Jack Palms Crime Series: Books 1-3: Jack Palms Crime Box Set 1 (Jack Palms Box Sets)

by Seth Harwood

  53. Baby

  They release Jack from the hospital later that week, just after giving him another tasteless meal—this one a “lunch.” Gannon’s back at her condo, having left him on his own to get there. Sure, she said she’d look after him, but Jack’s not sure yet if he can trust her or if he should go back to Sausalito to take care of himself, go back to the old solitude. After all, it’s his shoulder that’s wrong, right? He should still be able to walk, jog, take care of himself.

  The nurse says the same thing: that he can walk, that he might as well not spend another night. It’s fine with him, is the truth of it. Any place is better than another night in the hospital with the lights on, funny sounds, and people coughing up and down the hall. For the first time all week, he slides out of the bed and puts his feet onto the cold linoleum floor. They’ve put the little hospital bootie-socks on his feet, the kind with nonslip rubber treads on the bottom. The kind of thing you wear when it’s going to be nothing more than socks on your feet for a while.

  But now it’s time for him to get dressed, to take off the gown and put pants on, get his shirt on and get out. He sits on the edge of the bed, wondering whether it’s really just his shoulder that’s the problem. The nurse’s left him alone, everyone else is gone; he’s by himself. Just him, the bed, the window, and his clothes. Out the window it’s grey fog, the usual San Francisco situation. Maybe it’s raining, but from the bed Jack can’t tell. From where he’s sitting, he can’t see any other buildings, just the fog. Somewhere out there beyond it is his house in Sausalito, the one with the broken back door, Victoria’s shelves in the kitchen, his Action Movie Guild award for Best New Actor, the burned bed, a nice, big, warm shower, his clothes, and a Ducati—his Ducati—in the garage. Other than grabbing his clothes and the bike, he can do without the rest. Probably time to sell the old place and move on. But to where?

  In the other direction, out there across the Bay, is Ralph Anderino’s empty house in El Cerrito, probably gone to one of his relatives and sold by now. There’s Officer Shaw’s house in Walnut Creek, his family, his life, Mills Hopkins’s house, wherever that is. Jack doesn’t even want to know what the people there are feeling today, what they’ve been going through.

  His hands on his knees, Jack coughs and feels a scratching in his lungs, something not right. Part of him wants a cigarette, something he hasn’t had since he was checked in, and part of him knows he’s just going to feel bad for a while after that much H—that there’s nothing he can do. He shakes his head, coughs again. In his chest he feels weak, like some kind of cold is building, and his bones hurt. He really just wants to sleep, to stay in bed for a long time. But not this bed. Whether he can do this at Gannon’s condo is unlikely. Maybe a hotel room downtown would make more sense—a hotel room anywhere.

  His bed at home is a charred, burned mess.

  He’s got about two hundred dollars in his wallet, money in the bank from the deal with Castroneves, and no money coming in from Mills Hopkins or the police for all his troubles. Nothing unless someone else on the force knows about their arrangement, which is unlikely.

  Somewhere else out there is Freeman Jones, fucked, not walking because Jack shot his knees up. He shakes his head, coughs again, hocking up some phlegm that he considers spitting onto the clean tiles of the hospital floor, then thinks better of it, swallows the mess.

  Freeman wouldn’t leave town, blow out of San Francisco and forget about all of this. Freeman would stay here.

  Jack closes his eyes, sees Mills Hopkins in front of him: the cop strapped to the bed, his shoulder all but gone, the look in his eyes resigned and like he’s just ready to go, to leave this world. Jack also sees his own hand on the gun, hears the sound of the shot. It’s not a sound he’ll forget. He still sees the face of the man he shot outside of Tedeschi’s cafe on Bartol, the man between the two cars. He had no choice about it, he tells himself—either shoot him or he’d have shot Shaw—but that doesn’t make the sight of his face go away.

