by Mark Greaney
And Court imagined half of the red, yellow, and blue blooming flowers in Sinaloa were used here at this cemetery.
The Chrysler pulled to a stop in front of a smaller crypt. This structure looked new, and a dozen armed men stood around it. Madrigal himself was there, with his teenage son Chingarito standing by his side. The Cowboy wore a red shirt and blue jeans, a straw cowboy hat and tennis shoes. A gold belt buckle of a horse’s head was the only frill Gentry could find on the man’s body other than the simple cross around his neck.
The Cowboy met Court as he climbed out of the car, shook his hand with a smile partially hidden under his mustache.
As he spoke, Chingarito translated. “Seven days, amigo. One week ago exactly I met you, and you promised to make trouble for Los Trajes Negros. I have to say . . . I thought you would kill a few Black Suits, destroy some product, and then die yourself. You have proven to me that you are a warrior.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you positive you were not born in Sinaloa?”
Court did not answer. The “little fucker” had nothing to translate.
Madrigal continued. “You have earned my respect. What you have done in seven days, these miserable idiots have not done in seven years.” He waved at the men standing around, and Chingarito laughed while he translated.
Gentry said, “And I’m just getting started. Another few days and he will be—”
Madrigal interrupted. “That is why I brought you here.” Chingarito struggled to keep up with the translations.
“Nine of my sicarios were butchered last night in Puerto Vallarta. Five Jalisco state police on my pay disappeared in Guadalajara yesterday. No doubt they will be found dead on a road within the next few days with their dicks in their mouths. The day before yesterday, twelve of my men were murdered, and a shipment of product was hijacked.”
Gentry stared back a moment. “I don’t give a shit if your assassins get killed, and I would only insult your intelligence by pretending like I do.”
Chingarito translated. Madrigal answered back.
“DLR had it done. He suspects you are working with me. He is punishing me for this relationship. I told you this would only work if we could conceal that we were working together.”
“You had to have known there was a chance you would be blamed for my actions. I’m sure you have more hit men and drugs, right?”
“Of course. I could go on like this for years. You are hurting him worse than he is hurting me. But there has been a change in plans. We will not be continuing our war.”
“What are you saying?”
“Your benefit to me has ended. I have made a deal. In return for handing your body over to the Black Suits, I can make this war stop, plus I have been promised some other things in payment. I have agreed to this deal.”
“You made that deal with Nestor Calvo.” Gentry said it confidently. He knew DLR was not the type of man to agree to a compact with Madrigal, his archenemy. He would fight and he would threaten—he would not acquiesce.
Madrigal shrugged. Chingarito translated. “Yes. Nestor Calvo Macias is the center of Los Trajes Negros. He is more powerful than even de la Rocha because of all that he knows. He has offered up one of their remaining foco super labs. A gift worth, over time, billions of dollars.” Madrigal smiled. “You should be proud of your market value.”
“Right.”
The Cowboy shrugged. “I’m sorry, my friend, but I will have to kill you now. I will honor your service with this beautiful crypt you see here.”
The men around began moving closer. Court looked around frantically for Serna. He found the intelligence chief in the crowd. He did not look happy about this arrangement, but he said nothing.
Gentry looked at Chingarito. “I can do more for him than Calvo can. Tell him that!”
Chigarito translated.
Madrigal replied. “You are giving me what I want. I want that super lab.”
From behind, a bag was placed over Gentry’s head.
“Mátalo,” Madrigal said, and this Chingarito did not translate. Court knew it was the town of Madrigal’s birth, but it was also a command.
Kill him.
He heard a pistol cocking close behind his head.
Court shouted one word.
And then Madrigal said, “¡Espere!” Wait. And then, “¿Qué dijiste?” What did you say?
In Spanish Court replied. “I said Calvo. I can get you Nestor Calvo. Having him in your custody would end Daniel de la Rocha and the Black Suits, and you know it.” Court could not see Hector Serna, but he called out to him. “Hector, wouldn’t you like to pick through Calvo’s brain? To find out everything he knows?”
