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Chapter 33
Awareness came slowly, a haze of sensory pulses that invaded the darkness and brought Munroe fully awake.
She was seated. Chin on her chest, feet bound to the legs of a metal folding chair, hands secured behind it. Not by handcuffs, duct tape, or zip ties.
Her mind worked. Struggled toward lucidity. Rope. Thin rope. Lots of it. Idiots.
Whatever was wrapped around her eyes had been bound tight, and not even a kiss of light reached her eyelids.
To her left were voices, raucous conversation, men sitting around a nearby table.
Their volume and language spoke to playing cards or some other game of chance.
These men— four of them, by the distinctness of tone— were unconcerned with her. They were killing time. Waiting.
Each sound, each smell brought with it a mental snapshot to create a composite of what she couldn’t see.
There was no tell of a nearby guard, no restless feet or fidgeting fingers, no rustle of clothing, no breathing.
Cigarette smoke hung in the air, not heavy, as it would be in a small space; it dissipated in the same way the voices did.
This place was large. Cavernous. Munroe gauged ten feet between her and the men at the table, maybe fifteen, no more than that.
They’d set her off to the side, alone, with her face toward them, trusting that she was secure.
Such basic blunders made it easy to lower the estimate of threat, but she wouldn’t make the same mistake these men had.
They would learn that to underestimate an opponent was the fastest route to getting dead.
Chin to chest, as if she were still unconscious, Munroe’s fingers worked, wrists twisted until they found the slightest bit of slack, pushing, prodding until she had enough play to slip free.
Well-oiled rollers slid along tracks somewhere across the cavern behind her, pausing the escape.
She stopped to listen. Doors easing open. This place was a warehouse.
Only the faintest noise filtered in from the outside, no cars or horns, no pedestrians, no music. A warehouse outside of town.
The rollers made a return trip, and the purr of a well-machined car engine drew close, shut off.
The conversation around the table stopped. Chairs scraped against the floor. Feet shuffled. A car door opened. Shut. Followed by another.
Footsteps drew away from the table, toward the chair, and then fingers, hands, released the blindfold.
Munroe blinked. The lighting inside the warehouse came from industrial lamps beside the worktable,
and although the glare was easily swallowed by the building, the wattage was painful after having been forced into complete darkness.
Munroe winced, staring at the man in front of her.
She had expected someone from the Cárcan family to show, had planned on it, knowing that until the boss had a chance at her they’d keep her alive, a deliberate delay that would buy time not only for Bradford and Hannah but also for herself.
That the tormentor had to be the guy who’d groped her in the Ranch hallway was an unfortunate twist.
He stared at her now, looking down in a long-drawn-out silence that spread to the men on either side of him.
Munroe’s face relaxed from wince to deadpan. The boss man grinned, and his men remained motionless.
He then stood back, forefinger and thumb to chin in an exaggerated pretense of thought.
He wagged his finger at her. “I know you,” he said. Pulling at the knees of his slacks, the man lowered to a half-squat so that he was eye to eye.
“Yes,” he said. “I do know you.”
Munroe stayed silent, eyes glazed over in a stare of noncomprehension and ignorance.
Her eyes didn’t track him when he stood, didn’t follow when he turned to whisper to one of the men that remained behind him.
Now that she could see, could fully assess the situation, this Cárcan son was the least interesting object in the vast empty space.
Instead, her eyes darted to the table and then searched upward along the walls and around the circle, seeking out a way to escape, scouting for anything that could be turned into a weapon:
instantaneous survival assessment of who, what, when, where, and how. She already knew the why.
The floors were smooth concrete, the walls cinder block, and the roof, fifty feet up, was of corrugated metal.
The direction of echoes spoke to the warehouse being empty; the worktable near the wall and the lights around it seemed to be the only objects there.
The four men who had originally sat around the table had been joined by two more who’d arrived with the boss.
