A Wanted Woman Part 10

"We're glad that you're okay, but did you notice the woman in the next car?"

In the same parking lot, in the car next to where I was parked, a woman had been found dead. She was still in her car, body not covered. It was the girl who'd admired my hair sticks. She had stolen them. She had worked off the cap to the stick that housed the poison and that poison had touched her flesh.

She had been paralyzed, then each organ had shut down.

It had taken her two minutes to die, which had to have felt like an eternity.

That method of closing this account was no longer an option.

The officer asked, "Was her car here last night when you parked?"

"Didn't pay attention. It was dark. I was drunk. Lot of cars were here."

They had just found her dead, headlights on, engine still running. She had vomited, shat herself, and died, my beautiful hair sticks in her lap. A picture of her child was on the dashboard.

Grunting, I rubbed my eyes, hand combed my wavy, boy-short hair, asked, "What time is it?"

"Quarter past noon."

"Noon?"

"How long have you been parked here sleeping?"

"Eleven, almost twelve hours."

"Still drunk?"

"Head hurts. I have to pee. Other than that, I'm okay."

"Lucky you didn't get robbed. Be advised, we have a murder almost every day here."

I a.s.sured the officer from TTPS that I was fine, just parched, then asked for directions to the Hyatt in Port of Spain. I rubbed my eyes again and sped away, zoomed back toward the safe house.

The safe house was far away, at least three hours, northeast in Toco, past the ancient Chacachacare Lighthouse. At high noon there was high traffic. Woozy, I stopped thirty minutes into the drive. I had to face reality. With these congested roads, with construction, there was no time to go to the safe house, no time to get a new wig, no time to create a new persona. No time to sleep off the drugs. I checked the online pages for TV6 and the Trinidad Express. I checked the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter feeds as well. It was as if last night had been a dream. Hours ago when the police arrived at the Carlton Savannah, they found the dead politician, his tribute to Dora the Explorer untouched, but no one had seen anything, nor had anyone heard a scream. The woman who had been raped, she had vanished.

I had expected to see her on the front page, screaming to the world that she had been wronged.

She wasn't my concern.

A rude girl had stolen what didn't belong to her and died from curiosity.

A thief gets what a thief gets. I despised thieves. She wasn't my concern either.

Sun high, clouds forming, sweating profusely, I still had a racist politician to kill.

I was awake, but I remained in a slow-moving cloud, sweating down Bad Dream Boulevard.

I called the Barbarians, got my rep, and asked, "Which bank, where, and at what f.u.c.kin' time?"

"You have thirty minutes."

"I'm at least forty minutes from that part of the island."

"Thirty minutes."

NINE.

Mouth dry, coughing, squinting, blowing my horn over and over, cursing, speeding, and running people and cars off the clogged roads, I searched for Scotiabank in the city of Port of Spain, modern and cosmopolitan alongside the traditional and the derelict, skysc.r.a.pers huddled next to old zinc structures. Downtown was now and then. When I hit the narrow roads into town, too much f.u.c.king traffic. The square ran down both sides of an island that was as wide as a street and filled with vendors, shoppers, and loiterers. Looked at my watch. Kicked on the windshield wipers. Turned music up louder to keep me alert: Burning Flames. Pa.s.sed Gillette's Building Supplies. Nelson Street. Catholic cathedral. George Street. Express Newspapers. Abercromby Street. It was somewhere, right f.u.c.kin' here in Independence Square. It was here in Port of Spain. Was like being in Times Square for the first time. I had no plan. Hadn't checked out the location. Was flying blind. There was no time to change ident.i.ties, so I pulled on the red wig, the hair now wild and unkempt, and returned to being the Kiwi, maybe a homeless version of the same diva from the night before, my makeup smeared from being in a date-rape coma all night, drugs in my system battling with the adrenaline rush in my system. No time to stage a secondary vehicle. No time to plot three escape routes.

No scanner to know the position of law enforcement.

No time to remove my barely-there dress from last night, a dress that when accosted by the sunlight would show my body as if I were walking in the nude; no time to take off the combat boots I had on. I didn't remember putting them on, but they were on my feet, so they would stay on my feet for now.

