Final Target

by John Gilstrap

  As the door latch released, Gail pushed with her shoulder while pulling with her hand in hopes of not flexing the door panel and therefore keeping the noise level down. The hinge howled like a flayed cat.

  Shit.

  Fully committed now, she swung the door open wide and swept everything she could see with the muzzle of her pistol, ready to shoot anyone who was ready to shoot her first. She realized that her legs were trembling, but she forced herself to stay focused.

  Her first sweep included a living room on the left, a center hall with stairs, then a dining room on the right, with an enclosed porch beyond. It was a small space and more preciously decorated than she would have expected. Antiques and Lladró figurines seemed somehow incongruous with a professional killer.

  While she saw no one, the blood trail continued in a zigzag line down the first-floor hallway. Bloody handprints staggered down the walls on both sides painted a picture of an unbalanced person caroming from one side to the other as she headed toward wherever she was going.

  Gail followed the trail down the hallway, glancing up the stairway that rose from her right. She didn’t expect a threat from up there, but this had been a day of surprises. Ahead, she could see the open door to the kitchen and a closed door to the left, which she assumed was the first-floor powder room. The blood trail led to neither room but rather buttonhooked around to the right.

  With a blossoming sense of dread, Gail was certain that the goal was the basement, via a door that led to stairs behind the main staircase. And she was right.

  She sighed. This day was just getting better and better.

  The stairway door was wide open, revealing newly installed but unfinished pine stairs that led to a stonewalled basement.

  “I’m down here!” a woman’s voice called in a tone that was wretched with pain. “In the basement!”

  Shit. She’s expecting someone.

  Since way back in HRT days, Gail had despised the tactical disadvantage that stairways posed. From the perspective of a holed-up bad guy, the stairway coming up or going down was the one place where hunters had to go. For homicidal types who didn’t care about their own future on the planet, it was a target-rich environment that could allow them to rack up a big score before anyone could get into a decent position to neutralize them.

  This basement stairway posed the worst of all possibilities because it had no walls. Unwary targets would expose themselves a step at a time from the feet up. It sucked.

  “Come on down!” the voice called. “Please come down. I’m bleeding to death.”

  If it was a trap, Gail confessed, it was an elaborate one. Still, it was the cautious operator who lived the longest.

  Gail paused and lowered her butt onto the top step. Seated there and bracing herself with her hands, she leaned forward to get a view of what lay below. The space was lit by two dangling lightbulbs, which cast sharp and angular shadows across the floor and the assorted crap that you’d find in anyone’s basement. Even more incongruous in Gail’s mind than the Lladró statuary was the artificial Christmas tree stashed over by the furnace, its boughs still sparkling with ancient tinsel.

  In the brighter light, the blood trail was more vivid, and as Gail followed it with her eyes, she saw that the concentration of spattered and pooled blood was heavier here, probably because Yolanda had been bleeding in one place for a while.

  Who the hell was she expecting?

  Gail didn’t holster her Glock, but she lowered it to her side and bladed her body away so that it wasn’t easily visible. Essentially, she was walking down the stairs backward, a position that left the most options available to her. She moved slowly, carefully, not wanting to overcommit.

  “Relax, Doc. I’m not going to hurt you,” the bleeding woman said. She sat directly across from the stairs, in the kind of rolling chair that you’d expect to be in the office of a low-level clerk in a lower-end law firm. The chair seemed to have arisen out of a pool of blood on the concrete floor.

  Gail recognized the woman from a picture Venice had sent to be a pallid version of Yolanda Cantata. She sat naked in the chair, except for a bra, panties, and socks. Discarded packaging from gauze pads littered the floor around her feet, and she seemed intent on keeping the contents of those packages—the gauze pads themselves—pressed against a wound in her upper left abdomen, which continued to bleed freely.

  Gail took a deep breath, ignoring the rancid smell of the blood, and steeled herself for the big bluff she was about to play. Yolanda had called her “Doc,” so that was the role she intended to play. She holstered her pistol, straightened her posture, and walked the rest of the way down the stairs.

