Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(8)

Angelo lay near a side entrance to the hotel. The people who had surrounded him only a moment earlier had retreated back into the lobby. Afraid of being found near the body, probably. By the police or by the cartels, whichever they figured was responsible. Always a guess in Mexico.

By now, three minutes had elapsed since my call to Jesús. I wanted more than anything to run to Angelo. To take his pulse and—if he still breathed—to offer care and learn what had happened. But if I walked into the alley, the bad guys would have the perfect opportunity to pop me. There would be thirty witnesses to my death, and not one of them would be able to say what had happened.

Chances were, Angelo was already dead. By now, he’d been in the alley a good ten minutes. Better to wait for Jesús.

Then Angelo groaned. A gut-wrenching moan of the kind you would expect from a man whose face had been used as a whetting stone.

And still no sign of Jesús.

I bent my head, a form of surrender. Sometimes you have to trust the universe.

With another quick glance around, I ran to Angelo and dropped beside him. Light from the lobby revealed a face that would never be as it had been—even if he survived. Iraq reached out its claws, and for a moment I caught the heat and smell of the desert—sand and sewage and wind—and saw my lover’s own broken body as it lay on a gurney.

“Stay here,” I told myself, and pushed away the memory.

I gripped Angelo’s shoulder. “Angelo!”

He didn’t stir. His left arm was stretched out in the filth of the alley, his palm turned up toward the smog-smeared night. Three of his fingers were gone, the wounds cauterized. Gently, my own hand now bloody, I picked up his arm and laid it across his chest. I took his pulse—thready and weak.

I glanced over my shoulder at the hotel lobby, at the faces pressed to the glass.

“?Una ambulancia!” I screamed. “?Llame a una ambulancia!”

They stared at me as I mimed putting a phone to my ear.

“Hazlo,” I yelled. Do it.

A woman nodded and disappeared. I turned back to Angelo. From somewhere, a dog began to bark, a grating, repetitive sound.

“Angelo, it’s Sydney. Stay with me, buddy.”

A violent tremor ripped through his body. His remaining eye scraped open, and his gaze locked on my face.

“Go,” he whispered, his voice clotted with blood. “Run.”

“They’re gone,” I said, knowing the lie. “Help is on the way.”

“They . . .” Angelo’s right hand floated up, found my shirt, and gripped it. “They asked about the boy. About you.”

“Who, Angelo? Give me names. Who did this to you?”

He loosed my shirt, and I caught his hand.

“They . . .” He coughed, and a fresh swell of blood leaked through his lips. “Dalton. They wanted to know . . . about him. I . . . know nothing. Why . . . do they ask?”

Dalton. It was a name I recognized. Richard Dalton was a CIA guy who’d been on our base in Iraq. The first I’d known about him was when he showed up in a photograph I found of Malik. The picture showed Malik, Dalton, and a third man—Max Udell, a.k.a. Sarge. All looking as happy together as bugs in a rug.

In another picture, Dalton had been standing with Doug Ayers—Dougie. The man I’d loved who was tortured and killed by terrorists. In the photo, Richard and Dougie had been wearing native dress. Working together, I presumed. Or at least on friendly terms.

Angelo’s voice brought me back.

“I have heard . . . you cannot resist pain.” His one eye, filled with pleading, found mine. “I am sorry.”

I squeezed his uninjured fingers as if my hold was the only thing keeping him here, the string to a balloon caught in a windstorm. Grief and fury quaked through me. For Angelo. For his children, who wouldn’t go with him to any more soccer games. And for the fact that my only link to Malik lay dying in a filthy back lane.

Urgency throbbed behind my eyes, pounding out a rhythm that warned me to flee. The space between my shoulder blades itched. I glanced up and down the alley, taking in windows and doorways. I looked at the shadowed places where no light reached. I listened for the sound of men approaching, but the night fell oddly quiet, as if the universe had drawn a breath. The dog had stopped barking. The sounds of traffic were a dull, faraway buzz. The people in the lobby were voiceless. No one spoke at all.

“Where’s that ambulance!” I shouted into the silence. My voice echoed off the walls.

“La ambulancia está viniendo,” said a woman in the hotel, her voice muffled through the glass. “It comes.”

“Sydney.” Angelo groaned.

“Stay with me, mi querido amigo,” I said. “You’re going to be all right.”

His gaze drifted. He gaped at the night sky, his expression one of confusion. As if he wondered how a man who volunteered to find people now found himself in such a mess.

At the north end of the alley, men’s voices rose, a few in anger, most in drunken enthusiasm. Jesús López’s cavalry had arrived. A car horn blared, drowning out everything else. I waited for the flare of headlights, but then the horn fell silent, and a man shouted in English, “Move along! No cars here, no cars.”

I knew that accent. As Boston as the Red Sox. It looked like my fears about the Alpha had been right.