Austin Camacho - The Payback Assignment

Her brain spinning, she drove by reflex. As she cruised, a growing uneasiness crept into her mind. She wandered the streets, pursuing an elusive feeling. It was her usual danger warning, but then again it was not. She was confident of her own safety, but her senses were never wrong. Whatever it was, it was driving her crazy, like a hornet trapped in her ear. And something was drawing her uptown, making her turn. She wondered if Morgan ever…

That was it! Her eyes snapped wide and she squealed her tires taking the next corner. It was Morgan. He was in danger, deadly danger. Perhaps walking into a trap. She did not know how she knew, nor did she care. All she was sure about was how she cared about this man. He had saved her life and by God, she would save his if she could.

Felicity usually kept a low profile because she hated the idea of entanglement with the police under any circumstances, but this day her need for speed tossed all that out the window. She turned up the Chieftains blaring from her radio, then pressed her thumb into the button on the side of her Hurst T-shifter, releasing the nitrous oxide kicker to her engine. Her head snapped back as her car leaped forward and suddenly she was drag racing across town, aiming at the ramp onto the Henry Hudson Parkway.

The Henry Hudson, recently rebuilt, was a narrow strip along Manhattan Island’s western edge. It was two lanes wide each way, with a two-foot high cement wall on either side. The lanes were wavy lines dotted with potholes. The traffic flow was fierce, hot and unforgiving.

At times like this, she did her driving on another mental plane. The union of driver and machine was nearly meditative. She flowed among the cars, weaving with the wavy lines at eighty miles per hour. Pursuit was not a concern. She knew no policeman would be insane enough to chase her on this madcap road.

While much of her consciousness focused on guiding her car, another part of her brain considered her reactions, as if she could stand outside herself as an observer. She wondered if this mad urge she felt was the same as whatever drove Morgan Stark to her, days ago in an obscure Centrral American jungle. Where had it come from? What was the bizarre link between their minds that appeared to be functioning right then as a biological homing device?

After all, they were barely more than strangers and they could not be less alike. White and black, sophisticated and earthy, educated and not. They had nothing whatever in common. Of course, they both traveled in an underground subculture, but she moved in a world of thieves and confidence men, not professional soldiers and hardened killers like he did.

She remembered two or three people in the past telling her that she was psychic, usually after a narrow escape. She had never really accepted it. A natural skeptic, she had always figured she just had good instincts, or sharp senses. But now this had happened. There was no denying this, no explaining it away. There was no logical, rational way that she could know Morgan’s location. But she also had not cared about anyone this much since she had left her family. Now her respect, affection, and perhaps something stronger she felt for this adventurer rogue was leading her right to him.

Although she was quite familiar with Manhattan’s streets, she had very little experience with the rest of New York City. She somehow got onto the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Drive on the east side of the island. Soon she found herself on something called the Major Deegan Expressway. Minutes later she was smoothly shifting down through the gears in a slum neighborhood in the South Bronx. She remembered seeing Dublin after a clash between the IRA and British forces. The setting was eerily familiar.

Fear and doubt were eating their way into her mind. This was insane. She could cruise around for days looking for Morgan. She must have been crazy thinking she could find one man in a city of millions. Oh, God, she would hate to fail.

She shifted down into first gear to lose more speed just as her ebony Corvette slid past a building surrounded by vacant lots. At the moment she glanced up at the tenement, she heard the sound of a small explosion come from inside the building. A bomb? No. Too high pitched for a bomb blast, but too loud for a gunshot. It could have been a shotgun blast.

In less time than those thoughts took to form, she had pulled the ‘Vette over to the curb, locked the car, engaged the anti-theft device, kicked off her high heels and started her sprint toward the door. It was Morgan. Somehow she knew he was in there, and the intermittent gunshots she heard could spell his death.

Seconds later she stood in the hall, panting as much from anxiety as breathlessness. She had lunged up the front stairs to the landing before she had time to think. People were upstairs shooting at each other and here she came to save the day with nothing but her teeth and her nails. She cast about quickly for a weapon. In a far corner lay a dirty man, slumped over in a ball. Next to him lay a broken wooden table leg. In desperation, she snatched it up. With a leap she smashed the single naked bulb illuminating the building. Now the entire hall was midnight dark.

As silently as a cat creeping through a graveyard, the girl stepped up the stairs, avoiding the broken ones. She thanked the Lord for blessing her with almost inhuman night vision. It was an invaluable asset for a burglar. Now it was her only equalizer against men whose profession was killing.

Darkness also filled the apartment on the second floor, interrupted only by the intermittent muzzle flashes of pistols and a shotgun. Morgan could smell rather than see the cloud hanging in the air. The smell, gunpowder mixed with sweat, stung his nose. His back against the sofa and gun in hand, Morgan braced to make his move. His crash into the wall had sprained his left shoulder but, aside from that minor injury, he considered himself pretty lucky so far. A half dozen bullets had ripped through the couch but none had hit him. The well-stuffed sofa had also proved solid enough to absorb two follow-up shotgun blasts, mostly because the man firing the shotgun lacked the courage to get any closer to Morgan’s gun.

Morgan weighed his options during a brief lull in the firing. He had a pretty good mental fix on the riot gun user. He planned to slip around the couch on the end toward the door. He would pop up and take out the shotgun man with his automatic. Number two would fire at the bright pistol blast. He would score or he would not. If he failed to kill Morgan, Morgan would surely kill him with one shot. It was a gamble, the only one in town.

He poised on his haunches behind the end of the couch, both hands gripping his pistol. He would make his move now, following three deep breaths. One. Two. What was that? As he stared in frozen disbelief, he thought he saw two green cat’s eyes enter the room, just inches from the floor. He knew those eyes. They disappeared briefly behind the big chair, but reappeared a few seconds later against the middle of the far wall, slowly rising to five and a half feet above the floor. She was standing straight up. What was she doing here?

Silence spread through darkness of the small apartment, and for one brief moment, time froze for Morgan. When things finally moved again, they seemed to do so in slow motion. Turning to face the kitchen, Morgan lifted his pistol over the edge of the arm of the couch. In the kitchen doorway, a riot gun barrel was raised. A single drop of light splashed off Morgan’s automatic.

The man lying under the small table shattered the silence.

“I got you now,” the killer snarled in a strong Spanish accent as he raised his revolver. He was unaware of the woman straddling his upper body but Morgan could see her eyes above him, blazing with hate.