The Lawless Kind

by Hilton, Matt

  Also by Matt Hilton

  Dead Men’s Dust

  Judgment and Wrath

  Slash and Burn

  Cut and Run

  Blood and Ashes

  Dead Men’s Harvest

  No Going Back

  Rules of Honour

  The Lawless Kind

  Matt Hilton

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2014 by

  Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Matt Hilton 2014

  The right of Matt Hilton to be identified as the Author of the Work

  has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  ISBN 978 1 4447 2880 4

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  Dedicated to my brothers, Davey, John, Jim and Raymond

  ‘The world breaks everyone, and afterward, some are strong at the broken places.’

  – Ernest Hemingway

  Contents

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Chapter 48

  Chapter 49

  Chapter 50

  Thanks and Acknowledgements

  Joe Hunter

  Chapter 1

  The strength of human resilience can be shocking.

  Take the bruiser running at me with his gun raised.

  I’d already placed two nine-millimetre rounds in his chest and one high in his forehead and still he kept coming. He was dead, of course. He just hadn’t realised it yet. He only managed another two steps before his legs went from under him. Even so his finger was caressing the trigger of his MP5 and bullets blistered the air around me. Would have been a poor end to a good day if a corpse had managed to finish me off. As it was there was no guidance to his shots and they all went way over my head: I was in more danger from the falling corpse than the bullets. I met him with a sweep of my left forearm and sent him on his way, even as I targeted the next man to come out of hiding. I placed a single round between the second man’s teeth as he shook a machete and shouted a challenge. He went down on his back, surrounded by a billow of desert grit.

  ‘Heads up, Hunter!’

  My friend, Jared ‘Rink’ Rington’s shout turned me and the instincts honed through countless hours of point-shooting meant I had placed two more bullets in the third man to rush at me before I even saw him clearly.

  ‘Three o’clock.’ Rink again.

  Twisting to my right, I rattled off three shots in quick succession, knocking down another machete-wielding man, and then the slide locked back on my SIG Sauer P226. I didn’t have to inspect the gun to tell that it was empty. I thumbed the magazine release and allowed the empty mag to fall clear, even as I slapped in a full clip and released the slide. All of this while racing towards the arroyo from where the first living-dead man had emerged. From behind my right shoulder Rink’s Mossberg assault shotgun laid down a thunderous accompaniment. Somewhere to my far left our other buddy, Harvey Lucas, halted any attempt by our enemies to flank us. We were covered on the right by a high cliff of sandstone, ribboned with countless striations of colour. We were making ground faster than I’d anticipated, thanks to our opponents’ lack of discipline. If they’d had the sense to stay put, instead of charging us like kamikazes, they would’ve been able to halt our progress. Not that I was complaining.

  I slowed on my approach to the lip of the gulley, checking that gunmen weren’t hidden beyond the line of sagebrush at its edge. Clear of any resistance, I carried on, and then knelt to offer cover while Rink joined me.

  ‘You see the tunnel mouth?’ I indicated an abandoned mineshaft at the end of a natural ‘V’ formed by the tapering arroyo. ‘It’s just as Walter said.’

  Rink grunted at the mention of Walter Hayes Conrad’s name. He still hadn’t forgiven our old Arrowsake handler for using us for his own ends while fighting off a white supremacist plot to irradiate the Statue of Liberty. Walter was still using us now, but to be fair, we were also using him. In my book, that made us even.

  Rink hadn’t been happy when the elderly CIA agent approached us with a view to eradicating this particular pit of snakes, but his sense of honour won out when Walter showed us photographs of the latest shipment of workers to be smuggled over the border. There had been twenty-seven of them, all young Mexican girls and pregnant women who’d paid dearly to be transported into the USA in search of better lives. The gang had abandoned them to a terrible fate, sealed within the steel tomb of the container of a gas truck. By the time the truck with its horrendous cargo was discovered, it was estimated that three weeks had gone by. The bodies were in such a state of decomposition that you couldn’t tell where one ended and another began. Apparently the driver had taken to his heels when he thought that the Border Patrol were on to him. When no such thing had come to pass, none of the gang deemed it necessary to go back and release those trapped inside the sweltering confines of the converted gas container. Why bother when they’d already been paid up front? They had promised to carry their passengers over the border and they’d done just that: no guarantee had been given that they’d be alive when arriving in the US. Those bastards would probably lament the loss of their truck more than the lives they’d so callously disregarded.

