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He willed Broken Nose to come out while also forcing himself not to expend too much mental energy on rushing things along. This anger was his strength, fuel in the engine, but an engine without control wasn’t an engine at all, just an explosion. Wait.

Wait. Not this second or this one, but soon… soon…

Now! Frank heard the echoing rustle of gravel as Broken Nose stomped along, leaving the cave. He strained his hearing to the breaking point, but he didn’t detect any other footsteps, any radio or cell phone that, if interrupted, could give away his presence. Broken Nose was easy prey. Frank waited for him to emerge—violence waiting for expression.

Broken Nose came out. He was completely heedless of Frank’s presence; too immersed in lighting his next cigarette to pay the slightest attention to his surroundings. It could’ve suddenly become the dead of winter and he wouldn’t have known it!

Frank slipped between the junipers and approached, his G40 held at the ready, finger on the trigger, ready to fire if Broken Nose made one wrong move.

But such a move never came. The man was entirely absorbed in sucking smoke into his lungs. Not even when Frank was looming over him did he know he was no longer alone.

Frank took the muzzle of the G40 off him, but only for the split-second it took to raise the pistol high and bring the butt of it down like a sap. The impact cracked Broken Nose’s skull; it was a miracle it didn’t shatter it! Broken Nose went down to one knee and Frank was on him, one arm wrapped around his throat, the other hand jamming the Glock between his ribs.

“Make one sound and you’re dead,” Frank assured him. He was used to being believed and the thug took him at his word. “How many are inside?”

“Jesus! Fuck!” the man said, voice smarting, clearly in agony as blood spooled down from where the G40 had split his scalp.

“If you’d rather, I can count for myself,” Frank said, and cocked the G40.

“No! No! I’ll talk! There’s Frankie, Russo, Elliot, Al—”

“I don’t need their names. I’m not their undertaker.”

“Six guys, okay? Just six.”

“You’ll excuse me if I check.”

Frank pistol-whipped Broken Nose again, this time in the kidney, taking the fight out of him while Frank tightened his grip on the man’s neck. Kept it tight until he was unconscious.

Flexicuffs knotted his hands behind his back and six inches of specially bought duct tape covered his mouth. The duct tape was sold cut to that precise length, with a slip of tissue that peeled off like on a Band-Aid to expose the sticky side. It came in very handy.

In under ten seconds, Frank had the man cuffed and gagged. He dragged him to the side of the cave entrance, then holstered his G40 for his MP5. The submachine gun would be ideal for close-quarters combat. He moved in, MP5 held ahead of him.

The Belucci boys had made themselves at home. Tiki torches set out at regular intervals, lighting the way down the long throat of the cavern. No one wanted to stub their toesies, even if it kept them out of jail.

Frank moved cautiously ahead, slipping in and out of the shadows, letting his eyes accustom themselves to the flickering light and his ears get used to the weird echoes thrown around by the confines of this hollow passage.

There was motion and conversation up ahead. The musty smell, once faint, intensified. Dirt, dampness, and the cat-piss scent of meth production. Frank paused in the dark to take a knee and slip out a N95 mask, which he quickly put on. Next were a pair of goggles to protect his eyes from watering. Last, Frank took out his canteen.

He approached the next torch in his path and doused it, then flattened himself to the wall. He closed his eyes to reduce his focus on sight and stretch out his hearing. Sensed no change in the echoes of conversation from up ahead. The Beluccis hadn’t noticed.

Frank opened his eyes and snuck to the next torch. He repeated the process, this time moving on immediately. The longer he waited, the sooner they would notice that something was up. Even if they assumed their ’lookout,’ Broken Nose, was taking a shit, that could only occupy him so long.

Finally, the cave opened up into a cavity thirty feet in diameter. A gasoline generator ran, powering halogen lights and industrial fans. The lab was in the middle of it all. As usual, it looked like it’d been set up by someone who’d watched the first episode of Breaking Bad, but turned it off for being too boring. High school science equipment worked by idiots in aprons or moonsuits, with masks or without, sometimes just winding a scarf around their face like they were Al Qaeda.

Stalagmites projected from the floor and stalactites came down from the ceiling like sharp teeth, but far more of them laid amputated on the ground, broken off in a dimwitted enthusiasm for destruction. Even as he watched, one was kicked across the ground—the natural beauty of the place turned into the detritus of a messy crime scene.

