by Tara Janzen
He chambered a round into the M4 and did what he did best: waited in the dark to take his shot.
It was less than a minute before a steady stream of light cut through the dark down by the river. Smith had gotten his flashlight lashed to the dock. Somebody immediately fired off a short burst and tore up one of the dock’s planks. And that somebody’s muzzle flash was like one big spotlight for Kid. He saw movement, held his breath, and squeezed.
Two and a half pounds of pressure and a heartbeat later, the guy went down.
The narco-guerrillas with the automatic weapons hadn’t been nearly as far behind them as he and Smith had thought. Kid wasn’t really surprised. Fucking demoralized, but not surprised. It was going to be hell getting out of Banco Nuevo.
He reached down to his .45 and flipped the safety off. It wouldn’t take long for Conseco’s guys to lock in on his position, and then the whole porch thing would turn into “Kid’s Last Stand.”
Shit.
At least Butch and Sundance had gone out on their feet.
Something, a movement in the dark, an instinct, drew his attention to the third shack up from the river on the far side. Light from an adjacent doorway cast a thin sliver of illumination down the shack’s thatched wall. There wasn’t a sound, no crying out, no shot, but between one breath and the next a body fell out of the shadows and landed facedown in the mud.
It wasn’t Smith.
The appearance of the dead man brought another guy running up the street in a low crouch, rifle at the ready.
Ready for what, Kid wanted to ask him, but he already knew the answer—ready for the last mistake the bastard would ever make.
Kid raised the M4, sighted, squeezed—and he and Smith were up by three.
Two shots from the same hide were enough to set his warning bells ringing. He had to move, no matter what it cost him.
Using his pack for support, he pushed himself to his knees—and then he heard it. The soft sucking sound of a footstep in the mud. A quick glance back into the bar proved the old man, the bartender, and the two girls were still inside, huddled together on the floor, too smart to get into the middle of what he and Smith were bringing down on top of them.
The rats were on their own.
He pulled his .45, and when a rifle muzzle edged out around the corner of the cantina, he took up the slack in the trigger and waited. The instant the man showed himself, Kid fired—twice in rapid succession, blowing the guy to hell and back.
And now he was really screwed. Everybody in town had to know where he was, and God, the pain in his side was like a knife—a knife with a serrated blade. Geezus. He couldn’t catch his breath.
A fresh burst of shots, coming from a couple of directions, slammed into the cantina’s walls, showering him with splinters and bits of wood. He’d definitely been found. A piece of a board buried itself in his upper arm like a stiletto. Something sharp and hotter than hell caught him across the face. He felt the skin tear and burn. He smelled it. Swearing under his breath, he grabbed one of the straps on his pack and half stumbled, half dragged himself and the pack down the porch steps. He made it as far as the nearest tree before a slug caught him in the leg and he collapsed into a heap. His heart was pounding like a jackhammer.
Fuck! He wasn’t going to die here. No way.
Then the shooting stopped, and there was nothing but the sound of water dripping off the trees.
Bracing himself, he reached up and pulled the splinter of wood out of his arm. He tossed it aside without looking at it. He didn’t want to know how big it was. He just wanted the fuck out of there.
Easing the weight off his side, he checked the street. There were still two bodies in the mud and no sign of Smith or the other shooters.
An engine coughing and chugging its way down the river brought his head around. The Garza was pulling up to the dock, her cylinders misfiring, the paint-peeled letters on the bow sliding through the beam of Smith’s flashlight.
A wave of dizziness washed across the back of his skull—not the first of the night, and sure as hell not the last. He carefully lowered his head, fighting it, focusing on his breathing, making it deep, making it count, and he held on. He wouldn’t last thirty seconds if he passed out.
A whippoorwill sounded behind him.
A freakin’ whippoorwill in the Colombian rain forest. Oh, God, if he hadn’t hurt so badly he would have laughed. Smith needed his head examined.
He dared to glance up. Out on the dock, somebody stepped off the boat with a bow line and tied her off—and there she sat.
