Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (33 page)

Sprawled on the floor, I glanced up and saw Lina run down the hallway, disappear into a room and slam the door closed behind her. The fight had gone right out of
El Bruto
, the man shaking with shock and holding his mangled quivering foot in the air, his scream almost continuous.

I got up and left the wrestler where he was. He was noisy, but out of the game. Edging further down the hall, I wasn’t sure of the wisdom of following Lina. I put my hand on a doorknob and turned it. The air that came from the room was close and smelled of sickness. I opened the door. Daniela was propped up in bed, sleeping. Her closed eyes wore circles of green pallor, her throat encased in bandages. She opened her eyes and saw me. They went wide with fear. She opened her mouth, tried to call or scream, but only a dry croak escaped. I felt a pang of regret. She’d been a beautiful creature, emphasis on creature. Daniela was out of the game too. I closed the door and continued down the hall. Three other bedrooms. All were gorgeously decorated with tapestries, rugs and old weapons. The four-poster beds had all been slept in. Another suit of armor marked the end of the hall and the entrance to a dining room. A horse with a case of rigor stood stiff and dead in one corner of the room. It was
Siete Leguas
– Seven Leagues, Villa’s stuffed nag.

The sound of a vase or a plate smashing distracted me. It came from downstairs. It felt like a lure. I backtracked, past
El Bruto
who was now whimpering, his bloody foot making a hell of a mess on the wall and floor, and took the stairs down from the sitting room. The billiards room was still clear. My palms were sweating on the Sig’s handgrips. Along with Lina, who was armed and dangerous, Apostles and Perez were embedded somewhere in this house, waiting for me. More specifically, waiting to kill me. And by now, they would know that I’d come alone. Or maybe not.

*

I fired the rifle into the air and the three horses went through the ground floor hallway like, well, a herd of horses. They made plenty of noise knocking paintings off the walls, smashing vases, sliding on rugs and breaking chairs, neighing and whinnying in the strange environment. When they got to the front door and found it closed, the animals went seriously berserk, bucking and turning, and kicking out with their hooves, skidding on the wood floor. I came in behind them and ran to the side, into a library. I figured Apostles was into horses more than humans. He’d be worried about them. I heard him calling out to them, trying to soothe them and horse-whisper them back out the way they came in. One of the animals got the message, reared up and twisted around, galloped down the hall and out the rear entrance, the other horses following. I snuck into a room, came through an adjoining door and, in a mirror, saw Apostles’ back, a machine pistol dangling from his hand. All the noise and distraction hid my movement. Apostles sensed me behind him too late. He spun around but now the Sig was barely inches away, aimed at the bridge of his nose.

“I’ll take that,” I told him as he hesitated, relieving him of the machine pistol, pulling the weapon out of his hand.

“I don’t think so,” said Perez in Spanish.

What?
I froze. Jesus – the man was behind me! He’d done to me what I’d done to Apostles. The short vicious little fuck stepped around where I could see him. He had a H&K pistol, blue-black with pearl grips, pointed at my chest. The stupid gun matched that stupid knife of his. Maybe it was a boxed set.

I held my nerve. “Don’t think about moving.” To Perez I said, “This trigger only needs two point two pounds’ pressure to release the hammer. I’m squeezing it now – gotta be close to two pounds’ pressure on the trigger. Shoot me and the shock will make my finger twitch.” I took a glance at Perez. His head was no longer shaved smooth, a band of scraggly salt and pepper fuzz running around the back of his head from ear to ear. The tear tattoos were mostly gone, expensively lasered off I guessed, the skin still mildly scarred from the burning. The color of his eyes had also changed. Dung-beetle black was now cow-brown. He was changing his appearance, getting ready to disappear or perhaps start afresh. “Had a makeover?” I asked him. “Going for that paedophile accountant look, I see. Suits you.”

“I am going to enjoy killing you, Cooper,” Perez growled.

“Don’t count your chickens.” I sounded tough, if a sentence with chickens in it could sound tough, but I was compensating – the momentum had shifted out of my control.

Perez switched to English. “What is it you gringos call this? A Mexican standoff?”

And then Juliana walked in through the back door, hands behind her head. Coming in behind her was Lina, armed with that crossbow, the bolt aimed between Juliana’s shoulder blades.

“Ah, Juliana. How nice to see you, as always,” said Apostles. “And look, you’re returning my ballista. Can you believe those
putas
stole it?”

Juliana’s eyes met mine, and there was an apology in them. She must have simply stolen another boat and drifted along down the river behind me. But however she’d managed to get herself here was academic. Juliana was now their prisoner and this changed things, the balance now firmly in Apostles’ favor. Once upon a time, I might have taken a gamble in a situation like this, had a crack, shot first and worried about the consequences later, but I’d learned my lesson. This was how Anna Masters had lost her life. Experience had taught me this standoff shit never ends well.

