Surviving the Dead (Book 7): The Killing Line

by James N. Cook

  My problem with this approach was it assumed Ross and his men would not simply shoot me the moment Lopez’s crew was taken care of. It also required using Sabrina and Elizabeth as bait, which was something I was not willing to do. If they were going to be involved—which they would have to be since Ross could not take direct action—I wanted to make damned sure they were on offense, not defense. So I asked myself a familiar question: What would Gabriel do?

  The answer fell under Gabriel Garrett’s Fourth Rule of Combat:

  Defensive positions are made to be overrun, so stay mobile. Surprise attacks are always your best option.

  And his Seventh Rule of Combat:

  When you’re enemy thinks he’s holding all the cards is when he is at his most vulnerable.

  So I had a talk with Sabrina and Elizabeth and told them what I needed them to do. I told them Ross’ men would follow them and watch their backs until it was time to carry out the plan. And once the fighting started, Ross’ men would make sure no one interfered. Sabrina agreed readily. She’d had to fight and kill before, and was confident in her abilities. Liz was not so certain.

  “I don’t know if I can do this,” she said as we were preparing to leave.

  We were in the lobby of the hotel, Ross’ men lounging at the bar waiting for us to depart. Ross himself was nowhere in sight. Liz was armed with her Beretta, M-4, and a backup pistol, the same as Sabrina—who I was certain was also carrying enough knives to outfit a cutlery store—whereas I had only my pistols and combat knife. Both women wore the Kevlar vests we had brought with us from Hollow Rock. I had forgone wearing mine, as what I had planned for Lopez hinged on him believing I was helpless and unable to defend myself.

  “You know what to do,” I told Liz. “We were both trained by the same guy. Stay out of sight until you hear the fighting start, and then move in. Standard room clearing procedure just like at the CQB course at Fort McCray. We’ve done it a hundred times.”

  “Never with people shooting back.”

  “Listen,” I said, turning to look at her. Her face was pale, her lips drawn and white. “At least you’ll have a gun. I’ll be unarmed in there, and I’ll be counting on you. You freeze up, and you’ll get me killed at the very least. At worst, you’ll get all of us killed. But that’s not going to happen. You know why?”

  “No.”

  “Because you’re going to remember your training. When the bullets start flying, you’ll know what to do. You won’t think, you’ll just act. Believe me. I know.”

  With that, I turned and walked out the door. Sabrina followed immediately, Liz doing the same after a moment’s hesitation. I hated being abrupt with Liz—she had every right to be scared—but the more she dwelled on it the worse she was likely to react when the bullets started flying.

  If they start flying, I reminded myself. Big if.

  We did not have far to walk. Lopez’s headquarters was a tavern directly across the street called El Presidio. A fitting name, considering its purpose. It was the place I had first noticed Lopez and two of his lieutenants watching me. I headed straight for the tavern while Sabrina and Liz broke off to circle the block and come in from the east.

  As I approached the entrance I called to mind all the faces from Ross’ dossier on Lopez’s men and wished like hell I had Gabe’s eidetic memory. I recognized two men sitting on the porch rail, nonchalant as could be, doing their best to look like a couple of out of work caravan guards spending what little trade they had on booze and women. I strode toward them purposefully, and like the amateurs I figured them for, they focused their attention on me and did not watch the street. From the corner of my eye, I saw Liz and Sabrina round separate corners and casually move into position.

  The two men on the porch followed my progress as I went past them toward the bar. The bartender’s face was familiar. According to Ross’ file his name was Rodrigo Salazar. He was short, bald, sported a patchy black beard, and was covered in tattoos from neck to knuckles. Three crudely drawn teardrops adorned one side of his face just below the eye. I approached him and laid my hands on the bar.

  “What can I get you?” Salazar said. His eyes shifted to a trio of men seated at a table nearby. I glanced at them and recognized their faces as well.

  “I’m here to see your boss,” I said.

  “You’re looking at him,” Salazar said. “I own the place.”

