Not that the cartel couldn’t still reach them there, but it might be a little more difficult on American soil.
He took hold of her arm as they left the alley and turned onto the sidewalk. She stiffened a little and said, “Marty, you’re scaring me.”
“No need to be scared,” he lied. “Everything is going to be all right.”
“You act like we’re running away from something.”
“No, just . . . I want to go over to Del Rio.”
“At this time of night?”
“I have to see somebody. It’s business.”
He had never explained his business to her, but he was sure she suspected it had something to do with the cartel. Everything in Ciudad Acuña had some sort of connection to the cartel, no matter how slight.
His phone buzzed again. He kept his left hand on Catalina’s arm and used his right to take out the phone. The screen displayed an unfamiliar number. It probably belonged to one of the three men who were looking for him. They had stepped into the dimly lit club and one of them had called his number, hoping to hear his phone ring or see it light up.
He ignored it. Keep them guessing. Every minute that went by, he and Catalina were closer to safety.
When he slipped the phone back in his pocket, his fingers brushed a card that was there. It was a business card, but nothing was printed on it except a phone number that someone had scrawled in ink. The card had passed through a number of hands before it came to Marty, along with a message that someone wanted him to call that number. He suspected that it belonged to an American narc or Border Patrol agent. They were always sniffing around, trying to hook up with people on the edges of the cartel in the hope that they could work their way closer to the men who ran it.
Marty had never had any interest in helping the Americans . . . but maybe now they could help him. If he and Catalina could get across the river, he could call that number, maybe set up a meet . . . He would have to be careful, of course, but he had something to trade.
He had a file of cartel financial and organizational information on a flash drive that never left his pocket, along with a lot of intel about the connection between his employers and certain terrorist organizations on the other side of the world. Most of it was encrypted and he didn’t know what it meant, but there had been a lot of email traffic over the past few months. Something was in the works, no doubt about that. He could have broken the encryption if he’d taken the time, but he hadn’t gotten around to it.
Maybe the Americans would not only protect him but would also pay him to decipher those emails. He might come out of this all right after all, because there was the bridge, less than a block away, and both he and Catalina had work permits that would allow them to cross over into Texas . . .
Behind them, someone shouted, “Chavez!”
CHAPTER 5
Catalina Ramos had been making her own way in the world since she was eleven years old. At first that had meant becoming highly skilled as a thief. Later, it meant becoming highly skilled at . . . other things.
But regardless of what it took, she prided herself on her ability to survive.
It looked like that ability might be about to run out.
Beside her, Marty jerked around and let out an exclamation that was half angry curse and half terrified squeal. He still had hold of her arm. He used that grip to shove her toward the well-lighted bridge over the Rio Grande.
“Run!” he told her. “Get over the river and don’t look back!”
He didn’t have to tell her twice. Whatever trouble was behind them, she wanted no part of it.
It was pretty obvious that trouble had something to do with the man Marty worked for, Pablo Estancia, and the men Estancia worked for, the leaders of the cartel that moved drugs through this part of the world.
It had always seemed odd that Marty worked for such men. In a different world—across the border, say—his skills with a computer probably would have landed him a good job. But here in Mexico he worked for the cartel, which had its fingers in just about every aspect of day-to-day life.
Catalina stumbled a little from the push he had given her, then caught her balance and broke into a run toward the bridge. Her legs flashed back and forth, moving effortlessly and with sleek grace. She had learned to run during her days as a thief, and she still did as part of her daily workout.
Marty pounded along the pavement behind her, but there was no way he could keep up. His days spent sitting in front of a screen meant that he was in poor shape, easily winded. Catalina heard him huffing and puffing for breath.
Despite what he had told her, she slowed down and looked back. She didn’t love Marty Chavez, but he had always treated her decently and she was very fond of him. She didn’t want to see him hurt.
That seemed to be what the men pursuing him were bent on doing, though.
There were three of them, and they were closing in fast.
Without thinking about what she was doing, Catalina stopped and turned back.
The street was busy, even at this hour, but no one was going to help Marty. Catalina knew that. In fact, all the pedestrians and the people in the cars going slowly past as they approached the border crossing were making a point of looking away. They didn’t know what was going on, and they certainly weren’t going to get involved.
So Marty’s only chance to get away lay with her.
Catalina never wasted a lot of time pondering a situation. When she had a thought, she acted on it.
Now, as one of the cartel thugs reached for Marty, she left her feet in a leaping kick that sent the heel of her running shoe smashing into the man’s jaw.
Since both of them were moving, a lot of momentum was involved. The man’s head snapped back sharply. His feet ran out from under him and he crashed to the pavement on his back.
Catalina fell, too, but she caught herself on her hands and rolled, coming back up smoothly on her feet.
“Catalina, no!” Marty cried. “Get out of here!”
He turned and swung an awkward punch at one of the other men. The cartel man ducked and grabbed Marty’s arm, forcing it up behind his back. Marty cried out in pain.
