Primary Valor by Jack Mars (booksvooks TXT) 📗

go, and tossed thegrenade deep into the hole where the door had just been. He covered his ears,jamming a finger into each earhole. He closed his eyes and turned away.

“Watch it!” he shouted. “Fire inthe—”

BANG!

Inside the house, the ear-piercingsound came, with a blinding flash of light.

Half a second later, Ed jumpedinto the breach. He did not hesitate at all. He stepped in front of the doorand stuck the snout of his MP5 through the hole.

DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH.

The sound was loud. LOUD.

“Got him,” he said. “Got theshooter.”

He raised one giant foot anddelivered a monster kick to what remained of the door. The hinges held. Thelock held. The door itself came apart. He kicked it again. Now the hole washuge, gaping. He turned sideways, put his shoulder to the shards of wood, andbulled his way through it.

Luke, pistol out now, was onesecond behind him. He stepped through into the living room. The TV was playing.It took up one entire wall. A Mexican variety show was on, complete withcrazed, balding, late-middle-aged male host, and the young female dancers intight gowns, shaking their ample bodies everywhere.

A dead man lay on his side on thedirty gray carpet. The carpet might have been white once. The man’s body wastwisted, his arms splayed out above him. A pump shotgun lay on the floor behindhim. The carpet near his head was red. The pool of blood was spreading like ahalo.

Ed moved up the hallway, Lukethree steps behind him. Another man popped out of a room to their right. He hada gun, something big. Luke barely had time to see it. Ed opened up with hisMP5.

DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH-DUH.

The man’s head snapped back, hisbody jerked, and he went straight down.

Ed was a killing machine.

Now they moved through the house,one room at a time, closets. The place was barely decorated or furnished. Therewere narrow beds or mattresses in the bedrooms, piles of clothes on the floor,more clothes hanging in the closets. A few toiletry items in the bathroom. Cologne.Hair style goop.

Like every drug and safe housebefore it, the place was spare, utilitarian. These people were all business,and didn’t bother much with personal effects.

Luke and Ed stepped over thecorpse on their way back down the hall. They came into the living room. The TVwas a riot of colors and images, but the sound was all the way down. The firstbody lay on the living room floor, the rug becoming saturated with bloodbeneath it.

They had entered the place maybetwo minutes ago.

“That was it?” Ed said. “Areeither of these guys…”

Luke put his hand up. STOP. Helistened. He thought he heard a sound in the kitchen. He crept in there, lighton his feet like a cat. There was a dingy white pantry door, which almostseemed to be trembling.

Luke stepped to the side of it andwhipped it open.

A man was there. He was dark,short, with black hair. The man was young, barely more than a kid. His eyessaid this was not what he wanted. He hadn’t signed up for sudden gunfights. Buthe did have a gun in his hand.

Luke put his own gun to the man’stemple.

“Policia. Drop it.”

The man dropped the gun.

“Tirate al suelo! On thefloor. NOW!”

Hands raised, the man came out ofthe pantry and slowly went to the peeling linoleum floor. Luke pulled the man’swrists back, took a zip tie from the loop of them on his own belt, and cuffedhim. The guy gave him no resistance.

“You speak English?”

“Sí. Un poco. Little.”

“Is there anyone else in thehouse?”

The man shook his head. “No. Treshombres. Three men. No más.”

“Felix Ramirez Cienfuegos,” Lukesaid.

The guy turned his head a little,as if to get a better look at the person asking him dumb questions. He gesturedwith his head across the living room at the man with the shotgun, the dead manwho had blown away the front door and gotten cut down by Ed a second later.

“There.”

 “That’s Cienfuegos?”

“Sí. It’s him.”

Luke and Ed looked at each other. Theprimary person of interest was dead. They had killed him. Actually, Ed hadkilled him.

“I threw the flashbang to stun theguy,” Luke said.

Ed shook his head. “No. No way. Hefired on us.”

“The kid in Newark nearly killedyou. You didn’t shoot him.”

“Different circumstances.”

Luke nodded. “We didn’t needinformation from that kid.”

Ed shrugged. “Let it go, man.”

Okay. Okay, Luke would let it go. Buthe tucked it away in the back of his mind. It was something to think about, notnow, but soon. He looked at the guy on the floor.

“Ortiz?” he said. “El Tigre?”

The young man looked at himstrangely now. Luke could almost read his eyes. They know about El Tigre. ElTigre was a phantom, a legend, a ghost. You had to be careful answeringquestions about someone like that.

“Se fue,” the guy said.

He left.

“He no live here now.”

“Where did he go?”

“Jupiter, maybe.” The way he saidit, the word sounded like Yoopiter. “I don’t know.”

Ed moved toward the dead man onthe floor, the one who was supposedly Cienfuegos. Luke got up, went over, andconverged on the dead man from a different angle. The man was sideways, nearlyface down, and Ed toed him to turn him over just a tiny bit. Ed had shot himthe face several times. The man’s head was half demolished, stove in likesomeone strong had taken a steel pipe to it.

“That look like the guy in thevideo to you?” Ed said.

Luke shook his head. “No. The guyin the video had a face. This one doesn’t.”

“Oh my,” someone said. “Abloodbath. I wish I could say I was surprised.”

Luke glanced up and Bowles wasstanding in the doorway to the outside. As Luke watched, Bowles stepped throughthe gaping hole, pushing some of the remaining wood shards away with his bigshoulders. He looked down at the dead guy on the living room floor, thenglanced at the other dead guy in the hallway.

He smiled. Carnage didn’t upsethim, Luke noticed. Give him a few points for that. “Would you say it’s a littlehard to question people when you kill everyone you meet?”

“You’re welcome,” Luke said.

Bowles raised an eyebrow, hissmile fading into a smirk. “I’m welcome? For what?”

“If we’d done it your way, and youwalked up here like