won’t recognize it. And it might just be uglier than you expect.”
The stranger barked one short laugh, and his bodyguard also grinned.
“If you continue to play with this one, he will eat you like a barracuda,” the stranger said in his oddly accented yet cultivated voice. “Besides, I have a plane to catch. Let us complete our business.”
That was the cue for the bodyguard on Hannibal’s side of the room to cross to his boss and pick up the larger briefcase. He sat it on the coffee table and opened it, revealing the stacks of cash Hannibal expected. Derek sucked in a breath. The bodyguard looked to Rod. Rod nodded and handed him the disc.
Hannibal considered the rescue options to be slim. Sarge was bound and wedged into a corner where he would be slow getting into the action even if he somehow freed himself. Hannibal saw no possible allies he could turn in the room. The Colombian had what he had come for and would now leave Hannibal and Sarge to Rod’s limited mercy. Hannibal though the police would be there by then if Missy had sent them. Perhaps she had decided to distance herself from the crash site before calling for help. After all, she believed Hannibal to be an underworld character. She might have decided not to have any more to do with him or Rod. Out of respect for Hannibal’s undercover status, Cindy would wait hours before raising a general alarm.
With rescue hours away, Hannibal realized how thin his hand was. He had only one card, and the time had come to play it.
“He’s ripping you off, you know. The formula you’re paying for isn’t on that disc.”
Rod’s face contorted into something akin to deep concentration. The stranger released another short, barking laugh.
“He’s lying,” Rod shouted.
“That would be a foolish lie.”
“It ain’t,” Hannibal said. “It’s a scam. This cracker’s just trying to trick you out of your cheddar.”
“That would be a foolish trick,” the stranger said, tapping his cigarette ash onto the floor. “We will know, very soon, which of you is the more foolish.”
The first bodyguard sat the smaller case on the coffee table beside the first. When he pulled a laptop computer out of it, Hannibal realized that his outburst had been unnecessary. He fought to maintain a straight face as the guard opened the computer, booted it up, and placed the disc into the CD-Rom drive.
Hannibal closed his eyes for a moment, sending a silent apology to Cindy. There was no way around what would come next. The Colombian would have to make a statement. Rod would resist. There would surely be a firefight. Barring exceptional luck, he and Sarge would die in the crossfire.
Unless he could bargain his way out of it. He still knew the location of the formula.
The bodyguard crouching at the computer tapped keys in silence. The smoke of a custom blend cigarette flared Hannibal’s nostrils. Then the computer user’s eyes flared as well.
“Boss, there’s only one thing on this disc, but it’s not a data file.”
“That’s crazy,” Rod said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.” Despite his hubris, Rod was easing back toward his chair. The stranger raised a finger to his chin,
“Well, what is it?”
“It appears to be an audio file,” the guard said.
The stranger flashed a sly smile, glanced at Hannibal and said, “Well, play it.”
The guard tapped keys and what sounded like a hip-hop beat came out of the laptop. Derek’s hand slid toward the space between the cushions. The move was subtle, but Hannibal was sure the guard behind him would have noticed it. He sat very still, trying hard to look harmless.
The audio track evolved into a rap performance. Sarge finally looked at Hannibal when the lyrics started: “She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean…”
The stranger’s eyes hooked to Hannibal.
Sarge said, “Damn.”
Hannibal reached for the stranger’s attention. “Look this doesn’t have to end ugly. You still want the formula, right? I might be able to…”
Rod screamed, “You son of a bitch!” His hand thrust under his chair. “I’ll fucking kill you!”
The stranger stayed still, composed. The man at the computer performed some sort of sleight of hand magic trick and a pistol appeared in his right fist, pointed toward Rod. Derek pulled a gun out of the sofa. Sheryl dived for the floor. A hand landed on Hannibal’s shoulder, he guessed to hold him still as a shield. He heard a safety catch click off near his ear.
And then Hannibal went blind.
24
A heavy revolver roared and the eye-scorching blast jarred Hannibal into action. He dived hard to his right, away from the couch, one hand already working into his pocket as two more shots were fired. He had no time to wonder why the lights had gone out. He just knew that survival depended on taking advantage of miracles when they came along.
Hannibal had a pretty good mental picture of where each of the players would go for cover. Listening to the rustling of bodies scrambling for safety between at least half a dozen more gunshots, Hannibal rolled to the wall beside the door, the last place he expected any of them to go. A gunshot on his right brought a scream of fear from Sheryl. Her pitiful sobbing came from somewhere near the middle of the room. Hannibal managed to free his pocketknife and begin work on the tape holding his wrists in place.
Someone was creeping along the wall to his right. Someone else was crawling behind the sofa. Then he heard a heavier thump at the base of the stairs. It had to be Rod. He was moving up the stairs. There was no way to know what kind of arsenal he might have there. Hannibal imagined Rod at the top of the stairs with a machine gun hosing down the room. He couldn’t reach him without crossing the no man’s land of the center of the room. But, could he get one of the others to bring Rod down?
His hands free, Hannibal eased up into a crouch. While adjusting his balance he bumped his head against the blinds. The soft rattle shot fear down his spine. He snapped back to the floor, waiting for a bullet to find him. No one fired. Maybe the others were also focused on the stairs. And he had just bumped into the possible solution.
Focusing his attention on the denser darkness at the center of the room, Hannibal slowly raised his left hand, gripped the cord hanging behind it, and yanked hard.
With a loud whirr the blinds raced toward the ceiling. The pale blue moonlight revealed a frozen tableau of desperation faced with inevitability. Derek stood in the center of the floor straddling his weeping girlfriend. With his teeth clenched like Dirty Harry he held the big. 44 Magnum thrust forward aiming at a space on the wall halfway between the two bodyguards. Before Derek could even decide whether to swing left or right, two automatics spoke at once. The Magnum revolver fired into the ceiling and Derek flew backward as if yanked by wires. Sheryl screamed again. The gunmen’s eyes turned to Hannibal.
The stranger rose from behind his chair and walked calmly toward the door. When he was inches away from Hannibal he stopped and nodded once. Then his eyes went to the stairs. Rod must have already reached the second floor. The stranger looked again at Hannibal.
“Will we meet again?”
“No,” Hannibal said. “Other priorities.”
The stranger offered a half smile and then said, “Let’s go” in a clear voice and opened the door. His men moved to follow him. Hannibal stood and bolted toward the stairs. Halfway across the room he bent long enough to scoop up the revolver Derek had dropped. With the muzzle pointed toward the ceiling he raced up the stairs, praying that he would meet Rod at the top. Instead, he found the hallway empty. It was the hall where Rod had kicked and beaten him. The second floor of this house held only ugly memories.
Moonlight showed him that the first room, where Mariah was beaten, was equally vacant.
The second bedroom, where Derek and Sheryl had played before the boy was blown away trying to defend his mentor, was unoccupied.
He entered the final bedroom, where Hannibal had been chained and forced to watch Missy being brutally
