Allowing me to find out his true identity would be the biggest, and last, mistake that Eddie would ever make.
We would arrange a handoff for the scarab to string him along, but I planned on getting to him first. He was so fixated on getting it that a preemptive strike would be the last thing that he’d expect.
And what was in there that made it so valuable? The metal was something hard and black that I couldn’t recognize. The glowing amber liquid was a mystery. Nervous that I’d had it next to my skin for so long, I’d had Reaper check it with a Geiger counter. It wasn’t radioactive, and he couldn’t recognize it, so Reaper had hypothesized that perhaps the glow was some sort of bioluminescence. In other words, it might be alive.
Maybe it was some sort of bio-weapon? But its setting didn’t make any sense for that. Reaper, being absurdly inquisitive, had wanted to crack it open so he could get a sample to test. I’d shot that down, because I was afraid that opening it would kill us all. I just wanted to get rid of it as fast as I could. Maybe I was psyching myself out, but it made me uncomfortable just looking at it. All that we knew for sure was that it was more valuable than all of the other treasures in the prince’s vault and that Eddie was willing to kill crowds of people to get it.
My cell phone began to vibrate in my pocket, interrupting my thoughts of revenge. Glancing around, I made sure that there were no other passengers along the railing, just a couple of filthy seagulls. It was a forwarded voice mail from another one of my numbers. Suspicious, I punched in the security code. I did not give that phone number to very many people.
“You said not to use any names, so I hope you recognize my voice.” It was Jill Del Toro. “I hope you guys are doing okay with that thing you were working on. The date’s passed. I’m settled in pretty good here, thanks to you.” I was embarrassed to find myself grinning stupidly, not the way a cold-blooded criminal was supposed to act, but it was good to hear the recording of her voice. “You said to contact you if I needed help. There is something going on, something related to what happened before, from when you found me. I don’t know who else to turn to. Lo—” She caught herself then continued. “Please call me.”
She rattled off a phone number and the message ended. I dialed the number; it had an American area code, but I didn’t know which state it was for. An answering machine picked up.
“Hi, you’ve reached Peaches. Leave a message.” It was Jill’s voice; damn Reaper and his stupid stripper-name fake IDs.
“Got your message. I, uh . . .” What was I supposed to say? It wasn’t like I didn’t have more important things going on. Eddie needed to be dealt with. I had a mystery bug full of something glowing and apparently alive, and a crown prince who would have me fed to his tigers if he found out I’d been the one to steal it. My family was still in danger, and the only surviving member of my crew was healing from multiple gunshot wounds.
She had never even been a real member of my team. Like Carl said, she was just some stray that I had saved from Adar’s goons. She had even turned her back and walked away, so as not to sully herself in my gritty illegal world. I was a hardened, professional criminal. I didn’t have time for helping people out of sentimentality.
“I’m coming. Call me when you get this and let me know where to meet you.” I folded the phone and stuck it back in my pocket. “Fuck!” I shouted. The seagulls scattered, squawking at my vehemence.
Screw it. I was running out of friends. I could arrange a meeting with Big Eddie in the States just as easy as I could meet him in Egypt.
Change of plans. I was going home.
LORENZO
Santa Vasquez, Mexico
June 24
The chubby man wiped his brow as he entered the little office. Massive sweat rings had pooled in his armpits. He’d been working outside on the tiny airport’s asphalt runway, and it was over a hundred degrees. He dropped the bag containing his lunch on the desk and immediately turned on the oscillating fan, sticking his face directly in front of it. He never heard me rise from behind the filing cabinets.
I wrapped my arm around his throat, other hand clamping over his mouth, locking him right down. “Make a noise and I’ll snap your neck,” I whispered. He nodded slowly. “Good. Don’t reach for the gun in your desk. I’ve already taken it. Go for the knife in your pocket and I kill you. Comprende?” He nodded again. I removed my hand slowly but kept up the pressure so he could barely breathe.
“What do you want?” he whispered, terrified.
