Havana Run

by Les Standiford

  He should have had the foresight to fear this woman, he was thinking as he glanced back up. It had taken only seconds to understand, but seconds could sometimes take too long.

  He heard the whisking sound of the scalpel blade as it passed on by his ear, but that was too late as well. In the next moment he felt the searing sensation and a sudden rush of something warm and liquid pouring down his throat.

  He had thrown off the safety, had meant to pull the trigger of his weapon by this time, but whether he had or not was impossible to tell. He was on his hands and knees on the hospital bed now.

  He was coughing and retching, great heaves that shook his body and which he had no power to contain.

  And with every heave came a great warm splash about his hands and knees. He felt his head droop between his shoulders. His trousers were bunched about his knees. His member drooped like a forlorn stalk. And there was a deep, dark pool that had formed in the cavity of the bed below.

  A woman by the bed stood calmly dressing, a surreal rewinding of a film he’d helped to make. She stared at him without expression, then shrugged into her smock and turned to go.

  The sliver of light that fell into the room illuminated the pool above which he hovered briefly, a bright glint in an otherwise dark place. This fountain that fed it seemed impossible to stop, he thought. And then it abruptly did.

  He stared at the pool for a moment, a man so greedy he had grown two mouths. And finally he dove, facedown.

  Chapter Thirty-four

  “Could you hear the shot?” the young woman who had joined them asked Angelica. Her dark-skinned brow was furrowed in concern.

  “A little,” Angelica said. “Maybe. It doesn’t matter now.”

  The doors to the big elevator were closing behind them. They’d sedated Barton Deal before they’d moved him to the gurney, but he was still flailing in his restraints.

  “Remember San Juan Hill,” he said, clutching at John Deal’s arm. “Carry a big goddamned stick.”

  “Take it easy,” Deal said, a hand on his father’s shoulder. “Just try to rest for now.” Maybe Dr. Aponte should have given more sedative. In the next moment, the old man’s eyes closed and his grip relaxed from fierce to firm.

  “I pressed the pillow over his hand,” the young woman said. “It was all that I could do.”

  “You did much more,” Angelica told the young woman.

  The woman shook her head. “He was a pig,” she said. “He would have killed me without a thought.”

  Deal watched the numbers tick off on the elevator. Dr. Aponte had inserted her key into the emergency lock. The car would bypass calls from any other floor, even the normal lobby stop. Emergency Receiving was situated on the basement level. The opposite set of doors would open, they’d rush their patient to a waiting ambulance.

  Four more floors, then fifty giant steps to freedom, he thought. He and Angelica had met Aponte in the emergency waiting room what seemed like ages earlier. He’d marked every stride from the swinging doors to the elevator.

  Four, then three, then two clicked off the elevator’s gauge. All of them watched the numbers fall. They passed the lobby with a ping, and Deal felt himself tense as the heavy car began to slow.

  There came a hydraulic sigh as the car shuddered into place, then a slight sucking sound as the doors slid slowly open. There was a man in a dark suit standing at the gradually widening opening. He seemed to be thinking about something else as the scene in the car unfolded before him. His distraction might have saved their lives.

  “Machado,” Angelica breathed. Dr. Aponte’s face was ashen.

  Machado’s face had undergone several transformations in the few moments the elevator doors were open. As his gaze locked onto the form of Barton Deal, puzzlement was giving way to concern.

  He glanced at the younger Deal’s name tag and mumbled something in Russian. “He wants to know where you are taking the patient,” Dr. Aponte said.

  Machado’s expression had found its way to outright suspicion. He was reaching for something inside his jacket when Deal strode forward and caught him by his tie. “Why don’t you join us, comrade,” Deal said, jerking him inside the car.

  “Close the doors,” he called to Miguel, as he drove his fist into the side of Machado’s jaw.

  The man went down and Deal kicked the hand that had emerged with a pistol upheld. The gun flew away, clattering across the steel floor like a metal crab. Angelica bent for the weapon, but it skittered out a gap in the closing doors.

