“Fat chance,” Lyons said.
“I’m sorry,” Fitzpatrick said. He flexed his fingers together, cracking all his knuckles at once. “I might have given you the idea that we were debating that. We aren’t. I’m telling you exactly what’s going to happen. I like to skip to the end.”
“Funny,” Schwarz said. “We were just talking about that.”
“Enough,” Lyons growled. He admired his partner’s courage, but now was not the time. Provoking this psychopath was just going to make things worse.
“Still,” Fitzpatrick said, “I get your point. And, yeah, this is hardly sporting.” He drew his folding knife from his pocket. Lyons realized it was one of Able Team’s knives, taken by the Blackstar guards when Lyons and his team were searched and then tied up. Fitzpatrick snapped open the blade with a flick of his wrist, ignoring the thumb stud that would have let him snap it open more securely and with less grandstanding. The Blackstar man examined the edge against the tip of his finger. “Nice and sharp,” he said. He went for Schwarz again.
“Over here!” Lyons shouted, straining against his zip ties hard enough to make his chair shift beneath him. The wood of the chair creaked in protest. “Over here, you son of a bitch! Try me!”
“Cool your jets, Captain Ham-hands,” Fitzpatrick taunted. “See? I can make funny jokes, too. You like jokes, little man?” He was talking to Schwarz now. “You’re going to love this one.”
Lyons braced himself for what was to come. The men of Stony Man Farm were no stranger to the types of horrors that could be visited on an imprisoned man. In years past, when the Mafia had held sway, it was nothing to their torturers to carve up victims so badly that a mercy killing was the only option. It was an art with some of those jackals. Fitzpatrick didn’t have that kind of finesse, but he was probably no stranger to stabbing helpless victims. Able Team’s leader told himself that he just might have to watch Schwarz die in front of him.
“You do this,” Lyons said, “and you’re going to die with your neck under my boot.”
“I’ll do what I can to live with the fear of that,” Fitzpatrick said. He reached out and, in one smooth slash, cut the zip tie securing Schwarz’s left wrist.
Lyons’s jaw dropped.
Fitzpatrick wasn’t finished. He cut the tie securing Schwarz’s other wrist, then the ones at the Stony Man commando’s ankles. Stepping back, he struck a martial arts pose and beckoned with one hand. “Come and get it, little man.”
“Perry,” Lyons cautioned, using his cover name. “Don’t.”
“Sorry, boss,” Schwarz said. “But I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t kick this jackass in the—”
Fitzpatrick danced close as Schwarz was rising from the chair, lashing out with something concealed in his left hand. The tick-tick-tick of the electric transformer was unmistakable. The Blackstar man had just lit up Schwarz with a stun gun that he had concealed on his person. The effect was immediate: Schwarz’s muscles clenched and he went weak in the knees. Fitzpatrick grinned and threw down the little black plastic box.
To his credit, Schwarz did not fall, but Fitzpatrick followed the jolt with a knee to the Able Team operative’s groin. As the electronics expert doubled over, the Blackstar commander drove both his massive elbows down onto Schwarz’s back, knocking the much slimmer man into the floor.
“Stop this!” Blancanales called out.
“You’ll get your turn,” Fitzpatrick said. He threw a savage kick to Schwarz’s ribs. Schwarz grunted in pain and tried to roll out. Then he was up, on his feet, shaking but game, his hands raised and ready. “Hey, we’ve got a player!” Fitzpatrick said. “Come on, boy. Show Uncle Jay what you’ve got. I promise, I won’t cripple you so badly that you’ll have to have somebody feed you for the rest of your life. But then again, my promises usually don’t mean jack.”
“You are such a dick,” Schwarz said, and kicked Fitzpatrick in the face.
It was a good kick, and Schwarz might have laid low a smaller man with it, but he was weakened from the stun gun and had already had his brain knocked around inside his head for a few rounds. Fitzpatrick absorbed it, shook it off and slammed a Muay Thai round kick into Schwarz’s flank that dropped him to the floor again.
“Tell me what I want to know,” Fitzpatrick said to Lyons. He stood with his foot on Schwarz’s chest as Schwarz gasped for air. “If you don’t, I’m going to beat this man to death in front of you. I’m guessing that the idea of that bothers you a lot, big man. You hero types, you live and breathe for this kind of thing. Seeing your buddy get his guts stomped out…well, I’m betting that’s more than you can handle.”
“You’d be surprised,” Schwarz started to say, trying to form another verbal jab. Fitzpatrick cut him off, raising his boot and slamming it down, driving out what little air Schwarz had in his lungs. Schwarz wheezed in pain.
“He’s cute, in a stupid sort of way,” Fitzpatrick said. “Every squad’s got one of this guy. The guy who’s always cracking jokes. The guy who never takes anything seriously. And you know what happens to that guy, big man? One day he gets fragged, and nobody much cares, because everybody is sick and damned tired of hearing him talk all the time.”
“I’m pretty sick and tired of hearing you talk,” Lyons said. He kept his voice low. It was a struggle to maintain his self-control. He wanted to punch this Fitzpatrick into a bloody bag of meat.
Schwarz was still stirring on the floor, so Fitzpatrick kicked him in the head. Schwarz grew still, his limbs slack. He was still breathing—Lyons could tell that much—but he was clearly out cold. Well, that was probably for the best. Unconsciousness was Schwarz’s best friend right now, especially because it meant he couldn’t run his mouth and take any more punishment.
“I think we’ve exhausted the entertainment value of that one,” Fitzpatrick said. He went to Blancanales, whose eyes followed the knife carefully before landing on the stun gun still on the floor. “Oh, you’re thinking about that, aren’t you, Gramps?” the Blackstar commander said. “You think that little battery-powered toy is going to put me down? You’re going to have to do that on your own. And you’re going to have to do it while your team leader watches you get your—”
Blancanales slammed the heel of his palm up under Fitzpatrick’s jaw before raking his fingers back down the man’s face. In World War II jargon, the maneuver was called a chin jab, and if Blancanales hadn’t been trying to do it while rising from the chair in which he’d been held, it might have done some serious damage. As it was, Blancanales’s full body weight was not supporting the strike. Fitzpatrick hissed in displeasure and slammed an elbow into the side of his opponent’s head. Blancanales went down but, thanks to his training, managed to perform a shoulder roll and come up again.
Fitzpatrick was ready for it. As Blancanales rolled through the fall, Fitzpatrick stuck to him like a shadow and when Blancanales started to rise again, the bigger man slammed the butt of his chromed pistol into the back of Blancanales’s skull. The Able Team warrior made no sound as he dropped to his hands and knees, stunned. Fitzpatrick stopped long enough to grin smugly at Lyons.
“Pretty proud of yourself, aren’t you, Tinkerbell?” Lyons said. “Beating up a couple of guys who can barely stand because the circulation to their hands and feet has been cut off for an hour. Yeah, you’re a real macho guy.”
Fitzpatrick kicked Blancanales, but it wasn’t a rib-cracker this time. Blancanales was able to roll away from the kick. The Blackstar man dropped on top of Blancanales anyway, wrapping one thick arm around his captive’s throat. Dazed as he was, Blancanales didn’t appear to have much of a chance, not the way this “fight” had been set up against him from the start. Fitzpatrick tucked