Two Blancosran from the wild firefight. The moment of rising flame illuminated their sweat-shining, panicked faces. One man limped badly, his strides awkward. The second man ran past the first, made no effort to help his compatriot as the man's wounded leg buckled.
The wounded man called out as he struggled to rise from the street. "Armando! Armando, ayudeme… ayude…"
Armando did not turn or slow in his sprint.
Lyons glanced to Blancanales. "Prisoners?"
"We'll leave them for the police." Blancanales let his borrowed CAR rifle hang on his shoulder as he sighted his Beretta.
Bursts of slugs tore Armando's legs, a steel-cored 9mm shattering one knee, another low-powered 9mm breaking the shinbone of the other leg. Lyons scored only one hit on the falling death-squadder, but the merciless .45 ACP hollowpoint exploded through the man's thigh, the expanding disk of spinning metal decelerating in a microsecond to liberate 400 footpounds of shock force. Blood and muscle and bone sprayed from an exit wound three inches in diameter.
The limping man behind Armando took the next bursts, a .45 ACP ripping away a foot and breaking the other leg. Nine millimeter slugs from Blancanales's selective-fire pistol punched through his knees.
Screaming, moaning, calling out in incomprehensible Spanish, the men thrashed on the sidewalk. Blancanales pulled lengths of prepared nylon cord from his pocket and started toward the wounded Blancos. Lyons jerked him back.
"Leave them. We don't owe them any tourniquets. The more blood they lose, the less chance they'll shoot the sheriffs when they get here — which will be in about one minute!"
Sprinting ahead, Lyons dodged from shadow to shadow. At the corner house, he dashed up porch steps and stood behind a brick column. Over the sights of his Atchisson, he surveyed the scene on the next block.
No Blancosexposed themselves. No auto-fire broke the sudden quiet. A scream rose, faded to a whine.
Blancanales joined him. As Lyons squinted into the shadows of a driveway — did he see a man moving, a car door opening — he heard Blancanales whisper into his hand-radio.
"We're on the southwest corner. Where are they?"
A 40mm grenade cracked. No auto-fire answered. Blancanales whispered into the radio again. "Wizard!"
"Wait a second!" Gadgets answered. The radio went silent for a moment.
Lyons watched a driveway where the overspreading branches of a tree created a pocket of darkness. He saw a shadow move. Could it be only the rising and falling flames from the burning car?
Gadgets's voice returned. "Dudes, I'm all tangled up in wires. I'm monitoring three radios and trying to kill people, too. I got to get an assistant..."
"What do you see?" Blancanales interrupted.
"I don't see anything. But I'm hearing things. The goon squad's forming up for a breakout, so watch out."
Bracing the Atchisson against the column, the auto-shotgun's sights on line with the tree's night shadow, Lyons reached out with his left hand and pulled Blancanales's radio close enough to transmit his whisper.
"You got the scanner on?"
"Most definitely! Sheriffs' copter on the way. And they're assembling superior firepower. They know they got something badhapp'nin' in dis nadaland."
"Talk English, will you!" Lyons told him.
"You English? I'm not. Why should I talk that talk?" Gadgets answered.
An engine revved. Lyons saw a car accelerate from the darkness of the driveway. He did not fire.
"Hold off, Politician," Lyons cautioned his partner. The burning hulk in the center of the street blocked any straight-line escape. Keeping his right hand on the Atchisson's pistol grip, his eyes on the car, Lyons found the uppermost pouch on his bandolier. He pulled out a seven-round magazine of one-ounce slugs.
A 40mm grenade missed the car, plopped inside the house. Then Gadgets fired three-shot bursts of 5.56mm slugs.
A side window shattered. The driver whipped a hard right turn, putting the flaming Dodge between his car and the unseen rifleman, then raced for the end of the block.
Fishtailing through the intersection in a floored-accelerator left turn, the escaping Blancoshurtled directly into Lyons's and Blancanales's weapons. In one long explosion of 12-gauge fury, Lyons full-autoed seven rounds of high-velocity steel through the windshield. He dropped the empty magazine and jammed in the magazine of slugs.
Blancanales scythed the interior with a line of alternating military and hollowpoint 5.56mm, all thirty slugs tearing through the interior.
As the careering, out-of-control car failed to hold its high-speed left turn through the intersection, Lyons pounded the car with semi-auto steel-cored slugs. A door panel collapsed inward, gore sprayed from the far side. The car passed only ten feet away. Lyons snapped two more slugs through the shot-out back window as the car full of dead and dying Guerreros Blancoscrashed into the house.
Lyons jumped from the porch. He crouched and aimed at the gas-tank filler cap. The slug tore through the sheet metal. He aimed the last slug lower, fired into the gas tank.
No flames came. Pocketing the emptied magazine, he reloaded. Left-handed, he took an MU-50G mini-grenade from his thigh pocket. Not taking his right hand from his Atchisson's pistol grip, he stuck a finger through the cotter pin's ring, jerked it free.
A sound came from inside the car. A groaning, a gasping. A wounded Blancotried to form words. Lyons called out: "Does it hurt? Don't you like it?" He pitched the grenade under the wreck. "Go back to where you came from!"
As flames and choking black smoke rose into the gray night of Los Angeles, Lyons, Blancanales and Gadgets sped away.
33
Floyd Jefferson waited in the dark. As a game to keep himself awake, he listened to the sounds of the old hotel and the city outside. He heard the raspy breathing of Senor Rivera, asleep in a chair a few steps away, the long butcher knife clutched in his hand. The senora and the three girls slept in the bed, their arms around one another, the quiet sound of their breathing like distant waves. One of the girls moved and the old springs of the bed squeaked.
Startling awake, Senor Rivera straightened in his chair. The glow from the window revealed his look to Floyd. Floyd lifted his left hand in a mock salute. His right hand remained closed around the slick-tape grip of the sawed-off shotgun.
Letting his hearing travel the hotel, Floyd listened to the sounds of flushing toilets and faint voices. The solid brick walls blocked most of the hotel sounds. But outside the window, the noises of Los Angeles created a three-dimensional texture of late-night life.
A siren wailed. Floyd listened as it approached, growing louder, reverberating in the stone and glass canyons of the downtown boulevards, then fading as it continued away. He heard voices from the street, the screeching of tires, a blasting car radio.
Silence came, all the other sounds inexplicably absent. Small claws skittered on the steel of the fire escape outside. Shuddering, Jefferson looked toward the window. Rats.
He did not need to see them to imagine them. After five nights without sleep, the sounds of their claws created glowing rats on a giant fire escape in the theater of his mind.
Cool, kid. Be cool. You got worse than rats out there. Maybe. If his friends the "specialists" did their number, the goons would notbe out there.
Five days? Had it been that long? Two nights in Miami. The night before he and Mr. Holt planned to fly to Washington. The night in that traitor Prescott's office. And tonight.
A few hours' sleep in Miami. No sleep the night before Washington — thought I'd be making international news, couldn't sleep thinking about that! No sleep the night at Prescott's, not with the goon squad waiting. And tonight.