I was hurting too much to chase him, hurting too much to back away and regroup.
He had staggered to the waters and grabbed a rock. Jagged and the size of a cinder block, solid to the core, had to weigh thirty pounds, more than enough to bludgeon and crush a man’s skull. Water rained down from that chunk of the earth as he fought the waters to get back to me with his weapon.
I ran at him, caught his hands before the rock made it to its apex.
I had to battle him with one good hand.
Gave him a head butt, tried to take him to the ground.
The rock fell when he backed away, tumbled down between us, hit my shin, landed on my foot.
Birds and frogs cried as I stumbled with my new pains, did the same as he staggered with his.
The angered look on his bloodied and swollen face, the way blood dripped from his nose across his terse lips, and the murderous look in his eyes told me he wasn’t going to stop coming at me.
He was a demon. He would keep coming until I regretted this moment.
I was tired, lungs burning, every part my body heavy and on fire, barely able to stand.
Wounds from Birmingham began to sing. Edges of my illness in Atlanta remained.
And I had lost blood when I had been shot. And hadn’t recovered from dehydration.
He had the upper hand. He knew he had the upper hand.
He tried to stand tall, took a deep breath, wiped sweat and sand and water from his wounded face, gritted his teeth, and came at me, dug in deep and raced across the sand like a charging bull.
I did the same, raced at that red-haired son of a bitch like I was a juggernaut.
Two wounded velociraptors collided.
The collision took me to the ground, left me rolling; had to get back to my feet. I looked for him, saw he was down too, putting one knee into the ground, getting up while my pain had become an unbearable weight, the world on the shoulders of Atlas. He kicked my face, stunned me. As I fought I felt his hands on me, dragging me toward the sea, that ocean the weapon he was ready to use. I struggled with him, swinging with one arm, my left arm numb, dead, useless. He put blows in my ribs, struck my kidneys. Then I felt the rush of the sea, its water chilling, its salt stinging, cauterizing wounds old and new. I struggled to get a lungful of air, held my breath while he pushed me down, held me down, the world vanishing as I was forced into a liquid darkness that had no air. A watery grave that had claimed many. The wave pulled away and I found some air only to have the sea rush back and cover me once again. That motherfucker held me down, put his body on top of mine, choked me.
A wave pulled us toward the sea, sucked us away from the shore.
Then another wave came in hard, crashed over us; the sea swallowed and tugged as if a hundred octopi wanted to drag us out to sea. The undertow yanked the fight into deeper waters, closer to Davy Jones’s locker. The red-haired man stayed on top of me, weighed me down, hit me where he could as I battled his fury and the power of the sea. He stayed with me, tried to force me to exhale so I could gasp for air and take my final breath.
I wrestled until my face broke the surface, until I stole a lungful of air.
The red-haired man jerked, lost his grip on my neck, moved away from me, did that with urgency. Moved like he was trying to fight something off him. Then I felt the sting of one hundred mosquito bites. Something was in the water. This side of the island didn’t have sharks.
Jellyfish.
One had stung my left arm, but the way he panicked I could tell many more had gotten to him. I panicked too, knowing I had only one good arm. Now we both were fleeing the sea and her creatures, my effort pained and slow. I lost sight of him, struggled with making it back to shore, that shore no more than twenty yards away, that twenty yards feeling like twenty miles. The last few feet were impossible; a wave crashed over me and regurgitated me from the ocean back to the damp sand.
The red-haired man was already there.
I had to get up. Had to. I made it to my knee and saw him, in the sand, writhing in pain, holding his face with one hand and reaching for his lower back with the other. The jellyfish had gotten to him first and wounded him. His face, his back, his neck had been attacked, stung. There had been more than one of the sea creatures, more than one finding him before finding me. He was struggling to get up. Exhausted. Waterlogged. Battered. The mirror of my existence.
Now a jellyfish sting had swollen his left eye.
My blows had swollen his right eye. He could barely see, if he could see at all.
