The Lawless Kind (13 page)

‘You going to shoot me, Joe?’ he said in a whining Glaswegian tone.

‘Only if you don’t tell me why the fuck you’re following me.’

‘That’s good of you. But what if I haven’t got anything to say about that?’

I shrugged, aiming my SIG at his crotch. ‘Then I’ll shoot you for old times’ sake.’

‘You’re still holding a boner over
that
? Fuck, mate, that’s old news. Shit, I haven’t even thought about Mel Green in twenty years. You seen her? I bet she’s fat and grey with half-a-dozen bastard kids running round her feet.’

Actually Melanie Green had died of a heroin overdose less than two years after we’d fought over her. We were both nineteen years old at the time, young and stupid, and smitten by the perma-tanned dolly bird who served in the NAAFI bar. She’d been giving both of us the come-on and we’d fallen for her wiles. Drunk on watered-down lager we’d gone at each other, and afterwards McAdam was missing two front teeth, I’d a double indentation in my forehead, and Mel had gone off with another smooth-talking Scots lad called Graham Smith. She’d been the epitome of the camp tart and had earned the nickname of Naafi Mel, but this time the acronym stood for ‘No Ambition and Fuck-all Interest’. Yeah, she was a tramp, but she didn’t deserve the way she ended up. I decided to keep her sad fate to myself.

I said, ‘I see you never got your teeth fixed.’

He poked his tongue through the gap. ‘You think I’d hold a grudge because you knocked my teeth out? Shit, Hunter, are you forgetting the times you had my back in Belfast? Or I had yours?’

‘That’s what’s bothering me, McAdam. Why are you my enemy now?’

He squirmed to a better position, so that he could hold out his open palms. ‘Who said we were enemies? Do you see a weapon?’

‘Don’t play me for an idiot. You were following me on your buddy Marshall’s orders. Don’t deny it.’

‘Marshall was your friend, too.’

‘Only until he tried to blast me with a sawn-off shotgun. See . . . stuff like that makes me question the validity of old friendships.’

‘In Marshall’s defence, he didn’t know it was you until things got out of hand.’

‘So he did recognise me then?’

McAdam grimaced like a tourist with too much salt round the rim of his tequila glass.

‘If he did, he didn’t make an effort to call off the attack,’ I went on. ‘Kind of suggests he didn’t give a fuck for our old friendship.’

‘What would you have done in his shoes?’

‘I wouldn’t take a job where an innocent woman was caught in the crossfire.’

‘Oh, yeah, I forgot. You always were the holier-than-thou type, weren’t you? Don’t talk shit, Joe. You’ve killed women before.’

Sadly it was true. When taking the war to terrorist strongholds it was an unfortunate fact that women – and occasionally children – caught a bullet or piece of shrapnel. I wasn’t proud of the fact, but I’d never willingly have sighted either in my crosshairs. There were evil women, as murderous as men, dangerous with weapons and their wiles, but since I left the military I’d never come across one that I had to kill. Jimena Antonia Grajales a year or so back was a blemish on my tally card, but it was her pet hit man, Luke Rickard, who saw her off.

‘You’re admitting that it’s the woman Marshall’s after?’

‘You’re putting words in my mouth.’

‘Would you prefer a bullet?’

‘C’mon, Joe, we both know you aren’t going to shoot me in cold blood.’

‘Want to bet?’ I aimed directly at his face. His mouth slid open, offering me the gap between his teeth as a target. ‘If Marshall isn’t after the woman, why attack us? Why have us followed now?’

McAdam showed me his palms again. ‘You know I can’t tell you that, Joe. There’s a code us guys work by, and you
never
give up your sponsor.’

‘That depends on the motivation.’

I didn’t shoot him, just kicked him again, but it was enough to put him on his back. He blinked up at me, realising that the good ol’ days were well and truly behind us.

‘Now,’ I said, aiming my gun at his gut, ‘start talking or so help me . . .’

