walking a few steps and sitting hard on the tiles. Then repeating the maneuver again and again without ever crying. After Macon tired, Martin and Angel made love for the first time since his arrest. As they made love, his son slept beside them in a drawer Martin had taken from the chest and padded with a bedspread. It began raining, and they had fallen asleep, locked on to each other, when the young bodyguards hit the house. Maybe they were emboldened by the storm or the money they had been offered for the job. Maybe it was the grass and the thought of rape after the man was dead. They never said.
Martin awoke to a loud crash as the louvered door exploded open under the force of a boot. Martin, whose reflexes were automatic, pushed Angel to the floor by the crib and rolled in the opposite direction, because a machete used for gardening was propped against the wall near the headboard. He moved toward the door as the tall man burst through the bedroom door and began firing at the empty bed. Martin put the heavy blade through the man’s forehead, and he collapsed into himself, the thin blade locked into the skull to the bridge of the boy’s wide nose. There were fast footsteps in the living room, and the second man hit the door expecting to find the room’s inhabitants dead. The shotgun was half-lowered. As Martin had moved beside the door, Angel had grabbed up Macon and was heading for the window and freedom.
Martin wrenched the blade free as the man with the shotgun entered the room. The boy looked at Angel and then at his dead friend and was raising the weapon when Martin stepped in behind him and pushed the blade’s wide tip down into the torso at the place between the neck and the collarbone, severing the blood pipes that ran into the right side of the brain and back out, as well as opening a lung and the heart. As he pulled the blade out, the big gun went off. The shotgun blast caught Angel in the back, and she fell hard, her head hitting the wall and then the concrete floor. There was the dull, wet sound of crunching bone and mashed tissue.
The guard who had been left to cover the window pushed the shutters open as Martin pulled free the nine- millimeter Browning Hi-Power that had been stuffed into the shotgunner’s waistband. Martin opened up, and round after round hit home as the youthful guard stumbled backward into the foliage like a man who was being electrocuted. Then it was silent; Martin’s ears were ringing, and clouds of cordite swirled like wood smoke in the air above the killing floor. Martin had moved across the room, dropped to his knees, and turned Angel to him. Her nose was bloody and strangely flattened. There was a strange smile on her lips and a look of abject terror in her coffee- brown eyes. She squeezed his arm.
“Martin, where’s Macon?” she whispered, touching his cheek with a trembling finger.
“He’s fine,” Martin said of the still child.
“Take care of him for-” She gripped his arm for a second, went through a death rattle, and her body jerked itself stiff and then relaxed. Then Martin turned his attention to Macon.
The buckshot had passed through Angela’s delicate frame, and the child’s abdomen had been opened like a dropped melon. After what felt like a great deal of time had passed, Martin had wrapped Angela’s and Macon’s bodies in blankets and carried them one after the other outside. The rain fell in torrents, but he managed to dig a four-foot-deep hole and dropped them in as gently as possible. Then he knelt over the bulging mud and screamed his rage at the clouds. He was answered with thunder.
After he had dragged the dead pistolero inside, he set the house on fire using a jerrican of gasoline from the Jeep. Then he drove to the nearest town and left it there. He rode on a bus for hours and then caught another. It was days before he took notice of where he was.
The three men, who looked like boys, had been contract killers. Contra soldiers, probably. They must have been better than they looked, or they wouldn’t have been given the task. Martin knew that old associates in the CIA had decided to make sure he was silent about what he knew about whom. That was a business decision he understood. He cursed himself for not seeing it coming. He had overestimated his value to people who never got close enough to the help to understand how lethal one man could be. It didn’t matter in the least who had pulled the trigger, though. Paul Masterson and his Green Team had used manufactured evidence to take him down. If he hadn’t been arrested, he reasoned, he would not have represented a risk to the people who had hired the three assassins.
The men who sent the assassins had done what they had to do. The assassins had been poor soldiers killing for money and a future. Paul, Rainey, Thorne, and Joe had sentenced his family to death, him to a loneliness beyond measure. They were the ones who had to pay.
He had used Angela for company, assistance, animal comfort, and for cover. For Martin that was the closest thing to love he could feel for a living woman. But in the space of a long day and an evening, he had loved Macon beyond the way an animal loves its own. Through their deaths he had fallen in love with them.
He had killed his own mother because he couldn’t allow her to lead his enemies to him, or to live alone if he was to die. Now they would all know that he had killed the Mastersons, and the rules would change. After tonight he would be hunted like no other man in history. He smiled at the idea of what a challenge that would be.
She died listening to my voice. The recorded tape had started “Mother, I love you. Remember that I will always love you.” Then the device’s timer, triggered by the turning on of the tape player, had set off the Snickers- bar-sized block of Semtex inside the box. She could not have known what hit her. It was a merciful, kind thing he had done-out of love. Now she would be all right. If he escaped, he would be free; if he didn’t, she would never have to grieve for him. He remembered what she had always told him: “There is nothing in life as terrible as having to bury your own child.” I have spared her what I had to go through.
49
Woody was reading when a shadow crossed the page of the book in his hand. He got his hand on the Glock and brought the barrel around to find it aimed at a very surprised nine-year-old holding a red nylon sleeping bag and a cage with a bird inside. The cage had something white running along the walls. Reb had lashed Styrofoam blocks inside the bars.
“Reb,” he said as he put the Glock in front of him on the coffee table and exhaled deeply. “You sneaked up on me.”
“That was neat how you drew it out,” Reb said. “I bet my daddy could do it faster.”
“I know he could,” Woody said. “Why aren’t you asleep? It’s late.”
“The bed keeps moving me awake.”
“The water’s rough, that’s all. The wind will die down in a while. But you’re safe in a boat that was built for ocean traveling in rough seas. And, besides, I’m the Lone Ranger, kiddo, and Reid is Tonto.”
“Reid doesn’t know how to shoot,” he said. “What’s a Tonto?”
“We won’t be shooting anyone.” Woody smiled. “Go back to sleep.”
“Where’s Mom?”
Woody pointed to the teak door a few feet from where he was sitting.
“In there with Erin.”
“I’m gonna sleep in there, too. I don’t like the bunk cabin.”
“I’m sure they’ll be delighted to see you.”
“See ya later,” Reb said. “Where’s Wolf?”
“He’s walking. He’ll be at the door any minute,” Woody said. He looked up and saw the coated figure move by the porthole. Glad I’m not out there, he thought to himself.
“Reb, what’s that in the cage?”
“It used to be an ice-chest lid. It’s to keep Biscuit from drownin’ if the boat goes under.” He looked at the bird and shrugged. “I’ll get him another chest cover. It was an emergency.”
“Flotation? I see,” he said, nodding and laughing to himself. “Wouldn’t want a bird to drown.”
He watched Reb disappear into the V berth. For a moment Erin’s music filled the lounge with strains of hard-edged music. Then he started to open the book but heard a tapping at the door. He stood, picked up the Glock, and went over to it. “Yeah,” he said.
“The dog,” came the muffled reply.
Something’s wrong! Woody pulled the gun from the holster and moved to the door with the gun ready. As he opened the door to the sight of a man he had never seen before, something moved behind him. Shit! No hard shoes against the deck! He was trying to bring the gun around when the man on his flank fired the Taser. Woody saw the
