He laid all the pieces on the diapers then opened the bottle of solvent, enjoying the smell of the familiar tang. He dropped a bit onto the rod brush and passed it through the barrel to get it working. Then he took one of Sam’s Huggies wipes and cleaned as much swamp crap off the various parts as he could. He broke out some Q-tips to get the crannies. Then he finished the cleaning by shoving a few patches through the barrel.
With the gun clean, he lubed the parts with a few drops of oil and a Q-tip. He put the gun back together and performed the function check. Then he went to work on the magazines. He took the rounds out of the one, removed the bottom and spring, and wiped it all down. Disassembled the second and wiped it. The feel of the gun, the smells—it calmed him, filled his mind with good memories. He’d worked with some of the finest people on this planet. He was working with a few more now, even if they were less skilled.
He put the magazines back together and reloaded both of them. The last step was to take the girl’s belt he’d had Carmen get and make a sling for the P90 so he could hang it about his neck and work hands-free.
The stripping, cleaning, and reassembly had taken a little under fifteen minutes. He now turned to the current operation.
In a proper raid, he’d have five or six guys. He’d have two or three snipers providing cover and surveillance. He’d have a number of men creating a perimeter to prevent surprises coming in from outside. He’d have more intel. But you played the hand you were dealt.
“Carmen,” Frank said, “your job is going to be surveillance. You watch the area; you look for any approaching danger. You’re the eyes in the back of my head. Sam, you’re the driver. Your job is to stay with the van and drive, not get all heroic.”
“What about Pinto and Heber?” Sam asked.
“Tell them to fly home. They don’t need to be dragged into this quagmire.”
“I don’t think you know Pinto and Heber.”
“I’m going in alone.”
“They’re not going to fly home.”
Frank sighed. “Then have them fly a pattern high above the property. We can use the eyes in the sky. Once I’ve seen it up close, I’ll make the final plan.” There wasn’t going to be much to it. It was a simple recon. One man in, look around, get out. Unless life happened. And life always happened.
Tony’s phone rang.
Frank looked down. It was Sam’s number, the phone Carmen had given to the children. He put the call on speaker so Carmen could hear. “Hello?” he said.
“Jockstrap.”
Frank’s mind missed a beat.
“Frankie?”
Sam slowed the vehicle. Carmen looked down at the phone like it was some creature that had crawled out of Hell.
“Did you pick up that whore?”
“How did you get that phone?” Frank asked.
“You were supposed to pick up the children, Frank.”
“I was on my way.”
“It wasn’t too hard to figure out where they took the snowmobile. Wasn’t too hard to find them.”
Frank’s heart sank. Why hadn’t he secured them? Why hadn’t he done that first!
Ed said, “I’m trying to work a deal, for you, buddy. But I think you’re trying to stiff me. Are you trying to stiff me, Frank?”
“That never crossed my mind, Ed.”
“So now I’ve got one part of the threefer myself. Did you get the whore?”
Frank looked at Carmen, who was looking at him with venom, and put his fingers to his lips. “Yeah, I got her.”
“This phone has a lot of contacts in Rock Springs. Has your number, Frank. Who’s Sam Cartwright? He your friend?”
“I borrowed his phone.”
“He helping you?”
“No. He’s back in Wyoming.”
“I see his wife’s number. I see pictures of kids. I see all sorts of things. Put me on speaker.”
He waited a second. “You’re on.”
“Hey, Mr. Cartwright,” Ed said over the speaker. “You got yourself a fine wife. Couple of kids.”
Sam sat up erect and rigid in the driver’s seat.
“You make sure Frank keeps his part of the bargain. You bring that woman in. Do you hear me?”
Sam said nothing. Carmen’s eyes flamed with anger.
“Answer me, Sam.”
Frank shook his head.
“Or should I call your wife and confirm your location?”
Sam looked at Frank. Ed was going to find out anyway. He motioned for Sam to go ahead.
“Yeah,” Sam said.
“Nice phone,” Ed said. “I’ll see you two tomorrow.” Then he ended the call.
Frank put Tony’s phone down.
Carmen moved from the front seat to the back like she was going to pick up the phone. Frank moved aside, but she moved past him. And then in a whirl, she was behind him, Jesus’s scalpel-sharp knife at his throat.
“I’m not going anywhere.”
“I’m not working with Ed,” Frank said.
“Liar,” she said. “It was all a ruse. All of it!” She pressed the knife closer and a sting raced across Frank’s neck.
“You and Ed can go to hell!”
He felt her bunch, felt her prepare to cut his throat.
Frank grabbed her arm. She struggled, but then he twisted around, grabbed her smaller hand in his, and twisted more until she cried out in pain and dropped the knife.
She stabbed at his eye with the fingers of her free hand and connected. The world flashed white and pain in his eye shot through his brain, but he held on. He reached out, felt her hair, grabbed it tight.
He blinked but could hardly keep his eye open to see.
Sam braked hard and moved to the side of the road. The deceleration shifted her closer.
She thrashed like a wild beast. Struck him in the face. Tried to dig out his other eye.
