by Jim Geraghty
CHAPTER 30
Manuel fell backward; in the time it took Alec to draw his gun, Katrina had closed the distance to the door and was crouched down in a squat by the doorway. She held her gun with two hands and readied herself to quickly, instinctively survey the “the slices of the pie”—each section of angle around the corner. In one fluid motion measured in milliseconds, Katrina scanned from the floor to the ceiling; as she saw feet, she shot above it, center mass. She shot three, four, five, six times in rapid succession. One stray shot from the approaching assailants hit the ceiling; another hit the floor before them.
The two Calaveras who had shot Manuel were bold and, in retrospect, stupid. While Jaguar would undoubtedly appreciate their lethal punishment of Manuel for letting two Americans barge into his home—even Mexican police had to get a search warrant—he wasn’t the real target. The pair hadn’t realized that Esmerelda had selected them to go up first to measure the intruders’ skills. From the stairwell, Esmerelda and three other Calaveras crouched and heard nothing after the eight shots—their gang sisters had not even screamed or groaned in passing. Esmerelda exhaled. This was going to be difficult.
***
Just a few minutes earlier, a furious Jaguar had called Esmerelda and told her that he had seen two Americans, a man and a woman, searching his home on his surveillance system. The man had the cojones to taunt him once Jaguar had called on the phone. The Calaveras said that they had spotted one suspicious-looking American earlier that night and watched him enter the building and talk with the doorman and what appeared to be a local woman.
Jaguar told Esmerelda to get the Calaveras to deal with the intruders; he hadn’t specified alive or dead.
Esmerelda was no fool. Americans sniffing around Jaguar’s building, and now two of her gang sisters dead after eight shots had been fired in the hallway. These were not ordinary intruders, and she would be cautious. Right now, somewhere in the building, some resident was calling the police and reporting gunshots. Eventually, the cops would come.
***
Inside Jaguar’s apartment, half the Americans were similarly calm.
“Two women, armed, handguns, skull makeup,” Katrina said, safely crouched back within the doorway. “Both down.” Her voice was calm, but her heart was pounding.
Alec was less calm. He grumbled into his lapel microphone.
“Nice job, backup!” Alec fumed. “Where the hell are you?”
“On my way, but I’m seeing a bunch of women with skull masks converging on your position,” Ward reported. “I’ll be there to get you out in two minutes. Maybe three. Wait, I think one spotted me.” He swore. “Make it four. Okay, five.” Ward’s feed was just a steady stream of profanity.
Alec stared at Katrina incredulously.
“I feel like I’m watching my Uber driver go in the wrong direction,” Alec muttered. He wiped the sweat from his brow. “Dee, do you read me?”
Back in northern Virginia, Dee sat before giant monitors, trying to simultaneously refocus the drone camera and track which phone calls from the condo building were calling the police.
“Alec, I think you guys have five, maybe ten minutes max before the police respond to reports of shots fired,” Dee reported.
“How’s that tracking on the number that just called the condo’s landline? It was our Juan, calling himself the Jaguar,” Alec said, checking, unnecessarily, that his gun was fully loaded and that the safety was off. “Bet he’s close.”
“Triangulating location, almost have it,” she said. The audio connection was suddenly interrupted by the loud, sudden pop pop pop of gunfire.
“We’re all right! We’re all right!” Alec reported. “Katrina’s offering them steel-jacketed discouragement.”
Katrina removed a compact mirror and used it to peer out into the hallway. She saw the door to the stairwell at the end of the hall open a crack, then quickly close—just enough noise for Alec to hear.
“More of ’em?”
“Others down the hall, hiding in the stairwell,” Katrina said. In the mirror, she spotted the door opening. “Amateurish.”
She again rotated around the corner and made use of the fact that the hallway so tightly limited the space for the approaching Calaveras. Once again, she methodically fired another six shots, as casually and easily as most people typed on their phones. Five of her shots hit their mark in center mass, knocking the three women into one another and tumbling into a bleeding pile in the stairwell doorway.
“Nice shots,” Alec guessed without looking.
“I know,” she replied.
