Another round of laughter.
Hinge smiled. ‘No Lavander, no dinero, hokay?’
He shifted in his chair. The handcuffs rattled as he moved the briefcase on his lap. It was pointed at Arena, the spokesman.
‘Hey, senor, I could cut your arm off with one leetle whack of my machete.’
‘Reckon ya could, pal.’
Areno showed his bad teeth again.
Hinge smiled back. ‘The case stays with me until I see Lavander, got it?’
The leader was still grinning, but the grin turned nasty. ‘You talk big, for a leetle man. One needs friends with heem, to talk like that.’
‘Oh, I got a lot of friends. F’r instance — he looked at his watch — ‘one of them is at ol’ Chiados house right now. Why dontcha call him before we do any more talkin’.’
The three terrorists looked at one another quizzically. How did the gringo know Chiado’s name? What kind of trick was he pulling?
‘You better call him,’ Hinge said, in a voice that had become flatter and harder.
The leader stared at him for several seconds and then picked up the receiver and dialled a number.
‘Never know till ya try, right?’ Hinge said.
Falmouth sat behind the wheel of the Firebird about a hundred feet from Chiado’s house. On the back of the front seat on the passenger side there was a small clear plastic dish, no larger than a tea saucer, with a parabolic mike the size of a fingernail in its centre. It was aimed at the open front window of Chiado’s house with a thin cord from the mike to the speaker in Falmouth’s right ear. The setup could pick up conversations a thousand yards away.
Chiado lay beside Falmouth on the front seat. Around his throat was a thread of C-4 plastique no thicker than a nylon fishing line. Imbedded in the back of it was a tiny radio-controlled fuse. Chiado had been dead for more than an hour, ever since Falmouth dropped him in his tracks. Chiado had seen the tall gringo, with the cigar, leaning over the door, locking his car. As Chiado approached him the big man turned to him, pointing to the cigar, and said, in perfect Spanish, ‘Deme Un fosforo, por favor.’ And an instant later Chiado felt something sting his throat and it began to burn and the burning spread like a fire down his neck into his chest and down his arms to his fingers and then the world seemed to spin away from him and the man with the cigar got smaller and smaller. The dart had hit the main nerve in Chiado’s throat. Falmouth threw the terrorist in the front seat, pulled down a dark street and garrotted him.
Falmouth’s ear was deluged with sound. Two crying children, a woman’s shrill commands rising above the blaring radio somewhere in another part of the house, another child whimpering in her arms. Then the phone rang and she answered
‘Que hay!... Buenas noches, Areno ... Que pasa?
Falmouth put the car into gear, leaned over and shoved Chiado’s body into a sitting position. He drove toward the house, opened the car door, slowed down, and twisting sideways, kicked Chiado out in front of the house. He blew the horn several times as he drove away and saw Chiado’s wife, phone in hand, staring through the window at her husband’s body. Falmouth pressed the fuse button.
The plastique blew Chiado’s head off. It bounced, like a soccer ball, across the yard.
The woman shrieked. And kept shrieking, hysterically, into the phone and then suddenly she began to scream, over and over, ‘No! No! Pasco, no! Esta muerto? And she began screaming again.
Falmouth drove, without speeding, six blocks to the first main street, parked the car and went down an alley. He found the rear door of the restaurant, just as Angel had described it, went in through the kitchen and walked casually past the tables and out the front door. Nobody paid an’ attention to him. The cab was waiting.
‘Rico?’ Falmouth asked.
‘Si, senor,’
‘Bueno,’ he said and got in the cat. ‘Lleveme al Hotel Tamanaco, por favor.’
Areno’s eyes bulged as he listened to Chiado’s wife, screaming hysterically over the phone. He slammed down the receiver.
‘Los bastardos lo mataron! he yelled and grabbed for the pistol on the table. Hinge turned the briefcase toward him and pressed the laser trigger hidden in the handle. The green laser ray swept across the wall and pinpointed itself on Areno’s chest. There was a series of faint sounds and the man with the beard was lifted up on his toes and smashed into the corner. His chair clattered against the wall. A dozen bullet holes appeared in his chest. Blood squirted across the table and against the wall as he fell in a limp pile, like a suit falling off a hanger. He lay there, his good eye crossed, the gray eye staring bizarrely at the ceiling. His mouth popped open and he made a deep, gurgling sound and his left foot jerked violently for several seconds. Then it went limp.
The two others stared in disbelief.
Hinge turned the briefcase in their general direction. A green spot roved the wall.
‘Now, lissen here, boys, that little green spot on the wall, that’s called a laser. And if it touches one of you chinches, the gun just naturally goes off. You comprende? Watch.’
He put the briefcase under his arm so nothing was touching the handle and slowly swept it down toward Areno’s body. The bright-green pinpoint of the laser moved across the wall and down to Areno’s forehead.
Bupbupbupbupbupbupbupbupbupbup.
Areno’s head seemed to explode from the inside.
‘Now do you assholes comprende?’ Hinge said.
