War Lord

Twenty-eight

‘Easy, tiger,’ I said. ‘Not a good place for that.’ Ken took my advice and left his weapon where it was. It wouldn’t have been smart to engage these men in a firefight in the middle of this crowded square — too much potential collateral damage wandering around. And unless Ken had a bazooka nestled back there between his butt cheeks, we were seriously outgunned by these guys, as well as being outnumbered.

‘You were right from the beginning,’ I said in an aside to Petinski.

‘Right about what?’

‘It’s von Weiss. And what’s going on now only reconfirms it.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘Von Weiss managed to get his hands on the W80 and he’s about to use it, just like Randy said in his note…’ I looked at the timer on my watch, ‘… within the next seventy-two hours. The one star and the colonel — the FBI’s prime suspects? They were decoys. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had nothing to do with this mess at all. But now it’s time for von Weiss to clean house. He’s whacking everyone connected to the scheme and now, obviously, it’s Morrow’s and Dyson’s turn. I don’t like LeDuc’s or the White brothers’ chances of making it to sunrise.’ And in regards to those guys, if I was right, I was genuinely disappointed that it wasn’t going to be me pulling the trigger on them. But then a hard reality suddenly dawned on me: we were going to have to try to keep them alive. ‘Shit,’ I muttered.

‘Eh?’ Petinski was only half listening, watching the last of the attackers peel himself up off the road. He was nursing a badly broken forearm as he lurched toward the Toyota.

‘We’re gonna have to protect LeDuc, Charles and Falco White. If we don’t manage to keep someone connected to von Weiss breathing, he could walk away clean.’

‘He’s not the one, Cooper. Langley knows what it’s doing.’

‘Since when?’

The stolen Toyota van started to roll, the driver keeping his hand on the horn to clear a path. A police siren was still a long ways off, the world moving in slow motion. As the van crawled along, its rightful owner approached the driver’s window, his hands out in a beseeching gesture. The carjacker responded with his rifle, poking its muzzle in the guy’s face till he backed away.

‘I’m not getting into this fantasy with you now, Cooper.’

‘Listen — Emma Shilling told me von Weiss is hot for revenge against America.’

‘Why?’

‘For bitch-slapping the Nazis in the war, and for driving his old man, Mengele, into exile. And now, with Ali-Bakr al Mohammed and Gamal Abdul-Jabbar, he’s found people to help him do the deed.’

‘Cooper—’

‘This is von Weiss’s moment, Petinski. It’s the one he’s been working toward for a long time.’

‘Where is this going?’

‘I think our W80 is sitting on a ship out there in the harbor. Von Weiss has given the bomb to those two pirates to use against us.’

Petinski gave me her weary look. ‘And how’re they going to do that, exactly?’

‘Do I have to do all the work here, Petinski?’

‘Hello…’ Ken said impatiently breaking us apart. ‘We need to get back to our rental before it’s stolen.’ He turned to me. ‘You coming?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Then what are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘But that’s never stopped him before,’ said Petinski, sporting a look of triumph. ‘Right, Cooper?’ She turned and followed Ken back to the rental.

That shitty fudged ESTJ manner of hers aside, I knew I’d put some doubt in Petinski’s mind about the situation confronting us — just as her refusal to accept my theory put some doubt in mine that I was completely right. Nevertheless, I was struggling to find another that fit the facts — or the facts as I knew them, anyway.

I watched as the Toyota van carrying the gunmen slipped through a hole in the traffic, the van’s owner shouting and shaking his fists at its receding taillights as the dust and the night slowly engulfed them. It was a gutsy performance. I felt sorry for the guy. Maybe the car was all he had in the world.

An antique Nissan Pathfinder 4x4 pulled up beside me, the driver leaning across and winding down the window. ‘Hey, you want taxi?’

‘Sure,’ I said.

He’d read my mind, only unfortunately for him he hadn’t also peeked inside my wallet along the way because maybe then he’d have kept driving. The door was rusted on its hinges but I managed to open it and then pull it almost all the way closed. The driver reached across, grabbed a piece of thin cable dangling from the door, yanked it shut with practiced technique and hooked the cable around a bolt welded to the remains of the dashboard. ‘Where you want to go?’

