The American aimed the pistol with his right hand, not at Charlie but rather in the direction of the kitchen, and then he swiveled it to the front door of the suite, then back to where Minchev had been standing. The knife no longer jutted from under his left hand.
After just a moment, time counted off by the wheezes Charlie could feel in the wound in his chest, the man knelt back down to him, so close Charlie could smell his sweat. He felt a rough hand rifling through his jacket, his pants pockets. He was helpless to resist, weak, but he was able to focus on the man in the soft light above him.
Bearded, maybe forty years old, blood smeared on his neck and shirt collar, a tightness around the eyes that showed Charlie that the man was in a great deal of pain himself.
The American kept the Walther pointed up while he stripped Charlie of his one spare magazine, and then the man looked down into Charlie’s eyes briefly.
But only briefly.
Rising slowly, Charlie watched the man look away, then step towards the kitchen with not another glance to Charlie Coyle.
After a few receding footsteps across broken glass, and a few more footfalls on the tile heading toward the kitchen, he finally heard the man speak. “I’m gonna need that phone back.”
His voice was strained; he was injured, exhausted, but he somehow nevertheless sounded capable, resolute.
Utterly determined in his mission.
Minchev spoke now, his voice cracked with terror. “It’s here…sir. Take it…please. Just don’t—”
There was a quick pause; Charlie just lay there bleeding in the dark, and then Minchev screamed, “No! Please!”
A gun boomed, and an ejected shell casing bounced on the kitchen floor.
Minchev fell silent.
The attacker’s footsteps receded into the bedroom. Their cadence was unhurried, though the sirens outside seemed right on top of the location.
It was clear this man had a plan.
But that was the last Charlie thought of him.
He pressed hard into the wound on his chest now, ignoring the one in his leg. He wasn’t sure if he was dying. The leg wound was nothing; the chest wound was bad, but help was on the way. He just had to stanch the blood flow and, in all likelihood, he’d make it to a hospital.
The young Northern Irishman felt weak now, but he kept the pressure on.
There was a medical kit in the kitchen, but he couldn’t stand, couldn’t walk.
Right now, the kitchen might as well have been a hundred miles away.
Charlie Coyle leaned his head back, closed his eyes, and thought of home.
Right now, however, home might as well have been a million miles away.
Four
The blue-and-white squad car drove slowly past the small parking lot in front of the youth hostel on Primorski Street, a kilometer and a half west of the mayhem at the Cabacum Beach Residence, and the young officer behind the wheel shined his spotlight on a row of cars parked there.
The cop was disappointed to be relegated to searching outside the perimeter set up by his leadership; the police didn’t expect that the culprit of the mass killings a couple of blocks from the ocean an hour earlier would be this far up in the hills. No, their subject would either be hunkered down, in hiding in one of the dozens of buildings close to the action, or else he’d be out of town by now, and for this reason the officer in the squad car performed his duties perfunctorily, whipping the light around for a few moments and then rolling up Primorski to check out a pair of parked vans in front of a paint store long closed for the night.
—
When the squad car had moved on and out of sight, a man rose slowly up from behind a white Kia Sportage parked in front of the hostel, and he stood there in the darkness a moment, listening for sounds of danger.
Sirens wailed to the east, near the coast, and they’d been doing so for over an hour, since even before he’d climbed out of the suite of the Cabacum, lowered to a balcony, dropped onto a sharply angled balcony overhang astory below, then rolled down, grabbing the gutter before swinging to an even lower balcony. He’d continued like this, eventually making his way down to the ground.
He’d escaped the neighborhood, stumbled along in the dark, his body hunched over in pain.
Courtland Gentry had survived, he’d escaped, but everything had gone wrong, and now the pain, both physical and psychological, threatened to overtake him.
