Kill or Be Killed

by James Patterson

  I began making my way to the roof of Diego’s compound. Something was wrong here. Very wrong. Yes, it’s possible that Diego was tipped off ahead of time, but, beyond my annoyance at being evaded, there was a growing unrest in me. How can this place be literally empty?

  “Fat Man, do you copy?” I said again as I climbed up the courtyard wall, grabbing a rain gutter to pull myself up to the roof of the compound. My goal was to scout the town from a high position. There would be a decent vantage point up there. I needed to at least “feel” the visual, to satiate my nagging need to see that there was nothing to see.

  There atop the second story, I raised my M16 and scoped the horizon with its sight lens. “Fat Man, come in.” I was hoping to snoop around whatever was visible a half mile down the main road.

  I wouldn’t need to look that far.

  El Padron.

  It was on our front porch.

  The “message” was set up for us in front of the compound. At first I saw only one. But then I saw another and another. And by the time Rita joined me, there were twenty-three to behold.

  Police officers.

  All dead.

  Two dozen Matamoros police officers, murdered, left in the street like confetti. Killed for no other reason than to tell us, tell my platoon, who we were dealing with. We were being warned.

  “How can you be sure this is for us?” asked Rita.

  “It’s for us,” I said, wishing it weren’t.

  “Colonel!” yelled Kyra.

  She was calling me from below. She was already on the street, investigating. The other platoon members were slowly, quietly elbowing each other, calling attention to the spectacle out front. Kyra was the first one to the center and she had found something she wanted me to see.

  I went down. And I saw.

  Each of the dead bodies was mutilated with an extra type of signature. It was known as Diego’s Cross. He would etch it into the flesh of his victims. The wounds were fresh, the blood still trickling. His violently sarcastic artwork had taken place just minutes ago.

  Minutes ago.

  That meant our entire arrival was logged on their evening agenda. I grabbed the radio handset off our radio man. No more audio protocol.

  Rita tried to slow me down. “Wait, Colonel.” She was going to tell me there’s no connection, no listener, no rational reason to bark what I was going to bark. But it didn’t matter: I had already begun shouting into the void. “Fat Ass, I swear to God, do you have any idea what’s on the street in front of—?”

  “Tango, eight o’clock!” Kyra called out, dropping to her knee and aiming her M27 directly at the shadows behind us.

  We all instantly spun around, took cover, and aimed, waiting for the silence to usher in a shit storm of trouble.

  None of us lit up, though. Our potential tango, as in potential target, as in potential enemy, as in we’re about to reduce you to burger meat, was a little girl.

  “Hold your fire!” shouted Rita.

  “Hold,” I reiterated to my platoon. We’re not here to kill kids. “Hold!”

  The child was about nine years old. Unarmed. Alone. A local. She was emaciated but there was a raw energy to her eyes. She was driven by something deep inside.

  She stood in the middle of the street and looked right at me, eye to eye. She knew I was in charge and I could tell she would deliver her message only to the one in charge. Undaunted, unabashed, she faced me directly, then raised her index finger and gradually pointed in my direction.

  Slowly, viciously, she pointed at her own throat. She made the cross sign.

  “Ya tenemos usted,” she said with a carnivorous smile.

  Then she walked away. Her words hung in the air.

  We already have you.

  Chapter 3

  Arriving back home in Archer, Texas, usually felt good. It had been only a two-day jaunt, the Matamoros fiasco, but that’s enough to feel like forever.

  You miss everything when you’re away. Everything. The traffic, the radio, the mini-malls, even the trash on the street. Why? Because that trash is hometown trash. That trash is made up of scraps of daily life. My daily life.

  But nothing compares to the first glimpse of your front door. Both of my daughters love Halloween more than they love their own birthdays, so at this point our porch was covered with pumpkins and skeletons and Disney witches. Even though it was mid-September.

  They were expecting me tomorrow morning, which technically was still five hours away, so I didn’t want to wake them. I didn’t even want to wake my husband. I just wanted to slide under the poofy sheets and reverse spoon him. To disappear into his dreams. True stealth.

