I know I’m in trouble. There’s no way I can cross the border without explaining the damage to my truck, but the sad truth is that that won’t be hard; ‘what happened to your car, sir?’ He’ll ask. I’ll shrug and say, ‘Mexico.’ And they’ll laugh, and I’ll laugh, and I’ll be back in the states.
But my real problem is before all that. It’s the local cops. A lot of them are just cartel guys with a badge. I don’t want to deal with them and their questions. They could decide that it’s better to be on the safe side, and take me in until they have orders from their bosses. They’ve got no reason to kill me - not yet - but since when does that matter in Juarez?
I pull out of the barrio and onto a four lane highway. I won’t stop, I decide. Keep pushing. Plead shock. Pretend I was in the truck when they smashed it.
I weave in and out of the traffic enough to keep my speed, but not so aggressively that I draw attention; in Central America, that means I can be pretty fucking rough.
I keep looking in my mirrors. No cops. No tails. No reason that there should be, except for the usual; I’m a lone American. A six-foot three-inch dollar sign behind the wheel.
Up ahead I see two local cop cars on the hard shoulder. I breathe a little easier when I see they’re already out of the car. I pass at speed, but I can still see the look on the face of the man they’ve pulled over. He knows he’s about to get fucked out of something. Maybe his life.
My heart slows as I see the border ahead. This time of day, it’s not at it’s worst. Fuck, if I have to, I’ll ditch the truck and run. That’s why you have insurance, right? I just need to get back to my side of the border. Re-group. Re-think. Shit, I can put on the whole fucking Terminator act, but my best-fucking friend is gone, and so is his soulmate. That stuff is leaking through my armor now. I thought the grief would come at me like a war-hammer, and I could take it on my shield, but this shit is like poison. It’s slipping in through the cracks. It’s in my nose. My throat. It’s starting to choke me.
I need to re-group.
Instead I have to sit in traffic as I’m squeezed toward the border like toothpaste. I look around for danger, but the biggest threats I see in the cars around me are to my humanity; desperate, nervous faces. People fighting their own wars and battles. For good or evil, only God knows. Nothing is simple in life, but death.
Suddenly, I have my realization. I’ll come apart if I let myself get sucked into the complexity. The quartermaster of life didn’t kit me up to deal with the emotional shit that I face, but he sure as fuck loaded me up when it came to executing in every sense. I’m not a thinker, I’m a do-er, and there’s only one thing that I know in my heart needs doing after Lucia. After Ethan.
I hate to think how my face looked as I pulled up to the officers at the border. I had one thought on my mind, and it was ugly. He had to try and speak twice before he got his words out. Probably thought some loco fucking sicario in a smashed up truck was rolling up on them with a death wish. I saw his hand on his hip. Time to smile.
“Good evening, sir.” I looked at the damage on my windshield and grinned. “Sure is good to be home.”
Chapter Ten
The border entry wasn’t fun. They pulled me in. Asked me a few questions. Made a few calls. The officer that had pulled me in was young, and by the book. Righteous. When they gave me back my keys it was like he was doing me a favor; “Try and be more careful next time.”
I wanted to show the little prick that he should take his own advice, and not be a wise-ass when his hands were down by his sides and he was resting his weight on his back foot. But instead of running his nose through his face I thanked him for his service. Arrogant little fuck believed every word and almost bowed back to me.
I wasn’t much of a social drinker, but I knew my house was dry, and the bar was next to the liquor store, so what the hell. The place had flags and hunting trophies on the walls, blue-collars at the bar, and silicon and smiles behind it.
“What can I get you hun?” She was half my height, but twice as salty. Young girls turn old at bars. Must be tiring. Twelve hours of your day spent walking the line between giving a guy just enough hope of a fuck that he’ll tip, but beating him down when he goes over the edge.
“You got food?” I asked her, my stomach waking up to tell me that it had been empty since before Mexico.
