Kill for Me

by Tom Wood

  He had no idea who Miguel Diaz was beyond knowing his name, but the porter knew Diaz was part of the cartel. He was someone. The porter didn’t know how much of a someone, but nobodies didn’t drive Lambos, and they didn’t get special treatment in the hotel. So the porter made his way to the lobby to have a quiet word with the concierge. He told him that there was a foreigner in the Fortune Suite, and the concierge thanked him and told him to forget what he had seen and to go about his day.

  The porter did just that, his soul a little heavier, and the concierge picked up the telephone.

  • Chapter 32 •

  The young woman spent some time in the bathroom before she was ready to leave. She had the door closed, and Victor respected her privacy, but he heard the faucet running and not much else, so he imagined her reapplying her makeup and straightening out her appearance. He stood near the door while he waited, listening out for any footsteps in the hallway outside.

  When she exited the en-suite, she seemed surprised to see he was still present. “I thought you’d have gone.”

  “I said I’d see you out.”

  She shrugged. “Saying and doing aren’t the same.”

  “I don’t say things I don’t mean.”

  “You’re not really from hotel management, are you?”

  For an instant, he thought about lying, but there was nothing to gain. “How did you know?”

  “I’ve been in these kinds of places before,” she said, embarrassed and regretful. “You’re too nice.”

  “Trust me, I’m anything but.”

  “I do trust you.”

  She said nothing else, and took her handbag from where it lay on the floor near the bed. She slung it over one shoulder and nodded when he asked her if she was ready to go. He took the stairs because he always took the stairs, and she didn’t question him.

  “It’s best if we don’t walk out together,” he told her when they reached the ground floor.

  This time she wanted an explanation. “Why?”

  “Trust me,” he said. “Go ahead of me and get a taxi. There are some waiting out front. And don’t see Diaz again.”

  She held his gaze, and he saw a resolve there he hadn’t seen before. “Don’t worry, I’ve learned my lesson. Thank you.”

  He saw her lean in, and could have avoided the intrusion into his personal space if he so wished, but he didn’t stop her. She kissed him on the cheek.

  “Good-bye.”

  He stood at the foot of the stairwell, keeping out of sight as much as he could but watching her go. She crossed the lobby with a confident stride—nothing to hide, nothing to be ashamed of—and his line of sight was clear enough to see her step outside. She disappeared from view for a few seconds, but then he saw her climb into the back of a waiting taxi and a moment later she was gone.

  He dawdled for a minute, checking his appearance in a mirrored wall to kill some time and to provide an excuse for his presence to anyone who might pass by. Not bad, he thought.

  Victor knew something was wrong as soon as he stepped into the lobby proper. He felt the disturbance in the ecosystem before he understood why it had been disturbed. His gaze swept back and forth, taking in the hotel staff and guests, where they were positioned and what they were doing. He analyzed physiques and appearances, clothing and postures.

  Three guys didn’t fit in.

  They reminded him of a time in Paris. They weren’t dressed like the other patrons and they didn’t act like them either. There was no style to their suits, but they wore expensive watches. They were waiting, but they weren’t talking. They were observant but cautious.

  He saw them note his presence, although there was no immediate reaction that told him they were waiting for him. That came a moment later, because they looked to where the concierge was positioned behind his desk. He saw them do so—he was expecting such a look—and he glanced in Victor’s direction.

  His expression said nothing, but he nodded.

  A slight, discreet gesture; pointed, but nothing more than necessary—a diner informing a sommelier that the wine had not been corked.

  The porter, Victor realized. The bribe to look the other way had not been enough, or could never be enough. The specifics were immaterial right now. All that mattered was that the porter had told the concierge about Victor’s presence in the suite, and he had then passed the information on to Diaz.

  The three men had arrived fast. Even with the young woman taking a few minutes to ready herself, the response time was more than efficient. So they had been sent here based on their proximity, not competence. Local guys who handled local problems. The three men would be associates of Diaz—cartel guys or corrupt cops or whoever else was on the payroll. There must be similar teams all over the city. It was too much of a stretch to imagine these were the extent of it, and just happened to be close to the hotel.

  Diaz wanted information. He wanted to know who Victor was. He wanted to know why a stranger had been in his suite. Victor could see it going one of two ways. The three would follow him, intending to learn where he lived and where he worked, and from there identify him and his intentions with a certain degree of discretion. Then, they would pass that back to Diaz and he would decide the next course of action. The upsides to this were many. They could find out what they needed without exposing themselves, and if there was nothing to learn they lost nothing.

  Or else they would wait for the soonest—not necessarily the best—opportunity to corner Victor for an interrogation.

  Stepping outside the hotel, he saw that it was going to be the latter, because another man in similar attire was waiting outside, standing by a parked minivan with sliding back doors. The minivan was no taxi and the man standing next to it was no taxi driver. The door next to the curb was already open.

