The Lawless Kind

by Hilton, Matt

  ‘We’re sitting ducks here. We gotta make it between those boulders back there. Go now. I’ll cover you.’

  I didn’t wait. Propelling Kirstie before me, I headed for a fissure between the rocks. Bullets smacked the back end of the car, but already we were out of their line of fire and safe but for ricochets. By the time our attackers found a bead on us, I’d already pressed Kirstie down behind some boulders at the mouth of the narrow canyon.

  ‘You OK?’

  ‘I’m fine. But you . . . oh, my God! Your face looks horrible!’

  ‘Now you’re beginning to sound like Rink.’ She didn’t get the joke. I wiped the trickling blood off my features. ‘It’s nothing. Scalp wounds bleed like crazy, but I’m fine.’

  To prove my point I bobbed up and fired half-a-dozen rounds at the truck and the men now crouching behind it. I didn’t get a hit on one of our attackers, but that wasn’t my purpose. Rink sprinted over and joined us while they kept their heads down.

  ‘Fuckers are too determined for thieves,’ he said, as he found a place from where he could return fire.

  ‘They have to be my ex-husband’s people,’ Kirstie said.

  I shook my head. Something about the scenario was troubling me. I didn’t think these men had anything to do with Molina, or Benjamin, because there was no way they could’ve known where to launch an ambush on us. Besides, Molina would have sent more capable killers than these. There was something else happening here, but I agreed with Rink that they were too committed to be mere opportunistic thieves. They’d already lost more than they could ever achieve from continuing the attack. Perhaps they were so angered by the deaths of their friends in the first truck that the fight had grown personal.

  More bullets chattered against the fissure walls, and the time for worrying about motive was over. What did it matter? They were attempting to kill us, and knowing the reason for that didn’t amount to zero weighed against the need to stay alive.

  Leaning out past the rocks, I checked their positions. The four men were down behind their truck, bobbing up and down like whack-a-moles on a funfair while they took pot shots at our position. I ignored them in favour of checking where the fake cop had gone. The son of a bitch had laid the trap, but now that things were becoming unhinged, he was heading back for his abandoned vehicle. He turned briefly and the moonlight flooded his features, giving me a first look at his face.

  Two things struck me.

  He was no Mexican.

  And I recognised him.

  A bullet cut a chunk from near my shoulder, and I ducked down. By the time I looked again, the fake cop had clambered inside his truck, and his face could no longer be seen. He reversed on to the road and took off in the opposite direction. His friends fell silent, wondering where the hell he was going, but their confusion only lasted a few seconds. The sound of another engine had joined the fray, and I was relieved to hear that our back-up was almost upon us. To help Harvey and the others gain a safe position where they could offer protection to our flank, both Rink and I began firing at the truck. Curses rang out loudly, all in Spanish.

  The machine-gunner made another attempt at finishing us off, and we had to stay down until he’d expended the thirty-plus rounds in his magazine. But as his gun fell quiet, we took more pinpointed shots at them. His wild shooting had served a two-fold purpose: yes, he was trying to kill us, but it was also to cover his buddies as they got back inside the truck. Three of them had squeezed inside the cab, while the one with the machine-gun was in the process of climbing on the back. Rink shot him, a bullet through his left thigh. It hit only a second before mine took a sizeable portion of his skull. He performed a slow-motion tumble off the back of the truck like the bad guy in a Western movie swan-diving off a saloon roof.

  Those inside the truck had had enough, especially now that they were outnumbered. They took off at speed, leaving their dead gunner lying on the asphalt in a widening pool of gore. His MP5 must have fallen on the bed of the truck as he’d toppled off. We studied him from our concealed position.

  ‘I winged him so we’d have a live prisoner,’ Rink said.

  ‘Tell the truth. It was just poor shooting.’

  Rink snorted out a laugh.

  ‘Would’ve been good to find out what the fuck that was all about.’

  ‘Maybe,’ I concurred. ‘But he was still capable of shooting, so I prefer him this way.’

  It would have been handy to have a live prisoner. There was something decidedly odd about the attack, and answers from an injured man would’ve been welcome. However, what was done was done and not worth moaning over.

  ‘Maybe we’ll find something interesting on his body.’

  ‘Go for it,’ Rink said. ‘You shot him, made all that mess, feel free to be the one to check through his clothing.’

  ‘Since when were you so squeamish?’

  ‘Since that CIA asshole executed that guy back at the mine,’ Rink said, his voice barely more than a whisper. ‘You OK, Kirstie?’