She hands me a menu and I order the first item I see. “And double whiskey.”
She puts in my order and gives me a once over. “You look like you’ve had a shitty day.”
“I’m just here for this.” I tell her, knocking back the whiskey from the glass that she hands me.
The girl tries not to show it, but a flash of ‘asshole’ passes over her face. That’s bad for me. I don’t want my drinks watered down. I reach into my pocket and hand her four times what the whiskey’s worth. I give her the ‘sorry’ smile; “Yeah. Long day.”
She takes the money, hands me another glass, and moves to the other end of the bar where a group of guys in their twenties take turns looking back and forth from her ass to Sports Center.
I see my burger and fries appear from a small window in the counter. The server sets it down in front of me. I don’t catch what she said under her breath but I’m pretty sure it was “don’t choke.” For the first time in days I almost smile. Instead I stuff the food into my mouth like it’s my last meal. Maybe, with what I’ve been thinking over the last few hours, it will be.
Then, in the mirror between the shelved bottles, I see the shape of someone coming to sit beside me. There’s a lot of empty seats. I put down what’s left of my burger and look at her. Say nothing.
She’s blonde. Thin. Maybe twenty five. One look in her eyes and you know she’s made some bad decisions in her young life. I guess she wants me to be the next one; “Not interested.”
She laughs and moves closer. I’ve never seen this girl in my life but I’ve met her a thousand times. They’d come from miles to hit the Ranger bars, especially when we got back from deployment. I don’t know much about genes and DNA, but I think some people have ‘fuck a killer’ in theirs.
“I’m Cassie.”
I go back to my food. She reaches out and traces her fingers over the ink on my knuckles, reading out the letters: “R. L. T. W. Is that gang ink?”
“You could say that.”
She likes it. Her hand closes on top of mine. I’m trying to think of a polite way to tell her to get the fuck off of me when I hear a stranger’s voice.
“Go suck a cock in the stalls, sweetie.” The voice is as flat as Texas, and the girl doesn’t fuck with it. She leaves, I stand, and look down at a familiar face. A welcome face.
“Sarah.”
“Dom.”
She hugs me. I know it’s as unusual for her as it is for me, but it’s not everyday that her brother dies.
She steps back. She wears black-rimmed glasses, but I see no tears behind them. She was Ethan’s sister, but their relationship was about as strong as mine and the bartender’s.
“I couldn’t talk him out of it.” I said. “Not this time.”
She gestures for me to follow her to a booth. I do. She has that way about her. A leader. Sarah was a Rodeo champion at age thirteen and an FBI Agent a decade later. She knows how to lead a bull by the nose.
“Why not this time?” She asks me, knowing that it was me who’d kept Ethan tied to the earth long enough for him to meet Lucia.
“It was a woman.”
“She left him?”
I didn’t see the need for details. Not yet. I nodded.
She leaned back in the booth. Took a second to think that over. “I’ll never understand you guys.” She shakes her head. “You’ll walk through bullets and IED’s, but get your heart broken and you throw the towel in. I just don’t understand it.”
She has a point. I say nothing. The silence grows. It makes me itch. “How’s Dallas?”
She makes a laughing sound, like she has no idea. “I just sleep there. But work?
Work’s… interesting.”
“Anything you can talk about?”
She looks at my empty glass, “Maybe,” and she signals to the server. I didn’t need to ask her to know that it’s going to be a long night.
Chapter Eleven
The bartender is avoiding me like I have Ebola, and so our booth table is slowly being covered with empties.
“Impressive.” Sarah says, surveying the damage. Behind her glasses, her eyes are beginning to narrow from the booze, the slightest slur becomes present in her speech.
“I don’t know where you put it.” I tell her honestly. She can’t be taller than 5’4”.
“In my balls.” She laughs, grabbing her crotch. “You fucking pussy.”
And there it is. I laugh. It came and went faster than Christmas in Baghdad, but it was there.