  So Rink had joined me, as had Harvey, when Walter had pointed the finger at the human traffickers responsible. They were known as coyotes, or polleros, but to me they were just shit. Some people claim there is a grey area between the coyotes that take a high fee to sneak illegal immigrants into the USA, and those that traffic people to the sex trade and various sweatshops, but I see them all as part of the same problem. This wasn’t the first time a truckful of people had been left to die. If it were up to me, it would be the last.

  ‘So this is one
of their drops?’ Rink eyed the mine with distaste. ‘It’s an odd place to bring their cargo.’

  Normally coyotes would deliver to a drop-house in Phoenix or elsewhere rather than out here in the desert, but this was not your run-of-the-mill operation. These guys were controlled by one of the Mexican drug cartels, and most of those that they smuggled across the border ended up sold into slavery. The mine was a holding area until their ‘product’ was classified and moved on to other destinations throughout the States.

  ‘Odd or not, we’re closing it down.’

  ‘Just watch out for collateral damage,’ Rink warned.

  Intel from Walter promised that the mine was currently free of innocent migrants, but Rink was a worrier. Or perhaps he was more level-headed than me.

  Giving him a nod, I slipped down the side of the embankment and into the arroyo. The space had been cleared of shrubbery and boulders, making the gulley a rat-run for trucks, and also an exposed place from which to approach the mine. I hugged the wall as I neared the entrance, while Rink and Harvey offered cover from above. Going slow and easy, I listened for signs of life. I could hear only one voice, and it sounded like a one-sided conversation. He was speaking Spanish but I caught enough to tell he was frantically calling up assistance from his cartel buddies. Whether they answered his plea or not wasn’t the issue: the cavalry would arrive too late. I slipped into the mouth of the mine, the stink of sweat and urine invading my senses. Many poor souls had been held within these stuffy confines, and I could make out small cells lining the back end of the tunnel. I concentrated on the man hunched down behind an oil drum. The glow from his iPhone gave his features a blue cast. His eyes rolled white in their sockets as he stood up and reached an empty palm my way.

  ‘Don’t shoot, don’t shoot,’ he said in accented English. ‘I’m unarmed.’

  ‘So were the girls you raped, you piece of crap,’ I snapped at him.

  I’d recognised his face, even stretched with fear as it was. Another photograph Walter had shown me was of this man, posing beneath the ‘rape tree’ where he’d proudly hung the underwear of his latest thirteen-year-old victim. I wanted to shoot him in the face.

  ‘Put down the phone.’

  He obeyed, thumbing off the button at arm’s length, then making a show of placing it on the oil drum.

  ‘There,’ he said. ‘I did as you said. Now you must arrest me.’

  ‘Must I? For you to be released by the corrupt Border Patrol officials that you’ve been bribing?’

  ‘You are a Federale, no? You must obey the law.’

  I shook my head. ‘I’m Joe Hunter, and the law doesn’t come into what I must do to you.’

  The bastard understood where this was heading, and I was glad when he reached behind him to pull out the revolver he’d stuck in his belt. As much as I wished to kill him, I hadn’t wanted to do it in cold blood. He snapped the revolver up even as he dropped into a crouch. A curse split his lips a fraction of a second before my bullet did. He fell backwards, and the jolt caused an unconscious pull on the trigger. His gun flashed, but the round was lost deep in the ceiling above him. Gunshot residue would be on his hand, which made things easier when it came to cleaning up this mess.

  I walked further into the mineshaft and found where it dead-ended. There were no other coyotes alive. There were no innocents either, to my relief. It was important that nobody had witnessed what had occurred here. As far as anyone would know, the human traffickers had died under the guns of a rival gang. Our weapons weren’t on any law enforcement database, and we’d been careful while loading to wear gloves and ensure that every working part of our guns was thoroughly wiped down – even the mag I’d allowed to drop in the desert above. Our gloves, clothing and boots would be destroyed later, and evidence incriminating a rival gang dropped at the scene by Walter’s men waiting in the wings.

  When returning to the exit I glanced once at the dead coyote. Fucking hyena, more like. This man was the worst kind of scum, but he was only one of many. The only consolation was that he at least would not prey on any other young girl.

  ‘Satisfied?’ Rink asked.

  ‘I’ve barely started.’

  My big friend was leaning against the doorway, his shotgun by his side. He looked weary, but that was deceptive. Rink is part Japanese and has mastered the art of philosophical resignation, often wearing the emotion like a shroud.

  ‘You can’t kill all the monsters, brother,’ he said, an often-cited quote. He reckons that I’ve a St George complex, one that drives me to seek out and slay the dragons of the world. It wasn’t a bad analogy.

  ‘I can keep trying,’ I countered.

  A clatter of loose rocks announced Harvey’s arrival, a rifle canted over his shoulder. Dust had greyed his jet skin, and the aviator shades forming dark sockets in his visage gave him a death’s-head look. His wide smile spoiled the image.

