Hammer fumbled with the cap, filled the glass with several glugs of clear odorless juniper-flavored gin and washed down two aspirin. He scratched at the spot where a pimple was pushing itself out of his skin under his nose, and a tingle filled his nasal passages. He arced back and then lurched forward with a giant sneeze, and the glass in his hand shattered. A bullet lodged itself in the kitchenette and a loud bang echoed off the hotel wall and through the street outside.
Hammer hit the deck in a puddle of gin and broken glass, and with his free hand reached up to the countertop. His fingers found the plate of toast and brought it down. Ray took a bite, and then rolled under the bed to where he kept the .38 Special cartridge with the Jacinta’s message and his own Smith and Wesson Model 629.
Chapter Twenty-One
The engine stopped, and Adam’s body trembled, shaking all over. He listened to the voices of the men outside. He recognized a couple, Spade and Rapp, the two scientists who—he didn’t even want to remember. He touched his forehead tentatively, felt the pain searing through his skin, the salt on his fingertips rubbed into his wounds.
“What do we do now?” said Rapp, and Adam could almost smell his body odor through the sheets that surrounded him in his dark coffin on the back of the truck or the car or whatever it was they’d carried him here on.
“Chill, man,” said Spade. “They’ll show. They said they’d show. They’ll show.”
“Yeah, but what if they don’t?” said Rapp again. “I mean, they might have been incepted or they might not have been coming in the first place. We’ve risked everything for nothing. Heck, we tattooed nuclear codes to a kid’s forehead!”
“That was a stupid idea,” said Spade.
“Give me a break! It was all that I could think of!”
“What, just in case the Chinese intercepted us?”
“It’s better than nothing. It’s better than your stupid idea.”
“What, my stupid idea to take the codes to them ourselves?”
“Yeah, but what if they killed us?”
“They still might,” said Spade, and he tapped hard on the box with Adam Winters inside. “You alright in there, kid?”
Adam didn’t answer.
“I asked if you’re okay?”
He grunted something and Spade shut up.
Then both of them fell silent. Deathly silent.
Adam pressed his eye to the gap in the plastic that covered the box.
The purr of a faraway engine hummed closer.
Two white lights flashed in the night and a dark sedan came to a halt about a hundred meters from where they sat. The two men stepped forward, and Adam could see them outlined, silhouetted against the night. They’d ditched their lab coats and wore instead the drab khaki of military physical training gear.
Rapp disappeared from view and suddenly there were another two flashes, the headlights from their own vehicle. Spade shivered in the warm evening air. He hopped from foot to foot and waited for someone to jump out of the other car. They didn’t. Rapp flashed their lights again.
“They want us to leave him here,” called Rapp from the front of the vehicle, “or send him out to them!”
“Not without the money!” said Spade, turning back to give Adam Winters a clear view of his profile against the night. His nose was crooked, as if it had been broken, and his teeth were croutons in a Caesar salad, floating in a void of dark gaps.
Adam ran his hands around the inside of the box. It was mostly hard timber with a soft plastic covering. There were no handles as far as he could tell, but there were a number of depressions and grooves in the timber. He tried his weight against one of these grooved, and then pushed his knee into another, hard.
Nothing happened.
Adam felt around again and pushed his fingers into the gaps above him. There was some sort of door there. He reached his hands up and pushed harder. The door creaked open, and he crawled out into the night.
By the lights from the two vehicles, he could just make out that they were in a field of sorts. The city was outlined in the distance. Maybe it was some kind of abandoned airstrip or a sporting field. Adam couldn’t be sure.
He tested the turf with his bare feet and scrambled away from the car, away from both cars, keeping low to the ground so that his profile didn’t stand out against the skyline. There was a loud crunch as the box he’d been in crashed off the back of the pickup truck and onto the ground. Adam turned back to see Spade opening the door and finding it empty.
“Hey!” he cried, and there was a small kerfuffle as Rapp ran around from the front seat to see what Spade was hey-ing. “The kid’s gone!”
“He can’t be far.”
They looked around into the night. The other car started its engine and roared towards where Adam scrambled along the dirt.
When he felt he was out of earshot, he stood up and sprinted.
He knew he was outlined against the horizon, a silhouette in the night, an easy target.
He zigzagged back and forth, but the car gained on him.
It roared closer and closer across the field, bouncing up and down, its headlights flashing against metal posts and rusting structures that seemed out of place in this vast open expanse.
There had to be somewhere to hide, somewhere he could reach before the car got him.
Adam ducked left, and right again.
The car was almost on him.
He could feel the heat of the engine.
He could hear the roar of eight cylinders of pure power and death.
The fender almost kissed him, and Adam dove to the ground.
The car passed overhead. Its underbelly scratched his back in a long, jagged gash.
Adam let out a sharp shriek.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Hammer kept a cool head and surveyed the situation from the floor of his hotel room. He glanced at the gash in the window drapes and the glass scattered on the floor below where the windows used to be. A bullet zinged past, hit the tile floor and ricocheted up into the door. Another loud crack smashed through Ray’s head.