“We don’t need the whore!” the man holding him said. “Kill her!”
The other man reached behind his back, no doubt for a gun tucked behind his belt and concealed by the tail of his shirt.
Catalina didn’t give him time to draw the weapon. Her hand darted into her bag, which was still slung over her shoulder despite her exertions, and came out with a small, needle-pointed stiletto. A flick of her wrist sent it flying at the gunman, who staggered back and screamed as the steel pierced his right eye and buried itself to dig into his brain.
He wasn’t the first man Catalina had killed. A pimp in Matamoros who accused her of holding out on him, a client in Piedras Negras who would have killed her, who had probably killed many other prostitutes . . . she had taken those lives to save her own and never lost any sleep over them.
This man’s death wouldn’t trouble her, either, except for the fact that he worked for the cartel. That would come back to haunt her, she suspected, unless she got across the border and ran a long way. She might never stop running.
And even then she might not be able to put enough distance between herself and the cartel’s thirst for vengeance.
That was something to worry about in the future. For now she had to stay alive. The stiletto was the only weapon she carried, so she would have to deal with the third man with just her hands and feet.
As she wheeled toward him, she saw that he already had a gun in his hand. He chopped at Marty’s head with it, the blow driving Marty to the street as blood spurted from a gash above his ear.
The police on duty at the bridge must have seen and heard the commotion by now, but they weren’t budging from their posts. They were paid to check the papers of people crossing the border, and that was all they were going to do.
Catalina threw herself into a rolling dive as the gunman l
eveled his weapon at her and fired. The shot went over her head. As she came up she kicked him in the belly. She hoped that would knock the gun loose from his hand, but he managed to hold on to it as he stumbled backward.
The shot made people scream and run to clear the street. Up at the bridge, one of the police yelled into a walkie-talkie, no doubt calling for help. It might arrive eventually, but not anytime soon.
Catalina had landed with her toes and fingertips on the ground, like a runner in a starting stance. She lifted her head, saw the man aiming at her again. She knew all she could do was try to dive to the side, out of the line of fire . . .
Marty surged up from the street just as the gunman pulled the trigger. The bullet struck him in the chest at close range and knocked him backward. His arms flew out to the sides as he fell in an awkward sprawl.
“Marty!” Catalina screamed.
The gunman swung the weapon toward her and fired again, missing wide. She vaulted the body of the man she had killed, and as she did, she snatched the stiletto from his eye. The gunman sent another round at her, but he hurried his shot and the bullet ricocheted off the pavement.
Catalina knocked the man’s gun arm aside and buried the stiletto in his throat. She felt the blade grate against his spine as she shoved it as deep as she could.
His eyes were only inches from hers. They widened in pain and disbelief that she had killed him. A mere woman, and a stripper at that. Those were probably the thoughts going through his head as he died.
Catalina jerked the gun from his hand and shoved his collapsing body away, pulling the stiletto from his throat as she did so. The street was empty now, except for her and the four men lying on the pavement. The man she had kicked in the jaw was still alive, moaning softly because she had broken his face.
She shut him up by bending swiftly and cutting his throat.
Then she ran to Marty and dropped to the ground beside him, pulling his bloody figure into her lap and cradling him against her.
“Cat . . . Catalina . . .” he said in a raspy whisper.
“I’m here, Marty. You’ll be all right.”
“N . . . no. I won’t.” With a wildly trembling hand, he caught hold of her right hand and pressed something into her palm. Two somethings: a crumpled card and a small plastic oblong that she recognized as a flash drive.
“Take this,” Marty said. “Call . . . call the number. Tell whoever answers . . . you have information about . . . El Nuevo Sol.”
The New Sun? That made no sense to Catalina. What was it, and how could it help her?
“Be careful,” Marty went on. He stopped to cough, and blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. “Don’t trust . . . anybody. At least . . . not in Mexico. You need to get . . . across the border.”
“No, I need to get help for you—”
“Too late . . . remember this . . .”
He rattled off a long number and made her repeat it back to him. She said it a couple of times and knew that it was etched into her brain. She’d always had a good memory, almost a photographic memory, and he knew that. He had seen her do mental tricks with it many times.
“Don’t forget . . .” he told her, and amazingly, he managed to smile. “It’s important . . . One of these days . . . you’ll thank me.”
He coughed again, wrackingly. Catalina clutched him tighter to her, aware that she was getting his blood on her shirt and not caring.
“Marty, please—”
The sound of several sirens approaching cut her off.
“Go! ” he whispered urgently. “No time—”
His head fell against her.
She didn’t want to believe he was dead. Something unaccustomed welled up inside her. Maybe she had loved him just a little bit after all.
But the danger represented by those sirens crowded out everything else. She eased him off her lap and laid his head gently on the pavement, then stood up. She still had the stiletto in one hand, the gun she had taken from the cartel man in the other. It was an American gun, a .45 caliber semi-automatic, she thought, heavy and ugly. Holding it felt surprisingly good to her, though.
