Nightlife (22 page)

Where to funnel it—that had been the only real debate. Tampa’s kingpin, Rafael Agualar, had been out of the question. Should it turn out to be bad news, future relations with the
Agualares
would be strained, to say the least. Not healthy for business. On the other hand, a midlevel distributor like Mendoza was a calculated risk. If Tony went down for poison stock, Escobar knew he himself would never be implicated. And if everything went smoothly, someone like Mendoza would not be bad to have in the pocket for future consideration. Especially with Agualar snorting his way to an early retirement. Because somebody had to replace him, and while Mendoza was a punk, he was a punk with brains and the real vicious streak so crucial to a rewarding career.

So far there had been no news to indicate anything amiss in Tampa. However, word had it that Hernando Vasquez had messily departed this world, along with a houseful of aides. No more green powder likely to come in, and that was too bad, but hey, it wasn’t like there was established demand already. No, he was more concerned with the circumstances behind the Vasquez slaughter.

Fingers down in Medellín had been pointing in lots of directions, while nobody seemed to know a thing. This was strange. The Cartel had eyes and ears and feelers everywhere. Moves just weren’t made in that town without
somebody
knowing about it. Bartenders, bellhops, taxi drivers, airline clerks, baggage handlers, hotel desk staff—the network was like a hydra. Cut off one head, and two more would grow in its place.

Some said rival exporters in Cali had done it. Others said the
Vasquezistas
had been betrayed by one of their own, ready to assume control of the organization; possible, since his woman had disappeared. Still others spouted off about covert DEA raids in tandem with the leftist guerrillas. That a single gunshot had not been fired was most interesting. Poison, machete wounds, and apparent arrow wounds—with the arrows removed, by the way. Escobar himself threw his hands up in surrender. Either a real wild card had been tossed into the game, Or more likely, the real culprits had gone to a lot of trouble to use methods that would confuse the rest and shift blame elsewhere.

Whatever. Medellín was a crazy town. He was glad he lived in the good old U.S. of A. You had rules here.

And as he slept very late on this Sunday night, naked and sated and worn out from the incredible three-way geometries Vanessa and Tracy had inspired, events in Medellín could not have been farther from mind.

He was awakened by a smell. Faint at first, then growing in strength. Bad stuff. A hot, sweetish, smoky smell. His eyes fluttered, and with greater awareness, his heart skipped a beat.
Smoke.
Why hadn’t the bozos he paid to keep an eye out for such things raised some sort of alarm? It was going to take some fancy talking to save somebody from wearing his balls for earrings.

“Hey. Wake up. I think we got some problems.”

Escobar put a hand on the girls’ shoulders, gave them each a shake. They murmured, they mumbled, they burrowed into the sheets. Lazy bitches. He slapped rumps, and that got them moving. He was up and into his pants before they asked him what was wrong. He clicked on a lamp and told them to shut up.

“I smell something burning,” Tracy said. She wrinkled her nose, and the waterbed sloshed beneath her as she reached for panties.

“Yeah, no shit.” Escobar glanced at her, shook his head. He grabbed the phone on a bedside table to ring the upper cabin. The phone chirped in his ear three times before he gave up in disgust. Maybe the guy was alow, fighting fires or something.

While at the table, Escobar reached into the drawer to pull out his weapon of choice. He had a thing for Lugers. Precise German craftsmanship, and the romance of a relic from the world’s most kickass army. In their heyday, at least.

“What’s wrong? Why do you need
that?”
Vanessa this time. Her eyes had gotten very large.

Escobar ignored her and went striding to the sliding glass doors opening onto the rear deck. Parted the curtains just enough to peek outside and ascertain the deck was empty. Nothing but moonlight on white. Silver night. He unlatched the door lock and tried to open them. They gave maybe a quarter inch. If that.

He rattled them again, this time with more force. No good. He was starting to feel a hammering in his heart that the smoke smell alone had not caused. He looked at the outer handles through the polarized glass—

And saw they had been bound together with nylon rope.

Situation had just been upgraded from serious to critical.

Escobar looked at the carved double doors across the stateroom. Only way out of this place. Because every bit of glass around—sliding doors and side windows alike—was bulletproof. He couldn’t even shoot through them to untie the rope.