I pointed down the road the gunmen had taken. ‘I have to catch up with my friends. They’re driving a Toyota van.’

‘Fifty US dollar, okay?’

‘Ten,’ I said, just to generate a little respect.

‘Okay, twenty-five is good price. No problem. We will catch your friend,’ he said, laying into the horn to clear the way as the Nissan shuddered into movement.

I wondered how we’d managed to settle on twenty-five dollars but went with it.

‘Where are they going?’ the driver asked.

‘I don’t know. Just driving, having a look around.’

‘Can you see this van ahead?’ he asked, peering forward, leaning against the steering wheel. ‘Toyota van is popular.’

I caught a glimpse of one several cars ahead caught in the headlights of the vehicles stopped at an intersection. Maybe that was it. But then, down a side street, I saw taillights of another van that could have been the gunmen’s. Passing us on the other side of the road, heading back the way we’d just come, was yet one more Toyota van. Hmm, yeah — popular. ‘Just keep going straight ahead,’ I told the driver.

I counted four more Toyota vans within the next ten seconds.

‘Where’s Wally?’ I said.

‘What?’ the driver asked.

‘Forget it.’ Maybe this was a lost cause. I considered another plan. ‘The port. Where is it from here?’

‘We are going the wrong way. It is in the other direction.’

That came as a surprise. I believed the gunmen to be pirates, so naturally I’d assumed they’d head straight for the docks where they’d take a boat out to the African Spirit. Perhaps the van had pulled a one-eighty. This was looking hopeless, but I decided to give it another couple of minutes.

‘Please to put window up, sir,’ the driver said.

I wasn’t keen to, the temperature being somewhere in the low nineties, the humidity nudging a hundred percent. The .38 had gummed itself to my ankle and a free-flowing river of sweat had formed between my shirt and the seat back. But then I took a look at what we were driving through and saw why he wanted it closed. The homes hereabouts were shanties. Listless, glassy-eyed young males hung around smoking pot or openly dealing drugs while slack-jawed, barely clothed women sat on the earth with crying babies, which they ignored completely. Kids barely able to walk just stood like they didn’t know what to do or where to go. This was truly the end of the road. I glanced down a side street leading into the heart of the damned and saw the van crawling along.

‘There,’ I said, pointing it out.

‘No, not going down there. Your friends are lost, gonna be in a lot of trouble.’

‘I’ll pay you another ten dollars on top of your fee. I can’t just leave ’em here.’

‘Okay,’ he said reassessing the dangers.

Obviously, ten bucks was worth more than ten bucks in this part of the world.

‘We are near Uwanja wa Fisi,’ the driver said.

That sounded familiar. ‘Hyena Square?’

‘Yes. Everyone knows Hyena Square. Your friends have come for women.’

‘Maybe,’ I said as he turned into the muddy lane. As long as the guy kept on the tail, he could believe what he liked. Meanwhile, the van didn’t come to a stop but kept inching along seventy yards ahead.

‘Don’t get too close,’ I told the driver, not thinking.

‘You do not want to join them?’ he said, eyes darting to me, uncertain.

‘Actually, no. I’ve decided to surprise them. Let’s just see where they go.’

The streets became gradually wider, the mud and the ruts deeper, the smell of human excrement more powerful. We entered a square where the buildings were a little less temporary. The van pulled up outside a windowless cinderblock bunker that could have been a toilet facility, only they didn’t have those in Dar, at least not where you could crap right on the street. Two men loitered outside the bunker, smoking, and the smell of pot and shit hung heavily in the night air. Six men got slowly out of the van, carrying rifles. The guy with the broken forearm held it to his chest.

Two men appeared from nowhere. They ran past the Nissan drunkenly, weaving about, one chasing the other with a broken bottle. The one giving chase got close and threw it, but then lost his balance, fell and did a faceplant into an open sewer.

I glanced at the cab driver. He was nervous as hell, head swinging around, scoping out the scenery. ‘What we doing here, sir?’

‘I’ll give you another fifty dollars to relax,’ I said.

