David Lindsey - The Face of the Assassin

“Baida wouldn’t let him do that,” Mondragon replied. “Bern could be memorizing the route, the time sequence. Maybe repeating it back to Baida, rehearsing it.”

“Or he could be spilling his guts,” Quito insisted.

“You know,” Mondragon said, “Jude might have done that. He was just crazy enough to take the risk that we wouldn’t shoot her. But Bern’s not that tough, doesn’t have that kind of discipline.”

“But he’s taking too long,” Quito warned.

In truth, Mondragon was uneasy about the amount of time Bern was spending on the phone, too. Quito was probably right, damn it.

“Where’s Kevern now?” Mondragon asked, spritzing the front of his head.

“They’ve just passed Parque Hundido.”

“ Perfecto, ” Mondragon said. “Wait until they are approaching the on-ramp to the circuito and do it there.”

“Judas,” Sabella said, breaking the silence. “Stay where you are. I’m going to be off the phone for a few minutes, but I’ll be back.”

“What? Wait!”

“Just stay where you are. Stay on the phone. Talk to your man. I’ll be back. Do it.”

Bern couldn’t believe it. “He just left the phone,” Bern said to Kevern.

“Left the phone? Whatta you mean?”

“He left the goddamned phone. Said for me to stay on the phone. Not to leave the phone.”

“Shit, he’s running,” Kevern said. “He’s running, goddamn it!”

Mondragon’s man inside the pharmacy could see Bern through the front window. He kept one eye on him as he milled around the rows of shelves in the small shop. There was no one there at first, and then a young woman came in with a child, one of those children who simply stared at you in sober silence and could not be charmed into any kind of reaction at all. And yet she wouldn’t stop looking at him. Gave him the creeps.

The store was L-shaped, so he went around the corner into another row of shelves to get away from the kid, although still keeping Bern in sight. Good, magazines. He looked for some sexy covers and picked up one of them just as another woman entered from the back door of the shop, which opened into a typical courtyard.

The woman was nice-looking, late thirties, her dark hair done up quickly. She wore a blue shirtwaist dress that buttoned up the front. The top button was undone, exposing a very nice set of chichis. He glanced at Bern.

The woman came right at him, apparently interested in the magazines, too. But she seemed to want to see the ones on the other side of him. Gathering her skirt delicately, she begged his pardon, and he stepped back to let her by. For one sweet moment, they were face-to-face as she slipped past him, her eyes modestly averted as her bosom wafted by right under his nose. On the other side now, she turned her back to the front of the store, Bern behind her, and bent down to search through the magazines on the bottom shelf.

Her position couldn’t have been better for him. His eyes only had to move a slight flick to switch from Bern to her bosom, where gravity swelled her breasts to the spilling point.

Then suddenly, the little girl was in the picture again, appearing squarely in the center of the aisle behind the woman, her moronic stare fixed on him once more, her head poking up just above the woman’s hips, as if it were balanced on top of them.

Tits, child, Bern. Tits, child, Bern. The kid was irritating the shit out of him. The woman moved a few magazines, looking under them, her movements causing her breasts to shift and roll. The kid stared at him. Bern talked. With all the bending, the woman had to adjust herself, slipping a pretty hand inside-

The kid’s moronic eyes shifted slightly to a position over the man’s right shoulder, her expression still as dumb as a rock.

The hand coming over his shoulder and covering his mouth hardly registered on him before the knife did its work on his throat. He knew he was dying. The woman straightened up and walked past him as if he weren’t there. Then he felt himself being dragged backward.

The last thing his eyes registered was the mute, imbecilic stare of the little girl, who did not run or blink or react to what she was seeing. She seemed to think that watching a murder in the back aisle of a pharmacy was no extraordinary thing.

Bern gripped the phone and kept his head ducked next to the phone box as if listening intently. In fact, nothing was happening. Silence on both ends. What all of this was leading to was beyond him, beyond his imagining, almost beyond belief. But it kept going on and on.

Suddenly, Kevern was screaming, “Jack! Jack! Look out! Lookout! Lookout!” And then a woman screamed and there was a thunderous crash.

The old junker car slammed into them out of nowhere, flying at highway speed from a side street and ramming into the driver’s side like a torpedo. The two cars, twisted together, left the main street in a cloud of burned rubber and sparks, then careened off of two other cars before coming to rest just a few yards outside the window of a restaurant on the cross street.

Jack Petersen was killed instantly. Lupe was in the backseat on the same side, dying, a piece of chrome the length of a yardstick driven through her rib cage, pinning her to the rear seat. Mattie was dying, too, a fist-size lump of something lodged in her left temple.

Kevern had all the luck in the world.

He was dazed, his collarbone broken, a cut on his forehead bleeding freely, but he was conscious and fighting his seat belt even before the noise stopped. He knew what had happened, and he knew what was going to happen next. His door had been ripped off, and while the car filled with thick acrid smoke, he got free of his seat belt and simply rolled to the side and fell out of the car, hitting the ground in the narrow space between the twisted cars and the restaurant wall.

While the entire restaurant clientele stood back from the windows and watched the smoldering cars in stunned silence, Kevern crawled unobserved against the building’s wall, pulling himself along as fast as he could to the corner and then around to the other side. Just out of sight, he stopped to get his breath. He thought he was all right, but his guts felt as if they were swollen all out of proportion. His head was still throbbing from the impact, his hearing almost gone.

Within seconds, two helmeted motorcyclists roared up to the smoking cars. The driver of the junker, also helmeted, staggered out of his car on wobbly legs and crawled onto the back of one of the motorcycles, while the other cyclist goosed his machine right up to Kevern’s smoke- engulfed car. Instantly, he opened fire with a stubby automatic weapon, sending the horrified diners onto the floor of the restaurant. He emptied a full magazine into the car, and then he reloaded and did it again.

Then the shooter reached into his leather jacket and pulled out a hand grenade and lobbed it into the backseat of the junker. Both cyclists roared away, and by the time the grenade exploded, setting off a second and third explosion as the gas tanks blew, the two cyclists had hit the on-ramp onto the circuito, and they were gone.

The whole incident lasted less than a minute.

“Judas.” Sabella was back on the line. “Put down the phone and walk into the pharmacy. When you get inside, hurry straight to the back of the shop and go out the door into the courtyard.”

“Wait-”

“Mondragon’s man inside is gone.”

“But I just heard-”

“Do it!”

Bern slammed the phone down in its cradle, pocketed the cell phone, and went through the pharmacy door, a few steps away. Inside, he quickly oriented himself, then headed around a corner into an aisle, suddenly confronting four people gathered around something on the floor.