Dead Six (36 page)

“You two,” Tailor said, pointing at Hudson, “cover us. Val, follow me, I think he went through this door.” The four of us split into pairs again. Hudson and Byrne exited the way they’d come in, through the open dock door. Tailor extended his 1911 and led me behind another shelf of crates, through a door that was hidden behind it.

It led to a short hallway. Our two teammates stayed behind, covering the doorway while Tailor and I made our way down, weapons at the ready. There were two doors on one side and one door on the other, but all three were closed. At the end of the hallway, there was a partially open door. A small sign above the door read Custodian in English and Arabic. It was a janitor’s closet. A backpack with a broken strap lay on the floor, a few feet from the door.

My eyes caught a flash of movement in the darkened closet. Tailor and I spread out to either side of the hallway and continued to inch forward. We were wide open, and doorways were fatal funnels.

Shit,
I thought bitterly.
I wish we had grenades.

“Hey! Why don’t you come out and die like man?” I shouted. I looked over at Tailor and shrugged. When all else fails,
negotiate.

LORENZO

Please, don’t let them have any grenades.

“Hey! Why don’t you come out and die like a man?” one of them yelled. Despite his raised voice, he sounded very calm, almost conversational.

“Why don’t you come down here and get me then?” I shouted around the corner. The closet was decent cover, the walls were solid, and if they wanted me, they had to come down that fatal funnel of a hallway. The first one to stick his head down here was going to die, and they knew it.

“Who the fuck are you?” one of them yelled, clearly agitated. Apparently they weren’t used to somebody speaking English. He was obviously a Southerner.

“Nobody worth dying over,” I responded. “You better hurry. Somebody had to hear all that shooting. You don’t have much time.”

“We’ll make time,” stated the calm one.

Carl came over the earpiece. He was out of breath. “
Some skinny guy saw me coming in the market and tried to stab me, so I broke his head.
” So Jalal’s man had tried to stop my friend. That was a fatal mistake.

“There are at least three shooters. They’ve got me pinned down.”

“
I’ll circle around,
” he said. I could hear the Dead Six men talking back and forth in hushed tones down the hallway. The nearest two were speaking in Spanish, but they shouted at someone else in English that they would take care of me.

“
We’re on the way,
” Reaper said. “
But I’m stuck behind some trucks.
”

“
I’m coming to help
.” The female voice over the radio took me a second to process. I could hear the van door open.

Idiot.
“Jill, stay put!”

BOOM BOOM BOOM BOOM

I jerked away from the doorway as the walls shattered. The giant .44 Magnum slugs tore through the building materials with unbelievable fury. The smell of solvents filled the air from leaking containers. I stuck my gun around the corner and fired several wild rounds in response.

“Val! Holy shit, look at all this money!” They’d found the backpack.

“That’s mine!” I shouted. “Assholes!”

“Not anymore, motherfucker!” shouted the obnoxious one.
“Ha!”

VALENTINE

“This is taking too long,” I said, dumping a fresh speed loader into my .44. “C’mon, man, we gotta go!” Tailor nodded, slung the backpack full of money, and led the way. I backed down the hallway, keeping my gun trained on the closet at the end of the hall. We’d already told Hudson and Byrne to head back to their vehicle, and the cops would be all over Hasa Market before too long.

“Control, Xbox,” Tailor said, speaking into his radio. “Target neutralized. Egressing now. Will update as I can.” Sarah acknowledged him on the radio as we reached the door at the other end of the hallway.

“It’s your lucky day, asshole,” I said to the man in the closet, even though I doubted he could hear me. Tailor and I then turned and bolted back through the warehouse.

LORENZO

It was quiet. I risked a peek. I couldn’t see anything, but that didn’t mean they weren’t just waiting quietly to blow my head off.

“
Lorenzo, there are four of them. Two came in the back. They’re heading west toward the street.
” Carl said. “
Those two fodas from the video just walked out the front. They’re heading south through the market, trying to play it cool.
”

The ones with the box were the ones that mattered. “Tail them. I’m on my way,” I responded, already heading for the exit. I shoved the STI back in its holster as I hopped over the bodies of Jalal and his men. There was no way I was going to let them get away.