The look I got told me he was finally realizing that my story about catching up with friends stank as bad as the general area. I pulled the .38 out of my sock, the tacky handle giving my ankle a light wax job, and put it in my lap. Next I removed the Desert Eagle, confirmed that a round was chambered and that it was on safety before tucking it behind the belt in the front of my pants. It might only have three rounds in the bank, but iron like that made the right kind of statement. I checked over the .38, was reassured by those dum-dums and gave the cylinder a spin. The driver’s eyes were wide, staring at the ugly little killing machine in my hand.

‘Take a deep breath,’ I told him.

‘What are you going to do?’

‘Nothing for the moment. Just gonna wait and see what develops.’ I said that to reassure myself as much as him, because now I was even more outgunned and outnumbered than I’d been with Ken and Barbie back at the bullet-riddled Holiday Inn minibus.

Fifteen minutes later the cab driver and I were still sitting in his Pathfinder, nothing going on at the bunker down the road. It was just past four a.m. I felt like I’d been up for forty-eight hours. Something that sounded like it wanted to be set free growled in my stomach and lack of sleep was making my eyeballs feel as dry as glass marbles rolled in sand. If not for those little adrenal glands pumping away deep inside, I’d be trying to dream something pleasant, like Petinski feeling frisky in an Olympics leotard.

A door suddenly burst open. Men surged out of the toilet block — I counted twenty. Some of them had faces that were pale in the darkness, which meant they weren’t African. Interesting. From this distance and in this light, making a call on their nationality wasn’t possible. They dispersed and piled into the carjacked van and three other vehicles. Pretty much everyone seemed to be carrying an assault rifle and a bag of some description. The convoy moved off quickly, the vehicles low on their springs, tires churning through mud and shit.

I unhooked the door and kicked it open before I realized what I was doing. Apparently I was going to check out that bunker whether I wanted to or not. To the driver, I said, ‘How much do I owe you?’

‘Eighty-five dollar.’ The concern on his face told me he was not confident about collecting.

‘I’ll make it an even hundred.’ I made the offer to counter his desire to split as soon as he hooked the door shut. ‘Just don’t leave this spot.’

‘One hundred twenty-five,’ he said.

‘One hundred ten.’ That just came out.

‘Okay, but we must go soon. This is very bad place.’

That last observation was like saying water is wet because, aside from the gunmen and the glass-wielding sewer divers, I’d stepped calf deep into the foulest smelling mud in the history of foul-smelling mud. As I lifted my feet it sucked, clawed and gurgled at my boots like it was trying to dissolve them. I picked my way across the roadway to the side shared with the toilet bunker and moved toward it slow and stealthy. Before I got there I could see that the armed guards that had been seated out front earlier were gone. The place looked and felt deserted. Both sides of the block supported mean little shanties built from stuff most folks threw out. If at all possible, I didn’t want to disturb the people who lived in them, or damage these homes in any way.

My sweating palm kneaded the .38 gummy bear. The door was clearly a wafer-thin sheet of veneer, and gaps all round leaked a yellow glow from within. I could also hear the local R&B playing somewhere inside. Pressing my ear against the door, I heard the music a little louder and clearer, but no other sound that suggested habitation. Twenty guys with bags and guns had piled out; I hoped that was everyone. My heart rate was up. There was only one way in. I thumbed back the .38’s hammer, pulled out the Desert Eagle, cocked it and thumbed off the safety.

I put my bodyweight behind a front kick that blasted the door clean off its hinges, and moved in quickly, stepping over it. The hall was low and narrow and stank like the place had been washed down with urine, bong water and charcoal. A room off to the right. No door. A dark rectangle. I went in, staying low. Empty. Rubbish littered the floor — food packaging, plastic bottles. Kicking the trash aside I found two bottles of water, unopened, seals still intact, but nothing else of note. From the smell and the state of the blackened floors, cooking fires had been lit in this room. No windows, or other doors, though there was plenty of ventilation with the roof raised several inches above the walls. No people, either — clear. I turned and went out, keeping low. Another room like the last was off to the right of the passageway. Nothing but trash and old bedding in there also. I backed out. Not much hallway left, a heavily padlocked door sealing the end. One last doorway remained; dim light came from within. That’s where the music was coming from. A flash bang would’ve been a handy thing to throw in there before my body filled the doorway.

