Tuni blotted her eyes and wiped her nose. “Oh, hell, are we leaving or not?”
“Well, we need to retrieve Dr. Rheese and Matthew. We cannot leave either of them out here alone. The other kidnapper has yet to be apprehended, too. So I must stay here. But I do not wish for you to have to remain for another moment, so I’m willing to send you back to the city with Isaiah, if that’s what you wish. Oliver and I will fetch Matthew and apprehend Dr. Rheese and his accomplice. Is that what you want?”
She glanced back at the woods. The sky was starting to lighten in the east. She clearly didn’t want to see Matthew, but she didn’t want him out there in danger, even if he hadn’t felt the same concern for her.
“Yes,” she finally answered. “Please get him out of there. I want to be in a bed.”
Abel snapped his fingers for Isaiah to come. “Take Miss Tuni back to the hotel.”
“What about the men here?” Isaiah asked of the eager-faced Cubans congregating near the truck. “They were told few hours, and they no like all the shooting.”
Abel glanced at the ten or more men standing around the back of the second truck and trying to ascertain whether the present conversation involved them, their return home, or the promised money.
“Climb into the truck, Tuni,” Abel said. “I’ll see you in the morning. Everything will be all right, you hear?”
She attempted a smile. “Thanks,” she said.
Abel closed the door and walked to the rear of the truck. In Spanish, he told the men that the truck was heading back to town now and that anyone who wished could get on and receive their pay upon arrival. Or they could stay with him for a few more hours and double their money.
Five of the men were game; the other six didn’t want to stay another minute, no matter what he was paying. They climbed into the back of the truck, Tuni got in the cab, and Isaiah backed down the hill to where the silver van was parked. Then he swung the truck forward onto the dirt road and headed back toward Havana. Abel waved Oliver over and gathered his five remaining recruits. “We’re going to go out there and end this,” he said. “How would you gentlemen like some ammunition in those rifles of yours?”
THIRTY-THREE
On the flat-topped mountain, the highest peak in the area, Chuck Kohl lay with his face half buried in the dark soil and leaf litter, mouth open, unblinking eyes gazing at the walkie-talkie. A few feet from Chuck’s body, Roger Turner lay on his back on the ground. The hole in his blue polo shirt, an inch below the placket, still smoked. A purple flower blossomed across his chest as he labored to inhale.
Matt sat on his knees, watching his dad struggle to breathe, wishing he could do something. As he watched, a hand moved. It seemed to be pointing at something. Matt caught on, grabbed the half-buried rock out of the dirt, and put it in his dad’s hand, closing his fingers around it. Roger smiled faintly and closed his eyes, his breath growing shallower with each rise and fall. With what little strength remained, he squeezed the rock.
* * *
Fernando Solorzano rummaged through the second backpack, discovering an MRE and nodded his pleasure. He had burned off too many calories during the night and needed fuel. He tore open the brown plastic and found the main course: tuna and noodles. Ugh. Side of applesauce, oatmeal brick, giant cracker, peanut-butter packet. He ripped open the oatmeal cookie and stuffed the whole thing in his mouth.
As Fando chewed he glanced up at Turner, handing a rock to his dying father. No appreciable threat in that, so he let them be. Then he had a sudden thought and glanced around. Shotgun on the ground, three feet away from Turner. Pistol in the bushes, where he had smacked it out of the dad’s hand. Pistol on the hip of the dead dude with the shotgun.
He turned his eyes to the tree that Rheese had run behind. He could still see the dumb shit’s elbow poking out the left side. If Rheese weren’t such a useless coward, he could have gone for one of those guns. And Turner? Making him strip down was brilliant. Danny would have been impressed with that one. Turner couldn’t touch anything around the site, not even the clothes in which his own father was dying in. Fando snorted, amused at the father and son’s plight, but he needed to figure out what to do next. They couldn’t go back to the car, for others would surely be there—maybe more American cops.
What do you want? Fando thought. Turner and Rheese dead, especially Rheese. So kill them now. Just do it, homes. What the hell are you waiting for?