He had panicked, had taken in water as he fled the ocean.
He was fucked-up.
By the time he made it to one knee I had staggered his way, was standing over him.
The thirty-pound rock he had tried to bash my head with, it was in my trembling, aching hands. I struggled to raise it over my head. Left arm distressed, body shaking, I held it high.
The red-haired man turned his wounded face and looked up at me. Looked at the rock. Tried to crawl away, the sand keeping him where he was as I struggled to hold the rock higher.
He realized there was nowhere to run. The red-haired man looked back. Frowned in my direction, his swollen left eye closed as he searched for me, struggled to see me with his right eye. Again, that frown vanished for a moment. The man behind the demon shone through.
Respect stared up at regret.
I paused. This was not his war.
No referees. No one to throw the towel in. Unless one of us simply decided to walk away. I was about to drop the rock but his expression changed, the deep-set frown returned, a look of nonconcession that told me he would never stop coming at me, that this would never end.
Until the contract had been fulfilled.
His expression told me he was used to winning, would never concede defeat.
The same as Detroit, a woman who wouldn’t let go; stubborn, irrational, and power hungry.
London. Cayman Islands. Huntsville. Now here in the white sands of Antigua.
And she had hired a man who had an unshakeable, bedrock commitment to facilitating my murder.
The same man who had used that knife and murdered two innocent women in London.
He had butchered Catherine’s friends.
What had to be done was both regrettable and inescapable.
I brought the rock down on his face as hard as I could. His head opened in a gash. His blood poured into the gorgeous white sand as he continued to crawl away. Then I picked the rock up again. Brought it down on his head again. Another wound opened. His skin moved away from the bone on his head. Doing to him what he wanted to do to me moments before. Again I picked up the bloody rock.
I brought it down on his head again.
He stopped crawling.
But his hand was still twitching.
I bludgeoned him until he stopped moving.
Then I gritted my teeth and continued to bludgeon him.
I hit him with that jagged rock until his blood and brains mixed with the beautiful white sand.
I collapsed into the gritty sand, fell to my knees, struggled to breathe as I grabbed a handful of wet sand, rubbed that on my left arm where one of the jellyfish had stung me. I had no idea what type of jellyfish had attacked us, didn’t know if it was a Portuguese man-of-war or a common jellyfish.
Hawks. Had to get to Hawks.
It took all I had to stand up again, and when I made it to my feet I kept rocking side to side, unable to move in a straight line. I had taken a handful of steps when I saw her.
She was limping toward me, her steps uneven. It wasn’t Hawks.
Without looking up, I knew from the expensive shoes it was the strawberry blonde.
She took a step and paused, bent like she was in pain, then straightened back up.
She fired at me, her bullet finding a new home in the sand near my feet.
She bent over again, the gun at her side, her eyes on me.
She came closer, walked my death toward me one step at a time.
Her partner was five feet away from me, a bloodied rock resting near his head, the waves washing up to his motionless feet. I couldn’t move, not the way I needed to if I was going to be able to escape. But I tried and slipped, pulled a groin muscle, the abrupt pain severe and crippling, making me want to howl, gripping my body and sending me to the sand, throwing me to the ground once again.
It was the accumulation of injuries, not just one, that took me down. Shoulder shot and swollen. Exhausted from the fight. Clothes weighed down by sand and water. Lungs on fire. Loss of blood from the gunshot. Dehydration. My last pain was the one that brought them all together. In chorus they sang the same song, told me I wasn’t going anywhere. I battled my injuries. Tried to get up, refused to give up my life, never surrendering, moved the same way the dead man next to me had moved moments ago. In desperation. In vain.
I looked up, saw her bent over, hands on her knees, struggling to breathe.
Without warning she gagged, vomited, coughed over and over, began choking.
Her choking was violent. She was hurting. And she was hurting bad.
The gun wasn’t pointing at me, not while she was doubled over, giving her insides to the sand.