Sarah looks at me with a triumphant look on her face. “Gotcha.” She sits back. “I told myself I wouldn’t ask you this until I’d gotten you to laugh.”
There’s no trace of humor in her voice now.
“You can talk to me, Sarah. You were his sister.”
“Right.” She reaches for her glass. Groans when she sees that it’s empty. “So why didn’t he come to me?”
It’s a natural question with even more natural reasons. Ethan grew up around cowboys and ranch hands before he became a Ranger and went to war. Do you think anyone ever taught him to talk? Do you suppose he was shown another way of dealing with grief except with fists and liquor? Ethan was a product of his upbringing - his time - and he was more likely to try talking to aliens about his problems than his younger sister, no matter how tough she was.
“Maybe that’s the problem.” I said to her after I’d spoken the rest.
“What do you mean?”
“He always felt that he was weak for suffering after war. Seeing you kicking ass, and getting by after your parents…”
“You think it made him feel like less of a man?”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t need to.
“If he was here I’d punch him in the throat.” She promised. “He could have at least had the balls to tell me he was going to do it.”
“How did you find out?”
“Hospital. He called in before he did it.” She gave a sad, sick little smile. “Apparently he was apologetic as hell about what they’d find. The mess, and… fuck it.”
I kept my mouth shut. Sarah looked at my hand, squeezing my glass.
“Ease up before you shatter that thing.” And then she read the letters on my knuckles. “R. L. T. W.”
“Rangers Lead The Way.”
She looked up into my eyes. Hers were dark, and troubled. “Well, Dom, where are you going to lead me to tonight?”
Chapter Twelve
Her answer was a small motel a block down the street.
“I’ll check in with you I tomorrow.” I told her. “It’s been good seeing you.”
Sarah didn’t seem to mind that she was going to bed alone. If anything, I felt like she was smug, and that I’d passed some kind of test.
“You can’t drive home.” She said, but there was nothing in the words that sounded like an offer to come inside.
“My place is a short walk from here.” I lied. “I’m good.”
We hugged and I walked away. I’d only taken a few steps before I heard the door to her room close. Grief makes people do stupid things, but I couldn’t help shake the feeling that she’d been testing my character.
I looked into the bar parking lot and thought about driving. It would be a stupid idea at the best of times, but with my windows smashed in I was just asking for a cop to point a gun in my face before handing me a DUI.
My place was an hour’s walk on the roads, but I wasn’t a stranger to offroading it, and I’ve got a good sense of direction, even when I’m drunk. I started out on the hard packed dirt, a clear desert sky giving me all the illumination I needed.
I took the dip can from my jeans pocket and packed a thick lip. I wanted to sharpen up. I still had a lot to think about, and I was grateful that Sarah was in town. With her present to handle Ethan’s affairs, I could concentrate on what was really important; finding and killing the people who had taken Lucia.
I ran through those plans for the first two miles as I marched across the desert. I was deep in thought, and if it wasn’t for an unguarded flashlight I might have walked right on top of them.
I dropped to one knee, and controlled my breath. I knew I hadn’t imagined seeing a stab of light cut out across the terrain, and after thirty seconds of waiting I saw it again. Judging the distance of light in darkness is never easy, but I estimated they were about the length of a football field away. Then, as my breathing and pulse quietened down, and I tuned into the night around me, I began to make out the faintest traces of voices.
All at once, I realized I was totally alert, and sober. I could smell opportunity here, and knew without doubt that whatever was out there in the night had been delivered to me for a reason. I wouldn’t miss out on it, and I began to crouch and edge my way forward, careful to pick up and place my feet to avoid kicking rocks or dry vegetation. The light and voices were moving, but slowly, and heading north. That was about as much information as I needed to be certain that they were either mules, or more likely illegals who had just jumped the border a few miles to the south. Either way, I was eager to meet them.
