She felt like she was in semirural Mexico.
Omar’s was a rustic brick building that smelled of chili and onions and meat, with the scent of fresh tortillas curling through it all like a golden ribbon. The café was close enough to downtown that tourists might wander through, but authentic enough that only locals would stay. The tempera paints on the outside of the window were faded from sun and heat, not yet melted by rain. Yard-high red letters spelled out BIENVENIDOS Á OMAR’S.
Lina smiled. The smells of food and the language being spoken on all sides surrounded her like a lover.
“You look like you’ve been handed a piece of heaven rather than an invitation to a Mexican dive,” Hunter said. He knew his voice was too husky and he didn’t care. The more he discovered about Lina, the more he liked her.
Wanted her.
Good thing I’m wearing a loose shirt, Hunter thought wryly. I’m throwing wood like a teenager.
“I’ve missed this kind of Mexican food,” Lina said.
“Greasy?”
“Real. Country food meant to feed people who have little money and hard physical jobs.”
As they walked into the tiny restaurant, the sun flooding through the red letters on the window made the interior glow carmine. The three Latina women making tortillas behind the grill waved at Hunter and then giggled.
“Buenos días, señoritas,” Hunter called to them. His lilting accent was all Mexican, as easy as his English. “Omar, how’s business?”
Behind the counter, Omar grinned. He was six foot two—six foot six if his turban was counted. His dark complexion might have helped him to blend in, if not for his height and aquiline features, which would’ve been more at home in the Punjab. He wore his long beard carefully kept and his eyes glittered behind thin lenses. He insisted often and loudly that he was the only Sikh running a Mexican restaurant in all of Texas. No one argued. The food was too good.
“Excellent,” Omar said. “What may I serve you?”
“I’ll have the usual.”
“Machaca, half a stack of corn tortillas, eggs soft, extra salsa nuclear,” Omar called over his shoulder. “And for the beautiful young lady?”
Lina looked behind her, laughed, and said, “Machaca, frijoles refritos, corn tortillas, salsa, and orange soda.”
“The salsa,” Omar said, looking at her, “gringo, medium, hot, or nuclear?”
Darkness shot through with gold flashed as she rolled her eyes. “Just hot.”
Omar grinned, revealing black gaps and white teeth. “Coffee and water are in the customary place,” he said to Hunter as he totaled their order on an adding machine. “Soda is in the cooler.”
Hunter paid before Lina could open her purse. She would have argued, but it wasn’t worth it. At the moment she was very much in a man’s world.
Lina glanced over at the wall to the left. The cooler beckoned in cheerful, chipped colors next to a worn linoleum-surfaced table holding coffee, water, sugar, cream, and plastic utensils wrapped in napkins. By the time she and Hunter found an empty table—about two feet square—and two metal chairs, their order arrived.
For a few minutes the only sounds the two of them made were “Mmm,” “Wow,” and scraping utensils. Hunter ate with the same efficiency he did everything else. He never moved fast, but everything disappeared at an astonishing pace.
After destroying two skimpy napkins—his and hers—Lina gave up and simply licked her fingers.
Hunter watched and wished he could offer to help. Insist, actually. Her agile tongue was hotter than his salsa, which was hot enough to melt plastic.
“I missed breakfast as well as lunch,” Lina said as she mopped her plate with a last bit of corn tortilla. “These tortillas…fantastic. Like the corn was ground by hand with a limestone metate.”
“Could have been. Omar’s wife is Mexican, from Tamaulipas. So is Omar. The narco violence drove them across the border to Texas about five years ago. He has some pull with the feds, so he and his family have refugee status here.”
“I hear it’s bad,” Lina said. “Even the Yucatan.” She shook her head. “Zetas, Gulf Cartel, and others are making life hell for the common people.”
Hunter almost told her about the blue-painted, headless, heartless bodies being found by ICE, but didn’t. No use spoiling her meal. He liked watching a woman who didn’t push lettuce around on her plate and call it eating.
