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Authors: Matt Hilton

Tags: #Fiction, #Thrillers, #General, #Short Stories (Single Author), #Action & Adventure, #Suspense

Red Stripes (3 page)

BOOK: Red Stripes
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My supressed gun made a
clack!

The guard fell, and one of his elbows crashed against the window he’d been looking though. The glass tinkled. I held my breath as I sought fresh targets. The noise was loud within the building, but was only one of many as the hurricane plucked at the roof and walls and threatened to turn it into kindling.

I crept on, my gun up and out and seeking targets.

A flashlight beam moved lazily between the narrow walls of a corridor ahead. I didn’t get a full-on flash of light, which told me the person holding the torch was playing it in and out of side rooms, and not back my way. Then it went dark.

Creeping on I entered the corridor. I stalled at the threshold, listening. The entire building groaned and creaked; rain drummed on the roof. Faint footfalls sounded, but they were far off, in the back right quarter of the building, barely distinguishable from the dripping of water.

I moved for the rooms at the far end.

As I came within ten feet of the closed door, behind which the hostages were held, I heard weeping. It wasn’t the girl, but Stephan Pilarcik.

Wendy was stronger willed and more strident than her boyfriend, but then it wasn’t her whose fingers had been getting chopped off. She hollered angrily at someone, and in response there was the hard slap of flesh on flesh.

“Don’t you be tryin’ dat wit me,” a man snapped.

“You’re an animal!” Wendy screeched in defiance.

“Dis animal is hungry,” the kidnapper replied in thick patois. “Mebbe I have meself some fresh meat, mon?”

“Keep your hands off me!”

The man laughed, and so did his pal. There was a scuffle of feet, something bumping around. Another slap. Then there was more weeping, this time Wendy’s high-pitched bleating joining the chorus. I’d heard enough.

To Rink I said, “I’m going in.”

“With you, brother.”

I kicked open the door, immediately going in, my SIG leveled.

Snapshot!

Stephan Pilarcik huddled in one corner. Terrified. Hand bandaged with a soiled rag. Weak and bewildered. Of no use to himself, let alone his girlfriend.

Wendy Charteris. On her back, feet windmilling between her and the man trying to pull off her denim shorts.

One man standing bent over her. Skinny. Bald. Pockmarks on his glistening face and speckled across his bare shoulders and chest. One hand ripping at Wendy’s clothing, the other wielding a large machete. The blade was pitted and stained.

Second man. Big, with dreadlocks. Vest and baggy combat trousers. Turning my way, mouth open in shock. Gun coming up.

All these details seen and absorbed in as much time as it took to select my first target.

The man with the gun was the most dangerous.

I double-tapped him in the chest.

When you have innocent hostages to consider you don’t want your bullets to pass directly through the bad guy and hit them. You have to use smaller-caliber rounds. The problem with 9 mm rounds is sometimes they don’t have much stopping power. The big guy was fucked up, and would die without medical intervention, but the rounds didn’t put him immediately on his ass. He staggered toward me, mouth writhing in a grimace, tears beading from his eyes, but he continued to bring up his gun. It was a cannon. Magnum rounds. They’d definitely drop me.

Not that I waited around to give him a clear target.

I dodged to the right, grabbing at a rickety old chair and backhanding it toward him, even as his gun thundered and filled the space I’d just deserted with jacketed rounds. I felt the displacement of air as a bullet zipped by an inch from my neck. The stool hit the man’s gun arm, and his next shots went high and wide. It was all I required to brace my footing, adopt a Weaver stance and put a couple more holes in his body. This time he went down hard, his revolver clattering away across the floorboards.

It was only seconds since I entered the room and took note of the people inside, but already the tableau had changed. Stephan had curled up tighter, as frightened of me as he was the other man. Wendy had got her feet under her and had swarmed up, trying to reach her boyfriend, but the final kidnapper had other ideas. Armed with a big knife, he was no threat to me and my gun, so he went for the obvious. He grasped Wendy by her throat, pulled her around and used her as a shield between the two of us.

“Let the girl go.”

“Fuck you, mon, I cut off her head.”

“Do it then,” I said. My face was pinched in fury, my eyes seething. “See where it gets you.”

