The border Lords
( Charlie Hood - 4 )
T Jefferson Parker
T Jefferson Parker
The border Lords
Prologue
"Charlie, Gravas here. Reporting live from the Wild West."
"Good to hear from you, friend."
"My machine gun peddlers got a whiff of something. Me waiting there with my cash and meth like a dude with flowers and chocolates. They stood me up. How's my Seliah?"
"She sounded great like she always sounds."
"She doesn't tell you how hard this is for her."
"Neither do you."
"I feel strong, and clear in the eye. I want someone bigger than those machine gun punks anyway. I want someone with heft. I'm making some contacts out here. I'll get within spitting distance of Carlos Herredia if it kills me. Maybe I shouldn't put it that way."
"You're where you need to be. And when it's done you're out and rolling home."
"If Seliah needs something, she's going to call you."
"As always."
"I keep coming back to her, don't I?"
"You're supposed to come back to her."
"Gotta go now. Bad actors, incoming."
"Vaya con Dios."
"Yeah. I always go with God when I waddle around in hell."
1
Just before sunset the first bat fluttered from the cave and came toward him, wobbling and breeze-blown, like a black snowflake ahead of a storm. It rose and navigated between the trunks of the banana trees, then climbed into the magenta sky. Another flew, and then another.
The priest stood facing them, his feet together and his back straight and his hands folded before him. The reeking cave mouth yawned and the bats spilled out. He watched them come at him, then veer abruptly.
From the first few, he heard faint chirps but soon there were too many and all he could hear was their muffled flight. Then the air was heavy with them, a great dark blanket of membranous wings and small faces and tiny feet. One of them brushed his cheek and another glanced off his hair and another screeched at him in fear. Some of them dropped guano that tapped against his windbreaker but the priest stood motionless and let the flood of hair and skin rush past. My music, he thought. He considered the centuries and still the flood rushed.
When it was over he stepped inside. The smell was stronger. He lit a candle with a plastic lighter. Before he spoke he cleared his throat as he would before the homily.
"Yoo-hoo, little creatures of the night. Father Joe, here to see you."
His candle revealed the holdouts still hanging from the walls by their feet, wrapped like football fans, not in blankets but in their wings. Some of them squinted into the insult of the light; some shifted irritably like insomniacs, all snouts and elbows.
"Not quite feeling up to it tonight? The halt and the lame and the old and the sick. Feeling just a little off, are we?"
The priest strolled deeper into the darkness and the stench. A bat ran across his path, upright, wings raised overhead like a tiny man with an umbrella, looking back and up at him.
The priest stopped and held up the candle. A bat peered down from the wall and the man saw the glitter in its purblind eyes, the quivering, inquisitive expression on its face. The man cocked his head. The bat bared its teeth and screeched. The mouth was large for the face and the incisors were large for the mouth, and needle-like. The leafed nostrils were flared and its ears were enormous. The little animal began breathing faster, and it extended its wings and resettled them back around its body.
"Cold, my little friend?" The man saw the froth of saliva gathered at the chin, and when the bat sneezed the foam flew off.
The priest extended his free hand toward the animal. Again the bat bared its teeth and screeched but the priest didn't move, and a moment later the animal crawled down the wall a few feet closer to him. It was a cumbersome movement, with the thumb hooks grappling for purchase on the rock, and the minute toes spread for traction, and the sheer wings clumsy and useless. "Come closer, little fliedermaus. I'm not going to climb up there to get you!" The bat clambered closer and the priest stood on his toes and offered his finger and the bat climbed on.
The priest relaxed and lowered both arms and studied the animal in the light. Its eyes were bright in spite of their weakness. The man blew a puff of breath onto the animal, rippling its thin fur and revealing the almost-human shape of the rib cage. The bat cringed and screeched and bared its teeth again, and in this the priest saw humankind's embodiment of evil distilled into a single horrific face.
"Thank you," said the priest.