Perez relieved me of the machine pistol as Apostles turned and took the Sig from my hand. “I liked you, you know that? We could have done some good business, you and me. Pity.”

Plan A was busted. My mind raced through plans B, C, D, all the way to Z, and came up empty. I couldn’t see a way out. Apostles had my pistol, Perez was behind me with a pistol and Lina had an iron bolt that could kill out to three hundred yards aimed point blank at Juliana’s back. Tears of frustration ran down Juliana’s face.

Apostles checked that there was indeed a round in the Sig’s chamber. Satisfied, he cocked the weapon, brought it up and pushed the muzzle against my forehead.

“Move,” Apostles suggested to Perez, who was in his line of fire if my brains didn’t stop the bullet.

I taunted him. “What’s the matter, afraid you’ll miss?”

Apostles smiled a pleasant smile, pushed the weapon hard into my forehead. And then he pulled the trigger.

Click!

The hammer hit home but nothing happened. Apostles looked at Perez and took the gun away from my head, confused for an instant. An instant was all I needed. I reached out, snatched Apostles’ hand, jammed it under his chin and pulled his own finger against the trigger. This time, with no backward pressure on the slide, the Sig roared as it coughed up a round. The barrel jerked up and back and Apostles’ skin and blood and gray matter flew in all directions as the soft-nose bullet did its job.

Lina looked on in horror at her lover’s brains hitting the ceiling. Juliana dove for the floor as Lina’s finger tightened automatically on the crossbow’s trigger. The weapon’s string made a sound like a musical note as it discharged. A moment later, from down on the floor, Juliana fired her own pistol up at Lina, the bullet smashing the girl’s hip and spinning her around. Lina screamed and toppled to the floor.

Something was missing: Perez. He’d gone. “Where is he?” I yelled.

“He’s wounded – the crossbow,” Juliana yelled back, the gunfire and Lina’s screams ringing in our ears, and pointed out the door.

I sprinted for the back door and saw him. He was running toward the river with an awkward gait, clutching his bloody side, the kidney area. A long smear of deep crimson on the grass said the wound was bad. I ran and caught up with him trying to drag a heavy wooden canoe off the weeds and into deeper water. I hadn’t seen this boat earlier. I guessed it was the one Juliana had arrived in. Weak from blood loss, not to mention the pain, the task was beyond Perez and he was puffing, exhausted, staggering like a drunk in the shallows.

“What do you want?” he panted in that dry voice of his. “Money, a share of the business?”

“You could take that fancy pistol of yours out of your pants – using your left hand – and throw it into the water,” I told him.

He did as I asked and tossed it into the weeds between us.

“Good. Now your knife.”

He removed it from inside his jacket pocket and it went into the drink, roughly where he’d thrown the pistol.

“Any other weapons?” I asked him, covering his movements with the Sig.

“No,” he said and then coughed. “Tell me, what do you want? I can make anything happen for you.”

That was some claim. It took my mind back through a jumble of nightmarish images. “I want you to pay for the people you killed at Horizon Airport. There was a woman. Her name was Gail Sorwick. You remember her? You killed her husband and children after you forced yourself on her. And then you cut her. Remember?”

Perez stumbled to keep his footing and coughed some more.
“Por favor …”
he pleaded.

“There was a girl by the name of Bambi, and the hundreds of men, women and children you killed or wounded at Laughlin. Can you bring them all back, asshole?”

I placed the Sig’s front sight on Perez and followed him with it as he stumbled around in the weeds, in the grip of a minor coughing fit, hacking up blood. I’d made a promise to Gail and to Bambi. To hell with Chalmers and his guilt trip. That shit had almost gotten me killed anyway. Monsters like Perez should never have been born. I could do this. It would be so easy. It’s what I’d been paid to do. I kneaded the Sig’s handgrip. No witnesses. Just pull the trigger on this piece of shit. Do it.

A sudden depression appeared in the water close to Perez, followed by a bow wave like a submarine surfacing. Shit – a large animal surged out of the water, stopped still in the weeds and waggled a bizarrely cute set of ears on top of its head. It scared the crap outta me. Jesus, a hippo, one of the descendants of Escobar’s zoo. It wasn’t a full-sized one – an adolescent or even a baby. It might even have been the animal I’d seen at Apostles’ ranch on my first visit there. What was its name? Sophie?

If its arrival startled me, it gave Perez the shock of his life. He lost his footing and lurched a few steps toward it, off balance. That’s when a second hippo the size of an M1 main battle tank charged out of the water. If the smaller one was Sophie, then the big one had to be Sophie’s mother, Magdalena. Maggie trotted to Perez with her mouth open wide and snatched him up, impaling him on those huge chisel teeth and shaking him from side to side several times before throwing him up onto the bank, broken and bleeding.