She was back at it again. Lethal shots had become a habit that proved impossible to permanently break. She momentarily thought of her last night in Pakistan years ago, when the job was done, and a more-than-slightly inebriated group of men from the British SAS serenaded her with a farewell rendition of Queen’s “Killer Queen.” They mangled the lyrics a bit, but their salute was clear: “She’s a killer queen, gunpower and kerosene, dynamite with an M-16, guaranteed to blow your mind anytime! She’s like the Baroness, puts the sex in Semtex, if you’re on her list, you’ll dieeee!” Men trained to kill were in awe of her, and that fact periodically left her awake at night.
“Cover me!” Katrina said, and Alec peered out the doorway. Esmerelda was raising her gun above the three women bleeding in front of her and swearing in Spanish. Alec aimed – his shots were a bit high, hitting the door above Esmerelda, forcing her to duck back behind the doorway.
It took Katrina just moments to reload. “Go!” she said, hitting Alec on the shoulder and pointing to the other end of the hallway, past the elevators, where a second stairway awaited.
“They might be coming up the other—” Alec’s warning was too late: Katrina stepped into the hallway and sent another shot that seemed to send Esmerelda stumbling back and falling down ten stairs to the landing. “Move!” Katrina barked.
Alec inhaled and took giant leaping steps down the hallway. He was more than halfway down the hall when the door started to open, and he glimpsed one skull-like face emerging—he raised his weapon, but before he could fire, he heard bullets whizzing by his head—
—and two more Calaveras were shot as soon as the door opened. Alec looked back, realizing Katrina had been shooting from behind him. Holding her gun with two hands, she methodically shot both assailants twice each.
“Next time, duck lower,” she instructed.
Alec stood, stunned, angry, flabbergasted, and more than a little terrified at his wife’s lethal power. What’s more, none of this seemed hard to Katrina. She just aimed and shot, and her aim always seemed to be true.
He was shaken out of his shock by his earpiece. “I’ve tracked the call to the room from a cell phone, and it’s really close!” Dee shouted.
***
Katrina and Alec scrambled back down the other staircase and headed toward the rear entrance that led to an alley behind the building. Alec ran toward the door, as Dee recited something about the signal from the cell phone moving rapidly, suggesting he was on foot or maybe on a bike. Alec burst through the condominium building’s rear door, out into the alley, greeted by a giant street art mural of the Virgin of Guadalupe.
Alec heard Dee say, “Right there!” and her voice was cut off by the sound of concrete breaking away from the mural. Two bullets, then a third and fourth, hit the mural, sending concrete powder raining upon Alec’s head.
He turned and saw an image that had terrified many unlucky targets of the cartels in the past several years: a giant, man-sized jaguar was roaring at him.
CHAPTER 31
A millisecond later, Alec’s eyes refocused and he realized it wasn’t a man-sized jaguar, and the roar was the sound of guns firing. It was a man in a realistic jaguar mask. Clad in a black leather motorcycle jacket and pants, he held a pair of Belgian-made FN Five-seven handguns and let out an animalistic shriek.
Many times, Jaguar’s otherworldly cry and visage had paralyzed his foes with fear. B
ut that night his aim was uncharacteristically bad, bullets defacing the Virgin painting around Alec instead of going right through him.
Even worse for Jaguar, Alec’s semi-panicked instinctive response was to raise his gun and blast away wildly. Jaguar had to suddenly slide to duck below the barrage from Alec, rolling to his left and twisting until he had ducked behind a small dumpster. Much to Jaguar’s surprise and irritation, the smug American who had taunted him on the phone wasn’t frozen in fear or running away. Alec just ran furiously in his direction, continuing to try to put shots through the dumpster. Alec fired his last shot, ejected the cartridge, and then leaped for cover towards the dumpster, crashing into it. The large metallic box had wheels on the bottom, and Jaguar found the dumpster slamming into him, knocking him down from a crouch and momentarily trapping his lower legs underneath it. He howled, reached around the corner of the dumpster and emptied his clip into the spot Alec had run a moment earlier. But Alec had already ducked behind the other side of the dumpster, huddled in a crouch, and slammed another clip into his gun.