All six stood on either side of him in a hungry, uneven semicircle, each carrying firearms, most of which were holstered and a few held in waistbands.
The men were similar only in their build— thick and stocky from too many hours spent in the gym.
In contrast, their boss was slight and otherwise undistinguished apart from his expensive clothes and what Munroe already knew was an overdeveloped ego.
She absorbed the placement of men and weapons, each detail filtering into awareness with the accuracy of echolocation,
an appraisal that was swift and instinctual, made in less time than it had taken for the boss man to turn and speak.
It was difficult to predict the odds of survival. She’d fought against larger groups, but never in such a defined space, and never from a position of weakness.
Speed was her friend, was always her friend, speed born from the will to survive when night after night she was hunted down and forced to defend herself in order to live.
Agile and able to move faster than expected, she could handle four or five who were not trained military but thugs. Seven was pushing against reason.
Munroe’s eyes returned front, to the boss man’s second, the one to whom the boss had turned and whispered, the one who now strode toward her.
The second was the broadest and shortest of the seven, and he didn’t pause in his approach.
When his feet stopped moving, his arm continued on, fist connecting with Munroe’s face.
The blow, hard and dizzying, would have knocked her off the chair had she not braced for it, and were she not strapped to the chair.
Munroe shook her head to clear the dizziness. The telltale trickle flowed from the corner of her mouth, and the stabbing pain brought a hint of smile to her lips.
Her heart began to beat the march to destruction.
The boss came close again to look at her swelling face, and she studied his.
Her vision blurred to gray, the borders of sight narrowing to feral focus, the lust for blood, for retribution, rising,
while long years of practice in pulling back the urge kept her from striking.
Bradford’s words scrolled against the back of her mind. Have you ever considered that it’s not always wrong to kill?
The boss said, “【马赛克3】Donde está la ni【马赛克2】a? Where did you send her?”
Munroe’s eyes glazed again, stayed focused ahead, as if his words held no meaning.
The boss nodded to his second, and the man stepped forward again, struck again. The hit was harder. Set her ears ringing.
Maybe some people need killing, maybe by taking them out you break the cycle of pain and suffering.
Munroe’s eyes remained to the front, centered on what would appear to be some invisible distance.
The boss stepped back into the semicircle. Whispered again. His third placed a spring blade in his waiting hand.
The boss switched the knife open and squatted again, eye to eye with Munroe. He took the blade up, underneath her chin, pointed into that sweet spot so favored for the kill.
He pressed so that in order to avoid puncture, she was forced to tilt her head upward and back,
and when she had lifted as high as she could, had tightened all the skin along her neck, he flicked.
The blade took a quick slice, not deep, but enough to feel, enough to draw blood.
“Where did you send the girl?” he said again, only this time he spoke in nearly unaccented English.
“I didn’t send anyone anywhere,” she said.
The boss stood. Turned to the men behind him and let out a half-laugh.
“English?” he said, as if surprised to discover that what he thought was a long shot turned out instead to be true.
English was correct as far as he knew. He could have used Italian, German, Turkish, Ibo, or any one of twenty-something languages, and the result would have been the same.
“But you didn’t speak English when you were around my friends.”
“What friends?” Munroe said.
The boss shook his head. His was the look of impatience, the look she wanted.
He motioned a finger upward, and two of his men left the half circle for the chair, knelt, sliced at the bonds on her ankles.
Beefy hands closed around each of her arms. They jerked her upward and shoved her toward the boss man.
Munroe struggled to maintain footing. Her hands were still palm to palm, and the rope still slack.
Munroe breathed in the aura of this man and his intended violence, absorbing until he blended with the memory and musk of Pieter Willem, until they were one inside her head.
The boss drew the knife up toward her face, smiling as her eyes tracked it. He pointed it down toward her chest.
In a quick movement he sliced the material of her shirt; sliced through the undershirt. The clothing fell away, leaving her chest exposed.