He whirled around, and the girls were struggling into their clothes. Designer wrinkles.

“Luis, that smell’s getting
worse.”
Vanessa again.

She was right. He padded over to the doors, touched a finger to their knobs. Brass. Should conduct the heat quite well if there were a major fire in the hallway. They were faintly warm, but not enough to drive your finger away. Not like touching a hot iron.

This could change, of course. Depending on the fire. And if it grew, they could be trapped. The idea of cooking inside this stateroom was far less attractive than facing whatever lay on the other side.

Vanessa was nearest the stateroom’s private bath. He looked at her. “Go soak three hand towels, get ’em nice and soppy.”

While she did that, Escobar listened beside the doors. Heard a faint crackle of flames, grew increasingly repelled by that burning stench. All at once it seemed very negligent not to have had a peephole installed in at least one door. He left them long enough to kick his bare feet into a pair of leather deck shoes.

Vanessa came back with the wet towels. He took one, and Tracy took the last, and they put them before their faces to filter out smoke, possible toxic fumes. He tied his like a bandit’s mask from an old Western movie.

He wrapped his hands on the knobs, Luger still in his right.

Why the hell hadn’t his men raised a fuss? Anybody still sleeping was a dead man. Shark bait, next run out to sea.

Escobar opened the doors, and immediately a nauseating wave of foul smoke was in his face. So was its source.

The short, loud scream that escaped him wasn’t the most macho response. But it was involuntary. And very very heartfelt.

Propped against the right door was Jess, one of his men. At least the size indicated Jess. There was a lot wrong with him. The arrow shaft poking out of his eye, for one thing. That he was ablaze was another. A flaming shroud of bedsheets was wrapped around him, and the visible flesh was roasted and blackening. His hair was charred stubble. As soon as the doors opened, his flambé body slid along the carved wood and thudded to the floor at Escobar’s madly dancing feet.

Yes, he shouted. Completely blew composure. And let surprise get the best of him, if only for a second or two. Because somebody up the hallway suddenly leaned from a right-side doorway to fire something at him.

And son of a bitch, did it ever connect.

The infiltrator had planned well. With Jess’s body at right, Escobar had reflexively jumped left. Opened himself up to more vulnerability to someone in a right-side stateroom. And with the attacker being right-handed, he barely had to lean out the doorway.

The next thing Luis Escobar knew, a monstrous arrow—an
arrow,
of all things—had nailed him in the gun shoulder. The pain was sharp and deep, like a scalpel rammed in to the hilt. His arm spasmed, and he fired a wild shot that cracked into the paneling before him, and then the Luger thumped to the floor.

Escobar grunted and staggered back into the left door, aware of Vanessa and Tracy shrieking behind him, pain in his ears. He was about to bend over for the Luger when the bastard fired again. At maybe fifteen feet, this was probably point-blank range for arrows. This time he took it in the left side of the gut. No bones here to stop the shaft. Just tight skin, firm muscle, and soft organs. He screamed. And knew before he tried to move that it had gone all the way through.

Not only that.

It had nailed him to his own bedroom door.

This guy—this wild card—knew his business.

Paradise had gone to the province of nightmares in a matter of minutes. Skewered to the door. Jess burning near his feet. The Luger on the floor a maddening three feet before him. He would have to tear his own belly open to bend that far.

And trouble had quickly gotten a whole lot worse. Someone was quickly closing the gap with a machete.

“Get my gun!” he screamed to Vanessa, to Tracy. He didn’t care who.
“Get my gun!”

From the corner of his eye he saw Tracy start for it.

“Don’t touch it,” the bowman said, and the bitch chose to obey him instead of her meal ticket. If he got out of this alive, she was shark bait too.

Escobar couldn’t believe his eyes. This man before him wasn’t like any he had ever seen. Especially in
these
parts. South American Indian—he recognized that immediately. Bronze skinned, naked, straight hair still wet. With dark eyes that looked as if they’d never heard the word
mercy.
All at once the news about Vasquez flashed again through his mind, and the gap between Miami and Medellín narrowed to inches. Long-forgotten Catholic prayers and novenas surfaced in memory, all but spilled from his mouth.