  He rubs his eyes with his good hand, the one attached to the arm he can still move, the arm with the burn marks wrapped in gauze. His veins still feel like someone cleaned them with Drano, scraped them with a screwdriver, then poured hot coffee through. Something like that, something he knows is just the fact of his little taste of the old drug, the dip he took into the good that wasn’t good, what Akakievich did to him with the H.

  Fucking Akakievich.

  Jack shakes his head, thinking about the girls Akakievich had killed to get his message across to his big swinging dick customers. Guys like the mayor who probably won’t feel a damn bit of pinch for this, or like Franklin Clarence who took off but will get caught eventually, who fucked himself out of a job and a pension and whatever life he had that would lead him to a young Russian sex slave.

  Fuck all of them and their whole fucking mess.

  Jack puts his good hand on his knee and pushes himself up to stand. His back hurts. He coughs and then sighs. On the chair in front of him are his pants. The gown’s already off his left shoulder, folded inside the sling, and he pulls the rest of it off him, lets it drop off his right arm and to the floor. Naked, he looks down at his body, sees bruises, a cut on his left thigh, and the fact that he’s getting older. He’s even developed a bit of a paunch, an extra fold of skin around his middle. Probably the drinking has given him that.

  He reaches for his jeans and grabs them, sits back onto the bed and steps into them just like he’s done every other day of his life. His sneakers are under the chair and he puts them on over the hospital socks. Then he rings for the nurse to come help him get into his shirt.

  Downstairs and outside of the hospital, in the cold of the fog, he pulls his jacket around himself and steps into the cold wind. A strong breeze hits him and rushes up against his chest, and he wishes he could zip his jacket, but he can’t. It won’t fit, is just draped over his left arm and the sling. He holds it closed with his right hand.

  Shaw said that he left the Fastback in a garage, gave Jack directions on where to find it. He looks up the block, doesn’t see a garage, but starts to head up Hyde in the direction Shaw told him, up a steep hill toward Geary.

  He walks slow, coughing every ten feet or less. Maybe he won’t go to Jane Gannon’s, he decides. She has enough to deal with already. He doesn’t know where he’ll go beyond the car yet, knows only he’ll soon be back inside the Fastback that he hasn’t seen in too long. And when he’s there, then he’ll decide what to do next.

  He keeps on up the hill. It will take him a while to find the Mustang, though once he does he’ll know immediately it’s his, regardless of the new color. He’ll recognize it right away, then he’ll be part-way home, on his way back to a better version of himself, one ready to get through the days and weeks. Some part of him will be happy, because red or black, to his eyes, the 1966 Mustang Fastback k-code will have never, ever looked better.

  The Sinaloa Affair

  The Agent tested the tension on the rope for a second time. It would hold. Whatever purchase the grappling hook had found on the rocks above was enough. He readied himself to begin the climb.

  Just a few minutes before, he had come out of the water and shed his wet suit, changed into his standard black fatigues. The boat had dropped him two miles off the coast, leaving a swim of about forty-five minutes. Nothing more than what he had trained for. His pulse rate was already back to normal.

  Other than weapons and gear, his dry bag held a single liter of water—his last drink before the mission’s end. He drank down half of it and then hid the bottle between two rocks.

  He craned his neck and still couldn’t see the top of the climb. No matter. His night-vision goggles were dialed in, but the initial climb would be long. He jumped up onto the wall. Holding the rope with his hands, he began to scale the slick rocks. Even for a climber as good as the Agent, the seawall of this fortress didn’t offer many solid purchases.

  Somewhere far above, Archivaldo “El Guapo” Rivero Line
a, the head of the Sinaloa Cartel, Mexico’s largest drug distribution ring, had been staying in a seaside castle for weeks. Heat-signature images taken just that afternoon had confirmed El Guapo was definitively on location. That’s when the Mexican government, in cooperation with U.S. Armed Forces and black ops, decided to pull the string: send in a single-soldier unit, the best in the business, to infiltrate the compound, assess its defenses and the accessibility of the target, and to kill him if it proved necessary.