“You won’t shoot.”

“Try me.”

The kidnapper glanced around seeking a way out. There was a window behind him. Slats covered it. I caught a shiver of movement beyond them. Rink moving in.

“Throw away the knife,” I said. “I’ll let you live.”

“You will shoot me down like a dog,” he said. He was right.

“I’m gonna shoot you if you don’t.”

“Won’ matter if I cut up dis bitch, den!”

He wasn’t making an idle threat. But he was bluffing about cutting Wendy. He hurled her toward me, and for a brief second or two the girl’s body was between the two of us. I half expected him to crash through the window and into Rink’s arms. He didn’t. He came after Wendy, machete raised to chop at my head over her shoulder.

Stephan cried out, thinking his girl was about to be beheaded.

I grabbed Wendy, pulled her away, out of the way of the hacking blade. It whistled toward my skull. With my other hand I brought up my Sig. Not to shoot: there were no guarantees it would be enough to save my skull being cleaved in two. I used the top edge of my gun as a shield to check the blade.

A machete swung downward carries more force than a handgun swung up, and in a shower of sparks my SIG was battered aside. Yet I’d angled the gun so that the blade careened off it at an angle and it missed taking off the side of my skull by inches.

Wendy scrambled to get away on her hands and knees. She was still entangled between our legs as the kidnapper fell up against me, his arm rising for another chop. I clasped his wrist. His left hand went for my gun hand, wrestling for control of the SIG. For such a skinny guy he was strong, but that would have been the adrenaline flooding through him. I twisted the SIG around, fired point-blank at his gut. Fucking thing jammed. But not surprisingly, considering it had just taken the full brunt of the machete blade striking it. I’ve seen guys cut their way through cinder-block walls with those things. The gun an encumbrance now, I dropped it, freeing up both hands.

The man snarled something at me. I’d no idea what, but I felt hot spittle spray my face. We jostled, our fight taking us sideways. We caught up with Wendy.

Tangled in Wendy’s legs, I fell backward. I held on to the kidnapper, and he didn’t relinquish his hold on my wrist. Controlling my fall, I sat sharply and wedged both my heels against his shins, my toes outward, then rolled back. It was a technique I’d learned years before in a jujitsu class, not something you’d see in a competition environment because it would fail against a savvy opponent. But this man wasn’t used to this type of combat and was caught out as I levered up with both feet and spun him in a somersault over my head. Neither did he know the art of breaking a fall. Rather than roll out of it he went flat on his back, the wind knocked from him as he slammed the floorboards hard. I did continue to roll. Going over one shoulder and onto one knee. I powered up. Kicked at him. I had to skip backward as he swept the machete around to chop at my ankles. The kidnapper came up, the blade between us.

He looked from me to Wendy. His eyes stood out sharply against the darkness, and I could see he intended killing everyone he could that night.

I lunged for him.

He made a bark of victory as he swung at the girl.

Thankfully I got a hand to his right wrist and I shoved the blade aside. It skimmed Wendy near her hip, but she’d live. She went down, crying out, and Stephan finally came out of his terror long enough for me to shout at him.

“Get her out of here!”

I could spare neither of them any further notice. Machete-man backhanded the blade at me, and I had to twist away violently, almost rupturing the intercostal muscles between my ribs in my desperation. The kidnapper swung at my gut now, and I sucked in for all my worth, bending over the scything blade.

He missed me. I didn’t miss him.

I powered a palm heel into his chin, and he staggered, eyelids dancing as he fought unconsciousness. I followed, closing the gap, even as I heard the crashing of breaking window slats and guessed Rink was entering the fray. Behind me I heard harsh commands, and had an impression of Wendy being physically hauled out of harm’s way. Wind carried raindrops into the room. I was so energized by battle I’d bet the drops sizzled on my exposed skin. I went after the kidnapper. He’d made some space, and blinking through the disorientation, took swipes at me with his blade. Having no luck, he threw caution to the wind and came in with his favored hacking blow at my head and shoulders.

