Jackson had no time to be upset. He dragged the doctor down the hall and out the front door. Unfortunately, another piñata was waiting on the lawn. Jackson could already feel his braces changing. A long lobster claw reached out of his mouth, grabbed the piñata by the neck, and cut it in half. The evil red light of its eyes flickered to black.
Jackson and the doctor moved across the lawn. “I have to save Elizabeth!” Munoz cried as he pulled away from Jackson. “I won’t leave without her.”
“Doctor, it’s not safe here. The others are looking for her. I’m sure she’s fine,” Jackson said.
That’s when the door on the nearby delivery van swung open and a certain platinum blonde goon stepped out. The Hyena had a grin on her face until she saw Jackson.
“You!” she cried. “What are you doing here?”
“Rescuing this guy from killer robots. Are these piñatas yours?”
The Hyena smiled proudly.
“He’s under my protection, Mindy,” Jackson said.
The Hyena scowled. “Does everyone know my name?”
“You’ll have to kill me to get at him,” Jackson said, mustering all his bravery.
“Hmmm,” the Hyena said as she reached in the van and took out two silver sai with jagged points. “Well, I’m only being paid for the one kill, but a girl’s got to do what she’s got to do to get ahead.”
She swung the sai at Jackson, but his braces swirled and out popped sai of his own. They blocked the blows before they could do any damage.
“We know you work for Jigsaw. We also know he’s a nutcase.”
“Everyone’s a little quirky,” the Hyena said.
She slashed at Jackson’s shoulder, but his braces blocked the swing.
“He’s behind the kidnappings, right?”
It was then that the Hyena flung down one of her sai and with her free hand threw a punch that knocked Jackson to the ground. While he was struggling against unconsciousness, he felt the goon stamp her boots down on his braces, preventing him from using them to fight back.
“He’s building something, right?” Jackson sputtered. “Do you know what it is?”
“I don’t get paid to know that stuff,” she said. “I’m paid to kill people and you happen to be in the way.”
“You have to listen to me. Jigsaw is building a machine that will destroy the world. He’s insane, Mindy. He’s going to kill billions of people.”
“Not my problem. Now, where were we?” she asked as she pointed her sai at Dr. Munoz. “Oh, yeah, I was sent here to kill you.”
Just then, little Elizabeth Munoz came racing around the corner of the house. Tears were in her eyes as she attached herself to her father’s legs. “Don’t kill my daddy,” she begged the Hyena.
Jackson watched the Hyena study the little girl. Instead of cold-blooded murder, he saw something soft in her eyes. He hadn’t met any contract killers in his life, but he was sure they were supposed to have ice in their veins. The Hyena looked as if she might cry.
“I’m not going to kill your daddy,” she said. “We’re only playing, honey.”
The little girl looked up into the former beauty queen’s face. “Playing?”
The Hyena nodded. “We’re playing Zorro. Your dad was Zorro. I’m the villain. He just threatened to take me to jail and I was about to run away. You know what? Why don’t you and your daddy play now.”
Elizabeth wiped the tears from her eyes. “I like to play imagination.”
The Hyena lowered her sai. “I always did too.”
She stepped off of Jackson’s braces, and they slipped back into his mouth. Before he could get to his feet, the Hyena and her van were disappearing down the dusty road.
As the black helicopter soared over the frozen tundra below, the Hyena reviewed what had happened at Munoz’s house, and she was not happy. For months the Hyena had dreamed of the day when she stopped talking about being an assassin and actually became one, but the kid with the braces had ruined it all. She knew Jigsaw was a nutcase, but had managed to find a way to tolerate the idea. What she couldn’t stand was a liar. Jigsaw’s master plan wasn’t about taking over the world—it was about destroying it. She knew Jigsaw was building some kind of doomsday weapon, but she had assumed he’d use it to hold the world hostage. Mad-genius types never used their weapons. They just tried to scare the willies out of people so they’d cough up a ransom. But if what the kid had said was true, Jigsaw was planning something so … so … so diabolical. Mass murder was not why she had gotten into her line of work. Trained assassins killed people one at a time.
When the helicopter landed at the fortress, Dumb Vinci was waiting.
“Is it done?”
She nodded.
Dumb Vinci grinned, revealing a mouth full of broken and missing teeth. “Good. I’ll tell Jigsaw. Let’s get inside.”
She and Dumb Vinci rushed through the snow to the fortress. The wind was cold and vicious. It bit at her bare skin and she nearly knocked the goon down to get inside. Once there she excused herself and raced down the hallway to Jigsaw’s enormous lab. The door was locked so she hurried up the flight of stairs and into the observation room that held his jigsaw puzzle pieces. Looking through the window to the lab below, she saw the satellite dish, still aimed toward the sky. It was attached to solar panels resting on short tables scattered about the room. Clearly, Dr. Badawi had been smarter than Dr. Lunich and had given Jigsaw instructions on how to build her supercharged power source.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” a voice said from behind her. She spun around to find Jigsaw, Dumb Vinci, and twenty hulking goons.
“Yes,” she said. “Amazing.”
Jigsaw smiled. “Putting the world back together takes some very beautiful and powerful tools, Mindy. My machine is perfect in both form and function, and I owe its existence in no small part to you. If it wasn’t for your hard work, I could not have assembled the minds and tools to put all this together. The new world owes you a major debt.”
“So you’re saying I’m to blame for all the people you are going to kill,” the Hyena said.
“Oh, you say it like it’s a bad thing. Mindy, don’t think of it as destroying the world. Think of it as putting it back together. It’s broken and we’re going to glue the pieces back together. In the beginning of our arrangement all I had was my satellite dish. I could use it to move major islands around, but I had no control. I might latch on to Greenland. I might hit the Galapagos. It was very random. Then you brought me Dr. Lunich and his amazing machine. The tractor beam is a marvel, and with a little adaptation I supersized it so that it now links to my satellite dish. This allows me to drag an entire continent wherever I want it. For years all my work seemed hopeless. How can you fix the entire world if you can’t power the machine that puts it all together? That’s when I read about the marvelous Dr. Badawi’s solar panels. Now I have everything I need to put my jigsaw puzzle together.”
“You’ve lost your mind,” the Hyena said. “I never wanted to be a mass murderer.”
“Harsh!” Dr. Jigsaw cried. His feelings seemed to be hurt.
“I was hoping you would want to witness it, but I guess I was wrong.”
The goons cracked their knuckles and grinned eagerly.
“Getting rid of me is not going to be as easy as it looks.”
Unfortunately, it was. The Hyena was completely humiliated as the goons hoisted her down the hall. They carried her into a strange, painfully cold room. It had no floor other than the sheet of ice the fortress was built upon. In the center of the ice was a hole big enough for a large man to slide through into the water below.