Hunter palmed him under the chin. The hand felt like a wedge of wood as it drove his jaw up and back. Rickard felt the bone snap up near his left ear. The pain was excruciating. Rickard almost blacked out.
He wove on his feet.
Hunter actually stopped him from slipping off the roof. He clamped a hand on the neckline of his vest, while he readied the knife in the other. Then Hunter tugged down and Rickard realised what he was doing. The vest was fastened down the front by a flap of Kevlar that concealed a zip. The zip itself was the weak point of his armour. Hunter jabbed through the plastic zipper like it wasn’t even there. There was more Kevlar behind it, but only a narrow strip. Hunter merely angled the point of the blade so that it slid round the armour and into his chest.
Rickard could feel the steel pushing into his body.
How was this even possible?
He was better than this . . . better than Hunter.
He grabbed Hunter’s wrists. Tried to stop the pressure. Hunter was weakened by the loss of pints of blood – how did he still have the strength? Hunter’s face contorted with effort, beads of sweat breaking along his hairline, and Rickard felt the knife slide in another half-inch.
He thought that having his jaw broken was bad.
That was nothing.
‘Noooo . . .’
‘Yes,’ Hunter told him.
Rickard reached for Hunter’s face, trying to gouge his eyes with his thumbs. Hunter twisted out of his grip, pushing even harder on the knife.
‘You won’t hurt Alisha now, you bastard.’ Hunter pushed again and Rickard felt something pop inside him. ‘You won’t hurt Imogen Ballard. You won’t hurt
any woman
ever again.’
‘No . . . I won’t.’
His answer wasn’t agreement, just resignation. Hunter it seemed didn’t like the tone of voice he delivered it in. He pushed on the knife again. Blood frothed between Rickard’s lips. Sign of a punctured lung, maybe something even worse. Whatever, he knew that he wasn’t getting out of this alive. He spat the mouthful of oxygen-rich blood in Hunter’s face.
He could feel the serpent inside him.
But it was shuddering now.
Not with rage but fear.
And ignominy.
The serpent was dying.
‘At least I’m not going to die alone.’
With his failing breath he grabbed tightly at Hunter, clutching the hand holding the knife around the wrist so that Hunter could not release him. Then he kicked at Hunter’s good leg, even as he swung out and over the edge of the roof.
‘Shit!’
He heard Hunter’s expletive and it made him smile. He kept that expression with him all the way down until the crushing impact on the ground knocked it loose.
Chapter 49
My leg was threatening to collapse under me, my head full of fog from the pain and the loss of blood, and Luke Rickard was fully armoured. It was a fight I should never have won. But I was driven by a rage that was almost overwhelming. No way was I going to let Rickard walk away from this alive.
Even though he was wearing a helmet, it was the first good look at his face I’d had since our fight in Colombia. He’d changed, but there were still enough of my features in his to give me the uncanny feeling that I was fighting my own personal demon. It sent me a little insane, I guess.
I went at him like something demented, and though our fight was short and brutal it was one of the most desperate I’d ever been involved in.
In my early days as a soldier in the British Army I was shot by a player in the Provisional IRA. I still bear the scar where his bullet cut through my chest and exited from my back. It’s the closest I’ve ever come to dying, but this was a close second.
Tubal Cain, the Harvestman, tried to cut out my heart, and a monstrous killer called Larry Bolan tried to carry me into an inferno, but I’d stopped both of them. Despite how good they were, it was Luke Rickard who almost ended my life. In his last moment on earth he tried to take me with him by pulling me off the roof.
Weak with the loss of blood, faint from my exertions, I couldn’t stop the tug of his weight pulling me over the balustrade. And the only epitaph I could come up with to sum up my eventful life was
shit
.
It was how I felt, I suppose.
I fell with Rickard beneath me, then we somehow turned in mid-air and I was under him. Lucky in a way. It meant that I crashed down on the roof of the annexe wing, while he bounced off, somersaulted away and struck the ground headfirst another thirty or so feet below. His helmet didn’t help save him. Where I hit, the roof collapsed under me and I ended up lying on the floor of a ward that had fortunately been stripped of furniture.
Surprisingly – to me – I retained consciousness. I stared up through the shattered remains of the roof at the blue sky, thinking how beautiful a day it was. But that could only go on for so long.
Shadows began forming at the edges of my vision, and these twisted into faces that began swarming around me: they were the faces of all those who had died because I’d failed to shoot Jesus Abadia when I’d had the chance. It was a large crowd. They were all screaming wordlessly at me like all the other echoes of my past did. I closed my eyes to block them out of my mind, but they stayed with me as I drifted away into blackness.
My next conscious memory was of Rink leaning over me and shaking my shoulder.
‘You alive, Hunter?’
‘Wish I wasn’t.’
‘You hurting?’
‘Nah!’
Rink laughed at my bravado, but I meant it. I was so seriously injured I was beyond pain. Rink immediately jammed his fist against the pulsing wound in my upper thigh and started to shout for a medic, but then I was gone again, surrounded by those angry victims of Luke Rickard. At least he wasn’t there, or maybe we’d have taken up where we’d left off and fought our way through all the sub-levels of hell. Thinking of Rickard finally stilled the voices of the dead: when next their faces swam in my vision they were nodding in gratitude. They’d died horribly, but at least I’d avenged them.