He grabbed her arm, prepared to head-butt her face, but he didn’t want to break her nose. So he twisted and brought her down hard in the aisle between the captain chair seating, slammed her to the floor on top of the P90.
She cried out, kicked at him.
“Carmen!” he yelled. “Stop! I’m not going to turn you in!”
She tried to bite his hand.
“Carmen!” he yelled, then rolled her over so she was face down and knelt on her back.
She yelled and struggled. But he was too heavy and the spaced too confined.
“Carmen,” he said.
“I won’t talk!”
“I don’t want to know your secrets!”
“You have no soul,” she said. “You’re vermin.”
He put pressure on her arm. She cried out.
“Carmen, if I wanted the bounty on you, I would have tied you up. You would be in the back bound hand and foot with Sam’s lady pink duct tape. But I, don’t, want, you. I don’t want the frigging bounty. We could have taken you in the beet field and then rounded up those children. But we didn’t. Because we don’t want that. We are not working with Ed.”
She took in a couple of ragged breaths. Then the tension in her body lessened.
“I’m going to let you up. Just calm down. We’re going to work through this.”
Her voice was full of grief and hatred. “They’re going to beat those children. They will kill one of them as an example. It will probably be the boy.”
“We’re going to stop that,” Frank said.
He waited a moment.
“I’m going to let you up. The gun’s underneath you; you could pick it up and shoot me dead. But I’m going to show you I trust you. That you have nothing to fear from me.”
He released his hold and got off her.
Carmen brought her hands around and just lay on the floor.
Frank eased back into the seat behind Sam.
“They killed everyone else,” she said. “Hunted them, tortured them to find out where the money was, then murdered them.”
He supposed she was talking about the members of her organiz
ation.
“But none of them knew.”
She shook her head and closed her eyes.
“You can have your vengeance,” Frank said.
“That’s what you think I want?” She slid the gun out from underneath her and pushed it away. Then she got up on her hands and knees. “If I wanted nothing more than vengeance, we would have just killed them. We would have killed the Santos and the Menedez and Romeros and Morenos. We would have set up with high-powered rifles and shot to our heart’s content. Killed the peons and the padrotes and everyone in between. But that would have done nothing. We needed to raise the cost permanently; make it less profitable; make it higher risk. And we needed to free as many as we could in the process. My sister died, but at least I came for her. How many have no one coming for them? We couldn’t simply move to the other side of the road and walk on.”
She pushed herself up and sat in the seat behind the front passenger’s. Her hair had come most of the way out of its braid and hung about her head in a loopy mess.
Frank picked up her knife and held it out to her handle first. She was a soldier. Tough-beautiful. A fighter. He had met tough women before, but Carmen was at a whole other level.
“Take the knife,” he said.
She reached out and grabbed it.
“We’re going to do this thing,” he said.
“Right,” she said.
They had to do this thing.
Sam had parked them on the side of the road, the traffic on the interstate racing past. Frank looked up at him. “Let’s move out.”
Sam turned around, checked his mirrors, then he pushed the gas. The van accelerated down the parking lane, the rumble strips thumping under the tires.
Sam said, “That man has my phone. He knows about my family.”
“I’m sorry,” Frank said. Ed was like kudzu. He was like bacteria.
Sam’s face was stone.
Frank got an awful feeling, a terrible premonition. “Cartwright, I don’t want you getting all heroic. You leave this to me and keep your head down. You’re not the point of the spear. You’re support. Do you hear me?”
“Oh, I hear you,” Sam said, his tone pointing out that hearing and agreeing were not the same thing.
“I should have stayed with them,” Carmen said.
“Should-haves aren’t going to do us any good,” Frank said. “What we have now is the mission. We need to stay focused.”
He picked up Tony’s phone from the floor and noticed the clock. All these stops had taken a chunk of time. The minutes were running by like water. An operation like this needed careful planning and intel, and the plain fact was they didn’t have nearly enough.
24
H. C. and Sons
FRANK SAT WITH Sam and Carmen in the minivan in the parking lot of a wholesale plumbing store across the wide road from H.C. and Sons. He set Sam’s binoculars down. The bakery with its high cement walls looked as industrial up close as it had in the Google map—one more industry in the industrial part of town. They’d driven the streets around the place, zoomed in with Google satellite view. This was going to be a front door operation.
“Time for the chicken to cross the road,” Frank said. “We need a warm body to trade or an address where we can find one.”
“You want me to go to the parking lot.”
“The cameras mounted on the roof will pick you up. I don’t want you recorded on anyone’s tape. I don’t want them coming out to see who’s squatting in their parking lot. So stay here. Watch my back. Let me know when something happens out front.” He tapped the Bluetooth piece in his ear.
Frank put on his workman’s cap, got out of the minivan, and walked to the edge of the big road. Traffic zoomed by in waves. When there was a large enough break, he jogged across. On the other side his phone rang, and he answered the call without pulling his phone out of his pocket.
“We’re conferenced in,” Sam said via the Bluetooth.
“Pinto?”
The noise of a lawn mower came on. “Here,” Pinto said.
Frank looked up, shaded his eyes from the late afternoon sun, and spotted him up in the sky.
