by Tara Janzen
It was all a moot point. The line of sight from the house to the boat was a straight shot at seventy yards. Conroy Farrel didn’t give a damn about the money or the Sphinx, and Warner didn’t have to leave the boat. All he needed to do was move about four feet, and he’d be dead, and something was telling Dax that Conroy had a plan to get Warner to move four lousy feet.
And he did.
The collective murmur of awe running through twenty calloused drug runners made Dax look up toward the house, and he wondered how in the world Erich Warner was going to resist.
Farrel had sent Suzi out onto his deck, obviously unarmed, the radio in her one hand, held up to her ear, and in the other, the Memphis Sphinx, held up high into the fading light of the late afternoon sun. The Sphinx did not fail, not in any way. The light falling on the crystal eyes shattered into a dazzling, glittering spectrum of color and brilliance. The body of the statue was luminous in sunlight, supple. It was as if Suzi were holding an incandescent creature, a living thing that was warming in her hand.
An illusion, of course, but a damned effective one.
Anthropologists had a term they used when trying to get close to indigenous peoples who had never before been contacted by the outside world-“lure and attraction.” They would set glittery pieces of modern junk along riverbanks, where the tribes-people were known to come for water or to fish, and that’s what Conroy was doing, luring old Warner in with a show-a beautiful woman, a stunning artifact, and lots of flash and dazzle to catch the German’s eye.
Dax wouldn’t have fallen for it, but he knew how little exposure was necessary for a sniper’s shot to hit home. All a sniper needed was to see part of a man’s head, just enough to get on target, and if Dax had been responsible for Erich Warner’s safety, he would have made damn sure the German didn’t go poking his head out of the boat.
Warner was doomed. Dax’s problem was Suzi. When Conroy killed Warner, all those twenty drug runners could easily have a knee-jerk reaction and open fire. Or possibly, Conroy wouldn’t be content with just killing Warner. Maybe he would open fire on all of them, and then it was going to be mayhem, with Suzi exposed for as long as it took her to get back in the house-a few seconds at most. But it took far less than one second to die.
So Dax made his way back down the dock, through all the armed men, and when he heard the shot, he knew Warner was already dead, that the man had stepped out of concealment to get a better look at the amazing sight of immortality blazing away in the sunlight.
Stupid bastard.
The thought was fleeting, cut short by a screeching wail of some unspeakable emotion coming out of Shoko. For a second, the twenty men on the dock were held in check by the awful, wrenching sound.
Not Dax, he was moving, breaking into a run, heading for cover, and planning his assault on the house.
Orders-Creed loved them. They gave his life a certain dimension. Performing them superbly well gave him a lot of satisfaction.
The boss had said to tranquilize Conroy Farrel if the man set one foot onto the deck, if he exposed himself for even the barest instant of time-and Creed did. He’d been watching the doorway like a hawk, and almost at the same time as Creed heard the shot, Conroy stepped out, and Creed put pressure on his trigger, darting the man.
To Creed’s amazement, the guy did not go down. He kept moving.
“Tough bastard,” Zach said, obviously impressed, with good reason.
“Suzi?”
“Farrel grabbed her on her way in-geezus.”
A screeching, banshee wail tore through the air.
“Boss?” Creed said into his radio.
“Close on the house,” Dylan said. “Get Suzi and Farrel out of there.”
“Geezus. You seeing that?” Zach said next to him.
“Christ.” He heard Dylan in his ear.
“Who is that woman?” he said, but didn’t get an answer. Down on the dock, the Asian woman had drawn a knife and already cut three of the soldiers trying to get back on the boat. They all had blood on their shirts. One of them had dropped to his knees, his hand holding his throat. Creed could have given him the odds on that move working out for him-zip.
The Asian woman moved like lightning-like Red Dog, was what he actually thought, sleek and smooth, and lethally efficient.
He didn’t know what kind of knife the woman was wielding, but he wanted one. Hell, he wanted a dozen. Three guys sliced and diced and it still cut through the mooring rope like butter. Once she’d freed the boat, in one smooth move, she swung around and had her knife at the captain’s throat.