I was ready for him this time, and unencumbered by a girl between my feet. As the machete swept down, I stepped inside its arch and head-butted the man in the face. His nose flattened, blood spraying out over me. He clutched at me with his free hand, getting a grip on the cloth at my right shoulder, while I jammed his weapon hand under my left elbow. I nutted him again. Then I twisted, using the pivoting action to wrench him around and power him at the wall nearest the doorpost. As he was slammed against the wall, I disengaged quickly, stripping the machete from his hand but relinquishing half of my shirt, which he clung to for grim death. It wasn’t a fair trade for him. So I gave it him back.

Wedging my left forearm in his throat, I drove him tightly to the door frame, allowing him no room for escape and leaving him wide open for the blade as I forced the tip in under his ribs. He fought to push me away, but I thought of the boy’s bandaged hand, and gritted my teeth. I leaned my weight in, shoving the blade deep into his body.

A flashlight beam played over us.

Distantly I recalled there was still one man unaccounted for.

But I was too busy contending with my opponent to worry about him now. The kidnapper still refused to die. He clawed for my eyes with both hands. I squeezed my eyelids shut, pulled out the machete then instantly drove it in again. Then again. The fingers fell away from my face. I wasn’t content that he was fully dead. I rammed the machete in a fourth time and felt it slide with little resistance through his body until it drove into the wall with a dull thud. I gave it an extra bit of pressure and left the man hanging on the blade like a display in a psycho killer’s trophy room.

Stepping away, gasping for breath, I stood there for a moment. Gravity and the weight of the man’s upper body did their combined work. The blade sagged, was pulled from the wall, and the kidnapper splayed on the floor before me. I felt no satisfaction at his death. I was only relieved that his machete had completed its final work, and this time it wasn’t on a boy’s fingers.

Thinking of Stephan, I turned and saw Rink pull him from the broken window. Rink looked at me, and his head jerked in warning.

Again light played over me.

Swinging around I saw the fourth man standing in the doorway. He was looking not at me, but at his dead buddies. But then he brought up the flashlight again and it settled on my upper body.

He cursed, and I braced to take a bullet.

Yet the man spun on his heel and took off down the corridor, calling out in fright.

He was no Usain Bolt.

I could have caught up to him. But two things halted me: for one he was running away and no threat. The other was Rink’s command.

“Let’s get these kids outta here.”

I
n recollection, it had to have been the guy with the flashlight who’d got a good look at my tattoo. From the way in which he’d fled the scene, crying out for assistance that would never come, I didn’t think for a second that he was the man now pressing Jolie for my whereabouts. A more likely scenario was that when the remainder of the gang had heard about what had gone down at the abandoned holiday complex, they’d got the description from their final man on the ground. We never identified the men in Miami, but because that was where the money drops had gone down, it was apparent to me that they were the key players. The thugs on the island were simply that. Men who didn’t shy away from chopping off the fingers of rich young American kids, or burying at sea the boat’s crew snatched alongside them. The Miami connection were the brains of the outfit, and better placed to discover who was responsible for snatching their prizes away from them.

Although few people were aware of my tattoo, or what it signified, it wasn’t exactly a secret either. Recently I’d even seen a photograph of the tattoo design on the Internet, and wondered which of my old Arrowsake colleagues had been stupid enough to post it. It was only after I realigned the image that I understood the pic had been taken while its wearer was horizontal, lying dead on a morgue slab. The number of my old pals out there was dwindling. I was yet to find out which of them was the latest to die, because other than with Rink, I’d no connection to any of the other operatives I once hunted terrorists alongside.

I wondered if whoever was hunting me had used the tattoo to track me, but that wasn’t likely. A more probable scenario was that they had used their connections in the criminal underworld, or even the law-enforcement community, to sniff me out. Unfortunately I’d enemies in both camps. Yet the most obvious way in which they would have traced me here to Tampa, and to Rington Investigations, was through Charles White, the private investigator from Miami who’d played at mediator between the Jamaicans and the Pilarcik family. As far as I could tell, Charlie White was a good man: I doubt he’d have given me up willingly.

As I strode back to the office, clutching my waxed cup of Blue Mountain coffee, I called him on my cell.

“Charles White Private Investigations,” said a voice.

It wasn’t Charles. This voice was feminine. It sounded slightly wary.

“Who am I speaking with?” I inquired.

BOOK: Red Stripes
5.15Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
ads

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