Under the black hood Court perspired; all the muscles in his face and neck were tense, awaiting a shot to the head that he would never feel. He did not think of his own death, but only of Laura. He pictured her now, alone and afraid, and he pictured the men that would come to her when they did not need to keep her in one piece any longer.
He so wanted to help her.
He felt hands on his arms and back, pushing him forward into the mausoleum. There were shouts and orders barked behind him as he walked, and then the door slid shut behind him, and it was cool and dark.
His hood was removed. A man stood on either side of him, each with a pistol jabbed into his temple.
In front of him, from the light of a small, round stained glass window in the back of the crypt, he saw Madrigal, his son, and Serna.
Serna said, “Calvo is well protected.”
Court stuttered in fear. “I am well motivated.”
Madrigal spoke now. “You would say anything now to save your skin. I don’t believe you can deliver him.”
“How will you prove to Calvo that I’m dead?” Court asked in English, and Chingarito began a running translation.
Madrigal said, “I will tell him which crypt you are interred in here. He is planning on sending some men to see your body before the crypt is sealed.”
Court looked to Hector Serna. “Tell him you want to meet him in person here to show him my body.”
“Why would he do that?”
“He will have to do it, because he can’t tell DLR that the two of you made a deal. He will honor any reasonable request in order to keep this transaction quiet. And he’ll be intrigued, wanting to know what advantage he can obtain out of your meeting.”
Madrigal shook his head. “He won’t agree. It will be too dangerous for him.”
“You can tell him to bring whatever resources he wants. Tell him to bring one hundred gunmen to ensure this is no ambush. Tell him to send his men a day in advance to watch over the location.”
“You can get past one hundred gunmen?”
“Of course not, but he won’t bring that many. He is working in secret, without the knowledge of DLR, so he will want to keep these discussions off DLR’s radar. He’s not an idiot, he will bring security, but he won’t bring more than his usual close-protection detail. A manageable number so that word of the meeting does not get out around his organization.”
“And you can get through them?”
“I guess I’ll have to, won’t I?”
Madrigal said, “But when I get Calvo, how will that help you? I won’t trade him away for your little Gamboa puta.”
Chingarito translated. Gentry’s nostrils flared a bit, but he recovered. “Once I have Calvo, I will give him to you. But I will tell de la Rocha that I have him and that I’ll trade him for Laura. We’ll set up a time and a place for the trade. This will give you time to get what you need from Calvo before the Black Suits come looking, and it will give me a chance to get close to Laura, so I can get her back.”
Madrigal looked at Gentry a long time. Then he smiled. “You think like an outlaw. You scheme as well as anyone I’ve ever met, amigo.”
“Let’s just say this isn’t my first rodeo, señor.”
“I am intrigued by your offer, but there is one problem.”
Gentry kn
ew what it was. “You are worried you have informers in your organization, working for DLR, who will tip Calvo off in advance to our plan.”
Madrigal nodded.
“I have a way to prevent that.”
“How can you pos—”
Before Madrigal’s eyes, the Gray Man transformed into a blur of movement. He dropped straight down, out of the line of fire of the two pistols. At the same time he spun on the balls of his feet; his hands came up and shot skyward, knocking the pistols out of the hands of the two men. He then caught one of the weapons as it twirled in the dim, dusty air. He spun back on the balls off his feet, returned to a standing position, and pointed the big revolver at Constantino Madrigal’s chest.
All this took place in under one second. The disarmed men around him stepped back; Madrigal, Chingarito and Serna just stood and stared in confusion and shock.
After five seconds of silence, Court let the revolver roll backwards on his finger; it hung upside down from the trigger guard.
He stepped forward and held it out to Constantino Madrigal. “Here you go. Shoot me with it, or allow me to solve your problems with de la Rocha. If you don’t trust anyone here, shoot them, and then the threat of a leak will be gone. I’ll stay in here; you can tell everyone they were killed in a fight with me but you finished me off.”