  Both governments wanted El Guapo brought in alive for the headline potential—to strike a blow against the cartels and to prove there was still a viable War on Drugs. In short, they wanted to act like the campaign against the drug trade wasn’t already over. This was the governments’ mistake and their fantasy. Even within black ops there were a handful still naïve enough to believe the war could be won.

  But the Agent wasn’t one of them. He’d seen the numbers: the amount of drugs on the streets, the casualties, the tons of illicit substances crossing U.S. borders each day. The idea of a War on Drugs was as antiquated as Nancy Reagan herself. The Agent didn’t care about the politics of anything. He was a realist, operating in actions, not words. There was no room for diplomacy in how he viewed things. Only successful and unsuccessful missions.

  If he found El Guapo and had his shot, he’d take it. The cartels would know the what and the who. That would be enough—a shot across the bow. The message delivered.

  Politics weren’t going to stop drugs from reaching America’s streets.

  Through the night-vision goggles, the Agent made out a small camera about forty yards up on the wall—twenty yards above his location. No one would be able to see him against the cold black night and the wall if the camera was being monitored, but when he climbed higher, it would pick him up with a movement sensor.

  He flattened himself against the wall and tied the rope on the harness at his belt. From his hip holster, he removed the Beretta Px4 Storm with suppression and laser sight, and aimed across his body with his right hand. With his night goggles and the laser sight, the shape of the camera and its lens stood out as clear as day. From his intel, the Agent knew enough about the brand of security systems El Guapo’s estate had purchased in the last three years so that he could calculate the camera’s rate of movement and how long he had to wait once he saw the shimmer of his laser sight against the glass lens for it to wind its way back again.

  He held his breath for the moment it took him to squeeze the trigger, and a quiet clink came from the camera’s position, as soft as a pebble tossed shyly against a pretty girl’s window. Just a tiny rock hitting glass, and it was done. He estimated eleven minutes before something tripped in the security system and someone realized the camera was out. What they would do about it he wasn’t sure. But given the hour, the quality of the equipment, and the camera’s accessibility, he guessed it would be light of day before any repairs were attempted.

  He held himself against the wall again as he slid the Beretta back into its holster. A specific tool for a particular job, just one of the many tools he carried for the range of tasks he knew he’d face this night.

  He climbed again, soon making out the faint image of a low concrete wall where the natural rock face gave way to man-made construction. Hand over hand and step-by-step, he continued to creep upward.

  There was a chance that one of the patrolling guards on the compound’s perimeter could look down the wall or come across his grappling hook. The first possibility didn’t worry him. The black of his clothes was disguise enough, all but rendering him invisible. The second possibility was more interesting. But now that he had reached the stage where he could see the hook’s placement it was no longer a concern. From this distance, he could neutralize any threat in the time it took them to see what was even there. He had passed one of the night’s first deadly tests.

  A brief margin of safety existed before he faced the next risk; one flirtation with death was over before he faced the next one. He didn’t mind. Rolling the dice was his stock in trade. He didn’t get to be the best by being cautious.

  The rope tight in his hands, he felt a sudden wiggle from its top. In an instant, he saw a flash from above, just the glint of light on glass. Not a camera, but the lenses of a guard’s eyeglasses or his night-vision setup. The Agent knew the flash would come again; his hook was lodged in tight against the concrete, its exploding talons having cut their way into the wall. The guard would need either a tool to dislodge it, or he’d need to cut the rope. Either way, the Agent would have his chance.

  He climbed with one hand ready on his weapon. The sooner this threat was put down, the better.

  This guard might tell others, sound an alarm, and the whole mission would be lost. But that went against the Agent’s intel, the best of his bets. He didn’t expect much from them even though they were guarding the head of the Sinaloa Cartel. Down in Mexico, men were more swagger and tequila than knowledge and training; most preferred to let a big gun do their work, with little behind it. This and the fact that El Guapo had spent time in two prisons in the last four years and was now lower down on the food chain reinforced his calm.

  Sure, El Guapo was still high enough for black ops to send the Agent, but the Medellín and Ochoa cartels, the real threats to the Sinaloa, would target their attacks elsewhere—even if they knew of the Los Cabos location, which was unlikely.

