Krokodil

by Dustin Stevens

  I fought down the urge to step forward and peer in, both for fear it might derail our plan and that it might send that tiny spark deep inside into a full-on blaze. Despite whatever scar tissue the previous five years might have melded over the old wounds, they never actually sealed them completely.

  My only worry was what might happen once they ripped open again, allowing all the hate and rage bottled within to spill out.

  If the Juarez’s were smart, they would worry about that too.

  One more nod of the head and Diaz stepped through, her hands empty, her customary deep-set frown in place. From where I stood I could see the back of her head for three steps before she disappeared from view, leaving me alone in the hallway.

  With my back pressed against the cool concrete block behind me, I tried to fit everything I knew into some form of pattern. Discovering that the funds originated in Russia had been a bombshell, a shot in the dark that none of us could have seen coming. Were they what had Carlos so worried? And how did he now think he could avoid them?

  I stood in place, my gaze aimed at the tile floor, my mind racing, when a flash of color jerked my attention upward. Standing in full view of the window was Diaz. She wasn’t looking at me, keeping her attention on what I assumed was Manny, but as she talked I could see her raise her head up and down, an almost imperceptible nod meant for me. Tapping into just a bit of the animosity lurking within, I bolted across the hallway and jerked the door open, letting it slam back against the wall with a clatter.

  Diaz didn’t so much as turn her head as I entered, her focus fixed on Manny. For his part he jerked his gaze up at me, surprise at the sudden entrance soon replaced by a mixture of realization and shock. He extended one hand up towards me, his jaw dropping open, a sound resembling a pained moan sliding out.

  The sight of him made my every nerve tingle as I stomped across the room at him. With my left hand I shoved the table aside, the legs of it squeaking as it slid across the polished floor. Open and exposed, Manny sat and looked at me, his eyes growing wide.

  Again he attempted to say something, but never got the chance.

  My fist connected with his cheek with a deafening smack of skin-on-skin contact. I aimed it high enough to avoid snapping his jaw bone, but low enough so it would rattle a few teeth.

  The blow had the intended effect, sending him toppling over from the chair, depositing him in a heap on the floor. A trail of bloody spittle extended out away from him a full three feet in length, dotting the light tile floor.

  Without waiting for him to recover I flipped him onto his back with the heel of my foot and bent low over him, grabbing a handful of rough canvas shirt and lifting him towards me. I made sure to get a little skin and flesh as I hefted over half of his body up into the air, bringing him to a stop just inches from my face.

  “Where the hell is Carlos, Manny?”

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The ground crunched beneath Carlos Juarez’s feet as he exited the rented Jeep and stood staring at the structure. A plume of dust and debris hung in the air around him, raised by his tires as he traveled over the long-abandoned road, thrown upward no matter how slow he traveled. It tickled his nose as he stood and surveyed his surroundings, tasted gritty as it settled on his lips.

  Carlos ran the back of his hand across his mouth, adding even more dust. Thin and chalky, it caked on his tongue, causing him to spit repeatedly at the ground, little wet specks appearing by his feet.

  “Home again, home again,” Carlos said, a sour expression crossing his face. He waited several long moments, staring warily at the silent structure, waiting as the cloud of dust settled behind him.

  Once it did, he could see out through the California desert for miles in every direction.

  Situated atop a bluff in the Sonoran Desert, the place was fifty miles from the closest metropolis of any size. On especially clear nights the lights of San Diego were just visible in the distance, a tiny cluster glittering on the horizon, seventy miles to the southwest.

  The sky was not yet dark enough for such viewing, the sun still a few inches above the horizon behind Carlos. Long shafts of sunlight bathed everything in a late day glow, reflecting off of the Jeep beside him, their intensity barely contained by the thick coat of dust covering it.

  The choice in arrival time was deliberate, making sure to show up before his headlights could be seen cutting a solitary path through the night.

  After leaving Manny that morning, Carlos had every intention of doing as told, staying with the plan that they had laid out years ago. He would remain under protective custody, raise all kinds of hell to make sure they did their job, and he would stay alive. As tempting as the thought of finally being out from beneath their watchful eye was, the recent travails of Mateo served as a cautionary tale to keep him from doing anything rash.

  That had been five hours ago, though. Before Diaz and that bastard from another time dropped him alongside the highway, noon sun beating down on him, not a soul around. Before the second car, manned by a pair of condescending pricks with shaved heads and terrible facial hair pulled up and demanded he get in, making borderline-racist comments the entire way back.

  Long before they tried to force him to return to the house he’d been staying in for months, the same one that Mateo had sent the package to, had no doubt spilled the location of to whoever found him.

  Despite whatever he had promised his cousin, there was no way he could return there. Going back would all but confirm his death, be walking right into a trap that was lying in wait at that very moment, a team of men in place, waiting to spring for him.

  Instead, he’d gone off the grid. Gotten himself to town, rented a Jeep, and made a line for a house that only one other person in the world knew of, and he damned sure wouldn’t tell anybody about it.