  He was a heavy sleeper. His fantasy football app would be the last thing on his phone besides one or two naughty texts from yours truly. He’d be out cold. Our hallway floor always creaked, so I took my time with each step. Nothing seems louder than walking to your kitchen at 2:00 a.m. I could even hear the fabric of my pants slide against itself.

  I gently pushed open our bedroom door. We always sleep with it slightly ajar. Tonight was no exception. He’d learned over the years—the years and years of unpredictably long or short missions—that his sexy colonel could potentially saunter in at any hour of the night, and if he played his cards right, he could get that “she outranks me” sex he bragged to his buddies about. Though, on this occasion I was already spent, already shell-shocked from what my platoon had seen. We already have you. Drained from a day and a half without sleep. Tonight I’d be using him as a slab of warm comfort. He has his back to me. Curled in a fetal position. Perfect.

  I crawled onto the bed.

  And then my hand squished into a swamp.

  A wet area of the mattress.

  My first thought was that our eight-year-old was just here, napping, and probably had wet the bed. She’d probably left, stayed quiet, and thereby Daddy never knew. My second thought was that my husband had a fever and he was sweating out what had become a lagoon.

  My third thought wasn’t a thought. It was professional opinion.

  My husband is dead.

  I finally saw it. Bullet holes through his shoulder and through his temple. Heavy sleeper—they shot him in his dreams. His head was half gone. He’d been dead for at least three hours. Who’s they? My legs were already carrying me down the hall. It wasn’t even an instinct. It was like I was watching myself appear ahead of me. Fast. Inexorable. Who’s they? Already bursting through their bedroom door. Already flicking up the light switch, already prepared…

  To scream.

  The training manual says to arrive at a violent situation and execute your training with dispassionate precision. Don’t yell out your reaction. The enemy could still be nearby. Don’t gasp. The enemy could get the first attack.

  Don’t let anyone know what emotional state you’re in.

  Keep quiet. Watch exits. Assess the scene. Keep your weapon up.

  I did none of that.

  My daughters were dead.

  Both of them. Within several feet of each other. I grabbed my limp babies. The manual says to flee a situation where there is clear and present danger and insufficient intel. That’s Chapter Nine.

  What chapter is the chapter that says how to carry your dead daughters over to your dead husband? And place them in front of you, in a futile group hug, so that God could see that he might have made a mistake? That there is an undo button somewhere at his console he can press?

  God didn’t press it.

  Diego’s Cross was permanently etched on my family’s flesh.

  I made the only phone call my hands and my spinal cord were capable of making. I called Rita. I didn’t speak. I couldn’t. I couldn’t make my mouth emit words. But she could hear my throat cracking in the air. She could hear all she needed to hear to know that this isn’t Amanda’s normal communication. And so Rita was gonna do what Rita would then do.

  “This is your home phone?” she asked without expecting a reply. Calm. Decisive. Bankable. “Be
there in four minutes.”

  Chapter 4

  Present Day

  That was the beginning. That was what led me here to this freeway underpass, parked under a tree just beyond it, eighty miles east of El Paso. A million miles south of paradise.

  Waiting. Watching.

  I was in a sedan, waiting for the arrival of a particular truck. Rita was parked five miles away, watching from a small hillside. Page one of that manual I mentioned earlier says that heat is a state of mind. You can decide to be uncomfortable. You can decide not. I stopped feeling things entirely. It had been two years since I became a person without a family. At this point in my life, my skin doesn’t feel. My skin merely assesses.

  “Badger Three to Badger Eight.”

  I was talking to the Fat Man. I was using identification codes that intentionally misrepresented the size of our team. When your numbers are small, you want your enemy to think you are large. When you are large, you want them to think you are small. So says Sun Tzu.

  I was no longer an active Marine. I was freelance.

  “How’s the road?” asked the Fat Man.

  “Empty.”

  “What about the temperature?”

  “Hundred and five,” I replied. “About to get hotter.”