Hammer discarded the toast and crawled on his knees and elbows to the space under the windows. He felt the bite of the shattered glass crystals on his skin, but he kept moving. Another bullet split the air and sent a plume of feathers up from the pillow on Ray’s bed. He looked back at where his head had been just half an hour before.
Ray eyed the hole in the curtain and the place where the first bullet lodged into the kitchen sink. It gave him a rough trajectory as he peeked around the corner of the window and stood up with his back to the wall. His eyes scanned for smoke or muzzle flashed in the dark building down the road. He had a general direction to look in, but nothing happened.
The world fell silent. The streets were silent. Somewhere below, a woman cried out and a dog set off a chain of barking around the neighborhood. The barking stretched out, but all Hammer heard was silence. He listened for footsteps, for running, for an engine starting up. He searched for the location of the shooter, a figure, a vehicle, any movement in the distance. There was none.
And then, the faintest sound reached his ears. He checked his weapon was loaded and the hammer pulled back, his finger grazed the trigger. He turned to face the door, the squeak of a sneaker pivoting slightly as it stepped ever so hesitantly across the tiles outside in the hallway, and then the doorknob turned and Hammer’s heart thumped in his throat, in his ears, in his head, the smell of strawberry jelly wafted up from his fingers as he raised the Model 629 and fired off two rounds. Cordite mixed with the sickly smell of jelly and spilt gin.
Splintery holes, two of them, now riddled the door, smashing right through the hollow frame to the other side. The door didn’t open. Nobody entered the room. Hammer counted down from 60, and when there were no more squeaking sneakers or turning handles, he lunged for the door and wrenched it open.
He pushed himself back against the door frame.
A dark red puddle pooled on the tiles.
And the metallic scent of blood took him back to a time he tried to avoid but which never left him alone in his nightmares.
A keycard for his room lay on the ground. Her hand was outstretched, and a pair of onyx eyes glazed over and fixed on Ray’s face above a slightly crooked pearlescent smile.
Hammer hadn’t had a drink yet today and his brain wasn’t working. That one sip of gin with the aspirin bumped it up slightly, but not enough, and Hammer pressed his Smith and Wesson back into his belt. He knelt down beside her.
He pressed two fingers to Jacinta’s neck.
No pulse.
Wait . . .
There was a faint ticking.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Dazed, Adam rolled onto his side and curled up into a ball. The red taillights were fireflies in the night. They turned white as the black car reversed, its V8 engine roared, and it stopped just feet from where Adam lay curled up.
Another vehicle, a rusty, dusty old pickup, screeched to a halt next to him and Spade and Rapp jumped out and moved around to where Adam lay on the ground.
The doors of the black sedan opened and two dark-suited figures stepped out into the night. Adam watched a couple of flashes, heard the pops, and sucked in the scent of soil and slightly damp grass. A crimson eye spread in Spade’s forehead. His knees hit the ground. His body crumpled in on itself, a mirror image of Adam, but his eyes weren’t seeing.
Rapp’s shoulder jerked back and he spun a beautiful pirouette. There were another few pops. His white shirt became a red-and-maroon tie-dyed mess, and he thumped to the soft earth on his back, his eyes searching for the heavens.
Adam crawled. Slowly. Quietly. Across the damp earth. His elbows dug in, the pain in his back seared white hot in his mind. His throat constricted and he tasted stomach acid.
He stopped for a second, just a second.
He retched, but nothing came up, and he crawled forward again on his elbows and knees.
A boot was planted in his back and his face smushed down into the earth.
If he’d had any energy left, he would have cried out. Instead, he just whimpered and lay there.
“My back,” he whispered, and then there were hands under his arms, and he was lifted to his feet.
Familiar faces, wide smiles, and Marlowe saying, “I hope you didn’t pay too much for that tattoo.”
“Jesus, kid,” said Haruki, bundling Adam into the back of the car. “We didn’t even know that was you until we came back. We wouldn’t have hit you otherwise.”
Adam grinned, and the lights in the distance flickered and faded and then came back into sharp focus.
Marlowe arranged himself in the driver’s seat and closed the door, “Would have saved us fifty grand, though,” he muttered, and Adam’s grin grew wider.
Chapter Twenty-Four
A faint rhythm beat under Ray Hammer’s two fingers, a faint pulse.
“Thank God.”
Hammer knelt down and blew two breaths into her mouth, and then leaned back and was about to begin compressions when he saw it—the exit wound in the side of her stomach, the blood pooling on her shirt.
She’d been shot from behind, not through the door.
When he looked up, he knew what he’d see, the muzzle of a high-powered rifle leveled between his eyes. It was a Heckler and Koch G36.
“I wouldn’t do that,” said Solomani Rodriguez.
Ray held one hand up, put the other hand to the Smith and Wesson in his waistband and threw it down on the floor.
“Smart thinking, Mr. Hammer.”
And then, Ray lowered both hands and began counting compressions out loud.
“One, two, three.”
“I said I wouldn’t do that!” snapped Rodriguez. “Leave her.”
