The shotgun pellets shredded the man’s knees even as rounds from Connors’ gun struck the man in the side. My next shot caught a man in the stomach, while the men who had been opening the gate fumbled for their guns.
They fell while still grappling with their weapons, as Connors and I pelted them with well-placed rounds. As the men lay dead or dying, one of the federal agents entered the gate, followed by another, then still more.
“Over here!” Connors called out.
I loaded my last two shells as I headed toward the gate, and movement coming from inside the home caught my attention. There was a huge window set above the wide doors of the villa. It allowed a view of an unlit crystal chandelier hanging above the foyer.
Looking beyond the chandelier, I could see two figures running down a staircase. One male, one female.
They were too far away to make out details until they reached the wide landing of the marble staircase, where a lit lamp sat on an ornate table. The man was Juan Graboro, the cartel leader, while the woman was Mia Ortiz. Mia carried a shotgun in her hands, while a pistol was bouncing in a holster on her left hip.
I shouted to Connors even as I was sprinting toward the house.
“Graboro and Ortiz are inside the villa!”
I don’t know if Connors heard me or not. My focus was on getting to Mia. The front door had been left unlocked by the men who had headed to the gate. That stroke of luck gave me the time I needed to see which direction Mia and Graboro had taken after leaving the staircase.
They had gone right, past a room teeming with artwork, then down a corridor that led to the rear of the home. The hallway was wide and contained more treasures in the form of antique furniture and pottery.
I followed. My shotgun was at the ready and I was prepared to dive to the floor if needed. No shots came my way, although I was certain that Mia must have heard my footfalls behind her.
Without breaking stride, she cleared the gun from her hip holster and began taking wild shots while running sideways. I dove to the floor behind a huge oak table with massive carved legs and avoided the rounds.
Mia and Graboro were headed somewhere in a great hurry and I began to understand when they opened a door to go down a wooden staircase.
A safe room. I thought. There must be a safe room in the basement.
Graboro was in the lead. He began the descent, but Mia surprised me again by pretending to follow him, then popping back into sight.
She fired several hurried rounds at me. I figured her goal was to slow me down and make me think twice about following them, since she didn’t appear to take aim. I dived to the floor as a bullet hit the wall just in front of and above me, sending a chunk of plaster at my face that opened a cut on my forehead over my left eye.
I leapt up and resumed running while firing a blast from the shotgun, leaving me only one shell left. The shotgun pellets took a chunk out of the bottom section of the basement door Mia had been standing behind. I sought to wound her by firing so low, but the woman had already started down the stairs.
I rounded the corner with the shotgun leading the way and saw the steep staircase. Mia and Graboro were nowhere in sight, but as I started down the stairs I heard the sound of magnetic locks disengaging, then the creak of hinges.
When I was several steps from the bottom, I spotted Mia as she moved past an open metal door with Juan Graboro.
Mia couldn’t see me with her back turned, but she knew I was on her heels. She must have feared being shot in the back at any moment. The thought did cross my mind, but I wanted her alive. I wanted her to sit locked away in a cell during the best years of her life as punishment for killing Agent Corteron.
I dived off the steps, landed hard atop a tile floor, and slid through the open doorway, where I found myself entering a stand-off that might end with my death.
Chapter 52
“Hey, Blue Steele, how did you become a Fed?”
“My father was a Texas Ranger. In a way, I’ve followed in his footsteps.”
Mia looked delighted by my answer.
“Ah, a daddy’s girl, eh? I guess you could call me that too. My father was also an enforcer of cartel rules.”
“My father didn’t enforce rules, he enforced laws.”
“Whatever, he was still a man who did the bidding of others, just like my father.”
I knew that I shouldn’t let Mia get under my skin, but nobody gets away with putting down my daddy.
“My father wasn’t anything like your father. He wasn’t a lackey to the boss of a criminal empire. He was a sworn officer of the law.”
“You speak of him in the past.”
“He died while performing his duty.”
“My papa is dead as well, and it was because of something he did while performing his duty.”
“Somehow, I doubt it was the same thing,” I said.
Mia smiled, but stopped trying to goad me. As the minutes ticked by, I remembered the day my father explained to me what it was he did for a living.
LANDSVILLE, TEXAS, 1993
I was just a little thing when my daddy got wounded in the line of duty.
His regular partner, Deke Thomas, had been off that day to attend a family wedding, and Daddy had been partnered up with a Texas Ranger named Pete Douglas. I knew him as Uncle Pete, because he and Daddy often hunted together.
Five men robbed a bank in Fort Worth. They killed a bank teller, and two civilians outside the bank. The civilians had been run down by the getaway driver. They had been a young mother and her two-year-old boy.
Daddy and Pete went in pursuit. As Daddy drove, Pete leaned out his window and fired at the getaway car’s rear tires. It took six rounds, but he managed to flatten a tire and the car skidded into a ditch. Daddy and Pete planned to hunker down behind their vehicle until reinforcements arrived, but the bank robbers had another idea.