  Machado rolled over catlike, came up on his hands and knees, and a slender, spring-loaded knife appeared in his hands from somewhere. He rose up slowly, his eyes on Deal, muttering something in Spanish.

  “He says you are under arrest,” Angelica said. “He says to put up your hands and submit.”

  Deal nodded, staring at the waving knife. “Submit to what?” he said to Angelica, edging away. Miguel was pinned in a corner behind the gurney. Neither he nor Angelica was armed.

  Machado gave Angelica a warning look and rattled off something else. “He says to turn around and place your hands against the side of the car.”

  Deal had missed the Spanish, but he could read the glitter in the man’s eyes. “Tell him he can go fuck his mother,” Deal said.

  Whatever she said made Machado blink before he came in. The hesitation was enough for Deal to dodge the swipe of the knife. The blade clattered against the steel side of the car, but Machado managed to hang on.

  He was moving in again, eyes dancing now, all pretense of arrest out the window. “Maybe open those doors again, Miguel,” Deal called, edging away from the blade. He heard Angelica echo the command.

  Machado wasn’t waiting, though. He strode forward, the knife swinging back, poised for a low strike this time—disembowelment, Deal was thinking…

  …when he saw a flash of something at Machado’s back, and the man stagger sideways with a groan. He was swatting at something at the side of his head, like a man bothered by a stinging insect.

  Dr. Aponte danced away from the aimless slashing of Machado’s blade, her eyes fixed on the gleaming hypodermic that she’d jammed in his ear. Machado hesitated, trying to get his feet steady beneath him, a glare of hatred directed her way.

  It seemed as if he might be about to make a charge for her, and Deal readied himself for a tackle. Then Machado seemed to wilt like a blow-up doll suddenly relieved of his air. He collapsed without a word, his head bouncing off the wall of the elevator car, then settling to the floor.

  Deal felt a draft at his back and turned to see that the doors of the car were open again. A doctor with a stethoscope dangling around his neck stood staring at a pistol that he held gingerly in his hands. A female nurse stood by, equally amazed.

  Deal reached to pluck the pistol from the doctor’s hands with one hand and with the other pointed at Machado’s inert form. “This man needs help,” he said to the thunder-struck doctor. Then he motioned the others out the door.

  Chapter Thirty-five

  When Valdés came awake, he thought at first it was simply more of his troublesome dreams. The bed beside him, where the old man had lain, was empty. A food tray lay tumbled to the floor, and Valdés wondered if that was the sound that had wakened him after all. How could he have slept through such a thing?

  In the other bed, where the lunatic normally lay bound and often gagged, the news was worse. Truly the stuff of nightmares, Valdés thought, as he stood uncertainly, trying to steady himself with a grip on his folding chair.

  The lunatic was naked, his body covered with blood—face, chest and legs—his bedclothes drenched in it. The man had managed to work himself loose from his heavy restraints and was sitting with his legs tucked under him, holding something in his hands to which he crooned an unbroken litany.

  “Matanza,” Valdés heard. And other, even more troubling things as well.

  Valdés reached for the pistol at his belt and groped about
for a moment before he realized that his weapon had disappeared. He glanced up quickly, reassuring himself that it was not his pistol that the madman held.

  After a moment, Valdés stole closer to the lunatic’s bed, close enough now to see what it was that he held. The realization sent an icy shock through him. Valdés clutched at his own groin in reflex and fought to repress the pressure that rose in his throat.

  Lunacy incarnate. A man talking to his own dismembered manhood, Valdés thought, his mind reeling. How could he remain upright?

  And what had become of Diaz? he wondered, staggering away toward the nurses’ station. He felt glass crackle beneath his shoes. Something else broken, he thought. Something else he should have heard.

  He found the nurses’ station empty, the nearby lounge deserted as well. He snatched up the phone but found it dead. It took him a moment to register the slashed and dangling line.