  ‘I took it that the fighting was over with when the bullets stopped flying,’ he said.

  I nodded. ‘We’re clear.’

  ‘Yeah. Thanks for the heads-up, guys.’ From his shirt pocket he pulled out a small electronic device, on which he sent a signal to Walter’s nearby clean-up crew.

  We moved out into the arroyo to wait for them.

  They arrived on foot, three men I didn’t know, and didn’t care to. They shoved another man before them, a skinny Mexican with one eye white with cataracts. He was another coyote, but not from this gang. Terror shone in his face, and drool hung from his flaccid lips.

  As I released the catch to drop my mag, Rink sighed and turned away. I wasn’t happy with what was coming, but I told myself that the coyote was responsible for murder, rape and God knew what else. I jacked the slide of my gun, checking there were no stray shells inside, before walking to meet the CIA agents and their prisoner.

  ‘I ain’t doing it,’ I told Walter’s men.

  One of them, a severe man who reminded me of the Grim Reaper, offered a wolfish smile. ‘I’m happy to do it for you. Give the scumbag your gun.’

  The coyote stared up into my face, a prayer behind his one good eye. Unluckily for him, I’m not the religious type.

  ‘Here.’ I shoved the SIG towards him. Maybe he thought he was going to get a chance after all. But when he turned to the agent, he knew otherwise.

  ‘Please,’ he cried out, ‘I won’t tell anyone . . .’

  The CIA agent shot him in the head.

  Before the coyote had finished twitching in the sand, the grim-faced man held out his hand and I passed him the mag. He crouched down and reinserted it in the SIG. Then he manipulated the slide and fed the coyote’s dead finger through the trigger guard. He paused once to smile up at me before tugging back on the finger and discharging a round in the dust. Gunshot residue was now on the dead man’s hand. For all intents and purposes, he was the slayer of at least five members of the rival gang.

  ‘This is bullshit,’ Rink whispered harshly.

  He was right. But it was a necessary evil.

  ‘We’ll need all your weapons,’ Grim Reaper said.

  ‘Stick them in your ass,’ Rink replied, tossing the Mossberg down and stomping away. Harvey twisted his mouth wryly. Then he deposited his rifle and followed in our buddy’s wake.

  ‘Your friends seem to find this work distasteful,’ the agent said.

  ‘No, mate,’ I said. ‘They find you distasteful.’

  Before he could form a reply, I pushed by him after Rink and Harvey. We had a debriefing to attend, and afterwards I was going to place a few choice words in Walter’s ear. But my anger dissipated as soon as Walter pulled me to one side and told me of his small personal problem.

  Chapter 2

  ‘What’s Rink so pissed about? I thought he was going to spit on my boots before he left.’

  ‘You really have to ask, Walt?’

  ‘You guys have just killed a dozen men, what’s the big deal about one more?’

  ‘The others had a fighting chance. That last man w
as executed, Walt. None of us bought into that.’

  ‘We had to make things look like a gang war, son. We had to point the finger at a rival outfit. Any other time you would have capped that guy yourself . . .’

  ‘Not like that.’

  ‘He didn’t die in vain,’ Walter said, holding my gaze. ‘His death keeps you boys out of the frame, keeps you out of prison.’

  ‘And you,’ I reminded him.

  ‘That’s why I’m not complaining.’ Walter sighed, and lowered his frame into a creaking chair. We were in the rear of a large van, converted to a mobile command unit. His was the only chair, placed before a bank of computer screens and other electronic equipment. I stood looking down at him.

  ‘Back in the day none of you would’ve complained.’

  ‘Back then we were different men.’

  ‘No, son, you were always headstrong and wilful, and didn’t always see the bigger picture.’

  ‘That’s because we were never shown it.’

  It took me a moment to realise that Walter was laughing. He shook his head. ‘Despite what the politicians say we’re losing the battle against organised crime. Take these coyotes: we arrest one, another ten spring up in their place. Back when they were just some guys sneaking a few immigrants across the desert, it didn’t make much difference. But since the cartels took over, where many of these immigrants are either enrolled as drug mules, or sold into the sex trade or held for ransom, things have changed. We can’t stop them, Joe. All we can hope to do is slow them down.’

  ‘What about this talk about a North American Alliance? When Mexico, the States and Canada become a common market like the EU, and they all open their borders, controlling something like this will be nigh-on impossible.’

  ‘It’s almost impossible now,’ he admitted. ‘But we do what we have to do. Slow the gangs down.’

  ‘So this wasn’t about avenging the lives of all those women in the truck?’