Ted Bell - Warlord

"Stabbed you?"

"Yeah. I'm bleedin' to death, here, f'crissakes," Eddie croaked, and he looked like he might croak for real, too. Old man was in shock, his face white as a sheet, eyes dilated. And blood was seeping out of him, out of the cart, onto the grass.

Stoke pulled out his cell, punched in 911, and whipped off his belt, cradling the phone between his shoulder and his ear, waiting for an answer as he wrapped the belt tightly around Eddie's thigh just above the wound. "C'mon, answer me, damn it…"

"Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?"

"Listen carefully. My name is-"

Eddie eyed him with a watery eye. "Don't you hate it when they say, 'Por Espanol, press one'?"

"My name is Stokely Jones Jr., resident at Icon Brickell Towers, 495 Brickell Avenue, Brickell Key, downtown Miami. I have a stabbing victim here, deep puncture wound to the thigh, lost a lot of blood. I need both EMS and Miami-Dade Police assistance immediately."

"Yes, sir. Could you repeat-"

"You heard me. This man needs help now. Make it happen." He snapped his phone closed and cinched the belt tighter. The flow eased up a lot.

"Stoke, am I gonna die here?" Eddie moaned, looking up at him.

"Die? Shit, no, you ain't even about to die. I got this belt cinched above your knee. Cut off the bleeding. Ambulance on the way. You're going to be good as new. What the hell happened here, Ed? Take a deep breath and talk to me."

"Some wacky broad, man. Trespassing on private property. I spotted her ass over there in the garden, trying to hide behind the birds-of-paradise, looking up at the building with a pair of binoculars. Asked what she wanted, she says the master key card, crazy bitch. Ow! Fuck!"

"Sorry, it has to be real tight. Hurts like a bitch, I know. Can't help it."

"Yeah, but Jesus, Stokely."

"What happened next?"

"I drive over here, tell her to leave. She tells me go fuck myself. Then she pulls this goddamn diamond stiletto out of her handbag, jams it in my damn knee, that's how I rammed this tree. She says gimme the key card or I make it an even pair. My fuckin' knees! What am I gonna do? I hand it over. She takes the key card and splits and-hell, I dunno, I must have passed out."

"Diamond stiletto?"

"Yeah, the whole handle was gold, encrusted with diamonds."

"What did she look like, Eddie?"

"She was fuckin' beautiful, that's what. Some blond babe with tits out to here, that's what she looked like. Shit! This hurts!"

Stoke heard sirens screaming in the distance. He looked at Eddie hard. The bleeding had stopped. His color was coming back. He'd live.

"Hold on, Ed."

He ran for the entrance to his deluxe apartment in the sky.

"Stoke! Wait!" he heard Eddie screech behind him.

He stopped short and turned around. "What?"

"Did ya get the books? Dreadful Lemon Sky?"

"Jesus, Ed. Yeah, I got the books, okay?"

Eddie smiled and grimaced at the same time, and Stoke ran for the elevators.

FLASHY BLONDE WITH A HUGE RACK was gunning for him, huh? Great. He'd been thinking about her, the chick with the MAC-10 at the beach and in the black Charger, wondering if she'd come calling. She knew he'd seen her face and she seemed like a woman not out to meet new friends. He'd given Miami-Dade and the feds her description. And he'd been keeping his eye out for her, ever since the little shoot-out over on South Beach four days earlier.

Now he wished he'd said something to Eddie about keeping an eye out for her too. But he hadn't been that smart, and now Eddie had paid for Stoke's own stupidity and he cursed himself for it.

The beach bimbo was right now waiting for him up in his apartment. Had to be. Why else would a woman stab an old security guy and demand his master key? He hit PH and leaned back against the elevator's marble wall, trying to see how this was all going to go down. Picture the thing in his mind.

There was a big black leather chair in the living room. His personal chair. An Eames chair, the wispy decorator had called it. Chair faced south, out toward Biscayne Bay and the Keys; it had a matching leather footstool. His "watch the Dolphins get their asses kicked again" chair, he called it. It also swiveled.

It would be the most likely place for her to wait. Sit in that chair, swiveled around, directly facing the front door, cradling your nasty little black machine gun in your lap, your finger on the trigger, the lever set on three-shot bursts. Yeah. Maybe make it fun. Pour yourself a nice glass of wine from the jug of Almaden in the fridge, sit there all afternoon and wait for the big black dude to come home. That's the way he saw it going down anyway, and he was pretty good at visualizing this shit.

The elevator stopped on 60 and the doors slid open.

To the left was the corridor leading to his apartment. To the right was a door with a stairway leading to the roof. Stoke knew it wasn't locked because painters had been up there for the last couple of days, painting all the air-conditioning and heating equipment with some kind of rust-proofing paint. Shit got rusty fast in Miami, he'd learned from Eddie.

He quickly climbed the steps to the roof, trying to remember if he'd left the main sliding glass doors to his terrace open or shut. Open, he thought. But today was hot as hell, so he may have closed them and let the AC cool the place down while he was out. If they were open, he had an idea.

The entire rooftop, big as a football field, was covered with tiny white stones and the glare of the sun was painful. He crossed over to the eastern side of the building and calculated exactly where his terrace would be, right below the southeastern edge of the roof. He knelt down, looking below, suddenly very conscious of the amazing height sixty stories high in the sky.

He dropped to his knees and placed his hands carefully, shoulder width apart, gripping the raised four-inch steel rim sheathed in aluminum that went all the way around the four-sided building, took a deep breath.

Then he stretched out flat on the roof, digging the toes of his shoes into the stone, edging his body out into midair till his belt was almost to the edge. He could now lean out and down, take a quick peek at his terrace doors.

Please be open.

Closed.

And locked, he remembered. Shit. He always locked those sliding glass doors, even though it was ridiculous up here in the sky. Old habits die hard. He pushed back, heaved himself up, and got to his feet, thinking. Can't go in the front door and the terrace is locked up tight.

Es un grande problema, hombre, as Fancha would say. But big men solve big problems. He lifted his shirt, pulled the SIG 9mm out of the holster in the small of his back, checked his weapon. One round in the chamber and a full mag.

Now what?

The terrace. Yeah. The terrace was the only way. She'd have her back to it, eyes focused on the doorknob of the front door. The good news: the terrace behind her was just about the last place on earth anyone would be expecting company to drop in unexpectedly.

But once you drop in, then what? How the hell do you get through the sliding glass doors? Knock twice and smile? Mouth the word Domino's with your hands behind your back? Pizza man?

He looked around the rooftop, pulling down on his right earlobe. Old habit. Back in the day, thinking of some damn way or other to get his SEAL platoon out of a fucking VC ambush without anybody else getting killed, he'd started the ear-pulling thing. Nervous tic.

The doors were the problem. Glass too thick, terrace too narrow to get any force behind a surprise kick. So you're out there, she hears a thud and spins the chair, sees your ass, fires a short burst, and you're punched back over the railing, lost in space, already deader than the deadest damn doornail in the history of doors.