M.I.A. Hunter: Miami War Zone (15 page)

The man screamed and released the pressure on Stone's neck. His friend dropped Stone's gun arm and brought his own gun up, pointing it at Stone's face.

Stone shot him first, in the middle of the chest, knocking him back into the bedroom.

Stone kicked the other man in the face, reached for the rope, and went over the balcony rail.

W
iley and Loughlin gained the trees, knowing that Stone would be right behind. But
Lucci's
security men, now that they were stirred into action, proved to be smarter than they had seemed.

Not all of them had gone up the stairs after the first futile attempt. Most of them had left the house to cover the grounds, and they spotted Stone's team immediately. They began firing round after round, but being armed only with revolvers they lacked accuracy.

Loughlin and Wiley went down, rolled, and returned fire.

Stone reached the bottom of the rope and began firing from his position.
Lucci's
men sent a few rounds in his direction, chipping chunks of stone off the side of the house.

Stone began to close on the men. Two of them dropped like rocks.

The problem again was numbers. "Holy shit," Hog yelled. "Now I know how Custer felt!"

S
tone could not risk firing, afraid that he might hit his men, so he ran to join in the fracas, pulling one man off the writhing pileup and smashing him in the face with his big fist.

Blood spurted from the man's nose, and he swung at Stone with a roundhouse right, which Stone easily knocked aside, moving in with two quick jabs of his stiffened fingers to the man's sternum.

The man moved backward, bent almost double, catching his breath. Then he surprised Stone by coming out of the crouch with a quick kick at Stone's kneecap.

Stone kicked the flying foot aside and countered with a kick of his own, half turning his body and kicking upward. If the man's head had been a football, it might have gone fifty yards. As it was, it stayed attached to his body, but the sound of the man's teeth clicking together was audible for fifty yards anyway.

Meanwhile Hog was engaged in trying to hold off two men, neither of whom was quite his size. Taken together, though, they added up to quite a pair, and their desperation drove them to fierce kicking, biting, spitting, and whatever else they could do to attack the big East Texan.

To Hog, they were like two annoying mosquitoes. He could keep them off, but they kept coming back. One kicked at his stomach. The other clasped both hands together and swung at his chest.

Hog easily parried the blows and aimed a kick of his own, but the men hustled back out of range. As soon as Hog's foot touched down, they were back swinging again.

Hog was quick; for a big man, he was enormously quick. But these two were quicker. If they had been trained, they might even have amounted to something. As it was, they didn't do too much harm. They were simply incredible pests.

Hog was exasperated. As one of the men charged in, Hog reached out and grabbed a handful of the man's hair. Getting a good grip, he lifted the man off the ground.

The man screamed. To him, it felt as if his scalp was being torn off his skull. That wasn't Hog's plan, however. He spun around, holding the man out at arm's length, letting centrifugal force carry the man to an almost horizontal position.

The man's feet connected with his buddy's head with a resounding crack. Hog spun twice more and then released the man he was holding, almost like a discus thrower.

The man's screams abruptly died when his head came in contact with the ground twenty yards away. There was a popping sound, and the man lay still, his head twisted at an impossible angle.

While this was happening, Loughlin was tangling with the biggest of the goons, who had managed to bring the Brit to the ground and straddle him. He had his hands on
Loughlin's
throat, slowly squeezing the breath out of him. His knees ground into
Loughlin's
arms.

Loughlin tried to arch his back, but the man was too big. He must've weighed close to three hundred pounds. Though much of the weight was fat, the fat didn't matter. It weighed as much as muscle.

Loughlin flexed his right arm and gave it a sudden twist, managing to snap it from beneath the man's knee. He brought his hand up, covering the man's face, trying to find his eyes.

The man threw his head back, and
Loughlin's
fingers missed their goal. Instead, they felt the man's nose, and Loughlin without hesitation thrust his fingers in the nostrils, gouging and ripping as hard as he could.

The man yelled and released his grip on
Loughlin's
throat. The Brit sucked air into the bruised passages and heaved his body upward from the hips, throwing the big man off to the side. Getting to his knees, Loughlin chopped the man in the side of the neck three times, his hand sinking into the rolls of fat until it met resistance.

Finally, the man groaned and lay still.

Now that the shooting was over, Stone and his men could hear another sound through the pounding of blood in their ears—the sound of sirens.

Someone had set off a silent alarm in the house, and now the minions of the law were swooping down to protect the good citizens of Coral Gables.

"Let's get down that drain," Stone yelled, and they moved off to the trees, glad to be out of the floodlights. Soon they were dropping through the opening and into the galvanized tunnel.

"Want me to put the lid back on?" Hog asked.

"Good idea," Stone answered. "It might take them longer to figure out how we got in that way."

While Hog struggled with the drain cover, Stone and Loughlin started to retrace their steps to where Carol was parked. In only a few minutes they were emerging at the other end.

"I heard the sirens," Carol said, opening the doors of the car so that they could deposit their weapons and get inside. "I was beginning to get a little worried."

"We had to make a little more noise than I'd hoped," Stone told her.

He gave her the address the don had revealed. "We need to locate this place. That's where they have
Wofford
."