She grabbed her bag off the street where she had dropped it, shoved the gun and the knife into it, and trotted toward the mouth of the nearest alley.
She broke into a run as flashing lights rounded a corner a few blocks away.
By the time the police cars got there and screeched to a stop with their headlights washing over the four bodies in the street, the darkness had swallowed up Catalina Ramos and she was gone just as surely as if she had vanished into the jungles of the Yucatán.
CHAPTER 6
Del Rio, Texas, the next day
Catalina pressed the .45’s barrel against the side of the truck driver’s neck and said, “Out. Now.”
“Holy sh—”
Metal prodded flesh, and he gulped and shut up.
“I don’t want to hurt you,” Catalina said, “but I need this truck.”
He reached for the door handle but paused before he opened it.
“I’ll lose my job,” he said with a note of pleading in his voice.
“I’m sorry about that,” she told him, and meant it. “But I have more to lose.”
It had been the longest fourteen or fifteen hours of her life, and while she wouldn’t actually shoot this poor hombre, she might be tempted if he didn’t cooperate.
Thankfully, he did. He opened the door and slipped down from the cab, pausing to look back at her and ask, “Can you drive a truck like this?”
“I can do a lot of things,” Catalina said.
But what she did best was survive. Some instinct warned her and she went on, “Give me your cell phone.”
He winced, probably because he’d hoped she would forget about that. He didn’t argue, though. Instead he slipped the phone from the pocket of his untucked short-sleeved shirt and tossed it to her.
“You’re really gonna leave me out here in the middle of nowhere?” he asked.
“It’s not the middle of nowhere. The highway’s only a couple of miles away. You can hike there and hitch a ride in less than an hour.” She smiled as she scooted over behind the wheel. “You can even borrow somebody’s phone and call the cops to report that a beautiful señorita stole your truck. Of course, then you’ll have to explain why you were out here with her in the first place. Your boss might understand that, but I doubt if your wife would.”
He muttered something under his breath, a prayer or a curse or both, then said, “You’re in bad trouble, aren’t you?”
“You could say that.”
He thought about it and then nodded.
“I won’t report the truck being missing for a while, okay?” A sheepish look came over his face. “And I’m sorry I mistook you for a . . . a . . .”
“Never mind, amigo,” she said. “That’s what I wanted you to think.”
He stepped back, and she didn’t grind the gears too badly as she pulled out, swinging the eighteen-wheeler in a broad circle and then starting back toward the highway on the dirt road.
When she reached it a few minutes later, she turned left—south—and headed back toward Del Rio.
That might seem like the wrong thing to do, returning to the city just across the river from where Marty had been murdered and where she had killed three men. She knew cartel gunmen would be searching for her. Her hope was that they wouldn’t expect her to double back like this.
If she could stay alive for a while, maybe somebody from the American government could meet her and keep her safe. That was the hope she really clung to.
Wanting someone to take care of her went against the grain for her. She had been taking care of herself for the past fifteen years. But the odds stacked up against her now . . . they were just too overwhelming. She needed help.
She had been numb at first, when she stumbled away from Marty’s body. But the animal cunning that was part of her had still been working. She knew she couldn’t go to the bridge. The police there w
ouldn’t know what was going on, but they had heard the shots and seen the fight, and they would hold her until they straightened everything out.
She wouldn’t have been safe in custody. Too many of the police really worked for the cartel.
So, like an animal, she had found the closest dark hole and vanished into it . . . in this case a squalid alley that led into a maze of narrow streets that were mostly deserted at night. The only people out and about were human predators, and she spent the rest of the night ducking them and staying out of sight as much as possible.
Along the way she had found some washing hanging up in what passed for a backyard and taken a man’s faded blue work shirt from the line. She stripped off the bloodstained T-shirt and pushed it down a storm drain. The stolen shirt was big on her, but she rolled up the sleeves and tied the tails in a knot below her breasts, leaving her midriff bare. It didn’t look too bad, she thought, and most important, she could move around and fight in it if she had to.
The long hours of mixed martial arts training had come in handy when she tangled with the men from the cartel. Of course, she already knew how to fight and take care of herself from all the years spent on her own, but one of the other dancers had suggested the MMA training to increase her agility and flexibility. It was meant to make her a better stripper, not to save her life, but it hadn’t taken long for Catalina to discover that she had a knack for the brutal ballet of an MMA match.
The training had proven lucrative, too, because the proprietor of the Paloma Azul had had the bright idea of staging after-hours bouts between some of his dancers. A lot of men would pay handsomely to watch attractive young women beat the hell out of each other. They liked to wager on the bouts, too, and the club owner got a cut of everything. Catalina, in turn, got a cut of that. She had stashed away a tidy sum . . .
Which, she had realized despairingly, was upstairs in the apartment she’d shared with Marty. She had a very strong hunch that it would never be safe for her to go there again.
Anyway, the men searching for her would sniff out the money and take it. It was probably gone already, gone for good.
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