I slowly reached down and lifted his lunch bag from the table, bringing it up to our faces, and smelled it. Ham, eggs, bacon, guacamole, jalapeÒos, on fresh baked bread, oh yeah . . . I hadn’t eaten since the flight. I was starving. “I want your lunch. Dude, Lomitos Argentinos? This stuff is going to kill you. I see Juanita’s still trying to fatten you up. It’s working.” I patted his gut.
He hesitated. It had been years. “Lorenzo?”
I let go of his throat. “What’s up, Guillermo?”
He spun around, eyes widening in shock. “Pendejo! You scared the piss out of me!”
I put my finger in front of my lips, signaling the need for quiet. “I snuck in. I didn’t want anybody else in your outfit to know I was here. What’s up, man?” I grinned.
He crushed me in a hug. “You always were a scary bastard,” he said as we clapped each other on the back. Guillermo let go and studied me. “But what’re you doing here? I thought you guys were in Thailand? Where’s Death Train? Where’s Carl? The asshole still owes me money.”
Guillermo Reyes and I went way back. I shook my head. “Big Eddie killed them.”
“Oh, shit. Sorry, man,” he said. “That sucks. They were good men, honorable men. I hadn’t heard . . .” Realization dawned. “Hey, man, I don’t do nothing with Big Eddie anymore. He’s too crazy. The money’s not worth it. That man gives me nightmares.”
“I know,” I said quickly. “I don’t want you to get involved.”
It was obvious that was a relief. “Well, thanks for sneaking in. Last thing I want is being seen with somebody Big Eddie’s looking for. I like not getting my house burned down with me in it, know what I mean?”
“I need a favor.”
Guillermo scowled. He knew exactly what kind of favor somebody like me probably needed. “I’m a legitimate businessman now.”
“Legitimate my ass. That’s why this dinky airstrip has fifty flights a day taking off? Sightseeing?”
He smiled; once a crook, always a crook. “Smuggling is a legitimate business. All right, I still owe you a favor.”
Once upon a time—well about eight years ago— Guillermo had pissed off a certain group of drug dealers. They’d decided that for his disrespect the lovely young Reyes family needed to die. But before that could happen, Carl, Train, and I had made all those bad men go quietly away forever. We’d staged our own little Dia De Los Muertos, only with real dead people, and kept their money. Good times.
“A favor? You owe me like five.” He had three kids, so he knew exactly what I was talking about. “But I’m not picky. I just need intel. It’s been a really long time, and I need to cross the border tonight.” It would have been nice to fly directly into the states, but since I had no idea what the mystery item in my possession was, I had not wanted to try to bluff my way through US Customs. Those guys were actually really good at their jobs. The officials at the Mexico City airport were a lot easier to work with once you passed over the mordida. Reaper was still in Cairo recuperating. Once I had a clue where I was going, he would just fly directly there to meet me. Travel was much simpler when you weren’t smuggling glowing beetle vials.
“Whoa. Lorenzo is going back to the States? Are you loco? You need a place to hide, I can help you. I’ve got a little place back in the mountains. Beautiful. You stay there as long as you want.”
“No. I’ve got to do this. I just need to know where it’s safe to cross.” The last time I’d been here, Mexico still had a semi-functioning government. I didn�
��t know what the border was like anymore. For all I knew, the Americans had actually secured it since then. “I only need to get into Arizona.”
Guillermo plopped into his seat and opened his lunch. He pulled a giant knife from his pocket, flicked it open, and sliced his messy sandwich in two. He passed me the smaller side. “So, you were thinking that with a full-on revolution south of the border, your countrymen would actually be paying attention?” He laughed. “Man, you worry too much. Paying attention would cost money and be racist. Some movie stars said so. The military is for rent in this State. You got some extra money and I’ll send you across with an army tank if you want.”
So, just as lax as usual. Figures. “No tanks.”
