“Emilio,” the General said softly, striding around the desk. “For a smart man you lack the capacity to pour piss out of a boot with the instructions engraved on the heel. I didn’t survive all that time in the Army to lose everything now over a stupid cowboy and a dumb fucking western movie.” Then he pressed the pistol against Kaufmann’s cheek.
Nobody will ever know how Emilio Kaufmann intended to defend himself because without another word, the General pulled the trigger as Suzanne screamed, “Daddy, no!”
I have to admit that I flinched, deafened by the muzzle blast, blinded by the bloody splash as Kaufmann’s head exploded in my face. Kaufmann bounced off me, then flopped onto the desk, jerking the cane out of my hand. The General, nearly as covered as I was with blood and brain matter, but completely undaunted, stepped forward, clubbed my wrist with the .45, then stepped back and aimed it directly at my nose as the Glock clattered across the desk.
“Milodragovitch,” he said, “too many people know you’re here, and I would prefer not to put a round into you. But as you can see, I’m more than willing. So please don’t force me to fire.”
“It seems I’m out of options,” I said, trying to wipe the gore off my face. “What now?”
His daughters whimpered behind him, and he snapped at them, “You girls shut up!” I understood where Suzanne got her whipcrack voice. “I understand,” he said to me, a sparkle in his watery blue eyes, “that you have a great deal of my money.”
“I just took back what was mine,” I said. “And maybe a little for my trouble…”
“I had nothing to do with that,” he said calmly.
“What about the movie?” Suzanne asked as she rose to her feet, leaving Kate to weep dark tears upon the tiled floor.
“Fuck the movie,” he said.
“I’ve heard that somewhere before,” I said.
“Either restore my money, Mr. Milodragovitch, or I will kill you and everybody you ever cared about.”
“I can’t let you do that,” I said.
In that long silence afterward, the guy with the street sweeper stepped into the room to cover me. The four bodyguards in their baggy shorts struggled off the floor and hurried toward their clothes, which seemed more important to them than their weapons.
“Then you’re a dead man,” the General said calmly.
And except for Kate, I would have been.
“Daddy!” she screamed from her knees, Xavier’s small automatic braced familiarly in her hands. The joys of military life. “Daddy, no!”
The old gentleman didn’t flinch at her scream. But he did drop the .45 without pulling the trigger after she shot him in the elbow. I grunted as if punched in the gut. The guy with the street sweeper was half-turned when she put three rounds into the side of his chest. He did pull the trigger before he stumbled into the desk, but only the computer and the cell phone died. I had the shotgun before he hit the floor. But before I could cover the half-naked bodyguards, they were out the door.
Within moments unaimed automatic weapon fire tore through the open front door.
“Can’t you stop them?” Suzanne screamed at her father, who had fallen into Kaufmann’s chair, his arm hanging at an ugly angle, arterial blood pumping in gouts from his arm.
“Not a chance,” he said with the calm of shock. “We’ve fallen into the den of snakes…” Then he fainted.
I grabbed Suzanne’s hand, placed her thumb against the pressure point in her father’s armpit. “Hold that!” I shouted into her blank face. But her hand fell limply away. I slapped her, cursed her until she kept her thumb there. By then I could see men circling. “Help me!” I shouted at Kate, and we slammed the oak shutters over the wide window behind Kaufmann’s desk.
Then I scrabbled under the desk until I found the Glock and the General’s .45. As I handed them to Kate, I told her, “I’ve got to shut the front door. You just reach around the doorframe and fire out the front door until I get it closed. You hear me?”
She nodded, so I didn’t look back, just rolled out of the office into the great hall until I got behind the Plexiglas shield and rolled it to the door. Fucking rounds were hitting everywhere. And Kate was covering me like a pro, crouching and aiming her fire until I got the steel doors shut, and we retreated into the office.
Automatic fire had begun to splinter the heavy shutters, and Suzanne had pulled her father to the floor for cover.
“We have to get out of here,” Kate said.
“Where?” I said. “And fucking how?”
“The basement,” Suzanne said. “We’ll be safe there.”
With nothing to lose, I gathered the shoulder holsters, pistols, and clips off the couch, wrapped them over my arm, then folded the General over my shoulder and followed the women across the great hall, down a winding set of stone stairs to a large solid door. Suzanne grabbed a key ring off the wall beside the door, unlocked it, and led us to her version of safety. A large, expensively furnished stone-lined chamber, more like a tomb or a bomb shelter than a living space.
They couldn’t get in. We couldn’t get out. But Andy Jacobson poked his head out of the bathroom, wondering what the hell was going on. I set the weapons on a library table, doubled up my fist, and knocked the little bastard into the bathtub. I wrapped a tourniquet around the General’s arm, then stood under the shower over Jacobson’s unconscious body long enough to wash most of the blood and shit off me. I sat down in a soft leather chair with the shotgun across my knees, leaned back prepared to bleed to death. The round that Kate put into her father’s arm hadn’t stopped there. It was floating around somewhere in my guts.
