by Scott McEwen
Vaught could see the blanket wasn’t worth five bucks, but he was dealing with profiteering now, and he knew it, so he didn’t complain. He took the bill from his wallet and handed it over. The second he took possession of the blanket, he could smell that it had been taken from a dog’s bed.
He returned to the crash scene and gave it to Paolina. “It’s not the best, but it will keep her warm.”
“It stinks!” she said.
“Paolina, there’s not exactly a lot I can do about it. We have to make do. Give the Red Cross time to show up.”
She made a pffft sound and knelt to wrap the blanket around Valencia’s shoulders.
Valencia said the puppy was hungry and asked if there was any food for him.
“He’ll be okay,” Vaught said compassionately. “We’ll get him some food in the morning.”
“Can you go back over there and buy us something to eat?” Paolina said. “I don’t think those other people are going to bring us any more.”
“I’d rather not go back over there,” he said.
“But it’s the only shop with a light on.”
“I know, but the guy has a gun, and he’s not very friendly. Besides, he’s gonna charge five times what the food is worth, and we—”
“You’re worried about money?”
“No. I’m worried about the gun. It’s not a gun he got legally, so he’s probably a professional criminal, and we don’t need trouble.”
She let out a frustrated sigh and sat down beside her daughter.
“Hey, you know what, Paolina? The earthquake isn’t my fault.”
“No,” she said, looking up at him. “It’s your fault we’re not at home now with my husband where we belong.”
“Yeah? How do you know your house didn’t cave in? You might have been killed, for all you know.”
She pulled Valencia close. “Leave me in peace, Chance.”
“Mommy, this blanket smells bad.”
“I know, baby, but it’s the only one Chance could find. We’ll get a clean one tomorrow.”
Vaught picked up a jug of water and went to check on the burn victims. One of the women was burned badly on her arms and hands, but there had been no more room in either of the ambulances. She was sitting against a tree in the median, and though she was in a good deal of pain, she was bearing it like a stoic.
“Do you have any aspirin?” she asked. “Anything for pain?”
Vaught remembered seeing boxes of aspirin in the glass case in the shop across the street. “I’ll see if I can get some.”
He gave the others some water and then went back to Paolina. “I’m going to buy these people some aspirin.”
“What about the guy with the gun?”
He dropped the water jug beside her. “I thought you didn’t care about him.”
“Just be careful,” she said quietly.
“How sweet,” he muttered, walking off.
Vaught stepped up to the gate again and called inside. This time an older, meaner-looking guy came out of the back.
“What do you need?”
“Two boxes of aspirin,” Vaught said. “We’ve got a lot of injured people across the street there. A lot of them are burned. And three loaves of bread.”
The man set the stuff on the shelf attached to the cage door. “Five hundred pesos.” This was a little over thirty dollars.
Vaught was tired and annoyed, so he wasn’t as accepting of the situation as he should have been. “Do you have to take advantage like that? I told you there’s a lot of people hurt over there. The other shopkeepers were very generous.”
The guy crossed his arms and stared at Vaught. When he did this, his shirt rode up, exposing another pistol tucked into his belly.
Vaught put the bill on the shelf. The guy took it and shoved the stuff through the opening in the cage.
25
MEXICO CITY, MEXICO
08:00 HOURS
The next morning, Vaught was helping a burn victim to drink water from a bottle, when he looked up to see the mean-looking fellow from the night before coming across the street. It was obvious the guy still had the pistol tucked into the front of his pants and that his mood had not improved. He stalked over to Valencia and said something to her in a harsh tone. The little girl stood staring up at him with the puppy in her arms, and Paolina got between them, telling the man to leave her daughter alone.
Vaught stepped over quickly. “What’s the problem, amigo?”
“That’s my dog!” the man said, pointing at the Rottweiler pup.
“Well, it showed up here last night,” Vaught said. “We didn’t know whose it was.”
“It’s mine!”
