Resurrecting Midnight (48 page)

That package in the backseat, I knew how it could lead trouble to my front door.

Then we sped to the next safe house.

Barrio Norte was on the outskirts of Palermo. The safe house was on Avenida Salguero near Avenida Santa Fe in the area some called Villa Freud. Hundreds of boutiques stood side by side with acres of cafés and restaurants. Most were crowded. We were tucked in with hundreds of belle époque apartment buildings and modern high-rises.

If trouble showed up, it would take them a while to narrow down the building, even longer to narrow down the apartment. At least that’s what I was hoping. But flying grenades wouldn’t care. Part of me trembled from that race to get out of the
villa
. Part of me remained terrified.

But I’d never let that fear show. Only a dead man or a psychopath didn’t own fear.

There was a small television on the table. I turned on the local news. It showed bombings and bodies that had been left at a roundabout on Alcorta near the Japanese Gardens. Dark footage shot in the rain. Bodies covered in sheets. I recognized what was left of the Peugeots. That added a new ache to my body, one that started at my heart and worked out.

Across the narrow street, a band played. Tuba. Trumpet. Sax. Guitar. Drums. Each note hit my nerves like a brick being dropped from six feet high, down to the center of my scalp.

Shotgun said, “How’s your head?”

“Throbbing on both sides and down the middle.”

“Why didn’t you let me kill that man? All I had to do was pull the trigger.”

He was talking about Medianoche.

I didn’t answer. I’d stopped Shotgun from pulling the trigger. It wasn’t his death to give.

Shotgun asked, “Who was he?”

“Nobody. He was nobody. Nothing to me.”

He nodded. “What do we do now?”

“We wait to see who shows up. Hopefully, someone from our team will find us first.”

“We ain’t heard from them since they dropped us off on the highway.”

I nodded. “I know.”

“They didn’t show at the Claro building.” Shotgun paused. “Think they might be dead?”

Again I didn’t answer.

I picked up a bucket of ice, frozen water I’d taken from the refrigerator and dropped into a small mop bucket. I limped across the wooden floor and stood off to the side of the window, kept a loaded gun near where I stood. After I took a deep breath, I stuck my hands into the bucket of ice and groaned with the pain. I’d washed my body the best I could, had left a pool of filth and grime in the shower, but I felt nasty. Filth had saturated my skin, sunk into my pores. Grit was underneath my fingernails. My body ached from being beaten. My hands were swollen from returning that beating. Hands and legs hurt so bad I was barely able to stand up in the shower. Could barely see out of my right eye, but the vision in my left was good enough to mark a target.

A trumpet blared and a sax joined in, followed by a tuba, guitar, and drums. Those noises and the pain told me this was real. This shit was real. Midnight wasn’t dead.

Across the street was the Thelonious Club. Jazz screamed into the streets.

It would be like that until sunrise.

The club was in full swing. The rain had stopped and a crowd was out front, all dressed in winter coats and wearing scarves. A couple of people were smoking Achalay, a few others were puffing on cigarillos, Lucky Strike, and Philip Morris, but most of the crowd were sucking on Marlboro cancer sticks. The smell and smoke from the carcinogens drifted up to our cracked window, its stench no match for the stench I’d worn before. The sign out front said
CAPACIDAD LIMITADA BONO CONTRIBU-CIÓN
. Ten pesos. Less than three U.S. dollars to party until dawn.

There were dozens of men in baggy, wrinkled jeans. Women in tight, straight-legged jeans.

I studied them all. Any one of them could be a gun for hire.

My business didn’t discriminate. Hired guns came in all shapes, sizes, and colors.

And ages. Anyone old enough to hold a gun could be a killer.

I said, “Konstantin would’ve called by now. They’re not coming.”

“I have that same bad feeling.”

“They are in one of three places.”

Shotgun said, “In the hospital. In jail. Or dead.”

I nodded.

Shotgun grunted. “We have one of the briefcases, the one we just got.”

“And The Four Horsemen have the other one.”