He couldn’t quite sort out the answers in his head, not in any clear, rational form—only that he didn’t want to be alone, and he didn’t want it to be over. If he killed the two of them now, he would be on his own, the only survivor, and he couldn’t be that. Raúl, Danny, him. He couldn’t go home. No, when this thing was over, he would put a gun in his mouth, aim high, and pull the trigger. But he wasn’t ready for that yet. That was why Turner and Rheese—or at least Turner—got to live for now. He could control Turner. Rheese, though—he was feeling just about done with that fat, useless, stuck-up piece of shit.
* * *
Matthew Turner, wearing only his jeans, knelt in the dirt, hunched over his father with his hands shaking before him. He needed to get pressure on the wound, but his dad’s shirt would be imprinted for sure. He needed something between them, something clean. One of his gloves sat nestled in the ball of clothes behind him, but he couldn’t think. He looked up at Fando, digging through the backpacks. That man needed to die. Matt’s mind raced. Even if he stopped the bleeding from the chest wound, could anyone even survive an injury like that? It was in the middle of the chest, and he obviously couldn’t breathe right. He could see his father looking up at him, trying to move his lips, shape them into words, but they just quivered and contorted, and he finally gave up. His chest expanded a little less with each breath.
“Get up,” Fando said coldly. “We’re moving out.”
Matt didn’t even look up. “Fuck off.”
Fando cackled, as if both shocked and delighted by such bold defiance. “Oh, you wanna join yer daddy there on the ground? Get yer ass up before I put one through yer head.”
Matt glared up at him, wishing him dead. He scanned around him as best he could without moving his head. There was the shotgun on the ground near his dad’s dead friend. But he needed a way to grab it without touching it, and fast enough to get a shot off before Fando could react.
Roger gargled up some blood.
“You’re going to be all right, Dad,” he said.
Fando laughed again. “Really? You got some kind of big-ass Band-Aid on you, gonna fix up his boo-boo? He’s done. Let’s go.”
“I’m not leaving him like this,” Matt said.
“Oh, right,” Fando said gently. “Shit yeah, I don’t know what I was thinkin’, bro. No way you could just leave him lyin’ here dyin’. Dude, what kinda asshole am I?”
Fando stepped forward, knelt on the other side of Roger, and put his pistol muzzle to Roger’s forehead. Matt screamed and leaped up to tackle him, but Fando pulled the trigger, and blood sprayed over all three of them.
Matt’s shoulder bashed into Fando’s neck, and they crashed to the ground. Matt felt a flash of Fando’s consciousness enter his brain, but he rolled aside before it could knock him out. Fando clutched at his own throat, choking, as Matt hopped to his feet, blind with rage. Yanking the gun out of Fando’s hand, he felt his legs give out as the imprint came on, but he flung the weapon out into the woods as hard as he could, and his body was his own again.
Fando coughed, swore, and turned on his side to get up. Frantic, Matt looked around and spotted a rock about the size and shape of a Frisbee. He lurched over, and picked it up.
Fando was on his hands and knees, about to rise. He said, “Now I’m really gonna tear yer punk ass apart.”
Matt brought the rock down on the back of Fando’s head, the rock breaking into two pieces. Fando crumpled to the ground and was still.
“Rheese!” Matt shouted.
“I’m here, lad. Is the bastard dead?”
“I don’t know, but he’s out. He . . . he killed my dad.”
“I am so sorry, son.”
Matt turned around and picked his long undershirt out of the pile of clothes and, walking over to his dad, laid it over his face. Blood seeped up into it at once from the head wound. Matt returned to the clothes and shook out his turtleneck, and a glove fell out of it. He put it on his right hand and looked around for its mate.
“We need to get out of here, Turner,” Rheese said. “I know you don’t want to leave him—”
Matt cut him off. “It’s fine. We’re leaving. I’ll have someone come back for them. Just one thing first . . .”
Matt pulled one of his socks over his exposed left hand, then bent down to pick up the shotgun. He slid the bolt back halfway, revealing a fresh shell in the ejection port, then slid the bolt shut again and walked over to Fando’s limp body.
“Are you really going to do it, lad?” Rheese seemed shocked and a bit frightened at the thought.
“Yup. He dies right here.”
Rheese stepped beside him and nudged Fando’s leg with his foot. No response. His face was planted in the dirt, facing away from them.