“Seriously, man. It’s so open that it’s getting bad for business. I’m a professional, I run a clean outfit, but now I’ve got to compete with every coked-out asshole who’s just itching to shoot up innocent bystanders. And those UN pinche faggots—gotta bribe them more often than I did the old Federales. And you won’t believe this. I’ve got rag-heads sneaking across the border to blow shit up. Hell, about once a week now I get some dude named Achmed, pretending to be Mexican, crossing the border with bombs or poison gas or some scary shit. You know me, I kill those putas on sight.”
“That’s mighty nice of you, Guillermo.”
He snorted. “They start blowing up schools in Happytown, USA, and it turns out they crossed here, and then the US overreacts once the shit’s already blown up, and it’ll kill business for us regular guys. It’ll go from one Border Patrol per hundred square miles to a thousand Navy SEALs. I know how you Americans do it. You love to lock the barn after all the horses are gone. It’s getting bad lately. The world’s getting crazier, I tell you.”
It was kind of sad when smugglers were our first line of border security. The food was amazing. Juanita was still a great cook. “Got a map?”
***
Santa Vasquez stank.
The smell was a combination of chemicals, garbage, open sewer, and crowded humanity. I had been all over the Third World, and this town had to be in the middle of the list of olfactory offenders. It was worse than Afghanistan, where the stink of dried human waste was embedded into the dust, but it was far better than the shallow-grave smell of Bosnia back when everything fell apart there.
The town was on the other side of the sagebrush-covered hillside, but the prevailing winds still carried the funk toward the Arizona border. It was night and dark enough that I could barely make out the rest of the group stumbling northward. During the day illegals tended to walk in bunches, but at night they unconsciously strung out into a single-file line. I could hear the sloshing of the milk jugs of water that everyone else was carrying. The ground was rough, uneven, and strewn with trash.
I was dressed like the other border jumpers. Rough jeans, a button-down work shirt, and a ratty ball cap. I was unshaven and had not bathed since my flight had landed in Mexico City yesterday morning. I was traveling light, just a small pack and some water. The drug mules were the ones with the burlap forty-five-pound backpacks, and their tracks tended to leave deeper heel prints. Those were the ones that the Border Patrol paid extra attention to, and those boys knew how to track. Once I split off from the herd, I didn’t want my footprints to stand out.
It was late June and hot, but my body was acclimatized to the Middle East. This was pleasant by comparison. We were 5,000 feet farther above sea level than I was used to, so I was a bit out of breath. The border was a hundred yards away, and Guillermo said that the terrain was rough enough and covered in ocotillo that it was a rare occurrence to have Border Patrol vehicles in the area. Since I wanted to be discreet, Guillermo had pointed me to this section. The path was through a rough, hilly area. If any of my fellow travelers got picked up by the USBP, they would be detained, given a Capri Sun drink and a picante-flavored cup of noodles, fingerprinted, and bussed back across the border. For me, I was armed, smuggling something priceless, and had no idea what kind of flags my fingerprints might raise in America, so better safe than sorry.
Jill had not called me back yet, and it was beginning to worry me. I had left a message with the Fat Man to tell Eddie that I would arrange a drop-off within the week. The last thing I wanted was for him to get jumpy. When Eddie gets jumpy, people get burned.
There was movement in the sagebrush ahead. Instinctively, I took a knee and crouched low. The other illegals—technically I suppose I was an illegal, too, even if I was an American citizen—kept walking. They were talking, laughing; a few had ear pieces in and were listening to radios or iPods. I had the impression that most of them had done this before. Pulling the night-vision monocular from a pocket, I pressed it to my eye and scanned the horizon.
Vehicles at the border. Damn it, Guillermo. Staying low, I moved off to the side. Thousands of people walk across this border every day, and I have to blunder into a section that was actually covered by La Migra. We were in a natural gully with rocky hills surrounding us. It looked like it would be one heck of a climb. I sighed. Apparently I would be taking the high road.
Twenty minutes of hard scrambling later, I was on the top of the rocky hillside. The terrain up here was horrible, but I was certain that I wouldn’t run into any more inconveniences. Only a crazy person or somebody who really wanted to avoid getting spotted was going to take this path into Arizona.
Somebody was coming.