  The building was made entirely from concrete block, stretching forty feet in length and twenty feet in width. The back half of it was buried within the sand dune it was perched atop, a practical design meant to serve as natural coolant and to aid in reducing visibility. A single wooden door stood in the middle of the front, a pair of matching windows on either side. Every surface, the glass included, was painted sandy brown.

  If somebody didn’t know exactly where it was, there was no way they would ever find it on their own.

  The place had been constructed as a bomb shelter sometime in the fifties, the kind of place Army officials could hide in and watch remote detonations through binoculars. Rumor was there were dozens just like it scattered through the Sonoran Desert, all from a time when Cold War fears were a part of daily life.

  It was the only one Carlos had ever seen, doing so after Manny acquired it ten years before as a private safe house exclusively for the family. Not even Mateo knew about the location, something the two cousins had discussed at length before deciding to keep strictly between them.

  The fact that had that conversation gone a bit differently Mateo might still be breathing was something Carlos had actively avoided since receiving the package a day before.

  “Well, here we are,” Carlos muttered, reaching across the front seat of the Jeep and extracting a pair of plastic grocery sacks from the passenger seat. Each one contained bottles of water and Gatorade, stacks of canned and dried goods in the back. Stored inside the house were pallets of MRE’s picked up at a military surplus store years before, but the idea of actually eating any of those had been bad enough to force Carlos to risk the extra time needed to stop for some real food on his way out of San Diego.

  More than once he had thought of getting word to Manny about his plan, but in the end decided against it. He was going against the script now and he knew it. Better to lay low a few days and figure things out, hope the DEA got their heads about them, and resurface. After that he would stop by the prison and explain what had happened, why he did what he felt he had to.

  Manny would understand, he always did.

  And even if he didn’t, it was easier to apologize than ask per
mission.

  A thin top layer of sand whipped across the ground as Carlos walked to the front door, the sound of it smacking against the Jeep, the front windows of the building, ringing in his ears. Underfoot the ground was compact, soil hard packed and sunbaked, a heavy dose of sand lying atop it, pushed back and forth by the unending desert winds.

  Shifting both sacks into his left hand, Carlos rotated a clump of keys in his right, shifting them until the single brass implement he was looking for came into view. Using his thumb and forefinger he separated it out from the others and slid it into the lock, the mechanism turning smoothly, releasing with a click.

  The wind had driven a heap of sand beneath the doorway, clumping it on the ground and offering resistance as Carlos pressed his shoulder into the door and shoved. It pushed back against him a moment before giving way, swinging out into a darkened space, the only light spilling in through the doorway. His elongated silhouette stretched across the floor, the musty scent of stale air and dust meeting his nostrils.

  Carlos stood in the doorway a long moment, allowing his eyes to adjust to the darkness. He twisted the sacks a bit in his hand, the plastic echoing out, the sound breaking up the eerie silence of the building.

  “Okay,” Carlos said, nodding, before taking a step forward, his foot touching solid concrete for the first time since leaving the grocery store.

  His second step never made it.

  There was no chance for Carlos to defend himself, not even the opportunity for him to scream out. Instead there was just a single flash of light, a glint of sunshine flashing against polished steel, before everything receded to darkness.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  “How’s the hand?” Diaz asked, glancing over from the road to my right fist, lightly balled atop my thigh. I glanced down at it without looking over at her, flexing my fingers into a tight bunch before spreading them wide, leaving the hand flat.

  “It’s fine,” I replied, looking out the front windshield. “I’m not made of glass.”

  Until she asked, I hadn’t once thought about my hand. The combination of avoiding his jawbone and the concentrated adrenaline coursing through me had kept there from being even a slight hint of soreness. My skin, leathered from five years of exposure to the elements, had held firm as well.

  It was the first punch I’d thrown in a very long time, though my body didn’t seem to realize it.

  “I could say the same for Manny Juarez,” Diaz said. “Hard as you hit him, I thought he’d be unconscious for hours.”

  An inch up or down, inch and a half to the left, and he would have been. I don’t say that to be boastful, but as a statement of fact. Most people have never thrown a meaningful punch in their lives. They curl their thumbs beneath their overlying fingers, angle their hand away from their forearm, don’t know how to balance their weight.

  On the second day of DEA training, they began teaching us hand-to-hand combat. Not how to box, not some twisted version of the hottest MMA style, but how to fight. Even a few years out of practice, those skills never leave a man.

  If I’d wanted him unconscious, he would have been. Simple fact was, he was of absolutely no use to us lying on the floor, unable to open his eyes. So I did what I had to to make my point, to get his attention.

  Two minutes later he told us exactly what we wanted to know.

  “Tell me,” I asked, switching the topic of conversation, making no attempt to be covert about it. “How did you guys close the net on him anyway?”

  A long moment passed as Diaz pushed the speedometer above seventy, the setting sun in our faces. I reached out and flipped the visor down in front of me, the front dash piping chilled air into my face.

  “You never heard?” she asked, the top half of her face covered in plastic black sunglasses. The sun and the road ahead could both be seen on them, their mirrored front reflecting everything.

  “No,” I said, shaking my head less than inch to either side. “Once I was out, I was out.”

