Cartel

by Chuck Hustmyre

Then he noticed something that seemed out of place, two Cadillac Escalades idling at the bottom of the U, next to the portico, under which there appeared to be some kind of disturbance going on. Rodrigo drove to the front of the line and jerked the truck to a stop when he got close enough to see what was happening. Four men with M-16 assault rifles were backing away from the school's main door. One of them was also carrying a kicking, squirming, screaming bundle under his arm. The bundle was dressed in a school uniform skirt and blouse, with high socks and blue and white leather shoes. The bundle had long black hair.

  Rosalita.

  A trio of nuns followed the kidnappers, their hands raised in supplication and no doubt begging the gunmen not to take the little girl. The men ignored them.

  One of the gunmen stopped and aimed his rifle at a fat security guard who stood on the concrete apron under the portico. In response to a command from the gunman, the ter-rified guard plucked his revolver from its holster and dropped it. The steel made a loud clank as it hit the concrete. The gunman smiled and the security guard seemed to relax. Then the gunman shot the guard in the chest with a short burst from his M-16. The crack of the high-velocity shots echoed down the driveway as the blast drove the guard backward and then dumped him in a heap on the concrete just a few feet from his discarded revolver.

  The nuns screamed and crossed themselves. One knelt beside the dying guard. Rodrigo crossed himself too and sent a quick prayer up to God asking him to bless the security guard's soul and to look after his family.

  Some of the drivers waiting to pick up students sprang out of their cars in panic and ran. Rodrigo stayed in his truck, sitting motionless behind the steering wheel and wait-ing as the gunmen strolled back to their SUVs. The man car-rying Rosalita tossed her into the back seat of the lead Cadil-lac and climbed in after her. A second man got into the front passenger seat, and the other two gunmen climbed into the second SUV. Then the two vehicles raced to the end of the driveway and sped away.

  Rodrigo stepped on the clutch and pulled the shift lever on the steering column down into first gear. For just a sec-ond he looked at the nuns, all three of them now huddled around the guard's body, their habits stained with his blood. Then Rodrigo popped the clutch and mashed the gas pedal to the floor.

  Chapter 58

  Scott and Benny stepped down from the city bus into a derelict neighborhood in northwest Laredo. Beater cars lined the streets and local punks stood in clusters, most of them looking like they were still wearing their pajamas, doing a lot of nothing except smoking cigarettes and drinking beer. And eyefucking the newcomers.

  Across the street from the bus stop Scott saw a Section Eight apartment complex where he and his team had execut-ed a series of search warrants during his second month as resident agent in charge. They had pulled out five kilos of cocaine, three pounds of meth, two AK-47s that had been converted to fully automatic, arrested nine people, and seized $22,000 in cash. Garza was the case agent and Kat had made some of the undercover buys that led to the search warrants. It was a good case and convinced Scott that he had done the right thing transferring down to the border. This was the front line of the War on Drugs. This was where he belonged.

  Except now everything was different. Scott had seen the video. He had peeked behind the curtain and knew that a U.S. official had made a deal with the Sinaloa cartel and was actively helping the cartel smuggle tons of illegal drugs into the United States. How much of the cocaine and meth that his team had seized in that apartment complex been sanctioned by elements within his own government?

  And now that he knew, what was he supposed to do with that information? As a frontline soldier in this so-called war, what was he really fighting for? What had his fellow agents died for? Was it nothing more than a holding action, like the last years of Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan, places where thousands of American troops had continued to fight and die long after the politicians had given up?

  A train whistle blew in the distance.

  "We need to go," Benny said.

  Scott realized he had been staring at the apartment block across the street in a kind of nostalgic daze. He smiled at Benny. "I'm waiting on you."

  She smiled back and led the way down the sidewalk.

  The local shitheads gave them some hostile stares, but Scott and Benny ignored them.

  After a couple of blocks, Scott said, "You still haven't told me how we're going to get across the border."

  "Only because I didn't want to scare you."

  He laughed. "Too late for that."

  The train whistle blew again. This time closer.

  "How do you feel about trains?" Benny asked.