  “My goodness,” Gail said. “What did you do?”

  “Who are you?” Yolanda said. “Where’s Doc Jenkins?”

  “We don’t sit and wait for individuals to call,” Gail said. “The call comes in, and we take them in turn.” She was playing a hunch that Yolanda’s corner of the dark side played by the same rules as Jonathan’s side and contracted for off-the-books medical care. “Tell me what happened.”

  “Some bitch shot me this afternoon,” Yolanda said. “Ridiculously lucky shot.”

  “I hope you were able to return the favor,” Gail said.

  “I did what I had to do,” Yolanda said. Her features darkened. “Where is your medical bag?”

  “Upstairs,” Gail said, doubling down on the bluff. “I wanted to see what your injuries were before I bring down the wrong equipment.” She approached her patient, hoping that enough of the combat medic training from her FBI days would allow her to pull this off.

  Yolanda struggled to take a deep breath, and she winced against a wave of pain. “You’re wearing a gun,” she said, eyeing the holstered Glock on Gail’s hip.

  “You’ve been shot while shooting others,” Gail said, noting that a cocked SIG Sauer pistol sat on the surface of the workbench next to her patient. “It’s a violent world. I can’t save lives if I lose my own.” She cringed inwardly at the corniness of the line. “Now, let me see your wound.” She felt like she was drowning in this deception. She had no endgame but was rather winging it in hopes of finding inspiration.

  Gail stooped to get a closer look, but Yolanda kept her hand pressed on the bloody gauze she had self-applied to the left side of her ribs. Something had changed behind the patient’s eyes. There hadn’t been a lot of time for trust to build, but whatever little bit might have taken hold seemed to have eroded away. “Where did you go to medical school?” she asked.

  “University of Virginia.” Please, God, let there be a medical school at UVA.

  “What does mediastinal shift mean?”

  Gail stood back to her full height and did her best to look offended. “You’re the one who called for help . . . Nicole.” She bet the farm on her having used her alias when she called for help. “If you don’t—”

  “Where did you get that name?”

  “Which name?”

  “The one you just called me. Your voice stuttered a little.”

  Gail gave an indignant huff. “Well, I . . . That’s the name I was given. Is there—”

  For a wounded woman, Yolanda moved with amazing speed as she reached out and snatched the pistol from its spot on the workbench.

  Gail was at a bad angle, on the wrong side of her attacker, and too far away to beat her to the gun. As Yolanda’s hand slapped down on the pistol’s grip, Gail drove her knee into the bullet wound. She felt bones move as the patient launched an agonized howl.

  Gail didn’t care. Yolanda hadn’t yet dropped her weapon, and until she did—or until Gail had control of it—nothing else mattered. She grabbed the assassin’s wrist with her left hand while she drove her right thumb into Yolanda’s eye.

  Another wail.

  “Drop the gun!” Gail said.

  “Who are you?”

  Gail threw another knee, and this time, bones moved a lot. “Let go of the gun, dammit.”

  Yolanda’s hands were slick with
blood, and now so were Gail’s. She kept her gaze laser focused on the pistol’s muzzle. As long as you can’t see the little round hole, the little round hole can’t see you, either.

  Gail pulled her right hand away from Yolanda’s face and doubled up on her grip on the gun. She let out a wail of her own as she focused all her strength on the place where the SIG’s grip met the trigger guard. With a two-handed pull and twist, she was able to hyperextend the wounded woman’s wrist and elbow, and the pistol slipped away, snapping the would-be shooter’s forefinger in a right angle.

  Another wail.

  “Why did you kill Randy Goodman?” Gail shouted. She didn’t intend to be so loud, but adrenaline did that to you.

  Yolanda had landed on the floor, on her left side. Her bullet wound was bleeding ferociously now as she clutched her ribs with her right hand and her eye with her left. “Who are you, you bitch?”