  “Is Lopez here or not?”

  The beady black eyes narrowed. “Who?”

  “Lopez. You know, Hispanic fella, walks with a limp, owns this side of the district, tells you who to shoot and who to beat up when you’re not pouring drinks. That guy.”

  He put down the glass he was holding and leaned over with his fists on the bar. The finger tattoos on one hand spelled EVIL and the other spelled WAYS. Very intimidating.

  “I don’t know what you’re deal is, gringo, but you’re about to get yourself fucked up.”

  “Just let him know I’m here. Tell him it’s about Santino. I have some information for him.”

  Salazar glared another moment, trying to terrify me. I stared back.

  “Wait here,” he said finally, and walked the other end of the bar. One of the men at the table stood up and walked over. There was a whispered exchange. The guy from the table looked me over and then walked toward a narrow hallway behind the bar. Salazar made his way back.

  “Might be a while. Want a drink?”

  “No thanks.”

  I sat down and looked around the room. Perhaps a minute later Sabrina moseyed in and took a seat at the end of the bar closest to the door. She glanced at everyone in equal proportion, me included, and put on a face that said she was not impressed. Salazar walked over to her and offered her a drink. She asked for moonshine. Salazar asked what she had for trade, and Sabrina asked if bullets were okay. Salazar said they were and poured her a drink. Sabrina downed half of it in one gulp and sat back to enjoy the burn. No matter how many times I saw it, watching a fourteen-year-old girl drink like a soldier on a weekend pass made me feel like a bystander at a crime scene.

  Past Sabrina, out the front window, I saw Elizabeth stop outside a food stand and pretend to study the offerings on display. From where she stood, she could hit anywhere in the tavern except behind the bar. That was Sabrina’s area of responsibility. All I could do now was wait and hope Ross kept his word.

  While I waited, I thought of what to say to Lopez. So far, he had made no overt moves against me, which was more than I could say for Ross. The only evidence I had that Lopez was hostile toward me at all was a dirty look, a hunch, and Ross’ say so. And Ross was not exactly an unbiased party. My instincts, however, told me something was wrong. That Lopez was planning something, and he did not have my best interests at heart. I have not survived as long as I have by ignoring my instincts.

  Still, I had to know for sure. So I sat, and waited, and after what felt like about ten minutes, a man poked his head around the corner and nodded at Salazar. Salazar turned and jerked his head toward the hallway.

  “That way,” he said.

  I stood up and walked to the end of the bar. Salazar lifted the divider to let me through. I proceeded down a narrow, dim hallway built of wood planks cut a little wider than my hand. At the end of the hallway a bruiser about Hicks’ size waited in front of a heavy-looking door.

  “Arms up,” the bruiser said.

  I raised my arms. He searched me and took both pistols and my knife. Quick, efficient, no nonsense, the kind of thing he had done a thousand times. When he was finished he opened the door behind him.

  “Go in.”

  “Sure,” I said, and entered. The bruiser followed me.

  Inside the office there was another man leaning against the wall to my right. He was tall, lean, bearded, dark skin, and watched me with a pair of merciless brown eyes. His shirt had no sleeves, revealing a pair of hard, heavily tattooed arms.

  Bruiser and Sleeveless, I thought. Those are your names.

  The office
was a little bigger than Ross’, and like Ross’, it was windowless and lit by oil lanterns made from scrap metal. But that was where the similarities ended. There were no shelves, no books, no couch for Lopez’s men to sit on. Just a desk at the far side of the room, a couple of impressionist paintings most likely liberated from some rich collector’s abandoned home, and the hard-faced Hispanic man who had glared at me on the street a couple of days ago.

  “Have a seat,” Lopez said.

  His accent was heavy and his tone brooked no argument, the voice of a man used to being obeyed. There were two straight-backed wooden chairs in front of his desk. No leather, no brass studs, no plush upholstery. Unlike Ross, Lopez did not seem to care if his guests were comfortable or not. It made me think a little more highly of Ross. He may have been a lowlife and a back-stabbing hoodlum, but at least he had taste.