  "I've never actually ridden a train. Why?"

  Benny turned right at the next corner.

  * * * *

  Gavin raced the Suburban north on Highway 1472, zig-zagging between cars, even once passing on the shoulder when he got jammed up behind two slow-movers.

  "Next right," Jones said, staring down at the GPS track-ing app on his iPad. "We're less than two miles from them."

  After banging a hard right, Gavin slowed. The sudden change of speed made Jones glance up from his screen. "Why are you slowing down?"

  "We're in a neighborhood."

  "The targets are a mile away."

  "And we'll never make it if we crash."

  Jones looked back down at the screen. "Take the third left."

  The neighborhood they were in may as well have been on the other side of the border. There wasn't one sign written in English, and Mexican gangbangers were hanging on every corner. Half of them had no shirts, most of the other half wore tank-top undershirts, what the trailer park set called "wife beaters." All of them showing lots of ink, their hands holding nothing but cigarettes and quart-sized bottles of beer. Gavin had never used drugs, not even marijuana, and didn't know much about them, but he suspected that some of the cigarettes he saw these punks sucking on probably weren't packed with tobacco. He also knew that this wasn't America anymore, at least not the America he had grown up in.

  "Left, left, left!" Jones shouted, jabbing his finger at a fast-approaching side street.

  Gavin jerked the wheel hard over. The tires squealed and the centrifugal force tossed them to the right as the Sub-urban slid through the turn.

  "What were you doing," Jones snapped as soon as they were back on course, "taking a nap?"

  Gavin stared at him. He was getting tired of this pencil-necked spook. "I made the turn, didn't I?"

  "Watch the road," Jones said. Then he turned back to his iPad screen. "We're only half a mile from them."

  Gavin kept driving.

  * * * *

  Benny dropped to her hands and knees and crawled through a hole in a rusted chain-link fence behind an aban-doned furniture store. Scott had to take off the straw hat he had appropriated from the man in the hotel and get down on his belly to squeeze through.

  Two teenaged boys sat on the loading dock at the back of the store, their feet dangling over the ledge as they shared a joint. Scott could smell the burning marijuana. The boys eyeballed them but didn't say or do anything. Just kept hit-ting the joint and passing it back and forth.

  The loading dock was covered in graffiti, most of it in Spanish, a lot of it gang related. The concrete apron behind the store was cracked and sprouted weeds.

  Scott followed Benny toward the rear of the property, away from the old store, to where a set of train tracks ran, twenty yards beyond the edge of the concrete. Out there the grass was waist high. "Where are we going?" Scott said. Then he heard the train whistle again. This time much closer.

  "To Mexico," Benny said.

  They stood in the weeds, ten feet from the tracks. Scott could see a freight train rumbling toward them from the right. He pulled the brim of the straw hat down even lower across his eyes. "They're going see us."

  "It doesn't matter," Benny said.

  "Why not?"

  "People jump on and off the trains all the time. It's a cheap way
to get across town."

  "I didn't know that."

  "That's because you have a nice truck."

  "But if the engineer sees us, won't he call somebody?"

  "Who?"

  "I don't know," Scott said. "The railroad police maybe."

  "He's not going to call anybody," Benny said. "The train company doesn't want him to stop the train. They have a schedule to keep. And even if they did stop it, everybody would jump off and run. If you want to worry about some-thing, worry about falling and getting crushed under the wheels, or worry about getting robbed as soon as we get onboard."

  Chapter 59

  Gavin pushed the Suburban down a cracked and potholed side street. They were moving fast, trying to close the gap with Greene and the Mexican cop.

  "Two hundred feet," Jones said as he looked up from his iPad and scanned the street ahead. They were driving through a rundown industrial zone, mostly defunct now, empty of people and traffic. They shot through a cross street and were halfway down the next block when Jones snapped, "Here, stop right here."

  Gavin stepped on the brakes and skidded the Suburban to a stop next to a half-demolished sign hanging between two rusted posts. The posts stood in front of a wide, low-slung building with a façade of plate glass windows, most of them busted. At one time it must have been a showroom of some kind.