On foreign soil I would have to go inside a bank I had never seen before.

Had no idea what type of security would be present, didn't know what barriers existed.

All the new intel said was that the target was there to close the loan on a commercial building that was being financed with dirty money. He had come out of his hiding place and was the most hated man in Trinidad to press flesh, take photos, kiss babies, hug men, and kiss s.e.xy women on their cheeks.

Something else went wrong. Ever since I had landed on this boot-shaped rock, something was always going wrong. I parked my vehicle, left the engine running, and spotted the Town Car that was being used to transport the target. The car was double-parked, lights flashing, traffic backed up and going around their arrogance. The two guntas a.s.signed to guard the politician had stayed inside the car.

Walking by unsuspecting people, oversize purse over my shoulder, I pulled out my gun and screwed on the suppressor as people saw me coming across Independence Square and hurried to get out of my way. Just as I came up on the Town Car, as droves of people moved in both directions on the sidewalk, both guntas looked in my direction. The one nearest me saw the gun in my hand, down at my side.

He saw the eyes of the messenger of death, of a mechanic, of an a.s.sa.s.sin.

They saw a street preacher ready to write her sermon in lead to the condemned.

They saw MX-401. They saw Reaper.

I raised my weapon, a stranger in their town, and shot first, shot second, shot third, shot fourth, and prayed they didn't have G.o.d on their side. They didn't. Old Man Reaper had said no one did.

Then I spat into the rain, adjusted my bodacious wig, and put my gun inside my purse but kept my finger on the trigger, moved through skies that had darkened, walked into the bank.

A member of the clergy was inside the bank. The clergyman was in the same business as the politician. The LKs owned him. He had been on the rooftop of the Carlton Savannah the night before. I had met him before he was sent away to engage in coitus with two young girls. His being here now, it was a coincidence. The clergyman had seen the politician photo op and rushed over to say h.e.l.lo to his friend, had patted him on his shoulder, called for his attention as I walked through the gla.s.s doors.

The target was there. All that mattered was that the target was still there.

The damp soles of my boots squeaked, but I didn't hear the noise.

I moved in the target's direction, my right hand easing my gun from my oversize purse.

The target turned around, then stood to shake hands with the priest, and at that moment he saw me walking his way. An alarm went off inside of his head, as if he knew. I saw it in his eyes.

Then came the Spanish Inquisition. No one ever expected the Spanish Inquisition.

The politico pulled a gun from a black briefcase that was open on the desk in front of him, and in a crowded bank he started firing at me. He panicked. Without pause, suddenly on the defensive, jaw tight, teeth clenched, my hand trapped inside of my purse, I pulled the trigger over and over, blew holes in the bag, was shooting, shooting, no longer the mechanic, no longer the messenger of death, no longer the a.s.sa.s.sin, and now he was the one shooting first while I prayed that I lived, now I had become the condemned shooting to stay alive. The drugs in my system. I felt the drugs reignite in my system.

The first bullet I fired hit the clergyman. I was off due to the drugs, the shot a bad shot.

My lead created pink mist, opened the head of the clergyman, who stood between the target and me, a man of the cloth who ran to the right and stepped into a chunk of lead being sent from my projectile emitter. My second bullet caught the target in the leg. He screamed, lost his balance, and as he fell and fired at me, I fired at him. My next shot hit his chest and was caught by his bulletproof vest.

I pulled the gun from my bag, let the bag fall to the floor, and fired like I had been trained by Old Man Reaper after that job in Dallas, when he had taken my training to another level, when he had tortured me for sixty days, made me stronger, made me a warrior. The target's head caught the next projectile. Dora and Kermit the Frog eating a ham sandwich. Then I stood over him, frowned at his gun, at his vest, added two more shots to his head. For trying to kill me. I didn't like it when someone tried to kill me.

Not until then did my hearing return, not until then did I hear the screams. Every wild shot from the target's gun had hit a customer. He was not a gunman, yet like every amateur in America he had a gun.

A security guard raised his weapon, but I beat him to the draw. He took a shot in the shoulder, and the pain took him to the ground. My next shot left him in the waiting room to see Jesus's daddy.