"Let's get out of here first," Carol said. "Those sirens are too close for comfort."

"Before we go," Loughlin put in, "I have a question. Where the hell is Hog?"

H
og was still in the tunnel.

As he had pulled the iron cover over the hole, another hand had grabbed it by the edge, ripped it from Hog's grip, and tossed it aside as if it were a Frisbee.

Hog looked up through the hole, and a huge body landed on him. Loughlin had not killed his man, or even knocked him out, only temporarily subdued him. Now he was after Hog.

Hog fell to the bottom of the tunnel under the weight, landing on his back in the thin trickle of water, which he was sure contained raw sewage.

The man was taking no chances this time. He wrapped his thick, fat arms around Hog's body—no small accomplishment, considering Wiley's bulk—and began to squeeze. There was no way this one was going to get his hands free.

Or so the man thought. Hog butted him in the face with his head, crunching the man's already tortured nose.

The man let go and Hog rolled free, coming to his feet, but the big gorilla wasn't through yet. He tackled Hog around the knees and brought him down again.

Water splashed and Hog's breath
whuffed
out of his lungs. The man stood up, still holding on to Hog's legs. He struggled to pick Hog up, with the obvious intention of dropping him on his head.

Hog fought to get air back into his lungs. He was dangling upside down, trying to get some purchase on the bottom of the tunnel with his hands in order to steady himself. He couldn't.

The man was finding Hog a real handful and instead of dropping him he decided to crack his spine or break his neck, whichever came first. He lowered Hog's head to the tunnel floor, and still keeping his grip around the legs, began to press down as hard as he could.

This time, Hog did manage to get his hands down on the ribbed tunnel bottom and brace himself. Both men strained, their muscles pumped, sweat running down their bodies.

Suddenly, Hog relaxed completely. The big man, taken by surprise, loosened his grip slightly and Hog kicked his legs free, turning a backward flip and coming up to face him.

The two men crouched in the dark tunnel, trying to avoid hitting their heads on its top. The only light came from Hog's flash, which he had dropped several feet away. It cast long shadows down the tunnel's length.

Hog was wet and uncomfortable. He was sure that he had been rolling around in shit. His neck hurt. He bellowed and charged the big man, who bellowed and charged as well.

They ran together like two buffaloes, each trying to get a crushing hold on the other. The big man won, but this time Hog's arms were free. He had managed to slip them above the grip. As the man put tremendous pressure on Hog's chest, the East Texan began to force the man's head backward and down, trying to pop his head off like the head of a chicken.

The man let Hog go, propelling him back and down the tunnel. Hog went down hard on his ass.

"That's it,
goddammit
!" Hog yelled. "I'm tired of
fuckin
' around with you." He meant it, and he wanted out of the tunnel. He was afraid the police would hear something and locate the entrance to the storm drain. It was time to forget about a "fair fight."

Unfortunately, Hog couldn't find his .357, which was lying somewhere in the darkness. He had dropped it along with his light when the man had fallen on him. He had returned his plastic knife to his boot in the don's room, however, and now he pulled it out.

The big man ran at him. Hog met the charge and slipped the knife in between the man's second and third ribs. He had to do it just right, since he didn't want the knife to break before it had done its job.

The sharp, brittle plastic slipped in through layers of fat and muscle so smoothly that it was hardly noticeable. In fact Hog's adversary didn't seem to feel it at first. He smacked into Hog like a Mack truck.

Hog's hand retained its grip on the knife handle, and he instinctively tried to pull the weapon out. It snapped off, leaving Hog holding only the hilt.

"Damn," Hog yelled, as he fell once more.

The man stood over Hog as if trying to decide what to do about him. He bent slightly, blood gushed from his mouth, splattering Hog's fatigues, and he toppled over without a sound. Hog moved aside to avoid the falling body.

Hog got up, located his flashlight and then his .357. He looked back at the dead man and shot him the finger. It really pissed Hog off that he had been made to wallow in the foul water like a . . . well, like a damn hog!

Halfway back to the car, Hog met Loughlin coming back to find him.

"I thought you might have tripped over another sprinkler head," the Brit said wryly.

"
Naw
," Hog told him. "This time, I tripped over a dick-head."

They went back through the tunnel and joined the others at the car.

R
eacting to the police calls they heard on the way back to Miami, Rosales and
Allbright
found themselves looking over one more slaughter aftermath, this one at the
Lucci
estate, that was a virtual replay of the earlier scenes of bloody carnage at the Black Pussy Cat and at that clearing off Highway 1, south of Miami.

"This is becoming more and more like total war," Rosales lamented. "I am head of the Organized Crime Division, and I do not even know what is going on. There is no word on the street about this, no word at all."

"Homicide isn't going to look too good either,"
Allbright
informed him. "We've got as many dead bodies lying around right now as we had in the drug wars of the early eighties, and this may be only the beginning."

A uniform came out of the house and walked over to where they were standing on the floodlit lawn.

"There's worse news inside," he said.

"What could be worse?" Rosales wondered, looking across the bodies scattered around.

"About eight more dead people," the uniform said. "And one of them appears to be Don Vito
Lucci
."