“I’ve been thinking about the…items,” she said in English, glancing around.
The tables around them had filled up. People came and went through the tiny eatery like waves on a beach. Tex-Mex was the predominant dialect, but she heard accents that went farther south than Mexico City.
It would be stupid to assume that they were the only English speakers present.
Hunter moved his chair right next to hers, so close the metal legs scraped. “Go on. I’ll keep an eye out for eavesdroppers.”
“If they are fakes,” she said in a low voice, “why would anyone go to the trouble of painstakingly counterfeiting objects that less than a handful of people would recognize as relating to an obscure, forgotten god?”
He thought about her words as he checked out the occupants of the café with his unusually wide peripheral vision. “You’re saying that fake or real, the market is limited?”
“Very.”
“Outside your family, who would care?”
She flinched. “There are several museums in the Yucatan that specialize in local ar—ah, items.” Her voice dropped. “My father has made enemies. These could be a trap for him. Or them.”
“What’s the profit in that for anyone?”
“Revenge.”
Hunter hesitated, considered, nodded. “Anything else?”
He watched Lina’s pulse work furiously beneath her skin as she looked around yet again.
“Whatever cat you’re trying to keep bagged up is already out,” she said in a low voice.
He leaned closer, so close she felt his words as much as heard them. “How do you know?”
“Rumors of unusual ar—items are making the museum and collector rounds.” She looked at her fingers, clenched in a stained napkin. “You must understand. What you’re looking for, if real, could make a collection, and a museum, famous.”
“Even without provenance?” he breathed into her ear.
“That can be manufactured if you have the right connections,” she said reluctantly. It was one of the realities of the artifact world that really made her angry, so she tried not to think about it. “It would cost a great deal, but it could be worth it to some people.”
“And the provenance would be accepted, if the right people were on board?”
She nodded slowly, unhappily. “There would be academic carping, but it would be written off as professional jealousy.”
Three men walked in. They were of the same ethnic type as the men Hunter had seen at LeRoy’s apartment. Long hair, black, straight, clean. They weren’t as richly dressed as the apartment wreckers had been, but silence followed them through the small restaurant like a spreading shadow. Several patrons crossed themselves as the men passed.
“Interesting world you live in,” Hunter said.
He threw some money on the table for the cleanup crew, pulled Lina to her feet, and headed out.
The Jeep was waiting for them, as hot and dirty as the streets. Houston’s usual humidity was making a comeback from the earlier dry air. The sky had turned to steel, but it didn’t feel like rain was coming. Traffic was its usual relentless self. Lina was relieved to get inside the museum building again.
Inside her office, she stared at the photographs until they seemed to shimmer, breathe smoke, drip blood. Sitting next to her, close enough to rub thighs beneath her office worktable, Hunter was using her computer to search databases she really hoped didn’t leave any cookies on the hard drive. Auction houses weren’t on the academically approved list, much less some of the sleazy “archaeological specialties” sites he’d visited
.
Apparently, some people really got into Maya bloodletting rituals. Or what they thought of as Maya rituals.
While Hunter worked he exchanged texts with his friend Jase. From the set of Hunter’s mouth, none of the news was good.
Lina knew how he felt. Even in the Reyes Balam private databases, none of the artifacts she’d seen were like those in the photos. Artifacts similar in form and function? Yes. Identical in substance and detail? No.
Hunter stretched and yawned. Not boredom. Fatigue. The darkness beneath his eyes told of missed sleep and too much adrenaline.
“Why don’t you go home and nap?” Lina asked. “Yawning is catching.”
“You saying I’m boring you?”
“I’m saying you’re tired. How much sleep did you get last night?”
“A few hours.” It was the time of year he acutely remembered Suzanne’s death. Sleep was hard.
“Git,” Lina said in her best way-east Texas drawl.
Hunter hesitated.
She knew he was thinking about Omar’s and the men who had spread silence like darkness behind them.