They wanted my father’s cruiser. With their own car disabled it was their only chance to get away before more officers arrived. The men had shotguns. They advanced on my father’s position while firing. Daddy took out one of the men as Pete killed another, but then Pete took a fatal round while wounding one of the men in the leg.
That left my daddy facing three men alone. He scrambled beneath the cruiser with his own shotgun in hand and began blasting at the men’s ankles and calves. They went down screaming in agony, then took more rounds where they lay. Two of them survived after tossing away their weapons, but only after the third one had his head blown apart.
My father hadn’t realized that he was wounded in the right side until after the adrenaline rush subsided. It wasn’t a serious wound, but he had required surgery and was on medical leave for three weeks.
I learned these details much later. At the time, I only knew that my daddy had been hurt by some bad men. It scared me. Up until then, I had thought him indestructible.
To make matters worse, someone had been in the area of the bank at the time of the robbery and caught the robbers on film fleeing the bank.
I saw some of the video during a commercial break one morning as I was watching cartoons, as the station was touting their upcoming news program. The scene looked like chaos to my young mind. Gunshots were being fired in the air by the robbers and the people in the street dropped to the ground or ran away in a panic.
One day while he was home recovering, I asked Daddy why he went after the robbers instead of running away like everyone else did. He took me by my tiny hand and we went for a walk outside.
It was a late spring day and the weather was warm and the grass green.
My parents owned the surrounding land, but rented it out to a neighboring farmer, who planted on it. The old man who rented the land back then had been named Simmons, and we could see Mr. Simmons riding his tractor across a field on our right. Along the fields to the left of us the cornstalks were just forming their silk. When the silk turned brown they would be ripe for harvest.
“Honey, Daddy didn’t run from those men becaus
e that’s not who I am.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well now, not everyone is the same. Your teacher teaches you and the other kids because it makes her happy to see children learn new things. Now take old man Simmons over there, if he was told he had to be your teacher from now on he wouldn’t have a clue how to teach you, and I bet your teacher has never done a lick of farming. They’re different people, but they each have something they’re good at.”
“Is that why you chased after the bad guys, because you’re good at it?”
My father stopped walking and knelt down beside me.
“Yes, honey. They don’t scare me the way they do most people. I’ve also been trained to deal with varmints like that bunch that robbed the bank.”
I touched his side lightly, where beneath his shirt he still wore a bandage over his wound.
“But the bad guys hurt you.”
“Yes, but I hurt them worse, and they won’t be robbing anymore banks.”
I smiled. “You’re a hero.”
My daddy laughed. “No, honey, I’m just a lawman doing his job.”
“What’s your job?”
“To keep people safe, honey. Daddy keeps people safe from the bad men. That’s why I don’t run. I can’t. I’m just not made that way.”
I hugged my father around the neck.
“I want to be like you when I grow up. I don’t want to be one of the people who run away.”
“You’re not a runner, baby, you’re a fighter.”
I released him and looked at him with surprise.
“I am?”
“You took on that boy who was picking on your sister last week, and girl, he was twice your size.”
I made a face. “Robby Cooper, he’s just a dumb bully.”
“Maybe so, but most of the boys in your school wouldn’t fight him, but you did.”
“I thought you and Mama were mad about me getting into a fight?”
“Now I didn’t say that you should get into fights, but you also shouldn’t take guff from anybody.”
“I don’t.”
“I know you don’t, honey, you got the family grit.”
I laughed. “What’s grit? It sounds like food.”
“It means you have guts, baby, and the bad guys better never mess with you.”
I hugged him again. “I love you, Daddy.
“I love you too, baby, so very much.”
Chapter 53
The cartel leader, Graboro, let out a moan. I gave it a few seconds before risking a flick of my eyes toward him to see if he had awakened. He hadn’t, but likely would before long.
The shotgun was getting heavy in my hands. I had to keep my finger on the trigger as well, and it was beginning to feel a bit numb. Mia was in a similar position, but she looked calm and as relaxed as could be.
“You got kids?” Mia asked.
“A daughter.”
“I’ll make you a deal. Put down that shotgun and I’ll make sure you get to see your daughter again.”
“I’m not a fool, Mia. I know that I’ll be killed if I’m captured.”
Mia smiled.
“I could make sure you die easy, or I could tell the men to torture you.”
I wondered about Mia then. The Mexican cartels were not known for their progressive attitude toward women.
“How did you become an assassin for the Graboro cartel?” I asked.
“I followed in my papa’s footsteps. After my mama died, papa took me everywhere with him. He was proud of what he did for a living. He was feared by many and respected by all. There are worse ways for a man to live. I figured why not a woman too.”
“How old were you when you killed your first man?”
Mia laughed.
“You are a nosy one, but I don’t mind, it will help the time to pass quicker. I killed a man when I was only thirteen. He was a drunken pig who tried to rape me.”
“That’s self-defense, not murder. Killing someone because you were ordered to do so is another matter altogether.”
