The Murdered World 2

Frank moved in quick, quiet strides that ate up ground without letting himself break into a run. He ducked down, took the Ka-Bar from his ankle, and popped back up so that he barely broke stride.

Knives could be more useful than a gun. Punks looked for guns. They recognized the silhouettes. Knives confused them. They thought they could just shoot anyone who had a blade, right up until it was stabbed into them.

The sun was coming down. It was beautiful Miami sunset, but only at the beach and up in the high-rises. In this part of town, it was only less light. Like some stale leftover, a yellow thing that could’ve been illumination spilled out of a bulb over a side door.

That had to be where the woman was bound, because one of the punks was leading the way, unlocking the padlock that held shut a door that’d lost its handle a long time ago.

The other was behind the woman, prodding her along just to feel her body. She couldn’t go fast enough—that door had to be scarier even than being touched by the kind of man who couldn’t smell a rose without making it stink.

Frank turned the corner. He walked down the alley, not rushing, not lingering. The same cadence as the punk and the woman, like he was just another part of the caravan.

By the time the punk stiffened, sensing eyes that saw him as prey, Frank was close enough to touch him. And by the time he turned around, Frank was close enough to kill him.

Frank swung his fist, caved in the side of the punk’s face. He spun around, went down, on his knees with the baby pink of his scalp showing through his thinning hair. Frank wanted to take that scalp with him like some Apache. But he’d have to settle for blood on his Ka-Bar as a souvenir.

Frank ramrodded the knife forward like a bayonet charge. It took the thug in the back of the head, sharp enough to split the skin with surgical precision and heavy enough to break through the skull. The seven-inch blade neatly parted neurons until it was in his sinuses, tearing through the roof of his mouth, emerging out of his wide-mouthed scream with his upper lip and mustache caught on the tip.

The woman froze even stiller than she had in the car. The second man—what might optimistically be referred to as the surviving thug—went for his gun.

Frank had two objectives, both a priority, but there was no indecisiveness in him. He simply did one, then the other, with such speed that they might as well both have happened at once.

He lashed out with his foot and kicked the woman’s legs out from under her, dropping her below the line of fire. And he hauled up with the Ka-Bar, both drawing the blade upward to spread the dying man’s nostrils an inch apart and hauling him up to his feet.

When the second thug fired, his aim was not good enough and his care was not great enough to avoid hitting his partner. He simply emptied the clip into the human shield like the vehemence of his fire meant he would kill Frank Castle as surely as his old friend.

By now, Frank had moved to his third objective. He’d skinned his Glock 9MM out of the S.O.B. holster with his free hand. And as the punk dug round after round into his flailing buddy, Frank took a split-second’s aim and fired.

The bullet slit into the thug’s face where it could, smashed itself the rest of the way in. The man rocked back, already dead but still with dying to do. Blood rushed to get out of his voided face, spurting into the air like a rocket-tail pushing him down to earth, only it didn’t get the chance.

Frank fired again, to be sure, and the second bullet knocked the man down to the ground and locked him to it.

Frank fired a third time, this one into the man he’d knifed. The poor bastard had taken a knife through the back of his skull and countless bullets into his chest that were meant for Frank, but Frank was a professional. He made sure the job was done himself—putting the muzzle of the Glock up next to the Ka-Bar and giving the bullet nowhere to go but the top of the man’s skull.

The corpse managed one almighty twitch and Frank let him go, allowing his weight to pull the knife free of the falling body.

A spray of blood fanned over the sleeve of the hand that had murdered by knife. More red particles dappled, like the first drizzle of rain, the front of his jacket. Frank stepped away from the cadaver, not out of squeamishness, but to make sure his shoes didn’t attract any gore.

He swiped the Ka-Bar clean on the dead man’s clothes, then slotted it away under his pantleg. “Are you alright?” he asked the woman while he picked up his shell casings.

It was a chore he wasn’t usually conscientious about, but he’d just arrived in Miami. Frank felt no need to give the police any hints as to what was coming—not when they’d have the whole story soon enough.

“They were—they—I was getting into my cars and they had guns…”

Frank nodded. He offered the woman his hand to help her up. She touched his palm like a baby, not knowing how to grip an object she’d never encountered before. “It’s over. You’re safe now.”

Her voice haltered. It was letting in, bit by bit, all the sobs she’d had to swallow over the course of her ordeal. “T-they would’ve—they would’ve—and you killed them—oh God—they’re dead.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Frank replied, far enough from being a soldier to feel bemused about so addressing a civilian half his age.

Up close, there was some maturity. She was probably a college student, probably down in Miami for surf and sun. He felt sorry for her. As sorry as he could. She didn’t deserve to know how the world worked, but it did work this way.

“You used a knife—oh fuck, fuck—you shot ‘em with a gun!”

“Yes, ma’am,” Frank said, not one for small talk at the best of times and she wasn’t making herself much of a conversationalist at the moment.

“You saved me! You fucking—didn’t let them—” That was all she could get out. Her eyes rolled up in her head. Frank seized hold of her before she forgot how to stand.

Toting the fainted woman, Frank wondered if there were any irony in the fact that he’d gone from using a bad man as a human shield to carrying around a good girl. If there was, it was in how he’d enjoyed holding that man up by a knife in his skull. And if he enjoyed holding onto the girl—well, he tried not to.

If his car hadn’t been stripped for parts yet, Frank thought he’d still be able to make his appointment.

***

She laid on the couch like a cat in the sun. Tall, sleek, and sinewy, there was still nothing pared down about her. Her strawberry blonde hair tousled all around her face, hiding it from view, but if it were anything like her body it’d be almost illegal. She was sylphlike, with only the most piquant of curves at her hips and chest, but the flare, swell, rise, and fall of her curvature still added up to a sinuousness that made for a contradiction in terms. It could harden a man at his groin and soften him at his heart.

Even Christina felt it, seeing that little kittenish creature in her frayed jean shorts and T-shirt that was like a threadbare rag thrown over her lean torso. Her pert breasts might not’ve needed a bra, but they were still enough to fill a mouth—male or female.

Christina felt a charge of annoyance. Angel would just love that, wouldn’t he? Not only to fuck all the whores he wanted, but to have his wife join in, turn his marriage into a never-ending threesome. He’d swap out the sluts like this one until Christina made the trip from her early thirties to the big-F forties.

Then, Angel would pick one of those girls with a T—her twenties, her thirties—c’mon, it would be her twenties, if she wasn’t in her teens—and Christina would be replaced.

Christina didn’t like to yell, but Angel wasn’t a man who appreciated poise. She raised her voice: “Angel Mercader, you’re really going to bring your whores into my house and let ‘em sleep in my living room?”

“Jesus Christ!” the woman said, turning about out of her sleep, showing Christina the face of her sister, Emma.