‘Fuck you, Hunter. I’m telling you nothing.’ McAdam scrambled to stand up, and I allowed him to get halfway before pressing the muzzle to his forehead. ‘Fuckin’ shoot me then,’ he snapped. ‘
Just fucking do it!
If I tell you anything I can expect much worse than a clean bullet in the skull.’

I’d learned some of the atrocities the cartels employed to punish people – disembowelment, beheading, immolation, limbs hacked off and the victim left on a railway track, where you would hope to bleed to death before the next train came through – so it didn’t surprise me that McAdam would have a fear of his masters, yet something troubled me about that scenario. Basically, I believed him when he said that this had nothing to do with Kirstie Long, but if Marshall and McAdam weren’t working for Molina then whom?

The question took me back to our suspicions about tracking devices and who could have placed them on our vehicles. At last I’d figured it out.

‘Get up, arsehole.’ I withdrew my gun, took a couple of paces back.

‘Why, you going to make me run so you can shoot me in the back?’

He had made it to his feet, turning his left side to face me, trying to hide the movement of his right hand at his side.

‘Maybe they’re your tactics, McAdam, not mine. Now take your hand away from your weapon or you’ll be sorry.’

He lifted both hands again, completing a pirouette so that his shirt hitched up to show he didn’t have a concealed gun in his belt. ‘I told you I was unarmed.’

‘Yeah,’ I lowered my SIG. ‘But I told you I was going to shoot you . . . so we were both lying.’

The pinching of his eyelids told me he was absorbing my words, and coming to the wrong conclusion. He thought I was softening, that old friendships outweighed new enmity. It showed how different we were. He snapped down his right arm, and from his sleeve jumped a gleaming blade, a spring-assisted Gerber knife. In the next instant he lunged, the knife spearing at my throat.

His sneak attack would have been successful had I not noticed the rig attached to his forearm when I’d first knocked him down. The fact that he tried to rip out my throat vindicated what I did next. As I reared back, taking my throat away from the blade, I snapped a kick into his testicles that brought him to his knees, emitting a deep low moan from the depths of his guts. His arms lost the will to stab as they folded instinctively to cover his injury. I allowed gravity to pull down my foot, and this rocked my upper body forward, adding weight to the barrel of my SIG that chopped into his mastoid like an axe. McAdam went down, out cold.

I stood over him for a few seconds, wondering if allowing him to live was a mistake I’d later regret. But my mind flitted back to those times when we’d fought as comrades, and how, after I’d been shot by an IRA sniper, it was McAdam who’d laid down covering fire, then risked his arse to drag me clear of a second attempt on my life. I owed him one. But now he’d received payback.

I crouched over him, careful of the blade in his outstretched hand, and slapped him awake. He moaned, his lids flickering, then he opened his mouth to say something, but all that came out was a hacking cough that sprayed bile over his shirtfront.

‘We’re even, McAdam. You saved my life once, now I just saved yours. You can go back to Marshall and whichever fuckwit he’s working for, and tell him how hard a fight you had with me before I escaped. That bruise on your neck and the swelling in your balls should be enough to convince them. But hear me . . . come at me again, and nothing will save you.’

Chapter 17

‘Good to see you alive and well, Hunter. How’d you get on with your old buddy?’

‘McAdam was always a big mouth, but he didn’t have much to say this time,’ I said.

Over his cell phone, Velasquez had directed me a few blocks across town from where I’d left McAdam nursing his wounds and contemplating his future. Velasquez hadn’t come to blows with his tail, having lost the man as we’d agreed, before seeking a common meeting point from where we could continue our original walk towards Jorge Molina’s home.

I told him what had happened in the stinking alleyway, but left out my assumption about who was actually behind Marshall and McAdam. If I was correct then now was not the time or the place to confuse the issue. We were here to liberate a child from his abductor; everything else could wait.

