The Parker Trilogy Read online

  The rage in Parker that had been swimming around for years began to splash around in protest, but at the last second, he rotated his site to the goon’s left leg. Two more shots struck him, one in the thigh and the other in the shin. Now, for sure, he wouldn’t be sneaking up from behind on anybody. His screams were blood-curdling as Parker turned and advanced up the rest of the stairs.

  He was just through the entryway of the complex when someone punched him in the left temple, causing him to drop the SIG as stars erupted across his eyes. He span around and tried to bring the nine up, but it too was knocked out of his hands, right before a flurry of punches struck him. One he was able to block with his right forearm, but the other two rang home—one on his shoulder and the other on his chin. The chin shot, thank god, was a glancing blow.

  This sonofabitch can punch.

  Parker had squinted so hard when the blows came that his eyes were practically closed. He opened them as he scrambled backward and tried to get his bearings. Advancing on him was a man about his height with a slightly smaller frame. His hair was cut short to the scalp and he had the face of a boxer: layers of scarring beneath his eyes and a permanent bend in his nose. But it was his blue eyes with the crazy-ass stare that cemented his identity, once and for all: this had to be the famous El Puno—The Fist—that Clopton had mentioned in her briefing.

  A professional boxer was nothing to laugh at. But he was cocky, smiling and bobbing his head mockingly from side to side.

  What a dumbass. He had me. Dead to rights. All he had to do was keep up the advance. Instead? He’d given Parker time.

  Shaking off the cobwebs, Parker got his hands up and deliberately got into a classic boxer’s stance. It was not his chosen fighting style, but this was not about tactics; it was about psychology.

  Because the enemy had no greater weakness than its ego.

  In the desert, this meant fifty men in 1980s Toyota trucks thinking they could take on twelve highly trained army rangers armed to the teeth. It didn’t matter, because to them－this was their home. This was their desert. The damned Americans were done for. Never mind the fact that one 50-caliber rifle could turn the trucks into tuna cans and cut men in half at the waist.

  El Puno’s face held the same blinding arrogance. That Parker had taken up a boxing stance was an absolute insult. He was a Mexican legend; Parker was a white boy cop with soft hands.

  Or so he thought.

  He moved in with two jabs and a right hook. Parker sidestepped them, then threw a vicious right into El Puno’s left ribs, hearing the air rush out of his mouth in instant protest. They rotated positions and moved in a half circle, opposite one another, sizing each other up a bit more, before El Puno came in with a few more jabs. One missed but one struck home, tapping Parker right in the nose. Blood began to leak out immediately. Parker responded by throwing a counter jab that made El Puno rock back just enough for Parker to move in quickly with two more body blows, one on each side of his abdomen.

  El Puno now looked both confused and pissed.

  That’s right, dummy. It’s obvious you have a head that’s used to getting beat to shit. All I want is to work that body.

  Another gunshot rang out, causing them both to glance up the stairway to where Parker’s apartment was.

  El Puno smiled. “You sure you got time for this, pendejo?”

  Parker grimaced. El Puno was right. Going for the body was the long fight. And Trudy was running out of time.

  “What?” El Puno taunted. “Worried? Man. Tell you what . . . I can’t wait to get a taste of her when I’m done with you.”

  He moved in again, like a bull, but a very skilled bull, his shoulders hunched up to his ears, making a solid, compact target. Once in close, he rocked Parker’s head back with two straight-arm punches. Now Parker’s mouth was bleeding too. Then he pushed Parker backwards, using the apartment manager’s door to pin Parker in, like the ropes of a boxing ring, before he unleashed a flurry of body blows himself, all of which caught Parker’s biceps as he folded over in a defensive position.

  Their foreheads pressed together as they each grunted for position. Out the corner of his eye, Parker saw his apartment manager, Susan, pop her face through the curtains of her window, drop her jaw as her eyes went wide, then pop away again. No doubt she was startled as hell by all the gunshots at first, but she was also elderly and the sound of Parker slamming against her apartment door had probably nearly caused her to have a heart attack.

