“Man up. Looks like rain.”
Juan leaned forward and looked up through the windshield. The sky was indeed looking dark. It was as good a backdrop as any to face his brother in mortal combat. It’d also be a good day for Vaquero’s men to strike the safehouse . . .
“Penny for your thoughts?” she said.
“You don’t want to hear what’s on my mind.”
Cali reached into a container of macadamia nuts sitting in her lap and popped them into her mouth. “Sure I do.”
“Why?”
“We’re friends, you dolt. Besides, you really don’t want to hear my thoughts. It’d make you think I was crazy.”
“I already know that,” Juan said, and Cali punched him again. “Ow. What do you think about?”
“Mostly just stupid shit. Things I have no control over.”
“Me too. How do you cope?”
“I try to keep my mind engaged with something else, whether that’s catching bad guys or doing yoga. I like going for walks on the beach, too. With Schwarz.”
Juan laughed. “You know, up until two nights ago I never even knew you had a dog. Sometimes I think I must be blind.”
“You never saw the dog hairs on my clothes and wondered what they were from?”
“I just thought they were yours.”
She hit him again while keeping her eyes on the road. “You’re such a jerk.”
“And you’re such a . . . meanie.”
Their eyes met, and they laughed.
“Meanie? You poor thing. Getting beat up by a girl.”
“A very imposing girl.”
“Thanks. I guess.”
“Besides, you’re more like . . .”
“What? What were you going to say?”
“Well . . .” He didn’t want to say it; he didn’t want to get hit again. “One of the guys.”
“You’re a dick,” she said, and punched him for the third time. Then she shook her head and sighed.
“I didn’t mean it like that. I meant it in a good way. I still think you’re a very attractive woman . . .”
“Go on,” Cali said, watching the road.
“And a good friend. And everything.”
“Is that it?”
“Yeah. I guess. What about me?”
“What about you?” she said.
“It’s your turn to name all the good things about me.”
Cali thought about it. “Well, you’ve got a nice butt.”
“Wow. I feel so objectified. Thanks, I guess.”
“And you’re still a jerk.”
Juan threw his hands up. “There’s no pleasing you.”
“Nope,” she said. “Get used to it.”
Juan grinned and looked out the passenger side window.
Cali looked over at him. “Is it weird going back to the place?”
“A little bit. I can’t say I have a fondness for it.”
“I’m a little surprised Aguilar put you on the rotation. What does he have against you, anyway?”
“Is it that obvious?”
She nodded.
“We have a history is all,” he said. “Nothing to tell.”
Juan wished he could tell her that Aguilar had once shot dead an entire crew of robbers he had been rolling with while undercover. This was after the robbers had killed two people during a heist after swearing to him that no one was going to get hurt, but it was still cold-blooded murder—he’d shot them all in the back while they were playing poker in a smoky parlor beneath a restaurant to protect his family.
Juan had seen Aguilar, a detective at the time, coming out of the restaurant and figured out what had happened. While he’d made eye contact with Aguilar on the street, he didn’t think the man would remember him—they’d never actually met. Juan had sent an anonymous threat to Aguilar at his precinct the next day to get the detective to back off his smuggling operation. While it had worked, Juan should have known that Aguilar would remember his face all these years later. In fact, the man had probably connected his face with the threat he’d received.
Although Aguilar thought Juan might try to rat him out now, Juan had no such intention. He’d never had a family himself, but he liked to think he would do the exact same thing if in a similar position.
Aguilar could think what he wanted.
It was just another secret for Juan to keep.
He was really growing tired of keeping secrets—especially from those he was growing close to.
You’ve got a good team, Mika had said.
“Hell-ooo?”
Juan looked over at Cali. “Sorry. Zoned out.”
“You’re not kidding. I was just saying, maybe Aguilar’s not as clean as he tries to look. You know what they say about things looking too good to be true.”
Juan shrugged.
“I mean, the way he looks at us during briefings sometimes . . . It’s like he thinks he’s better than us Americans,” she went on. “Or maybe he just doesn’t trust us. You said yourself that someone is trying to kill you. Maybe it’s him.”
Juan considered this. “I don’t think so,” he said at last. “But it’s like Niña said. You can never really know someone, I guess.”
“I like to think you can,” Cali said. And then, “Who’s Niña?”
“You jealous?”
“No,” she said, perhaps too quickly.
“An important influence in my life. When I was a kid.”
“Sounds like pretty deep insight for a kid.”
“Maybe I was a mature kid.”
Cali looked over at him. “Yeah, right.”
They both laughed.
“We’re here,” Cali said.
It looked smaller than Juan remembered. And the brown vinyl siding still looked ugly.
Juan walked around the side where three men had been killed and stacked against the house when Mika was abducted. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t unsee the bodies. They’d had families, and they’d died because of him.
Juan turned and rotated his shoulder to straighten out the persistent pain that flared up at the worst times. It felt like his shoulder was dislocated. “You ever get tired of the pain?” he asked Cali as she walked around the side of the house to find him. He looked at the small cut on her cheek from the siege at the Shed. Again, he reflected on how lucky they’d been last night.