Madrigal’s mouth remained open in astonishment. He looked to his son to await the translation, but Chingarito’s own mouth hung agape. His father nudged him, and then the boy spoke. While his boy repeated Gentry’s words in Spanish, Madrigal looked around at the others in the mausoleum with him, as if to see if they had seen the same incredible act by the American.
The Cowboy took the gun. Slowly, he motioned with it to his guards. “These two . . . I trust.”
He looked back to Serna. “Hector, as well. And mi Chingarito. He is family. Plus he’s too smart to cheat me, aren’t you, mi hijo?”
The Little Fucker confirmed with a nod that he was, in fact, too smart to double-cross his dad.
One of Madrigal’s men picked his pistol up from the floor; the other took his weapon back from his boss. They both looked equal parts shocked and embarrassed.
Soon the Cowboy recovered. “That was good, amigo. Very good. You could have killed me right then and you did not. I will give you your two days. Hector and I will tell no one else what our plan is. But I promise you, if I do not get Nestor Calvo delivered to me, alive, then I will send every one of my men after you.”
Court nodded. “He will be yours, señor. I promise you.”
For the second time in a week, Court Gentry swallowed all pretense of honor and shook the hand of Constantino Madrigal. It was even tougher this time than the last, chiefly because he knew that what he had just said was a blatant lie.
FIFTY-THREE
Forty-six hours later, three armored black Chevrolet Suburbans streaked west on a two-lane canyon road in southeastern Sinaloa. The lead vehicle flashed red lights on its dashboard, and the armed driver blew through tiny villas and the occasional intersection with no regard for any other traffic.
The driver knew the convoy had to keep moving—fast.
In the center seat row of Truck Two, braced on either side by two of the thirteen bodyguards brought along to protect him, Nestor Calvo Macias spoke on his mobile phone to his assistant. Calvo’s second-in-command had set up shop at the new property in Puerto Vallarta, and his job for the day was to keep DLR occupied and disinterested in Calvo’s whereabouts. Nestor was a professional, he did not like lying to his boss, but Nestor knew adult supervision was called for at the moment. He would not allow some gringo assassin, some ridiculous resin-skeleton bride in a dress, or some distracting quest for a fetus in hiding to ruin all he had built in the past years.
By going against his leader’s orders right now and meeting with Hector Serna of los Vaqueros, Calvo would stop a costly gang war, he would present the corpse of his boss’s gringo nemesis to him, and he would limit the hemorrhaging of treasure and bodies that had been going on for the past week.
The price would be somewhat heavy to end the Madrigal war, a methamphetamine laboratory in the northwestern tip of Jalisco state. But Calvo had chosen this barter item shrewdly. The lab had been costly and time-consuming to build, but it had underperformed since opening just thirteen months prior. Infrastructure in the area was poor, and access to skilled labor in the region problematic. Further, the army had concentrated on marijuana eradication efforts in the area, and the Black Suits worried constantly about the lab being discovered by some young college-grad army lieutenant who could not be bought off. So Calvo had offered to trade this potential debacle for the life of the man who was costing his organization millions of dollars a day and untold headaches.
An easy enough decision.
Meeting with Serna had been the most worrisome part of the deal for Calvo, but he now decided his concerns had been unfounded. Calvo’s security forces had sent an advance team to check out the location of the meeting, and they reported a safe house with only a few of Madrigal’s men, including Serna, and no other Vaquero forces in the area.
Nestor had ordered his bodyguards to travel light and undermanned today to decrease the chances of DLR finding out about the meeting. Calvo knew he could never tell de la Rocha about this bit of intrigue. Logic and reason would play no part into his patrón’s thinking; he would not agree to a deal with Madrigal in any form or fashion.
As the three-vehicle convoy raced through the narrow canyon on its way to the safe house in the mountains, Calvo continued speaking on his mobile phone to his second-in-command.
