Resurrecting Midnight (46 page)

He studied her, looked for deception in her angered eyes.

She said, “Whatever problems are between us, they are irrelevant.”

Medianoche nodded. “Millions of dollars irrelevant.”

“Maybe a billion dollars irrelevant.”

He took a deep inhale, exhaled, then extended the sensor to Se ñorita Raven.

She held the edges of the sensor with her fingers, but he didn’t let go.

He kept eye contact with her. Stared into a face marked by shrapnel. At eyes that reminded him of what he wanted to forget. She looked at him and held his stare.

Again, he felt like they were about to kill each other.

He let go of the sensor like he was letting go of the prize itself.

Señorita Raven battled the rising wind, sprinted toward the wall of containers and the railroad tracks. He charged for another quarter mile, sections of the shantytown crumbling behind them. Her pace, her agility, her determination to recover what was lost was as hot as the fires. Medianoche followed her trail, her sprint incredible. Tracker in one hand and XD45 in the other, she ran into the darkness, obscured by the falling rain.

Medianoche slowed down when the mud tried to pull him into the earth, but he didn’t stop. He adjusted his eye patch, then wiped water from his eye.

From his only eye.

Another explosion came from behind him, an earth-shaking bang louder than the crude
cumbia
music that drowned out the escalating screams of the dead and dying.

He turned quickly, aimed his weapon at the glowing shantytown.

A settlement that looked like the back end of a battle from the Old Testament.

His weapon searched side to side, found no threat lurking behind him.

Only hell.

And when Medianoche turned back around, when he inhaled cold air and was about to continue the chase, he saw that he was no longer standing alone on the edge of stolen grounds.

He had company.

His company stood there, covered in contaminated sludge, highlighted by flames.

For a moment, as Medianoche stood in the winter rain, a downpour that created a web of murky floods that reminded him of the Baldwin Hills disaster in December of 1963, he thought he saw the familiar silhouette of his own father. He thought he saw his drunken, abusive father.

But it wasn’t him.

The young man they called Gideon was in front of him.

The assassin who had put down Señor Rodríguez was a few feet away.

The sonofawhore who had cost him an eye was close enough to kill.

He looked like a wild animal. An enraged, wounded animal that had escaped its cage.

Medianoche raised both XD45s and prepared to fire.

Then sparks exploded behind his eyes.

 

The sparks ignited memory, and Medianoche was yanked from the battlefield and thrown back in time to North Carolina.

Once again, daguerreotype memories played at ten frames per second, the edges still dull, the images still in black and white, each image blurry like a hand moving back and forth in front of his face in fast motion. A war went on inside his head, ground zero being where the bullet had penetrated his skull, that missing memory blazing, battling to reboot. A thousand sparks.

He was facing a beautiful French whore who used the name Thelma.

The French whore was angry. Shouting in his face, pointing behind him. Pointing outside. Someone was out there. Lurking in the dark. The whore was angered, cursing Medianoche in French, making threats in English. Said she knew his secrets. Said she would tell his secrets. Then he grabbed her arm and she slapped him, spat in his face.

Snatches of a heated conversation, cries of terror bombinated about his head.

Daguerreotype memories played at twenty frames per second.

He slapped her.

She screamed and attacked him. Came at him with a steak knife.

He overpowered her, took the knife, threw it across the room.

Then he choked her.

She had tried to kill him.

His odium no longer under control, he was going to return the favor with his bare hands.

Inside that memory, Medianoche looked through a window.

He looked outside and saw a man watching.

A man in a dark suit was waiting, standing like a pallbearer.

Medianoche saw The Beast. He was there.

The Beast was there in North Carolina.

Then the snot-nosed boy came out of nowhere.

Gun in hand, anger on his face, his little fingers pulling the trigger.

The gun exploded.

Then blackness. Darkness. Permanent midnight.

