by Sam Jones
Maria, eyes on the map, measured the distance to their destination with her eye and a finger. “Almost there,” she said.
Billy glanced at the map. “You’re sure?”
“I know how to read a map.”
“Really? Because it’s upside down.”
Maria checked the edges to see if he was right.
“I’m just messing with you,” he said.
Maria hid a grin.
“How far out are we?” Billy asked as his eyes quickly investigated the surrounding mountains.
Maria looked down the road and saw where the dirt road jinked left—the exact location of Kruger’s coordinates. “Three hundred yards.”
Billy’s foot moved toward the brake pedal.
Stop the car.
He slowed, checked over his shoulder, pulled the Granada to the side of the road, and parked it parallel to a rotting ironwood. He kept the engine running as both he and Maria slowly—and very cautiously—exited the vehicle like canines inching up on an ominous object.
They were completely surrounded by mountains, stuck in a kind of bowl-shaped part of the desert—no way in or out save for the dirt road they had just pulled off of that cut through the bowl from east to west. It was either turn around or keep going.
But the choice had already been made.
Billy looked left. Maria looked right. She asked him, “What are you thinking?”
Billy figured they could get to higher ground and scope out the area. If Kruger was sending in people to pick them up, maybe they could get the drop on them.
Sniper rifle would have been handy.
But there was no time. No resources. No way of planning a way out this time.
Improvisation only.
“Anything?” Maria asked, her eyes not spotting a thing.
Billy scanned around, his senses returning to a sharpened state that he hadn’t experienced in years. He was alert, manic, highly observant and sensitive to his environment. Every buzz was a potential threat; every gust of wind was the enemy making its approach.
His pupils dilated.
He timed his breathing.
He sniffed the air. He got in sync with his environment. The second that something felt out of place, he would be able to tell. Based on his experiences, he knew he had about eight hundred yards of coverage with his little spidey sense.
In a lot of ways, that was the best way to describe Billy Reese—he was a man who was two hundred yards shy of the infamous thousand-yard stare.
For the first time in a long time, Billy felt like he was back in the war.
Back in the jungle.
Back in the shit.
Back in his “War Mode.”
But even with an eight-hundred-yard range with his War Mode, Billy couldn’t spot anything out of whack in the area, anything out of the ordinary.
Everything was…still.
“Nothing,” he said to Maria, still scanning the mountain range to his left. “Not a goddamn thing…”
There was nothing. Nothing but the road. Nothing but the mountains and the desert. Nothing but the pink hues of the setting sun slowly painting day into night. Nothing but the hush of the wind and the static buzz of the insects.
Zzzzzzzz…
As the bugs continued to clamor, Billy just stood there.
Thinking.
What would Sykes do?
What would Sykes do?
Then the buzzards stopped.
Billy tensed up.
Something in his brain, some invisible switch had been triggered.
To your left!
He turned and started walking a few paces to the north; his eyes focused on a plateau about five hundred yards ahead of him covered by the long shadow of the peak above it, a kind of cave-like area.
Billy stared.
And stared.
And then Billy realized something. He realized how easy of a solution this was for Sykes, at how simplistic the remedy to his Billy problem was, at how painfully obvious the tactics were that Sykes would employ to dispose of the two people standing in his way of his illegal entrepreneurial enterprise.
Oh, shit.
This was so easy…
Billy’s heart beat a little faster.
His breathing began to pick up.
His brain started to signal a four-alarm fire.
In a trembled tone with a hand moving toward his Colt, he turned his head to the right, took a breath, and hollered, “Maria!”
And then the crack of the sniper rifle rang out a half second later.
45
BILLY HAD UNSHEATHED his gun right as the sniper’s shot rang out. He turned and fled back in the direction of the Granada, his free hand reaching out for Maria as she turned around, pulled her Beretta, and began to take aim to the north toward the source of the rifle shot.
A half second after the shot when off—she fell.
Hard.
For a second, Billy thought his mind was playing tricks on him.
He slid over the roof of the still-running Granada, ducked down, and took cover on the other side as a second shot went off and buried itself into the hood, one inch off from hitting him in the lower part of his spine.
PING!
“Maria!” Billy shouted again, crouching and prepping to go into a defensive stance. “You okay?”
And then he looked to his left.
On her back, her hands out by her sides and a forlorn expression on her face, Maria laid motionless on the ground, her breathing shallow, and her eyes wide with shock as a pool of blood accumulated around her torso.
Billy was unable to fight his stomach twisting into a knot as he focused on the dime-sized entry wound from the sniper rifle round that hit her two inches to the right of her sternum.
It took Billy a moment to digest everything, to let his brain catch up with his eyes.
He wanted to deny it, but this new fact of life was a fact nonetheless.
Maria was dying.
“No,” he said in an obstinate tone. “No, no, no, no, no…”
He crawled on his hands and knees over to Maria and nearly sobbed as he saw that the entry wound in her torso was no mere illusion. Billy slowly cradled her in his arms as he examined the wound.
You can’t fix this.