  He dropped the phone and hurried back down the hallway toward the elevators. Fear had enveloped him by now, and he glanced over his shoulder repeatedly, certain that someone was about to burst from one of the darkened doorways to snatch at him without warning.

  He was so distracted that he missed the inert form that lay sprawled across the hallway in front of him. He felt his feet tangle and slide out from under him, felt himself go down so hard his breath left him momentarily.

  He was pushing himself up from the floor when he saw what it was that had brought him down. Diaz’s body, an awful trail of blood behind it. He took in the awful slit at Diaz’s throat, then his eyes drifted down to an even worse defilement.

  The lunatic, Valdés thought, scrambling to his feet, his hands slick with gore. He rushed to the elevators, slamming his bloody palm against the call button repeatedly, whimpers escaping his throat. At any moment, the lunatic would appear in the corridor behind him, and what had befallen Diaz could befall him as well.

  His fear was pathetic, but he did not care. All he wanted was escape.

  He heard the approach of the elevator then, and turned, tears of relief and gratitude beginning to brim at his eyes. The doors slid open—maddening in their pace, easily long enough for a madman to come bounding down that hallway—and he leaped inside, jabbing wildly at the buttons. Any floor, he thought, anywhere but here.

  The doors closed—no gory claw reaching in to snatch at him—and Valdés slumped back against the side of the compartment, breathing a sigh of relief as the car began to descend. Safe, he thought. Safe at last.

  And that is when he noticed the others in there with him: the doctor and the nurse bound and gagged in one corner. And worse yet, the man they called Machado, hands tied behind him, feet bound. Gagged. His gaze burning up at Valdés in a way that made him understand that safety was a word that no longer had meaning, not in this world at least.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  “Hate to do this every day,” Russell said, cutting a quick glance at Driscoll. He was at the wheel of the Caddy, inching down one of the narrow cobblestone streets of the old city, Driscoll poring over a street map with a penlight clutched between his teeth.

  “Take the next left,” Driscoll said, glancing up from the map. He craned his neck out the passenger window as Russell made the turn. “Okay,” he added, “stop here.”

  Russell switched off the engine and doused the lights. Squirreling down these narrow streets was no picnic, but driving this machine reminded him of being back home in Georgia. He’d had a great-grandfather owned an old Buick nearly of the Cadillac’s vintage. He’d played at driving in the springy seat of that old car. That was back in the days when the purpose of life was enjoyment, he thought. He wondered just when everything had begun to change.

  “About a block down that way, if this map’s right,” Driscoll said at his side.

  “Looks like it,” Russell said. He noted an open courtyard on their left. It seemed like the one they had passed a few days before. He turned back to Driscoll. “I still don’t see why we’re doing this.”

  Driscoll stared at him, exasperation evident even in the moonlight. “Because that’s what you do, Russell. You knock on all the doors, you rattle every single chain. You hope something leads to something. Right now, let’s have a look at Vedetti’s.”

  Russell gave him a grudging nod and opened the door of the Caddy, then closed it softly. With this beast in the way, there wouldn’t be anyone coming or going along this path, he thought. Barely enough room for the two of them to squeeze between the car’s bulk and the chiseled walls on either side.

  As they made their way along the passage, he could see that this was indeed the route they’d used to approach Vedetti’s gallery earlier. Up ahead was the old-timey drug-store he’d marveled at the first time. The shop was closed now, of course, steel grates pulled down over the broad windows, but the big urns of green and red and amber liquids were illuminated, glowing in the darkness like giant night-lights.

  “The back entrance is right over there,” Russell said quietly to Driscoll. “Maybe we ought to go around front…”

  “Maybe,” Driscoll said. He put his hand out to try to the door, then turned back, surprised. “It’s open,” he said.

  They stared at each other for a moment, then Driscoll eased the door open wider. “You know the way,” he said to Russell. “Lead on.”

  Russell nodded and stepped past him into the darkness, Driscoll close on his heels. They paused, listening intently. The sounds of rustling footsteps and vague conversation drifted down the passageway toward them, muffled by the heavy curtains that masked the entrance to the gallery itself.