  Jones jabbed a finger at the ruined building. "There."

  "Inside?" Gavin asked.

  After a glance down at his iPad, Jones looked back up at the dilapidated hulk. "Behind it."

  In the next block, a freight train rumbled past.

  * * * *

  As the train rolled and clanked its way past Scott and Benny, the engineer stared at them through an open side window. His arm was propped on the windowsill but he did-n't wave. He didn't smile or frown or change his expression in any way. He just stared at them. The way he might have stared as he passed a couple of cows.

  "He was looking right at us," Scott said. "He knows we're going to hop the train."

  "Of course he knows," Benny said. "But he doesn't care. He just wants to get wherever he's going on time. Or close enough so he doesn't get fired."

  The train was a combination of boxcars and flats, rat-tling past them at less than twenty miles an hour. The sides of nearly all the boxcars were splattered with graffiti. Most of the flatcars were carrying steel shipping containers, whose sides were also tagged with spray paint. The rest of the flatcars were loaded with heavy machinery covered with tar-paulins.

  To Scott, the flatcars looked almost impossible to climb onto while the train was moving. There was nothing to grab. The boxcars, at least, had steel steps and ladders mounted to them front and back. "Have you done this before?" he asked.

  "Lots of times."

  "Any tips?"

  She turned to him and smiled. "Don't let go."

  Scott edged closer to the tracks. He heard shouting be-hind them and turned around, his hand reaching for the pis-tol tucked into the small of his back. The teenagers who'd been passing the joint were running away from two men in suits standing on the loading dock. The fake State Department clowns who'd mugged Scott outside the DEA office and stolen his prisoner. Jones and...whatever the hell the other guy called himself. Probably Smith.

  Alias Smith and Jones.

  Scott's pistol was in his hand. He had a score to settle with these two.

  Benny laid a hand on his arm. "My daughter."

  That stopped him. He looked at her and nodded. "Let's go." They started running toward the train.

  Behind them, Scott heard a shout. He glanced back and saw that the two suits had spotted them and were chasing them. The end of the train was coming up. Scott and Benny ran beside the tracks, trying to keep pace with a boxcar. There were only half a dozen cars left. Time was running out.

  Scott was two strides behind Benny. He eyed the lad-der welded to the back of the boxcar and tried to figure out how to time the leap he would have to make to reach it. Speed was the problem. Fifteen miles an hour was slow for a train, but it was an all-out sprint for a human, and the weed-covered ground they were running on was uneven and full of hidden obstacles. They would only be able to keep up with the train for about sixty seconds, maybe less, and that was if they didn't trip. Scott was well aware that a fall now could send them sprawling under the train.

  Benny grabbed the ladder with one hand. She ran two more steps then jumped and got her other hand on it. She hung there for an instant, her feet dragging the ground as Scott ran to keep up with her. Benny pulled herself up two more rungs until she was high enough to get her feet on the bottom step. Then she scrambled onto the narrow deck at the back of the boxcar. She waved Scott closer and shouted, "Come on."

  Scott was running full out, trying to catch the ladder, when he heard a soft pop behind him and simultaneously a sharp ping just in front of his face as something glanced off the steel side of the boxcar. Then another pop and another ping. Bullets ricocheting off steel. He glanced over his shoulder and saw the two men twenty yards behind him and running hard. The tall one in the lead, firing his pistol one handed. A bullet knocked the straw hat off Scott's head. He reached for the Glock at his back.

  "No," Benny shouted. "Keep running." Then she started shooting, blasting an entire magazine of 9mm rounds at their pursuers in about four seconds of sustained fire.

  Scott glanced back again. The tall one was down but not hit. He had tripped or gone to ground to avoid getting hit. Scott saw him rolling into a prone firing position, not giving a shit about his suit, just focused on presenting the lowest possible target profile, his military training no doubt kicking in. The other one, the dick who had called himself Jones, was also down but not all the way. Probably not ex-military and too fastidious to get down in the dirt. He was on one knee and raising his pistol.