I counted to three, moved to the other side of the opening, stopped. No reaction from within. I put the .38 around the corner, followed by my head, briefly. In, out. A table, an automobile battery on it, wires leading to a car headlight bulb burning dully. Nothing had moved. I put my head around a second time, saw the battery on the table again. A tub was bolted to the wall along with a workbench. Two mattresses were on the floor. A man lay on one of them, overnight bag on the floor beside him. I went in. He was plainly dead, staring open-eyed at nothing on the soot-stained ceiling. A neat bullet wound like a squashed raspberry colored the center of his forehead. His forearm was broken, a red and white bone end breaking the skin like the bow of a sinking ship. I was pretty sure he was the man injured in the car crash. I figured his buddies had fixed it so that it wouldn’t bother him anymore, or slow them down. Not much of a healthcare plan.

I checked his pockets and found a few US dollars and two Somali thousand-shilling notes in the bottom of a thigh pocket, which was probably as much in the way of identification as I could hope for. Next I opened the bag. It stank of sweat, tobacco, grass and something my nose couldn’t identify. I dug around. Two empty AK-47 mags; standard terrorist ski mask, black; a cheap plastic spray or rain jacket with hood; a pair of pants, dirty; a ratty blue t-shirt with holes; a red scarf. The source of the unusual smell lay in the bottom, a bundle of damp leaves bound tightly together inside a banana leaf. I pulled out the bundle and took a sniff. Christ, this smelled foul, like old meat soused in vinegar. I’d seen pictures of the stuff before in DEA handouts, but never come across it. Khat, drug of choice in Somalia, Yemen and Kenya. From what I remembered reading, the stuff produced an effect similar to speed when chewed or brewed up like tea. I threw it back in the bag and pulled the zip shut. The spray jacket told me the dead guy spent time at sea, the ski mask and AK mags said bandit, the Somali shillings and the khat suggested his nationality. In short: Somali pirate. His vessel had to be the African Spirit. Maybe the NVG-wearing bandits I’d seen aboard had captured it along with the men bivouacking in the bunker. I wondered why the port authorities hadn’t challenged the vessel. Maybe they’d just been bribed to look the other way.

Moving on, the music I’d heard had come from an antiquated cassette/compact disc/radio player. It was on the floor, covered in trash. The battery levels on the player’s face hovered in the red. The floors in the other rooms were thin concrete slabs but here the floor was wood. I noticed an empty foil fruit-juice container sticking up between the boards and brushed it aside with my foot but it refused to budge. It appeared to be jammed in the seat of a trapdoor. Further investigation revealed a knot in a rope recessed into one of the boards and a hole in the floor beside the trapdoor. I pulled on the rope and a section of floor came with it. I lifted it completely out, revealing a dark square of nothingness beneath. The rungs of a ladder disappeared into the jet-black void.

I holstered the Desert Eagle in the small of my back, and shifted the .38 to my left hand. A hand free, I carried the battery to the hole in the floor, set it down and dangled the globe into the basement. The bulb flickered off and on several times until it stopped swinging, the connections dodgy.

Lowering my head into the hole, I saw… Jesus Christ, it was a man hanging by his wrists from a chain bolted to the ceiling. I gagged. The air smelled putrid in there — of blood, shit and death. I had no choice but to climb down into that stinking hellhole to get a better look. The man, a white man, was stripped to his undershorts and covered in dirt and human feces, festering machete cuts, burns, bruises and welts. The animals had been shitting on this guy through the hole in the floor above. He had to be dead, but then I saw a bubble of mucus grow out of his nostril and pop. The guy was alive. I checked the chains to see if I could get him down quick. They were covered in thickly clotted blood. And then I saw why. The manacles attached to those chains were secured with bolts that went clean through the poor bastard’s wrists.

‘Can you hear me?’ I said. ‘I’m gonna get you down.’

I spun around, looking for something that might help get the job done. There were more auto batteries here — three of them wired together. Other wires were attached to the terminals with alligator clips. The ends were wrapped in sponges, one of which dangled over a bucket of filthy black water.

The man hanging by his wrists started to whisper, a dry exhausted rasp. His lips and tongue were cracked and I couldn’t make out exactly what he was saying. This guy needed water bad. I climbed back up the ladder to get the two full bottles I’d noticed upstairs, returned and poured some water into his mouth. Most of it he coughed straight back up. His lips were moving. He was saying something. I went up close.