  I sat down in one of the chairs and found it every bit as uncomfortable as it looked. But it felt solid enough. The other chair was within arm’s reach. I glanced behind me and saw Lopez’s henchmen standing shoulder to shoulder a couple of feet behind me. As good a setup as I could have asked for.

  “Was he armed?” Lopez asked Bruiser.

  The man walked around me and set my weapons on Lopez’s desk. Dumb, I thought. Lopez looked at the guns and knives, then at me. His eyes were narrow and black, his lips drawn down in a thin line, jaw outthrust, nostrils flared. I wondered how many hours he’d spent practicing that look in a mirror.

  “You come here armed, to my place, looking to see me?” Lopez said. He made it sound like a challenge, as if I’d committed some great offense. Five years ago, in a situation like this, I might have been frightened. But now, I wanted to laugh.

  “Anybody comes into this place unarmed,” I said, “and I’ll eat my boots.”

  Lopez held the angry look a few more seconds, and then his mouth split into a smile and he laughed.

  “You see that?” Lopez said to Bruiser as he walked back behind me. “He ain’t scared. I like that. Surrounded by a bunch of stone-cold motherfucking killers, and he ain’t scared.”

  “Should I be?”

  “Yeah, you should. If you were smart. But hey, you come to talk to me, right? Said you got some information about Santino.”

  “I do.”

  “Well, let’s hear it.”

  “Santino’s days are numbered,” I said. “An investigator from Army CID is going to come out here in a week or so and start digging. I’m going to cooperate with them, and so is Ross.”

  “Who?” Lopez said.

  I went on as if he hadn’t spoken. “I’m telling you this so if you have any operations running you don’t want the feds to know about, you’ll have time to wind them down. You’re going to have to go legit for a while. But when Santino is out of the way, and he will be, it’ll just be you and Ross.”

  Lopez stared quietly for a few seconds. The fake tough-guy look was gone, replaced by an empty-eyed calculation that seemed far more genuine.

  “How you know all this?” Lopez asked.

  “Because I’m the one who notified the Army official who’s requesting the investigation.”

  “No, I mean how you know about me and Ross and Santino?”

  “I asked around.”

  “Who told you about us?”

  “I don’t see how that matters. What’s important is you know what’s coming so you can prepare.”

  Lopez leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on his desk. His cowboy boots were of pre-Outbreak manufacture and looked expensive.

  “And you telling me this…what, out of kindness?”

  “No. I’m telling you this because I don’t want to have to kill you.”

  Lopez laughed again. He looked at the men behind me, each in turn, and his eyes crinkled with amusement.

  “Man, you got some huevos, I’ll give you that.”

  “Ross thinks I’m here to take you out.”

  The laughter faded. Lopez’s expression went suddenly blank. “That so?”

  “Yes.”

  “And how he think you gonna do that?”

  “He may have had some idea of me coming in here with guns blazing.”

  “You a trigger man?”

  “Something like that.”

  “And you told Ross you gonna come in here and shoot the place up?”

  “I may have mislead him a bit.”

  Lopez crossed his hands over his stomach and tapped one finger a few times. “Ross ain’t the kind of man you want to be messing around with, homes. He ain’t gonna be happy you didn’t do what you said you were gonna do.”

  “Ross can eat a bag of syphilitic dicks,” I said. “I don’t much give a shit what he likes or doesn’t like.”

  Lopez’s grin returned. Only this time, it actually reached his eyes.

  “Makes two of us. Anything else you want to tell me, trigger man?”

  “That’s it.”

  “So what now? You just walk out of here?”

  “That was the plan.”

  “And go where?”

  “Back to my hotel room.”

  “And then what?”

  “Wait around until the CID investigator gets here. Then I imagine I’ll have to make a statement. Once that’s done, I’ll sign on with the first caravan headed toward the Springs and you’ll never have to see me again.”