  Rita’s voice then came on the radio. “Eyes on tango, Badger Three. Point-eight klicks. Barrel-assin’ your way.”

  I looked up. I saw the truck. A big rig. Unmarked. Driving well over the speed limit, heading toward my position.

  Time to rock.

  “Good luck,” said the Fat Man.

  “Don’t need it,” I told him.

  Chapter 5

  I put my police beacon on the roof of my sedan, flicked on the siren, and stomped on the gas. The enemy was on eighteen wheels and moving fast.

  You never know how someone’s going to react to getting lit up by the law. Most normal people freeze mentally and pull over erratically slow. They cooperate almost to a fault. But this guy could have warrants out. He could have paperwork issues. He could have a girlfriend who just told him she cheated on his ugly mug. He could have whiskey in him. Brass knuckles. You never knew.

  He pulled over as soon he cleared the bend. This picnic was just getting started.

  His big rig took a half minute to slow to a stop. I had to assume this was sufficient time for him to radio his contacts, his pals, his boss, his muscle, his mom, whomever. And I, of course, had to assume he was leaning over to his glove box and getting, what would be my guess, a Glock. I had my own Glock. Making for a Glock-on-Glock fight.

  I don’t like those odds. I don’t like a fair fight. Ever. That sort of macho B.S. might work on a TV show, but in real life I never want a level playing field. I want the upper hand in every possible category. If you have a black belt in jujitsu, I want a knife. If you have a knife, I want a gun. If you have a gun, I want a missile. A missile that shoots smaller missiles from its side missiles and that bleeds acid. I want surprise on my side. I want backup. I want a sniper covering my six. I want my enemy drunk, sitting on a toilet, asleep, when I find him.

  But that’s a perfect story that never gets told in the world of Amanda.

  There’s always one fun detail that jacks things up a bit.

  I was walking up along the left side his trailer. I would have loved to stay in his blind spot but truck mirrors pretty much cover all angles.

  I knocked on his door and he opened up. Game on.

  “Do you know how fast you were going?” I asked him.

  “¿Cómo?” he replied. Accent thick. Mexican.

  “I got you doing eighty-four in a seventy zone.” My goal was to keep him off track. Confuse him. Have him think I’m a cop initially.

  “Lo siento pero no hablo Ingles.” But maybe he was the one confusing me. “¿Es usted la policía?”

  “Keep your hands where I can see them.”

  He didn’t. His hands were roaming.

  “Your hands.” I gestured to indicate the obvious.

  “¿Mis manos?” he asked, seeming to barely, just barely, understand me. “No hay una problema.”

  He was reaching for his center console. Slowly. As if his slowness would go unnoticed.

  “¡No te muevas!” I shouted at him. “Tus manos.”

  “¿Mis manos?” Was he really thinking he was going to grab his weapon before I could react? Yes, he was.

  Five tenths of a second later, he was pointing a .38 Special in my general direction and I was already firing three quick shots at his hand.

  I missed my first but the second and third bullets both nailed him in the arm, ruining his chances for a response.

  There was a second guy in the cab, the wingman. I hadn’t yet seen him from my vantage point. He was getting ready to join the party, but Rita was lightning-quick to yank open his passenger door and get the muzzle of her Glock on his rib cage.

  She had capitalized on the previous distraction.

  “Damn, lady, what the hell’s your problem?” yelled the injured driver.

  “Get out of the cab!” shouted Rita. “Both of you. Now!”

  They were slow and grumpy about it, muttering all sorts of hateful gems under their breath. Bitches. Putas. Lesbians. Trust me, coming from your enemy, these are all compliments. Every last syllable. The best part is they were cooperating, bless their little cotton socks, they were moving along, hands interlaced behind their sweaty heads, exiting, and separating themselves from our eighteen-wheel trophy.

  “You’re gonna run down the road,” Rita told them. “Directly down the center line. And if you turn your head back…I shoot you.”

  They started to trot away from us.

  “If you run slow, I shoot you,” she declared.

