I let out an obnoxious drunken snort. “Oh, do you? So you know that he cut her open, cut out her organs, and put them on his shelf like bowling trophies?”
“Oh my God,” Sarah said. We’d kind of left that part out of our report.
“So don’t barge in here and tell me I can’t have a goddamned drink!”
“I’m just trying to help you.”
“I don’t need your help!” I shouted, slamming the plastic bottle down on the concrete floor. “You’re not my damned mother! She’s been dead since I was a kid. You know what? I get by just fine.”
Sarah’s expression softened a little. “How did she die?”
“She was murdered. I came home one day and found her cut to pieces, just like that girl. My dad’s dead too. So are half my friends. You know what? I don’t care. I kill people for money. Shooting people is my job. I can handle it. I always handle it. I don’t need your help. I don’t need your pity. And I don’t need you. So just march your little ass the hell out of here and leave me alone!”
Sarah’s eyes flashed with anger. “I don’t need this. Go ahead, drink it all! Drink yourself to death if you want. I hope you choke on it!” She turned on a heel and stormed out of my room, slamming the bathroom door behind her.
A pulse of anger surged through me. I picked up the ancient puzzle box and threw it against the door as hard as I could. It crunched loudly as it hit, and fell to the floor, broken. I stared at the bathroom door, breathing heavily. I just wanted to be left alone. I just wanted Sarah to come back. I wanted another drink. I didn’t want to drink anymore.
A sickening pit formed in my stomach as I realized what I’d done. Good job, Ace, I thought. You managed to drive her away, too.
“Shut up,” I said aloud. It’s not my fault. I had a bad night. There was comfort in self-pity. I lifted the plastic bottle to my lips and began to gulp down the rest of the pungent mystery alcohol. It burned on the way down, and I thought I was going to throw up. I let the empty bottle clatter to the floor.
I slumped back against the wall and closed my eyes. The room was spinning, and it wouldn’t stop. My thoughts became even more sluggish than they were before, and it was difficult to concentrate on anything. I had a hard time remembering what I was so upset about. I drifted off to sleep.
LORENZO
The van slalomed around the corner as we headed back toward town. I bounced painfully against the wall. The girl I had rescued was sitting next to me, head flopped back on the seat, totally out. Apparently she’d been drugged by the bad guys.
“Easy, Carl, don’t get us killed.”
“Don’t you tell me easy! Plan, Lorenzo, we had a plan. Who the hell is this broad?” He swung us around a truck full of sheep, and when I say full of sheep, I mean that literally, like it was piled full with legs sticking out the top. “She was not part of the plan. I would have remembered that.”
“They were going to torture her. I couldn’t just leave her. She sounded like an American before she passed out. We can just drop her at the embassy gates and take off.”
“Is that what you think now?” He gestured out the window at the Zubaran police vehicles streaking in the direction we had come from. “Cops crawling everywhere. And you forgot, because of the mobs of angry assholes, they evacuated the embassy.”
To accentuate his point, I saw a man on the sidewalk getting the hell kicked out of him by some of the Zubaran secret police. “Okay, our place is closer. Get us off the streets.” The whole city had gone nuts.
“I’m not taking her to our place. With what we’re working on, nobody can see that.”
“Do it, Carl.” I ordered. My crew was loyal, and I seldom had to pull rank, but this was my crew, and it wasn’t a democracy. The driver swore, his beady eyes glaring at me in the rearview mirror. We reached the compound in minutes. We entered through the attached garage so no one would see us carry the girl in.
Reaper met us at the door. He had a Glock shoved in the front of his pants. “What happened out there? Police bands are screaming about some massacre. Did you get the box? Hey . . . who’s the babe?”
“Lorenzo decided he’s Batman, sneaking around at night and rescuing people,” Carl spat. I ignored him and carried the girl up the stairs and into the apartment. I laid her gently on the couch. She was still out.
“Where’s the box?” Reaper asked.
“Somebody beat us to it and whacked Adar.” I put the DVD in his hand. “The shooters are hopefully on this, and we need to figure out who they are. We need that damn box.”
“On it, chief.” He ran for his computer.
I flopped onto the couch next to the girl. My hands were starting to do the post-action shake. No matter how many times I did something like this, that part never changed. Carl sighed, folded the stock of his stubby Galil, and set it on the coffee table.
“Pretty bad in there, I guess?” he asked slowly, sitting down. We had been working together for over fifteen years now. We’d met in Africa, where he had been working as a mercenary, and we had both gotten screwed over by our respective employers. Working with me had proven more lucrative, and we’d been together ever since, through all sorts of craziness, and it still took me a moment to realize that Carl was trying to be comforting. He just wasn’t very good at it.
“I shot three of them. Took out some more with a grenade.” I shrugged. “The guys before me made a real mess.”
Carl regarded me suspiciously, wheels turning, probably wondering if I was going soft on him. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch.” He gestured at the girl. “And what do we do with her now?”
I studied her for the first time. She was young. Probably in her twenties. I had thought that she was from the Philippines when I had first seen her, as most of the servant girls in Zubara were imported from there or Indonesia. They were literally a slave class. Now I wasn’t so sure. She would have been unusually tall for a Filipina and didn’t look quite like most of the servant girls I had seen here. She was snoring peacefully in a drug-addled haze. One eye was badly bruised, and it made me glad that I had shot those men.
“I couldn’t leave her. You should have seen the girl upstairs,” I said. Carl didn’t respond. Acts of mercy were few and far between in his life. I patted her down: no documents, no passport. Something caught my eye. “Check this out.” I held up her wrist. She had a gold ring on one finger.
“What’s that say?” he asked, squinting his beady eyes.
“California Polytechnic University, San Luis Obispo.”
“Think she stole it off a tourist, I hope?”
“I’m thinking that we’re going to need to come up with a pretty good cover story for when she wakes up.” I gestured around the room. Hundreds of pictures were tacked on the walls. Posters of Al Falah, Adar, building schematics, road maps, and miscellaneous paper littered every corner of the room. A scale model of the Phase Three target was on the coffee table, and there were at least ten visible guns, and that wasn’t counting the RPG in the corner.
Carl took his time responding. He would have just left her there. Hell, I don’t know why I hadn’t just left her behind. We were thieves, not heroes. “You’re the one with the imagination. I just drive good and shoot people.”
“Guys, come check this out,” Reaper called excitedly from the other room. “I’ve got your shooters.”
We entered the makeshift computer room and hovered over Reaper’s shoulder. He was playing some Finnish goth-metal over the speakers. “I’m skipping past the torture porn. This Adar guy was one screwed up son of a bitch . . . and here is where your shooters come in.”