Katrina emerged from the doorway, heard the sound of gunfire, and gaped at an absurd sight: Alec was crouching and firing above the dumpster, just above Juan the Jaguar’s head. The Jaguar crouched and fired around the side of the dumpster. The two men were no more than six feet away from each other, firing furiously in the general direction of each other, missing every time. She had seen it before, how peripheral vision could disappear in the intense adrenaline of a gunfight.
Katrina added her fire to the barrage against Jaguar.
Jaguar realized that he was under fire from two directions. He swore in Spanish as he retreated, backing up, and then scrambled on all fours around the corner toward the next street, Ignacio Chavez. He finally rose to a human stride and began to race away. Where the hell were the Calaveras?
***
“Dee, stay on that phone’s signal!” Alec said, running down the alley into the street, spotting the dark figure running in the opposite direction. He heard police sirens.
“Heading south—no, wait, he just cut east,” she said, following the dot on the map on her screen. Headed toward … Avenue Canal Nacional!”
Katrina caught up with Alec, then passed him. “Come on!”
“I hate it when they run,” he huffed and puffed. “This is why I shoot them, so I don’t have to run after them.” He stopped for a second, feeling a pain in his side. “Wait a minute, why are we running? We brought an SUV!” He pressed his earpiece. “Ward? Ward, where the hell are you?”
An ominous moment of silence followed. “Ward?”
He heard gunshots through his earpiece.
“Sorry, had to turn off comms for a second,” Ward said. “One of the Skull girls tried to jump me. I’m over in … where the hell am I? A block north of the condo complex.” Alec sighed. Too far away.
“Come on!” Katrina huffed into her earpiece. “He’s almost into the park!”
***
A few moments later, Alec and Katrina stood by the edge of the pitch-black expanse of the Xochimilco Ecological Park. They glanced back and heard the sirens of police responding to the condo complex, where they would find quite a few members of the Calaveras gang, dead from gunshot wounds.
They heard a splash. The brightly colored gondola-style floats and barges were all tied; during daytime, the water looked too murky and polluted to be home to many fish. No, it was a much larger animal that had disturbed the surface of the water. The night had been cloudy, with a forecast for rain, but for the moment, there was just enough ambient light from the city to show the movement, down the canal, too far away for any shot to be worthwhile, even with Katrina’s marksmanship.
Alec and Katrina hustled in that direction. Alec looked at the sludge floating on the surface of the water and shuddered at the thought of jumping into that heavily polluted waterway in pursuit. They’ll be pumping us full of antibiotics for weeks, Alec thought.
He turned and watched as Katrina dove in without hesitation. He grimaced and realized that he couldn’t fail to follow. He jumped in, too, making more of a cannonball. He was surprised to hit the bottom, and realized that the canal wasn’t deep at all, maybe six feet or so.
Their heads surfaced, and Alec did his best to not think of the multitudes of bacteria that were likely making their way into his body at that moment in every possible orifice. He wished he had night vision goggles. But Katrina just turned her head, listened, and pointed. “That island over there.”
They swam, noticing how overgrown and lush that island appeared. The trees seemed to be bursting with strange, large, lumpy fruit. As they swam closer, Alec began to wonder if they were sleeping birds, or some other strange animal. Monkeys? No, they didn’t seem to move, beyond swaying with the branches. There was movement by the tall grasses by the shoreline, and the figure, almost certainly Jaguar, crawled on all fours and disappeared into the bushes by the shore.
Katrina gave Alec a come on head shake, and the pair approached the shoreline. Alec was ready to curse the darkness, until he realized that at least for now, the darkness was his best protection. If it was a bit brighter, Jaguar, now ashore, could simply try to shoot him. Every moment in that canal water was basically an open invitation to flesh-eating bacteria or dysentery or God knows what. Once ashore, would Jaguar have a clear shot at them? Would the water jam Jaguar’s gun? Would it jam his own gun? Too many variables, even for his appetite for risk.