Gringo bait.
He took another breath and tried to keep himself as motionless and quiet as possible. Conseco’s guys were still out there, waiting for him and the whippoorwill to make a try for the Garza.
He didn’t hear Smith come up behind him, but neither was he surprised when Smith slid into view. Smith looked a little worse for wear himself. He had blood on his face and a gash on his arm.
Nothing was ever easy.
Smith held up three fingers and pointed at three different places along the street.
Kid gave a short nod and pointed to his six o’clock position. There had been shots coming from behind him.
Smith drew his hand sideways across his throat.
Okay, Kid thought, impressed as hell. That was two for the boy wonder and his knife. Unless Conseco’s guys had called in reinforcements, they were down to just the three guys on the other side of the street.
And the Garza was still out there, looking about a million miles away.
“They’re going to cut us down, if we try the dock,” he said quietly. The damage report would have to come later.
Smith nodded. He was breathing heavily, the blood running down his arm. “We’re going to have to swim for it. Come up on the starboard side.”
Yeah. Swim.
Swim a flooded river, upstream, with him carrying two slugs, bleeding like a stuck pig, and praying to God the piranhas weren’t looking for a midnight snack.
Nothing was ever easy.
Smith shouldered Kid’s pack along with his own, stopped for just a second to catch his breath, then signaled him to move out.
Yeah, he was right, and if C. Smith could carry the gear, the least Kid could do was get himself down to the river. It was crazy to worry about the piranhas. Shit. He’d probably sink like a stone and drown long before the piranhas got hold of him.
Right.
He got his one good leg under him, and the effort instantly cost him his dinner. He lost it all on the jungle floor.
Oh, geezus, that hurt. He grabbed for his side, and that hurt, too. Every single part of him hurt like a sonuvabitch. He wiped the back of his other hand across his mouth and tried not to feel so friggin’ awful—and suddenly, he knew he was in real trouble. He didn’t have to look down at his wound. He knew what he felt. He’d bled through the Sani-Pak. Already.
When he didn’t move, Smith looked back.
It took Kid a moment to find his breath, another couple of moments to work through the pain and find his voice, but when he did, he outlined the facts for Smith as neatly and succinctly as possible.
“We . . . we need . . . I . . . fuck, Smith. It would take Superman to get me out of here tonight.”
C. Smith knew who Superman was, everybody did: a guy named Christian Hawkins who worked with Kid at SDF, Special Defense Force, a clandestine unit of special-forces operators nobody at the Pentagon or the Department of Defense would ever admit existed. He was a legend with a well-deserved reputation for getting himself out of the kind of situations that killed mere mortals—himself and whoever was with him.
He was also over three thousand miles away from the Rio Putumayo.
Smith understood, though.
“Well, tonight’s your lucky night then, Chico,” he said, dropping the packs back into the mud. “Because tonight I am fucking Superman.”
In one tortuously painful move, he had Kid on his shoulders and was headed for the riv
er.
CHAPTER
1
Panama City, Panama. Four days later.
THERE WAS A BIKINI BOTTOM in his bathroom.
Curious as hell, Kid picked the tiny scrap of green-and-purple cotton up off the towel bar and turned it over in his hand.
It wasn’t unusual for him to come home and find somebody crashing at his place. He’d known the instant he walked in that someone was there. The house in Panama City had belonged to his brother, and J.T. had always had an open-door policy.
But the bikini bottom was unusual.
Combat boots, surfboards, cases of beer—that’s what he usually found. Not outrageously green bikini bottoms with purple palm fronds printed on them.
It was enough to make a guy think.
About sex.
And about death.
He swore softly and put the swimsuit back on the towel bar. J.T. had been the kind of guy who took care of people, a lot of people. Some of them had been women—mostly friends, but a couple of ex-lovers had shown up over the last few months. Kid didn’t think he could face one of them tonight, and have to be the one to tell them J.T. was dead. He still felt about half dead himself.