 

He battled like a madman, broke through that memory like an out-of-control car speeding through darkened glass. He battled his way back to reality, came back to darkness and freezing rain, and pulled the trigger fingers on both guns, wanted to blast Gideon back to the hell he had come from. But it was too late. Gideon tackled him, hit him hard, took him off his feet as both guns exploded. Medianoche grunted, hit the ground hard and lost his weapons. He rolled in the mud and came up on his feet empty-handed.

Gideon rushed to pick up the guns. Medianoche bolted toward Gideon but slipped in the muck. By the time he got to his feet, both guns were in Gideon’s hands.

Medianoche growled, “Shit shit shit shit shit.”

Gideon snapped, “What the fuck was that? What just happened to you?”

Medianoche didn’t answer. “A fucking
guacho
.”

“What?”

“You’re a fucking
guacho
. A goddamn mutt.”

“Fuck you.”

Medianoche smiled. “You fucking sonofawhore.”

“What just happened? Looked like you were in a coma.”

“You got lucky. That’s all you need to know,
guacho
. You got lucky.”

Gideon was trembling. The weather was getting the best of him.

Medianoche felt the same chill on his wet and heavy clothes.

He asked, “Where is the package you stole from us?”

“We got it. That’s all that matters to me. I got what I came to get.”

“Won’t do you any good, Señor Guacho. Won’t do you any goddamn good.”

“I don’t care. Not my problem.”

“We’ll track it down before it leaves the area. We’ll have it back in our possession. Yours is a Pyrrhic victory. Whoever has it, my soldier is right behind them. And my soldier is both capable and ruthless, takes no prisoners. Your friends, we put a few of them down, took possession of the package they had.”

“You’re lying.”

“Look behind me. You see those fires? That was only the continuation of what has been a frustrating day. We caught up with the Peugeots, and your friends were given the same wonderful treatment. The young man with the long hair, that incompetent fool is dead. That dumb sonofabitch Scamz is probably on the same express train to Hell. Both of the Asian girls are copilots on that journey. The pregnant woman was feisty, sneaky, good with a blade. But after I beat her ass, a few grenades changed that attitude of hers.”

“The pregnant girl . . . where is she?”

Medianoche paused, detected some emotion.

He asked, “The pregnant bitch, was she carrying your kid? The tight-eyed gook they called Arizona? I tried to crush her goddamn skull into the concrete. Her pretty little face wasn’t a pretty little face when I was through with her. She was just another tight-eyed gook with road rash down to her neck.”

“Shut up.”

“What’s the problem, Señor Guacho?”

“Stop calling me that.”

“Why, Señor Guacho? Something about being called what you are bother you?”

“Because I said so.”

He wanted to keep Gideon angry. Wanted him off balance. Needed him emotional.

Powerful emotions highlighted Gideon’s filthy face. “Where is Arizona?”

“Was I vague? Or are you deaf and stupid? That bitch was a two-for-one.”

“You’re lying.”

“We captured those fuckers in Palermo no more than an hour ago. Your soldiers are dead. Casualties of a war they had no business fighting. Never step into a man’s homeland and expect to defeat him in combat. General Lee learned that lesson when he went north and lost. And so did America in Vietnam and in Iraq. Your friends, they’re dead. But our objective must remain clear. What you have and what we have, when combined, it’s a lot of money. Your team with one half of the package, my team with the other half. So we’re back at square one. The game is back at zero-zero.”

Gideon said, “You went to Montego Bay nine months before I was born.”

“You’re back to that bullshit.”

“I never left
that bullshit
.”

“What do you want?”

“I don’t know. I thought I knew, but I don’t know.”

“You put a bullet in my head in North Carolina. You put a bullet in my goddamn head and cost me an eye and part of my fucking memory. And as far as I’m concerned, you owe me.”

“You were there, in Montego Bay, with Thelma.”

“So were dozens of British and American and Chinese cruise ships filled with tourists.”

“They’re not important.”

“It was a goddamn whorehouse. New customer every fucking hour. Men lined up to fuck her the way Argentineans line up to get
helado
.
She was a goddamn whore motherfucker
.”

