He's down permanently. Sofia is exactly where I left her, on the bench, but she's not cowering. She's pressed against the wall with her back flat against the cinder block and the folding knife open in her hand, blade angled outward. She's holding it wrong, grip too tight, thumb on the spine instead of the flat, but the positioning is smart. She's put herself where she can see both corners of the building, and she's kept the dumpster at her flank so no one can come from that direction. She's not trained, but she thinks like someone who's studied threat assessment from the other side of a courtroom, and she's adapted.
Her eyes are fixed on the corner where the sounds are coming from. She's terrified, but she's ready.
"Two left," I tell her. "Stay down."
"Mateo." Her voice stops me and I turn. She's looking at me with an expression I can't fully read in the dim light, not horror, though she's watching a man in combat and has seen me kill, and not admiration, though there's something close to it. It's the look of a woman who is seeing exactly what I am, all of it, the violence and the skill and the hands that have held her and are now killing for her and is choosing not to look away.
"Be careful," she says. The same words as before, carrying the same weight.
I move back to the front of the building. The parking lot is a mess with two bodies visible and shell casings glinting in the headlights of the SUVs, which are still running, their high beams creating cones of white light through the gun smoke.
The man at the near SUV fires again, three rounds spaced evenly, probing. He doesn't know where I am. I use the sound of his shots to mask my movement, circling wide around the pump island to approach his position from the flank.
I see him before he sees me. He's crouched behind the driver's door with his weapon up, scanning the building. He's young, mid-twenties, with a tattoo on his neck, one of Diego's foot soldiers.
Two rounds. He falls against the door and slides down.
Five rounds and one man remaining.
Salazar.
The lot goes quiet, the kind of silence that rushes in after gunfire and sits heavy in the ears. I scan the pump islands, the dumpster, the road, and the tree line at the edge of the property. Nothing moves.
Salazar isn't at the SUVs. He wasn't at the front of the building during the firefight. Which means he repositioned while I was dealing with his men, using the chaos and the noise as cover the way a professional would. The foot soldiers were expendable. He let them draw fire, let them die, and used the time to move.
I've worked alongside Salazar twice. Both times were jobs where the cartel needed the aftermath to send a message, jobs where a clean disappearance wasn't the point. He's patient in a way that most violent men aren't. He doesn't rush. He doesn't panic. He waits until the geometry is right, and then he acts, and by the time you realize he's moved, he's already behind you.
I hold still and listen past the idling engines and the wind and the tick of hot brass cooling on concrete. I'm trying to hearthe thing that doesn't belong, a footstep, a breath, the scrape of a jacket against a wall.
The seconds stretch. He's circling. I can feel it the way you feel weather coming, a shift in the pressure, a wrongness in the air. He knows I'm good. He watched me drop four of his men in under two minutes. A lesser operator would have run. Salazar is recalculating.
Then I hear it, from behind the building. A scrape of gravel. Footsteps.
Sofia.
I'm running before the thought completes itself, rounding the corner of the building at full speed, and I see him. Salazar is coming from the opposite direction, circling the building in a mirror of my own movement. He's ten feet from Sofia's bench, and his weapon is raised.
She sees him first. She's on her feet with the knife in her hand, and she throws herself sideways as Salazar fires. The round hits the cinder block where her head was, spraying fragments. She hits the ground hard and rolls and comes up on one knee.
I fire three times. The first round catches Salazar in the shoulder and spins him. The second misses as he staggers. The third hits him center mass and he drops, his weapon discharging once into the ground as he falls.
Two rounds left.
I close the distance in three strides and kick Salazar's gun away from his body. He's alive, breathing in shallow wet gasps, but the center-mass hit has done its work. He looks up at me with eyes that are already glazing over, and his mouth moves in words I don't bother to hear.
I turn to Sofia. She's on the ground, pushed up on her elbows, breathing hard. There's a cut on her forehead from the cinderblock fragments, and blood is running down the side of her face, mixing with the dirt and the cold.
"Are you hit?"
"No." She sits up and looks at Salazar, then at the parking lot visible around the corner with its bodies and shell casings and headlights still blazing through the smoke. Then she looks at me.
I'm standing in a gas station parking lot in Putnam County before dawn with two rounds left and the blood of five men on my hands, and the woman I took from her life is looking at me from the ground with blood on her face and a knife in her hand.
I should feel something. The magnitude of what I've just done, the violence of it, the bodies cooling on concrete, should register as something more than operational data. But the weapon is still running and the compartments are still sealed, and all I can feel is the relief that she's alive and unbroken and looking at me with those dark steady eyes.
"Give me your hand," I say.
She takes it and I pull her to her feet. She sways slightly as the damaged feet and the adrenaline crash combine, and I steady her with a hand on her waist.