“No one orders me around, Blue Steele. I am an independent assassin, and my own woman.”
“You mean you’re not just another cartel assassin like your father was? You get to choose your targets?”
“That’s right, and just because my father worked for a cartel as a hired gun it did not make him weak or evil. My papa was a good man, Blue Steele, and one hell of a father.”
MEXICO 1996
Nine-year-old Mia Ortiz smiled while marveling at the endless expanses of barren land she saw in every direction, as her father sped their car down a lonely two-lane highway.
Having grown up near Ensenada, Mia was more at home among the bustle of souvenir shops and foreign tourists. To see so much vast emptiness without a soul in sight was a new experience.
The little girl’s smile was one of the few she’d had since her mother had passed away weeks earlier. Although she loved her father intensely, the loss of her mother had left a wound in her young heart.
As a consequence of having no one at home while he traveled about, Mia’s father had taken to bringing her with him wherever he went, save for the times she was in school. Having always been close to her papa, Mia enjoyed the trips.
Her father slowed the car as they approached a gap in a row of trees, and Mia saw that there was a strip of dirt running westward that could be used as a road. It was a bumpy path. As they jounced along on it, Mia’s father pretended to be jostled more than he was. He pantomimed having trouble holding onto the steering wheel as he bounced high in his seat.
Mia giggled at her father’s antics and was pleased to see him acting like his old self again. She had not been the only one devastated by her mother’s sudden death from an undiagnosed brain aneurysm.
Mia’s father, Fernando, drove their vehicle several more miles before coming to a stop where the road ended at a large clearing.
At the rear of the area was a hill. The side of the hill had been scraped by a bulldozer and made into a flat vertical plane. Thick wooden posts were in front of the bluff and nailed onto them were painted targets in a bulls-eye pattern.
Mia’s father had driven to the spot to try out a new weapon. It was a rifle he had someone modify so that it would fire on full auto.
Fernando shot at targets for over an hour with a series of handguns, then decided to take a break before trying out the new rifle. After loading the weapon so that it would be ready to go, Fernando extracted two sodas from an ice chest and passed one over to Mia. She was delighted, as she was rarely allowed to have sugar. This told her that her father considered the outing to be special, and that he wanted her to have a good time.
After their break, Fernando used a small pistol to teach Mia the basics of shooting, with much emphasis on safety. In fact, her gun wasn’t even loaded.
“You’ll be given the opportunity to shoot once the proper handling of the gun becomes second nature to you,” her father told her.
As they were setting up a new target from a stack Mia’s father had brought with them, the sound of another vehicle bumping along the road reached them. It was a pickup truck with two men inside.
Mia’s father gestured for her to stay by their car while he went to talk to the men. Fernando carried the rifle, but he kept it pointed toward the ground.
The pickup truck slowed, then came to a stop about thirty feet from Fernando. When the two men stepped out of the truck, Fernando saw that they were carrying shotguns. One of the men smiled as he spoke to him.
“Great minds think alike. We have also come here to do some target practicing.”
“With shotguns?” Fernando said.
The man’s smile widened.
“They make it much easier to hit what you’re aiming at.”
“I would guess so,” Fernando said, while not liking the stranger’s smile. The other man wore no expression at all, but he kept staring at Fernando’s rifle.
Fernando reasoned that the men had followed the s
ounds of his earlier shots to locate him. They likely expected to find him holding a handgun, not a rifle with a thirty-round magazine. If they knew it could fire on full auto they might have snuck up on him, despite being two against one.
At the sound of Mia’s scream, Fernando shifted his gaze to include a view behind him, where a third man had crept up on them through the trees. He was taller than the other two, who were doubtless his accomplices. The fiend gripped Mia’s long hair with one hand, while his other hand was holding a knife to her throat.
The smiling man spoke again.
“Before you do anything stupid, my friend, I suggest you listen to me. We won’t hurt you if you give us your weapons and your car.”
Fernando tore his eyes away from his frightened daughter to stare at the man with venomous eyes.
“Tell your partner to release my daughter.”
The smile was back on the man’s face.
“Oh, I forgot to mention. We want the girl too. She’s worth a nice price in certain circles.” The smile became an evil grin. “I think I’ll break her in myself.”
Fernando brought up the untested rifle while already squeezing the trigger and stitched a line of rounds from himself to the two men with the shotguns. The smiling man’s stoic companion was struck in the right hip, stomach, and chest while further rounds shattered the teeth, and the skull, of the smiling man.
Having emptied the rifle, Fernando released it and freed the pistol holstered on his hip.
“I’ll slit her throat!” the tall man shouted. The shout turned into a yelp of pain as Mia sunk her teeth deep into the flesh of his thumb.
With her mouth clamped onto his hand, the man was unable to use the blade on Mia’s throat, leaving Fernando the precious moment he needed to take careful aim.
The pistol cracked twice as shots sped toward their target, and the tall man was struck two times in the chest. Mia’s teeth had such a strong grip on his thumb that when he fell over she followed him to the ground.
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