Another was coming but was cut off. Hawks ran at him, a man who had no idea what was going on as Hawks swung her backpack, a backpack that was now full and heavy, a backpack that caught the man in his face, the sound of bottles shattering on impact, then Hawks losing her grip on the backpack, letting gravity and lack of friction steal it away. The second man staggered backward two steps, then in a blind rage went after Hawks. She didn’t back down, moved toward the fight, not away from the man who was more than twice her size. She had her belt in her hand, its end wrapped around her right hand, snapped it out, the huge belt buckle that had the shape of a heart being stabbed with a knife striking the man in his eye, the bite of a cobra. He backed away from the pain. She beat him with that buckle over and over, battered his head, hands, and face, beat all she could until he managed to grab the buckle and stagger away. She let him have the belt, went after him, running through rain as she went airborne, moved with the quickness of Kyra Gracie, taking her knee straight to the man’s wounded face. Hawks hit him hard, then went down hard too, size being on the man’s side, but the force from her mass and acceleration being in her favor. She crashed hard, landed on unforgiving rocks and concrete.
But she made it to her feet before the man did, ran at him, attacked him with her charge card.
A charge card that had been sharpened on the edges, that plastic sharp enough to cut like a blade. A charge card that was inside her purse and always made it through security undetected. Like in prison, anything that could become an improvised weapon became a weapon, anything with an edge or a point turning from a harmless household item into a deadly shank.
Hawks. A creative and mean son of a bitch. A pit bull on gunpowder.
Trained by a Russian named Konstantin, the meanest of us all.
Another came up on the scene, moved between the parked cars in search of his friends, not knowing they were down, and I went to him, saw he didn’t have a gun drawn as I reached inside my pocket, pulled out the taped pencils I had put there when I was leaving the plane, attacked him before he realized what was going on, becoming a velociraptor once again, sending the sharpened end of those pencils deep inside his sternum, sent both in at an abrupt and upward angle, an unforgiving angle that wouldn’t allow him to pull them from his punctured lungs, a different kind of lead poisoning.
As he fought with the pencils, I pulled out the cans I had torn in half, cut the arteries in his neck.
Heard footsteps running toward me.
Then his friend was on me; first his gun pointed in my face and I raised my hands in surrender, rain falling, my left hand not going up because of the bullet wound to my shoulder, and he came closer, pointed the business end underneath my neck, stuck it against my skin as if his plan was to send a bullet from my chin up through the roof of my head. He looked into my eyes. The eyes of a killer. In that moment I saw his fear. Felt that fear making his finger tighten on the trigger. Knowing exactly where I was, a half second from an unrecoverable death. The hand I had up, my right hand, without hesitation I swept it across the gun, moving my head in the opposite direction at the same instant, the gun’s muffled discharge going into the sky as I struggled to rip the gun out of the man’s hand, the gun firing over and over as I threw blow after blow to his face, blows that slowed him down but didn’t stop him, then I took the Bic ink pen from my pocket and tried to gouge his eyes; he turned his face after the first stab, but I kept on giving him the pen, tried to stab his eyes out of their motherfucking sockets, but settled for doing damage to his neck, face, and ear, tried to impale his head so hard he had ink in his brain. That rapid and rabid stabbing gave him severe pain, the kind that made him have to make the choice of flight or fight; his choice was to flee, and that retreat put some distance between us, made him stumble away in panic, the gun leaving his hand and not staying with mine. His blood was all over my hand, being washed away by the rain. He had been stabbed two dozen times and he was ready to come back at me. He was desperate. He was afraid. He was a wild animal that had been wounded and was returning to attack.
Before I could take my pain to the ground and retrieve the gun, there was the sound of muted gunfire. A hole had been put in his head. He crumpled to the ground, rain making his face look like he was crying water and blood. I looked up and saw Hawks in charge of the silenced gun. Behind her was the man she had tackled. He was facedown in the mud and gravel, the Caribbean storm soaking his battered body, still moving but injured, face broken by a backpack filled with bottles of E&J, J&B, and whatever Hawks had bought when she had stepped through customs and hurried to Clarkie’s, the man’s eyes cut and blooded by a modified MasterCard, his leg broken, the brick that had been used in Hawks’s other hand. The wounded man reached out like he was trying to pull himself away from this battlefield, probably wishing he could redo the last twenty seconds of his life. The man whose nose I had broken, he was on the ground, two feet away from his slashed and crippled friend, still disoriented, trying to get to his feet, slipping in mud, making it up on one knee, unsure of which way to go for help.