  Russell glanced at Driscoll, then started forward. Halfway down the narrow hall, he caught sight of a flashlight beam sweeping across a void where the heavy curtains joined. He flattened himself against one wall, holding Driscoll still with one arm. The beam of the light sliced across the face of the opposite wall, then disappeared.

  Russell was about to move again when there came the sound of something falling to the floor, the crack of wood, and a faint curse. He took advantage of the commotion to move quickly toward the curtains, vaguely outlined by the glow of the flashlight on the other side. He paused at the gap in the curtains, peering out into the gallery space.

  He saw a smallish Latino man bent over the shattered frame of one of the architectural drawings that had tumbled from the wall. He seemed to be examining something in the beam of his flashlight. Something familiar about the guy’s wizened face, Russell thought…then realized it was the street hustler who’d tried to sell Deal cigars and rum and women. So he was a sneak thief, too? Somehow it didn’t add up.

  He felt Driscoll at his back, edging up for a look of his own. The little guy had bent now over the fallen drawing, reaching for something, his face glowing eerily in the reflection of the flashlight beam.

  “¡Mira!” the old man said softly to someone in the darkness nearby. “¿Qué es esto?”

  The man plucked whatever it was from the shards of wood at his feet and held it up to the light, turning it over in his hands. Russell moved closer, straining to see, his shoulders brushing the curtains now, his face surely visible should anyone turn his way: The little guy was holding up a wad of gum with an adhesive backing, Russell saw. The same device that he’d found in Deal’s hotel room.

  Another shadowy figure stepped closer to the pool of light spread by the flashlight beam and extended a hand. The little guy handed the device over. Russell heard a muttered curse and a command barked out in Spanish. A woman’s voice, he realized—something familiar about it, as well. Then he realized there were footsteps hurrying toward him.

  He ducked back, pulling Driscoll with him. In the next moment, he felt the curtain fly back and saw her shadow appear, silhouetted by the glow of her companion’s light. Driscoll’s own penlight popped on behind him and the woman stopped short with a gasp. She was frozen, momentarily, one hand thrust up against the sudden glare, her mouth a grimace of surprise. Still, there was no mistakin
g who it was.

  “Delia?” Russell said, hearing the astonishment in his own voice. He saw that under one arm she had tucked a box crammed with folders and paperwork. She blinked, trying to see past the glare, at the same time calling out some command in Spanish over her shoulder. At the sound of her voice, the little guy’s flashlight winked out. Russell heard the sounds of footsteps crunching away through broken glass.

  Delia tried to backpedal in the same direction, but Russell caught her by the arm.

  “Let me go,” she said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “You’re goddamned right, I don’t,” he said. “But you’re going to explain it to me.”

  He turned to Driscoll. “Get the little guy,” he called, but it was a waste of breath. Driscoll was already pawing through the heavy curtains, his heavy shoes crashing through the mess on the floor.

  “Please,” Delia said, twisting in Russell’s grasp. “It is dangerous. You must let me go.”

  The familiar tang of her sweat rose in his nostrils, her hand came to press hard against his chest. What a difference a couple of days make, he thought. Same woman, same frenzied actions, slightly different results.

  “Are you part of this Vedado Project? Is that what this is all about?”

  “What do you know of it?” she spat back.

  “It must have been important, what you were willing to do with me.”

  “It is a job,” she said, still writhing. He’d seen how nimbly she could move. He didn’t remember that she’d been quite so strong as well.

  “Where’s Deal?” Russell said. “Who the hell’s got him?”

  “He is with friends,” she said. He heard something soften in her tone, and she seemed to relax for a moment in his grip.

  That sudden shift of body language should have told him something, but he missed it. It was dark, he was distracted by the clamor of Driscoll’s pursuit, he’d felt the weight of her body go slack against him, had even had a moment’s flash of the first night they’d met, her head thrown back, her neck arched, as she had moved above him…