The mercado’s stink still clung to Sawyer’s jacket when he crouched beside the pile of loot they’d pulled off Rocko and Jinx. He grabbed the wad of cash in Rocko’s jacket, the twenty thousand dollars they were going to use to bribe them to leave Panama.

  “Twenty grand,” Cormac muttered, leaning over his shoulder. “As if that’s enough to leave our vacation in Panama. It was rude of them to ask.”

  “Yeah,” Sawyer said. He peeled a bill free.

  The first one was a one hundred dollar bill. Then he peeled back even more bills and soon uncovered the truth.

  “Wow,” Sawyer muttered.

  The inner stack of the wad of cash was entirely made of one dollar bills. They were tight and clean.

  Cormac swore under his breath.

  A shape tottered out from behind a hanging tarp. They spun around to see an old Panamanian woman. She was small and bent at the spine. She wore a faded floral dress. Her gray hair was tucked under a fraying scarf. She marched up to Sawyer, lifted her cracked leather purse, and smacked him across the shoulder with surprising force.

  “You!” she barked, pointing a crooked finger toward the mess of shattered stalls and scattered seafood. There was a snapper, shrimp, and squid dusted with vampire ash.

  Cormac glanced at Sawyer, then at the cash. “Your call.”

  Sawyer sighed. He pressed the wad of cash into her hands. Even with the ones tucked inside there was still about six hundred dollars there. It could have bought a couple used M4s on the black market. But he supposed they could always steal them from the police.

  Her eyes went wide. The hand that had just smacked him now patted his cheek like a favored grandson. She muttered a blessing and shuffled away, clutching the wad of cash to her chest.

  Cormac shook his head. “Now that’s good vampire PR.”

  Sawyer stood. “Let’s get back to the shack. I’m sick of this place.”

  ###

  The drive out of Colón was long enough for the city to fade into a different kind of world. The sodium streetlights vanished one by one in their Honda Civic’s rearview mirror. The city lights were replaced by black jungle walls and a chittering insect chorus. The air grew heavier and wetter and the smell of rotting vegetation replaced the tang of sea-salt.

  By the time they reached their shack on Gatun Lake, the sky had gone hard black. It was pinpricked with stars. The water stretched out like black glass and caught the moonlight.

  Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  The shack leaned slightly toward the water. Its stilts creaked when the waves lapped at them. A warped back porch jutted over the lake and held two battered folding chairs. There was an old tin bucket filled with tangled fishing line which had held twelve beers earlier that morning.

  Cormac dumped their gear inside, then came back out with two fishing rods and a small cooler. “Been a day,” he said. “Might as well see if we can pull something decent before sun-up.”

  Sawyer dropped into one of the chairs. The boards under him groaned. He baited his hook and cast out, then leaned back and let the line hum through the reel until it plinked against the water.

  They fished in silence for a while. The only sounds were the faint lapping of the lake and the creak of the shack. There was also the lazy whine of a mosquito circling Sawyer’s ear.

  Cormac was the first to break the silence. “Maybe we should think more about the old lady.”

  “What?”

  “I mean, people caught in the crossfire. You know me, I’m used to airfields. Raiding in a civilian environment is different.”

  “You get used to it.” Sawyer kept his eyes on the rippling water. “We’ve got bigger things to worry about. Especially now that we’re ever more being hunted by vampires. What else is next?”

  “We keep fighting in places like the fish market, then we’re going to leave trails of ruined lives behind us eventually. We’re lucky things went smoothly.”

  “It’s always going to be dirty. We have to stop Harland. Do you think he cares about the lives he’s ruined?”

  Cormac grunted but didn’t argue.

  A soft wind shifted across the lake. It carried the smell of rain. Then, Sawyer caught the scent of something new. His nostrils flared slightly.

  He heard a sound that wasn’t quite like the steady thrum of a fishing skiff or the idle putter of a tourist boat. It was a deeper vibration.

  “You feel that?” Cormac asked.

  They turned in their chairs and scanned the dark horizon. At first there was nothing, and even with Sawyer’s low light vision it was hard to notice much across the glassy sheet of lake. But then a bulk figure emerged from the darkness.

  A black freighter glided slowly and silently across the water. A diamond in white trim lay painted across its hull, clearly belonging to BlackDiamond. It didn’t run any lights. There were no deck floodlamps. There was just its presence in the darkness gliding across the still black water.

  Neither of them spoke as they watched it slide closer. The outline sharpened under the dim wash of moonlight. The containers were stacked high on its deck could have held anything.

  It should have been enough of an eerie clue on its own.

  Something moved against the backdrop of steel containers.

  Sawyer squinted. At first, the shapes were no more than silhouettes skittering along the rail. Then one paused. Two pinpoints of red burned from its hulking form.

  Sawyer’s voice dropped. “Cormac…”

  Another pair of red eyes lit up, then two more pairs. There were four sets in total. They were all fixed on their shack.

  One of them crouched low behind the railing. The others copied the same pattern of movement.

  And then they jumped.

  They simultaneously leap an impossibly far distance and cleared the black gap of water in a single monstrous arc. Their red eyes streaked through the night like tracer rounds which led right for their shack.

  Sawyer clenched and looked for his pistol.

  “No,” Cormac said. “We have to run.”