“She’s gonna…” Zach said.
“Oh, yeah,” Creed agreed, and then it was over. A long arc of blood shot out of the captain’s neck, and he crumpled to the deck as the woman started the gunboat’s engine and headed up the Tambo River.
And so she could have had her little river cruise. She’d done SDF a favor, two dead cartel cowboys and two probably mortally wounded, and the odds were now down to about three to one.
But the girl didn’t stop. She went for the.50-caliber gun mounted on the boat, and Dylan made his call.
“Take her out.”
“No shot.” He hated saying it, but he couldn’t see her. In another two seconds, he and Zach weren’t going to be able to see the boat either. She was moving upstream, past the house, and it was blocking her from their line of sight.
“Maybe you better go get one,” Dylan suggested.
“Roger.” He and Zach were already on the move. They knew what needed to be done.
The first guy to get hit by one of her.50-caliber rounds ended up in pieces. The same with the second, and then she started in on the house.
Ba-bam. Ba-bam.
And the whole compound turned into a melee.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Suzi had a plan, and it was called “get the hell out of Dodge.”
She had the Sphinx. Dax was somewhere close by. Conroy Farrel was-well, she didn’t know what Conroy Farrel was, except that it was awful. All she and Dax needed was to rendevous and find some transportation out of this place.
Conroy Farrel needed something else. She didn’t know what, but he was writhing on the floor, almost convulsive. She’d seen the dart he’d pulled out of his neck, and she didn’t understand, except to think that Dylan knew who he was and hadn’t wanted him dead.
She was smart enough to figure out that Conroy Farrel was SDF’s Paraguayan mission.
None of which mattered if she couldn’t get away from here.
Someone was shooting the house, breaking windows, rocking it with blast after blast. Shards of rock and shingles were raining down all around, turning the place into a war zone.
Conroy Farrel still had her fanny pack with her phone and her gun, but she didn’t dare get close enough to him to take her pack back. She did grab the carbine he’d dropped and moved toward the door to the deck, hoping to locate Dax.
Looking out over the deck to the river, there were men running everywhere, a lot of them shooting toward the house, some of them shooting toward the river, but she didn’t see Dax. Dammit. Racing back to the dining room table, she felt a percussive thump-thump-thump shaking the house from below. Then it stopped.
Just one more damn thing.
Moving quickly, she put the Sphinx inside the gray pack, then slipped the straps onto her shoulders. She wasn’t going to lose the statue. If she got out of here, she wanted to get out with her mission completed.
Chances were, though, that she wasn’t going to get out of here. She checked the magazine on the carbine and headed back to the door that was still open onto the deck. Using as much cover as she could, she sidled up to the wall, raised the weapon and settled her cheek onto the stock, and then she found a target and squeezed the trigger.
Everyone in the compound was moving. It was not like shooting fish in a barrel. She missed more than she hit. Her adrenaline was pumping. Her small motor skills were shaky as hell. Half the time she had to hold her sh
ot because she’d lose her focus for a second. Then she’d remind herself to breathe and aim again.
Tunnel vision-that’s what happened to her. She was concentrating so hard on what was out in front of her, that she never saw what was coming up behind her.
Dax had two goals-get to Suzi, and get to Erich Warner’s body, or rather, Erich Warner’s jacket. Screw the Sphinx. He didn’t need it for anything now that Warner was dead.
But Suzi had it, and he bet his girl had it locked down.
Another blast off the.50-cal rocked the house, shattering glass. The next round hit one of the stone walls. Goddamn, somebody needed to take Shoko out. She was on a rampage.
A few shots had come from the house, but they’d stopped a minute or so ago. There were shots still coming from up on the ridge, precision shots, one Vargas boy going down after another, and he’d sure like to know who was helping him out.
He made it to the house by fast-crawling along the edge of the compound, using the trees for concealment, until he could make his break for the deck. When he got there, he swung himself up, subgun ready to blast anybody who came out of the door.