Give me a break. I settled myself into a depression in the rock beneath some prickly pear and scanned through my monocular. Three men were on the steep hillside above, moving through the shadows. They were dressed similar to me, each carrying a heavy pack, and were having a tough time moving through the thick brush and cacti. Probably drug runners. I stayed hidden. Most mules were unarmed, just regular Joses roped into carrying the packages in exchange for passage, but in every group there was usually one actual bad dude with a gun.
I watched them pass. Two of them had long tubes strapped to their packs. They paused just past me at the lip of the hill and examined the trucks parked below. One of them pointed and spoke. It wasn’t in Spanish. My ears perked up. I recognized the language. No way. I crawled forward slightly, careful to not shift any of the rocks. Scorpions crawled under my body. The man said something else before turning toward the border and continuing on.
What the hell were Chechens doing crossing the American border?
Guillermo hadn’t been kidding. It was getting crazy around here. I refocused the monocular and took a closer look. Those tubes looked suspicious.
Oh, wow.
I pulled my STI 9mm from my holster, the Silencerco suppressor from my pocket, and began screwing them together. Not in my country, assholes.
***
A few hours later, I stood inside a gas-station phone booth in a town north of Nogales, Arizona. It was close to three in the morning and the little desert town was utterly silent. A stray dog watched me from under the gas station’s neon sign. Loud insects buzzed around the glass.
“Sheriff’s Department.”
“Listen to me very carefully,” I said, adding a Mexican accent to my voice. “There are three dead men on the American side of the border, just north of Santa Vasquez.”
“Okay, and who is this?” The deputy sounded almost bored. Apparently multiple dead bodies were not that strange of an occurrence on the border.
“I’m the man that killed them.”
“Wait, what?” That got his attention.
“The men were crossing the border. They were Chechen terrorists.” I was careful not to touch anything in the booth in a way that would leave fingerprints. My rough clothes were splattered with dried blood.
“Chechens, like from Chechnya?”
“Yes. Write this down.” I rattled off the GPS coordinates. “That’s where you’ll find the bodies. There’s a missile hidden under some rocks ten meters east of the bodies.”
“A missile?”
“Look, I’m just a coyote,” I lied, “but I don’t want
guys like that shooting down airliners, you know what I mean. I’m calling because one of them talked before he died. There will be a second group crossing the border in the same area just before dawn.”
“Sir, I need—” I hung up the phone and quickly walked to the still running Ford Explorer. The last Chechen had talked all right, encouraged by some expedient use of my Greco knife. There had been a vehicle waiting for them, but I didn’t feel the need to tell the deputy about where I had left the driver’s body. Besides, I had needed a ride.
I had dealt with people like them before, bloodthirsty fanatics who just plain liked to kill innocent people. The average American had no idea what was waiting for them out in the world, and there was some serious badness crawling across the country’s soft white underbelly. At first I had assumed that it was just random chance that had allowed me to bump into those men, but I had a sneaky suspicion that Guillermo might have put me on that particular path for a reason, and probably saved him some work, the sneaky bastard.
Warning the cops about the second group of Chechens would count as my good deed for the day. Never hurts to put a check in the positive-karma box. I wiped some of the dried gore from my hands with a rag as I drove north. That third terrorist had been pretty tough, but everybody talks eventually. In the back seat was the second portable Russian surface-to-air missile launcher. I figured it might come in handy.
Flagstaff was my next stop. If my attempt on Eddie failed, then I knew he would kill my family purely out of spite. They deserved a warning. And there was only one person I could think of who might be clever enough to reach them all without Eddie’s goons finding out.
Too bad he was an FBI agent. I bet you thought your family reunions were awkward.
LORENZO
Flagstaff, Arizona
June 25, 2008
My brother’s house was in the suburbs. It had been easy enough to find with the address written in Eddie’s folder. The sun had been coming up by the time I found the place, so I had just done a quick drive-by. I had no way of knowing if or how Eddie was monitoring them, so I didn’t want to risk a visit during the daytime. Plus, I looked like I was here to pick fruit, smelled horrible, and was still splattered with at least a pint of Chechen.
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