  “Damn,” Diaz muttered, just audible above the air conditioning fan in front of us.

  She left the comment open-ended, pausing for a moment, allowing me to fill in the blanks if I wanted to. There was plenty I could have inserted for her, ranging from the need to get as far away from the desert as I could, to the knowing if I was around it even a little bit there was no way I would be able to control the torrent of emotion within me.

  My actions a half hour before, the first of what I feared would be many, had already displayed a tiny bit of that, even after five years to suppress it.

  “First of all,” Diaz said, reaching up and adjusting the sunglasses on her face, the reflection bouncing in equal measure, “it was you guys that did it, not us.”

  Unable to stop it, my jaw dropped open a half inch, my head twisting to the side. “Say what?”

  Diaz nodded, rocking her body forward an inch or two with it. “Maybe a year after you left. Took almost another year before Manny entered prison and all the details were ironed out, but, yeah. It was the last thing Hutch did before heading back to Washington.”

  I stared at her a long moment before turning back to face forward, running a hand over my face. For three solid days now I had been interacting with my old boss, but not once had he shared that bit of information with me. Why? Was he trying to protect some old wounds he thought I still carried?

  “Son of a...” I muttered, letting my voice trail away.

  “Yep,” Diaz agreed, nodding once more.

  Silence fell between us, my mind racing to determine what to make of this newest piece of information. My breathing grew louder as I sat and stewed on it, forcing air in and out through my nose, my eyebrows knitting together as I stared ahead.

  Sensing where my mind was, feeling the anger start to roll off of me, Diaz pushed ahead. “The plea bargain was to cover Carlos and Mateo as well. I got the impression from reading the case file after the fact that Mateo was more of a throw-in than a demand, a pity toss by our side based on the volume of information he gave up.”

  This time I was more prepared for any surprises. I kept my mouth closed, not letting the wonder of this statement show.

  In all my time with the DEA, I had been a full-time field agent. Never was I inside the boardroom for final negotiations with anybody that we brought in, but not once could I remember our side throwing in extra concessions just for the sake of it.

  “All three protected under one plea deal? What the hell did he give up?”

  A smirk pushed Diaz’s head back as she glanced over my direction. “Who didn’t he give up? In total over a dozen distributors, stretched up the coast from here all the way to Fresno.”

  “Fresno?” I asked, letting shock show in my voice. “Damn, when I was running them they were making their way into Bakersfield. That’s over a hundred miles of expansion in just a couple years.”

  “Yea,” Diaz said, nodding in agreement, “and my hunch is if we hadn’t gotten to them they’d have been all the way to the Bay Area within the decade.”

  An elongated whistle slid out between my lips, my head leaning back to sit on the headrest behind me. All told, that represented a stretch almost five hundred miles long, encompassing no less than five major cities, including LA, Oakland, and San Francisco. There were no doubt other competing interests in each of those areas, but just the fact that they were there spoke volumes of the scale they had become capable of operating on.

  “So you pinched Manny? And he rolled for protection of his higher-ups?”

  Diaz lifted the sunglasses from her face onto her forehead and pulled her cellphone from the middle console between us. She checked the automated directions onscreen against the mile marker outside before dropping the phone and her glasses back into place.

  “Two more miles,” she said, both hands returning to the wheel. “I don’t know all the details, even now. Large chunks of the terms have been redacted, written off under the old company maxim-“

  “Above your pay grade
,” I finished for her, having heard the words a hundred times before, each just as bitter as the previous.

  “All I know for sure is Manny went in for fifteen, probably be out in less than half that. Carlos and Mateo were both put into protective custody, I assume in case any of the distributors they ratted out decide to go after them, and given the caveat that they provide any assistance we ask for with dealers along the coast.”

  She slowed the car to less than half our previous speed as a green mile marker sign came closer along the right shoulder. We both leaned towards the window as it crept by, eyes aimed on the ground, looking for anything that might be construed as an in-road.

  Seventy yards after the sign we found it, a matching pair of indents in the shallow desert sand giving the place away. Without flipping on the blinker Diaz hooked a right, the car bouncing up and down, tires spinning, before settling into the grooves and rolling forward.

  I waited until the car evened out before returning my thoughts to the conversation, so much of what she was telling me not making sense. Priority one was to find Carlos, but getting him, Manny, and Hutch all together in the same room wasn’t far behind.

  Whatever had happened with the Juarez cartel three years before was a mess I had to get cleared up if I was to have any chance at deciphering why they were now under attack. There were dozens of questions still left unanswered but I decided to let them go for the time being.

  Beside me, Diaz removed the sunglasses and tossed them atop the dash. She pulled her chin back into her neck, folds of skin gathering there, the frown back in place on her features.

  We rode in silence for a full five minutes, traversing the three miles from the roadway, just as Manny told us it would be. The entire way we both leaned forward in our seats, straining to see the faintest hint of a path through the sand, the sedan whining in protest as it pushed along. Outside I could hear the sound of sand crunching beneath our tires, mixed with gravel and soil beaten down hard over the years.