Adrian McKinty - The Bloomsday Dead

“She hung up,” I explained.

“Ok, now we kill you,” Shotgun said.

“Wait a minute, Pablo, me old mate. She said that I was to say ‘The pussy begs you not to shoot him.’”

Shotgun considered for a second, fought back a look of frustration, put down his weapon.

“Shit. I was looking forward to doing you. The head of hotel security in his own hotel. That would have added to our prestige,” he said.

The man with the 9mm looked at his boss.

“Now we’re not going to do it?” he asked.

His partner shook his head. Reluctantly, he put the 9mm in a shoulder holster.

“We’re all flying to Europe, no?” I said.

“Yes. You have five minutes to pack and then we’re going to the airport, I have a car waiting.”

Shotgun threw an airline ticket at me. I examined it. British Air-ways first class direct from Lima to New York, Aer Lingus first class from New York to Dublin.

Commercial jets, not private ones. Dear, oh, dear. Bridget’s little cock-up. You can’t railroad someone from Peru to Ireland using commercial flights. Who did she think she was dealing with? She should have coughed up the money for a Learjet.

“The plan is if I don’t cooperate you’ll kill me?” I asked Shotgun.

“That’s right,” he replied.

“The two of you and the one of me.”

“Yeah. Hurry and get packed.”

“You’ll kill me?”

“If necessary. Yes.”

“Like to see you attempt that on a plane that’s going to JFK,” I said.

I was just trying to test his limits, make him a bit eggy, but I saw immediately that I had blundered. This was a mistake. His brow furrowed. I’d really made him think about this whole rotten assignment. About the obvious flaw in the arrangements. Goddammit, I had to get him back on track.

“Not that I’ll be a problem. I won’t cause you any trouble, I want to leave this bloody town anyway. Yeah, we’ll go to New York and then Ireland,” I said hastily.

But the atmosphere in the room had changed. The seismic shift had happened and Shotgun was thinking along different lines now.

“No, no, you are right, Forsythe. We will have too much trouble with you. The pay is the same either way,” he said. “Step back, Rique.”

Rique saw that Shotgun was going to kill me.

“What are you going to tell her?” Rique asked.

“We had to kill him. He tried to escape. It was him or us,” Shotgun said.

Rique nodded.

“Now wait a minute. This isn’t what Bridget wants, this isn’t what she’s paying you for. She wants you to take me to Ireland,” I said desperately.

Rique lifted the 9mm.

It was typical of me to let my big mouth get me into trouble. Bloody typical. And where was that eejit Hector? Halfway home? God save us, there was only one way out now.

I fell to my knees and started to beg for mercy in evangelical Spanish. I invoked the mother of Jesus and the Virgin of Guadalupe (who I think are the same person but I’m no expert).

“Please, please, please, don’t kill me, you’re not supposed to, you’re not supposed to, in the name of the Father and the Son and the…”

And as I begged, I leaned forward, let my hand run down my trousers, and removed the tiny three-shot.22 pistol that I kept there for just such an emergency. My ace in the hole. In South America it was considered cowardly to strap a gun around your ankle. That was something a puta would do.

Better a live puta than a dead hero.

“You are going to die, Irish pig,” Shotgun said.

“Yeah, you’re right, tough guy, but not today,” I said, tumbling from my kneeling posture into a forward roll that carried me over the hard-wood floor, while at the same time grabbing the gun from my ankle holster and shooting the chatty bastard in the neck. He fell forward, frothy, arterial blood spewing from a mortal wound.

I scrambled to the side and Rique fired twice with the 9mm, hitting the piece of carpet where I’d been a tenth of a second ago. I dived behind the sofa and took two shots of my own, missing the dodgy bugger both times. Shit. That was the end of my little gun. Had to move fast now. I tossed the weapon and picked the boom box off the floor and threw it at him. It missed, exploded into the wall, spewing CDs, batteries, and sparks.

Rique shot again, sending a bullet into the ceiling above my head. I hurled a vase and then a small glass coffee table.

The door opened.

Hector came in.

“Thank God, over here, mate,” I said.

Rique yelled at Hector: “He’s unarmed. Shoot him.”

Hector pulled out his revolver.

“You said I wouldn’t be involved,” Hector muttered.

Rique turned to lecture him.

“Do as you are told, and…” Rique began.

I picked up my favorite leather armchair and ran at Rique. It was studded leather with a metal back, so it might afford some protection.

I charged the bastard, hoping he wouldn’t have sense enough to shoot me in the legs.

But Rique was flustered by all the things happening at once. He fired off the rest of his clip into the leather chair before I smashed into him, driving him backward into the tinted plate-glass window. My Irish was up and my momentum easily took out the thick safety glass.

Chair and assassin smashed through the window and tumbled through the early-morning air onto the car park below. I was lucky I didn’t fall out after them. I scrambled to a dead stop, but I didn’t even pause to admire my luck or watch Rique smash to pieces on the hood of the Japanese ambassador’s limousine, which, rather inconveniently, had just pulled up outside. Instead I strode across the room and grabbed the gun out of Hector’s hand. He was dazed and bleeding from a cut on his fingertip he’d somehow managed to acquire when he’d taken his pistol out.

I pistol-whipped him across the face and kicked his legs from under him. He collapsed to the floor.

“Hector, Hector, Hector,” I said with disappointment.

“I’m sorry, so sorry,” Hector said, his eyes filling with tears. I checked the revolver, saw that it was loaded, cleaned, ready.

“Hector, you realize this is going to have to go on your résumé,” I told him.

“Oh, please don’t hurt me, they said they would kill my family, they said-”

I put the gun in his mouth and rattled it around his teeth.

“Save it, mate, they already told me, you came to them, you sought them out. What was the finder’s fee?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about, I love you, boss, I don’t know what-”

Clicking the hammer back is such a cliché in these situations, but in my experience it is a shortcut to the truth.

I clicked the hammer back.

“Ten thousand dollars,” he said.

“Damn it, Hector, if you needed the money I would have loaned it to you.”

“I wanted to earn it.”

“There are better ways,” I muttered.

“You would know,” Hector said petulantly, making a move for the knife he kept in his pocket. That wasn’t going to happen twice in the same hotel room. I kicked his arms apart, so that he was spread-eagled on the floor. I took the gun out of his mouth and placed it a couple of inches from his forehead.

“You are one disloyal asshole,” I told him without much passion.

He closed his sad brown eyes.

“No more disloyal than you,” he said.

“There’s a difference,” I explained. “I did it to save my skin, you did it for the goddamn money.”

“What are you going to do to me?”

“I’m going to salvage your honor, my friend,” I said.

Hector understood. He blinked away the tears, flinched.

I pulled the trigger, blowing off the top part of his head, his blood and brains spraying over me.

I placed Hector’s gun in the dead assassin’s hand, I put the three-shot.22 in Hector’s bloody paw.