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.
They all looked up in puzzled disbelief as he approached. At a glance, Bern sized them up as the white-jacketed pharmacist, his wife perhaps, also wearing a white jacket, a child, and a woman who appeared to be her mother. He didn’t stop to figure it out, just pushed through them, nearly slipping on the stuff that they were looking at.
By the time that he realized that he had walked through a pool of blood and then realized how it had gotten there, he was opening the door to the courtyard. A woman grabbed him.
“?Andale! ” she said, already turning to lead the way, her blue dress swirling around her legs as she took him around the courtyard, through a door on the far side and into another courtyard, and then immediately up a flight of stone stairs that led to the second floor. They turned into a corridor and came face-to-face with Mazen Sabella.
“I dragged the guy under a stairwell down there,” he said to the woman. He looked at Bern, and there was an awkward moment in which Bern felt as if something was happening but he was missing it. He saw blood on Sabella’s clothes. He was sweating and out of breath.
Sabella broke eye contact with him and looked at the woman.
“I’m going down to get the car ready. I’ll be waiting for you across the street. You know where.”
Suddenly, he was gone, and the woman pushed Bern through a doorway and out into an open-air patio. They crossed the patio and then burst into an apartment.
Baida turned to them. He was standing by a pair of open windows that overlooked the plaza. They were above the Farmacia Pedras. He had an automatic pistol in one hand and with his other hand he held a tiny headset to his ear.
“Your man’s not coming,” Baida said. “They’re dead. All of them.”
Bern gaped at him, stupefied.
Baida held up the headset and the automatic.
“Sabella got these from the guy downstairs in the pharmacy. I heard the report to Mondragon that it was done.”
Bern knew it was true. There was no doubt at all.
“Mondragon’s boys saw you go into the pharmacy,” Baida said. “They tried to contact this guy, and when he didn’t answer, they switched frequencies. It’s no good now,” he said, flinging the tiny headset across the room. “And down there,” he added, jerking his head toward the plaza, “they’ve all disappeared.”
Baida was talking fast, his celebrated composure showing signs of fraying.
“I’ve called my people,” he said, lunging across the room to an armchair where a gray nylon bag lay open. He jammed the gun inside. “I have to go.”
The woman, who still hadn’t said a word, was pulling things out of an open drawer in a chest near the entrance to another room. She brought a packet of something wrapped in clear plastic-it looked like documents-to Baida, who jammed it into the bag. He was sweating profusely.
“I’m going to give you a number,” Baida said. “You won’t remember it… with all this… I’ll show you where to hide it. Pull down your pants. Carleta, un boligrafo! ”
The woman grabbed a ballpoint pen from the top of the chest and gave it to Bern, who unbuckled his pants.
“Write it high on the inside of your thigh. If they strip you, they won’t see it there.”
“Who-”
“Anybody! Hurry!”
Bern bent over and with a trembling hand wrote on the inside of his thigh the number Baida recited to him. Baida repeated it, and Bern nervously traced over the numbers. Hell, someone would figure it out later.
“When you get to our people, use the number,” Baida said. “Time is running out.”
Time was running out. Bern pulled up his pants and buckled his belt. In fact, he was damned convinced that it was gone entirely, and that the numbers he had just written on his skin were useless.
Baida started to zip the bag, then stopped suddenly. He looked up at Bern. Then he pulled the gun out of the bag and handed it to him.
“My advice,” Baida said. “If you get a chance to kill Vicente, do it.”
The pistol was lighter than Bern expected. He didn’t even know the caliber. He found the safety above his thumb on the grip. He checked the magazine and was surprised to see that it was loaded. Jesus. He shoved it back into the grip.
Baida quickly zipped the bag, and all Bern could think about was Baida walking out of there with his terrible secret. Without thinking, he reached out and grabbed Baida’s shirt.
“Wait! Listen-”
In a move that Bern didn’t even see, Baida ripped Bern’s hand off his shirt and was holding another pistol to Bern’s forehead before Bern could even recoil.
“Listen to me, my friend.” Baida’s voice was tight. The barrel of Baida’s automatic was cutting Bern’s forehead. His face was inches away from Bern’s, and every pore was moist, every nerve taut.
“The deal for my cooperation was my guaranteed safety,” Baida panted. “That isn’t happening, is it? And it doesn’t look like it’s going to. In fact, it looks like Vicente is in the process of wiping out your whole operation. I think you need protection as much as I do.” He was trembling. “But… if there is a miracle anytime soon, you know how to reach me-the numbers are warming your balls.”
In the silence of the moment, an incredible sound seeped into the room through the windows overlooking the plaza: the gentle, serene whisper of a slow rain. Bern concentrated on it. In fact, he clung to it as if that sound alone could redeem him to reality, to sanity, offer him deliverance from this nightmare.
Baida lowered his pistol.
“You’d better get the hell out of here,” he said.