‘I toe there noth…’ he whispered.

‘You told them nothing?’ I said, taking a guess.

He nodded.

‘Attaboy,’ I said, wondering what information the guy had that the fucks holding him wanted.

‘I toe there nothi, nothi…’

‘What’s your name?’ I asked him. I kicked a pile of trash to one side and saw a hammer and an old wrench, probably what had been used to bolt the guy in.

‘I toe there noth…’

‘Who are you? What’s your name?’

He swallowed, coughed up a blood clot that ran down his chin and made his Adam’s apple jerk up and down. ‘Weewarah. Ran Weewarah. Ran Weewarah…’

Randy Sweetwater. My heart backfired. ‘Fuck! Randy! That’s you?’

Tears streamed from his eyes. ‘Waity, waity, waity?’

‘Waity?’ I asked him.

‘Waity,’ he said, over and over.

Waity? And then it hit me. ‘You mean W80? The nuke?’

Apparently it did because with the burden of this knowledge passed along, Randy slumped to his knees, unconscious, pulling the chains taut and jerking his arms violently in their sockets.

Being out cold did Randy a favor. It wasn’t easy getting the manacles off those bolts with a slippery, rusty wrench. It wasn’t easy getting him up through the hole in the floor. And it wasn’t easy carrying him to the waiting cab across the river of mud and shit. Most difficult of all was convincing the cab driver to let me put the bleeding feces-covered agent on his rear seat.

The promise of another ten bucks overcame the problem. But where to take him? There was a hospital up the road from the Southern Sun offering a nice view over the water. But Sweetwater was in a bad way and a nice view wasn’t going to be enough. Some of the deep machete cuts on his legs and back had gone septic. He was also badly dehydrated and who knew what the fuck else. I’d given him more sips of water from those scavenged bottles, but he hadn’t been able to keep much of it down. His captors believed he was as good as dead, which was probably why they’d left him breathing. Maybe they just wanted to make his death as ugly as possible — torture the guy a few hours more before he died alone, from blood loss and septicemia.

‘We take him to hospital?’ the driver wanted to know.

‘How far is the US Embassy from here?’

‘Twenty minute.’

‘Go there. Hurry.’

The driver stepped on it while I sat in the back with Randy to stop him sliding onto the floor. I wanted to ask him where that nuke was, who had it, what they intended to use it for, and when they intended to use it. None of which was possible, the guy being unconscious. So instead I kept brushing the persistent flies off him and counted the machete strikes on his legs and back. I counted more than a hundred before giving up. Some of the cuts were over a quarter of an inch deep. His wrists were a mess. I’d chosen to leave the bolts where they were in case I severed vital blood vessels pulling them out. God knows how the arteries hadn’t been destroyed when they were hammered through.

‘How much farther?’ I shouted forward.

‘Ten minute, a little more perhaps.’

Randy stirred briefly, distracting me, then returned to his previous limp state. Alabama had been right about him being alive, and with odds I believed were overwhelmingly against it. I wanted the opportunity to ring her to give her the news, but someone from the embassy would eventually have the pleasure of doing that, though maybe they shouldn’t be too hasty about placing the call. I’d seen enough battleground casualties to know that while some people recovered from devastating wounds, others died from injuries that seemed little more than a scratch. Just because Randy had made it this far didn’t mean his prospects were good. As far as I could tell he had no broken bones or major punctures in his chest cavity or back, which was reassuring, but he’d lost a lot of blood from those cuts and some of them wept yellow and green pus. I took his pulse. His heart rate was completely off the scale, windmilling like a fan in a storm. The guy could blow a gasket any moment.

‘How long now?’ I shouted.

‘Ten minute! Ten minute!’

You said that last time, pal. A pre-dawn tropical downpour was now drenching the scenery out the window. We were well out of the bad end of town, this area resembling the one around my hotel, with plenty of gardens and so forth, though nothing appeared particularly familiar in the darkness.

The cab ride was giving me time to consider whether taking Randy to the embassy was such a smart move, given what Petinski said about the situation there with the station chief taking bribes. I had no idea who he’d been taking bribes from, or if the bribery related to this case. For all I knew it was von Weiss or one of the White brothers doing the paying off. And were there others besides the chief still dug in at the embassy, selling their country out the back door? Or was the cancer entirely cut out with his removal? Too many questions with no answers. All I knew was that the medical aid at the embassy would be first world.