“Go ahead, Rheese,” Matt said.
“Go what? What do you—”
“The opal . . . his pocket. Just get it. I know that’s what you’re thinking.”
“Well, I’d bloody well forgotten about it, but since you mention it, I suppose it’d be a right waste just to leave it.” He crouched down and dug under Fando’s hip for a moment. “A-ha!” He pulled his sock out from Fando’s pocket. The end snapped up at his hand, empty. “Must have come out in his pocket,” Rheese said, shoving his hand back under.
“Hurry up,” Matt said.
“I’m trying, Turner. The man’s not exactly a featherweight.”
“Flip him over.”
Rheese paused and peered up at Matt with an expression of incredulity. “How about I hold the gun, and you turn him over?”
Matt had waited long enough. He let go of the shotgun’s barrel, leaned over, and pulled Rheese’s shoulder back. “Out of the way. I need to get this over with.”
“Just hang on, Turner . . . I think I feel it.”
“Move, Rheese. I’m not joking. You can root through his pockets after he’s dead. I’m not risking him coming to, like the end of a bad horror movie.”
Fando’s leg spasmed.
Rheese flinched and fell back toward Matt, and Matt shifted to the left, out of Rheese’s path. The shotgun muzzle dipped just as Fando rolled right and swung his free arm blindly out. His hand caught the shotgun barrel.
Matt tried to pull back, but Fando twisted the barrel in one sharp motion, breaking Matt’s trigger finger and forcing him to let go.
It all happened in a second or two. Now Matt was standing, nursing his gloved hand. Rheese was on the ground, trying to shuffle away. Fando was sitting with one knee up, the other on the ground, the shotgun aimed at Matt.
“You two are funny as hell,” Fando said. “Can’t do nothin’ right! Yer like those cops that bungle around fallin’ over each other in the old movies!”
Rheese muttered, “Keystone Cops.”
Fando’s smile evaporated. “So let me show you how this shit is done. I just decide I’m killin’ one of you. So now I just do it!”
He moved the muzzle from Matt to Rheese, and Matt jumped in front of it.
“Wait!” Matt said. “Just . . . wait.”
“I can’t believe you, kid! This is yer goddamn homeboy now? This son of a bitch would throw yer ass in front of a bullet without a second thought! You gotta be the dumbest fuck I ever met. ‘Get off him!’” Mocking Matt’s earlier plea. “Let me tell you somethin’ about yer buddy that maybe you didn’t catch. That rich Russian dude? Rheese wasn’t tryin’ to sell him no Bible. That was just the icing or whatever. That was just to make the real shit look shinier. He was sellin’ you.”
Matt looked at Rheese, sitting on the ground, his head hung low, not saying anything.
“You woulda spent the rest of yer life in a damned dungeon or somethin’. Who knows what the hell that dude was gonna do with you? But he was gonna pay twenty-five mil to do it.” Fando laughed. “And you screwed the whole thing up! I don’t know what the hell you said, but I guess he was like, ‘Screw this shit; you can keep his punk ass!’” He giggled. “So what you think of yer buddy now, eh? You still wanna take a shot for him? Or maybe—ha ha—maybe you wanna take him out yerself. No one would know—just you and me, homes.”
Fando held the shotgun with his right hand, ready to fire should someone move. With his left hand he dragged over one half of the flat rock that Matt had hit him with. He positioned the rock on the ground before him, and now he had the opal in his hand. He placed the gem on top of the rock, in a little concave dip in the middle. Then he stood up.
“Get up, Rheese,” he said. “I ain’t gonna shoot yer fat ass.”
Rheese tentatively rose, as if suspecting a trick, but he must have decided he was no more at risk of being killed standing up than lying in the dirt.
“I want both of you to pay attention to this for a second,” Fando said, taking a step back. “This shit is gonna be crazy, all right? Trust me.”
Matt looked at Fando and at the shotgun pointed toward the rock on the ground. The opal was sitting on the rock. Matt’s eyes suddenly widened, and he shot a look up at Fando, who smiled and said, “Yup.” Then, putting the muzzle of the shotgun a couple of inches from the opal, he fired.
