Royal Flush

18

It was not over for Carl Lyons. The shooting of the Shillelagh woman had disturbed his whole being.

Asleep at the U.S. Embassy four hours after the hit, he thrashed about wildly on the bed. Suddenly he awoke in a sweat. The action on foreign soil — maybe killing the woman — had set it off again.

He was scared. And he knew damn well what caused him such fear. A recurring nightmare haunted his sleep since his woman — hiswoman — had met her death. The dreams filled him with horror, especially since the nightmare was different each time. Each hideous experience was a variation on the death of Flor Trujillo…

This time he knew the gunman would follow Flor to the airport, that there would be yet another death. In the dream, he leaned against a row of lockers and scanned the crowd.

He saw Flor as she approached the metal detector at the entrance to the waiting area. She was beautiful. Not sick, not crazy, not violent. Just a totally beautiful woman. She joined the group of travelers already in the line. She was last. Lyons watched. From time to time she craned her neck to look through a huge plate-glass window at the planes on the tarmac.

Lyons could see the runway area through the window. The brightly painted Ecuatoriana Airlines jet looked like a Chinese paper bird in his dream. He saw the fuel attendant remove the nozzle of the hose from the plane's fueling port.

Then it was Flor's turn to go through the detector. Once Flor left the departure area, she would be safe.

The gunshot thundered in the confines of the glassed-in corridor. The slug lifted Flor onto her toes.

Even in death she was spectacular. Her exquisitely sculpted calves stood out fiercely as she rose on tiptoe. Thigh muscles strained against white cotton walking shorts. Well-shaped buttocks clenched.

Lyons watched her back arch slightly, her arms upraised as purse, passport, documents flew out of her hands.

Then she crumpled to the floor. He rushed from cover, panning his revolver across the hallway.

Nothing moved. People lay flat the entire length of the corridor. Slowly he let his arm fall as he stepped backward to where Flor lay.

She was lying on her side on the grooved rubber mat of the departure-lounge entrance.

Lyons knelt beside the inert form. He turned the body onto its back. He looked at her fine Hispanic features. He saw her full lips, cherry red with blood, touched with a hint of a smile.

Something slammed into his gut so hard that Lyons thought he was hit. Then he recognized the pain for what it was.

Lyons, awake now, moaned to think of Flor. The woman was the only person with whom he had shared his soul. Lyons hurt inside for his mother also, dead for ten years. She had known nothing of the good life, nor had she expected it. Lyons cried inside for his drunken father who achieved with his loins what he had failed to achieve in a wayward and vagrant life, and thus presented Carl to the world.

Finally, Lyons wept for himself, the lonely adolescent, the sad teenager who closely guarded his every step upward, afraid it would be taken away from him. He did everything right, followed all the rules. That was why he had become a policeman.

Lyons remembered target practice at the LAPD training academy, the first day in the shooting booth when he thought he'd blown his chance to become a cop and make something of himself.

As the dummy popped up before him, he started shooting at the head. For a fleeting instant he saw his father's face on the cardboard cutout. Lyons kept squeezing the trigger until there were no bullets left in the pistol. He continued to squeeze the trigger, again and again, until the weapons instructor tapped him on the shoulder and told him to quit it.

From that day, he understood the degree to which he must contain the rage within him.

As a member of Able Team he had demonstrated on occasion a volcanic nature that made his two colleagues shake their heads. Now he struggled to relax and empty his mind in a land far from home where once again he had acted like a raging storm.

One battle was over. But the battle within him would never be done.