Hawks limped toward the one crawling on the ground, her cowboy boots kicking grit and gravel. He tried to move away from us, mud taking to his battered body. The man moved like he was a horse with a broken leg, looked up in surrender, unable to see because the rain was blinding him, his expression begging for mercy, saying he quit, that he gave up.
This wasn’t a game. There was no surrender.
Without blinking, Hawks eased his pain and suffering, left a bullet in the back of his head. She did the same to the man who had made it up to one knee, a man who saw what had happened to his coworker and did his best to get to his feet, that
pop
erasing life and sending him down on his broken nose. Another man with a broken nose. Hawks’s carry-on was on the other side of the men. She stepped over both men like they were the roadkill of the day, the anger in her wet face telling me she was tempted to spit on them. She picked up her backpack, the sound of broken glass singing, and alcohol leaked to the ground, then she struggled to bend over and grab the handle on her luggage. The way her face contorted told me she was injured, but she tightened her lips, pulled her ponytail away from her face, threw it over her shoulder, and took a few breaths like she was shaking off the pain.
The storm was strong; rain fell hard enough to keep people from coming this way.
We went deeper inside the parking lot, anticipating more men from Detroit out there, now knowing they had silenced weapons, on full alert and at the same time searching for a car or truck to steal, that being Hawks’s area of expertise, knowing we had to leave this mess as it was. Hawks limped, her leg hurt real bad. My walk was motivated by pain; blood trickled down my shoulder to my hand.
The cars in the lot were modest; most didn’t have car alarms. Two rows back was where taxis congregated in the far reaches of the rugged lot, taxi drivers inside their vans, radios on and unaware of what was going on thirty yards away. Next door was the
Antigua Sun.
No one was in that lot.
A minute later we were inside a soft-top, two-door Jeep Wrangler, Hawks in the passenger seat. Not the type of vehicle I wanted to find, but I doubted there were any with bulletproof glass and a machine gun that popped out of the roof. I had helped Hawks get inside, us doing that as fast as we could, her leg hurting her pretty bad, her breathing and grimacing revealing the depths of her pain.
My gunshot wound had me doing the same, grimacing and breathing, my hurting intense.
We sat there a moment, adjusting to our pains, the storm easing up, now a drizzle.
A few seconds later I wished I had left Hawks behind.
The pathway leading from Airport Road to the terminal was teardrop-shaped, with the terminal at the bottom of that teardrop. We were in the lot right before the terminal, meaning we had to pass British Airways, ASA, American, Air Canada, Carib Aviation, and another half dozen carriers, each providing a spot for the enemy to hide and send a shot from a silenced weapon. I pulled out into the pandemonium. Going with the flow of traffic, I passed the front of the terminal, moved at the pace of traffic, and circled to my right, passed people being loaded into cars and vans, headed toward Pavilion Drive, the route that led to the top of the teardrop, then headed toward a roundabout and came up on Stanford International Bank, mind racing as blood ran down my arm, searching but unable to see the gigantic fountains, incredible plants, and flowers that surrounded me. I doubted if Hawks saw them either.
Detroit had left the departure lounge at the main terminal, was waiting, bodyguards surrounding her, one holding an umbrella high over her head, deep anger etched in her face.
A familiar face stood next to her too. Her lieutenant. The man with the red hair.
The man who had brandished his gun on Shaftesbury Avenue in London.
He had been waiting for me to exit customs and go in the other direction, toward where the contract had said a car would be waiting. He wasn’t alone. His strawberry blonde partner wasn’t at his side, not this time. All men. At least half a dozen hurried toward cars. Before I made it to the end of Pavilion Drive, they were zooming toward Airport Road, growing larger in my rearview mirror.
They were behind me, but where Pavilion Drive met Airport Road, someone was there too.