The boss man turned to his men, jerked his thumb toward Munroe, and said, “See, I told you she was a woman.”
He drew close, his breath hot against her neck. Ran his finger along her nipple. Tweaked it.
“I was right,” he whispered. “I do know you.” He took the blade and played it against her skin.
“And now that you’re no longer their guest but mine, I will treat you as I please.”
He paused when he saw the slivers that marked her torso, stared at them a moment and then his face creased into a half grin.
“I see I won’t be the first,” he said. “Did he make you cry, the one who did this? Did he make you bleed?”
He stretched closer, sniffed her neck and her hair, licked her, his tongue running from her ear to her cheek and over her eye. “Did he make you suffer the way I will make you suffer?”
The rush of blood was loud in Munroe’s ears, a heavy pounding that drowned out the world, drowned out everything but the man in front of her, and shouted the command to kill.
Instinct. Timing. Calculation. In a last effort toward reason, she forced it back, fought against the urge, offered a way of escape to someone who deserved none.
“Let me go now,” she said, her voice low, nearly a monotone, “and I won’t kill you.”
In response, the boss laughed. His bark was hard and unfeeling, a mockery.
“Please, little girl,” he said. “You go ahead and try to kill me. It would make for an entertaining morning.”
She sighed.
Wrong answer.
It was always the wrong fucking answer.
Her eyes closed as pleasure flowed through her system. This was the point of no return, the pre-rush of a killing. There was no going back.
She had no regrets, had made her peace, would die happy if such was the outcome.
She’d traded her life for an innocent child’s, and it had been an even trade.
“I will tell you what you want,” she said.
“Yes,” he whispered, his eyes on the knife as it caressed her skin. “You will.”
He paused, broke from his trance, and slipped the knife into his jacket pocket.
Sudden and violent, he drove a fist into her stomach and knocked her to her knees. He leaned over her and ran his fingers along her cheek.
Time slowed. Motion was broken into the fragmented jerking of strobe-light speed.
Munroe’s fingers worked, wrist passing, bonds loosening. She looked up, and this time, she smiled death.
One movement, solid, fluid, fast. Knees to feet. Upward. Forehead into his face.
Fast enough to break his nose, hard enough to whip his head backward. Her hand to his pocket. His knife to her palm. Arm around his neck. Blade to his throat.
In the time it took for his bodyguards and bullies to draw their weapons.
The boss man’s arms flailed, trying to get a grip, trying to gain balance as she dragged him backward along the far side of the semicircle toward the table and the wall that lay behind it.
He was strong. Nearly her weight. Equal to her height, and such was the beauty of adrenaline and the rush that it bore that she didn’t feel his strength, didn’t know his weight, and pulled him along like a ragdoll.
The men, afraid to fire and hit their leader, followed instead, tightening the circle and drawing near.
Munroe flicked the boss man’s neck, drawing blood. “Back,” she hissed, and each of the men from the semicircle paused in their encroachment.
Her cut had been more carefully placed than his had been. She’d struck the jugular, like putting a hole in a dike,
and he, still flailing, not yet accepting his fate, seemed unaware that the harder he fought, the faster he’d die.
He got hold of one of her ears. Began to dig, tear, pull. She stabbed his hand. He screamed.
“Right now you’re just in pain,” Munroe said, “but if your men don’t put their weapons down, you’ll be dead.”
He hissed an unintelligible response. She reached the table. Stepped around it. The wall was solid, cold against what was left of her shirt.
No one would be coming at her from behind, and the table forced at least six feet of space between her and the others.
To her captive Munroe whispered, “You’re bleeding. Badly. At this rate you’ll be dead in twenty minutes. Do you want to make a trip to the hospital or do you want to make a trip to the morgue?”
She’d spoken a lie to keep him motivated; at the rate he was bleeding, he’d be lucky to last ten. He stopped struggling.