But nobody did, and he ducked inside. At one time, about two minutes ago, the place had been beautiful. Shoko had turned it into a garbage heap. He didn’t see Suzi anywhere. There was a carbine on the floor by the door, though, and when he reached for it, he saw something else lying on the floor-a long, faceted piece of rock crystal.
He knew what it was, and when he picked it up, he got a bad feeling. He had to find Suzi, and he was well aware of the fact that Warner’s jacket was moving away from him and up the river, still wrapped around Warner’s dead body, with Shoko at the wheel.
Still, if his girl was here, he had to find her.
It took him too damn long to check every room, and by the time he finished, he realized he was in danger of being overrun by the few Paraguayans that hadn’t either run away into the jungle or been killed, and he didn’t know where Conroy Farrel had gotten off to-the guy was nowhere.
The last door he checked opened onto a dark stairwell with a deeply dank smell coming up from out of it. He didn’t hesitate. He followed the stairs down at a quick gait, feeling the air getting cooler and wetter.
“Suzi!” he called out, hoping to get an answer, and getting none.
In combat, phone calls were called communications, and though he doubted if Conroy Farrel had let her keep her phone, it was a chance.
His carbine still at the ready, he slipped his phone out of his pocket and called her number-and heard a ring. He speeded up his gait. Nobody answered the phone, but it kept ringing until he got about halfway down the stairs. Then he lost service, dammit.
At the bottom of the stairs, he came out into an underground boathouse, a cave lit by the fading sunlight coming in through its mouth, and a few lit lamps. The cave floor had been extended with a wide dock, and there was a go-fast boat tied up to it. The gate at the cave’s opening had been blown off its hinges. The place still smelled of burned metal and pulverized rock, and all he could think was Shoko and the.50. The girl had blasted her way in here, and she’d done it for one reason only-the Sphinx. His gut was telling him she’d gotten Suzi, too, if for no reason other than he didn’t think his girl would have given up the statue without a fight.
But it wouldn’t have been much of a fight.
Oh, hell no.
Moving quickly, he headed toward the mouth of the cave, and at the edge of the dock came to a sudden halt. There was something, a low, grumbling growl that made the hackles rise on the back of his neck. He’d trapped something in the corner of the cave, something wild, some animal.
He took a step back from the dark form he could see huddled up against the wall, and he exchanged his phone for a flashlight he took off his tac vest. He pushed the button on the light and stopped cold.
It wasn’t an animal. He didn’t know what or who it was, but his first guess would be Conroy Farrel-and he took another step back. The growling deepened, the creature’s wild eyes locked onto his. It was a man, purely human, but a feral human, twisted up in agony, sweat running off of it, his muscles tight, his teeth bared.
Dax had an instinct to try to help, but it was instantly overridden by his need to find Suzi, to save her.
Backing off, without taking his eyes off the guy, he made it back to the boat. He cast off and fired up the engines, and using the throttle, he reversed out of the cave. When he hit open water, he swung the prow of the boat upriver and poured on the speed.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Suzi had never dreamed in all her years that she would die in Paraguay, but the writing was on the wall. She’d made a tactical error, and she was going to die for it. She hadn’t been watching her back, and she’d been caught, attacked from behind by an exceptionally strong, crazed woman with far too many knives who had all but knocked her out and dragged her down and out of the house and thrown her in the bottom of the gunboat.
This was not going to go well, and she knew it, and once again, she was trapped in far too small a space with a dead body, two this time, Erich Warner’s being one of them, she presumed. The man’s clothes were exceedingly expensive, even by her standards, and he’d been shot in the dead center of his face by an expert marksman, and that would have been Conroy Farrel, whose sole purpose had been to kill the German crime lord. And the other dead guy was a Paraguayan homeboy, she would guess. In a new twist for the day, he hadn’t been shot. No, Suzi could see the crazed woman’s handiwork from one side of his throat to the other.