“Oh, fuck,” he objected, praying for a way to buy it all back. “Oh, come on!”
Maria was trying to speak, but any effort she made was done in vain.
Her time in life was down to its last mere seconds.
No question.
Billy sucked it up and started applying pressure on the wound. “Hang on,” he said to Maria. Confident. Trying to take back control. “We’re gonna fix this.”
Maria couldn’t speak, but her eyes communicated everything to Billy.
She knew what the score was.
She was making quick peace with her fate.
And all she needed was for Billy to do the same…
No. She’s not dying for nothing.
Think, damn it!
Billy took her hand into his and squeezed, swaying and thinking and trying to figure out a way to fix it all.
Calculation.
But he knew it was futile.
Confidence.
Hope was nonexistent.
Patience.
All her time had run out.
Control.
And there was nothing that he could do to stop it…
Billy looked back into Maria’s eyes as the life fleeted from them. All he could think to do was hold her close and fruitlessly keep the pressure on the wound in her chest.
And then something happened.
Maria smiled.
Of all things, she smiled at Billy.
She whimpered one word before winking at him.
“Clichés…”
Billy took her hand and held it as the wind blew, the sun burned, and Maria Delgado slipped quietly away into the unknown.
It was over in a matter of seconds.
46
SILENCE HAD TAKEN over the Sonora Desert for a lengthy ten seconds as Billy looked into the now-lifeless eyes of Maria Delgado, numb to the pain and waiting for the moment that it would all catch up to him and send him down a spiraling vortex of fury that was driven by rage and fueled by sorrow.
Maria was dead.
Maria is dead.
The rumbling of the Grenada’s still awake and idling engine brought Billy out of his haze, and a surge of adrenaline began to sear through his system like a junkie’s fix as the veins in his neck started to bulge—a trillion little red-colored, spear-toting Spartans traveling through the tubes in his body and injecting themselves directly into the rage part of his brain.
He was no longer despondent.
He was mad.
He was really fuckin’ mad…
Billy took Maria’s hands, folded her arms across her stomach, scooped up her Beretta, and fished the two extra clips out of her pockets. With his War Mode back at full, virulent, and razor-sharp levels, he took a quick tally of his supplies.
Nine rounds in my Colt with two backup clips—twenty-five rounds.
Fifteen in Maria’s Beretta with two extra mags—forty-five rounds.
Seventy rounds total.
More than enough.
He knew the sniper was probably hanging out in that cave-looking plateau off to his left five hundred yards to the north, based on the direction of the shots. Either way the shooter was somewhere off in that direction, so it all came down to a matter of Billy drawing his fire to get a better idea of exactly where the little cockburger was camped out.
Billy crawled back to the passenger’s-side door, and he came up with the quickest and dirtiest plan his revenge-saturated mind could think of.
Drive up there and kill him.
He opened the passenger’s side door and prepared to move inside—another crack from the sniper rifle resounded, a round drilling itself into the hood a split second before Billy heard it go off.
He’s going for the engine block.
Billy thought quickly on his feet.
He reached in through the passenger’s side to the shifter and threw it into neutral. The Granada starting rolling forward, Billy followed alongside it.
The sniper rifle fired off two more shots spaced about a second apart, both rounds hitting the hood again but managing to miss all the vital organs.
But it was only a matter of time before the sniper would hit his mark.
Billy fired his Colt blindly over the hood in the general direction of the shots. He knew that he wasn’t going to hit anything from five hundred yards out. If anything, he was just squeezing off shots in lieu of a clenching a stress ball.
After all nine shots were spent, and the slide of the Colt racked back empty, Billy dove inside the Grenada. The sniper fired another shot, this time taking out both the driver and front passenger windows just as Billy ducked into the car.
Billy, shattered glass showering him as he tried to stay as low as humanly possible, squeezed in the driver’s seat with his head just below the steering wheel. He threw the car into drive and then jerked the wheel to the left as he slammed his foot down on the accelerator and buried it into the floor mat.
His heart was pounding.
The adrenaline kept him moving.
Maria getting shot kept him angry.
The sniper fired off three more rounds as Billy began to zigzag the Grenada toward the plateau, the car bumping and bouncing every inch of the way along the terrain as the sniper’s muzzle flashes blinked at him like Morse code from a distant ship.
Now the sniper was having a hard time getting a good shot. The first round he popped off clipped the grill of the Grenada, the second buried itself in the left passenger seat (two inches off from Billy), and the third round missed entirely as Billy got the car up to sixty miles per hour on the speedometer and drove as erratically as possible so the prick couldn’t line up a decent shot.
The sniper took aim at the tires.
Crack! The shot hit the dirt.
The sniper took aim again at the engine block.
Crack! The shot hit the windshield and took off the driver’s headrest instead, Billy crouched low enough but still feeling the impact and hearing the hiss as he blurted out, “Fuck!”
Three more inches lower and Billy would have been yesterday’s news.
He continued to speed and spin the wheel madly as he closed in the distance on the sniper’s location, ticking off the distance in his head.