“They caught up with our people on the highway.”

“That’s what Medianoche said.”

Shotgun made a mournful sound. “What do we do now?”

Again I didn’t answer.

As the trumpet blared and the band joined in, as at least four kinds of cigarette fumes rose through the damp air and made their way into our hideout, a black Peugeot pulled up out front.

The security gate opened and the Peugeot pulled into the narrow driveway that led to underground parking. Five minutes passed before there was an anxious knock on the front door.

We answered, guns in hand, fear in our hearts, fingers on the triggers.

I was up front. Would be the first to catch lead. The way it was supposed to be.

Shotgun was off to the side, weapon aimed chest high, center of mass.

The first face I saw was Konstantin’s. His right ear was bloodied as more blood drained down the center of his face. His left arm was pulled tight to his body, his hand wrapped in ripped cloth that protected a bloody fist. His jaw was tight, teeth clenched. He was Russian. He was strong, even with cancer. Scamz was with him. He was battered, bleeding from the left side of his forehead, only one shoe on, a backpack over his shoulder. Both men were soaking wet and muddied. They looked like they had tunneled their way out of a death camp.

But the third survivor held my attention.

Her marred face, matted hair, swollen lips, bruised and broken skin, bleeding flesh wrapped in tattered clothing, all of that added up and made her look like a vagrant.

I didn’t recognize her at first.

Then I saw her swollen belly.

A trail of red marked the floor like a pathway for the Grim Reaper to follow.

Arizona bled like she was dying.

Capítulo 44

It felt like Medianoche was experiencing anosognosia.

He tried to speak, and his words were slurred, like alphabet soup. Felt as if the right hemisphere of his brain had been damaged, as if he were battling cognitive-communication problems. A blanket had been thrown over his memory. Like when he had been shot in the face.

Then it went away.

The right hemisphere of his brain snapped awake.

But the pain from the fight kept him on his back, panting, struggling for air.

He rolled over on his left side, put his aching hands down in the soupy mud.

His hands went deeper into the runoff from the
villa
, vanished up to his wrists.

Outraged, battered, and bleeding, Medianoche rose to his feet one grunt at a time, a warrior wounded, but a warrior whose battle was far from over. One fight never won a battle, and one battle never ended a war. He stood in the freezing rain, wiping his muddied hands on his muddied clothing, his breathing ferocious, his language as foul and disgusting as the contaminated slime and filth that covered his Colombian-made uniform.

The
villas
burned behind him. Shelters made of plastic tarps and sticks like the slums near Mumbai collapsed as he stood. Slumdogs screamed and ran through the catastrophe.

His blood was his fuel. His blood anointed him with power to return to war.

He clenched his teeth, ready to run against an army of troops, ready to leap over walls.

He stood, the world slippery and unsteady beneath his feet, the taste of his own blood in his mouth, ready to kill as he searched for Gideon, ready to launch a demonic attack.

Señorita Raven coughed as she rose up from the same hungry mud, made it to her feet, and searched for her weapon, saw she had been disarmed. She stood ready to fight or attack.

Medianoche watched her, an incensed silhouette glowing in the flames.

She opened and closed her fingers in a way that told Medianoche her hands were numb. She took two steps, abrupt steps that splashed chilled refuse on his pants, then she bent over like she was dizzy, severely disoriented, as if she had been hit in the gut and the pain had returned with a vengeance, growled, then she wretched and spat out a mouthful of blood.

When she stood up, he saw her nose was bleeding. Half of her face was swollen.

Medianoche said, “You okay or do I need to carry you?”

“He shot me. Fucking shotgun blast took me off my feet. My uniform took most of it. Don’t think there was any penetration.”

That was her answer. She was hurting, but she wasn’t dying.

Medianoche inspected the flaming battlefield. In the distance, people from the slums were still running, fleeing, their shadows looking like ghosts risen, spirits haunting a graveyard.

Gideon and the giant were gone.