Frank wouldn’t say that they had desecrated the place; but if they had, what he was about to do now would be downright blasphemous.

He clicked the MP5 to full auto. Then he took a CS grenade from its place on his vest. He pulled the pin with his teeth, but held the spoon down in his free hand.

Then he fired, raking the stream of bullets across the lights, taking out several in showers of sparks and flickering blue electricity. He ended the barrage at the generator, emptying the last of his clip into it.

The generator wheezed and spewed gasoline before bursting into flame. That was the most consistent light source now.

Frank threw the CS grenade, turned, and ran at a steady jog. It was almost a straight shot back to the row of torches he’d left intact. He ignored the screams of pain from those hurt by ricochets and shrapnel, the confused shouts, the mounting panic. Instead, he maintained a cool, precise pace, reloading the MP5 while in motion, then stopping short of the torches’ renewed light.

Reaching out to his left, he felt a trio of stalagmites that he’d clocked on the way in. It would make good cover. He crouched behind it and leveled his MP5 back the way it came.

Driven by terror and whipped along by the chemical agent, the buttonmen quickly piled into the corridor. They used the flashlights on their phones to see the way. Frank let them clog the corridor. They came closer, closer, the light from their phones sliding over him twice, but they took no notice. The lights kept bouncing along, whirling around, revealing everything and nothing to terrified eyes seeking a way out.

Frank saw the first one emerge from the darkness. He fired, a three-shot burst taking the man in the chest and belly. His target opened his mouth to scream, but all that came out was the last breath he would ever take. Then, blood, and he doubled over, sank to the ground.

Frank didn’t bother waiting to see the whites of the others’ eyes. George Washington was a great man, but he’d had to make do with breechloaders. Heckler & Koch made a much better product.

Frank shifted his aim from one bobbing light source to the other, firing a three round burst here, then there, then there.

The acrid smell of blood scorched his nostrils. It must be just gushing out in the darkness, painting the ground as if in cruel parody of all the rankness this scum had defiled the place with previously.

Frank wished he could see it, but what the whirling beams of light revealed was enough. Blood hung in the air, it slathered the walls, and as Belucci’s men laid there dying, Frank could only imagine they thought they’d stepped into a charnel house.

He took out another CS grenade, pulled the pin, and tossed it into the midst of the cell phones that now laid on the ground in a rough circle, lights assembling a crazy-quilt world out of the gory darkness.

He heard coughing. Then footsteps pounding on the floor, echoing off the walls.

“Fuck you, man!” someone yelled, and sent shots at Frank that whizzed over his head, coming nowhere near him.

Still, Frank felt a thrill of adrenaline. Those ricochets could go anywhere. But they couldn’t kill him. He was far too alive right now for that.

Coming to his feet, Frank fairly ran through the smoke and blood—he felt puddles of it splash when he stepped in them. Ahead of him, the entryway to the meth lab loomed wide, lit infernally by crackling electricity and the fire he’d started. Frank made a split-second call: his best bet was to breach before the survivors had time to mount a defense.

He waited only to reload, then he was in the lab. His broken bird was there, jabbering with someone who’d stayed behind, holding out his gun to him… Frank thought he wanted the man to help him reload. It didn’t matter. Frank took quick aim and let loose a long burst.

The bullets rattled the nearest man’s body. His arms flew up, the gun slipping out of them and clattering to the floor. A dead issue, because the barrage propelled the man’s body into the scumbag he was talking to, knocking the other man back and onto a waist-high stalagmite.

The button cried out in agony as it entered him in the small of the back, tip stretching out the front of his shirt.

Frank kept his MP5 trained on the skewered man while he approached. His eyes did a quick scan of the room, but there was nothing worth taking, only worth destroying. Including the people.

He reached the man. Gravity was slowly pulling him down the stalagmite. He looked up at Frank without rancor. There was nothing left for him to do but beg.

“Please… help me…”

“You went past help a long time ago,” Frank said.

He brought his fist down like a judge’s gavel, thumping it on the man’s chest and driving him a foot down the stalagmite. The penetration became an impalement.

Frank left a pipe bomb behind him. Using a can of spray paint, he left crude approximations of the Haitians’ graffiti on the passage leading out. He doubted anyone would be enough of a connoisseur to tell the difference between his forgery and the original.

 On the way out, he let Broken Nose know that his count was off. There were zero guys in there.

One bullet later, there wasn’t anyone outside the cave either.