The Last Infidel by Spikes Donovan Page A

next day, right?” Jose asked.
    “She’d told me she wanted to marry me as soon as possible.  The next day, two o’clock came and went.  We all waited for her, then we went to her apartment.  She’d packed and left.”  Cody slid the strange looking piece of paper out from between the pages of his diary and read it twice.  He folded it up and, with his eyes glued on Jose, tore it into as many tiny pieces as he could.  He swallowed half of it and threw the rest out through the window.
    “Now she’s here,” Jose said.  “And now you can take her and leave – I have a plan.”
    Cody crossed his arms and said, “I’m all ears.”
    Jose looked around the room and scooted his chair close to Cody.  “So, you know – we can make a cool hundred thousand in gold on that explosives shipment,” Jose said.  “And Bashar?  He’ll probably give her to you and let us go wherever we want to go after we sell it to him.”
    Cody didn’t hesitate for even a millisecond.  Jose’s little attempt to make him feel again, something he hadn’t wanted to do since he’d been stood up by Tracy, angered him.  He uncrossed his arms, pointed towards the wall to distract Jose, and swung a weak left hook into the side of his head.  Jose tumbled out of his chair and hit the floor; but Cody wasn’t finished.  He picked Jose up, forced him out of the window, and dangled him above the street by his feet.  It was a trick he’d learned from watching Bashar’s men.
    Jose screamed and flailed his arms like a bird trying to hold onto a flimsy clothesline.  “You’re crazy!  Help me!  Help me!”
    Down below, one story beneath them, a few of Bashar’s guards began to laugh and yell in Arabic.  A gunshot, probably from a pistol, rang out.  The bullet ricocheted off a red brick near the window, throwing pieces of mortar and dust into Cody’s face.  Cody pulled Jose back inside and set him down carefully onto the hardwood floor.  He picked up a chair, carried it to the window, and threw it down at the three men standing just below the window.  The chair hit one of the men, knocking him down, and Cody waved and smiled when the hurt man looked up and glared at him.
    One of the other men called out: “Your time is coming, Cody Marshall, infidel!  You don’t have very long – and we are going to peel the skin off you and dip you in alcohol!  Do you hear me, Cody Marshall?  We have wonderful plans for you!  You will die horribly on the last day – do you hear me?  You will be the last infidel!”
    Cody leaned out and spit.  He said, “Don’t you have a goat – or is it a pig? – waiting for you at home?  Or is she seeing another Muslim man?”  He put his head back inside and helped Jose to his feet.  “I wouldn’t have let you ago,” he said.  “But I will the next time.  Got it, amigo?”
    Jose brushed himself off.  “You can throw me out the window – and I know I probably deserve it – but Tracy?  She works for command.  And after what happened out there on the highway, you know she wants those explosives.  Are you going to meet with her like it says in the note you just ate?”
    “There isn’t enough whiskey in Tennessee to make me want her to see her again,” Cody said, implying he had no intention of contacting Tracy.  “Besides, what am I going to do?  Just walk through the street at midnight, meet her, and hope I don’t get shot?”
    “You got a point,” Jose said.  “Those bastards out there?  They’ll shoot you and tell Bashar that they didn’t know it was you.”
    A certain doubtfulness settled over Cody’s face.  He held his next thought, a thought that might not have crossed his friend’s mind.  Someone had put the note in his diary – though none of the men in the room had been here since early in the day.  Tracy couldn’t have done it – not after today’s little episode on the square; and any woman being seen entering the men’s dorm would have been