  Victor slowed his pace to give himself an extra second or two to work out the best course of action. He knew without looking that the three guys from the lobby would be coming out behind him, closing the distance fast, ready to bundle him into the back of the minivan before he knew what was happening. Only he did know what was happening.

  He could run, and he was confident enough in his own speed and stamina to know none of the four had any hope of catching him. They had the minivan, though, which he could not outrun, and even if he ran through places it could not follow—buildings, alleys, parks—anyone on foot could follow, while the vehicle maneuvered to head him off.

  Should he escape, word would reach Diaz, and he would know someone had an interest in him. He would be on guard. He might pass out word to the rest of the cartel. Victor’s description might reach every sicario and informer. The difficulty of his job would exponentially increase, as would the risks to his life.

  He could fight. He couldn’t take them all by surprise because they were expecting to go into action; they were expecting him to resist. He could act ignorant until he was in range and put a stomp kick in the guts of the guy waiting by the minivan. With nowhere to go but into the bodywork, the force of the kick would put him out of the fight. There would be massive blunt-force trauma to his abdominal cavity. Internal organs could fail. He might be dead before paramedics understood what was wrong. The three behind would be trickier. They would be reacting by the time Victor turned to deal with them, but not fast enough to prevent him from taking down another. Maybe a strike with the edge of his palm to the closest neck, or, if that neck happened to be dense, to the clavicle instead. A shattered bone or shocked carotid would put that guy on the ground alongside the first.

  Two left, maybe drawing guns by that point, but fumbling in surprise, muzzles nowhere near high enough for a shot. Depending on the gun, depending on how they held it, Victor could knock it from the man’s grip or take it for himself. Three seconds gone by then and three guys down.

  One left, with a gun in his hand and raised by that point.

  If that guy wa
s good, if he was fast, then Victor would be the one dropping next. If not, then there would be four dead or injured cartel associates lying on the ground outside of a hotel in broad daylight.

  Running was not a good course of action, but neither was fighting.

  So Victor let himself be kidnapped.

  • Chapter 33 •

  He played along to the role they expected. He resisted. He acted scared. He made them work to get him into the back of the minivan, but he didn’t fight back. He had to battle the instinct to go for pressure points, to break bones and gouge eyes. It was harder than he thought. He had to fight himself more than he fought them. Calling for help would have added to the performance, but he didn’t call for help just in case he got it. A would-be hero might get himself killed, or a rescue attempt might actually work, and neither scenario would benefit Victor’s goals of getting close to Diaz and remaining unnoticed.

  One man drove, one guy took the passenger’s seat, and the other two sat on either side of him in the back, gripping his arms as he struggled to the extent a scared civilian might. He told himself he feared for his life, but he was weak; he didn’t know what to do.

  They bought it. The guys in the back weren’t exerting themselves any more than they needed. They weren’t even holding him with any real force. This was just another day at the office for them. Fun, perhaps.

  The one in the passenger’s seat showed a gun and told him to calm down, so Victor kept in character. He stopped struggling.

  “What do you want?” he asked, making his voice break.

  The guy in the passenger’s seat put his firearm into a holster behind his jacket and turned back around to face forward. He spoke to Victor without looking at him.

  “We just need to ask you a few questions. Then we’ll let you go. Answer us honestly and you have nothing to worry about.”

  “What questions?”

  There was no answer.

  Victor used the time to examine the four men. The driver was the youngest, and the frequent swallowing suggested the dry mouth of the inexperienced. That was why he was the driver. The easiest job. Drive the car, let the others deal with the real work. He had the same kind of cheap suit as the others, but the driver’s arms couldn’t fill the sleeves. The shoulder pads jutted. The two in the back could almost be photocopies of each other. They had the same blank expressions and similar builds; the useful bulk of the manual laborer, whether that labor was shoveling sand or breaking bones. The one on Victor’s left sucked on a plastic cigarette. The one to his right stank so bad Victor wondered how the other three tolerated it. The guy in the passenger’s seat was in charge. He got to ride up front, which was always a giveaway, further confirmed by his age—at least half a decade older than the others—and protruding gut. It was the weight of leadership. He let the others do the heavy lifting.

  The suits said “legitimacy” in a city where such dress was uncommon. These guys wouldn’t be sent to the slums. They were exclusively city based, dealing with hoteliers, government officials, and cops. Tattooed sicarios with shaved heads and machine guns couldn’t operate in the same circles.

  “Tell me what’s going on,” the frightened man Victor was playing pleaded.

  He looked at both men in the back for an answer, gaze pleading, imploring. One shrugged. The other smiled. Both were relaxing more with every passing second. He was just a scared guy, a civilian.

  No trouble at all.

  Victor drove his thumb into the smiler’s thigh, pushing down on the quadriceps with enormous pressure focused on the anterior cutaneous branch of the femoral nerve.

  The man screamed. He threw himself up from the seat in his instinctual reaction to escape the pain, butting the roof with his head. Both his hands grabbed Victor’s wrist to pull him away, to end the agony, but Victor was strong—far stronger than the smiler could have imagined—and his arm was locked and immovable.