‘I’ve spoken to Rink,’ Velasquez said. ‘He offered to come on over and help bang a few heads together but I told him you had it under control.’

‘Bet that pleased him?’

‘Harvey and Mac have practically stripped the panel van back to the chassis, but they haven’t found a tracking device. They think the van’s still good for when we get out of here.’

‘Good.’ Actually it would have been better if they had found a bug, one that could be destroyed; because it meant the one in situ was too cleverly hidden. That confirmed my suspicions about who was directing Marshall and his men. ‘Did Rink source another vehicle yet?’

‘Yeah, he was able to purchase a car with cash, no questions asked.’

‘Great, we’ll need two vehicles. I trust the car isn’t an old junker?’

‘Don’t worry; Rink knows his stuff when it comes to cars.’ Rink had a weakness for flashy models, and usually tooled around the streets of Tampa in a Porsche or something equally classy.

The streets were filled with shoppers and the lunch-hour crowds sitting at pavement cafés indulging in cold drinks and snacks. It was a scene similar to the one where we’d picked up on McAdam and the other tail, but nothing untoward was triggering my radar this time. We had to be careful, because within another block we’d be in sight of Jorge Molina’s home turf. We walked on, talking through our plans for infiltrating Molina’s house by this afternoon.

‘Take a look and see if you think it’s achievable.’ Velasquez gave a subtle nod of his head, and I glanced where he indicated.

Jorge Molina’s house was in a walled compound on the south-facing side of one of the rock islands that rose above Hermosillo. It stood where Spanish Colonial-style buildings faced each other across a wide plaza. Once horses and carriages would have made the ride up the incline, important residents of Hermosillo attending functions in the big house at the head of the street. Now the plaza was a pedestrian zone, the only vehicles in evidence a utility truck parked at the lowest end where workers were digging up a section to get at duct pipes, and, nearer to the top of the hill, a motorised road sweeper cleaning the gutters with its whirling brushes. I wondered if Molina – or more correctly his father – had influenced the local council to control public access to the house, making it more difficult for enemy vehicles to approach undetected.

‘OK, I see it, but this isn’t the way we’ll be going in,’ I said.

‘Just wanted you to get an idea of the scale of the place. I did my recce from further up on the hillside where you can see down into the grounds.’

At the foot of the plaza a number of pedestrians moved along the cross street on which we stood. It was almost as if there was an invisible barrier that forbade them from marching up the hill, and I guessed that the locals knew the approach to Casa Molina was out of bounds. If we tried to get much closer a guard would be dispatched from the gatehouse to dissuade us. Even from where we stood, like two guys in innocent conversation, I could make out a turreted structure to the left of the ornate gates. The turret looked to be a couple of hundred years old, but had been recently modified to include a broad, smoked-glass window behind which I could make out the silhouette of a man peering down the plaza. That the guard would have easy access to a weapon was a no-brainer. Covering my scrutiny with a less than subtle tilt of my head, I searched beyond the gate and high walls to where a large house stood astride the foot of the hillside. It was a rambling hacienda-style building, added to over the years so that it now boasted three wings as well as the original central structure. The roofs were a collection of flat terraces and pitched clay tile. Two figures patrolled the terrace, their attention on the grounds at the back. Velasquez had estimated that there were around a dozen people inside: it looked to me as if it could comfortably accommodate a hundred or more.

Earlier I’d put down Velasquez’s trepidation to the fact that he was looking at the plan from a police officer’s perspective, and I’d brushed off his concerns. Molina’s house wouldn’t pose a problem for Rink and me in the normal sense; we’d infiltrated heavily guarded terrorist compounds on more occasions than I could recall. But this time I had to consider a major factor. Then we’d been on seek and destroy missions; this time it was about securing and protecting a child’s life. Fighting our way out past determined guards and an enraged father might indeed prove nigh-on impossible. I thought about Kirstie. If her boy was killed in the firefight, it would destroy her. But only after she’d clawed out my heart with her fingernails.