“I’m going to put it back on mute,” Pinto said and the lawn mower cut out.
Frank walked down the drive and crossed the lawn. He avoided the front entrance and headed straight for the truck bays. Right to the blue door he’d watched men come and go through the last fifteen minutes. He walked past a truck that said White Transportation. “Going in,” Frank said then walked up to the door, opened it, and stepped inside to a wide loading area.
There was a guy at a desk close up to the wall. Fat yellow lines had been painted on the floor around his area. Beyond him was a wide cement floor and then aisles of pallet racks seven levels high, all stacked with bags and boxes and buckets filled with various forms of sugary death.
Frank whistled. “This ain’t your mother’s bakery.”
The guy at the desk looked up.
Frank said, “I’m with the truck that just came in. I got to take a leak.”
The guy looked him up and down then pointed at a path on the shining cement floor. “Stay between the yellow lines. It’s right around the corner.”
“Thanks,” Frank said. He followed the yellow brick road of safety that was provided to keep men safe from the forklifts. It led him over to the wall. Frank followed it to the corner and glanced back. The guy was heads down, a testament to the miracles a little uniform can perform. Frank turned the corner. The towering storage aisles stretched out into the distance. Up ahead on the right was the door to the bathroom. Frank walked to the bathroom, opened the door, and went in. A moment later he walked right back out and proceeded down the hallway to the center of the plant where the offices were.
He walked past a woman wearing a white smock and hair hat. Up ahead he saw a number of smocks hanging from pegs on the wall. When he passed, he helped himself to one of the bigger smocks as well as a disposable hair hat from a cardboard box and continued on. It took about two seconds to shove his workman’s hat into a back pocket and don the smock and hair hat. The name patch on the smock said Shawn Wykstra. The hat was nothing more than a thin white bag with an elastic around the edge—oh how Chef Boyardee had fallen.
Some distance ahead stood the entrance to the factory proper. Through the double door windows, Frank could see folks in white smocks and white bag hats working along a production line. Frank didn’t go to the production area. Instead, he turned into a hallway that looked like it led to the front entrance. A number of pictures hung on the walls. There were pictures of frosting and scones and strawberry filling, pictures of three stellar employees who looked like they needed to get out and see the sun a bit more, and a picture of what looked like a Christmas party. On the opposite wall hung three framed portraits. On one side was José, on the other was Hector, and right in the middle was a woman named Flor.
Flor and José looked like they were in their late fifties. Flor had short hair. She was wearing a pink blouse and too much makeup on a face that had sagged. It was the face of a grandmother, but there were no kindly wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. It was a hard face. Not anything at all that you’d put on TV to sell snack cakes.
José was dried up, like he’d smoked too many cigarettes. Hector was younger, in his late thirties. A good-looking guy. A ladies’ man.
Frank walked down the hallway toward the front and found more bathrooms, a closet, a stairway, the reception area, and two small offices. One said Phil Dean on the door plate, and another said Sales. These weren’t the digs of a big shot. Those would be upstairs with the window views.
Frank took the stairs. It opened onto a space with a number of low-walled cubicles, the kind where everyone can see everyone else, head and shoulders. There were three women working in the cubicles. They all glanced at him.
Behind the cubicles were three offices lined up side by side. They all had big glass windows facing the office areas with blinds.
Fra
nk walked up to the first woman and said, “Is Hector in his office?”
She looked at his name patch, looked back up at him with a quizzical look on her face. She turned to the other women. “Did Hector come back?”
The women shrugged.
“We all just returned from the meeting in quality,” she explained. Her eyes fell back to his name patch. Rose again to his face, her curiosity sharpened.
“I’ll check,” he said and walked on by. He hoped this would be his lucky day. He hoped in this card game a Hector might be just as good as a Flor. And if there wasn’t any Hector sitting in one of the offices, maybe there was an address.
“Who are you?” one of the others asked as he walked past.
“Sam Alito,” he said. “Shawn lent me his smock.” Two of the offices were smaller. One had a long spread. Frank headed for it and was rewarded when he saw Hector’s name on the closed door.
Frank walked right up, grabbed the handle, and shoved. But the door was locked. He wrenched the handle again, but it was a good lock.
“Hector,” he called like a long lost buddy.
“Who did you say you were again?” one of the gals asked.
“Doctor Alito,” Frank said.
There was a thin slit between the window frame and the edge of the blinds. Frank leaned in close and cupped his hand around his eyes so he could see in. It was dark. He looked at the door. It was seated in a steel frame. It was going to be a bugger to bust down. It would be easier to break the glass. And then what? He’d search, hoping to find an address, and one of these women would call security, and they’d corner him on the stairs.
Frank turned around. The women were all looking at him.
“This is a bit of an emergency,” Frank said. “I have his results back. He’s going to want to know this.”
The older gal shrugged.
“I don’t think we want to wait with this. I’m going to need his home address.”
The younger woman glanced at the older gal, but the older gal was playing it cool. She said, “Check with the front desk. They can ring him.”
“I already tried that. You’re his secretary, aren’t you?”
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