If she hadn’t been so scared, she would have been sick. There was blood everywhere, the bottom of the boat awash in it-the wasteful bitch.
The Asian woman was motoring them up the river, watching the shoreline, and Suzi knew exactly what she was looking for-an open space, a break in the trees where the moonlight could shine down on them. The ceremony for immortality was not that complicated-physical contact with the statue, glinting eyes, moonlight falling on the whole show-immortality. In Warner’s case, considering his state, which was dead, a few pints of fresh blood needed to be poured over the granite Sphinx, and that magic combination would bring him back to life-resurrection.
The Asian Queen here obviously knew all of this, and Suzi didn’t have to work too hard to see what part she played in the drama-blood donor. It was ridiculous. There was a perfectly fresh extra corpse lying in the bottom of the boat, and considering the time frame they were working with, if Knife Girl hadn’t let it all run out of him, the captain’s blood would have been more than fresh enough to suffice.
But no. The bitch had miscalculated, and in Suzi’s opinion, was getting ready to miscalculate again.
Much to her surprise, and her chagrin, Suzi had lost one of the rock-crystal eyes out of the statue. Somewhere on her run, from when she’d grabbed the Sphinx off the kitchen table until Psycho Girl had coldcocked her, she’d lost the left eye, the one she’d taken out earlier but had seen Conroy Farrel put back in. It must have fallen out while she’d been running around the house with the statue, before she’d had the sense to put it back in the gray pack.
And now she was paying for her lapse in logic.
She had a good-sized bruise forming on the side of her face. She could feel it, and it hurt like hell, but she had always supposed it would hurt to be pistol-whipped. It had knocked her out cold for a while-again, dammit-and she’d come around handcuffed to the boat, with the woman frisking her with a knife, cutting her pockets, ripping seams, obviously looking for the damn eye. She’d been cut a dozen times, small nicks and a couple of deeper cuts that all stung like hell and scared her spitless.
So, great, another crappy day of being terrified and run ragged.
This job had been unlike any job General Grant had ever sent her on-and if she wanted another, so help her God, she needed to step up. Buck Grant wanted the Memphis Sphinx, and come hell, high water, and one crazed psycho bitch, she’d gotten it. She’d won. Hands down. The Memphis Sphinx
was lying right there in front of her, cushioned on the backpack and a greasy rag laid inside a box of tools.
Most of it anyway.
But not enough of it. Not in her opinion. To lose her life over a ceremony whose odds of succeeding had just dropped from “highly unlikely, babe” to “no way in hell, bitch” was untenable.
She did have a plan. It was covered in blood, but it was there in the bottom of the boat, the dead Paraguayan’s pistol. All she needed to do was free herself from the handcuffs, move like a lightning bolt, wrestle the pistol out of the bloody holster belted onto the dead guy’s waist, and shoot the black-haired beauty as many times as she possibly could.
Piece of cake.
But she’d had that plan for the last half an hour or so and was still handcuffed to the boat, and then suddenly she ran out of time. Just like that. The river widened, the sky opened up on a grassy inlet, and the bitch slowed the gunboat down.
“This party is over,” Creed said into his radio. The woman in the gunboat had disappeared up the river, taking her.50-caliber gun with her before he’d gotten within range.
He’d lost sight of Dax in the fighting but had to consider that Suzi might still be here somewhere, and the quicker he and Zach found her, the better, and if he found Conroy Farrel, even better.
There’d been some casualties. He didn’t know whose fight this had actually been, or what everybody had been fighting over, except the Sphinx thing, but a lot of boys had died for it-the man in the boat, the captain, four guys here in the compound, and he was betting a few more over on the other side of the house, down by the dock. The house looked like it had been severely damaged-just about every window was shattered, and part of the deck had been blown off.
The sun was falling fast now, the light was low, but the fight was over. He and Zach ran across the compound without meeting any resistance.
“You take the main floor,” he said to Zach. “I’ll check the boathouse.” Or cave, such as it was. They’d all seen the big iron gate covering the opening onto the river.