Easing himself around, he limped back out to the living room. The house was pure tropical bungalow, with two bedrooms, two baths, a kitchen and dining area together, and a living room that opened onto a palm-shaded courtyard. It had lizards darting around outside, a housekeeper named Rosa who held the place together no matter how many unexpected visitors showed up, and neighbors who liked to party—tonight being a case in point. A salsa beat was coming from both sides of the house.
After his and C. Smith’s adventure on the Putumayo, two days in a Bogotá hospital, and two days of debriefing with the DEA and the Defense Department guys, he wasn’t in the mood to party. All he wanted to do was sleep in a bed he called his own. He hoped the bikini girl had picked the spare bedroom and not the one he usually took.
The thought made him pause.
Geez. No wonder he never got laid anymore.
He shook his head and continued on across to the breezeway and the south bedroom, the one he preferred, and sure enough, it was definitely ocupado. There were clothes everywhere, and stuff, girl stuff, piled up on his dresser and draped over the chair, filmy stuff, bright colorful bits and pieces. The girl’s suitcases were on the floor in a corner, and besides being the most amazing shade of crocodile-patterned hot pink leather he’d ever seen, they were overflowing with electrical cords, makeup bags, and shoes, like a “girl grenade” had exploded and sent her clothes flying in every direction and left the heavy stuff to settle.
That thought gave him pause, too, sort of reminded him of something else, but he wasn’t going to spend the effort to figure out what. He was too damn tired to sort through anything tonight. All he wanted to do was sleep, and one bed or another didn’t really make much difference.
He turned to leave, when a small torn white T-shirt hanging off the doorknob caught his eye, a plain white T-shirt with a paint smear on it—electric blue paint.
Everything inside him froze, except his heart, which plummeted into the pit of his stomach.
Impossible. It was absolutely impossible—but he knew that T-shirt, knew that paint smear.
His gaze slid to the clothes draped over the chair, and he saw something else he knew: a purple silk robe with a letter “N” painted in pink on the pocket. Geezus. He looked around the room, at all the stuff. But it wasn’t just stuff, and it wasn’t just any girl grenade that had gone off in here. It was a Nikki McKinney grenade.
He picked up the robe, brought the silky material to his face—and her scent flooded his senses. Hot sex, warm love, all the memories were there, so close to the surface.
Too close.
Nikki was here, and suddenly, he was in over his head. Way over.
Why in the world would Nikki be in Panama City?
And had she brought the freakin’ fiber artist with her?
Geezus. He couldn’t take that. No way in hell.
He looked up from the robe and checked the room. No, this was a one-person disaster, from the Panama hat and pink-and-green-striped sunglasses on his dresser to the pile of underwear on the bed. This was all Nikki, every square inch of it.
Underwear. Bed. Nikki.
And suddenly, he was wide awake, every cell in his body.
He dropped the robe back on the chair and headed out the door. In the courtyard, he turned toward the loudest music. Nikki would be at ground zero, which meant the Sandovals’ walled garden next door.
Rico and Luis Sandoval were a couple of trust-fund twins whose daddy ran the biggest chain of car dealerships in Panama. They were great guys for a good time, a cold beer, and a Friday night poker game, strip poker if they could talk a girl into playing.
Kid always opted out of any Sandoval brothers scheme that included drunk naked women, but Rico and Luis wouldn’t have had to use liquor or talk very fast to get Nikki in the game. There wasn’t anything she liked better than naked men. Twins would be an irresistible bonus in her book.
Cripes. Nikki and a couple of Panamanian beach-boy hustlers with a marked deck. The thought had Kid limping at double time. It would serve Rico and Luis right if he just let her have them. They’d never get the drop on her, no matter how much they cheated, and once she pulled her “Gee, can I paint you naked” line on them, they wouldn’t have a chance. She’d have them stripped out of their machismo faster than they could drop their skivvies. The trust-fund boys would still be looking for their balls come Christmas.
