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well last time, did it?’
    Julio cast his eyes to the ground. One way or the other, it would all be over soon. He wished he had the balls to strangle the old man himself, save them both a lot of trouble. But he didn’t.
    ‘Time for you to do
something
, Julio.’
    ‘Sure, Papa. Anything.’
    ‘Get that fucking marshal on the phone,
numero uno
. And,
dos
, get your little posse together and get down to Florida. This thing stops now.’

THREE
    Erica Weisz lay in a private room in Lakeland Regional Hospital dreaming of fire. She saw only bright orange light and felt searing heat all around her, at once welcoming her and, conversely, pushing her back with its intensity. Then it was gone, as if sucked into a vacuum, taking her life with it, but leaving her body and an all-encompassing emptiness as cold as any Arctic region on earth.
    She woke up sweating, strands of hair stuck to her face, tears streaming down her cheeks. A feeling of post-operative nausea and dizziness enveloped her. She sat up with great difficulty and felt pain in her side and lower abdomen. The room spun to a stop, and she was able to see her surroundings in the late afternoon light that filtered through the window: an aseptic hospital room painted a vague green, an uncomfortable-looking vinyl chair for visitors, her chrome-railed bed with unwrinkled sheets as if laid over a corpse.
    Her mouth was dry. A small folding table next to the bed held a yellow plastic pitcher of ice water, a clear cup, and a plastic straw. She peeled the paper off the straw, stuck it directly into the pitcher, and drank deeply. She looked at the IV in her arm and up to the bag that fed it. Lactated ringers in a one-litre bag, piggybacked with a half-litre of normal saline, a red tag on the bag that read Amoxicillin on its side. Both were dripping at KVO (‘keep vein open’) rate. She reached down with one hand and pinched the skin on the back of the other hand. It made a small fleshy tent that lingered for a few seconds before slowly laying back down. She was extremely dehydrated. She glanced up again and saw an empty plastic IV bag, its insides coated with blood. Must be pretty bad if they had to give her blood, too. She reached up and turned the drip rate up on the bag of ringers, and forced herself to drink more water.
    She wondered if she’d said anything while under anaesthesia and wondered how long she’d been out.
What happened to the red-haired man after I shot him?
Was he dead?
She recalled the urgent jerk of her body as the buckshot caught her in the side and spun her around. She remembered the look of surprise as she fired and caught him in the neck.
    Fear crept through her as she thought there might have been other gunmen and that some of the children – those precious children – might now be dead. She hoped she had stopped them all in time. Before they could get to the kids. She remembered being consumed with that goal:
stop these bastards before they hurt anyone else
. She remembered waking up briefly in the recovery room, a doctor speaking to her and she back to him, but she couldn’t remember what the conversation was about. Probably previous medical history, current meds, etc. Standard medical questions.
Had she revealed anything?
    The plastic name band on her wrist read: Weisz, Erica.
I didn’t tell them everything
, she thought. It gave her relief, made her feel safe, at least for now. But that wouldn’t last long. She needed to make a plan; first, she needed to make a phone call.
    The phone rang at Robert Moral’s home. Moral was in his office, on the computer, playing
Slots Jungle Casino
. Netbet.org had given it a ‘#6’ rating, so he dived right in. Let his wife answer the phone. He heard her banging around in the kitchen then shuffling over to pick it up.
    ‘If it’s those vultures from MasterCard,’ he hollered to her, ‘tell them I already sent a payment, and it is
illegal
– make sure you tell them it’s
against the law
– to call a