  They increased the speed of their trot by a billionth of a percent.

  Rita fired a shot through the flannel shirt flap of contestant number two. Didn’t hit his body. Just hit his shirt. From a field goal away. On a moving target. She’s that good.

  They started to sprint.

  “If you drift to the side, I shoot you!” she yelled.

  They ran so dead center it was almost comical. And soon the heat waves from the asphalt drowned them from our sight. And soon we were going to work. Barbecue time!

  We had backpacks full of C-4, my favorite way to end the life of a large vehicle. Fuse detonation. Lightweight. Very stable. Rita cracked the padlock off the back with the butt of her gun and swung open the trailer doors. The cargo bay was mostly empty except for a pyramid of sacks piled up against the front end. Sacks of cocaine? Yes. Sacks of meth? Yes.

  Sacks of them.

  Not a bad haul. I’d say a quarter of a million’s worth, as a guess.

  Leaving our backpacks nuzzled down in the heart of the matter, fuses lit, we scrambled out of the trailer top-speed. We both got in my car and spun around, fishtailing it, gravel flying, hustling to flee the scene as fast possible, just as—boom—a concussion blast of ten M112 bricks of plastique shattered that truck into last Tuesday.

  Diego Correra isn’t going to like this.

  Chapter 6

  Nor was he gonna like this….

  Within a twenty-mile drive from the previous raid, we had located the second of Correra’s big rigs. A Peterbilt. We were tracking the driver on a desolate stretch of Highway 285, waiting for him to be truly alone. The question was whether or not he had been warned by the last guy.

  He pulled over as soon as he saw my police beacon light up.

  As far as we knew, the last thing his buddy would’ve announced is that some asshole cops were detaining him. We made sure they didn’t take their phones with them on their involuntary hike. So, yes, they might have broadcasted that the law was stopping them but, fine, that was a much better bulletin than, Dios mío, some crazy bitches just blew up our truck.

  When we got the Peterbilt driver to open his driver door, he was more angry than surprised. Almost indignant.

  “Do you know whose shit this is?”

 
; I looked over at Rita. He was engaging us as if we were bribed cops, as if we were on Diego’s payroll. What do we say to this? Play it cool? Play dumb? We didn’t look like cops. At best, we looked like immigration patrol. But this was the type of bandit who wouldn’t care regardless.

  “Do you know whose shit this is!” he asked again.

  “I guess it’s mine.” I had to speak up. My mouth does that. And then it added, “As of today.”

  “This is the property of Diego Correra, you dead pig. You know who you’re dealing with?”

  “Not really. Is he nice? He seems nice. Does he give you dental benefits? Because you could use some.”

  “And you just wasted your time,” he said, pointing to his trailer, “because this shit is empty.” He started laughing, his yellow teeth gleaming in the sun. “I already made the drop.”

  Rita and I traded a look. This would really suck. An empty bed. It would mean Diego had one-upped me. Again. The driver seemed excited that we were escorting him to the rear of his vehicle, that we were about to open up his trailer’s doors and witness his hilarious joke.

  “Open the gate,” Rita said to him. “¡Muévelo!”

  He led us to the back and started to unlatch the door. Squeaking the bolt like crazy. The pride in this guy’s demeanor—I was cringing at the thought that his truck would be bare.

  The door opened up and, here we go, two of his pals were right there, AK-47s all set, immediately unleashing a spray of bullets right at us. Ambush!

  Rita and I both dove for the ground, tumbling as tightly as we could, to roll forward, into the protective cover of the truck itself. Wheels, metal, axles, anything. My only thought was to get behind a barrier, any possible barrier, because if these guys had the sense to shoot directly downward through their floor, they’d have a good chance of shredding us.

  And I hate chances like that.

  I was just getting to a crouch and soon enough a rain of high-caliber bullets came streaking down around us. Rita was on the far side of the combat zone, already in the ditch, just off the road, scurrying for some rocks. Smart muchacha. She would have a great angle of attack once they emerged from the tailgate.