  “Not a doctor,” Gail said.

  “Oh, you are so dead,” Yolanda growled.

  “Says the lady sitting in her own blood,” Gail growled back.

  “You have no idea what you’ve done.”

  “Tell me.”

  Yolanda’s good eye narrowed as she considered Gail. “You’re with that rescue team, aren’t you?” she said. “Blue Eyes and Gigantor.”

  Gail didn’t respond, but she felt color rising in her face.

  “They’re dead, you know. Were they friends of yours?”

  Gail nearly corrected the facts but decided to let her go instead. “Yes, they were friends of mine.”

  “Hired whores,” Yolanda said. “Just like you and me.”

  “Why did you kill them?”

  “I didn’t kill anyone. That was the agency’s doing. I thought the whole thing was stupid.”

  “I watched you kill Randy Goodman,” Gail said.

  Yolanda’s shoulders sagged. “Are you shitting me? That was you? Jesus, I deserve to die.”

  “Why did you kill him?”

  Yolanda forced a laugh, which brought frothy bubbles to her lips and her nose. “There’s only a few reasons to kill anyone, bitch. Why do you think?”

  “To keep him quiet.”

  Yolanda said nothing.

  “The same reason you killed Harry Dawkins.”

  Yolanda recoiled from the sound of the name, seemed genuinely surprised. “So, you do know. Good for you. You’re better at this shit than I expected you to be. With that lesbian GQ look, I expected you to be one of those clueless G-man types.”

  “What does Senator Clark have to do with this?”

  Yolanda’s demeanor changed. The dismissive “my shit don’t stink” attitude transformed into what Gail interpreted to be a flash of fear. It didn’t last long, but it was there. She coughed again, and there was more blood.

  “Oh, honey, your death wish is so going to come true,” Yolanda said.

  From upstairs, Gail heard the sound of the front door opening and closing. The sound of footsteps.

  “You’re not very good at this, are you?” Yolanda pressed. That smarmy smile had returned. “I’m in the basement!” she shouted.

  Gail drew her Glock, leveled it at Yolanda’s head.

  “What’s the point?” the wounded woman mocked. “You gonna kill me just for the hell of it?”

  The footsteps approached the opening at the top of the stairs.

  Gail’s mind screamed for a solution. Had she walked into a trap? No, that didn’t make sense. Yolanda had been genuinely surprised to see her. And it didn’t matter now.

  The footsteps paused at the top of the stairs, and then she saw feet and pant legs as a man started down.

  Gail kept Yolanda’s SIG in her left hand, pointing at the lady on the floor, and she stepped to her right to make herself visible to the newcomer, her Glock trained up at him. “Let me see your hands,” she said.

  The newcomer looked to be about sixty years old. Fit in an older guy sort of way, he wore a suit that was a little too big for him—tailoring that could easily conceal a firearm. He carried two bags in his hands. One was leather, and the other was actually more of a box—a tackle box made of plastic. He froze. “I am not armed,” he said.

  “You must be Doc Jenkins,” Gail said.

  “I—I am.”

  “Come on down, Doc,” Yolanda called from her spot on the floor. “I’ve lost a lot of blood, but I think I’m okay. Might have nicked a lung.”

  Doc Jenkins’s face folded into a raisiny scowl. “There’s no such thing as nicking a lung.” He quickened his pace for two steps but then stopped and looked at Gail. “May I?”

  “Don’t worry about my friend, Doc,” Yolanda mocked. “She’s not the cold-blooded type. Her only play is to get out while she can.”

  Doc Jenkins waited for Gail’s nod. She stepped back to let him pass. It was at that moment when she first saw the security camera at the top of the stairs. She pivoted her head and saw another one attached to the ceiling joist just above the chair where Yolanda had been sitting.

  Yolanda caught the look in Gail’s eyes and said, “Your only smart plays are to kill us both or to run as fast and as far as you can. Hiding from Uncle Sam can be a real challenge.”

