M.I.A. Hunter: Miami War Zone (7 page)

Such as the other bouncer and a razor-wielding friend who had come along with him.

Stone's leg flew up and the razor spun glinting through the smoky haze. His leg touched down and he drove a flattened hand into the razor man's diaphragm, the stiff fingers punching in deeply.

The man was still falling as Stone's foot smashed into the bouncer's right knee, bringing forth a crack almost as loud as the one that had come from the breaking table.

The bouncer screamed and fell forward on his face, leaving a red smear on the floor. He sat up, clutching his knee, blood streaming from his ruined nose.

Hog had gallantly stepped across a prone body to offer his assistance to the stripper.

"I gotta apologize for the behavior of my buddies," he was saying. "They don't know much about the social graces, like I do."

Just at that second, a man tried to brain him with a beer bottle.

Hog reached up idly, catching the man's forearm in his bearlike paw. The arm stopped coming down, frozen in mid-strike. The man strained mightily, his face turning a dusky red as he tried to complete his move.

Hog hardly noticed him. "You see, some people just don't know how to behave in the presence of a lady." He looked the stripper over. "And I can tell you're a real lady."

When he finished the sentence, he gave the man's arm a vicious twist, tearing muscles and tendons and snapping the bone. The man's red face turned suddenly white, and he fainted. Hog put up a foot and kicked him into another man who was moving in that direction. They both thudded into another table and went down.

"Terrible manners," Hog said. "Here, let me help you up."

The stripper had fallen out of her chair in the shuffle that was going on all around her. She looked at Hog with wide eyes and open mouth, then gave him her hand so he could help her to her feet.

He turned to look for a way through the rioting crowd and saw Loughlin go down beneath three men.

"
Fuckin
' limey," he snarled. "Excuse me, ma'am."

He released the stripper's hand and walked to the spot where Loughlin was struggling beneath three heaving bodies, all trying to punch him at once.

"You fuckers won't even fight fair," Hog said, reaching down and taking hold of one man by the seat of his pants and the scruff of his neck. He picked him up and whirled around, tossing the man a good fifteen feet through the air. The man smashed face-first into the concrete blocks of the wall, his head making a sickening sound upon impact.

"Damn," Hog said. "I didn't think I threw him that hard."

Loughlin had already thrown the other two men off, smashing one across the throat with his flattened hand and gouging the eyes of the other.

Hog turned back to the stripper, but she had fled through the door in the back wall.

"Well, shit!" Hog yelled. "You try to treat '
em
right, and where does it get you?"

No one answered him, all being otherwise occupied. Stone was facing four men, two with knives, one with a pistol, and one unarmed. That one could wait.

He feinted with a kick, and the two with razors jumped back, leaving him with an opening to the gun. He stepped in so fast that the man had no opportunity to move, slapping the gun aside with his open palm and driving his other hand upward, hard, into the man's nose. If he hit too hard, the bone and cartilage would be driven into the man's brain, but at the moment Stone didn't particularly care.

As the man collapsed to the floor, the other man, the one with no weapon, turned and ran. Stone let him go.

The men with the knives moved in, their hands low and their weapons held loosely, palms up. They knew what they were doing.

So did Stone. He leaped to the side and jumped high into the air. His powerful left leg was a blur as it flew forward, smashing into the side of one man's head.

Stone felt bone give beneath his foot.

The kicked man flew sideways into his buddy, the other side of his head cracking into his pal's skull with a sound like two trains colliding.

Stone landed lightly and looked around.

There were bodies all over the place. Some of them were moving, squirming, gasping, groaning.

Some of them weren't moving at all.

Hog was still looking through the door where the stripper had disappeared, but Loughlin had pulled Rodriguez to his feet and forced him into a chair.

Stone joined him, putting his hands under Castillo's armpits and levering him into a seat.

The fight was over.

"You think anybody called the cops?" Hog asked, his mind finally off the redheaded woman.

"This kind of thing probably happens fairly often around here," Loughlin commented dryly. "Probably no one noticed anything out of the ordinary."

Stone was lightly slapping Rodriguez's face. The Cuban's head wobbled on his neck, but his eyes blinked.

"Is there any beer left around this place?" Stone snapped. Hog looked around. There was a bottle on its side a few feet away, a little of its contents still within it. Hog got it and handed it to Stone, who tipped it to Rodriguez's lips. The man inhaled a bit of the beer and sputtered.

"Now," Stone said in a flat and deadly voice, "tell us what you know about Jack
Wofford
."

"I . . . I knew him," Rodriguez managed.

"Car pulling up outside," Hog said.

Stone ignored him. "So you knew him. How well did you know him?"

Rodriguez shook his head as if trying to clear it, glancing to the side at the still unconscious Castillo. "Who are you?" he demanded. "Are you from the don?"

"The don?"

"Yeah, the don. Shit, man. We delivered, didn't we? We didn't take no money for nothin', right?"

Car doors slammed in the street.

"What
did
you take the money for?" Stone demanded.

