Matt Hilton - Cut and run

My ears were pulsating.

Gunfire crackled from somewhere, but my senses were so rattled that I couldn't get a fix on the direction. I placed my palms on my ears, pressing and releasing, attempting to pop my eardrums into a more natural configuration. When I withdrew, the palm of my left hand was spotted with blood. I didn't think that my eardrum was ruptured; the blood was more likely from a superficial wound on my face. Who knew?

I'd more important things to worry about.

I gave myself a once-over. I hurt everywhere but, apart from my throbbing hand, nothing seemed to have been broken or torn loose. So I bent in search of a weapon.

First thing I found was my SIG Sauer. There was an indentation on the slide where Rickard's lucky shot had struck it. I doubted it would function properly, but still jammed it into my waistband. Call me sentimental but the gun had been with me through too many trials to leave it lying there.

I kicked through drifts of collapsed ceiling and shattered bodies and saw my assault rifle. I shook off the dust, ejected the magazine, slapped it back in place. Sliding the bolt, I ejected a shell, then racked a new one in the chamber. Round about then I felt blood spatter on my chin. It wasn't the red rain falling from the ceiling, but my nose in full flow. I wiped the blood from my face with a sleeve, starting walking cradling the gun.

My coordination was still shot to pieces, but movement helped. I only staggered twice before reaching the door. Leaning against the frame, I checked the short passageway ahead. Placing my finger on the trigger, I was acutely aware of the pain in my hand. Broken or not, it would just have to work.

Fifteen feet away a man lay face down.

Hoping it was Rickard, I moved forwards. At the body I paused long enough to kick it over on to its back. The round-faced soldier grinned up at me. Except this grin was a rictus smile. Beneath his chin a wound stretched equally wide. His throat had been opened from ear to ear and I guessed that Rickard had made it out of the room after all. Guarapo – the grenade thrower – had felt his wrath.

And now it was Rickard's turn to feel mine.

The only thing stopping me was the man at the head of the stairs pointing a machine gun at me.

Rickard was both exhilarated and furious.

Exhilarated because he was still alive. Intensely angered by more than one thing.

Foremost in his rage was that the cowardly son of a bitch, Guarapo, had tried to kill him by lobbing a hand grenade at him. Well, he'd shown that asshole the error of his ways soon enough. When the L2A2 had clattered to the floor between him and Joe Hunter, Rickard had known he had seconds to live. It's surprising how much ground a man can cover when trying to save his ass. He made it out of the door just as the grenade blasted the room. The percussion knocked him sprawling, but he avoided the flying shrapnel and came immediately to his feet again. As he did he whipped out his ceramic knife, the same moment as Guarapo popped up from where he'd been crouching and blinked at him in dismay.

Guarapo didn't expect anyone to survive the bomb.

He certainly wasn't prepared for when Rickard grabbed him, spun him and wrapped a hand round his jaw. A quick jerk back on the man's head and a swipe of the blade and that was all it took.

Next on his checklist was that Guarapo's indiscreet betrayal had killed Joe Hunter when the honour should have been his. Rickard might have come here to murder his employer, but it didn't mean that he wouldn't have seen the job through. A deal was a deal, the way he viewed things: only Jimena Grajales broke contracts.

Alvaro Silva was another point of anger. Had he ordered Rickard murdered or was that solely Guarapo's plan? Maybe he'd been harbouring a plan for revenge since they first met and Rickard had tickled his balls with the tip of his knife. That was something to think on later. There was something far more pressing on his mind.

Alisha.

The way Jimena made it sound, his wife hadn't betrayed him at all. She hadn't led men to his apartment. Not killers sent by Jimena. But the fact remained, Alisha had conspired against him with the men he'd killed in Miami. Any way that he looked at it, the bitch needed punishing. Maybe it was as simple as that Alisha had been having an affair with the man he'd surprised in the elevator and the man had come back with some friends to do away with the competition. In retrospect Rickard recalled thinking that they weren't very good when he'd killed them, not professionals. Proof of his theory of Alisha's infidelity was the way in which she'd run off, seeking solace and protection in the arms of another man. Rickard had never learned the name of the cocaine dealer in Liberty City, but he didn't doubt that he'd been screwing Alisha when Rickard was out of town.

Bitch!

The thing that angered him most was that Alisha hadn't died. He believed Jimena's words. There was no reason for her to lie. She knew she was going to die, so why mention that his wife had survived? Unless it was to anger him, to throw him off while she positioned the gun she had hidden in her bed. Perhaps she thought he'd be so stunned that he wouldn't notice what she was doing and would not react in time. But he didn't think so. Jimena wasn't afraid to die; in fact it looked like she had fully embraced the idea. She'd only intended taking him with her. She'd told him that Alisha was still alive to score some points on him before she died. One up for the girls!

Yeah, we'll see about that.

And after he finished with Alisha he had a date with that other cow, Imogen Ballard. He'd promised her that things weren't finished.

No woman would ever fuck him over again.

First things first, though. He had to get away from this battleground, avoid the opposing armies and get himself back to the States.

Armed with the gun he'd taken from Guarapo's dead body and the knife sheathed once again at his belt, he felt he was up to it. He wouldn't let the wounds he'd picked up stop him. They required medical attention, primarily the gunshot in his shoulder and the one that had creased his ribs, but they could wait until he was safely away from here.

He used the window he'd shattered to climb outside, where he crouched next to some flowering shrubs as a tall black man raced towards the front of the house. He was followed a moment later by a muscular Asian-American. Rickard blinked in confusion, but when he thought about it he wasn't that surprised. They were the two men that had been with Hunter when Jimena's hit team had failed to take Hunter out at the Miami diner. The Japanese dude, he recalled, had also been there when he had riddled Alisha full of bullets.

Maybe these two men would be as relentless as adversaries as their friend had proved. Or maybe when they found his eviscerated body down in the bombed chamber, they'd just give up.

He thought about following them back inside the house, killing them, but then decided, what the hell. Why tempt fate? Once Alisha and Imogen Ballard were dead, he could always track them down later.

Romeo, his one-eyed pilot, had mentioned staying on a couple of nights at the village where he'd delivered him. Couple of young senoritas he was going to hook up with. Apparently he wasn't known as Romeo for nothing.

Gunfire still echoed through the valley, but it was sporadic now, Silva's troops mopping up the last resistance. The shots were single cracks: more executions than they were all-out gunfights. Silva would be pleased. Calle's home was now Silva's, and so was his niche in the drug market.

You're welcome to it, Rickard thought. He headed for the jeep in which he'd originally arrived. The windscreen was shattered and the driver dead inside, but otherwise it was still driveable. He tugged the dead man out, allowed him to crumple to the ground, then climbed inside. The keys were still in the ignition. He spun the jeep round and away, heading off in search of Romeo.