Kidnap and Ransom

A chunk of plaster blew off the wall behind his head. Instinctively he dived, hitting the floor. Decker landed beside him.

“You okay?” Mark asked.

“Holy shit!” Decker said, checking out the hole punched through the wall above where the guard had been sitting. “What was that, a missile launcher?”

“Double barrel loaded with triple-ought buck, I’m guessing,” Mark said.

Another chunk of plaster exploded, a few feet lower than the last. Mark slid the LMT to Decker and signaled for him to move to the far side of the store, near the bandages. From there he’d have a better angle to cover him.

Mark commando-crawled toward the cheap plywood counter, praying it wouldn’t occur to the shooter to fire through it. After a few feet he entered a long aisle of cold and cough supplies. The good thing about a double-barrel was that after two shots it had to be reloaded, and reloading was a pain in the ass, especially if you were an amateur all hopped up on adrenaline. Mark scooped a bottle of cough syrup off the shelf by his head and hurled it toward the door.

Another explosion, the shot wild. The window shattered, glass peppering the floor by the door. Movement across the room—and another shot. A puff of packaging exploded a few feet above him.

Mark jumped to his feet and lunged for the counter. He slid across it and landed in a crouch. Turned and found himself facing a girl in her twenties. Shorts peeked out the bottom of her white coat. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail, glasses askew on the bridge of her nose. She fumbled frantically with a shotgun shell, trying to chamber it.

He grabbed the gun by the muzzle and pulled, yanking her off balance. She splayed out on all fours, glasses falling to the floor. One more tug and the shotgun was his. He palmed a few shells, tucking them in his pocket before chambering two.

“Por favor, señor,” she said, scrambling away from him. “No me moleste.”

“Tranquila,” he said, before calling out, “All clear!”

Decker’s head popped up above the counter. “Jesus. Annie Oakley, huh?”

“Yeah.” Mark glanced at her. Both hands covered her head, as if she were attempting to ward them off. “Tell her to relax. We gotta scramble, cops’ll probably be here soon.”

“Sure.” Decker rattled off something in Spanish. Whatever he said didn’t make the girl noticeably calmer. On the other side of the counter, the guard moaned.

“I’ll handle him.” Decker vanished. Mark grabbed a plastic bag from a stack below the register. He kept one eye on the girl as he scanned the locked, refrigerated cabinets. “Antibióticos?” he finally asked.

She didn’t answer. He came closer, kneeling beside her. She avoided his eyes.

“Lady, the faster we get this stuff, the faster we leave,” he said.

“You’ll kill us anyway,” she replied in surprisingly good English. “Fucking junkies.”

“We just want to help our friend,” Mark said. “Morphine, coagulants, antibiotics and we’ll be out of your hair.”

“Your friend was shot?”

He nodded. “We were kidnapped.”

“So go to the police.”

“I don’t trust the police.”

“Got the bandages and the phone,” Decker called. “We ready?”

“Almost.” Mark turned back to the cabinet. Toward the end of the row he spotted a bottle marked Morfina. He used the butt of the shotgun to shatter the case, causing the girl to suck in her breath sharply. Mark carefully stuck his hand in, avoiding the broken glass, and drew out two bottles.

Kaplan could live without anticoagulants, but antibiotics were crucial. If they could get him through the next few hours, Tyr would be able to reach them and he had a shot at surviving. But once infection started, it was tough to beat.

“Antibiotics?” he asked again. The girl refused to look at him. He reached back into the cabinet, swept an armful of bottles out and sent them crashing to the floor. They shattered in quick succession like bottle caps.

“Ay!” she cried. “They’re over there!”

He followed her pointing finger and spotted the antibiotics in the opposite cabinet. Punched a hole in the glass again, then drew out two bottles. “Syringes?”

She motioned toward the drawers below the cabinet.

Mark tried one: locked. “You got a key, or should I shoot the lock?”

The girl fumbled in the pocket of her jacket. She drew out a key ring and tossed it to him.

He caught it, unlocked the drawer and slid it open. Grabbed a box of syringes and tossed them in the bag with the other stuff. Turning to leave, something caught his eye. He bent again, shifting the other boxes aside. The girl stiffened as he drew out a package: white powder wrapped in layers of plastic.

“Dude, we gotta bolt.” Decker reappeared on the other side of the counter. “What’s that?”

“The cops aren’t coming, are they?” Mark asked.

The girl slowly shook her head. “Los Zetas?”

Her expression shifted at the name, but she didn’t reply.

“Shit,” Decker said.

Mark’s next words were interrupted by a spray of automatic weapon fire. He dived to the ground, landing hard. The counter in front of him bucked and splintered as dozens of rounds pumped through it. Over the barrage, he heard the girl screaming.

“They’ve been gone too long,” Sock said. “Something went wrong.”

“It’s only been an hour,” Flores replied. “Maybe there wasn’t a pharmacy nearby.”

“Yeah, or maybe they got smart and decided to ditch us. It’d be a hell of a lot easier to get out of this shithole if we weren’t dragging around a guy with a gunshot wound.”

“They’ll be back.” Flores turned his attention to Kaplan. The T-shirt he’d been using to apply pressure to the wound had soaked through. He replaced it with another from the stack Sock had stolen on his foray outside. Kaplan wasn’t looking good. He was getting paler by the minute, more waxy-looking. He’d probably lost a few pints of blood by now. It was giving Flores a bad sense of déjà vu. A year ago he was in the mountains on the border of Pakistan and Afghanistan, running interference between the local warlords while trying to determine which of them was still Taliban. When their convoy was coming back from the nearest village, one of his buddies got hit by a sniper. They waited more than three hours for a Medevac chopper. As it was landing, his friend bled out. Kaplan had that same look now. If Riley and Decker didn’t get back soon, he was done for.

Sock wasn’t making the situation any easier. He’d returned ten minutes earlier with the T-shirts and some tacos he’d scrounged up, and hadn’t stopped pacing since. This was Flores’s second mission with Tyr, and the first time he’d worked with Sock. The guy struck him as a typical SEAL asshole, convinced he was better than everyone else because he could wear a scuba tank. He’d run into the type a lot since entering the service: didn’t like them then, and couldn’t stand working with them now.

The irony was that Flores had taken this job because it was supposed to be safer. He was sick of getting shot at in some sand-blasted country where everyone hated Americans. Now here he was, in his hometown, facing the same situation. You had to laugh.

He thought for a minute of Maryanne, six months pregnant and waiting for him. Wondered if Tyr had even told her that something went wrong. They promised to take care of relatives if anything happened to him; he’d felt pretty good filling out a whole stack of paperwork attesting to that. But you had to wonder. If the company could screw up an operation this badly, how good was their word?

Kaplan groaned. Flores lifted his head, forced the mouth of a water bottle between his lips and got a few drops down his throat.

“We should leave him,” Sock said. “Riley and Decker might have gotten picked up again—we’re probably still in Zetas territory. We get our hands on a phone, we can call in, get help.”

“Why didn’t you come back with a phone?” Flores asked.

“Didn’t see any,” Sock said defensively.