by Titan Books
Then he heard the familiar sound of an Enduro engine, coming fast, much faster than those screaming sirens. Henry took a deep breath; apparently he and the kid weren’t done dancing. Dammit.
Henry limped away from the crowd into the middle of the street with the vague notion of drawing Junior Hitman away from the innocent bystanders; also the kid would have a harder time getting at him if he was standing in moving traffic.
Except the traffic wouldn’t keep moving. Drivers slowed down to go around him, or pulled over and stopped altogether, because this was not his day. Should he put himself between Junior Hitman and the crowd, or face the crowds himself so they weren’t in the kid’s sights? Too late—the crowd had grown so large they were all around him and he couldn’t think because the Enduro engine drowned out everything.
Henry’s vision suddenly settled down and let him see the bike was coming right at him. Like a spear, like a lightning bolt, like a missile, and son of a bitch, he couldn’t fucking move, not a step. He could only stand there, swaying a little while he waited for Junior Hitman to ride right over him. Maybe one of those distant sirens was an ambulance; with the way things were going, though, probably not.
He should close his eyes, Henry thought, but he couldn’t do that, either. Nothing was working right today. Not his day…
Seconds before impact, Junior Hitman squeezed the front brake with just the right amount of pressure and the crowd gasped in perfect unison as the Enduro rose up on its front wheel again. It had taken Henry months to do an endo without sending himself over the high side, and even more time to do one that lasted longer than three seconds, and the kid had just done it twice.
Junior Hitman’s eyes met his and all the tiny hairs on the back of Henry’s neck stood up. He watched the kid shift the handlebars, making the bike actually pirouette. Henry kept watching, too transfixed to realize what was happening, until the still-spinning back wheel came around and whacked him. Again.
Henry felt his feet leave the ground as he flew through the air and crashed into the side of a parked car.
Bitch-slapped me with a motorcycle twice, Henry marveled, using the car door handle to drag himself to a standing position. He caught a glimpse of the driver hurriedly getting out on the passenger side and wondered if he should apologize. Sorry, my insurance only covers collisions if I’m actually in a car.
He turned just in time to see the kid had the bike down on two wheels and was skidding it sideways, intending to hit him with the back wheel a third time. Leaning hard against the car, Henry threw both legs into the air, feeling the heat from the muffler as the bike missed him by inches.
The tires screeched as Junior Hitman turned to face him. He took the bike up on its back wheel, revved the engine, and let it go at Henry riderless. Henry staggered out of the way; the front tire smashed the car’s driver’s side window and the impact threw Henry over the hood to land heavily on the street where he lay panting and gasping, unable to move.
Only he had to move, because Junior Hitman was still coming for him, like some kind of unstoppable robot killing machine. Henry struggled to get up but could only manage to crawl backwards while the kid advanced on him with a combat knife. And he wasn’t even breathing hard, Henry saw. The muscles in his arms flexed smoothly and easily, his face was set in the stony mask of a professional determined to finish his mission. A pro didn’t quit, didn’t fail, didn’t die; a pro accomplished the mission. Junior Hitman was about to accomplish his and Henry couldn’t do a goddam thing about it. He had nothing left and the kid knew it. Nothing was going to stop him from finishing Henry off.
Every time Henry had gone out on a mission, it had been with the knowledge that he might not make it home. A body count as high as his pretty much guaranteed he was going to be a target himself someday; he knew better than to count on dying of old age. He had lived with that reality for a very long time without letting it get to him.
But of all the ways he had imagined his life would end, he had never envisioned this. It would never have occurred to him; it was patently impossible. Only it wasn’t because here was the only other thing he hadn’t seen coming: Junior Hitman.
Or maybe Junior Henry was more apt. Again, Henry recognized his own posture, the way he moved, even the way he held that goddam knife. More than that, he knew exactly what Junior Henry was about to do, how he’d counter Henry’s self-defense moves, then how he’d counter Henry’s counters, and so forth and so on, ad infinitum. It would be like they were fighting their reflections in a great big mirror.
Or it would have been except Henry barely had enough strength to crawl and he wouldn’t be able to do that much longer. The kid would have no trouble finishing him off. He could just lean over and slash the femoral artery in his thigh. Henry would bleed out in a matter of minutes.
And to add insult to injury, he could tell that Junior Henry still didn’t see the resemblance. Henry couldn’t think of a more fucked up way to die.
At least the little bastard had finally lost his baseball cap. Like that mattered.
The screaming sirens were suddenly right on top of them. Henry heard two police cruisers pull up behind him as several more screeched to a halt in the street. The kid’s eyes flickered from him to the uniformed officers now getting out of their cars, demanding to know what the hell was going on. Henry looked over his shoulder, saw their irate expressions. They weren’t going to be too happy with Junior Henry, either, he thought, and turned to see if the kid was actually crazy enough to try fighting a mob of angry cops.
Except Junior Henry wasn’t there, wasn’t anywhere. All he could see now, besides what had to be most of the population of Old Town, were cops coming at him from all sides, more cops than he had thought were actually on Cartagena’s police force. And every single one was furious with him.
Henry put his hands up as they closed in around him.