  Parker had had enough. The boxing thing was fun, but it was never his shtick. El Puno had had a lifetime of training . . . and the ruse had been achieved anyway.

  Bringing both hands up over the back of El Puno’s neck, Parker laced his fingers together and pushed El Puno’s head swiftly downward as he brought his right knee up viciously into his face. The thud of bone on bone was dull but it had the desired effect; El Puno was both shocked and stumbling backwards, screaming in rage. This was not an acceptable boxing move, and as such, he hadn’t expected it.

  He moved in with a wild roundhouse punch, and that’s when Parker decided to introduce El Puno to Krav Maga. Deflecting the punch with a firm, outward sweep of his left forearm, Parker shot his left hand out in a tightly curled fist, aiming directly at El Puno’s throat and striking his Adam’s apple flush.

  Classic Krav Maga was a no-nonsense approach designed by the Israel Defense Forces to swiftly incapacitate an opponent, primarily by attacking the soft parts of the body. Parker dropped quickly to one knee, deciding to rock El Puno’s macho-man definition of fighting at its core by punching him directly in the balls. As expected, El Puno’s head and hands came down instantly, leaving him wide open for a solid elbow sweep upwards into his chin.

  Stunned and hurt, El Puno’s eyes went hazy for a second. That was all Parker needed to put all his weight behind a punch to the inside of his left knee, which gave way in a sickening crack as his kneecap slid totally sideways in its socket. El Puno’s scream was deafening as he fell over onto a small lawn that led to the courtyard, and began rocking back and forth.

  Parker stood and wiped the blood from his nose and mouth as El Puno clawed at the inside of his jacket.

  Now? Now you go for the gun? Too late.

  Parker advanced on him like a man possessed.

  Sitting on his chest, Parker began to punch him with solid, targeted and ruthless blows. He wanted to stop, but he couldn’t. There was a cold joy to it, a deep well of wicked bliss. Besides, El Puno was dangerous. Very much so. He could’ve killed Parker only moments before, so he had to be finished off in a way that left no doubt that he would not be getting up.

  He didn’t hear Napoleon this time, but he could feel him. Right there. Watching. Like some eternal sentinel.

  Screaming in frustration, Parker spun El Puno onto his stomach and cursed as he reached to the sheath tucked into the small of his back and pulled out his hunting knife, which he stabbed directly into the back of El Puno’s right hand, forcing the knife all the way down into the soil until the hilt was jammed against El Puno’s knuckles. There was no way he could get that knife out while on his stomach and with a shattered knee.

  El Puno screamed in agony as Parker stood up and sneered down at him. “Still can’t wait to get a taste, man?”

  Parker scrambled and picked up both his guns before taking the stairs to the second floor in fours.

  Another gunshot rang out. And another. And now he was running, full bore, down the walkway. As he approached his apartment door, he could see from the wooden shards in the door jamb that it had been forced open. No one was in sight. So, they were inside. Without hardly a thought, Parker reached out with his right hand and used the SIG to shatter his living room window as he passed it. Then he dove to the bottom of the doorway just beyond it and took aim at the inside of the apartment.

  Sure enough, the shattered window had made the two men inside turn around, and sure enough, they were looking right at the window and not the door.

  Parker let
four rounds loose from the nine and another six from the SIG, bullets puncturing their bodies at upward angles, just as they looked down to see him lying at the bottom of the doorway. They were mostly gut shots and both men returned fire, but the one on the left, in a blue jacket, began to cough up blood almost immediately. He took a step forward and caught a bullet in the back of the head from his partner, who hadn’t expected him to do so. Falling over like a tree, he crashed face-first through the glass coffee table.

  His partner, in a black-and-white Nike jogging suit, took aim at Parker, but it was too late. Parker caught him with a shot to the right side of his chest, which knocked him backward against the wall and made him drop his gun. Enraged, he charged Parker . . . with a gut wound and a chest wound. It was incredible how powerful the survival instinct was in a human being.

