Adrian McKinty - Hidden River

“No, you stand there and fucking listen to me,” I said.

“But I don’t know what you’re talking about, I’m really sorry, Alexander, you’re out of your mind,” she said softly, patronizingly, like a social worker or a nuthouse nurse.

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. Alan Houghton, the first obstacle. Victoria Patawasti, the second. And you seduced her and she wasn’t sure, but you’re so goddamn beautiful. You fucked her. Probably with that strap-on dildo you used to have.”

“That’s disgusting, you must be drunk or on drugs or something. Please, Alex, believe me, I have no idea what you’re saying,” she said.

“Liar. You fucked her. Charles told you to do it. Maybe it was her first time with a woman, she was nervous, so she made that joke. That same fucking joke. Her on top, you below. ‘That’s position twenty-one of the Kama Sutra,’ she said. And stupid me. You remembered it when I said it.”

“Oh, my God. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You’re quite delusional,” she said, calm and lovely and irritating.

“When I did that Kama Sutra joke, you knew I’d slept with her too, that I knew Victoria Patawasti, that I’d slept with her and that I’d come to avenge her, to seek you out.”

She didn’t speak, she didn’t budge, she stared at me, silent, unmoving. Infuriating.

“Tell me I’m wrong, you bitch, you bloody bitch,” I screamed at her.

But she said nothing. Shook her head sadly. Smiled. It was the final straw.

I climbed out of the thicket. I walked down the embankment toward her. I took out the.45, chambered a round. She dropped something, a signal. Hit the deck, put her hands over her head, a glint of her white teeth grinning in the dark and rain.

The shooting started and I was hit immediately in the chest and shoulder.

I tumbled to the bottom of the embankment. Gasping. Blood over my hands. Bullets flew out of the dark, thumping into a tree a half meter to my left. Others flew by from a different angle, big and churning like machine-gun rounds. The rain poured down. It hurt to the touch. My hat gone. Amber gone. Dazed. I looked for a way out but the air was as thick as coal.

I stood again. Easy target. Petrified. I dived for cover. I got behind a gravestone. Caught my breath. A scream of objects came whistling by out of the trees. An arc of fire. A shotgun. Jesus. So that’s shooter number three: a guy above me blocking off the exit.

They had planned it out. Trumped me, checkmated me. They had anticipated that I would come early, that I would be in the trees above the shelter and along the wall. They had seen all this and had placed two assassins in the shelter next to Amber and one in the trees behind me so I could not escape. The men below had me from different angles and the man up at the wall could shoot down on me from a flanking and elevated position.

I had lost all the advantages that I had come here with: surprise, tactical superiority, the high ground.

Automatic weapons. M16s. Coils of tracer in the black sky. A hungry pack of bullets seeking me out. The cemetery far from streetlights, and Fort Morgan cloaked in low clouds. Thunder. Rain. No stars. No cars. No help.

They found me. An object smashed into me and I went down again. My eyes saw white. I bit through my tongue. I rolled to the side. I’d taken another hit. Above my left knee this time. I reached down and my hand came back with blood. Shotgun pellet. I couldn’t tell if my patella was smashed. A lot of blood. I yelled and burst into tears. Scrambled away. Pathetic. I had failed. For Victoria, for me. For everyone. I, who was so goddamn smart. Jesus. My eyes closed. She was cleverer than me. I could see that now. I had been bested. Arrogance. Hubris. I blinked. Crawled behind a big tomb bedecked by angels. The men were moving too. Getting a better position. I had to move. I slithered toward the embankment, under monuments, gravestones and Celtic crosses. A sign told me that I was in section K, block 1, wherever that was.

My head was light. I couldn’t breathe. A tunnel collapsed my vision into a single fatal exit and the downpour took on a dreadful cadence. Funereal and mocking.

I should have listened to Pat.

No, it went further than that. I had fucked this up from the start. From the very day I landed in America. And now I was going to die.

At least it would be my just desserts. The punishment for such incompetence should be death. I took another breath.

“Lost him,” one man yelled.

“No, over there somewhere,” another replied.

“I’ll go around,” said the first.

Trapped, but I would try for it. The least I could do. I got up, I staggered on. Impossible. Shambling. Ahead of me somewhere in the pitch black were steps that led to the back entrance to the cemetery, the closed gate, the wire fence. Twenty or thirty wide-spaced cuts into the side of the hill, filled with pounded stone, leveled. I could have run them in thirty seconds on a good day. Now, at night, in the middle of a storm, with a shoulder wound, a leg wound, and with at least three gunmen less than the length of a basketball court away and zeroing in on me, it would be a bloody epic. Three men, one armed with a shotgun and the others using bloody automatic rifles.

I made it up about three steps, slipped on the dirt, fell. Tumbled down the hill, slewing in the mud. My head hit the side of a cast-iron litter bin. Sickening pain, a big cut above my ear. The shotgun tore up the air to my left.

“There he is,” someone yelled.

I slithered behind a stand of trees. I couldn’t see them but somehow they could see me. Maybe they had night scopes. Or, more likely, maybe they just knew there was nowhere else I could be. I gasped for air, panicked, waited for the big hit.

The rain a knife blade. My scalp on fire. My knee screamed, my chest gurgled, the wind blew down. I threw up in my mouth. Junk sick.

I saw a storage shed for lawnmowers. I crawled behind it. Safe for a few seconds. I took a deep breath. Calmed myself. Options. I wasn’t dead yet. I had the dark. I had a gun of my own. And the rain so thick it was nearly impossible to see. The boys would have to come close to administer the coup de grâce.

I did a quick triage. I’d been hit in the chest, but the vest had protected me.

The shoulder wound was a ricochet off the Kevlar. I felt around, it wasn’t serious. I was bleeding, but no major blood vessel had been punctured and it hurt like hell — a good sign. The shotgun pellet in the leg wouldn’t kill me. I put my finger through my soaked jeans to the skin. A lot of blood, but I could wiggle my toes. My tendons and nerves were ok. All that shooting and I’d really only been fucking grazed.

More shots, yells of organization: “Where’d he go? Where’s that fucking light? Who had the light?”

Only male voices. Amber, of course, was well out of this. Back at the car. Gone. Already left town. I took out the.45. Blacked out for a second. Where was I? I was in the middle of a graveyard. Shooters above and to the side of me. Three points of a triangle and I was at the center. They were good. Pat had been right. I was an idiot, an amateur dealing with professionals. It made no sense, Amber, why would you hire three more potential blackmailers? Goddamnit, it made no sense. Forget it. Had to get out. If I could make it to the fence on the far left of the cemetery. About fifty yards. Could I walk it? I’d have to crawl. Ok. Ignore the pain. Let’s go.

Caked with filth, I slithered my way over graves, cleaning the vomit out of my nostrils, sliding carefully along the ground.

Suddenly someone shouted triumphantly: “There he is.”

They turned a dazzling portable spotlight on me. One of those with thousands of candlepower.