Hurricane Fever (12 page)

Roo broke his attention. “Hey, can you tell me where to find the ice machine…” He dropped the duffel bag with a heavy clunk and cracked the towel at the man’s sunburned, heavily stubbled face. There were tattoos up and down his forearms, more swastika bullshit.

“What the fuck?” The lookout seemed confused, not expecting a swimsuit-wearing tourist to snap a towel at him, so he instinctively grabbed at it. Roo let go, and as the lookout focused on balling it up and throwing it aside, Roo ran into him and flipped him over the rail.

It was four stories down to the ground, and then tumbling as the body snapped its way through scrub along the steep incline the rooms were perched on.

Roo hadn’t waited to see the outcome, he’d already unzipped the duffel bag and started up the stairs. He pulled out a two-foot-long speargun and paused to pull the bands into place, forearms straining to get them on the release catch.

A silencer wouldn’t do shit. It was useful for disguising where you were shooting from, or cutting down on mayhem. But out here, the supersonic crack of the bullet was going to give everyone a head’s up.

Bullets were loud. That was always a constant.

A spear, on the other hand …

When Roo cleared the top of the stairs he could see a guard standing outside the door. All muscle. Slavic and with shoulders so wide he probably had to turn sideways to slip through a normal sized doorway.

Muscle on muscle, like an over-bred bull. Thanks to steroids, human growth hormone, maybe even some sequenced DNA spliced up, and reinjected with new markers from top muscle builders. You didn’t need to be born with lucky genes, you could always steal them from black market sequencing shops.

Whether the person who created the new viral DNA strain you were injecting into yourself was any good at his coding, that was another story.

Shooting a slab of meat this tall wouldn’t even guarantee his silence. Not unless it was a direct hit to the heart.

But, Roo knew, shooting him in the lung with a speargun was a good way to shut him up. The speargun twanged.

The mountain of a man grabbed the end of the spear embedded in him and opened his mouth. Blood sprayed the air as he hoarsely tried to shout a warning. But with a pierced lung he was reduced to little more than grunting. Roo yanked on the long string still attached to the spear.

It came out in a sickly ripping gasp and a tiny rush of air. The barbs were designed to keep the spear in place, but Roo had yanked it back so hard it came out anyway.

The effect was dramatic. The giant dropped to the floor, gasping and struggling to handle a suddenly collapsed lung.

He held a hand up, trying to push Roo away, but there was no pity left in Roo. He drove a knee into the center of the man’s chest as he dropped onto him, then slit his thick, corded neck with a shark knife pulled from the end pocket of the duffel bag.

Now there wasn’t even gasping. Just blood.

“There was a boy,” Roo whispered to the man, leaning forward and looking into the pale green eyes. “You shouldn’t have killed him.”

There was no comprehension. The eyes focused on something far away from Roo.

He reloaded and listened to Kit scream. There was a slap of a hand from inside the room, faint, but audible. Roo stepped toward the door, then grimaced.

There would be one more guard. With a deep breath he rubbed his hands on his shorts. Inside his head, he was on the edge of a cliff and wobbling. It was good to be scared, it heightened his nerves. What he had just done would sink in later. For now, he needed to keep moving. There was no turning back. The decisions made in anger were solid. He was here for retribution. He was here to do this the messy way.

He turned away from the door.

Stepping out of his flip-flops, Roo ran silently for the other stairwell. Around the corner he pointed down, sighted, and shot the other posted guard in the chest before the elaborately tattooed, muscled neo-Nazi could reach for his gun.

This one Roo didn’t kill. He knocked the gun free from the man’s hands and yanked him up the stairs by pulling on the wire still connected to the spear. The guard tried to scream, sprayed blood in the air instead, and clutched his side. Holding the spear in place and groaning, he stumbled upward until he was close enough for Roo to lean in. “Walk,” he said.

The guard shook his head, so Roo stepped behind him and pushed him forward by gently tweaking the spearpoint to repeat the request. The guard jerked forward toward Kit’s room while Roo wound the spear line around his arms to bind him.

Blood dripped on the ground as they moved forward. Enough that Roo knew the guard wouldn’t be standing upright for much longer. He prodded the man forward. “Faster.”