“I’m in a museum that is guarded all day, every day,” she pointed out. “Go home and sleep. I’ve got a lot more work to do on these photos before I’m ready to talk about them. When I leave, I’ll have the guard walk me out to my car. My apartment is very secure.” Because my family is paranoid. “I assume I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I can’t leave the photos here.”
“I have an excellent memory and lots of notes.” She didn’t mention the quick sketches she’d made. She just scooped up Hunter’s photos, stacked them neatly, and handed them over. “Go.”
Reluctantly, Hunter went. Lina was right. He couldn’t do all-nighters the way he once had.
“Call me if anything breaks loose,” he said.
She waved her hand in a shooing motion. She was already at work, making cryptic notes. A thick book of glyphs stood open at her elbow.
Silently Hunter let himself out of the office.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HUNTER GROANED, TWISTING IN THE COILS OF A NIGHTMARE.
Suzanne, trapped in a beat-up truck, hammering against the window with her little palms flat and red, her eyes so wide that they’re more white than brown. The truck is parked on a frozen lake, so cold that Hunter feels his skin split and bleed.
Icy blue fog claws its way around the truck tires while something laughs like breaking bones.
No, not bones. The ice is breaking, the blue fog rising in fingers shaped like a shaman’s smoke dreams. Ancient glyphs smiling death.
He runs and gets nowhere, heart slamming, open mouth screaming “NOOOOOO,” and his cries are more glyphs, more death.
More bones breaking, ice smoking into blue nothing.
The back end of the rusty Ford slips away first, shards of blue teeth chewing up the truck bed. Suzanne with her father’s eyes staring at Hunter, beating on the window with small fists, smears of blood. She is sideways now and the icy teeth and glyph, blue fire and red death, chewing, chewing.
Sweat glazes Hunter’s body, his heart beating like his daughter’s fists, his body frozen in blue ice and fire.
The car slips deeper into the hungry blue while Hunter, frozen in a glyph, watches helplessly, screaming, Suzanne dying—
The phone trilled at Hunter, dragging him from the nightmare. For long moments he didn’t know where he was, who he was, how he was alive. A last ripple of thunder came through the apartment walls. A storm, not ice breaking, not him screaming, his body slicked with sweat.
Goddamn. Goddamn.
He hadn’t had a dream that bad since Suzanne had died in a single-car rollover accident with her mother and drunken father. No ice, no water, except in his nightmares.
The phone stopped ringing, then started up again. Hunter grabbed it.
“Yeah?” he asked hoarsely, looking at his alarm clock.
He’d slept well into the next day. No wonder he felt like roadkill.
“Hunter?” Jase asked. “You sound like something the cat dragged in and rammed down the garbage disposal.”
“What’s up?” Hunter asked. The last thing he wanted to talk about was why he sounded the way he sounded.
“I got a tip from someone who owes me. A bust is going down that sounds like it might be interesting. I’m out front.”
“My car or yours?”
“Mine. Some of the agents are used to seeing it.”
Hunter swigged the dregs of yesterday morning’s coffee straight out of the carafe, jammed his feet into his jungle boots, and went out to meet Jase. It was hot, stinking hot. The thunder that echoed in the distance hadn’t brought any rain.
Hunter got into Jase’s white minivan, slammed the door, and fastened his belt.
“I’m not going to say anything,” Jase said. “Don’t want to prejudice you.”
Hunter grunted. Silence was just fine with him
Jase drove through Houston to Willerton Lane. Going through this part of Houston was like peeling back time, skinning away years and watching things get meaner and meaner until the low stucco buildings went feral. Sunbaked and blasted, mangy lawns reverted to swatches of prairie yellow, dead for lack of water. Weeds grew waist-high and finally starved out, leaving behind a prickly thicket that you could lose bodies in.
ICE and Houston PD had cordoned off the area. Patrol cars were sitting with rollers blinking urgent colors, moving aside only for official vehicles. Neighborhood people watched from porches, nursing the second or third cerveza of the day while the children played with faded plastic toys in a heat that was more summer than winter. The sky reflected the neighborhood. Sullen.