Besides, indecision was a luxury I couldn’t afford. I had to get back to Petinski and Ken, convince them to drop their stakeout and form a boarding party. And, of course, I could give Petinski the news about her former partner. Speak of the devil, he groaned.

I leaned in close. ‘Randy? Randy…’

‘Eye dee,’ he whispered. ‘Eye dee.’

‘What? Eye what? Idea?’ I asked him. He was drifting in and out.

‘Eyee dee, eyee dee,’ he repeated before his mouth went slack and he slipped back into unconsciousness.

‘Sir, we are here!’ the driver said. ‘US Embassy.’

There was now a wall beside the road. I couldn’t see the end of it. It was high, too, and blast resistant, featuring anti-truck bollards disguised as potted trees placed at regular intervals a distance out from the base. With a wall this long, the compound behind it had to be massive. That massiveness felt reassuring. And so was the sight of the Stars and Stripes hanging from a towering flagpole behind the wall, transfixed in the crossfire of floodlight beams.

A roadway opened up on our right, leading to a parking lot. The driver turned into it. A gatehouse lay ahead. The lights were out. Heavy steel anti-collision gates prevented access to the compound beyond.

‘Wait here,’ I told the driver as I got out and ran to the gate. Shit, no buzzer to press, but there’d be cameras on this entrance and, in this part of the world, someone somewhere would be watching monitors. I ran back to the cab.

‘You got a pen or pencil?’

He shook his head. ‘No, sir.’

‘A cell phone? Let me make a call? You can add it to the bill.’

He handed it over reluctantly, an ancient Nokia with a cracked screen and the battery held in place with a bit of old electrical tape. There was a notice on the wall with an emergency number to call. I dialed the number. Nothing. I examined the phone’s screen. Signal strength one bar out of five. I tried it again with the same result.

‘Sometime it work. Sometime not.’ The driver shrugged.

Shit. I gave him back his phone, went to the gutter, found a piece of rock and used it to scrawl on the asphalt. The rain instantly washed it away. Double shit. Four twenty-five a.m.: time was getting away from me. I went back to the cab and opened the rear door wide.

‘Sorry, buddy,’ I said as I put my arms under Randy and lifted him out. Last time I saw him he was maybe a hundred and ninety pounds, but not anymore. On top of everything else, his captors had starved the poor bastard. The good news was that he was easy to carry when the ground underfoot wasn’t a river of poo. Taking extra care of his wrists, I set him down on the asphalt in a puddle of light in front of a surveillance camera, then ran back to the cab, grabbed the dead Somali’s overnight bag and stripped the cover off the back seat.

‘Hey!’ the driver snapped.

He didn’t know what to say when I pulled the headrest out of the front seat. ‘The bill — add another twenty,’ I told him and rushed back to Randy. The rain was still coming down hard. The guy wasn’t moving, but he was breathing. I repositioned him on his side, put the headrest under his ear and spread the seat cover over him. I took the clothes from the bag, laid them on the cover and then put the rain jacket over the top. That’d have to do. Randy wouldn’t be lying there long. But to make sure of that, I took the .38 from my sock and fired it into the air once, twice, sharp cracks ringing around the wall and bouncing off the gatehouse.

‘What are you doing? You will make them angry!’ the driver wailed as I jumped in the back seat. He wrenched the wheel to one side and stood on the gas pedal.

‘I couldn’t find the doorbell,’ I said, as we snaked out of the lot. Whoever was watching those security screens would see a body placed outside the gate by a guy firing a gun. An alarm would be raised and folks would rush out to see if the body was alive or dead. That was my plan, at any rate. I just had to hope that Randy would regain consciousness long enough to tell someone who he was and what was going down, because I’d run out of options for the moment on that score. ‘Okay. You know the Holiday Inn? That’s where we’re going.’

‘No! I want money! You pay now!’

I was tempted to remind him that I was the only one in the car with a gun, but chose the next best option and lied in the most soothing voice I could muster. ‘The Holiday Inn is where all my cash is. I’ve got nothing on me.’

‘What?!’ he squealed like someone was squeezing his nuts. ‘Two hundred dollar you owe me!’