In front of the closed door, Roo pulled the duffel bag further open, his bloody hands shaking. Another spear, another reload. He pulled on a gas mask and reshouldered the duffel bag. He yanked out tear gas grenades from the bag now under his arm, pulled the pins, and then shoved the guard up to the door.

“Knock and enter,” he hissed. “Now.” He twisted the spear again, and the reluctant, bleeding man obeyed.

The door creaked open, and Roo kicked the guard forward while tossing the tear gas grenades in past him.

A stream of nasty swearing in Russian and Hungarian filled the room as two men scattered from the spitting tear gas like startled cockroaches.

Roo shot the nearest one in the stomach with the speargun, the twang of the released cable filling the room. The other man Roo hit with the duffel bag, the weight of the guns and ammo inside cracking him hard in the head and knocking him onto the large queen bed in the center of the room.

He pulled the bloody shark knife free of the bag and crawled up onto the bed. He was breathing heavily in the gas mask, struggling to pull air into his lungs.

The other man, reddened eyes streaming with tears, blinked as Roo crawled onto the bed. For a moment he managed to get a hold on Roo and pawed for the gas mask.

A moment passed. One that stretched as they strained and grunted at each other.

But Roo’d had some training at the dojo with bigger, stronger instructors. He wormed his way out and buried the shark knife deep into the man’s neck.

He lay for a second, panting, staring at the white speckled ceiling and the unmoving fan.

Not a single shot, he thought dizzily.

The first man he’d speared as he entered the room crawled around, trying blindly to find his gun. Kit held it now, aiming it in his general direction as she squeezed her bloodshot eyes shut in pain and tried to wipe tears off with a shoulder.

Quick thinker.

Roo jumped up, crossed to the door, and pulled the big guard inside. Then he grabbed the duffel bag, Kit’s elbow, and pulled her in the bathroom.

“Keep looking up.” He tilted her chin and used a bottle of liquid antacid to flush her eyes out. She thrashed for a bit, unused to the sensation of the chalky liquid.

He handed her a gas mask and an emergency scuba bottle.

“Hopefully we have some time before all that blood outside is noticed,” he said. “But why don’t you get your things together, take them down to the car. Catch your breath. I’ll be down after I have a quick chat with the man still crawling around on the floor.”

*   *   *

Roo pulled a desk chair over to the tied up, bleeding man with a spear still in his stomach. He leaned close, so that the man could hear him through the gas mask.

“When I was just so,” Roo held his hand up off the floor to indicate the height of a young boy. “I worked for this dealer named Vincent. Tough yardboy, sent from Kingston to make sure we did it all just right. He told me once, you kill someone’s blood, then you might as well kill them, too. Because there’s no way to settle that, no way to work past it.”

There was no response. Roo picked up the bloody dive knife he’d used earlier and began to cut the man’s shirt off to look at the tattoos underneath, poking at the swastika.

“This don’t exactly make you the most sympathetic person,” he said. “Seems like a favor to the rest of the world to get rid of you.”

That got a response. “Fuck you!” The man spat at him. The spittle ran off the water-repellent glass of the gas mask almost instantly.

“Whatever you wanted,” Roo said. “You wanted it from me. Why did you drag my nephew into it?”

The man shrugged, then grimaced as the motion caused the spear in his gut to shift slightly. But he bore the pain like a soldier being interrogated, with some hint of pride that went along with the defiance. “We were looking for a black man with a data chip,” he said in a thick English accent. “A black man showed up, we shot him. He didn’t have the data chip.”

Simple as that. Roo’s eyes were wet, and it wasn’t from what little teargas had leaked around the edges of his mask.

He sat back and stared at the Golden Dawn tattoos, the swastikas, the double lightning strikes. Hungarian fascist bullshit. The man was a walking billboard for failed twentieth-century fascism. An easy-to-use foot soldier.

“Who wants that chip?” Roo asked.

“Fuck you,” the man said, in such a way that they both knew he wasn’t going to give that up easily. His eyes dared Roo to do something nasty and horrible. “Do your worst.”

“I’m not fucking CIA. I already shot you, not going to torture you. Seen enough of that in my life. But you killed an innocent. A civilian,” Roo said. “My nephew. There is a price for that.”

“His death is just a taste of what comes in the war,” the neo-Nazi hissed. “The clash of civilizations is coming. The rising tide is here.”