Jase flashed his badge and got waved through with a nod and a glare of sun from the cop’s mirrored aviator sunglasses. Nobody seemed to care that Hunter was in the passenger seat, probably because he looked rough enough to be an undercover agent. Jase pulled over to the decaying curb behind a newly minted Houston blue-and-white. Under other circumstances, the high-gloss finish would have been irresistible to neighborhood taggers.
Jase didn’t move to get out.
“Now what?” Hunter asked. He needed something to keep his mind off his nightmare or his second taboo line of thought—Lina’s scent, her warmth, her lush lips made for the sweetest kind of sin.
She must think I’ve disappeared again.
“We don’t get to move in until after the door is cracked,” Jase said.
The house on Willerton had been left to abscess for a long time. It was rotten to its foundation. But that wasn’t what kept neighbors at a distance.
“The bad guys live here,” Hunter said. “No graffiti.”
Every other house on the block had been tagged, broken into, and then patched up. But this old house would be standing long after the neighborhood was abandoned and stripped. Nobody would be messing with the sun-faded stucco, because real predators lived here. The only things new about the house were the security doors and bars on the windows. They were black steel, powder coated, and looked like they could turn a bullet shot from the street.
“Nice bars,” Jase said.
“Stupid,” Hunter said. “Limits your field of fire from the inside.”
“Dude, sometimes I worry about you.”
Nearby a tactical van was parked close enough to do some good, but not close enough to get in the way. Two snipers lay on the van’s roof, covering the front of the house and yard. Hunter knew there would be another van just like it on the opposite side of the house, with ICE troops ready to come over the back fence if anyone tried to rabbit.
An electronically amplified voice boomed from the van in front of the house, advising the occupants of the house that they were officially required to quit the premises with hands on head.
The house stayed quiet.
“That’s the third warning,” someone shouted. “Take it down.”
A group of men cut the chain on the fence’s gate and moved in fast, marching
up the cracked walkway in black fatigues and vests that clearly spelled out ICE in what seemed to be mile-high yellow silkscreen. All of them carried handguns at a precise forty-five-degree angle from the ground.
The agents swept up the short stoop. They didn’t bother knocking. One of them stepped to the side and yelled, “Clear!”
“Det cord?” Hunter asked. Explosive cord made short work of locks.
“No, on houses like this—”
Gunshots rang out. The door shuddered and swayed, held on only by the dead bolt.
“—they shoot out the hinges and kick in the rest,” Jase finished.
Someone wrapped his climbing cord around the doorknob and took a good five steps back, bracing to pull. A big agent went to work around the dead bolt with a pry bar. The door clattered to the ground and skidded out into the front yard.
“THIS IS YOUR LAST WARNING. COME OUT BEFORE WE COME IN.”
No response.
An agent armed two flash-bangs and tossed them inside the open doorway. He counted down with his fingers, starting at three, two, one.
For an instant the gloom of the darkened interior went thermite bright. Sounds like a fireworks display gone psycho rolled through the neighborhood. Glass shattered behind one of the barred windows. Agents streamed into the house two by two, sweeping the rooms.
Hunter was relieved no more shooting came. Despite his training, he really didn’t want to have to go med-tech on anyone right now.
Soon six men were sitting cross-legged in the prickly yellow weeds that made up the front yard. Their hands were cuffed behind their backs. Eight cops stood around them, weapons low but attentive.
“Bet those bad boys have jailhouse tats and iron-pile abs,” Jase said.
“Sucker bet.” Hunter rolled the window down, flinched, and swore under his breath. “Something’s been dead for a while.”
“And not buried,” Jase agreed. “Stay here until I make sure it’s cool for a visitor.”
Hunter settled back. It would take time to Mirandize the gangbangers in the weeds and secure the house. He checked the glove compartment and found the little pair of binoculars Jase always kept there, just in case.
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