What if next time it’s not Mika but Cali who gets hurt?
“Not really,” she said as she stepped up to him. She drew her arm back as if to punch him in the face and then feinted to the side, punching his shoulder instead. His arm popped back into its socket, and she frowned. “And neither do you, or else you wouldn’t keep hanging around me.”
They walked inside the safehouse for the change of shift. The interior was comprised of an open living room and kitchen area with a hallway at the back leading to a bedroom on the left and a bathroom on the right. It still looked relatively the same.
Sanchez and Boraita rose from their stools around the kitchen island and shook their hands.
“All was quiet,” Boraita said.
“Target mostly stayed in the bedroom, reading books and stuff,” Sanchez added.
Cali glanced at the hallway. “He hasn’t had a nervous breakdown and tried to make a run for it?”
Both men shook their heads. Boraita slapped Sanchez on the back. “Well, you ready to go back to civilization? I’ve been craving one of those glazed donut burgers from that uh . . . what’s it called . . . restaurant on 8th Street.”
“Yeah, I could eat,” Sanchez said. “Man can only eat so many deli meat sandwiches and Easy Cheese.”
They slapped Juan on the shoulder and nodded to Cali.
Juan watched them walk shoulder to shoulder toward the beat-up, unmarked police truck he and Boraita had taken to surveil the first safehouse. “They make a cute couple,” Juan said as he shut the front door.
“Too cute,” Cali said.
They walked over to the three policemen who wer
e also stationed inside the safehouse with the witness. One was at the kitchen island making a sandwich and drinking mango juice. Another was sitting in a wooden rocking chair in the living room next to a bulletproof window, and the third was coming out of the bathroom. Juan knew these had to be fine, upstanding officers, hand-picked by Aguilar himself.
“How you guys doing?” Juan said.
They shrugged noncommittally and resumed what they were doing, so Juan and Cali checked in on the witness. As Sanchez said, the witness Christian Mana was down the hallway and in the bedroom reading a book. He was wearing shorts and a t-shirt, and his serious face suggested he was not enjoying his time here. One of his arms was in a sling from the being shot at the first safehouse.
Juan didn’t try to make conversation with the witness, instead choosing to leave the man alone. He sympathized with the man because people were trying to kill him as well.
A long peal of thunder crackled, and the policeman by the window glanced out and shrugged.
“Who wants to play cards?” Juan said.
Cali excused herself to use the bathroom while Juan rummaged through the kitchen drawers. He knew there was a deck here somewhere; he had played solitaire before the party his team had thrown for him here months ago.
Juan smiled at the recollection.
He pulled out an island drawer and winced at the hefty chef’s knife inside it. Shaking his head, he pushed the drawer back in. There was a flash of lightning at the window, and white light silhouetted the policeman sitting in the rocker.
Juan was suddenly overcome by a wave of unease. It was like a sixth sense honed over years of flirting with death, a warning siren only he could hear.
He tensed and waited, but nothing happened. Cali came out of the bathroom, and he moved over to the next drawer. He found the deck of cards.
“You okay?” Cali said.
“Why do you ask?”
“Your face is pale.”
“Must be the lighting in here.”
Juan tensed again as he waited for the world to end—for Paul to come bursting through the reinforced front door with a machine gun—but nothing happened. There was another flash of lightning, and then another peal of thunder.
It’s just the storm.
He folded out a small study table and two aluminum chairs on either side of it. Then he shuffled the cards and dealt Cali and himself five cards. The rest of the deck he placed in the center, flattened out in a spiral.
Cali picked up her cards. “What kind of game is this?”
“Go Fish.”
“That’s a kid’s game.”
Juan heard one of the police officers chuckle.
“Hey. Dealer’s choice, okay?”
“Whatever. I haven’t played this in probably twenty years.”
“Looks like I’ll have the advantage then,” Juan said.
“Cheater.”
“How am I cheating? It’s dealer’s choice. What do you want to play?”
Juan looked up in time to see the policeman by the window mouth the words strip poker.
“War,” Cali said.
“Never heard of it,” Juan said, then asked for a seven.
“Go fish,” she said. And then, “You’ve never heard of War? What rock have you been hiding under?”
“I’m just kidding,” Juan said, and drew a card from the pile. “Your turn.”
“I know how to play Go Fish.”
“Enough talking. Play, woman.”
A particularly loud crash of thunder shook the safehouse. The lights, powered by a generator, didn’t flash. Juan realized just how dark it was outside now as sheets of rain swept sideways against the window.
Play continued, each of them asking for a card and then feigning indignance when they had to draw from the pond until Cali looked at Juan, her eyes suddenly alert.
“What?” Juan said, whispering for some reason.
“I never heard Boraita and Sanchez leave.”
“How could you? With the storm.”
“You know how loud that truck is. We’d have heard it backfire when it started up.”
“Shit.”
She was right. Maybe that’s what had tripped his senses when he was looking for the cards.
“Maybe they’re just sitting in the cab. Waiting out the storm?”
