Seven Seconds by Andy Maslen

Author:Andy Maslen [Maslen, Andy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-06T16:00:00+00:00

30

Gabriel knew Margot would be trying to get back across the river. But Casildo had locked down the barrio. That meant men at the bridges and the roads leading out into the neighbouring slums.

She was giving a good account of herself, though. As he checked each new road he came to from the rooftop, he saw a succession of corpses lying sprawled on the tarmac. Stray dogs were already pulling and nipping at their exposed flesh. Huge rats darted forward when the bigger scavengers retired with their booty.

How long would Casildo’s men hold the line and not try to kill her? The sniper had said he was already a dead man because he’d failed in his allotted task. So Casildo was a brutal boss. Gabriel shook his head. Of course he was! He ran a drug cartel not a department store.

So would they keep taking losses until either she escaped or they got lucky and winged her? Or would one trigger-happy soldier miscalculate and accidentally kill her? He’d presumably have to disappear himself. But Honduras was a big country, with copious employment opportunities for a man willing to kill without mercy.

He found her fifteen minutes after killing the sniper.

She was backed into a corner, a submachine to her shoulder, firing short bursts as a trio of cartel soldiers advanced on her, taking cover behind parked cars, whose bodywork clanged and clonked as her rounds tore through the side panels and hit the steel and cast-iron beneath.

The final round left her magazine. The cartel men cheered derisively – an incongruous sound after a firefight – and emerged from their hiding places, machetes drawn.

‘The boss said to bring you in alive,’ one crowed. ‘He didn’ say nothing about fuckin’ you up a little first.’ He grabbed his crotch. ‘Or maybe just fuckin’ you.’

Gabriel shrugged off the trench coat and balled it up on the roof’s low parapet. He didn’t have time to calculate windage; it was a still night in any case and the range was short enough for it not to matter. With the rifle’s fore-end pushed down onto the wadded-up fabric, he sighted through the scope on the crotch-grabber and shot him through the head.

As the skull exploded, filling the air around him with pink mist, the other two gangsters shouted and ran for cover, firing wildly in all directions. Margot, he noticed, looked up at the rooflines of the surrounding buildings. A woman used to working with sniper cover, he had time to think, before shooting the second man in the chest. He fell sideways, clattering into a dumpster that wobbled for a few drunken feet on its unlocked castors.

That left the final man, now ensconced in a doorway and firing short, controlled bursts back at Gabriel. A third shot took him in the head and he died with his mouth stretched in a rictus grin, blood fountaining from the exit wound in the back of his head, painting scarlet arcs all over the white stucco wall behind him.

Margot had a fix on him now.

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