He dropped the candle to the cave floor where the guano devoured the flame and left him in darkness supreme. He gently cupped the bat between thumb and forefinger, then put it in his windbreaker pocket, zipping it halfway for security and oxygen. Then he carefully picked his way back out of the cave.
2
Charlie Hood sat in the ATF field station in Buenavista and watched the live-feed monitors. Hood was thirty-two, tall and loose, with an earnest face and calm eyes. He had been watching the screens for eight hours, doing his job for the ATF Blowdown task force. It was not pure excitement. He was on loan from the L.A. Sheriff's Department but by now he had spent fifteen months in this often infernal, often violent, often beautiful desert. He liked this place and he feared it. He palmed another handful of popcorn from its paper container without taking his eyes from the screen.
Buenavista was a California border town with a population of thirty thousand and an elevation of twelve feet. The monitors displayed live feeds from a "safe house" in one of Buenavista's nicer neighborhoods, three miles away. The Blowdown team called the house the Den. ATF had bought it on the cheap as a foreclosure, then wired it for sound and video. Hood's friend Sean Ozburn, an ATF agent operating deep undercover as a meth and gun dealer, had arranged to have it rented as a home for four young gunmen of the North Baja Cartel.
The assassins ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-two, and ATF figured them good for thirty murders between them. Some in Mexico. Some stateside. Almost all business related, the business being recreational drugs. Sales of those drugs brought Mexico some fifty billion dollars a year-by far the single largest contributor to its economy.
Hood watched one of the pistoleros, Angel, standing in his kitchen while a pot of carnitas warmed on the stovetop. Hood knew it was carnitas because two nights ago he'd watched Angel prepare the pork for boiling. Now the pot was on the stove again and a tortilla was warming on one of the electric burners and there was a skillet of eggs going.
It was unusual for any of the young killers to be up this early but Angel was here in the kitchen and Johnnie and Ray were in the living room. Angel was the only one who ever cooked anything. He was a skinny little guy with a wisp of a mustache and an overbite. He stood still a moment and watched his own monitor, a little kitchen-size DVD player on which he watched nothing but American gangster movies. This morning it was Scarface again, in Spanish, Angel at times mumbling along with Pacino, mimicking his expressions. A machine pistol with a noise suppressor and an extended magazine lay on the counter by the DVD player.
These guns had first come to Blowdown's attention in Mexican crime scene photographs late last year. Nobody at Blowdown had ever actually seen one except possibly Hood, two summers ago, though he wasn't totally sure at the time what he was seeing. He knew for certain that brand-new semiautomatic handguns were being packed for shipment at a Southern California gun factory. This he had confirmed with his own eyes. Then these illegally made guns had slipped away from Blowdown, right under their collective noses-one thousand gleaming new handguns, gone. Hood suspected they were headed south to Mexico.
Now he wo
ndered again if one of those apparently humble handguns could somehow be converted into a curve-clipped, silenced beauty like the one lying on Angel's kitchen counter. Hood would bet on it. If he was right, he knew for certain who had built the one thousand silenced machine pistols-a talented young gunmaker named Ron Pace. And if that was true, Hood also had very strong ideas about who had delivered them into the hands of Carlos Herredia's North Baja Cartel gunmen-a fellow LASD deputy named Bradley Jones. Hood was hot to get his hands on one of those guns. All of ATF was hot to get one. And Hood wanted to send Pace and Jones to the slammer where they belonged.
He ate and watched and opened another soda. Graveyard was hard on sleep and diet. He wondered if the assassins were up early because they had a job to do. Usually they slept until noon. His mind wandered back to Sean Ozburn again, and Hood wondered why Ozburn had gone silent. Almost fifteen months undercover, and once a day Sean would call one of the Blowdown team-usually Hood-even when he had nothing substantial to report. He called it touching his life raft. Fifteen months UC was a long run in anyone's book. Too long, according to many with experience. The calls had been Sean's established pattern and it had worked for him, and now he had broken it. Six days and no call.