“Okay. No problem.” Vaught turned to Valencia. “Sweetheart, we have to give the puppy to this man so he can take him to his mama.”
Valencia began to cry, and Vaught knelt down. “It’s okay, sweetheart. The puppy needs his mama.”
Valencia clutched the puppy to her and began to sob into its fur.
Her sadness affecting him, Vaught looked up at the guy. “Can I buy the dog?”
The guy scowled at him. “Six thousand pesos.” This was almost five hundred dollars.
“I know that’s a fair price, amigo, but I don’t have that much cash on me. Can you take three thousand?”
“No.”
Vaught turned back to Valencia. “We’ll let him take the puppy home, but we’ll come back tomorrow to buy him. How’s that sound?”
Valencia was not stupid. She knew that to relinquish the dog meant never seeing it again. She continued to weep as Vaught began to gently manipulate the dog from her arms.
At the last second, Valencia redoubled her hold on the animal. Her intention was only to give the puppy a kiss good-bye, but the dog’s owner saw this as an attempt to take back the dog, and he lost his patience.
He grabbed Valencia by the arm. “Give me the damn dog!”
Paolina instantly grabbed the collar of the guy’s shirt. “Don’t touch my daughter!”
The guy shoved Paolina away. She stumbled backward over a tree root and fell to the ground. Valencia screamed.
Vaught stood up, a wild look in his eyes.
The owner of the dog panicked and went for his gun, but before he could get his hand beneath his shirt, Vaught had him by the throat. The two were of equal size and strength, but Vaught knew a lot more about balance and leverage. He took the man down easily, planting him solidly on his back in the median and knocking the air from his lungs.
He snatched the 9 mm Beretta from the guy’s pants and quickly hid the pistol in the small of his back, turning to help Paolina to her feet.
The guy lay on his back, gasping for air, struggling to get up.
Vaught knelt beside Valencia and gently took the dog away from her. “We have to give the dog back right now, honey, before someone gets hurt.”
He stood up with the dog in one hand and was reaching to help the owner to his feet, when he saw the younger shopkeeper running across the street with his pistol thrust before him.
“Aw, shit!” Vaught hissed, dropping the puppy and grabbing the pistol. “Paolina, get down!”
Paolina leapt on Valencia, covering her with her body as Vaught opened fire on the young man coming at them. He fired twice, aiming low to hit the boy in the legs, and the kid went down, his pistol skidding across the pavement.
Vaught ran into the street and kicked the pistol away before the boy could get his hands on it.
“Fuck you!” the young man sneered as Vaught grabbed him by the shirt to drag him out of the street.
“Shut up!” Vaught said, giving him a kick to the face. “Don’t open your mouth again!” He spun around to aim the pistol at the older guy, who was finally getting his feet beneath him. “Sit back down—now!”
The man
did as he was told, and Vaught gave the kid a kick in the ass to send him crawling. “If you either one of you tries anything stupid, I’ll shoot you both!”
A small crowd was gathering, and Vaught was in the process of assessing how much danger he was in, when a pair of Mexican army J8 model Jeeps rolled up, each vehicle loaded with four soldiers and equipped with a turret-mounted .30 caliber machine gun. Both machine guns were aimed directly at Vaught.
He dropped the pistol and put up his hands. “Where the fuck were you guys last night? The tunnel’s burned out, and we have a lot of injured people here!”
A lieutenant climbed out of one of the J8s and walked over, picking up the pistols from the ground. The name tag on his uniform said “Lieutenant R. Felix.” He looked over the injured motorists and then gestured with the pistols. “What’s happening here?”
Vaught nodded toward the men sitting on the ground. “Estan abusando de la necesidad de la gente.” These guys are profiteering.
Recognizing Vaught’s accented Spanish as coming from the United States, Felix glanced down at the kid bleeding from his knees and stood tapping the pistols against his legs. “For that you shoot them?”
