Fisk felt as though he’d been hit in the chest with a brick.

Instinctively he pulled back on the trigger of the 870 as the impact shoved him backward. The roar was deafening in the enclosed space.

But the gunman was already gone. Fisk’s ears were ringing too loudly to hear his own footsteps on the metal stairs going down.

It was only then that Fisk realized he’d been shot. He looked down. All three rounds had struck his vest, which, because of the gunman’s apparent military training and skill as a shooter, had saved Fisk’s life.

A worse shot might have hit him in the face or the neck or the groin or the arm.

This guy had put three rounds dead center, destroying nothing but Kevlar.

A man that good would not make the same mistake twice. Center mass was standard military training, but once you knew your enemy was wearing body armor, you went for the head.

Fisk pumped the shotgun and charged down the hallway. For the first time in his life, he felt an odd fatalistic sense that things just might not break his way. And to his surprise, it did not really bother him. Something about it seemed natural and right.

The whole series of thoughts just came and went like a small dark cloud passing over the sun on a summer day.

He rushed through the doorway to the stairs. If the men had been waiting, he would have been cut to shreds.

They were not. Fisk ran to the bottom, passing the bloody wall and floor, passing the horrified screams of the girls behind the locked doors. The open door above left enough light that Fisk did not have to use his SureFire. He did not want to risk moving his hand off the rifle pump anyway.

As Fisk turned into the narrow hallway, he fired a quick round just to keep them honest. It lit up the tight space, but Fisk saw no one. He racked the 870 again and continued his charge.

He popped up the bulkhead stairs into the light, aiming right and left down the narrow space between buildings. No one.

The door to the next building closed slowly, with a click.

Fisk had to follow. He was racing toward the door when he saw a figure enter the sidewalk space at the far end of the walkway.

CHAPTER 69

Garza had come too late. The Emergency Service Unit heavy rescue truck was parked outside the warehouse Fisk had pointed her to, agents in full tactical gear fanning out. Garza held out her credentials, worried they would not be respected by this fast-moving rapid-entry unit. She was approaching them from the side when she passed the space between the warehouse and the building to its immediate left.

A man wielding a shotgun turned on her from twenty yards away, almost firing. He pulled off his aim . . . and it was Fisk.

There was a bright fire in his eyes. He took his hand off the pump of the shotgun just long enough to point her hard around the other side of the building next to the warehouse. Then Garza watched him run up the stairs, throw open a side door, and enter.

Garza spun away, pulled her Beretta, and started off at a sprint around the other side of the building, looking for a way in.

CHAPTER 70

A sustained burst from the MP5 went barely wide as Fisk slapped the trigger of the 870.

Another deafening roar. Buckshot spraying the wall.

Yelling. Spanish. Fisk could not make it out.

His ears were screaming. His chest was aching. He was running.

His mind told him to keep moving, to count his shots.

He slid out into the open, seeing an iron spiral staircase in the middle of the building, leading up to the second floor. The ceiling in the old industrial building was twenty feet high, so the staircase twisted twice, making anybody who ascended it visible from all parts of the warehouse floor for several seconds. To clatter up the stairs in the presence of two well-armed shooters was to invite death. To retreat was to trap himself like a rat.

He ignored the tempting stairs, continuing room by room. He peeped around a corner, saw movement.

The shooter raised his MP5, firing already, rounds biting into the floor on their way toward Fisk.

Fisk pumped, aimed, and fired the shotgun.

The shooter’s head erupted in an explosion of red.

The man crumpled on the spot.

Fisk did not slow down for a moment. He ran past the twitching body to the next doorway. He peeked around the corner. Looked clear.

He ducked back, plucking a couple of cartridges from the rack along the gunstock, loading them in. He was feeding in a third when a burst of gunfire sounded and a needle of fire went through his forearm.

He dropped the shotgun. His left hand opened spasmodically, and he gripped it with his right, getting blood on his palm.

He reached for the shotgun, pulling it to him. He pumped it one-handed and fumbled for the trigger, backing away from the holes in the wall where he had just been standing.

Yelling outside. Cop sounds. They were close.

More shouting. Thumping of feet. Directionless.

Suddenly everything went quiet.

Fisk had a premonition.

“Comandante?” he called out.

No answer. More footsteps.

“Stop, NYPD!” said Fisk, his left arm jerking, right hand aiming the shotgun.

Footsteps. Fisk fired at the doorway, a warning shot.

The buckshot tore into and through the wall to the left of the frame, going wide.

His hearing was gone again. Fisk set down the shotgun quickly in order to grasp the pump, trying to reload one-handed.

He jerked it, but the rack did not catch. The cartridge had misloaded.

He was jammed.

A man swung into view in the doorway. The lower left side of his white shirt was red with blood, but he held his weapon firmly.

Fisk recognized the face. The expression.

The Hummingbird looked at Fisk sitting on the floor with the shotgun. His lower lip curled into a sneer.

“You are not the comandante,” he said.

Then suddenly he looked up, raising his aim.

Too slow. Crack-crack-crack from behind Fisk.

Chuparosa’s head flew back. His torso twisted, his free hand going to his neck, out of which pulsed blood.

He fell to the side and began kicking, trying to crawl away.

Fisk turned. Garza stood in the doorway in a balanced shooter’s stance. Her cheekbones were flushed and her black eyes were wide and intent, glazed with adrenaline. A goddess of wrath.

She walked past him, Beretta on Chuparosa. He was still kicking, trying to get away.

She came up behind him, ready to shoot. Wanting to shoot.

She never got the chance. The kicking stopped, and the assassin’s body lay still. He was dead.

CHAPTER 71

Fisk heard about the aftermath from the emergency room at Beth Israel Medical Center in Brooklyn.

Eleven girls. Eleven young Mexican women, ages fifteen to twenty, had been locked in the basement of the warehouse.

Eleven young women had been saved.

The man Fisk had wounded and Garza had killed was all but confirmed to be Chuparosa. Learning his real name would take time. No matter what they might learn about the man, the killer known as the Hummingbird had been stopped forever.

The Teixeira Brothers truck was discovered in the garage. A remote control robot was sent in to open the cartons of oysters safely.

The disassembled gun parts were discovered packed inside.