The Complete Hammer's Slammers, Vol. 3

Coke risked a look over his shoulder. He prayed that Pilar would have returned to the van, but she hadn’t, she was just below him. Her lips trembled, and her face had no expression.

The door behind Serafina moved. A man looked out nervously, then stepped the rest of the way. He carried a needle stunner in one hand and held his trousers before him as a veil. He hadn’t managed to get his legs into the openings.

“See who’s here, Terry?” Serafina said, cocking her head so that she could watch the man out of the corner of her eyes. “She’s here to take you back with a gun!”

“That’s nothing to do with it!” Coke said. “I tell you, there was a bomb in the drum you thought was refinery tailings. You’ve got to disappear before the folks on Delos learn what I already know.”

“Lies!” Serafina cried. “All lies!”

Her gaze slipped past Coke to Pilar. “Do you want to shoot me, bitch? It won’t get you Terry back, you know. He’ll never go back to you now that he knows what it’s like to fuck a real woman!”

Ortega had been a good-looking man once. He still had the face, but standing nude on the landing made his paunch and generally run-down appearance painfully evident. Part of Coke’s mind found time to wonder at what Serafina Amoretta saw in the fellow.

“Look,” the Frisian said desperately. “You can lie to me, but it won’t do you a bit of good with the enforcers from Delos, you know that. And L’Escorial, it’s L’Escorial that planned this, they’ll be curst sure Delos learns who planted the bomb because they don’t want suspicion falling on them.”

“You can’t have Terry and you can’t have me!” Serafina cried. She groped behind her and caught the hand with which Ortega held up his trousers. She jerked the garment from him, tossed it down the steps, and then drew his hand forward to cup her breast. “Do you see! Your lies get you nothing. Nothing!”

There was a clatter behind Coke. He glanced back. Pilar had dropped the sub-machine gun. She was stumbling down the stairs.

“Wait!” he called.

“You see!” Serafina said. She jutted her hips backward against Ortega’s groin and wriggled. “You see!”

Coke backed down the stairs. He didn’t dare turn away from the needle stunner.

His boot jarred the sub-machine gun. He snatched the weapon up. For a moment he imagined blasting the couple on the landing to doll rags. No, the cartel would take care of that….

He reached the bottom of the stairs. He heard the van’s diesel roar to life. Serafina turned, drawing Ortega with her back into the room. Coke ran out into the street. He was too late. The van was a block and a half away, still accelerating.

A crowd had gathered at a discreet distance, drawn by the shooting and the corpse lying half in, half out of the stairwell. The pimp’s eyes were glazed below the ruin of his forehead.

“One, this is Four,” Coke’s commo helmet announced in the voice of Lieutenant Barbour. “Something’s happened at what used to be Larrinaga’s house. I think you’d better be present when L’Escorial gets to checking. Do you have transportation? Over.”

“That’s a negative, Four,” Coke said, watching the port operations van disappear in the distance. “Over.”

“Roger, somebody’ll pick you up on the way,” Barbour said. “Four out.”

Matthew Coke stared into the night. Spectators shifted when his blank expression fell across them, but they were only blurs to his consciousness.

He tried to change the sub-machine gun’s half-expended magazine for a full one. He had to give up the attempt, because his hands were trembling too badly.

Metal scraps and pieces of broken glass hung from an ankle-height string concealed in the broad-leafed ground cover. Despite his visor’s light amplification, Vierziger would have missed the warning device if he hadn’t been looking for something of the sort. He knelt and tugged the trip-line with his left hand, making the trash rattle.

The only response was greater stillness.

“Larrinaga,” Vierziger called in a low voice.

There was a rustle from the bole of the fallen tree. “Who’s there?” Larrinaga demanded.

Larrinaga was crouched in the opening, gripping a club with metal spikes. He wouldn’t be able to make out Vierziger’s crouching form against the background of the trees between him and the rear of Potosi’s buildings.

“Vierziger,” the Frisian said. He switched on the miniflood in his left hand.

Larrinaga jumped as abruptly as if Vierziger had shot him. His head knocked against the lip of his shelter, but the punky wood cushioned the blow.

Vierziger stood up. “Don’t worry,” he said with the touch of a sneer in his voice. “I’m not here to put you out of your misery.”

The local man scrambled to his feet. The intense light made him sneeze. Vierziger slid the control down, dimming the glare to a yellow glow.

“What do you want then?” Larrinaga said. He seemed to notice the club for the first time. He dropped it at his feet.