“Get that piece of shit out of the tub, Katie,” I said, “and fill it up before they figure out to turn off the water.”
“It’s not bleeding much,” Kate said later, washing my sweaty face with a cold washrag.
“Thanks,” I said, not saying what I thought. Not much on the outside.
Suzanne huddled over her father on the large bed, tending the tourniquet, trying to save his arm. A lost cause, I suspected. As lost as we were. Jacobson drooled, strapped into a chair in front of me. Kate had found me a bottle of brandy, which I sipped and tried not to swallow. Occasionally, we would hear muffled sounds through the oak-shrouded steel door. But when I wondered why the bodyguards didn’t blow the door, Suzanne pointed out that they needed the General to get to the money.
“They want to kill you,” she said, the bloody planes of her face staring over her father’s slowly heaving chest. “Not him. Or me. Or Kate.”
Kate leaned her forehead on my knee, whispering, “I’ll die before I let them kill you.”
“Thanks, kid,” I said, my hand on her close-cropped head, “but that’s not necessary.”
“Oh yes it fucking is,” she said, raising her face to me. “What was it you said? I always wanted to fall in love with somebody I couldn’t fuck.”
“You people are sick,” Suzanne said, as she hurried into the bathroom for another towel.
Kate and I laughed. Laughed loud enough to make Jacobson stir in his chair. His eyes followed Suzanne like a sick puppy’s.
“Beautiful woman, hey?” I said to him.
“Frankly, I liked her with a little more meat on her bones,” Jacobson said. “Suzanne,” he whined as she passed him again. But she ignored him. Kate and I were still giggling.
Kate staggered into the bathroom to wash her face. Somehow the General’s corrupt blood had missed her.
Or maybe it wasn’t in the blood. Maybe the General had learned corruption. At great government expense. Or maybe all the years in Central America had found the real bastard beneath all the breeding and education and gentility. Too often it seems that way. We send our legions among the savages in the name of democracy, and they learn violence and torture in the name of United Fruit. I wasn’t sure, now, if we had created General Kehoe, or he us, but I knew that we had created Emilio Kaufmann…
And now all the bad guys were dead. Except for me. And I supposed I was dead, too. Shot by the only decent person in the whole fucking deal. And it was never about drugs or money. It was always about a goddamned western movie. In some way I didn’t exactly mind dying. As I drifted away, I heard the sounds of rushing air, felt the force of moving water, heard the great beasts singing…
“Look!” somebody screamed at me, slapped me. “We’ve been here all night. So what the fuck happens now?” Suzanne asked, standing over me, pointing a pistol in my face. A muffled pounding came from the door.
I suppose I had drifted a long way, that the pounding had been going on for a long time. I meant to put a load of buckshot into Jacobson before I died. But suddenly it seemed too much trouble. You step on pissants. You don’t shoot them.
“What?” was all I could say.
“What happens now?”
“We survive this shit, love, which seems a long chance,” I said dreamily, “your father dies in prison, and you wander the earth like a pariah dog. Again.”
“But you loved me, dammit,” she demanded. “I fucking know you did. I can tell.”
“Maybe I did,” I said. “I even put enough of Ray Lara’s money aside for you to finish the movie…”
“I knew it,” she said. “I knew you loved me. I’ll give you the Puntarenas tape. Give you the formula. Just tell me how to get the money. Come on, goddammit, you love me…”
“I’m not completely responsible for my character flaws,” I said, then looked into those hard green eyes. “Or yours. Maybe I’d’ve felt differently if you hadn’t put all thirty rounds into Aaron Tipton and your father hadn’t been such a scumbag.”
“My father’s dead.”
“Tourniquet mismanagement,” I suggested, then laughed.
Suzanne clubbed me across the face with the pistol. “I’m going to give you to them,” she said. “They’ll make you talk about the money…”
“No, you’re not,” Kate said, leaning over her father’s body, her shining face dripping tears. Then she walked over to stand in front of her sister.
“Fuck it,” I said. “Let her, Katie. It’s fine. It’s a fair price…”
“The General’s dead,” Suzanne said flatly. “It’s our only chance.”
“Please,” I begged, “let her give me up. Please…”
Perhaps it was the begging. Who knows? For the first time in a long day and night of blood and guts, Kate collapsed, her forehead again on my knee. I could hear the rain on Betty Porterfield’s tin roof as I drifted away again, could hear in the background the pounding against the door as Suzanne struggled with the locks.
Then somebody else was slapping my face and cursing me.
“Goddammit, Milo, you fucking son of a bitch.”
And I knew it wasn’t the angels.