The opal exploded into thousands of tiny bits, ricocheting off the rock and into Matt and Rheese.
Matt hit the ground hard, his arms and legs flailing as if he was being electrocuted. He tried to scramble off his back but kept flopping down again. He mumbled strange words in a high-pitched voice, with intermittent outbursts of garbled nonsense, and made snappy flinching movements like someone possessed.
THIRTY-FOUR
The rising sun lit up the highest trees on the mountain, steadily descending to those of lower elevation. Jess, Paul, and Núñez veered off the paved road to climb the hill toward the campsite and the silver van. A deep gunshot rang out from over the mountain and echoed all around them. They stopped.
“You got a mark on that, Núñez?” Jess asked.
“Yes sir. I’d say one to two clicks south.” She surveyed the sky and landmarks around them. “I can get us close.”
“Then let’s move. But we’re still talking to our buddies at that truck.”
Núñez had been trying to raise Chuck or Roger on her radio every few minutes. A few steps farther up the hill, they heard the distant sound of a diesel engine drifting away.
“Bastards are leaving!” Jess said.
They kicked up their pace.
The two Cubans had told them about the job offer that had spread by word of mouth, and about the three men and one woman—”muy guapa, muy sexy“—who had picked them up at the baseball field in Guanajay. They mentioned the offered pay, and the only information describing the job: to help find a missing young man. Jess had asked who was in charge, and the older of the two told him of the tall, well-built man who spoke Spanish with the vocabulary and accent of a Spaniard. The two black men clearly worked for him, he had said. And the beautiful woman seemed to be just the boss’s girlfriend.
When they made it to the hilltop where the remaining truck was parked, not a soul was around. Paul found the tracks of the departed second truck behind the one still parked.
“Maybe they all left in the one truck we heard,” Paul said. “Obviously, a much smaller load for the way back . . .”
Jess checked the door on the remaining truck and found it unlocked, so he climbed inside the cab and poked around for anything of interest. Nothing in the glove box, nothing in the door compartments. He turned around and noticed a storage space between the back of the cab and the seat back. Clicking on the overhead lamp, he peered into the space and found some duffel bags. Crammed behind the
driver’s seat was a nice suitcase.
“Anything, sir?” Núñez asked.
“Yeah, we got some luggage here.”
Climbing down, he lifted the release lever, and the seat back sprang forward and down. He grabbed the first duffel and threw it to the ground. “Here, root through this.”
After heaving another duffel bag down, he wrestled the heavy suitcase from where it lay wedged, and opened it on the seat. In a zippered pocket, he found airline tickets, all for Tuni St. James.
Matty’s girlfriend? It didn’t make sense at first, but then he recalled that she had phoned the Turner house to let them know that Matt had been taken and that she was with people claiming to be law enforcement. She had to be Ms. “muy sexy.” Something was starting to come together in his head, but he was missing pieces. Unless these men she was with were part of Rheese’s group, how would they have known that Rheese and company were going to Cuba? Especially if they didn’t really have access to law enforcement data. And why would they want Tuni here? Was it a double kidnapping? Two completely separate perp groups competing for the same goal? And what was that goal . . . besides just Matty?
“I’ve got clothes and some men’s toiletries here,” Núñez said.
Jess opened the suitcase’s main compartment and found neatly folded and organized women’s clothes, along with a toiletry bag that matched the suitcase.
“No photo IDs?” Jess asked rhetorically, and Núñez shook her head. “We gotta piece this thing together, folks. I feel like everyone on this goddamn mountain knows what the hell’s going on except for us. We got no clue where Matty and Rheese are, or Roger and Chuck, or our maybe-Cuban buddies that are sending us off on wild-goose chases. Not to mention, we got us a bloodthirsty murderer out here. At least we got the damned sun, though. That’s something.”
“Chuck or Roger, this is Núñez. Please respond.”
A few seconds later, a strange voice came on: “They’re dead, bitch,” it said. “You can shut up now.”
Paul, Jess, and Núñez looked at each other. Jess swallowed and closed his eyes, but a second later they were open again. “Let’s go get this fuck,” he said.
The Opal (Book 2 of the Matt Turner Series) Page 23