Cali pulled her cell phone from her hip holster and tried calling Sanchez. “Damnit. No signal. I’m going to check if they’re still here,” she said as she got up and started for the door before Juan could stop her. She looked through the glass peek hole in the door as an even louder boom shook the safehouse.
“That sounded close,” the policeman leaning against the kitchen counter said in between mouthfuls of sandwich.
The policeman by the window turned to look at him, his face pale. “That was no lightning strike.”
Thunder roared again, and all the lights in the safehouse went out.
36
The Stand
“That’s not good,” the policeman eating the sandwich said, his hand on his gun.
Juan shot to his feet and rushed toward Cali.
He was too late—a bullet smashed through glass with a dull, muffled chinking sound.
By the time Juan reached Cali, her body had already hit the vinyl floor.
“Cali.” He bent over her body, grabbed her shoulder.
As if in slow motion, Juan turned in time to see the policeman by the window fall sideways over the arm of the rocking chair. The chair tipped, spilling the man to the floor, his eyes seeing right through Juan, a black circle on the man’s forehead, the back of his skull sprayed across the refrigerator door and kitchen counter. There was a tiny hole in the bulletproof window he’d been sitting next to.
Cali opened her eyes, and Juan lifted his hand from her shoulder. She rolled to the side and drew her gun, coming up on her knee in a shooter’s stance. Juan already had his gun out and was crouching beside her with his back to the wall.
The policeman who had been eating dropped what was left of his sandwich and fell to the floor behind the kitchen island as another bullet chinked through the window, the bullet boring into an overhead cabinet just behind where the man’s head had been. China shattered inside the cabinet.
“That’s one big-ass rifle,” Cali said.
“Yeah,” Juan said. “The truck still out there?”
Cali nodded. “One of them is facedown in the mud. I couldn’t tell if it was Boraita or Sanchez.”
Shit.
“Did you see anyone else out there?”
She shook her head. “It’s storming like a mother out there. I don’t know who’s behind that rifle, but that is some impossible shooting.”
Juan agreed, keeping his back against the wall. He closed his eyes.
Paul . . .
“If they’re going for the witness, got to be at least five,” Cali said. “Going to use the storm as cover while they breach the place and butcher us all.”
Juan didn’t think the men were after the witness at all. More likely, it was the ELEPHAS hit squad from the prior night come to finish the job with Paul behind the rifle. He didn’t want to tell Cali that, though. They might be able to handle a bunch of sicarios, but those snake men?
“We won’t let them,” Juan said. “Follow me.”
He crawled behind the kitchen island where the sandwich policeman was crouching with his gun at the ready. It was just light enough to make out the policeman’s figure. When the lightning flashed, Juan could see the fear etched on the man’s face. The look in his wide eyes said, I didn’t sign up for this!
Juan heard the sound of a door slamming shut, and he peeked over the countertop down the hallway. The third policeman was pounding on the door to the witness’s bedroom.
“Just the other policeman,” Juan said. “I’m going to check on him.”
Keeping as low as he could, Juan crept around the corner of the island, glancing toward the window above the tipped rocking chair. Lightning flashed,
and he saw the dark, solid outline of a figure looking in. Juan almost fired his gun but didn’t as he turned into the hallway. The policeman was really beating on the door now. He looked about to kick it in when Juan said, “Hey!”
The policeman turned and saw that it was Juan. He fired his gun twice at point-blank range.
Cali heard the gunshots. She made it to the hallway in time to see Juan’s body jig left—then right—and slam backward into the wall, both shoulder blades punching holes in the thin interior walls. He slid sideways and wavered as he tried to steady himself with his palms.
Then the policeman fired a third time into Juan’s chest.
Juan slumped to the hallway floor with choking gasps.
Cali put four rounds through the policeman’s chest, but he was wearing a Kevlar vest. Stunned, his back slammed against the bedroom door as he raised his gun to shoot at her.
Cali pistol-whipped his wrist; he dropped the gun. Then she shoved her forearm against the man’s collarbone with such force that the bedroom door burst inward, and she fell on top of him, her knee running up into his gut.
“Why’d you do that?” she said. A tear fell to the man’s cheek as she hovered over him, her gun lowered at his face. From this distance she couldn’t miss. “You shot him. Answer me, damnit!”
“He works for Vaquero—he was trying to kill me!”
Cali looked up at the witness thrusting his hand accusingly down at the policeman under her. “You’re dirty?”
Her finger tightened over the trigger as the policeman raised his hand and knocked her aim to the side. The gun discharged, sending a bullet tearing through the queen-sized mattress beside them. The policeman slapped a hand against Cali’s face and chin, tried to shove her to the side.
Cali bit his hand.
“Arrgh!”
The man pulled back his hand, and Cali was able to break free from his grasp. She slammed the butt of the gun against the side of his head. His eyes wiggled and bobbed and then closed. His arms fell at his side.
“You know this man?” Cali asked the witness.
“No. But they’re coming. They’re going to kill me. I knew it. I knew the police couldn’t keep me safe.”
Cali looked at the man, rage filling her vision. Because of this man, Paul had been shot . . .
The Colombian Rogue Page 24