A left turn would have taken me toward Old Parham Road and the dense population of the island, but the pain in my left shoulder made it easier for me to mash the gas pedal and make a screeching right turn, shooting out in traffic and almost speeding off the road until Hawks reached over and yanked the steering wheel and got me back on track. I accelerated and zoomed by a few cars coming in my direction; seemed like I was about to sideswipe them all. Half a dozen houses went by in a blur. Hawks kept her hand on the steering wheel as I sped up over a small incline and did my best to make the Jeep accelerate like it was a race car, the vehicles following us having a hard time adjusting to the narrow roads, and I gained some ground and moved through an area I thought was called Coolidge, trying to remember the lay of the land. Hawks let the steering wheel go, her pain pulling her back to her side of the car.
Gun in her right hand, Hawks was grimacing, down low in her seat, using the side-view mirror on the left side of the Jeep to look back when she could. I drove fast across the narrow roads, not concerned with being on the right side of the road unless I saw a car coming at me, then hoping that vehicle wasn’t part of their team. The island went by in a blur, the sea to the right, homes displaying Antiguan flags on the left, and bullets flying from behind as the smell of liquor filled the cab, the scent from Hawks’s backpack; the liquid leaked and moved across the floor, that broken glass crunching and clicking as the Jeep rumbled like a terrified tiger. I knew this land, had driven roads all over the world. The narrowness of the single-lane road was in my favor, making it impossible for them to pull up next to me without risking going head-on into oncoming traffic, impossible for them to zoom past me and cut me off for the same reason. This would have to work for me, for us, the road’s ups and downs; the road became wider, smoother, not working in my favor, needed to get to the part with curves and unevenness that would make it impossible for whoever was shooting at us to get a clear shot, because once I made it to that section, the road would be on my side, would be the weapon I would use, because there was no way for a car with even the best suspension and shocks to have a ride smooth enough to allow the best shooter to get a straight shot. But even the worst shooter could have a little luck.
If I lived to see that section of the island.
My death meant Hawks’s death. It meant the kid and Catherine would die, if that bitch from Detroit hadn’t already gotten to them. My dying would kill too many others.
Death wasn’t an option.
I sped toward the end of the road, had to brake and decide if I was going to take this to the left or right. Straight ahead across the intersection was Camp Blizzard, and that was not an option.
Turning left led toward Hodges Bay, Cedar Grove, Mount Pleasant, Blue Waters, and Crosbies. To the right was Shell Beach and Dutchman’s Bay. A United States Air Force station was there too. Somewhere after that was a landing strip that was still part of the airport, where the celebrities and rich came in on private jets, an area away from the rest of the common people.
All of that was to the right.
It was easier for me to turn to the right, so pain and lack of time made that decision for me. I turned hard, sent Hawks into her door, almost lost control, then was back on track, speeding toward the U.S. Air Force installation. Those grounds were fenced in, probably unmanned; stopping there was not an option. Stopping now would give them a chance to make my heart stop.
To the left was the Hospitality Training Institute and Lord Nelson Beach Hotel; that left would lead to another dead end, would box me in, so I had to make another hard right, and the gravel made the Jeep slide toward an old Texaco gas storage station that looked abandoned, then I passed the Beachcomber Hotel, fishtailing and seeing they were behind me, not giving up, taking wild shots at us, shots that hit livestock up ahead, a cow falling as we passed.
They were close enough to start shooting and make those shots count. Close enough to tap the rear end, do a police maneuver, and force us to spin, a spin that, at this speed, would be devastating and force me to lose control, a bumper tap that could make us take to the air and flip a dozen times.
Hawks held on, her knuckles the whitest of whites.
Up ahead the road gave me two choices: to go straight or cut and go right toward Liat’s cargo hangar, a rugged field in between that straightaway and right turn, livestock in that area, grazing in the grass. I cut to the right, Hawks’s body coming toward mine. I turned at the last second and they followed, then about thirty yards later I cut to the left, cut hard without warning, a move that sent Hawks flying in the opposite direction, slamming against her door again, this time the impact causing her to drop her gun, a move that threw my pursuers off, forced them to screech to a halt as I rode over bumpy terrain, the type of terrain a Jeep was made to handle at a much slower pace, my body bouncing up and down and Hawks’s body doing the same, like we were on a flight that had severe turbulence, never slowing down, speeding by unimpressed livestock until I made it to the left section of the other road, again speeding and swerving and fighting for control, kicking gravel and dirt, the beauty of the Caribbean Sea at my side.