She could feel his body weakening, either through defeat or because with his neck held in the vise of her arm, she’d slowed the blood supply to his brain. The reason mattered little.
“Drop them,” he said to his men. His voice was low, a whisper.
“They can’t hear you,” she hissed.
“Drop your weapons,” he said again. Not much louder, although this time he flailed one arm up and down to emphasize the point.
In case there was any doubt, Munroe repeated the command, and when the men hesitated, didn’t move at all, she dropped the tip of the knife into the tender of the boss man’s shoulder joint and yanked.
He screamed again. The men placed their drawn weapons on the floor.
“Scoot them under the table with your feet,” Munroe said, and then added to the boss man’s driver, “You. Fat guy. Toss the car keys on the table.”
When they’d done as instructed, she nodded to the two closest to the warehouse entrance. “Get the doors,” she said.
Munroe couldn’t reach for the weapons on the floor, couldn’t collect them and maintain her hold on the boss. They knew it. She knew it. They knew she knew it.
She counted seconds as the two faded in the dimness toward the sliding doors.
Now was the moment of weakness, when the four still standing on the other side of the table would begin to close in.
Across the warehouse, the gate men slowed. Dawdled. They were killing time, keeping the escape route sealed off while they waited for their counterparts to take action.
She was losing the upper hand, the window that she’d gained by surprise was closing.
The four around the table fanned out, inched forward, moving in a way that was far too confident for unarmed men, no matter how loyal they might be.
Instinct again. The fastest way to survival. Munroe dropped the boss— just let go and let him fall.
He collapsed under his own weight, and she went down with him. Pulled two weapons off the floor. Dip and grab. No time to look, just take what she could get, then point and click.
Her fists closed around a pair of Bersa Thunder 9s, identical to the one pulled off her earlier.
If the magazines were full, and they would be, they afforded seventeen rounds apiece.
If that didn’t cover what she needed, she deserved to get shot.
Still lying on her side, she fired. A warning discharge, aimed toward the floor in front of the men nearest the table.
The report was a loud echo in the emptiness. They jumped, crouched, backed away only to the edge of the light.
Time continued to move in split-second intervals, body language screaming in a way that words never could.
The men were each reaching. Backup weapons. If she was going down, she wasn’t going down alone.
Munroe paused. Calmed her breathing. Double tapped. The closest man yelped. Fell. Wounded but alive. For now.
The boss moved to get up. She drove an elbow into his face and then downward against his cut shoulder. He screamed again.
She slid over the top of him so that his body remained a shield between the shooters and the wall,
and with one weapon pressed into his spine, said, “Move again, and you’re paralyzed for life. Understand?”
He groaned.
The three men remained on the periphery of light, inching forward again, trying to find a line of sight between the legs of the table and chairs and past their boss.
The warehouse doors were still closed. Munroe yelled into the darkness, “One minute to get the doors open or one of your people dies.”
This time the shooters backed fully into the darkness; nobody wanted to be first.
The occasional shuffle, toe scrape, and rustle betrayed position. They were close, just out of sight.
The distance would make it difficult for them to shoot with accuracy, but there was always dumb luck and shrapnel.
Especially when the lights blinded Munroe to what lay beyond the table area and made her an easy target.
She shifted forward. Aimed. Popped the lights, and the warehouse went completely black.
Her eyesight ringed with the burning images of the powerful lamps, but even effectively night-blinded as she was, the darkness was still home.
Their eyes would have adjusted first, it would make them brave. Brave enough to crawl in close where they could see.
She knelt. Waited. Listened. Then stood to a crouch, fished the keys off the table, and ducked back down to where the table and chair legs provided a modicum of cover.
She whispered to the boss, “You’ve been deserted.” She punched the muzzle of the gun to the back of his head. “Get up.”
He struggled to push upward to hands and knees. His breathing was slow, shallow. He’d lost a lot of blood, wouldn’t last much longer.
She needed to get to the car before any collateral she held in him ran out.