  The scream was so loud, so shrill and piercing, that the others were shocked into a moment of inaction.

  Victor kept his left thumb in place and slammed his free elbow into the face of the second guy in the back. He had a dense skull and was no stranger to pain or injury, so it took another two before his head hung forward, blood and teeth flowing from an open mouth.

  The smiler was so relieved, so elated, when the merciless thumb was removed, that he couldn’t stop Victor from taking the handgun from his shoulder rig, nor could he prevent that gun striking him on the temple.

  By the time the guy in the passenger’s seat had his own weapon back in hand and pointing at Victor, Victor was pointing one at him too.

  “Stalemate,” Victor said.

  The leader was still trying to process what had happened, what he was seeing. The men on either side of Victor were bloody and unconscious. Even if they woke up soon, they wouldn’t be any help. The one who had taken the pistol whip to the temple wouldn’t be able to focus, let alone fight. It could be hours before he could stand unaided. The one Victor had elbowed would be in so much pain after waking he would beg to be knocked unconscious again.

  The guy said, “Drop it.”

  “No,” Victor said.

  “I mean it.”

  “I do too.”

  The driver was saying nothing. His gaze was in a frantic back-and-forth between the road and the rearview. The guy in the passenger’s seat was giving him no direction, so the driver kept driving. The roads here were almost empty. If the driver knew anything about tactical driving, he would start swerving and throw Victor around in the backseat, but he didn’t. The ride was as smooth as any he had experienced.

  “Last chance,” the leader told Victor.

  “No,” Victor said in return, “it’s yours.”

  The guy in the passenger’s seat didn’t want to shoot him, at least not yet. He wanted answers and he was scared, whatever his previous machismo. Few people could handle a gun in their face. It took a long time to get used to such a thing. Victor had lost count of the times he had stared down a muzzle.

  Victor’s lack of fear was adding to the other guy’s, and the cartel associate couldn’t handle it. He wasn’t thinking clearly. If he were, he would understand that Victor didn’t need him alive. The driver was the important one. Victor needed him to keep the car from crashing. The guy in the passenger’s seat was window dressing. He was alive only for now, until the streets cleared a little more, until the best opportunity presented itself.

  “Okay,” the leader said. “You win. I’ll put the gun down. No one has to die here.”

  Victor said nothing. He just watched as the guy in the passenger’s seat did as he said he would. The pistol went back into a shoulder holster, nice and slow, and his hands came up.

  The driver said, “What are you doing? Are you crazy?”

  “I’m handling it. See?” he said to Victor. “We can keep this calm.”

  Victor said, “I’m always calm.”

  “We made a mistake,” the guy said.

  “The biggest of your life. Who are you?”

  “Consultants,” he explained. “Private security.”

  “For the cartel?”

  The leader hesitated but nodded.

  Victor said, “Explain.”

  “Okay, okay. Listen, we’re not drug runners. We protect the business. Not just from the police, but their rivals. Maria’s sister, for one, but there are always young punks looking to muscle their way into the business. Then there are the Mexican cartels, who can go from being best business partners one day to worst enemies the next. We guard the bosses when they come into town; take their kids to school. Dig up dirt on politicians. Stuff like that.”

  Maria employed a two-ring approach to her safety. She had an army of fearless gunmen surrounding her at all times, and a network of private security teams working farther out, scouting and bribing, looking for threats and taking care of t
hem before the need for overt force arose. These were part of the second ring, the guys that Lavandier’s Web site had mentioned. Victor hadn’t expected them to be this efficient, this well organized.

  “And you kidnap people from outside hotels,” Victor said. “You have a wide repertoire. I’m impressed.”

  “We handle the sensitive work, yes.” The guy in the passenger’s seat paused, then added, “We provide security. We act as insulation between our employers and those who would do them harm.”

  Victor understood. They were an independent crew operating in the city under the guise of legitimacy. A detective agency on paper, registered private eyes, but putting their skills to use for the cartel. These were the guys who sat down with reporters and in polite but no uncertain terms told them to back off. These were the guys who followed politicians to learn their dirty secrets. These were the guys who paid off the cops. Pressed suits and smooth cheeks, but beyond the surface they would be as ruthless as any sicario.

  “Who’s your boss? Miguel Diaz?”

  The leader shook his head. “We don’t answer to Señor Diaz, but we responded to his request. A stranger is a potential threat not merely to him but the whole organization. You understand, we were just doing what we were told to do.”

  “How many of you are there?”

  He looked around the car. “We’re it. But we’re one firm. They have many like us. Different neighborhoods, different teams. You understand?”

  “What would you have done if you found out I was no one to worry about?”

  “Call Señor Diaz and tell him exactly that.”

  “He wouldn’t want to check me out personally?”

  “Only if you were a threat, but not necessarily. He would tell us to take care of it.”