So maybe Sean had been made, Hood thought. He wasn't sold on the whole idea of the bugged safe house, because of that possibility. One whiff of suspicion or one person who recognized Ozburn, and boom-he was dead, or worse. The Den was supposed to be an ATF jewel but they all knew its potential cost to their man undercover.
And the bugged safe house wasn't only a risk; it was frustrating, too. Hood understood that they didn't have enough evidence to arrest any of the four assassins. Most of their murders were committed across the border where ATF was essentially helpless. And the murders they were suspected of committing in the States were quiet and neat: no willing witnesses, no weapons left behind, no written warnings or mutilations or beheadings, just plenty of shots to the head and heart and that was that. Always.32 Automatic Colt Pistol rounds. Nobody heard. Nobody saw. Nobody knew anything. All this manpower and technology, and not an arrest made, thought Hood.
But the truth, and he knew it, was that ATF didn't want to roll up the Den and go to court just yet, because although the four young sicarios were only small-time killers, they were gold mines of information. Since this "safe house" had been activated four weeks ago, their conversations and phone calls had provided ATF hundreds of hours of talk and video, giving the Blowdown team a street-level view of the North Baja Cartel's blood-soaked battle for Southern California.
Behind Hood, three large, rolling whiteboards were backed against the far wall. Two of them were jammed with writing and one was beginning to fill-names, crimes, suspects, straw buyers, timelines, organizational charts, routes, possible tunnel locations, turf, family relations, feuds, debts-many grouped in circles and linked by solid lines or broken lines or some by strings of small question marks. Certainties were written in black. Suspicions were rendered in red, speculations in blue. It looked like graffiti. And all of it was gathered by ATF eavesdropping on the four baby-faced hit men. Blowdown wasn't after the likes of these boys. They were after the lieutenants and up, to the top of the food chain-the men who bought the guns and called the shots.
So, Hood thought, the whiteboards are full of intel but the killers are free to roam about the cabin.
He looked at monitor two and watched Johnnie and Ray playing Halo on the living room fifty-four-inch TV. Hood lifted an audio headset to his ear and winced: As usual the boys had the volume up loud. The hidden mikes were so good they could pick up both ends of a phone call, and this video combat game blaring through the home theater system sounded like Armageddon itself.
Johnnie and Ray were the two Americans, poor kids recruited from the rough Buenavista streets, kids with voracious desires and stunted notions of self-control. Hood knew their plan for happiness: Get a gun, get a job using it, get some decent clothes, get a better gun, get a car, get a big-screen television, get a truck, get a girl. Then, if you were still alive get a house, somewhere to put your girl and your stuff. They always bought the house last. It was the same for all the young pistoleros along the border. The cartels didn't care if they were American or Mexican. Global economy, thought Hood. Johnnie was the seventeen-year-old and he had earned a new Dodge Ram 1500 two weeks ago as a bonus for a hit in Tijuana. Chunks flying out the back of his head, as he'd bragged to Ray one evening, over and over. Johnnie had washed the gleaming black truck fourteen consecutive nights, up late, inside the garage of the Agate Street safe house so the neighbors wouldn't see him. He talked to the truck as he polished its coat.
Only Oscar was unaccounted for now. He claimed to have a girl-friend in Buenavista but no matter how much the other assassins teased him, Oscar had so far refused to bring her to his lair.
Hood heard two sharp knocks on the front door of the office, then the buzz from the ID reader. He glanced up at the security camera, then looked at the first light of the October morning just now touching the drawn blinds.
Dyman Morris came into the room with a tall cup of coffee and his war bag, and he set both on the desk, then sat two chairs down from Hood. He looked up at the screens. There were six of them. Dyman smelled of soap and his dark skull was cleanly shaved. "Look at this. The baby killers are stirring."
"Maybe they've got something coming up."
"Still nothing from Sean?"