The peace that came with that realisation allowed me to sink into oblivion. But that only lasted until Jimena and her boy decided to scream at me instead. I knew their deaths would never be resolved in my heart.
My next bout of wakefulness was when I was loaded into a chopper and strangers began fussing over me. Rink was still with me, hovering over my shoulder like my personal guardian angel. Walter was there too, and he was frowning at me.
‘I’ll try not to bleed all over the place.’ There wasn’t that much blood left in me, so I was confident I could keep my promise. Walter leaned in and squeezed my shoulder. For a second there he looked remorseful. I winked up at him. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll pull through.’
‘You do that, son.’
‘Can’t let you take all the shit for this, can I?’
An oxygen mask was placed on me. There was a sting of catheters administered to my arms. Medics crowded me. I blinked and the blackness came back. Then Walter was gone and I was up in the air. Scraping the underbelly of heaven: quite literally. I was later told by Rink that the medics almost lost me. My blood pressure was so low that it was off the charts. They had to do an immediate transfusion while we were still up in the air, and Rink had donated a few pints of his own to keep me going. Afterwards he joked about it, of course, telling me I was now part Japanese. Then he got more maudlin, hugged me and said that now we really were brothers. Blood brothers. I liked that.
I was transported to the trauma centre at the University of Miami Hospital, but have no recollection whatsoever of my time there. When next I drifted up out of delirium I was at the same hospital where Walter had secreted Alisha Rickard. She was my first visitor. She hobbled in, one leg in plaster and her body swathed in dressings under her shift, toting an intravenous drip on wheels along with her.
I didn’t know what to say.
I was responsible for murdering her husband and even though he’d abused her, tried to kill her, that might still mean something.
Maybe like Jimena Grajales she’d pull out a gun and start shooting at me.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead Alisha just came up and kissed me on the forehead. We didn’t need words. We understood each other. Alisha walked out again and that’s the last I saw of her.
Rink arrived next.
‘When are you gonna get your ass outa bed? We’ve got work piling up.’
He was back to his old self now that my imminent death was out of the picture.
‘It could be a while before I’m back to my best, Rink.’
‘I know. Maybe it would be a good idea if you took some time off,’ he offered. ‘You’ve some vacation time coming, I guess.’
Not a bad idea. ‘I’m thinking of heading back home for a while. It’s been a while and I want to check my dogs are OK.’
I’d no doubt that my German shepherds, Hector and Paris, were fine. It was Diane I wanted to see most. For a start, she deserved an explanation for why a friend of mine had been stationed outside her house for the best part of a week. And then there was the other fact . . . I just wanted to see her.
‘That’d be great,’ Rink said, but there wasn’t as much enthusiasm as I expected. ‘Just don’t forget you’ve people here who love you, OK?’
He glanced away. He needn’t have: a big tough guy admitting their feelings was OK by me. But maybe embarrassment wasn’t his reason.
‘Just hurry up an’ get better, huh?’ he said.
‘I will.’ Now I was the one who didn’t sound so enthusiastic.
The bullet wound was bad enough, but it was all tissue damage. That would heal soon enough, leaving nothing behind but another scar to match all the others. What had almost finished me was the jab of Rickard’s knife. He had nicked the femoral artery. Fortunately for me, the trauma caused by the bullet wound had already caused many of the blood vessels to contract so I hadn’t bled as profusely as I should have. Any other time I’d have died within minutes. Who’d ever guess I was happy to have been shot? My fall on to the roof had broken ribs, and also finished the job started in Colombia on my right hand. The ribs would heal by themselves, but my hand, broken in three places, might require some physiotherapy.
Harvey had gone home to Arkansas. I was sorry to have missed him, but he promised to come and visit soon.
‘He’d better,’ Rink said. ‘I think we owe him a drink after all this.’
‘Maybe more than one.’
Rink brought me up to date on the entire Luke Rickard thing.
‘Wetherby was behind it.’
‘Should have known,’ I said. ‘I never trusted that bastard.’
‘Neither did Rickard. He killed him and two of his guys before going to the hospital.’
I frowned. ‘Saves us the trouble, I suppose.’
Rink was silent for a short time as though weighing my words. Finally he just nodded. ‘Wetherby hated you. When he heard that someone down in Colombia was trying to locate the members of a CIA hit team he jumped at the chance to set you up. Apparently after your original falling out he’d dug into your background and discovered that you worked on the team with Bryce Lang. Guess he thought all his Christmases had come at once. He contacted this Gutierrez and promised him the best man for the job. Enter Luke Rickard. Pity Rickard was a woman-hating asshole, or maybe he’d have won. He let his personal agenda direct him.’
‘We both made a mistake in not taking the shot when we had the chance. Me when I failed to shoot Jesus Abadia, Rickard when he killed the two cops and let me live.’
Rink sighed. ‘You know, Rickard thought that Alisha was working with Jimena and Wetherby. He thought she set him up to die. How fucked up is that?’
I remembered Alisha’s kiss on my forehead. Maybe she did want him dead, but she’d had nothing to do with any of that. ‘She’s safe from him now.’
‘Good job, Hunter.’
‘Yeah. Good job.’
We just sat there in companionable silence for a minute or two. Finally Rink stood up, stretching his tall frame. ‘Anyway, gotta be going. I’m keeping your next visitor back.’
‘Before you go,’ I said. ‘What’s the fallout?’