“No one else is important.”

“Are you not listening to what I’m saying? I fucked Thelma and so did everyone else. She was just like the whores walking around Micro-centro and Palermo and Recoleta and all over this damn city. I paid up front, fucked her until she screamed. I busted a nut and walked away. You want to know the price? You want to know what was on the menu? And they do have menus in Montego Bay. You pick a whore and you pick what services you want from the menu. And being the father of a child with a whore, well, that wasn’t on the goddamn list. And if you are here because I busted a nut inside a lying whore, why in the world would I want you to be my fucking son? You might be that whore’s kid, but you sure the fuck are not mine.”

“Sure.” Gideon nodded. “Now that we have that out of the way.”

“Your sperm donor might be an astronaut, a lawyer, or a clown in the circus. But it’s not me, you dumb fuck. I can’t have kids. I got my nuts cut a long time ago. I had a vasectomy when I was eighteen. I have no idea why she picked me out of the lineup, but she picked the wrong one. Gideon, I don’t know who the fuck you are, what game you’re playing—”

“Fucking liar. All of you are fucking liars.”

“You’re a fucking mental case.”

“
She told me you were my father
.”

“I don’t know what the fuck this has to do with the mission we’re on, but whatever you’re trying to pull, if this little fucking mind game is suppose to make me forget you have left two of my men dead and one of my men wounded, maybe dying in this shit-filled slum—”

“She said you were my father, but I don’t give a fuck. You’re a piece of shit. You’re no soldier. You’re nothing like the man I had in my mind. He was an honorable warrior. You’re a thug in a bulletproof suit. You’re nothing better than a money-hungry fucking thug.”

“From the mouth of a fucking hoodlum.”

Gunshots erupted.

There were a dozen gunshots off in the distance. From the direction of the train tracks.

The direction Señorita Raven had run.

The direction of the package.

Gideon turned for a moment, only a moment.

Medianoche charged at Gideon, ready to kill or ready to die.

He would do one or the other.

Medianoche tackled Gideon hard enough to send both guns flying from his hands and tumbling into the filth and darkness. They splashed into muddy lakes created by rain and runoff from sewage. Medianoche grunted, moved like he was twenty years younger, and took Gideon down on broken glass and plastic, tin and rusted metals. Mud splattered and debris was squashed underneath Gideon’s shirtless body. Medianoche tried to knock the wind out of him.

Gideon cried out in pain, his howls reaching up into the dark skies.

Medianoche pulled back his fist and beat Gideon.

Gideon struggled to block as Medianoche threw blow after blow.

Medianoche wanted to knock an eye out of Gideon’s face.

Gideon’s left eye was swollen shut, his rugged face bruised by a barrage of punches.

Medianoche hammered Gideon, battered him.

Gideon struggled, wrestled with him, finally pushed him away and got free.

The fires highlighted his enemy.

Gideon struggled to his feet, moved like every part of his body was numb from the rain.

Medianoche went after Gideon again.

It felt like the rain had added a thousand pounds to his bulletproof clothing.

Medianoche hit Gideon hard enough to knock him out, a blow that twenty years ago would’ve left a man twice his size in a permanent coma. He struck him again in the chest, hit him with a blow hard enough to stop a heart from beating. Gideon didn’t go down, stood like a wounded machine. Then Gideon came at him hard, threw elbows, threw head butts hard enough to break Medianoche’s nose. Medianoche returned the fury, hit Gideon and made that sonofabitch slip in the mud. And while Gideon fought to get his footing, Medianoche threw a hard right hand, a blow to the face that made his enemy stagger, but his enemy refused to fall.

Medianoche kept pounding Gideon.

The weather had done half the work, had weakened his opponent.

Each blow sent Gideon staggering, slipping and sliding like an outclassed amateur boxer being knocked across the ring, being hit at will by a seasoned pro.

Gideon refused to fall. He stayed on his feet, remained upright, one eye shut.