“Carlos! Do what I said!” Tomas yelled.
“No, Tomas,” Carlos said, pulling Roberto closer.
Tomas fired and Carlos reeled backward stumbling into the brush near the porch. Roberto dropped to his knees, covering his head. Rafael spun away, shielding the baby.
Frank fired, his bullet zinging into the brush. Tomas returned fire, his bullet tearing into Frank’s shoulder. Frank crumbled to the dirt.
Louis swept the trees with his gun.
Where was he? Where the hell was Tomas?
Louis heard the baby crying, then saw Rafael turning away from Tomas, shielding the baby. Rafael’s voice, tight and hoarse, sliced through the air.
“Tomas! No! No!”
Jesus...Tomas was going to shoot Rafael and the baby.
Louis aimed blindly toward the darkness. He couldn’t see Tomas. He couldn’t see anything. Then he heard the snap of Tomas’s lever-action Savage.
Louis fired at the sound, pumping bullets into the darkness. Seventeen explosions, burnt air, the jerk of the gun in his hand.
Then silence. The magazine was empty.
It was a few seconds before he could hear, and then his other senses came back. There was no sound or movement from the dark brush.
“Stop! Stop shooting! He’s dead!” Rafael called out. “Tomas is dead!”
Louis could hear crying. The baby’s weak rasp and sobbing that he knew came from Roberto.
“Louis?”
Landeta’s voice behind him, anxious.
“Stay there, Mel. Don’t move!”
Slowly, Louis stood up, pulling a new magazine from his belt and slapping it into the Glock. He moved cautiously up the dock, swinging his gun from Frank, to Rafael, then to the darkness where he knew Tomas had stood.
As he moved closer, he could see Rafael clearly, standing over Carlos and Roberto. He had the crying baby cradled against his shoulder.
Louis moved toward the patch of darkness where Tomas had been. He saw him, on his back, in the dirt. Louis knelt to feel for a pulse. Nothing. He scanned Tomas’s body. Then he saw it, one entry wound just below the right ear. Nothing else, not another mark on him.
He heard footsteps behind him and spun.
“Easy,” Landeta said.
Landeta came up to Louis’s side and looked down at Tomas. “Where’d you get him?”
“In the neck, one shot.”
Louis looked around. Frank was across the yard, alive but struggling to sit up. Rafael was still standing by the porch, holding the baby. Roberto was huddled on the ground by his father’s body. Louis could hear him crying.
“Mel, go check on the boy,” Louis said.
Louis went to Frank and knelt beside him. Frank was holding his bleeding shoulder, his dark eyes glistening in the lights.
“Go,” Frank said softly. “And take the baby.”
“I have to bring the police back, Frank.”
“I know that. Just go. Now, before the others come.”
Louis stood up and went over to Rafael, his gun at his side. Rafael took a step back when he saw him coming. Louis stopped in front of him. Rafael was shaking, his arm wrapped tightly around the baby.
“Where is Angel?” Rafael asked.
“She’s dead,” Louis said. “She was bleeding and she needed help no one here could give her.”
Rafael’s face crumbled. “I knew something was wrong,” he said softly. “She was bleeding so much, but I couldn’t do anything. Where is she? Where is my wife?”
“On the east side of the island. There’s a cloth tied to a tree near her body.”
Rafael nodded.
Louis held out his arms.
Rafael’s eyes welled. He opened the blanket and looked at the baby, touching a dirty hand to her tiny foot. Then, slowly, he wrapped the blanket back around the baby and held her out to Louis.
Louis gathered the baby into one arm, and turned to Landeta.
“Let’s get the hell out of here,” he said.
CHAPTER 48
Louis stood at the bow of the Fort Myers PD patrol boat, the wind in his face. It was still dark and there was a light fog over the sound, but he could see a thin gray glow of dawn in the eastern sky.
He watched the waves roll away in the beam of the boat’s spotlight. Maybe they should not have left the island. He had left hoping that Frank could take care of things, that he would not allow any more killing. But he was worried Frank did not have the control he thought he had. He wondered if the other men would kill the women, or maybe even destroy the graves of the babies.
The flashing red and blue lights of the other police boats were making his head hurt. He closed his eyes. Exhaustion was seeping in, eating away at the adrenaline that had kept him going for the last couple of hours.
He felt the boat slowing and forced his eyes open. The fog had softened the mangroves into a smudge of dark green. The floodlights were still on, and the fog defused the light, turning the yard into a soft white-gray blur.