"Fuck it, man. You know—"

"Company!" Loughlin yelled.

Stone and his team reacted instantly. "Company" in that context did not mean the police, or any other
friendlies
. Not that the police would be so very friendly at this point, considering the havoc that had been wreaked in the Black Pussy Cat.

Hog and Loughlin hit the floor behind overturned tables.

Stone ducked behind Rodriguez.

The four men who burst through the door wasted no time in looking for their targets; instead they began firing indiscriminately, long bursts from automatic weapons that sounded like Uzis.

Chips of wood spun through the air as the bullets ripped over the edges of tables. Splinters of concrete mingled with white dust as jagged lines were chewed up the walls.

Bodies danced and hopped on the floor as the deadly fire jerked them this way and that, tearing ragged gobs of flesh from the bodies and filling the air with a red haze of blood.

Rodriguez was pinned to the chair in front of Stone as the slugs ripped into him, flinging his head backward and taking off the top of his skull.

The screams of the dead and dying echoed off the hard concrete walls.

Stone and his men had not even felt the need to draw their weapons in the previous fracas. The opposition was too amateurish and hardly worth considering, despite the numbers.

Besides, they really had nothing against the patrons of the Black Pussy Cat and no desire to kill them in a simple brawl.

But this was different.

This was trained killers, firing everywhere, killing everyone their bullets could reach.

Stone pulled out his Beretta 93-R and began firing around Rodriguez's body in three-round bursts. He smiled as one of the 9-mm
parabellum
rounds punched out the eye of a man with an Uzi and went on through the top of his head, taking with it a dollar-sized piece of his skull.

Hog was blazing away with his Colt Trooper .357 Magnum with its six-inch barrel. One of the gunners looked terribly surprised as a bullet opened up a hole in his belly. He dropped his Uzi and stumbled backward. Hog shot him again, in the chest. Blood spurted and stained his shirt a carmine red, and he fell forward.

Loughlin shot the third man with the .45 automatic that he had been carrying cocked and locked. He slipped off the lock and started firing. His second bullet went through the man's neck, severing a carotid artery. Blood
fountained
and sprayed as the man put his hand to his neck, trying vainly to cut off the fatal flow.

The fourth man was the unluckiest of all. He was shot by all three pistols, bouncing to the left and right as the slugs hit him, his chest virtually disappearing in a shredded red mass.

Suddenly it was quiet, except for a few last groans and screams. Stone stood up and looked around.

"What the fuck?" Hog growled. "This place is worse than a war zone."

"I don't understand it," Loughlin agreed. "This wasn't murder. This was a massacre."

"The important thing is, who were the targets," Stone said. "And I think I know."

"Us?" Hog asked.

"No. That's simply not possible. Only one person knew that we were coming here, and that's one person I know we can trust."

Hog nodded. He would have trusted Carol Jenner with his life—and he had, more than once. He believed in her just as Stone did.

"So if it wasn't us . . ."

". . . it was them," Stone finished for him, pointing to the bodies of Rodriguez and Castillo. They couldn't even see Castillo's face now. The bullets had torn it apart.

The room smelled of cordite, carnage, and death. They heard sirens in the distance. A war would bring the police even to a neighborhood like this one.

"Time to go," Stone snapped.

Hog slipped his .357 into the clamshell holster at his waist. "Yeah. I bet there ain't too many folks in this neck of the woods who drive white Toyotas."

They faded out of the club and into the humid Miami night. Hog got them back to the safe house without getting lost even once.

"C
harlie . . ."

". . . Charley . . ."

"Charlie . . ."

". . . Charley . . ."

"Charlie . . ."

The words rattled in
Wofford's
brain, ricocheting from one side of his head to the other, bouncing around in his skull.

He saw the leering face of the major, his mouth cracked in a gruesome grin, his teeth stained from the incessant cigarettes that he smoked, his breath as foul as a sewer in hell.

"So, Yankee turd, how do you like your friend now?"

Creel's body still hung from the bamboo bars of the cage.

Wofford
had no idea how long it had been there.

Hours?

Days?

It didn't matter. The flesh was peeling from it in strips.

Maggots writhed in the shoulders and back muscles.

Birds had been at the eyes and face.
Wofford
had heard them and been thankful that he couldn't quite see.

"He is shit now. Garbage. Just like you. You are shit. All the Americans are shit. And this is how you will all die."

The major kicked at the bars of the cage, and Creel's body swung out for a few inches. Then it swung back with a sickening scrunch.

Creel's face began to grow. It puffed up larger and larger, and then it exploded.

A spasm went through
Wofford's
body and he tried desperately to sit up. He couldn't, being still bound to the bed where he had awakened some time earlier.

His mouth was burning fiercely, as dry as sand.

For a brief lucid moment, he wondered just what in God's name kind of drugs they must be feeding him.

And he wondered where in God's name he was, and if
Kathi
knew.

K
athi
Wofford
was distraught. Stone had promised her that he would be on the job at once, and she had believed him. Still, there had been no word.