He wrapped his hand around the arrow shaft and gave a tug, and all it accomplished was snapping the shaft from the bamboo tip. He looked down, wishing he had taken time to put on a shirt. He could see that razor-sharp arrow tip punching right into his belly. See the puckering wound as it drooled blood down his side to stain his slacks. He started to slide forward on the bamboo, maybe he could free himself that way. Agony, sheer agony. Every fraction of an inch seemed to grate on something inside. Especially deep within his back.

The thing was
barbed.

No telling what it was hung up on inside.

Escobar, now sweating profusely, looked up in fear into the merciless eyes. They had not changed.

“Money,” Escobar rasped. “I have lots of money. I can make you soooo rich—”

The bowman paid him no attention. “You stay inside,” he said to the girls. Gesturing to the stateroom. They backed farther in without complaint, and Escobar felt even more alone in a world that had already become too painfully lonely.

The bowman shut the scorched right door. Then gripped the handle of the left and pulled it forward as well. Escobar shrieked. He pedaled with his feet to keep up with it, lest he stumble off balance. Fall. Leave an intestinal ticker tape behind as he fell. The doors latched.

And then, the final insult upon injury—

Vanessa and Tracy locked the doors from the inside.

He danced a careful series of steps. Wasn’t enough that he was pinned to the door like a butterfly to a collection board. Now the heat from the burning Jess was getting very uncomfortable. The smoke nauseating. Tears began to leak from the corners of his eyes.

“Money?” he tried again, weakly.

The bowman kicked the Luger behind him, farther up the hall
—no
hope now. He yanked the wet towel from Escobar’s face, held the machete along his neck. It was warm, slick.
Already used.

“Green powder,” said the bowman. “A man named Hernando Vasquez gave it to you.”

Escobar bobbed his head, eager to please. “Yeah, yeah, that’s right.”

“You tell me where you have it. And I go.”

“Oh,
paisa,
man, I wish I could help you.” Breathless, he was panting. Frantic. “You’re about two weeks too late. I sent it away. Come on,
paisa,
you don’t want to hurt me like this. We got some of the same blood inside, don’t you see my face?”

“I’m not your countryman,” said the bowman, and Escobar’s hopes for appealing to some kindred heritage died.

The Indian grabbed the arrow in his shoulder, gave a wrenching twist. Escobar screamed. He’d rather his arm fall off than go through another one of those.

“Where is the green powder now?”

“I sent it to Tampa! You know where Tampa is, everybody knows where Tampa is!” Escobar felt blisters rising on his sockless ankles.

“Who has it? His name.”

“Tony Mendoza.
Tony Mendoza!”
Dear lord, his pant legs were starting to catch fire. He thrashed one leg in the air to try and snuff out the flames.

“Where do I find him?” Another twist of the shoulder arrow.

“I don’t know, I swear it!” Wrong answer, he
knew
it.

The bowman sliced a shallow gash down Escobar’s left pec, split the nipple dead center. Both hands had been trying to hold his insides together, but he let go with one and flailed at his tormentor. Got a nasty chop across the forearm with the machete.

“Where do I
find him?”

“I don’t know
I don’t know!”
Escobar thought he could never die quickly enough. “He’s in Tampa, fucking Tampa and please
please put out that fucking fire man
PUT IT OUT PUT IT OOUUUUT!”

With a guttural cry, the bowman wound back with the machete, cocked, ready to fall. Escobar scrunched his eyes shut, didn’t want to see the blow. Felt his legs blister, the flames from Jess having crawled all the way up to his knees. Eating toward bone. Toward thighs. Toward genitals.

He waited, welcoming the fall of the blade.

But it didn’t come.

And when he opened his eyes again, the bowman was already halfway down the hall. Sitting on his haunches.
Watching me burn.
Greasy smoke wafted up into his face, the sizzle of fat. Escobar drummed his smoldering feet on the floor. Anything to distract from the pain. The fire was feeding on itself now, halfway up his thighs, his slacks charred tatters. Drop and roll—that was all it would take.

Yet he still couldn’t work up nerve to tear loose from the arrow.

Flames, broiling his legs into crisped hide. His voice, raw and hoarse by now. Anything was better than roasting alive from the ground up. He braced his palms against the door behind him. Took a deep breath.