  The Agent picked up his pace. If he had to, he’d make a fast play at the wall to stop any move toward an alarm. But that didn’t prove necessary. In the next moment, the shine of glass returned. He saw a whole head now and one arm coming over the wall with a knife to cut his climbing cord. He waited an instant, wanting the tipping point of the guard’s balance to be past the edge before he fired. The body falling forward was key.

  Then he shot: a single bullet to the forehead that stopped any movement of the knife and the hand. The knife fell free, dropped right past the Agent’s position on the wall. He watched it pass, even considered catching it before deciding to let it fall.

  Now he took a deep breath, better to grab what oxygen he could before ripping off the last of the climb. The guard remained on the wall, enough of his body over it so he didn’t fall back, but not enough that he dropped like the Agent had wanted even though he had shot him at his farthest point over the wall. Sometimes it just came down to the odds. Play them the best you could. Roll the dice. Never make a mistake.

  He closed the gap to his grappling hook and reached up to grab the guard’s limp arm at the wrist. Bracing himself against the wall with both feet, still holding the rope with his off hand, he tugged once at the arm and then a second time, harder, finally getting the full measure of this soldier’s girth. Judging from the weight of the body, the Agent believed the guard might have resisted pulling an alarm purely out of sloth. That suited the Agent just fine.

  He pulled the enormous body over the wall and watched it fall. The guard’s gun, a simple Israeli-made Uzi, was still slung across his back as he went down.

  Far below him, the Agent heard the splash as the water broke, creating a liquid grave for the first corpse of the night.

  He hit the release on the grappling hook as soon as his hand caught the ledge, let the rope fall and the hook disappear, removing any sign of intrusion.

  When this thing was over, however it ended, he was going out one of two ways: diving over the wall to the water below or out the front door on his own two feet.

  He kicked his toe spikes—nothing more than modified crampons for climbing or combat—into the wall and peered over the ledge. Just as he’d hoped, the fat sentry had acted alone. No one else was within sight; no sign of lights, alarms, or any personnel watching him. And best of all, not a camera in sight.

  He vaulted over the wall and was in.

  He kept low, taking another look at his surroundings now that he had both feet on solid ground. He listened to his heartbeat, his pulse, the wind, any sign of approach. His breathing came back into line, his heart
rate slowed. For a moment, he closed his eyes. Less than one hundred yards from him, he heard footfalls: boots, two sets. Headed in the opposite direction.

  Around the corner of the small building he faced, two men were walking away. Not a threat.

  He listened for one last moment with his eyes closed, then heard his watch make its familiar tick and knew the night was getting shorter. Time to move.

  He opened the small computer screen on his wrist, a modified version of a smart phone. He pulled up daytime satellite images of the compound: its buildings—their balconies and individual heights—and the spaces between them—the walkways and grass, the three pools, the tennis court, the polo grounds.

  His intel identified two possible buildings that El Guapo could be using as his living quarters. Either one of them could be the location of his bedroom, or it could be both. Maybe he alternated between the two. Wouldn’t be the first time the Agent had seen a target exhibit this level of caution. Then there was also the chance that El Guapo didn’t sleep. This was the Agent’s best bet.

  If you were in charge of a significant portion of the world’s cocaine supply and felt the noose tightening around you—as El Guapo had to be by now—would you sleep? Not during the night, the Agent was betting.

  He chose to make his move toward El Guapo’s clubhouse. If he were El Guapo, it’s where he would be.

  Using his training in Japan, the Agent chose to pass across the compound’s roofs, as if he were a fourteenth-century ninja assassin. “Light as a feather, fast as a snake.”

  That mantra echoed through his head as he took the four steps to the closest wall and kicked onto it, launching himself to a windowsill, then jumping for the overhang and its gutter. He caught this with both hands, kicked the wall again, and flipped himself up onto the roof, not lingering on El Guapo’s gutters to see if they would support his weight.