  Doc Jenkins walked backward as he passed Gail, keeping an eye on her and her guns. She watched him, then looked at Yolanda, who gave her the finger. “I told you, you weren’t very good at this,” the wounded woman said.

  Gail looked at the camera at the top of the stairs again and then back at the doctor and his patient.

  “Bye,” Yolanda said.

  Holstering her Glock and stuffing the muzzle of the SIG down the back of her pants, Gail took the stairs two at a time back up to the first floor. She spun to the left and headed out the front door, then paused a few seconds on the porch to strip off her bloody latex gloves and stuff them into the back pocket of her jeans. She’d literally have to burn these pants by the time the night was done.

  Darkness had fallen, providing Gail cover as she retraced her steps back to her car. She refused to give in to the urge to look backward to see if she was being followed. She didn’t want to make any move that would call attention. With her bloodstained blouse and pants, she’d have a hard time answering any curious inquiries. The closer she got to the car, the more convinced she was that someone was going to jump out and grab her.

  She wanted her pistol in her hand but instead pulled on her shirttail to make sure that both pistols were still concealed. With twenty yards left to go, she reached into her right front pocket and found the key. Almost there.

  Less than a minute later, she was inside the car and the doors were locked. In a little over an hour, she’d be back in Fisherman’s Cove.

  And then what?

  The shakes didn’t hit her until she was already on the Beltway.

  CHAPTER 25

  Jonathan had set aside time in the schedule for rest, but after very few minutes, it became obvious to all three of them that sleep—or anything resembling it—was not in the cards. It was too hot, too buggy, and the clock was ticking too fast. On the positive side, they had made good time on their hike through the jungle. They’d started out with nearly two hours of light left, and without a bunch of kids in tow, they’d been able to make good time, covering nearly six miles before darkness fell. That left only four to be covered in the dark. At this rate, they could be in Tuxtla Gutiérrez by midnight, give or take. With a lot of luck, they could be out of this godforsaken place and on their way to America before first light.

  If not, then prudence dictated that they wait until the next night. The risks of moving during daylight outstripped the benefits by a large margin.

  Now that it was dark, and his perceived world glowed green in his night vision, Jonathan felt in control again. Never mind the fact that natural predators of the night were far more dangerous than those of the daytime. And never mind the fact that through his NVGs, the eyes of those predators shone like green lightbulbs as Jonathan passed with his party. Life was just too shor
t to end up being something’s dinner. That’s what firearms were for.

  The predators that concerned Jonathan were of the human variety, and after darkness fell, the odds tilted vastly in his direction. To be able to see and shoot an enemy who was functionally blind was a huge advantage.

  “How are you holding up, Harry?” Jonathan asked. He had to speak more loudly than he liked to be heard above the screaming insects and frogs, but it was important for the PC to know that he wasn’t alone. Harry walked in the middle of the three-man column, as always, but this time Boxers was in the lead, while Jonathan brought up the rear.

  “I’m doing fine,” Dawkins said. “The red light helps a lot. At least I can see what’s in front of my face. How much farther does your magic GPS machine tell you we have to go?”

  “I show it about four miles,” Jonathan said. The truth was that he didn’t yet know precisely where they were going. Venice was supposed to be researching that question back in the office. All he knew for sure at the moment was that they were headed to Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Given the nature of their kit and weapons, they couldn’t exactly wander the streets without looking like invaders, so Venice’s mission was to find them something on the southwestern edge of the town.

  His earbud popped. “Scorpion, Mother Hen.”

  Jonathan pressed the TRANSMIT button in the center of his vest. “Good evening, Mother Hen. Do you have news for me?”

  “That’s affirmative,” she said. “I wanted you to know that your exfil assets are in place and ready to go on your order.”

  “Wow,” Jonathan said. “That was fast.”

  “It’s why you pay me the big bucks,” she said.

  Truer words had never been spoken. “How did you do it?”