“I shot him because he was going to shoot me”—he nodded at the Rottweiler puppy—“over a dog.”
“Whose pistols?” Felix asked.
“Theirs.”
“Who are you? Where are you from? Why are you here?”
Fuck it, Vaught thought to himself. “My name is Chance Vaught. I’m a foreign agent working with the Policia Federal Ministerial. Agent Mendoza is my commander here in the city.”
The lieutenant glanced around again at the injured people staring back at him. He pointed at the dog’s owners with one of the pistols. “Did these men start the trouble?”
Everyone confirmed that Vaught was telling the truth and that he had cared for them during the night. Felix then ordered both dog men taken into custody and walked Vaught out into the street, questioning him vigorously about his connection to the PFM. Eventually he forced the American to come completely clean in order to avoid being arrested himself.
At length, Felix seemed satisfied that Vaught was telling the truth. “Where are you going?”
“Toluca.”
“For what?”
“To meet with Chief Juan Guerrero.”
“Why?”
“I honestly don’t know,” Vaught said, deciding to make something up. “That’s who my commander in the PFM said to go see.”
“I have friends in the Toluca department,” Felix said. “Sergeant Cuevas and I grew up together.”
Vaught shrugged. “I’ve never heard of him.”
Felix grinned. “You’ll be very lucky to survive your mission. Lazaro Serrano is going to be the next president of Mexico.”
Vaught smiled back. “Not if the PFM has anything to say about it.”
The lieutenant chortled, turning for the J8. “El león cree que todos son de su condición.” The lion thinks everyone is like him.
“You don’t trust the PFM?”
Felix looked back, his eyes shining. “This is Mexico, my friend. All I can tell you for sure is that you are a long way from home. I will call for army ambulances to evacuate these people. Good luck to you.”
26
ACAPULCO, MEXICO
12:05 HOURS
Rhett Hancock and Billy Jessup sat on the balcony of their luxury twentieth-floor hotel room overlooking Tlacopanocha Beach. A Mexican woman in her early forties sat in Jessup’s lap, finishing a cigarette while he fondled her breasts through her open blouse. She was a hotel employee and had come to the room earlier in the day to change the bedding and replace the towels. She’d no more begun to strip the sheets before Jessup offered her money to have sex with them.
She took immediate offense and was turning for the door when Jessup flashed four thousand dollars’ worth of Ben Franklins. This was more money than the single mother of two earned in a year working for the hotel. So, to her shame, she had returned to the room on her lunch break and allowed the two American men to have their way with her.
She crushed out the cigarette and stood up from Jessup’s lap, buttoning her blouse. “My money?” she asked in English.
Jessup led her back into the room and gave her the wad of folded cash from his bag.
She put the money into her pocket and left without another word.
Jessup returned to the balcony chuckling, “It ain’t every day you can turn a woman into a whore.”
Hancock glanced at him briefly and then back over at the next hotel three hundred yards up the beach. “You mean it ain’t every day you can take advantage of a woman with hungry mouths to feed.”
Jessup lit a cigarette. “How do you know she’s got hungry mouths to feed?”
“She didn’t get those stretch marks on her belly making beds, dumb-ass.” Hancock smirked and shook his head. “You just paid four grand for a piece of housekeeper pussy. Jesus Christ, you’d fuck anything.”
“I didn’t see you pass it up.”
“Hell, no. You were payin’.” Hancock looked back across at the hotel. “Go get the scope. It looks like the party’s starting.”
Jessup disappeared for a minute and then returned with an M151 spotting scope, setting it up on the table and taking a seat behind it. He glassed the rooftop of the far hotel as people were emerging from a glass-enclosed suite, mingling around a pool with drinks in hand. “I don’t see the guest of honor.”
“He’ll be there.” Hancock got up and went inside to the minibar, unscrewing the top from a small bottle of tequila and drinking it down.
“Don’t overdo it in there!” Jessup called from the balcony.