  The two paintings on the wall behind Lopez had glass-covered frames. The light from the lanterns fell so I could see the reflections of the two goons standing behind me. I glanced at their reflections and saw them watching Lopez, arms loose at their sides, the stance of men preparing for action.

  “Afraid that’s not gonna happen,” Lopez said.

  I tensed my legs beneath me. “What’s not going to happen?”

  “That whole thing you just said about leaving and going back to your hotel and all that shit.”

  “Why?”

  Lopez shrugged. “Two reasons. One, you know too much. Can’t have a loose end like you running around. Two, I need trade. You got a lot, and ain’t nobody but you and those two women with you to know you was ever here. And I like those women. Especially the girl. She’s nice and young, the way I like ‘em.”

  Lopez looked at the men behind me. I watched their reflections in the glass picture frames. Sleeveless reached behind his back.

  Now or never.

  Lopez had a small smile on his face. He was still smiling when I grabbed the chair next to me, stood up, and swung it at him. The flat edge of the seat bashed him square in the mouth and sent him tumbling over backward.

  The men behind me were stunned for the briefest of moments. It gave me the precious time I needed to kick the chair I had been sitting in and send it into the legs of Sleeveless. He stumbled backward, got his legs tangled in the chair, and fell down. Bruiser dodged sideways and avoided the chair, but he did not avoid the jab-cross-hook-uppercut combination I pounded into his jaw. The force of the blows knocked him back against the wall, eyes vacant and unfocused. A step forward and a hard knee to the balls sent him crumbling to the floor.

  Behind me, I heard Lopez cursing in Spanish. To my left, Sleeveless had gotten his feet under him and came up with a knife in his hand. He feinted a slash at my face and lunged forward, intent on burying the knife in my gut. I parried the knife with a cross block, head-butted Sleeveless in the nose, and used the moment he was stunned to drag his arm across my chest and flip him over my shoulder with an old Judo throw called ippon seoi nage. Sleeveless landed flat on his back on Lopez’s desk, the force of the impact driving the air from his lungs. Despite this, he still had the presence of mind to reach for the weapons Bruiser had taken from me and placed on the desk. His hand curled around the butt of my Berretta, pointed it at me, and squeezed the trigger. The gun did not fire. While he was doing this, I stripped the knife from his hand, flipped it so I was holding it in an underhanded grip, and buried the blade in his heart. His finger twitched spasmodically on the trigger a couple more times. Stil
l, nothing happened.

  “You forgot about the safety,” I said as I disarmed him. “And you forgot to chamber a round.”

  I worked the slide on the Beretta. Sleeveless had seconds to live. A glance behind me revealed Bruiser was still down, and still dazed. I turned back to Lopez and saw him on his knees digging a revolver out of a desk drawer. Four of his front teeth had been knocked out and his mouth was a bloody mess.

  “Hijo de la chingada!”

  He started to point the revolver in my direction. I aimed the Beretta at his head and pulled the trigger. A neat hole appeared above Lopez’s left eye and the contents of his skull painted the wall behind him in a splash of crimson. The roar of the weapon was deafeningly loud in the small space. If the guys in the bar hadn’t been aware of what was transpiring in Lopez’s office before, they were now.

  With my ears ringing, I grabbed Bruiser by the scruff of his neck, hauled him to his feet, pressed the Beretta against the small of his back, and shoved him toward the door.

  “Move!”

  He moved.

  Come one, girls, I thought. Don’t let me down.

  THIRTY-SIX

  I rounded the corner into the bar with Bruiser still in front of me, my gun pressed against his back.

  “Nobody move!” I shouted.

  Everybody moved.

  In moments of high stress, I sometimes experience a strange slowing of perception. My heart pounds loudly in my ears, all tactile sensations become hyper-sensitive, each sound takes on its own individual resonance, every one separate and distinct and all moving together in a harmony of awareness. I heard the thunder of my pulse, felt the texture of my pistol’s grip, the rough fabric of Bruiser’s collar, the warm air against my skin. The room seemed to turn a light shade of gray, all color fading.