Rain drained across Medianoche’s face and felt like ice, rivered across his numbed and swollen flesh, flowed over his injured lips, and went inside his bloodied mouth.

He reached for his eye patch. It was gone. Had come off in the battle.

He wiped his mouth, ignored the discomfort, and said, “We still have half of the prize.”

“Half gets us nothing. Half won’t get us a fucking thing.”

“Gets us nothing. Gets them nothing.”

Señorita Raven coughed. “We should have it all.”

“We have to get to them.”

“We have to get to those fuckers.”

Medianoche nodded. “We have to get that briefcase back.”

“We have to get back to The Beast. Have to get back to the van.”

“They could track him. They could’ve tracked him down.”

Medianoche took a deep breath, an inhale that told him that his ribs and kidneys had been pounded by hate, a breath that told him he might piss blood later.

He began a slow, uneven jog. The jog changed into an aching run that held a stoic military cadence that ignored ten levels of pain and suffering, an aggravating ball of agony that coursed through every vein.

They hurdled over dead bodies and debris that polluted the fields where orphans played.

Ran through flames and a world filled with the poor and destitute.

Medianoche tasted his own blood, drank it like wine, became intoxicated with anger.

He ran back through the fires and destruction in the
villa
. Ran past settlements that collapsed like communism in Russia. Ran through enraged immigrants who looked like the evil dead. Señorita Raven struggled to maintain the pace but remained at his side, her every exhale powerful, intense, determined. As if the taste of her own blood fueled her insanity and anger.

Fury and insanity grew like a tumor.

Hurting head to toe, Medianoche raced back to a decrepit road near Avenida Gendarmería Nacional. He didn’t slow his run until he was a few yards from their stolen van, a van that had one dead and one wounded soldier inside.

The van had been left on a bumpy and unpaved street on the edges of the slums. The muddy roads weren’t good enough to drive, would’ve left them stuck and vulnerable.

They’d been forced to go in on foot.

The Beast was outside the van, leaning against the passenger-side door, grunting like he was suffering. Medainoche knew The Beast was still bleeding from his lower back.

The Beast had gottten out of the van with a weapon in one hand.

He guarded their half of the package as if his life depended on it.

The black briefcase was behind The Beast. He frowned and held up the sensor.

He cursed, then said, “The fucking package.”

Once again it was time to reload and move before a lost battle became a lost war.

Chapter 45

Arizona bled
a river of pain.

Shotgun stepped up and took her from Scamz, handled her gingerly.

Scamz could barely stand, as if he had used all of his energy to get her this far.

Arizona held her swollen belly and gritted her teeth like she was dying a slow death. Dark smudges covered her face, looked like the blackness of asphalt and tar. Her lips were split and swollen. One eye was red and purple, puffed and closed.

Her elbows and knees were bloodied, skin ripped away. Almost every fingernail was broken and the tips of her fingers were scarred, bloodied, and swollen, as if she had clawed herself out of a pile of concrete.

But that wasn’t the biggest concern.

A lake of redness grew between her legs, flowed down her inner thighs, mixed with the rain that saturated her clothing, dripped to the wooden floor, left a cherry river marking her path.

She was in bad shape. Needed to be medevaced to an emergency room.

My voice was strained when I said, “We need to get her to Alemán Hospital.”

Scamz panted, “Put her in the bedroom . . . get her on the bed.”

“
We need to get her to the goddamn emergency room
.”

“If I don’t do what bloody has to be done, they will find us, and an emergency room will do none of us any good, unless we’re on the bottom floor where they lock away the dead. There are more than the bloody Four Horsemen after the bloody packages. Germans. Serbs. Albanians. So shut your mouth and put her on the bloody bed like I told you to do.”

He took a step toward me, gave me a shove, and I grabbed that motherfucker. I wanted to pound his Latin face with my swollen fist and beat that British accent out of his pretty-boy face.

But Shotgun grabbed me, stepped between us.

I could’ve hit Shotgun in the mouth right then. But I knew better than to try.