The cops hauled him to his feet and two of them pushed him up against the nearest cruiser so they could cuff his hands behind his back. Henry looked around, thinking the kid might be enjoying this portion of The Kick Henry Brogan’s Ass Show from a nearby rooftop but there was no sign of him, not high up or at ground level. There were only a lot of innocent bystanders milling around, in no hurry to disperse despite the cops’ efforts to shoo them away. Maybe they were hoping the kid would reappear and do some more tricks on another stolen police bike.
Henry looked around again and finally spotted Baron and Danny. They should have been far, far away but he couldn’t help feeling relieved they were there. They were the only two people in all of Cartagena who didn’t want to beat him like a big bass drum. Baron gazed at him with a pained expression and Danny was staring at the ground. Henry wondered if she was angry with him or just embarrassed. Then she stooped to pick something up.
Henry got only the briefest glimpse of what she was holding as the cops threw him in the back of the cruiser but it looked like a black baseball cap.
CHAPTER 12
Among the many historical sites in Cartagena, the most spectacular is the Castillo de San Felipe de Barajas, known as the most impressive fortress that Spain built in any of her colonies. It sits at the top of San Lázaro Hill overlooking quite a lot of Cartagena including the central police station across the street. Unlike the weathered seventeenth-century stone castle, the Policía Nacional building was bright, clean, with ultra-modern twenty-first century lines on the outside and, on the inside, dull tile floors and cement-block walls characteristic of institutions where people are not guests. Henry wondered if the cops here ever looked at the fortress and thought about how law enforcement had changed over the last three and a half centuries. Probably not. They seemed to be pretty busy, especially now.
In Henry’s experience, getting arrested in a different language was a far wordier process than it was in English. In Cartagena, it was also more emotional, at least on this occasion. He had seldom seen local law enforcement anywhere so infuriated; the way they were acting, it was like he had b
roken every law on the books and then gone out of his way to personally insult all of their families. Of course, that may have been due at least in part to his American accent. Being an American had always been problematic in certain areas of the world and lately it seemed like there were more of these areas all the time.
But as Henry sat in the small, humid interrogation room sweating through his clothes while a continuing stream of cops, some in uniform, some in plainclothes, took turns ranting at him, he knew their outrage didn’t stem from anti-American sentiment. From their perspective, he had come into their town and gone batshit crazy in the streets, and then, when they busted him for it, he claimed his evil twin was trying to kill him.
If he could have gotten a word in edgewise, perhaps he could have explained himself better. On the other hand, his Colombian Spanish was a bit rusty so he might have only made things worse. And it probably wouldn’t have mitigated their anger at the accidents he and Junior Hitman had caused, not to mention the people they had endangered by shooting at each other. Cartagena was a tourist destination; batshit-crazy men running around with guns would kill their business and their economy. Worse, he fit the description of the pendejo who had knocked out two officers, stolen a police motorcycle, and then wrecked it doing tricks to show off.
He tried to point out that he couldn’t have been that pendejo, he was the other pendejo on the other bike, whom the pendejo on the cop’s bike had been trying to kill; they could tell the difference because that pendejo had been wearing a baseball cap—but it only made them angrier. Henry couldn’t really blame them. If he’d been in their place, he’d have thought he was off his meds, too, and he’d have already called the appropriate institution to come and take him away. It made him wonder why he was still sweating in the interrogation room stone-cold sober and not floating on a Thorazine cloud in a straitjacket.
Probably because Cartagena had no institution for the criminally insane, he realized. The closest one would most likely be somewhere like Bogotá or Medellín, both of which were several hundred miles away; one hell of a drive. Maybe there was an ambulance on the way. Unless the authorities in Bogotá or Medellín were arguing with the Cartagena police about who was responsible for transporting him.
Henry began to think he was getting delirious from the heat.
He didn’t know how many hours he’d been roasting alive in the interrogation room before he finally heard a new voice, female and very familiar. She was fluent and spoke calmly but firmly, laying it out for them without impatience or hostility but refusing to be argued with. Finally a uniformed officer came into the room, detached Henry from the table, and dragged him through the police station to the front entrance where Danny was waiting.
The grey-green suit coat, white blouse, and blue jeans she was wearing gave her an air of untouchable authority, underscored by the badge on the lanyard around her neck: Homeland Security. Danny gave him an authoritative look as they stepped outside. Nope, he wouldn’t argue with her, either, Henry thought as he stood blinking in the late afternoon sunlight.
The officer said something to her that might have been either an apology or a proposal of marriage. She responded in a professional tone that had a slight hint of kindness, perhaps telling him to go now and sin no more. Then Baron pulled up at the curb and she hustled Henry into the car.
“Sorry, Baron, but your place is burned,” Henry said. “Get me somewhere I can see him coming.”
“You got it,” Baron said.
* * *
The view from San Felipe Castle was spectacular. As he sat on a low wall with Baron and Danny, Henry could see Old Town as well as the skyline of twenty-first-century Cartagena, all against a backdrop of Caribbean blue, a shade unique to this part of the world.