Why? Because of my job as a border agent? Fuck no. Because Lucia had been taken by kidnappers, and if anyone knows the latest intelligence on that kind of criminal, it’s the people running for their lives across the border.
Like a pit-viper I stalked my prey in the desert, creeping closer until they were within striking distance. From the voices I knew that there were at least three of them, and they all sounded scared. No voice of authority, which was good for me; the Coyote had probably already dumped them, and so I wouldn’t have to kill him, and deal with a body.
The group had no idea that I was within ten yards of them. Their flashlight came on again, and I saw they were using it look at a shitty home drawn map. I waited until the light went out, and moved at once, striking while their eyes were still robbed of night vision.
Poor fuckers. Imagine it. You’re already terrified, and then, from out of nowhere in the middle of a fucking desert you feel a 250-pound wrecking ball slam into your back. I used no words. I just threw myself into them, slamming bodies to the floor.
There was a lot of screaming. Then there was running. At the end of it, I had one of them pinned to the floor like some discovery channel shit. She was an adult women; I’d let the easiest target - the one kid in the group - go because there’s nothing on earth that fights like a mother for her child. Instead, seeing that she was caught, she’d yelled at her kid to run and not look back. How fucking desperate were these people? Desperate enough to answer my questions, I hoped.
“Do you want to see your child again?” I asked in Spanish.
She did.
“I’ll let you go.” I promised. “I just want some answers. I’m going to get up now. If you move, I’ll shoot you in your stomach and leave you to die here.”
I moved. She didn’t.
“Tell me everything you know about kidnappers in Juarez.”
Chapter Thirteen
It was a long night for me. Probably felt a lot longer for the illegal. I had to poke, and prod, but she sang, and I got my answers before letting her run terrified into the desert. Now I was sitting on the porch of my ranch, looking at a notebook in my lap. Everything she had told me, written down as soon as I’d come out of the desert with the dawn. There were routes, gangs, rumors, and whispers, but one name had my attention, and was circled in ink.
Lopez.
The name had come up again and again from my “informant.” It had been said with the kind of fear I believe would be caused by a reputation for torture, like I’d seen inflicted on Lucia’s body. So far as I could tell, Lopez was my man.
I lower the not
epad, and think about going into the office to see what I can dig up on him there. The problem is, our job is more concerned with stopping people getting in than it is about looking out for the ones who get kidnapped and held across the border. That’s the FBI’s job.
I think about it for ten minutes before I call Sarah. I don’t want her involved, but I decide to test the waters. The motel manager seems pissed that I interrupted him in the early hours to put the call through, but I don’t have her cell, and I don’t give much of a fuck about his jerking-off schedule.
“Hello?” She answers with the croak of the chronically hungover. “Oh, hey Dom. Jesus-fuck my head is killing me.”
Now isn’t the time to get her on my team. Sarah’s always been a pro at whatever she does, and she’s not about to put her career on the line without the biggest of reasons. I’m not sure yet how far I’m willing to bring her in, so I ask her to meet me that evening. When she asks what it’s about, I tell her “Ethan’s last wishes,” but leave out the detail about how that included killing everybody who had harmed Lucia.
I hang up the phone and sit back in my chair. I’m beat up from emotions, a night in the desert, dehydration, and no sleep. I want to just close my eyes and sleep, but those Ranger School memories are there to poke me in my eyeballs; it’s when you want sleep the most that you have to fight it. Your body is a weapon, and water and calories are its ammunition. I push myself up and out of the chair, and open the door into my kitchen.
It’s then that I hear the sicario.
Chapter Fourteen
The sound comes through the far wall; distinctive creaking of a footstep on the dry hardwood floor that needs oil. That’s my bathroom, and some piece of shit is waiting in there so that he can put two rounds through my head before cutting me up in the tub. He knows who I am, how much I weigh, and is trying to save himself the job of dragging my ass in there from the kitchen, where he should have dropped me the second I opened the door. I draw my weapon; that bit of laziness is going to cost him his life.
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