The smile crumbled from the man’s face and he stepped forward, his hands curling into fists at his sides.
“Closest hospital is what, two hours away?” Hayes asked, without taking his eyes off the doorman before him.
Luca Harrak folded the newspaper in half and set it on the table, but instead of looking up, turned his attention to his fingernails. He studied his manicure for a few seconds and when he finally spoke, his voice was calm, seemingly indifferent to the impending violence before him.
“About that,” he said, looking up. “Why do you ask?”
“Because unless you have an orthopedic surgeon behind the bar, you might want to put your dog on a leash.”
“Emil, let him pass.”
The man grudgingly stepped aside, and Hayes made his way to the table, took a seat, and studied the man before him.
Luca Harrak was in his early forties and well dressed. The Saint Laurent suit, eggshell-white button-down, and slicked-back hair made him look more like an accountant than the head of the largest smuggling ring in the North Atlantic.
But Hayes wasn’t fooled.
“You are late,” Harrak said, his hand coming to rest on the black case sitting on the table.
“Yeah, but I’m here now.”
Luca popped the clasps that secured the Pelican case and opened the lid, revealing three stacks of white cartons with ERYTHROMYCIN 250MG written in black letters.
“May I?” he asked, waiting for Luca’s nod before grabbing two of the boxes from the case, opening them, and studying the pink pills inside the blister packs.
Hayes checked over the packaging, made sure the seals were intact while Luca spoke.
“In my line of work, I have been asked to acquire many things. Drugs, guns, even people,” he shrugged. “But never antibiotics. Turns out they are rather hard to find.”
Sucks for you.
He got to his feet, pulled a sodden envelope from his back pocket, and handed it to Luca.
“Yes, very hard to find,” the man said, opening the flap and thumbing the bills inside.
The menace in the man’s voice told Hayes it was time to go, and he hurriedly tossed the pills back into the case and shut the lid. He was reaching for the latches, ready to thumb them back into place and get the hell out, when Luca slammed his hand flat on the lid.
“Did you hear what I just said?” he demanded.
“Yeah, I heard ya,” Hayes answered. “But we had a deal—a deal that ended the second I handed you ten thousand euros.”
“That was the price an hour ago, but . . .”
“But what?” Hayes asked.
“But you were late.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
“Be that as it may, if you want the merchandise, it will cost an additional five thousand euros.”
“You’re shitting me, right?”
Luca clicked his tongue behind his teeth, eyebrows and shoulders lifting into a prototypical Gallic shrug.
“What the hell is that supposed to mean?” Hayes asked, aping the gesture.
The moment his hands were off the case, Luca tugged it back to his side of the table and lowered himself into his chair with an exaggerated sigh.
“Pay or leave,” he said, unbuttoning his jacket and leaning back in his chair. “The choice is yours, but either way, you are wasting my fucking time.”
In an instant, the atmosphere in the bar dropped from chilly to downright inhospitable and all talk ceased, the only sound the scrape of Emil’s chair against the floor as he got to his feet and walked to the table, coming to a halt behind his boss, fingers tapping the butt of the pistol at his waist.
The pistol was a Norinco NP-20, a Chinese knockoff of the Heckler & Koch P7. The pistol was a favorite in places like Morocco because they took a beating, and with a street value of fifty bucks cost a hell of a lot less than the German-made H&K.
While he generally believed in the old adage that you get what you pay for, he’d been around the block enough times to know that the 9-millimeter fired from the chamber of a fifty-dollar piece of shit would kill him just as fast as one from the custom STI on his hip.
“Well?” Luca asked.
Any other time Hayes would have paid the man, but after the boy in Ceuta, he was flat broke, and he’d come too far to leave empty-handed.
Which left only one option.
Hayes stepped away from the table, a shot of adrenaline rolling through his veins, widening his vision until he saw the entire room. His hand dropped to his side and he stood there, calm and relaxed, seeing everything but focusing on nothing.
“That’s not going to work for me,” he said, voice sharp as a straight razor.
The silence fell heavy over the bar. The blood hissing in his ears like static, Hayes took in the room. Aware of Emil’s hand cheating toward the pistol on his waist, the bartender reaching below the counter, and, finally, the bald smuggler near the door shifting so he could reach the pistol Hayes assumed was tucked into the small of his back.
Hayes worked the lethal calculus in his head. Big man first, then old Hooknose behind the bar, and then Baldy. Four seconds, five max? Is it enough?
A gunfight was all about angles, space, and timing. Hayes had been in enough to realize that he was holding the short end of the stick. There was no doubt in his mind that he could dump one or two of the men before they got their pistols into action, but not all four.
He didn’t like the odds and would have bowed out if he could have, but the men in the bar were all gas and no brake, which didn’t leave Hayes many options.
“No one has to die,” Hayes said, “just give me what I came for and I’ll be out of your hair.”
“I’m afraid that is impossible,” Luca said.
“This isn’t going to go the way you think it is.”
“You Americans, so John Wayne, so Gunfight at the K.O. Corral.”
“That’s the O.K. Corral, and you’ve been watching too many Westerns.”
“Perhaps, but, since I am a sporting man, what do you say I count to three and yell draw like they do in the Westerns? Would that be fair, Emil?” he asked, looking up.
“Yes,” the man grinned.
“And you?” he asked, turning to Hayes.
“You can count to a thousand for all I care. But if I were you, I wouldn’t be sitting in that chair when the shooting starts.”
Luca’s face went white, the realization of his position in the line of fire sending a bead of sweat down his forehead. His hands snaked out for the arms of the chair and he cleared his throat, his voice weak when he spoke.