“You gonna make me?” asked Ray Hammer, knowing full well he probably would. But, Rodriguez dropped his gaze.
“This is your fault. If you’d been alone, if she hadn’t been here, then . . .”
Hammer continued to push down on Jacinta’s chest, pumping her heart for her. “Then what? You would have killed me and been done with it?”
Ray pushed his way through another ten compressions, his fingers trembled over the front of her bloody shirt, “Why don’t you?” he added. “Just get it over with.”
Rodriguez shook his head. His breathing was rapid. And then, he was on his knees, beside Ray. Ray blew two more breaths into her mouth and Rodriguez continued the compressions.
“How many?” he asked.
“Because you feel guilty?” said Ray.
Rodriguez shook his head, but there was a tear in his eye, just a small speck, a glistening sheen just hovering over his eyelid. The surface tension could break at any moment. “How many compressions, dammit!”
“Thirty,” said Ray.
And Rodriguez counted down.
Ray blew another two breaths into Jacinta’s mouth. “And you don’t know why you’re doing this?”
Rodriguez shuffled back and Hammer took over the compressions.
Rodriguez raised an eyebrow. “My job is to take orders, not to question.”
Ray gave him one of those withering glances that would turn most people to stone, but Rodriguez just shrugged.
“You didn’t fulfill your orders, Rodriguez. I’m still alive.”
Rodriguez nodded and his hand played over the G36 on the floor beside him. Hammer lunged for his Smith and Wesson just as the Jacinta sat up.
Life once again filled her onyx eyes, but her memorable smile turned into a grimace of pain.
“I . . . I . . .” she said, and then her hand found the bloody mess that was her abdomen and her eyes rolled back in her head.
Hammer leveled his revolver at Rodriguez. “Take out your cell phone.”
He complied.
“Now, call an ambulance.”
Ray watched as he unlocked his cellphone and searched through his contacts. One caught Ray’s eye, “Hatashi, Okai.”
Rodriguez punched the numbers into the phone, and Ray listened to the faint dial tone. The call connected. Rodriguez asked for an ambulance and looked at Ray when they asked for the address. Ray gave it.
They sat and waited until the sirens came close and then Ray stood up, gestured with the Smith and Wesson for Rodriguez to move along down the hallway, and Ray knelt to pick up the G36. He slung it over his shoulder and then they both moved into the emergency stairwell, walked down to the ground floor and out into the street.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The V8 engine revved, and Adam turned his tired, pained eyes towards Haruki, who sat in the backseat with him. He opened his mouth to speak, but Haruki cut him off before he could get a word out.
“When you didn’t meet the rendezvous, we figured we’d give it another half an hour and swing by again. Then, some news came in over the wires. A deal was going down. Some rogue scientists wanted to sell something, apparently they had the codes we needed . . . the code that seems to be tattooed to your forehead.”
Adam nodded mutely, kept his lips pressed shut, turned his body slightly to the side so that the scrape on his back wasn’t pressed into the fabric of the chair. It was starting to stick.
“Let me see that,” said Haruki, and Adam leaned forward.
“This is gonna hurt,” he said, and took a flask from his suit jacket and poured some of the liquid over his hand and down Adam’s back, searing his flesh anew and sending excruciating jabs through his body.
His vision swam, and then it refocused. “What happened to the supposed buyers?” he asked.
Marlowe chimed in, “Don’t know. We beat them to the handover point. That’s all. I’m glad we got you. You’re one of us now. Hell, no one else in the world will employ someone with a tattoo like that on their forehead.”
Adam almost laughed. “Do you think a hundred grand would afford a plastic surgeon good enough?”
Haruki shook his head. “It’s gonna be hats and knit-caps for you from now on.”
Adam h
eld out his hand and Haruki poured some rum onto it. Adam wiped his forehead with the rum.
“Hey, hey!” said Haruki, and pulled his hand back. “Stop that! We can’t have you rubbing it off, damaging it.”
“It’s a tattoo. Jesus Christ,” said Adam curling his lip into a mocking sneer.
All of a sudden, Marlowe turned around and the car skidded slightly to the side, the back wheels skated out. He jerked the wheel back around the other side. The car straightened.
“Shit,” Marlowe said, glancing in the mirror, “We got ourselves a tail.”
Haruki and Adam turned to look out the back window and sure enough there was another black sedan riding their tail.
The other car pulled along beside them, windows down, black muzzles appeared and lit up with flashes of death.
Marlowe pulled on the handbrake, wrenched the wheel hard and spun the car off the road, into a shallow ditch. Then he squealed back up onto the blacktop. The car lurched.
The other vehicle had maneuvered itself around as well in a sharp U-turn and was gaining on them.
Flashes lit up the night, and the glass beside Adam’s face shattered and splintered across his already pained expression, tiny pieces of silicon embedded in his skin. He wrinkled his eyes instinctively, just in time to prevent the particles from adding blindness to his growing list of disabilities.
There was a thud in the headrest of the driver’s seat and fabric exploded out followed by a pink puff of a bullet exiting Marlowe’s skull.
Strike (A Ray Hammer Novel Book 3) Page 6