  Both of them opened fire.

  Scott dove for the ladder and managed to catch the bot-tom rung. The movement of the train swept his legs out from under him. As his toes dug into the dirt he was sure his fin-gers were going to slip off the ladder or be ripped out at the knuckles. More bullets pinged off the side of the boxcar. Scott reached up and wrapped his fingers around the second rung. Then the third. Climbing hand over hand until he was high enough to brace his knees against the side of the box-car. He climbed one more rung and was able to get a foot on the bottom step. Then both feet. He clambered over an iron railing and onto the deck at the back of the boxcar.

  Benny jammed a fresh magazine into her pistol. "You all right?"

  "Never better," Scott gasped and reached for his own pistol, which he was pleasantly surprised to find had not fallen out of his pants.

  The train car behind them was a flatbed loaded with heavy equipment under tarpaulins. Scott leaned out to the side of the boxcar and looked back along the train for the two men, but the tracks had curved in the opposite direction, and they were out of his line of sight, which meant he and Benny were out of their line of fire.

  They had made it. Barely.

  Chapter 60

  The two Cadillac Escalades were moving fast, faster than Rodrigo's old pickup could match. So he pushed the old girl harder than he had ever done before just to keep them in sight. Then he got lucky. The cartels may be above the laws of man, but they are not above the laws of physics. After flying down a narrow side street at something like sixty miles an hour, the two SUVs had to stop where the side street crossed a busy four-lane highway. There was too much traffic, too much steel coming broadside at them for the two Cadillacs to plunge through.

  Rodrigo jammed the floppy accelerator pedal to the rusted floorboard and said a silent prayer that no one would step into the street in front of him. His grandniece's life de-pended on it.

  He was fifty yards behind the two SUVs and switching his right foot from the accelerator to the brake pedal when the lead Cadillac found enough of a seam in the traffic to jump out and straddle both near lanes so that the second Ca-dillac could turn right. As Rodrigo neared
the stop sign, the first SUV was backing up so that it too could turn right and follow its companion. A few drivers laid on their horns in protest, but most of them stayed silent and waited. Sleek new American SUVs racing through traffic almost always meant trouble. And very few residents of Nuevo Laredo wanted trouble.

  Taking advantage of the break in traffic, Rodrigo didn't stop. Instead, he swung through a wide right-hand turn that made the truck shudder as it carried him across both near lanes and halfway across the oncoming lanes. This time the other drivers weren't so reluctant to register their anger, and horns blared all around him. Rodrigo ignored them as he downshifted into second and popped the clutch.

  Up ahead, the SUVs were slicing through traffic, the second one riding the bumper of the first, like fighter planes flying in formation, or what Rodrigo imagined a pair of sharks might look like cutting through a school of tuna. So he kept the gas pedal mashed to the floor and tried to hold the shuddering steering wheel straight while the old truck screamed in pursuit. The speedometer hadn't worked in years so he wasn't sure how fast he was going, but he guessed he was up around seventy. Still, the SUVs were steadily pulling away.

  Rodrigo didn't look at the other drivers as he passed them, but he heard their shouts and their horns. He ignored them. His entire world was reduced to the two sets of tail-lights ahead of him. He let go of the steering wheel with one hand just long enough to dig into the burlap sack and slide out one of the pistols. He tucked it under his right leg, with the handle sticking out so he could reach it in a hurry.

  A hundred yards in front, two sets of taillights flashed red and both SUVs nosed down as the drivers braked hard then cut left, their solid suspensions and wide tires keeping them steady and hugging the street through the tight turn.

  Rodrigo stomped the gas pedal but it was already on the floor. He knew the streets of Nuevo Laredo as well as he knew the reflection of his own face in the mirror. As a street urchin, later as a gangster, and finally as a priest, he had spent six decades in this city. And he knew that just a few blocks from where the two Escalades were turning, was the five-way intersection of two highways and three side streets. If the SUVs reached that intersection before he could catch up, he would lose them and lose any chance of rescuing Rosalita. But his pickup truck could only go so fast, and she was already giving him everything she had.