Hancock dropped the empty bottle into the trash bin beside the bar. “Just takin’ the edge off.”
He went to the closet and took out a guitar case, setting it on the bed and opening it to remove the dissembled Barrett XM500 sniper rifle. He assembled it and set up the bipod, resting the sniper system on the bed, aimed toward the balcony. Then Hancock stepped into the bathroom to take a leak.
When he came back out, Jessup was coming in from the balcony.
“Turn on the movie,” Hancock said. “Loud.”
Jessup slipped the disc of an old war movie into the DVD player and ran up the volume all the way: machine guns firing, artillery blasting away. Then he returned to the balcony to check the scope a second time, scanning the growing crowd for the mayor of Acapulco. He spotted the dark Mayor Guillermo Cruz dressed obligingly in all white, standing by the glass parapet on the nearside of the pool with two other men, looking out over the ocean. “Target acquired.”
Hancock went back into the room, put on his ear protection, and got behind the rifle, finding the mayor in his own scope.
Jessup stood up and closed the curtains and the sliding glass doors to an aperture of twelve inches, to keep the sound of the shot inside the hotel room. Then he sat back down and put his eye back to the scope.
Mayor Cruz was standing broad chested before them at three hundred yards. The shot could not have been more pristine. “Rhett, what the fuck are you waiting for?” Jessup whispered to himself. “Shoot him, goddamnit!”
Hancock studied the mayor’s face, the dark eyes beneath thick black eyebrows, and was reminded briefly of an actor from some Mexican beer commercial he’d seen in the US.
Cruz had been the mayor of Acapulco for just six months, but already he was causing the Ruvalcabas a lot of aggravation. The city’s tourist industry had fallen off dramatically over the past ten years due to ever-escalating drug violence, and Cruz had based his election campaign on promises to restore the city to its former greatness as an international tourist destination. So far he was working very hard to keep that promise, and not only was he hurting the narcotics trade but also setting the wrong example for other mayors acr
oss the country.
So, as they had with Police Chief Juan Guerrero of Toluca, Lazaro Serrano and Hector Ruvalcaba had sent Hancock to make an example of him.
The gringo sniper held Cruz dead to rights in the crosshairs. The mayor was doomed no matter what, so Hancock decided to get creative; to wait for the moment to ripen. After fifty long seconds, it appeared that the target was turning to step out of the sight picture, which would have forced Hancock to shoot him before he was ready, but the moment suddenly blossomed as a woman in a yellow dress—along with a man wearing a soccer jersey—stopped to chat directly in line behind the mayor.
Hancock squeezed the trigger. The .50 caliber armor-piercing round blasted from the muzzle of the Barrett with a muffled boom, covering the 300 yards to target in just under three seconds to strike Cruz dead-center in the chest at 2,900 feet per second. The mayor virtually exploded from hydrostatic shock, as did the woman directly behind him and the soccer player standing just in front of her. To the naked eyes of the other partygoers, it appeared that all three bodies exploded at the same time.
The party fell into instant pandemonium. People were knocked into the pool as others scrambled to get back inside the suite. Others stood in horrified shock, splattered with blood and viscera. The mayor’s three bodyguards took up cover positions, pistols drawn, but there was no way to discern where the shot had come from.
Hancock got to his feet as Jessup came into the room and closed the curtains. “See that shit?” he said with a laugh. “Three in one!”
“I saw it.” Jessup set the spotting scope down on the table and switched off the movie, secure in the knowledge that the rooms on either side of them were reserved by Ruvalcaba’s people. “Look, I think this is my last op.”
“Oh, come on,” Hancock said. “What the fuck does it matter? The other two were rich assholes like everyone else on that roof.”
Jessup shook his head. “It’s not that, man. You enjoy this shit too much. You’re gonna push it too far one of these days, and I don’t wanna be there. I know you don’t give a shit about dyin’, but I do.”