Mother then nuzzled daughter affectionately and herded her back into the water.

I blinked. A wheezing Perez groaned at my feet.

It’s a core belief of mine that you can’t trust advertising. It’s all retouched, right? But then I got a look at Juliana naked and I have to admit that the reality was every bit as desirable as the orange-juice fantasy on the side of the bus. Put it this way – if she were a Big Mac, I’d eat Big Macs.

I gazed down on her tan body, the blue-white sheet twisted into a loose column that lay across a hip, a breast and an arm. She enjoyed the attention and gave me her ‘blue steel’ look, part pout and all seduction. “This would make a great picture for your portfolio. You want me to get a camera?” I asked her.

“No.” She shook her head and smiled that knowing, over-sexed smile I was becoming familiar with. I took her lead, leaned over the exposed breast and traced the edges of her aureole with the tip of my tongue, which hardened pretty much instantly into ridges of coffee-colored pleasure crowned with a chocolate nipple. And then the playtime turned into something else as she grabbed me, rolled her tan leg to one side and, keeping her eyes on mine, guided me inside her.

I wasn’t going to fight it.

Sometime later, when the sun was well and truly overhead and we needed to come up for air and sustenance, we hit the pool, slipped into the warm water and waded up to the bar overlooking Montego Bay.

I gave the barman a nod, a young black guy by the name of Innocent with dreads and a silver skull hanging from his earlobe, and made the multi-lingual gesture for two drinks. Already regulars‚ a vodka, lime and soda and a Maker’s Mark materialized on coasters in front of us.

“What shall we toast?” Juliana asked me.

“Indecision,” I suggested.

“Still haven’t made up your mind?”

I gave her an ambiguous smile and took a long sip.

My phone started ringing, one of those waterproof models. I took it out of my back pocket. It displayed a photo of Arlen and Marnie, Anna’s sister, on the screen. Marnie’s arm was casually draped across Arlen’s shoulder.

“Hey,” I said to my boss and pal.

“Hey yourself,” Arlen replied.

“So you got it?”

“Just hit my desk.”

“How’s Gomez?” I asked.

“Fine. No long-term damage. He told me to tell you that next time you need a partner … ask someone else.”

“What about Perez?”

“I heard he’s gonna pull through well enough so that we can kill him all nice and legal with a lethal injection.”

“Where they holding him?” “They” being the feds.

“It’s a secret. There’s been a move to reinstate public hangings. People want to throw garbage at him while he swings.”

The depth of feeling was understandable. Perez was the very worst example of the human species. Apostles wasn’t much better, but he was entertaining worms and beyond reach.

“What about Daniela and Lina?” I asked.

“They won’t come out of it much better than Perez.”

They didn’t deserve to.

“You still with Apostles’ daughter?” Arlen wanted to know.

I turned to look at Juliana. She was chatting to a slim Asian woman who’d swum up to the bar. My keen powers of observation noted that the newcomer’s bikini was as brief as Juliana’s, though not as full in the cup area. “Yeah.”

“I’m sure you know what you’re doing,” he said.

“That’s a first.”

“You know how the media would react to it if they ever found out you were sleeping with the enemy’s daughter?”

“Why would they care? I’m no one.”

“I care.”

“You haven’t met her. Don’t judge.”

A black woman swam onto the seat beside me, her hair piled up on top of her head and held in place by her sunglasses. She ordered a mojito. A small diamond stud twinkled in her nose. She caught my extended glance summing up her figure – tall, lean and dangerous. “Hi,” I said to be neighborly.

“Bonjour,”
she replied, all smiles.

“What?” said Arlen.

“Nothing – just doing my bit for international relations here.”

“Getting back to this letter … You seriously want to resign your commission?”

“That’s what it says.”

“We haven’t talked about this. It’s out of the blue. I’m going to do you a favor and sit on it a while. You take your time. Think about it. I’ll clear things here. And when you’re ready to come back, you let me know.”

“Don’t hold your breath.”

“I know you, Vin. You’ll get bored and restless.”

“I doubt it,” I said as another Maker’s Mark materialized on the bar in front of me.

“From the lady,” said Innocent, nodding at the Asian woman who was looking at me, giggling about something with Juliana. I gave her a nod.

“So what are you gonna do?” asked Arlen.

I leaned back in the seat with drink in hand and enjoyed the view to my left and right. The black woman caught me feasting on her a second time. Busted. I shrugged her an apology. She reacted with a smile, shrugged right back, sipped her drink through a straw and I felt her leg brush against mine under the water.

“Arlen, I think I’ll just live the dream for a while, you know? Live the dream.”