Chapter 35

The cries of a woman’s pain tore a hole in my heart.

I spit out a curse and then took a quick look up at the men who had instantly stopped their idiot game at the sound of the howl. I tried to contain both my fury and the urge to charge up the boat ramp and just start firing. Then I heard a door fling open and the sound of footsteps on the wooden planks above, one set light but quick, and the other heavier, but following the first. Their direction was toward the third cabin in pursuit of the painful wails.

Yet again, I held. How many times had I jumped too quickly? How many times had I not waited for backup when I was a cop in Philly, including the night I ran into the robbery on Fifteenth Street and caught a bullet in the neck for my impatience? Despite the blood now pounding in my ears, I dared to wait, and the howling stopped.

Was it Diane? Was she being tortured? Jesus, why torture her now? For what reason? Kidnap victims weren’t tortured; kept in isolation, yes, abused through living conditions, yes. Their lives were bargained for politics or money. But torture didn’t make sense.

I dared another glance up at the men, who were now shrugging their shoulders and looking toward the door of the big cabin. Two minutes? Less? And the wail began again and to hell with backup!

I was up and out of the water, striding up the boat ramp and pulling the P226 Navy from my pants pocket at the same time. The two men instantly swung their heads to me and the look in their eyes would not have been different if one of those gators had roared up onto the deck after them.

“Down!” I yelled, motioning with the barrel of the P226 Navy. “Get the fuck down, hands behind your head.”

Again, they looked at each other, but followed the order, onto their knees and then bellies to the wood. It was six long strides with the painful screeching in my ears, but I kept repeating in my head, Protocol, Max. Disarm. Secure who you have. Do not screw up. You’re no good to her if you screw up.

I jabbed the nose of the P226 Navy into the back of each man’s head as I slapped his pockets, checking for firearms. Nothing. Unarmed guards—what the hell was I into?

“If a face comes up, I will shoot it,” I growled. “Got it?”

Heads bobbed, noses stayed down. Now, with that pain shrill in my ears, I turned to the middle cabin, but heard another door open behind me. I spun to the big house to see a figure of enormous size fill the frame.

The big Indian took two steps into the sunlight, glanced at the others lying on the deck and then at me. Stoic—he had to be the man that rooftop Yoda had described. But under the present circumstances, he also had to be the calmest human being I’d ever seen. He was dressed in a colorful Seminole jacket, but he was no Seminole. His black hair was oddly braided. He went easily six foot six and near three hundred pounds.

There wasn’t a single discernible emotion in his eyes: no fear, anger, or surprise. His hands were at his side. My gun was pointed at his chest. I worked the scene in my head: two on the ground, two more who had run to the third cabin, one big fucker in front of me staring like it was a soft summer day, and the wrenching cries of my best friend’s pregnant wife over all of it. The big Indian made up my mind for me. His right hand went for something behind his back.

“Don’t do it, Chief!” I yelled. “You’re a dead man if you move!”

“Then so be it,” the deep voice said with no more emotion than was in his face. His arm moved with incredible speed. I picked up on the flash of steel in the sunlight, and from fifteen feet away I fired the P226 Navy four times. All four of the water-sealed rounds worked as manufactured, finding a grouping within an eight-inch circle on the big man’s chest. The first bullet hit a piece of sternum bone, which sent it tumbling and tearing through the superior vena cava of the man’s heart, and then bouncing off a rib and spinning through the viscera in the middle lobe of his lung.

Two others passed through his body just below the sternum and bored expanding holes through upper liver tissue and exited through his back. One path was never determined by the medical examiner. The big man went down, first onto one knee, then onto a tripod of palms and knee, and finally over onto one side on the deck. There was no Tarantino spraying of blood or ridiculous propulsion of body through the doorway behind. Bullets pierce and rip and tumble and internally destroy. Trained cops go for center mass with intent to kill, never just to wound. It is not a circus; it’s real death.

I looked over at the others. They were still nose-down on the planks, though they’d cut their eyes to the big man when the shooting started. I stepped across the deck to the big man’s body, and there was no doubt that it was a body. Death is not hard to recognize: total, and I mean total, lack of movement—nerve, muscle, or respiratory. Lying next to him was a huge-bladed knife with a carved-bone handle. I put my foot next to the weapon and kicked it across the deck into the water where the young men had been feeding the gators. They wouldn’t be going in after it.

With my gunshots still echoing across the open Glades, I went for the door from which the sound of agony was still roiling. I hesitated for only a second at the frame, but when I heard the distinct but ragged voice of Diane Manchester say, “Please, Billy, please,” I went hard, shoulder-first, splintering wood and wrenching open metal-lock hardware. I came into a single room crouched low with the barrel of the P226 Navy sweeping chest-high at anything that moved.

A white kid about the same age as the two outside, but definitely not of the same family, turned when I bashed in the door. When he saw the P226 Navy swinging toward him, he raised his palms and said: “Whoa, whoa, whoa.”

I swung my sights from wall to wall and then stepped to my right. Behind the kid was a strawberry blonde girl, face turned away, who did not look up. On the bed lay Diane, her back propped up by a mound of pillows, her face a ghastly pale, her mouth providing the only noise left in the room—that of a raspy panting and blowing.

I took two more steps forward, let my eyes move down her body, and said: “Oh, geez.”

“No kiddin’, right?” the kid with his hands up said.

“Shut the hell up and help already, Danny,” the girl said, and finally turned and looked first at the gun in my hand and then into my face.

“And if you’re gonna keep shooting that thing, then get to it, mister,” the girl said. “’Cause we’re having a baby here, and it isn’t waitin’ on you.”

I was still mesmerized by the girl’s audacity when I heard the rasping voice say my name.

“You’re done shooting, right, Max?” Diane said, and the words caused me to lower the P226 Navy and move to her side.

“Diane? Jesus, Diane.”

“No, it’s not Jesus, Max. It’s a baby,” she said. If she was trying to make a joke, it was an awfully brave thing to be doing at that moment. Then she shifted her eyes to a spot behind me. “Where’s Billy?”

Even if I knew, which I didn’t, I had no time to answer as Diane’s face suddenly turned into a mask of grimacing pain. A throbbing blue vein rose on her left temple as she tucked her chin to her chest. “ARRRRRRGH” came out of her mouth like an unholy eruption.

“OK, OK, push, push, push,” said the girl at the end of the bed. Every living muscle in the room tightened for the next ninety seconds.