“They hurt my feet. I took them off.”
“Get back against the wall.”
“What for, senor? I am not a threat to you.”
Mike stepped closer to the bars. “Get back against the wall, turn around, and lean on it. I’m coming in.” With a flick of his right hand, he whipped a telescopic steel baton to its full length.
“ Senor, you’re not going to use that on me, are you?” Krill said.
“Get back against the wall!”
The woman, still hanging by her arms, lifted her head from her chest and parted her lips. “Give me some water,” she said.
Mike looked over his shoulder at her. “Be quiet,” he said.
“I need some water,” she said.
“You did this to yourself, lady. I tried to be nice to y’all, and this is what I got. Now close your mouth.” Mike turned back to Krill. “You move your ass to the back of the cell. Spread your legs and lean on your hands. Don’t tell me you don’t know the drill.”
“Please give me water,” the woman said.
Mike turned around again, his hand gripped tightly on the foam-wrapped handle of the expandable baton. “I’ve had it with you, lady. You open your mouth one more-”
From the back of his waistband, Krill pulled loose the shoestrings that he had removed from his running shoes and braided into a garrote. He flipped the garrote over Mike’s head and jerked it tight around his throat and squeezed Mike’s head between the bars, pulling backward with all his weight, the garrote sinking deep into the neck, closing the windpipe and carotid artery and shutting off the flow of blood to the brain. Mike tried to work his nails under the garrote while veins bloomed all over his neck, not unlike cracks in pottery. Krill pulled tighter as Mike slipped down the bars to the floor. Krill grabbed Mike by the back of his shirt so he would not roll away from the cell once he was on the floor.
Krill got down on his knees and reached through the bars and slipped his fingers into the dead man’s shirt pockets but found nothing. With two hands, he turned him over so that the dead man faced the cell, his eyes half- lidded as though he had been shaken from a deep sleep. Krill got his hand into the man’s left pocket and found a folding single-bladed knife and a wad of Mexican currency and a penlight and a betting receipt from a racetrack. In the other pocket was a three-inch iron key.
Krill was trembling as he rose to his feet and extended his arm through the bars and inverted the key and inserted it into the lock. The key was an old one, and he twisted it slowly so as not to break it off inside the mechanism. He felt the tumblers turn and click into place and the tongue of the lock recede into the door and scrape free of the jamb. He shoved the door open, pushing aside Mike’s body.
“Hold on, Magdalena,” Krill said. “You are a great woman, a master of distraction, the greatest woman I have ever known. I will get you down right now. I never could have done this without you. You were magnificent.”
“Don’t talk,” she said, her lips caked, her voice hoarse. “His right ankle. You must hurry.”
“What about his ankle?”
The color was gone from her face. “He has a gun,” she said. “They’re moving around upstairs. Hurry.”
“No, we get you down first,” Krill said. He fitted his left arm around her waist and lifted her weight against him, then sawed through the pieces of clothesline that held her wrists to the rafter. When she fell against him, her cheek and hair touched his face, and he thought he smelled an odor like seawater on her skin.
“The holster is Velcro-strapped to his right ankle,” she said. “Take the pistol from the holster and give it to me.”
“You are a woman of peace, Magdalena,” he said. “You have no business with guns.”
“Don’t talk in an unctuous and foolish manner,” she replied. “A shadow just went past the window. Please do not waste time talking. The men upstairs will show us no mercy.”
Krill pulled up the right pant leg of the dead man and removed an Airweight. 38 from the black holster strapped to his ankle. The woman took it from Krill’s hand just as he heard an upstairs door crash open and glass breaking and a burst of machine-gun fire ripping through walls and doors.
“You have to live for your children, Antonio,” the woman said. “You have to tell others what happened to them. From this point, you live among the children of light. You become one with them. Do you understand me?”
“I think I do,” Krill said.
“No, say it.”
“I understand, Magdalena. And I will keep my word and do as you have said,” he replied.
Jack Collins pushed Eladio and Jaime ahead of him, through the patio door and into the dining room, both of them resisting and looking back at him anxiously. “Get to it, the pair of you,” Jack said. “You look back at me again, you’ll discover another side to my nature. You kill everything that moves on this floor.”
“We are campesinos, Senor Jack,” Eladio said. “We do not know tactics. We do not even know what we are doing here. What is the profit in rescuing a Chinese woman who teaches superstition to our people?”
Jack stiff-armed him between the shoulder blades, pushing him forward through the dining room, knocking over a heavy antique chair, breaking the crystal ware on a serving table. The first of Sholokoff’s men to come out of the hallway was bare-chested, his shoulders and lats stippled with body hair, an automatic in his left hand. He raised the automatic straight out in front of him, his face averted, as though staring into a cold wind and a magic wand could protect him from its influence. At the same time, Eladio shouted out, “Not me, hombre! Do not shoot. I am not one of them! This is a great mistake.”
Jack fired on Sholokoff’s man, a burst of no more than seven or eight rounds that blew away the man’s fingers from his grip on the automatic and stitched his chest and destroyed his jaw.
Eladio stared in horror at the man crashed against the wall and fell to the floor. Then he stared at Jack, his eyes seeming to search in space for the right words to use. “I froze. You saved my life, Senor Jack. We must prepare to attack the others,” he said. “They’re hiding back in the hallway. I can hear them.”
“Your fear got the best of you, Eladio,” Jack said. “This isn’t like gunning down a bunch of teenagers at a birthday party, is it?”
“Yes, I was very afraid. I was speaking insane words.”
“I wouldn’t say that. You always knew how to cover your bets.”
“Let us now go forward, Senor Jack. Tell me what you want me to do.”
“Just rest easy a second,” Jack said. With one hand holding the Thompson and the other holding Eladio’s cell phone, Jack pressed the redial number with his thumb. In the back of the house, a cell phone rang.
“You would think your bud would have enough sense to silence his phone,” Jack said. “That’s the trouble with treacherous people. Most of them cain’t think their way out of a paper sack. Your man in there sold out Sholokoff, just like you sold out me.”
“I don’t understand,” Eladio said.
“Your bud in there didn’t tell Sholokoff we were coming. Otherwise, Sholokoff would have set up an ambush. Oh, here’s your phone back.”
Jack tossed the cell phone to Eladio. When Eladio raised his free hand to catch it, Jack lowered the barrel of the Thompson and fired directly into Eladio’s chest, the shell casings bouncing off the furniture and rolling across the hardwood floor.
“Senor Collins, I do not know what is happening here,” Jaime said. “Why are you killing my cousin? Why are you turning your gun on your own people? We came here to fight your enemies.”
“You’re not my people, son,” Jack said. “Turn around and walk into the hallway.”
“No, I cannot do that.”
“Why is that, Jaime? You don’t trust your compadres in there?”
“These are not my friends. You are a deranged man. You’ve killed Eladio. You speak craziness all the time, and now your craziness has killed my cousin.”
“Pick up the cell phone and hit redial again. I want you to give somebody a message.”
“What message? That you’re killing your own people?”
“I want to tell Josef Sholokoff I’m just getting started. Can you do that for me, Jaime?”
“No, I will not do this. I didn’t have nozzing to do with Eladio’s transactions. I don’t know nobody in there. I am not responsible for what Eladio may have done.”