The market was continuing as normal. The walls of the old warehouse and the music must have muffled the gunshots enough not to spook the crowd. I walked quickly, as running would have drawn too much attention. A woman gasped and pointed at me. Glancing down, I realized that I was still splattered with Jalal’s blood. “Shit,” I muttered.

“
They’re moving south
,” Carl reported. “
I’m on them.
”

“Where?” I hissed. The woman was pointing at me and pulling on her husband’s sleeve. I ducked my head and turned, moving deeper into the throng.

“B
y the fountain.
”

“Reaper, move up on the entrance. Be ready to roll. Carl, we need one of them alive.”

Carl came back. “
I’ve been made.
”

Then there was a gunshot.

VALENTINE

Guns holstered, Tailor and I pushed our way back through Hasa Market, south, where our vehicle was waiting for us. We nervously eyed the crowd as we walked, checking over our shoulders for the guy in the soccer jersey. I didn’t know who he was, but I knew he wasn’t just another militant asshole.

There wasn’t time to worry about it. We’d been lucky, so far, in that no one had heard the shots or called the police, but I didn’t want to find out how long that luck would hold. All we had to do was make it back to our truck and we were home free.

Not necessarily,
I thought bitterly, remembering the night Wheeler died. We cleared the tangled mess of the marketplace and came upon the open area that surrounded the old fountain at the center. Like the rest of the market, it was choked with people, but it wasn’t nearly as claustrophobic as the maze of shops and carts.

Gun.
I noticed it so instinctively that I almost didn’t realize it. Everything slowed down as
The Calm
kicked in again. On the other side of the fountain there was a man with a gun. He was short and squat, with a dark face and a scraggly beard. He was staring at me intently, and through the bustle of the crowd I could see him trying to bring a pistol to bear. He was dressed in local garb, but, like the man in the soccer jersey, I didn’t believe he was some random Zubaran citizen.

Before I’d finished processing that, I realized my gun was clear of its holster and that the front sight was aligned on the man with the gun as he brought his own pistol up. His eyes grew wide as a gap appeared in the crowd; I had a shot. I fired.

I
missed.
My bullet struck the edge of the fountain, blowing off a small chunk and ricocheting off into the distance. My revolver’s roar echoed through Hasa Market, and all at once everyone froze, heads turning to see what was happening. People around us stared at us wide-eyed, mouths agape.

“Oh, shit,” Tailor said, his .45 already drawn. More shots rang out as the man with the gun fired at us, using the edge of the heavily constructed fountain as cover. Tailor and I shot back, moving laterally as we fired, trying to hit the gunman without killing anyone in the crowd.

All at once the marketplace was in chaos. People screamed and began to stampede in every direction. Tailor and I were nearly crushed by a throng of people trying to get away from the shooting. We couldn’t even see the shooter through the morass of panicked shoppers, much less get a bead on him.

“We’re compromised!” Tailor shouted, straining to be heard even though I was only a few feet from him. “Let’s get the hell out of here!” He struggled to reload his .45 while he talked.

Following his lead, I lowered my now-empty revolver and began to push my way through the crowd. We headed west, toward the mosque. Our Land Cruiser was parked in an alley between the mosque and a school next door. After a few seconds, the crowd thinned a little, and I had room to breathe. I emptied my gun’s cylinder and reached for my belt again.

Someone crashed into me as I drew the speed loader from my belt, causing me to drop it. My speed loader bounced off the concrete and rolled away. Swearing, I shoved the hapless person aside and crouched down, grabbing my loader.

I stood up, pausing to twist the cartridges into the cylinder, when someone shouted at me to stop in heavily accented English. I froze and looked up. About ten feet to my left was a Zubaran police officer. His pistol was pointed between my eyes. He held a radio in his other hand.

Two puffs of blood and uniform material erupted from the Zubaran police officer’s side as Tailor double-tapped him. The cop staggered, and Tailor put a third round into his head. He dropped to the concrete like a sack of potatoes, his pistol clattering as it hit. I made eye contact with Tailor, nodded at him, and we took off at a run toward the mosque.