Baron had brought them up here by way of what he claimed was a shortcut, which turned out to involve a lot of stairs. Baron had managed them easily and Danny had simply trotted up one set of steps after another with little apparent effort. Henry had been panting before they were even halfway to the top. The Enduro could have handled all those stairs but it was probably illegal to ride a motorcycle in a national monument.
There had been a time when he’d have climbed up to the top of the castle without even thinking about it, no matter how hard his day had been.
Yeah, and there had also been a time when he wouldn’t have missed the shot in Liège, which was why he’d decided to retire in the first place.
Damn. No matter what he did, he could not get a goddam break.
The sun was starting to set now; this close to the equator, night would come quickly. He had to make some decisions about what to do next, the sooner the better.
“I wanted to go in there guns blazing,” Baron said, grinning. “She thought the diplomatic approach made more sense.”
“Gunfire would have been kinder,” Henry said. “She shredded those poor guys.”
Baron chuckled. “So, now what?” Both he and Danny were looking at him expectantly.
“I need to get to Budapest,” Henry replied.
“What’s in Budapest?” Danny and Baron asked in perfect unison.
“Jack’s informant—Yuri.” Henry stood up and stretched. A plan was coming together in his mind. The adrenaline that had kept him alive while Junior Hitman had been trying to kill him was gone and he had been holding off fatigue by sheer willpower but he knew he wasn’t going to last much longer. He had to find some way to keep his mind engaged and focused, or he was going to start feeling instead of thinking. If he did that, he might lose it and losing it was not an option, not now.
“These guys aren’t after me because I’m retiring,” Henry went on. “They’re after me because they think Jack told me something classified. Yuri ought to know something about that.”
Baron laughed a little, shaking his head. “Sorry, partner. My Aztec doesn’t have that kind of range.”
“Yeah, I was hoping we might borrow something that does. Maybe a G.”
Baron’s expression was solemn. “Wow. Taking someone’s Gulfstream. You’d really have to hate a guy to do that.” His face suddenly lit up with a broad smile. “And I know just the fella. Gimme a minute.” He took out his phone and moved away a few yards.
* * *
“I’m so fired,” Baron sang to the tune of ‘I Got A Woman.’ “Yeah, I’m so fired! I’m so fired and I don’t caaaaaaaaare!” On the last note, the jet lifted into the air, then banked gently as Baron put the last faint glow of sunset behind them.
In spite of everything, Danny smiled as she continued tending to Henry’s various cuts and abrasions. The Gulfstream’s medikit was quite extensive, which was a good thing since Henry’s injuries were, too. Danny had had to pick more than a few chunks of dirt and grit out of the long, deep scrape on his outer thigh. It was an awful process but Henry barely flinched. And he’d seemed all but unaware of all the cuts on his arms and just below his collarbone.
But the worst injury besides his leg was the one she was working on now, a gash where something sharp had been driven into his face scarily close to his eye. She used a cotton ball soaked in witch hazel to clean away the dried blood and dirt caked around it so she could see exactly how bad it was. It wasn’t long but it was deep. She saturated another cotton ball with hydrogen peroxide and warned him it was going to sting before applying it to the wound.
He winced a bit but that was all. She supposed a little sting was nothing compared to getting bike-fu’ed by a homicidal maniac—but not just any homicidal maniac. She knew Henry had seen his face. And vice versa, although Henry had been so covered with dirt and blood, the other guy may not have spotted the resemblance. Hell, she might not have recognized Henry herself if they hadn’t already met.
“Henry?” she said tentatively. No answer; he didn’t want to discuss it but Danny decided to plunge ahead anyway. What the hell, she was wiping up his blood; she was entitled to some answers. “Did you ever have a kid? A son, maybe?”
He gazed at her through hood
ed eyes. “No, why?”
“The guy on the motorcycle—did you notice anything funny about him?”
“Yeah,” Henry said. “I noticed he was very good.”
“I meant his face,” she said, applying the first butterfly bandage to his cheek. Stitches would have been better but she wasn’t skilled enough at facial sutures so butterflies would have to do. “The similarity?”
Henry gave a resigned sigh. “Yeah, I noticed that, too.”
“So you never had a long-term relationship?” she asked, putting on the next bandage.
“Not unless we count you.”
Danny couldn’t help laughing at that one. “Is it possible you had a kid without knowing it?”
“No,” he said firmly. “Zero chance.”
“Then…?”
“Danny.” He hadn’t raised his voice but she got the hint. Instead of pushing him, she tucked two bloody cotton balls into a small plastic bag and pushed it under her seat with the other item she was hanging onto.
“Thank you, by the way,” she said.
Henry’s eyebrows went up. “For what?”
“Leaving Baron’s apartment so he and I wouldn’t be targets,” she replied. “Also for coming to get me in Georgia when you could have just run for your life.”
Henry chuckled. “Just wanted to put you on a private plane and give you a free trip to Hungary.”
“Where I’m going to find…?”
“Hungarians,” Henry said. “When I saw him it was like I was seeing a ghost.”
“A ghost with a gun?” Danny said.
“It was like it was every trigger I ever pulled,” he said, surprising the hell out of her.
She was still trying to figure out what to say to that when he lay back and closed his eyes. The conversation, like the first aid, was over.
