Fear No Evil

Chapter 97

We had seen Emmanuella Alejandro’s half brother the day before at a distance. But now, up close, I could see that Durango was a far different man than the one who’d appeared on a bench next to me in Mexico City a few weeks ago.

Back then, his lively eyes had roamed all over me, his expression a study in confidence and mild amusement. Now, Durango’s eyes had gone dark and flat, the telltale sign of a man who’s flipped the off switch to his humanity and gone asocial.

Going asocial is what stone-cold killers do before they strike. They lose compassion, dehumanize themselves and their prey. There’s little reasoning with them once it happens.

I set down the shotgun. He came to the edge of the trees, not ten feet from me, one eye behind the rifle scope, the other wide open and blank.

“Back up,” he said. “Let’s see if Emmanuella is right about you.”

I looked at him, puzzled. “Right about what?”

“She thinks you’re allied with Maestro.”

I glanced over my shoulder at the edge of the ledge about fifteen feet behind me. It looked like a long fall beyond it. “What would backing up prove?” I asked.

Durango’s expression never changed. “If M’s sniper knows you, he won’t shoot you when you appear in his sights.”

“You think M is here?”

“I think his men are,” he said in a monotone, taking another step. “Maestro guns below us on the river, you above us on the river, working a squeeze play with your dummies in the raft, getting us to expose ourselves. How many men does M have there?”

“I have no idea who is or is not downriver.”

“Back up, Dr. Cross,” Durango said. “Let’s see.”

“And if the sniper doesn’t shoot me?”

He smiled coldly. “I’ll shoot you myself. It’s what my sister wants. Now, back up.”

I glanced to my right, saw that wall of stone at the far end of the ledge, knew it would cover me only a few more feet. I took one step back, then two.

Durango followed me, staying in point-blank range. His smile disappeared and he went reptilian once more.

“Almost there,” he said. “Two more steps, Dr. Cross, and we’ll know your fate.”

I stared at him, swallowed, and shakily reached my right foot back six inches, sure now that I would be in view of the shooter downriver.

I stepped back again with my left foot and heard a tremendous kaboom! along with the sonic whoosh of the three-hundred-grain Alaskan bullet that ripped past my left ear and smashed into the forehead of the half brother of Emmanuella and Marcus Alejandro.

The top of Durango’s head erupted. Blood spattered with the wind and fell with the rain. He collapsed lifeless on the ledge, a bloody groove dug so deeply into his skull that it looked like the hull of a small canoe had blasted through it.

Shaking head to toe and knowing I was still exposed, a target, I moved fast around him and over his man, who was whimpering at the blood and gore all over him.

Once I knew I was behind that wall of rock and safe from the sniper downstream, I looked back across the river and saw Sampson standing just inside the tree line opposite me with his bear gun thrown overhead in victory.