But he didn’t want any other guys dropping their shorts for Nikki tonight, or any other night—Panamanian beach boys or fiber artist fiancés.
A fiancé—how in the hell had he let things get so out of hand? How had he gone seven months without calling her? Without writing her?
He stopped by the gate in the wall—stopped and made himself take a reality check. The truth was, he knew why he hadn’t contacted her. He knew exactly why he hadn’t gone home at Christmas. And nothing had changed.
He wasn’t the man she’d fallen in love with, not anymore, not even close, and there was no coming back from the places he’d been.
But she was here, and he had to see her. He wasn’t going to fool himself into thinking she’d come to see him. He was the last person she would have expected to show up in Panama City, despite his owning the house. If she’d wanted to come to Panama, for whatever reason, Skeeter would have loaned her the key and given her the official situation report: He was in Colombia, working out of Bogotá.
And if he hadn’t reached the end of his rope, that’s where he’d still be.
No, she couldn’t have come here looking for him. For the last seven months, no one except the men he was with had known where he was or what he was doing. In the beginning, that had been Hawkins, and later another SDF operator, Creed Rivera. After Creed had finished his mission, he’d gone home, but Kid had stayed.
He’d stayed too long.
Colombia wasn’t safe for him anymore. People were looking for him. They just didn’t know his real name or what he looked like, not yet, but that wasn’t going to hold them off forever, not these guys, not if he kept doing what he’d been doing. The airfield on the Putumayo wasn’t the first time el asesino fantasma had hit Juan Conseco’s operation, and the drug lord knew it. News of the “Putumayo bounty” Conseco had put out on the ghost killer had hit Bogotá while he’d still been in the hospital. The cocaine baron wanted him dead or alive, and for half a million dollars, Kid figured Conseco had a pretty good shot at getting him.
It was a helluva lot of money, but Kid had done a helluva lot of damage, including a pair of sniper hits contracted by the Colombian government via the U.S. Department of Defense on two of Conseco’s top lieutenants, a mission so black it had been black-on-black. Which all made Nikki’s presence even more unnerving, if that was possible—which, honest to God, it wasn’t. He was already unnerved all the way down to
his gut and his toes by her being here. The situation with Conseco only made it worse.
And wasn’t that just perfect? He hadn’t been home five minutes, and the first thing he had to do was literally kick Nikki McKinney out of his bed.
Well, hell. At least now he had something to say that didn’t begin and end with “I’m sorry.” He’d said that to her so many times, especially when she was crying, and when they’d been together, she’d cried a lot. He had to admit that “Get your butt home” didn’t sound much better, though.
He reached for the gate, then had to stand back when a couple stumbled through, their arms wrapped around each other, holding each other up on their way to the Ramones’ place on the other side of Kid’s yard.
From the looks of the two of them, a little drunk, a little disheveled, and both in drag with half their clothes falling off, the Sandoval party was in full swing—a fact proven when he stepped through the gate.
Every year, four days before Ash Wednesday, Panama City hosted Carnaval, a sexually charged, anything-goes party leading up to Lent. Every Friday night, no matter what was happening on the next Wednesday, the Sandoval brothers did the same.
There were colored lights hanging in the trees, two transvestites crooning on a makeshift stage, well over a hundred other people crammed into the garden, some in costume, plenty of beer, and a bar serving baja panties—literally “panty lowerers,” which in Panama translated to any drink made with hard liquor.
And there was Nicole Alana McKinney. He spotted her instantly. She was half in costume, with a pink feathered tiara in her black-and-purple spiked hair, and a blue sequined miniskirt with a matching stole to go with the top half of her green-and-purple palm frond bikini. She had a baja panties in one hand and five cards in the other. Her back was to him, and she was sitting at a table with four guys, two of them Rico and Luis, one of whom was already down to a pair of tighty-whities and an orange feather boa.
It was like the living incarnation of his worst nightmare—or at least his nightmare before she’d gotten engaged.
