Speak of the Devil Read Free Page B

drama. She stepped back into Jack’s embrace. She just wanted to bask in the bliss of getting engaged to the man she loved. They’d figure out everything else tomorrow.

5
    A moment after Hector knocked, a woman began yelling from inside the brothel.
    “Ayúdeme! Ayúdeme!”
    Her voice was muffled, but her words were unmistakable.
    “A woman is calling for help inside.” Hector spoke loudly toward his pocket so the arrest team would hear him through the transmitter. “I need backup. I’m going in.”
    Cursing under his breath, he pulled the Glock from the back of his jeans, braced himself, and kicked the door to the basement apartment. It buckled open. Hector swung into the brothel, gun first. So much for the plan. There would be no evidence collection, no orderly execution of a search warrant. Not when there was a woman screaming for help.
    The dim hallway smelled of cigarettes, latex, and sex. Hector’s eyes skimmed the interior and landed on a hulking shape at the end of the hall. One man was crouched over another, rifling through his pockets. The crouching man sprang to his feet, holding a machete. He was young, with the glassy, unfocused eyes of the very high.
    “Stop!” Hector yelled. “Police!”
    The man raised his machete and charged at him, screaming obscenities in Spanish. Hector had years of training and experience; he’d practiced hundreds of drills—but a guy charging with a machete was still a heart-stopping moment.
    Hector fired twice into the man’s center mass. The machete clattered to the floor. The guy dropped a couple of yards from Hector’s feet. Burned gunpowder overpowered the brothel’s other smells.
    The sound of gunshots inside the apartment was stunning. Hector had been on the Metropolitan Police Department for ten years; he had fired his Glock countless times on the range and in MPD training. But he’d never shot a person. His ears rang from the noise; his heart pounded from the shock of what he’d just done.
    Ralph and the others rushed inside behind him. Ralph knelt down and started cuffing the guy Hector had shot. No telling what damage the shots had done—the man still had to be incapacitated.
    Hector stepped around Ralph and approached the prone man whose pockets the machete guy had been going through. His hands and feet were bound with duct tape—but his entire head was gone. Where there should have been a face there was just a pool of blood on dirty carpet. Hector swallowed back a wave of bile and kept going.
    The hallway deposited him into a dark and musty living room. The main source of light was a boxy old TV with porn playing on it. “Ah, ah, ah!” the woman on TV moaned, her breasts bouncing frantically as she rode the man beneath her. A cheap plastic stopwatch was tacked to the wall, to track the time each john was allowed. A bookshelf was overturned, its stash of condoms, lube, and VHS porn tapes scattered on the floor. A few dingy couches slouched around the TV. Several of the cushions had been sliced open, and bits of the inner fluff floated through the air.
    Another man lay on a couch; he was also bound in duct tape, with a piece of tape over his mouth. This man was alive and terrified. He met Hector’s gaze and signaled with his head toward the back rooms.
    Hector strode to a bedroom and threw open the door. There were two mattresses separated by a curtain, but otherwise the room was empty. He moved to the next bedroom.
    It took him a moment to process the scene. A naked woman curled on a mattress, sobbing. Next to the bed, a grinning man scrambled to pull up his pants, which were tangled around his ankles. A severed human head—presumably from the body in the hallway—was impaled on top of a cheap bedside lamp. It dripped blood onto the lightbulb, which flickered in protest.
    Two men in trench coats were fumbling with the lock on the bedroom’s back door, which led outside to the back alley. They held a third man, who wore only a bloody white T-shirt