t permit her to survive, simply because she spilled the names—most likely false—of two gringos she barely knew.

  Perhaps a bullet was the quicker, simpler answer now.

  But Cabrera was a fighter, never one to quit, regardless of the odds against her. She was not secured by straps or chains atop the table, since Sarmiento and Roldán seemed pleased to hold her down, smiling and ogling her body while her tormentor took his time with her, her former boss hissing out the questions she had to answer to relieve the pain. Now the porcine torturer hunched down behind the table, trying to reload his small automatic weapon that was now empty. Cabrera knew that it was time to do or die.

  She clutched one of the table’s edges with her right hand, rolling to her left and reaching down with that hand, fastening upon the homemade ripping instrument Mauricio had apparently been saving for the grim finale of his show. She grabbed and lifted it, turning to face her tormentor, holding the weapon’s pistol grip, driving the wide blade—knife and saw, combined as one—into the right side of his neck.

  The Butcher made a gagging sound, raised piggy eyes to meet her own and opened up his thin-lipped mouth as if to speak. Instead of words, however, blood gushed forth, spattering Cabrera’s hip and bare stomach. Cursing him, she wrenched the blade free with an effort—more blood spouting from that ragged wound—then drove it down again, into the hollowed place between his clavicle and the scalene muscles just behind it.

  Now the Butcher howled, a gurgling sound that seemed to issue from his ponderous belly. He toppled over backward, palsied fingers losing hold of his weapon, and Cabrera slid along with him, landing astride his torso, sickened by her contact with his rubber apron as she rode him down, a gruesome parody of lovemaking.

  The monstrosity who would have killed her slowly for his own amusement and financial gain, was spewing blood like Ahab’s great white whale, as Cabrera struck him with his own blade time and time again, sobbing and cursing him, the blade plunging and rending until he lay still beneath her, beyond harming anyone ever again.

  She might have kept on stabbing him indefinitely, but a hand came into view over her shoulder, gripped her wrist and made her stop. A voice she recognized addressed her from a distance, saying, “You can quit. He’s done.”

  “I’d say,” the man she knew as Joe Gaynor agreed. “This one over here’s still breathing, though, and Sarmiento’s in the wind again, dammit.”

  Bolan helped her rise, asking, “Where
are your clothes?”

  “In rags,” she said. “He cut them from me.”

  “Okay. I’ve got a couple guys on tap to lend you theirs, short-term, if you don’t mind a little blood.”

  She laughed aloud at that, but cut it short before it turned into hysteria and got away from her. “No,” she replied, imagining how she must look to them. “I don’t mind blood at all.”

  Suramericana, Medellín

  “Where are you taking me?” the young blonde woman asked.

  “I’m not taking you anywhere,” Sarmiento answered. “I couldn’t afford to have you call police from where I found you, but I will let you go soon. Just a few more blocks, okay? But I will need your car a little longer.”

  “I don’t mind,” she told him, clearly trying to ingratiate herself with her kidnapper. “Just don’t hurt me. I beg you.”

  “Why would I hurt you?” Sarmiento asked. “No, no. Nothing of the sort. I am compelled to flee from evil men, unfortunately, but no harm shall come to you. I’ll park your car when it is safe for me to do so, and I’ll leave the keys under the driver’s seat. How’s that?”

  “Oh, thank you! I was so frightened when—”

  “There, there. It’s almost over now.”

  Meeting the blonde had been a streak of luck. He wasn’t sure he could escape the gringos when they’d come for him a second time, bursting into his secret place before the Butcher had achieved much from his questioning of Carolina Cabrera. Sometimes Sarmiento thought Mauricio Yépez enjoyed his work too much, but what good was a sadist on the payroll if he never went all out? Besides, Yépez was not his problem now. He guessed the odds were fifty-fifty that the fat butcher was either dead or on the run to parts unknown.

  Sarmiento had expected one or both of the gringos to follow him, but Roldán and the Butcher had to have slowed them down enough to give him a head start. He’d run flat out through the strip mall’s remaining store spaces and on to Caller 54, along the next block—taking time to tuck his pistol out of view from passing motorists—and reached a service station where the blonde was filling up her Honda Fit. It was a smaller car than he preferred, but it was there, the blonde was there and Sarmiento had no better choice.