“DLR insists la CIA is working with Madrigal. He wants us to send sicarios after CIA men in the D.F. He is even talking with Spider about a direct attack on the American embassy. This is absolute madness!”
Two hundred yards ahead of the three Suburbans a large cement truck pulled onto the road from a commercial gravel pit on the left. The big black trucks closed on it quickly as the huge lumbering mixer struggled to gain speed. Its red and white rotating drum revolved as it lumbered up the road.
The driver of Calvo’s lead vehicle honked and blinked his lights rapidly as he rushed up from behind.
Calvo was unaware of this, and he continued his conversation. “The girl was never worth the trouble; the Gamboa family was never worth the trouble.”
The lead vehicle arrived directly behind the cement truck as the canyon narrowed in a turn. There were just a few feet on either side of the narrow blacktop road, which was surrounded by steep, rocky inclines that made passing impossible. The lead driver flashed his lights continuously and honked his horn. The cement mixer was increasing its speed but not fast enough to satisfy Calvo’s three expert security drivers. Words were exchanged over the radio between the Suburbans about the slowdown.
Calvo remained unaware.
“I need you to let me know if Daniel comes to you and begins asking too many questions about where I am. I can call him at any time and give him some story. Don’t try and fool him yourself. He can smell a lie just like his father could.”
The canyon narrowed further, and the cement truck accelerated to barely forty miles an hour. The lead motorcade driver leaned on his horn now, swerved his truck from left to right behind the mixer, and the front passenger rolled down his window, hefted his M4 rifle, and waved it outside so that it could be seen by the cement truck’s driver in his passenger-side rearview.
Calvo glanced up at the persistent honking as he spoke.
“Nothing, just traffic.” He looked down at a notepad on his lap. “Yes, I will give them the coordinates of the super lab. As soon as we see the norteamericano’s body I will contact—”
In the lead vehicle the front passenger had removed his seat belt and positioned half of his body out the window now, angrily waving the rifle in the air. The driver flashed his lights and began cursing loudly as they arrived at the most narrow portion of the mountain canyon. He reached for his radio to warn the other vehicles
to be ready for—
Right in front of him, the big cement mixer slammed on its breaks, skidded to a stop. A two-foot-wide high-pressure stream of wet concrete shot from its five-foot-long chute, and the lead Suburban drove right into the gravelly mixture before braking. It slid hard into the rear of the mixer, airbags deployed, and concrete covered the hood and windscreen. Hundreds of gallons of the gray sludge sprayed the vehicle and splashed onto the narrow road around it.
The bodyguard who had been hanging out the window flew completely from the Suburban; his back snapped, and his weapon slid forward, all the way past the front wheels of the cement mixer.
Just behind this the driver of Calvo’s SUV screamed “Hold on!” Nestor looked up from his phone, out the windshield, and into the morning glare ahead, just as his truck’s brakes locked and the SUV slid into Truck One.
Calvo’s phone flew out of his hand, and he slammed into the seat back in front of him. The bodyguards on either side of him did the same.
The leader of Calvo’s detail sat in the front passenger seat of Truck Two. As he recovered from the impact, his M4 rose from between his knees, and he grabbed his walkie-talkie and shouted to the rear vehicle. “Truck Three! Back! Back! Back!”
The rear driver jammed his Suburban in reverse, and Calvo’s driver did the same.
Nestor climbed back into his seat just as his truck went into reverse, throwing him forward again. The bodyguard on Calvo’s right grabbed him and covered him with his body. While doing so, both he and Calvo saw a flash of light on the rocky cliff above and just slightly behind them. The boom of an explosion came a fraction of a second later, and an instant after that, Calvo and his protector watched helplessly as the explosion blasted stone and dirt away from the brown scrub on the cliff. Boulders the size of easy chairs broke from the cliffside and tumbled down towards the convoy, knocking flat shale shingle and trees and dirt free on their way down.