Then I looked at the rest of the people in the bank, the young, the old, children, men, women, they were all down on the ground, all shaking, shivering, afraid for their lives.

I grabbed an umbrella that a customer had dropped in the panic, hurried out of the bank with my gun at my side, and expected to see a hundred LKs waiting on me. People had congregated where the bodyguards had been killed. Traffic had come to a stop. The malicious were in the mix.

Cell phones were out. Facebook. BBM. Instagram. Twitter.

Someone opened the pa.s.senger-side car door, and the body fell out into the street.

Four people dead. Maybe a dozen wounded.

Dead bodyguards. Dead bank guard. Dead politician.

Collateral damage inside that bank, bleeding out.

Blood flowed in two directions, the Nile reaching for the Mississippi.

The living becoming the dead, waiting to chat with Jesus's daddy.

Dora the Explorer many times over.

I let the umbrella open and strolled into the rain, walked by that crowd like I was leaving the Trincity Mall. A woman had dropped her shopping bag, horrified at the sight of the dead men. I picked up her bag and kept moving. The shootout inside the bank had taken twenty seconds at most. Twenty seconds that had felt like twenty-hundred years. Two weapon-heavy LKs were dead on the side of the road.

If those guntas hadn't been dead, after that shootout my exit would have been impossible.

I would've ended up in a second shootout with those minions, maybe dead in the street.

As I left collateral damage behind me, the echo of sirens came from all directions.

Police. Ambulances. The news station was in the area, would be there within moments.

Even then what struck me as odd was that I had walked into the bank armed.

No alarm had sounded when I walked inside with my gun, but a teller had pushed the b.u.t.ton.

I made it to the car, dropped the umbrella, pulled into traffic, sped down side roads, hit a one-way street going the opposite direction, but took that road to the next street and ran with the flow of traffic.

Sirens. Sirens. Sirens.

TEN.

Beautiful architecture and slums went by in a blur. Colonial firehouse, National a.s.sociation for the Performing Arts, Knowsley, St. Philip's Anglican Church, Our Lady of Montserrat Roman Catholic Church, the pink Dattatreya Temple. I wasn't sure how much of that was real, how much I had seen on the drive to and from the safe house when I had first arrived, which images I had seen when I googled locations on the island, but what was real was I woke up in the back of my vehicle drenched in sweat. Woke up feeling stiff, dehydrated, and hungover. Could hardly breathe. Had to let the windows down to catch fresh air. It was dark. Middle of the night. Gun in hand, I left the vehicle, walked to get my bearings. I was north of downtown Port of Spain, on a hill overlooking the city. Looked around. Stone walls. Cannons. Bars on windows made from rifle barrels. Victorian-style signal house. Signage told me that I was on the grounds of Fort George. No police. Not a person in sight. I stumbled across the gra.s.s like I was leaving a bad dream. I went back to the car, picked up my cellular, and walked past cannons to the edge, looked out at city lights and Caroni Swamp, second largest mangrove wetland in Trinidad and Tobago. Gulf of Paria was out there in the darkness. Westmoorings, Carenage, and Pointe Gourde were out there too.

There was no bathroom available, only the bathroom that had been installed by nature.

I pulled napkins from the glove box, went into the bushes, and relieved myself.

When I was done, I staggered around the grounds, rubbed my temples, and called the Barbarians.

"MX-401?"

My voice was raw, coa.r.s.e, like I had a cold. "Yeah. MX-401."

"Where the h.e.l.l are you?"

"Trinidad."

"Where in Trinidad?"

"Not sure. I'm sort of lost at the moment."

"Did you return to the safe house?"

"What's the issue?"

"What the f.u.c.k happened? You went off grid again, were off grid for hours."

I told them that I had closed the contract and needed to be extracted.

"What happened at the bank?"

"I killed the target, as I was instructed to do."

I got down on my haunches, coughed a few times, felt where mosquitoes had bitten me while I was unconscious, scratched myself, and then told them about the shootout.

"Did you go back to the safe house and lay down incendiary devices?"

"I haven't been back to that part of the island. You gave me a safe house so far away it's like driving from Atlanta past Birmingham to get there. Was too much traffic. Had to improvise."

"Your photo has been broadcast."