They crawled ashore. Alec didn’t feel that much better out of the filthy water; the thick tangle of trees and vines gave Jaguar all the cover he needed and then some. The moonlight and ambient light of the city couldn’t penetrate the branches and leaves. At any moment, two shots could ring out, and if Jaguar’s aim was true, that bacteria wouldn’t have time to do any more damage.
Katrina suddenly reached out and grabbed Alec, digging her fingers into his forearm so hard it hurt. Alec froze, wondering if he had just touched some tripwire or some other danger. He glanced over at his wife and saw a terrified look on her face, one he saw so rarely he could count on two hands the number of times he had seen it in more than a decade. This woman had just been brave enough to jump into sewage without a moment’s hesitation—what on God’s green earth could have stopped her in her tracks here?
After a moment of his eyes adjusting further to the darkness, he realized what she was looking at: the motionless body of a small child lying on the sand before them.
Wait, no. Not a child, a doll. A weathered, dirty old doll with one artificial eyelid closed and one open, staring creepily in their direction.
They exhaled together. Weird and creepy, but not, as they had both momentarily thought, the heart-stopping sight of a dead infant right before them.
Then the clouds parted again, and the moonlight illuminated the tree in front of them.
On every branch stood a child’s doll—ten, twenty, dozens, all staring vacantly, some from empty eye sockets, some missing limbs, some hanging from strings and ropes almost like nooses. Some just heads, and some eerily realistic.
Katrina’s eyes suddenly widened in terror and grasped her hands over her mouth just in time to stifle a scream. She had kicked down doors in some of the world’s most ruthless terrorists, but an endless jungle of creepy dolls staring back at her kicked her amygdala into overdrive. The wind picked up and the frozen smiles swayed, seeming to silently laugh at the hapless mortals beneath them.
Alec reached out and tried to put a reassuring hand on her shoulder—never mind he had nearly peed himself a moment ago when he saw all the creepy doll faces staring at him—and after a moment she downgraded to much milder nerves.
They peered and silently crept to where they had seen Jaguar climb ashore. Alec was half-prepared to see the tracks of a giant cat; the idea that the feral, ferocious, purring Juan Lopez was some sort of were-jaguar would have somehow made sense in light of the surreal events of recent days. But the shore revealed no footprints of any kind at all. Alec an
d Katrina shared a glance of disbelief.
She nodded, an indication that it was time to swim back to shore, and slowly started moving toward the water, continuing to scan the woods for any sign of Jaguar. Alec didn’t mind leaving, and it wasn’t just the persistent sense that the dolls were watching him. Just minutes earlier in the alley, feeling the adrenaline and the thrill of the chase, he felt unstoppable. The fact that Jaguar had somehow missed four shots at him—pockmarking what had been a rather impressive street art vision of the Virgin of Guadalupe—must have used up his last bit of luck for a while. Here, with all the dolls watching him, he sensed any risk would go against him.
Or maybe that was just the infectious brain-eating bacteria talking.
CHAPTER 32
Fifteen minutes later, Alec and Katrina sat quietly in the backseat as Ward drove them to one of the Agency’s safe houses. He made the traditional sudden turns to throw off anyone following them, but neither he nor Alec saw any indications they had picked up a tail. Katrina closed her eyes, seeming to do some sort of meditation to calm down from the adrenaline of the hallway gunfight, the chase through the Mexico City streets, and the bizarre, twisted sights of what they later learned was a macabre local tourist attraction, the Island of the Dolls.
Ward explained as they drove that apparently a young girl had drowned near the island many years ago, and shortly after the tragedy, the island’s caretaker had found the girl’s doll on the shore. He hung it from a tree in tribute, and the locals started doing the same out of sadness for the girl. The island caretaker felt haunted by the girl, and he continued to hang dolls and toys from the trees to bring her soul to rest. The caretaker lived on the island for fifty years … until the day he drowned, in nearly the same spot the girl did.
“That story is the opposite of helpful,” Alec responded.
He checked the messenger bag at his feet and the plastic bags within it. Thankfully, the two dips in the awful-smelling canals hadn’t damaged the evidence they had recovered from Jaguar’s apartment.