Hood shook his head and watched Angel flip his tortilla. "I left him another message. That's three in six days."
In the silence that followed, Hood thought of their comrade Jimmy Holdstock, kidnapped last year on U.S. soil and taken to Mexico. Hood knew that Dyman was thinking of Jimmy, too. Jimmy hadn't even been working UC like Sean. Jimmy wasn't setting up bugged safe houses for the North Baja Cartel like Sean. Jimmy was just a former divinity student, part of the Blowdown team checking ATF Firearm Transaction forms, keeping an eye on the licensed dealers, trying to stem the flow of the iron river-the guns heading south.
"What I don't get," said Hood, "is who tells these boys they can do this."
"Do what, Charlie."
"Kill people for money."
"The cartel recruiters tell them that."
"But what about the consequences?"
"You've seen the consequences, man-a new truck for a bonus, and free prostitutes, like last week. Remember when Ray got that ten grand for a job well done?"
"What I mean is, who tells them it's okay?"
"Who do they have to tell them different? Their parents either don't care or don't know what to do. These boys don't go to school. Probably haven't been inside a church their whole life. So who are they gonna listen to except each other, and the actors in the movies they watch, and the cartel dudes with all the cash?"
Hood thought about that. "Still seems like something's missing. Some kinda horse sense or something."
"You had advantages you didn't know you had. I had them, too. Bakersfield is like Beverly Hills compared to these border towns."
Hood, a Bakersfield boy, nodded. Morris of the South Bronx sipped his coffee. By six thirty A.M. agents Janet Bly and Robert Velasquez had arrived. This was the transitional hour, when the graveyard watcher went off duty and the three-agent day team took over for another shift of interviewing firearms dealers, recruiting informants, shadowing suspected buyers and sellers, posing as straw men and illicit buyers, answering the phones and watching the young killers on live feed-all in a day's work for Blowdown.
"Well, look who's up bright and early today," said Bly. "Is that Angel with his carnitas?"
Hood nodded, looking at Angel's machine pistol again.
"Sean call in?" asked Janet.
Hood shook his head, saw the hardness in her face.
"Then maybe he called Mars or Soriana."
"He'd call us first if he was in trouble," said Hood, confident that his good friend Sean Ozburn would call Blowdown well before he'd call the ATF field station in San Diego.
Ozburn was a soldier, loyal and focused.
But six days and no calls. So the ghost of Jimmy Holdstock-retired now with long-term disability from injuries suffered in the line of duty; in his case, torture-hovered there in the war room once again.
Then, as if that ghost had cast its long, dark shadow over the room, one of the monitors went white, then black, and the audio died.
Hood's attention had been drawn to it just a split second before it went blank.
"The hell," said Bly.
"Don't worry," said Velasquez, their techie. "It'll come back. I'm not sure what's…"
Thirty seconds later the other monitors suddenly all turned bright white, then black. And the audio feeds died with them.
Blowdown was on its feet now. Velasquez looked down at the main control panel, head cocked. The others stared at the dead screens. They had lost camera transmissions before but never all of them at once.
"This is what my son does when the satellite goes out during SpongeBob," said Morris. "He just stares at the TV like he can make it come back on."
"It'll come back," said Velasquez.
Hood dialed Buenavista police chief Gabe Reyes and asked for an unmarked unit to drive by the Agate Street safe house, and Reyes said the shift was changing right now but consider it done. Ten long minutes, thought Hood, ringing off.
"Cops are changing shifts," he said. "Ten minutes."
"We can't lose all six feeds," said Velasquez. "Even in a power outage, even if someone cuts the line. Those cameras have two hours of battery backup. You have to shut them down from here, or in the control panel on the side of the safe house. But I built that control panel, and I disguised it as a breaker box, and it's got a lock, and the only people who have keys are us. So what the-"
"I saw something on screen six," said Hood. "Just before it went out."
"I was watching Angel make his breakfast," said Bly.
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