Deal to Die For Read Free

under his shirt and jacket, trench the flesh along his spine. A jagged point of wood shot up through his collar, took out the lapel of his new coat, glanced off his jaw. His head snapped back as hard as it had the day Chico from the iron pile decided he didn’t like some
gringo pendejo
walking around with a Mexican name, sucker punched him into another orbit.
    But hey, Paco was thinking, screw Chico, screw the tree limb, screw his old man and his brothers and sisters and the horse they all rode in on, because the fact of the matter was, even if he was bleeding from several different places now, even if his side was ripped open and his jaw was kissing his own ear and his sphincter was shrunk to where he could crap through a straw, the main thing was, he was no longer falling. He realized, in fact, after he’d finally mustered the courage to open his eyes, that he was hanging like a scarecrow in the clutches of a tree, a tree that itself had defied gravity to grow nearly sideways out of the sheer cliff.
    Beneath him, another thirty feet or so, was the backyard of an expensive house, a spacious area laid out in what seemed to be Japanese gardens, with a sizable grotto pool where great red fish lazed in the soft glow of hidden lights. He looked up, to the lip of the cliff where the limo sat, and saw that he couldn’t have fallen more than twenty feet. It seemed to have happened years ago.
    He saw the cruiser then, sliding to a stop on the graveled shoulder. Saw its passenger door fly open, heard the whine of its big cop engine dying down. He saw a cop approaching the limo, a flashlight beam dancing in his hand. Saw another beam from the other side of the limo, knew there was another cop over there somewhere.
    There were voices, and muffled replies from inside the limo. Then, drifting down clearly on the sinking canyon breeze, “Open a door.”
    Open a door
. What a weird way to put it, Paco was thinking, until he realized that the cop had some strange kind of accent.
    Again the command, “Open a door.” Then the sound of that very thing happening. A pause.
    “Officer…” Mendanian’s voice, commanding exactly nothing. “Hey, what is this…?”
    And then, the terrific explosion. The sound of shattering glass and steel. The biting stink of powder drifting down to him.
Shotgun
, he found himself thinking.
    It took Paco a moment to understand, but when he realized what it was, what it had to be—it wasn’t really cops up there at all—a fear swept him that made his tumble through the void seem something only good and true.
    He heard the woman’s screams, the sounds of footsteps running through gravel. More explosions. And the screaming stopped.
    “…where is driver?” Paco heard. Same voice, same accent. Paco was trying desperately to untangle himself from his ruined coat, now.
    A second voice, this one in an Oriental language, someone shouting back to the other phony cop. The new voice much clearer, the guy probably right at the top of the cliff now, having figured out just what Paco had—only one way off this island, Dan-O.
    Paco yanked wildly at his coat sleeve, felt the fabric give way, felt himself swing away from the limb that had nearly taken his head off. He was dangling by one arm now, some zoo monkey who’d escaped but lost his way.
    He squinted when the flashlight beam swept across his face, tried to shield himself with his free hand.
    His grip was slipping now, some kind of oddball California tree bark peeling away beneath his fingers. One way or another, this would not take long. He imagined the big red fish down there, gazing up, their mouths popping open and closed, fins flapping them nowhere, unfazed and simply waiting.
    “There,” he heard a voice above him say. “In tree. In goddamn tree.” Then the roar of the shotgun. Paco felt a stinging here and there, but nothing fatal yet. Then the blast of another weapon, maybe a handgun, but no pain, these guys apparently unequipped for anything that