Did I? I’d lost count. That seemed a lot.

‘You have no money?’

‘Yeah, I’ve got money, but like I said, it’s at the Inn. And if you don’t get me there pronto, I’ll take ten off.’

The driver swore at me in Swahili, downshifted and hauled ass.

‘How long till we get there?’ I asked. ‘Lemme guess, ten minutes?’

‘Yes, ten minute,’ the driver snapped, giving me the evil eye in his rear-view mirror.

In fact it was eight.

Up ahead on the left, just before the hotel, was a vehicle with its hazard lights flashing and its alarm honking. Parked in front of it was Ken’s light-green Ford. On the other side of the street was a prefab concrete block of around ten stories lit up like a bad party in a variety of colors the hotel probably described as ‘fun’. The Holiday Inn ‘H’ was displayed in a concrete frame just off the sidewalk and the forecourt was clearly visible. Petinski and Ken had chosen a good vantage point from which to keep the place under surveillance.

‘Here is good,’ I told the driver, leaning forward and pointing past him at the space behind the Honda Acura with its lights flashing. He pulled over. ‘I’ll be right back.’ He gave me a look like he expected me to run.

I strolled past the Honda with its taillights flaring orange in time with its horn. No one was paying any attention to it — just another car alarm set off by a passing truck or something. I looked ahead to the Ford and worked on something irritatingly clever to say to Petinski and Ken. It was then that I saw small glass crystals scattered on the roadway beneath the driver’s door. On the asphalt beside the Ford were the black skid marks of a vehicle that had come to a panic stop. Through the Ford’s rear window, I could see Ken slumped sideways toward the passenger seat.

Adrenalin glands over my heart mainlined a bucket of juice into my left ventricle. I covered the remaining distance in a jump. There was blood on the passenger-side window as well as the windshield. I reached in, checked Ken for a pulse but couldn’t find one. The attack must have only just happened, though: even the sweat on his forehead was still warm. So where was Petinski? The passenger door was slightly ajar. I checked the rear seat and saw a canvas bag — hers. Was this a random attack, or was it planned? I knew what my gut told me, but I had to be sure. I opened the bag. A separate zip-up Chanel makeup bag, deodorant, a change of underwear, a t-shirt, a Lakers ball cap, a small packet of mixed berry juice with a straw attached, and two Weight Watchers energy bars. I took the food and drink, shoved it in my pockets and put the bag back on the seat. Patting Ken down, I found his BlackBerry. His 9mm Glock was in its holster, wallet in his rear right-hand pants pocket. Opening the wallet revealed a thick wedge of US dollars and receipts. The fact that he still had a wallet with money in it, as well as his weapon and phone, said that this was no opportunistic smash and grab. Petinski’s open door and her bag still on the rear seat indicated abduction. But who’d done the snatch? Petinski and Ken had been staking out the White brothers. Had Falco and Charles shown up? Or was it the Somali pirates from the bunker? I took most of the cash, leaving some in the wallet before replacing it in Ken’s pocket. I also left the Glock where I found it. Petinski’s most recent partner had been whacked. I didn’t want the local cops drawing an easier conclusion — like theft — from the crime scene. I punched a few buttons on his BlackBerry. The screen asked for a password. I punched in four zeros on the off-chance — no joy. Fuck. The thing was useless to me.

A couple of guys from the hotel had walked down the driveway and were looking across the road toward the car with the sounding horn still going bananas.

‘Hey, you!’ one of them called out to me — a Brit, from the accent. ‘What are you doing?’

I dropped the BlackBerry onto the floor and walked back to the cab, keeping a nice easy smile on my face.

‘Two hundred dollars, right?’ I asked the driver, taking the front passenger seat.

‘Yes, two hundred.’

He was unaware of what had happened in the green Ford, and that suited me fine — the guy was spooked enough already. I counted out two hundred and twenty from the wad and handed it to him. ‘You know Magogoni Street?’

‘Yes, I know this,’ he said, now beaming.

‘That’s where I’m going. Hurry.’

The two guys from the hotel were getting gamer, about to cross the road.

‘It is near, only five minute,’ he said, still grinning, counting the money and noting the tip.

Five minutes, now. Amazing what a few bucks will do.