Three hundred yards…
Two hundred yards…
The sniper continued to fire off round after round but managed to hit nothing but the already busted-up exterior of the Grenada. It was still functional with nothing but (substantial) cosmetic damage.
As Billy came within fifty yards of the plateau, he picked up Maria’s Beretta, held it out the window with his left hand, and gave the sniper all fifteen rounds, his finger squeezing the trigger with the same amount of pressure he was hoping to put on the bastard’s throat when he got up close to him. Billy knew he was firing off wild shots, but two of them, by sheer chance, got close to the sniper.
Close enough to spook him out of cover.
Click! The Beretta was dry.
Billy tossed it on the passenger’s seat.
As he came to the base of the mountain, about eighty or so feet from the plateau, he spotted the sniper descending the slope on his right that lead up to the plateau, dressed in desert camouflage as he retreated and scrambled down the slope, which fed into a dry riverbed.
Billy balled up a fist and laid on the horn as he shouted out, “Buenos dias, asshole!”
The sniper, about fifty feet from Billy, moved to his right, sidestepping his way down the declining riverbed toward the four-door Crown Victoria he had craftily concealed behind a large staghorn rooted near the base of the mountain.
Billy quickly loaded a magazine into the Colt, cranked the wheel to the right and drove the Grenada head on toward the driver’s side of the Crown Vic as the sniper scrambled to open the door.
But he knew Billy had the drop on him.
He took out his Glock and spun around.
Billy hit the headlights to throw the guy off as the sniper turned and took aim with a 9 mm Glock.
Foot off the accelerator, Billy quickly looped his seatbelt around his arm and torso and dropped to his right side on the passenger’s seat as the sniper emptied the Glock into the windshield.
Holes were punched into the glass. Fragments of it rained down on Billy. The upholstery was torn to shreds and two rounds missed Billy’s head by about a half an inch as the Grenada slammed headfirst into the sniper and crushed him between both cars with a merciless metallic crunch.
“The end,” Billy said. Flat.
47
BILLY WAS RESTRAINED enough by the seatbelt that he only bumped his head on the cushioned armrest of the passenger’s seat when the cars made impact. The second everything settled, he took off the seatbelt, grabbed his Colt, kicked open the driver’s-side door and drew down on the sniper—pinned between both of the vehicles and trying his best to shake off the dizzies.
Billy approached.
The sniper raised his Glock.
Billy popped off a round and blew the thing out of his hands.
BANG.
The sniper wailed in pain.
Billy surveyed the damage from the impact and saw that the sniper was now pinned from the waist down, his back up against the dented-in driver’s side of the Crown Vic and the front of him bent partway over the hood of the Grenada.
“Eesh,” Billy said. “I was clockin’ maybe thirty. How the hell are you still breathing?”
“Fuck you!” the sniper cried out.
“Yep,” Billy said. “That sounds about right.”
The sniper planted his hands on the hood and tried to steady himself. He had enough going on between being pinned between the cars and getting a hole shot through his hand that he was hollerin
g out in excruciating pain. He should have been dead, but life clung to him like a curse.
Billy double-checked the coast was clear; he spotted for signs of backup but found nothing.
He’s alone.
Billy asked the sniper, “Where’s Kruger?”
The sniper looked him dead in the eyes. Said nothing.
“I asked you a question, dickhead,” Billy said. “Answer me.”
The sniper spit blood on the hood of the Grenada.
Billy sighed.
Then he shot the guy in the shoulder.
The sniper pitched back. He moaned again but nothing louder than a stifled grumble. He sat up straight, looked at his wounds, and then turned his eyes back to Billy as the blood flowed from the wound.
Billy said moved toward the passenger’s side of the sniper’s Crown Vic, tapping the sniper on the forehead with three soft pats of his Colt as he walked past—tap, tap, tap.
“Stay here, sugar plum,” he said. “Just be a minute.”
Billy opened the door to the Crown Vic and searched inside. He found a bag filled with protein bars, three water bottles, a case for the sniper rifle, and, intriguingly enough, a satellite phone that someone probably paid huge coin to obtain.
Then Billy had a thought.
He picked up the handset, quickly deduced how the fancy toy worked, and punched in a number. It rang for three turns before someone answered.
“Hello?” a female voice greeted, calm and under no apparent duress.
Billy closed his eyes.
Heather…
She’s home.
She’s okay.
Sykes never went near them…
“Hello?” Heather said again, slightly agitated at the prospect of a crank call.
“It’s me,” Billy cut in. “Sorry.”
“Billy. Are you…Is everything okay?”
Billy breathed. “I’m fine. I actually have to go. I’m sorry. I, uh…I was just checking in on you and Tommy.”
“Oh. Okay…”
“He’s good? You’re good?”
“Yeah, we’re fine Billy. Are you sure you’re all right?”
“I’m okay, really. I just…I’m sorry; I’m just a little scatterbrained at the moment.”
“Are you working?”
Billy looked at the bloodied-up sniper pinned between the car, his eyes still focused on Billy as he spit up blood on the windshield.