Looking back through the crowd, I couldn’t see the stocky man who had shot as us by the fountain. But as we crossed in front of the school, I noticed a woman in a black burka running determinedly in our direction across the lawn of the mosque. She produced a small pistol from somewhere just as I rounded the corner into the alley.

LORENZO

I spotted the two Dead Six operatives fifty yards ahead, moving fast, straight for the mosque. That had to be where they’d left their car. I raised my gun, but there were too many terrified people stampeding between us, then they were around the corner of some booths and out of sight. “Damn it! Carl, flank around the mosque and hit them from the other side. Reaper, get your ass up here now.”

I took off after them, darting between people. Some lady saw my gun and bloodsoaked countenance and screamed. That caused a bunch of other people to shriek and point, and a lot of them were already on their cell phones. This was so not good. “
Reaper
! We need immediate evac!”

“
Almost there!
” he responded.

There was a winding alley between the one-story school and the much taller mosque. The east end dumped into the market, and the west onto a quiet street. That’s where I would have parked. I caught a glimpse of a khaki-clad figure duck into the alley.
Got you.
I moved up along the school wall, gun at my side. I was going to drop whichever one I saw first, then try to shoot the legs out from under the other.

Most of the people from the market were moving away from the two Caucasians and the men chasing them, and maybe that’s why the woman with the veil stuck out so quickly. Jill Del Toro was coming across the lawn of the mosque, directly toward me, only she was going to reach the alley a few seconds before I was. She reached into her clothing and out came the little Makarov.

I ran faster, forcing myself forward. Jill brought the gun up in both hands, but she made the classic mistake of letting her gun lead around the corner, telegraphing her presence. And
he
had been waiting for it. One hand clamped around her wrist, jerking her forward. Jill disappeared.

Chapter 14:
Anger Management

VALENTINE

I grabbed the woman’s arm with my right hand, crushing her thin wrist as roughly as I could. I used her momentum, vaulting her around the corner. She cried out in surprise as I wheeled her around a full two-hundred and seventy degrees, and gasped for air when I smashed her against the wall of the mosque, my forearm on her neck. In the same instant I brought my own gun up, leveling it between her eyes, and I froze.

The veiled woman was now staring down the barrel of my .44 Magnum, dark eyes wide with fear. Her right hand went slack, and the little Makarov pistol clattered to the pavement. She stopped struggling, and I asked myself why I hadn’t already fired. I couldn’t find an answer. Tailor asked what was going on. I didn’t answer him either.

I reached forward with my gun hand and ripped the woman’s veil off of her head. The black veil covered a very pretty face. She was young, with tanned olive skin and night-black hair. She was Hispanic, or maybe of Philippine ancestry, and she looked . . .
damned familiar.

Holy shit,
I thought, suddenly remembering where I’d seen that face. “Jillian Del Toro?” I asked cautiously. Her eyes suddenly went even wider, and the color flushed out of her face. I couldn’t believe it. It was the woman Gordon had put out the BOLO on.

I noticed something out of the corner of my eye: movement. Everything moved in slow motion as I watched, my consciousness still enveloped by
The Calm.
The man with the soccer jersey was approaching from my right, weapon drawn. He was running straight at me, hoping I wouldn’t notice him in the mass of panicked, fleeing shoppers.

I yanked Jill Del Toro’s arm forward as hard as I could, twisting to the right as I did so. She gasped in pain again. I let go of her hand and clamped my right arm around her neck. I pulled her against me and tightened my arm as I brought my revolver over her left shoulder and leveled it at the son of a bitch in the soccer jersey.

“Lorenzo, look out!” Jill Del Toro screamed. I tracked him with my gun and fired. Jill winced as the gun discharged a foot from her face. He dove aside. The .44 slug smacked the corner of the school, smashing a small piece of brick into a cloud of dust.

I tightened my grip on Jill and hunched down behind her. The man in the jersey, Lorenzo, hovered just around the corner, where I couldn’t get a shot at him. He didn’t seem willing to risk a shot at me under the circumstances, either. Tailor was coming up behind me, pistol drawn.

“Just let the girl go,” he said from around the corner. He spoke flawless, generic, unaccented English. “We can all just walk away.”