brains of the operation, if mindless slaughter like this could be said to have any brains at all.
One of them—a younger man, his hair slicked back in an almost comically typical Guido hairstyle—raised a hand to his brow and scanned the area. Then he shook his head.
“Find his wife and son!” he shouted.
At which point Maria’s heart leapt into her throat, and she thought: Frank. Oh God, Frank, wherever you are, please help me.
Castle ran, a step behind his father, through the awful, blood-soaked landscape.
He forced his eyes not to linger on any one corpse, except to identify it, to make sure that neither his wife nor son lay among the dead. He’d seen them last heading for the beach— maybe, he thought, they’d managed to escape already. Maybe the attackers had gone right by them, and Maria and Will had snuck past. Maybe . . .
“Frank.”
His father’s voice brought him back to the here and now.
“Careful,” Frank Sr. said.
He nodded, suddenly aware that the gunfire had stopped and that they were out in the open, dangerously vulnerable. Stupid. They weren’t going to be able to rescue anyone if they were dead. Stupid of them to charge right out, he should have—
He sensed movement behind him then, and spun around just as a man stepped out from behind the cinder- block firepit Mrs. Gutierrez’s husband had built last night, for the dinner that already seemed to belong to another lifetime, and the man already had his weapon out and aimed not at him but Frank Sr., and—
Gunfire exploded.
The elder Castle screamed and went down.
“No!” Frank yelled, and started to squeeze the trigger of his own weapon. Then he heard a sound from his left, and he swung his shotgun around just in time to smash the barrel full force into the skull of another man who was charging at him, knife drawn, but even as that man fell, he heard footsteps from behind.
Something thin and unbearably sharp cut into his throat, and, all at once, he couldn’t breathe.
Wire. Steel wire, slicing into his neck, cutting off his oxygen.
He gasped and slammed his right elbow back into his attacker’s gut and caught bone, not the soft solar plexus he’d been going for. He drew his elbow forward again, and felt the man behind him shift position slightly, anticipating the blow. Castle shifted his own weight then, intending to throw the man over his shoulder, but as he turned, his foot slipped in something, blood he supposed, and his knee buckled; the man pulled the wire even tighter around his neck, digging his elbows into Frank’s back for leverage.
Damn it. Castle choked, and saw stars.
What to do.
“You’re dead, motherfucker,” the man whispered in his ear, and then exhaled sharply.
All at once the pressure on his neck let up.
His attacker slumped over, a dead weight on Frank’s back. Castle pried the man’s fingers loose from the wire, and he slid to the ground.
There was a knife in the man’s back.
Frank Sr., one arm hanging limply at his side, the other pressed to his chest, where blood—ungodly quantities of dark red blood—stained his shirt, looked into his son’s eyes, and smiled.
“Okay,” his father managed. “Okay, Frankie. Go get the rest of ’em.”
And he toppled to the ground then, eyes suddenly vacant.
“Dad!” Frank Castle screamed. “Dad!”
FOURTEEN
Maria was gauging the distance they’d have to run when she heard her husband scream, and the faint hope she’d been nursing in her heart—that Frank would appear, suddenly, magically, jump in to somehow save the day —shriveled then and died within her.
She blinked away tears.
“Mom?” Will was looking up at her. “What was that?”
“I don’t know,” she lied. “What I do know is we have to get out of here. Now.”
“It’s too far.”
“It’s the only chance we have,” she said, turning again to look toward the Jeep. It was parked down the beach away from the bungalows, on an unpaved access drive that skirted the compound before joining up with the main road. It was barely visible from their vantage point, and entirely invisible, she hoped, from the bungalows behind them.
They’d rented it first thing day before yesterday, on arrival in Boqueron. It, and the attached fishing trailer she’d insisted on getting. Which, assuming they reached the Jeep safely, was going to make driving it a hell of a lot more difficult.
Why did I make Frank get that stupid thing, she thought. He’d told her the odds were they wouldn’t get out to the bay, not with all the diving they were going to do, but she’d insisted, and he’d given in, no, not given in, that wasn’t the way their relationship worked, he’d done it for her, and damned if he wouldn’t have found a way, even with all that diving, to get out into the ocean at least once before they left here for London and the job that was going to mean he came home to her and Will every night. No more sleeping in bed alone, no more renting DVDs to watch by herself, no more dealing with Will’s friends and friends’ parents, and after-school activities like her divorced friends did, no more—
“Mom.” Will tugged on her sleeve, and pointed.
Two of the men in black were beginning to walk down toward the beach, poking at fallen bodies, peering around rocks, clearly looking for survivors.
They had to go now, she realized, or not at all.
“I’m going to count to three,” Maria said. “Then we’re going to run to that Jeep, okay?”
Will was suddenly crying.
“What about Dad?”
Maria forced herself to lie again. “Dad’ll be okay. You have to do what I tell you, honey. Promise?”
He nodded. “Promise.”
“Good.” She took a second look back at the approaching men—who hadn’t turned their way yet, thank God— and began to count, her voice quivering, barely audible to her own ears.
She ran on two, dragging Will along with her.
Finger on the trigger of his AK-47, Quentin Glass stepped quickly around the corner of the main bungalow, prepared to shoot at anything that moved.
Nothing did.
He lowered his gun. Just bodies and blood, plenty of each. Including Morrie Shusheim’s two men, one of them burned black on the lower half of his body and still smoking. Glass shook his head. Shusheim had said he was giving them his best men, and he’d definitely charged them for such, but seeing these two, dead like this, he had to wonder. He’d have to talk to Howard, see if they should make a stink about not getting their money’s worth.
On the other hand, there was Lincoln, lying still on the ground, and Lincoln was as good as they came. Glass bent and checked the man’s pulse—still alive, but down for the count, apparently. If Castle had handled him so easily, perhaps they didn’t have a case. Something to consider, afterward.
John Saint came up behind him, wearing a frown.
“Where the hell . . .” Saint shook his head. “He was right here a second ago.”
“Ran off, most likely,” Glass replied. “No sign of his wife and kid yet?”
Again, Saint shook his head.
It was a mystery all right. Where had the man gone? The main point here was to kill him, not his relatives; it was all well and good that they’d taken care of the family members, but he could not go back to Howard and Livia and tell them their primary target had escaped.
He stepped out onto the blood-stained patio and surveyed the compound. Bodies, bodies, and more bodies. Bodies on the volleyball court, bodies on the dunes, Dante and Spoon down on the beach, searching for survivors, and—
Ah.