  Parker could’ve shot him again, but instead he got to one knee and stood just as the man was upon him. Pivoting his weight, Parker picked him up and threw him off the second-storey balcony and down into the pool below, his body splashing in head-first as his blood began to taint the aqua blue of the chlorine.

  The sirens were so loud now that Davenport had to be out front. Parker turned, sure that his initial assessment had been right; he saw a balanced attack force, three on the outside and three on the inside. That’s when he heard Trudy cry out. “Stop!” she said at first, then it was just terror-filled screams. He looked to the bedroom door to see that it was ajar.

  Someone had gotten inside.

  He flew across the living room, tossing the SIG aside, and erupted through the bedroom door, the nine out in front of him, aiming with both hands.

  What he saw next made the entire world go so red that the air might as well have been made of blood.

  Another man, in a white T-shirt and baggy jeans, tall and with broad shoulders, was ruthlessly beating Trudy in the head. Her gun had somehow been knocked from her hands and was lying on the floor near her feet, and her arms were splayed in panic, grasping at the window ledge for support. Her eyes were filled with tears and her face, that precious face, was cut and blood was spilling from her mouth and down her shirt.

  If hell could’ve opened the face of the earth and sent a messenger, at that very moment his name would’ve been Evan Parker.

  He advanced on the man, yanked him off Trudy and, using the butt of his gun, began to break apart the man’s face. First, he knocked out all his teeth, then shattered one of his eye sockets. He hit him and hit him and hit him, the man’s eyes rolling back in his head a few times, each time returning with a panicked desperation, that survival instinct again . . .

  Not gonna save you, you bastard. Nothing’s going to save you.

  The man was clutching at him in terror, but Parker kept bludgeoning him.

  You got under the wire, didn’t you?

  But you didn’t expect this, did you?

  In the distance, from another world, Trudy was screaming for him to stop.

  No. Not this time. This time he was taking the train aaall the way.

  He was tired of it. Tired of bad people always trying to hurt the good. It was simple really; it was all supposed to be just black and white. But sometimes, the most frustrating part, was that the good people weren’t always good, and the bad people weren’t always bad, and it was just so damn confusing. And he was sick of being confused, of not sleeping, of seeing Waheeb being dragged away by the enemy, or Roland walking head-first into a sniper round at Outpost Keating, and all those body parts everywhere . . . of sons and husbands, brothers and boyfriends, who would never go home again.

  He was sick of all this shit, but mostly . . . he was sick of all the gray in this world.

  So sick of it that he wanted to make the gray bleed red. So he took the nine and jammed it into the man’s mouth and pulled the trigger.

  But the gun didn’t go off.

  It jammed.

  Or so it appeared.

  Trudy cried out in pain again.

  To Parker’s amazement, her hand had fallen over the gun, her fingers splayed desperately outward, and her index finger was now stuck between the hammer and the firing pin, blood spilling from her knuckle as she looked into Parker’s eyes with absolute horror at what he’d almost just done.

  The man in Parker’s grip blacked out. Parker let him drop to the floor and looked at Trudy with raw sadness as he freed her finger from the hammer and took her into his arms, just as Davenport and her unit came rushing into the apartment from the front door.

  “Parker?” she screamed.

  He blinked, hard, took a deep breath and forced himself to get it together. “Yeah! It’s clear. Last one is down in here!”

  He hugged Trudy tightly as she began to sob against his chest. Close. She’d come very close to dying, and they both knew it.

  All of time slowed. The clouds outside the bedroom window moved across the sky in a lazy drift from right to left as Parker watched in a detached sort of way. The SWAT unit flooded in. Parker’s heart was still beating rapidly in his chest and he tried to calm his breathing, to tell himself it was okay, Trudy was safe. Burying his face in her red hair he breathed in the smell of her shampoo as he struggled to hold back his own tears. She needed him right now, not the other way around. To be there. To be strong.

  Police activity swirled all around them. More sirens arrived outside and he could hear shouts as the complex and then his apartment were both secured. A few of his neighbors were shushed away at the front door and the chaotic bleeping of radios was chirping around everywhere.