Roo sighed. Well, there was another hurricane coming, he thought. That was about the only tide coming anytime soon.

He got up and rifled through the pockets of the dead men on the floor and found a passport. Thumbing through, he looked at the last date stamp on the paper. Thank goodness for old, paper-oriented passport systems and tourist nostalgia for having a stamp in their passport to memorialize their travels.

The Aves Island CARICOM non-exclusive trade zone was the last place the man had been. “You can’t know where you going, if you don’t know where you’re coming from,” Roo said.

“What?”

Roo held up the passport. “A week on Aves Island before coming here, when you could have come straight from…” He flipped through. “Budapest. What were you doing on Aves?”

“Fuck you.”

So. Something interesting.

“It took me four hours to scrub all my nephew’s blood off the cockpit floor where you killed him,” Roo told his captive. “I had a lot of time to do a lot of thinking. Thinking about what I would do next. And I’ve decided this: you and your men here, they killed Delroy. But it didn’t start with you. Someone else further up the food chain did that. So I’m going to kill you, and then start working my way up to find out who caused this. And then I’m going to kill them, too.”

*   *   *

Kit waited for him in the car. He handed her a small baggie with a phone sealed inside. She looked at the flesh-shaped bulge at the bottom. “Is that an index finger?”

“I want to find out who they really were. The passports were fake, though helpful.”

He put the duffel bag in the back. He used one of the hotel towels to clean blood off the spear he’d pulled free of the last man.

“Spear fishing?” an older man in a maintenance uniform asked.

Roo looked up. Nodded.

“Catch anything big?”

“Not big enough to keep,” Roo said.

“Better luck next time.”

He got in, shut the door, and sat for a moment with his hands on the wheel. There was blood in the crevices between his cuticles.

“Did you kill the last one?” Kit asked quietly.

Roo shook his head slowly. “No. Pulled the spear out the back and let him scream a bit, but no.” Killing someone tied up in front of him … he couldn’t do that. Not even in the middle of all that white-hot rage.

“So…”

“Left him holding a sheet to his stomach wound. The harder he presses, the slower he’ll bleed out,” Roo said. “Figure the cops’ll roll up on him soon. Even if you and I disappear following this lead, we’ll leave a fairly obvious path for anyone behind us to follow.”

He crept the car forward and put the gaudy condos and hotel block of Frenchman’s Reef in his rearview mirror.

14

The blue articulated crane, a two-story-tall spider of a contraption that glinted here and there in the midnight dark, gently lowered the
Spitfire
into the water with its padded metallic claws as Roo stood on the bow. Once in the water and settled, Roo tied them off to the concrete walls, then clambered out onto the dock.

Tinker climbed out of the cab of the crane and smiled when Roo handed him a thick brick of paper money. “Fuck me,” he said, flipping at the ends of it absently. And then he realized how much Roo had just handed him. Once more, with a mild awe in his voice, he repeated, “Fuck. Me.”

“That should get your engines up and running,” Roo said. “Maybe see you down south some time?”

“This is too much,” Tinker said, his beard blowing in the wind.

“Hide it good,” Roo said. “If they figure out you helped me they’ll hassle you for serious.”

Tinker shrugged. “Weren’t here. Saw nothing. Boatyard’s gonna be pissed I hot-wired their crane, though. It was a quick, dirty thing. Good thing it’s electric, not some damn engine. Start an older one up everyone for miles would have known what we were up to.” And it had still been loud enough as it was, making Roo nervous about getting caught.

“I left an envelope of cash in their mailbox,” Roo said. “They’re taken care of.”

Tinker slipped the cash into a pocket in his dirty overalls, and frowned. “You gonna be okay, Roo?” He glanced at the
Spitfire
’s cabin. Wondering, no doubt, who Kit was. “The memorial…”

“Good-bye, Tinker. See you down south, some day. Okay?”

Tinker nodded, and grabbed Roo’s forearm in an awkward shake. “Some day,” he grunted.

Roo watched him amble out of the yard, a ball cap pulled firmly down over his face.

“Will he be okay?” Kit asked softly. Roo knew what she was asking. A camera, somewhere, would tag him. He would get questioned. But Tinker knew that.