I sucked in the agony, had almost made it up on one knee, only to have the groin injury spread like a powerful fire, the pain the most intense pain I’d ever felt, an agony that yanked me back to the sand. That was more than the time she needed to look at the lifeless body a few feet away from me, enough time to see her partner in crime had died an unkind death, time for her to close the gap that existed between us.
The strawberry blonde. She was in front of me. Her face covered with sweat. Blinking her eyes over and over, in time with her pain. Her hair was braided. Made her look Puerto Rican. Maybe from Spain. That thought passed in the blink of an eye. The West Indies breeze on high, her exotic clothing fluttering as multimillion-dollar holiday homes and a tropical paradise framed her body.
A gun was in her right hand; her left hand came up; I saw her take deep breaths, cringe as she struggled to hold her death maker steady. She trembled, fought her agony. I saw the rage and coldness in her eyes as I gave her the rage and coldness in mine.
Unable to move, plagued by pain, I was helpless and hors de combat.
I had become a soldier out of the fight.
Stars over our heads, that beautiful assassin stood at point-blank range.
Thirty-three
brutal
Death’s harbinger
stood over me, frozen, gun aimed at the center of my head.
Her eyes opened and closed over and over, sweat pouring from her forehead.
Then she grabbed her stomach like she had the bends, her stilettos sinking in the sand.
She twitched and lost her balance, her face tense as she lowered the gun and looked down.
My eyes did the same.
Her white jeans turned pink at her crotch; that pinkness moved down her inner thigh.
She was wounded.
She wobbled, grabbed her stomach, gagged, regurgitated again, bent over, kept giving her insides to the sand, didn’t let go of the gun as she staggered backward, lost her footing, and collapsed.
She fell like she had been shot, her impact causing a whirlwind of sand to cover her body.
Sand that made her close her eyes. Sand that had her temporarily blinded.
I made it to my knee again, grunted and pushed up, made it to my feet, took steps that made me want to howl, steps so short they were baby steps, moved toward her, eyed the property, expected more of them to come out gunning. The strawberry blonde, her face was dusted with sand. Her eyes were closed. The female assassin rocked and held her gut as if she had been shot in her belly with a .45.
She moved her legs, her shoes digging into the sand, slipping off one at a time. She couldn’t stand up, wore a horrible expression that let me know her pain wasn’t fake. The pinkness between her legs turned red. The gun she had pointed at my head was near her in the sand.
I struggled, couldn’t bend over, the ache and fire in my groin severe. I fell to the sand again, dropped next to that gun. She panicked, struggled for the weapon, both of us grabbing the gun. I had the business end but she had her finger locked on the trigger. I tried to push that business end toward her head. Her expression was one of both pain and panic, a glare that told me she wanted to do the same thing to me. The silenced gun fired twice, bullets projected into the sky, then the gun fired over and over until the clip was empty. That was what she wanted to do, empty the gun and keep me from putting a bullet inside her head. She loosened her grip and I yanked the empty gun away from her.
Her eyes met mine, swollen eyes, redness invading the pupils.
She was suffering. Beyond ill. I’d seen that look on the faces of a few people.
It was the look of someone poisoned and dying.
In this world dying wasn’t dead.
My mind told me to crawl on her, choke the life out of her. But the sting from the jellyfish, followed by lifting that rock up over my head and taking out the man with the red hair, had damaged my already-wounded shoulder, had left my arm in too much pain to make what I needed to do to that female assassin a reality. The gun I had in my hand, it was empty but hard enough to bludgeon her.
Not that long ago I had left one enemy alive, had done that and my life had become a living hell.
Never again.
I crawled over her, grabbed at her clothing as she tried to roll away, pulled her back, used my weight to hold her down. She tried to push me away, tried to beat me away, but she wasn’t a physically strong woman. I crawled over her leg, crawled up to her breasts, crawled until I was eye to eye with the agony in her face, my ragged breathing on her skin, her desperate breathing mixed with my exhales.