  After some time, the EMTs arrived and managed to pull Trudy away from him. Parker assured her that he’d come straight to the hospital, as soon as he was done briefing Davenport, who had been standing outside his bedroom door the entire time he’d been calming Trudy down.

  “Shit, Parker,” Davenport said as she finally walked up next to him. “This whole complex looks like a damned war zone. You were supposed to wait.”

  Parker nodded, but his words disagreed. “I couldn’t, Sarge. I heard multiple shots. I thought I heard a scream.” He could barely choke out the words for the rage that was gripping at his throat.

  “Okay. Calm down. I get it. But it’s all gotta go in the report, you know that. Right?”

  He nodded again. “Any of them dead?”

  “Three. The rest are wounded. Most of the sirens you hear are ambulances trying to get them to the hospital.”

  “Yeah? Well, too bad they’re not all dead,” Parker said.

  “I didn’t hear that, and you’d better not repeat it in front of anyone else,” she replied. “Was Güero here too?”

  “No, he wasn’t,” Parker said flatly. Then, in a tone of shock and disbelief, he added, “They almost killed her, Sarge.”

  A few awkward seconds of silence followed before Davenport put a hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Parker. We’ll get him.”

  Parker was standing at his bedroom window, looking out intently over the cityscape beyond. As the sky gave the rain, his voice gave the thunder.

  “You bet your ass we will.”

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Parker walked out of his apartment complex, through the carnage he’d helped to wreak, past the mailboxes and down the same rain-stained stairs he’d ascended not that long ago. Police cars were clustered out front, along with the SWAT van, an ambulance and two paramedic trucks. Small crowds of chattering people had gathered at either end of the sidewalk, a few of whom he recognized as his neighbors.

  There was blood on his clothes and both forearms, but he didn’t care. There was blood on his hands, too, but that was nothing new. There had been for a long time. Because some kinds of blood never washed off.

  As he reached the sidewalk, a few uniforms and a paramedic talking in hushed tones saw him coming and motioned him over.

  Wearily, he complied. “Yeah?”

  The paramedic gestured his head toward the ambulance. “She won’t leave without you.”

  Parker was back
in that haze again, that fade-in, fade-out state of consciousness that was filled with a staccato soundtrack of screams and terror threatening to take him halfway across the world. Big sun. Massive desert. Small lives.

  But the paramedic’s words had shocked him out of it. He assumed that Trudy had been driven off to the hospital immediately after being whisked out of the apartment. “What?”

  One of the uniforms, his name tag said “Rodriguez,” looked him up and down uncomfortably. “Yeah, Detective. She lost it and ripped the IV needle out when they tried to drive off.”

  There was something in Rodriguez’s eyes that made Parker look away. Awe maybe, or perhaps just fear. But word had obviously spread on scene that Parker was the one responsible for the shattered, broken or dead bad guys who’d been hauled off for medical attention or to the morgue. There was a time he would’ve cared about such things, about legends or having a rep, but that was a long time ago.

  He moved immediately toward the ambulance. When the EMT by the door saw him coming, he opened it, allowing the harsh light from inside to spill out into the abnormal darkness of the day caused by a swath of nearly black storm clouds that had gathered over the city. Incredibly, even more rain was coming, and a lot of it by the look of things.

  When he saw her, sitting partially upright on a stretcher, her face exhausted with stress and her red hair matted to her forehead, his heart gripped so tightly that he could barely breathe. Her eyes immediately sought and found his. They were desperate eyes and he realized that this was the look someone who loved you, deeply, gave you when you finally arrived after they’d been waiting for such a long time.

  “Evan!” she squeaked. He jumped in, sat next to her and took her in his arms. She buried her head in his chest and began to cry. Soon, the cries became sobs that required deep breaths of air as she tried desperately to regain her composure. The adrenaline of her standoff with so many men sent to kill her had now worn off and was being replaced with the usual gamut of emotions he was used to seeing: relief, terror, bewilderment and shock.