  She was shocked, not by what she’d just lived through as much as what she’d overheard. A question was building, but she couldn’t yet find the words.

  Stepping in quickly, I took her by an elbow, just as Harvey brought the panel van to a halt behind our abandoned rental.

  ‘Come help me unload the car. We’re going to have to travel on from here in the van.’

  ‘Was Rink talking about Conrad? Did he execute someone?’

  I chose words that weren’t exactly a lie. ‘Walter doesn’t do any wet work. He’s a sub-division director, who works out of an office at Langley.’

  ‘Who also gives the orders,’ she whispered. ‘Which makes him as culpable as the one holding the gun.’

  Any argument would have rung false, so I was glad when Harvey, McTeer and Velasquez all scrambled from the van for an update. I left Rink and Kirstie to bring them up to speed while I approached the dead man on the road. Most of the top of his skull was gone, but there was enough left of his face for me to recognise a local. He was swarthy, round-faced, pockmarked across both cheeks, and he had a large star tattooed on his neck. Gang tag, I assumed. His clothing was casual, mainly blue denim but for a cotton T-shirt and stained sneakers. Blood was all over him, and – not because I was repelled by its sight but because he could’ve been carrying a disease I’d no intention of catching – I used the barrel of my gun to push back his jacket to check the inside pockets for ID. There was none to find, but I did discover a billfold in his hip pocket. Inside it was a couple of grubby twenty-peso bills – which didn’t amount to much – alongside a short stack of brand new US fifty-dollar notes that looked as if they’d come fresh from the bank. Ten in all. Five hundred bucks. The guy had sold his life cheaply.

  The presence of the cash gave me a number of important clues. He wasn’t a regular thief, reliant on taking our belongings to earn his living. Someone had paid him to take part in this ambush. I bet that similar sums of money had burned up with the bodies of those trapped in the crashed truck, now sending billowing flames up the front of the cliffs. For such a low sum, the person in charge had struggled to find competent killers, and had simply rounded up local gang boys willing to do the job. It told me that the ambush had been organised to catch us, yet was rushed and mishandled by the one in charge. The guy dressed in the police uniform was most likely responsible for the attack, and therefore our enemy.

  ‘James Lee Marshall,’ I whispered to myself. ‘How the fuck did you end up here?’

  Chapter 13

  ‘You know that punk with the shotgun?’ Rink asked.

  We were back on the road, streaking towards Hermosillo with the dawn breaking over the fields behind us. After cleansing our rental car of all identifiers, we’d torched it. The dead machine-gunner had been added to the pyre, seated in the driving position to confuse any investigation of the scene. When we got the chance I’d drop the rental company a call and tell them that the car had been stolen while parked outside a bar in Tucson – let t
hem jump to conclusions of their own. Now, while Harvey, McTeer and Velasquez cluttered the front seats, the rest of us were in the back of the panel van, bruising our backsides on the wooden benches. I’d just told Rink and Kirstie about recognising the bogus cop.

  ‘I only got a brief look at his face, but I’m pretty sure it was him.’

  Back when I was still with the Parachute Regiment, the airborne infantry element of the British Army, I’d fought alongside an exceptional soldier named James Lee Marshall. I was a headstrong teenager, looking for a role model, and Marshall had been an inspiration and my best friend. He joined up before me, and had served with both 2 and 3 Para, gaining the experience to pass selection to 1 Para, the Special Forces Support Group. I was about eight months behind him on my career path, and by the time I was selected for a tour with SFSG, Marshall was already a legend among the lads. Our paths crossed occasionally, but following my promotion to sergeant, and leading my own unit, we were deployed to different theatres and our contact grew minimal. After I was recruited to Arrowsake I lost touch with him completely and gained a new best friend in Rink. I later learned that Marshall had lost the sight in one eye to an IED while working transport security following Desert Storm and had been medically discharged. I’d rarely thought about him over the intervening years, and had assumed that he’d been absorbed back into Civvy Street, had perhaps married and raised children. I hadn’t expected him to turn up here in Mexico as some criminal’s hired gun.

  Then again, there but for the grace of God go I.

  I’ve often pondered my choices over the years, and know how close I was to becoming something similar while hiring myself out as a problem-solver back in the UK. Even as I was bringing vigilante justice to the gangsters and hoodlums of my hometown of Manchester I consoled myself that I was only hurting bad people. I was righting the wrongs that the police were unable to touch. But I know that it’s a subjective thing, and my code of honour would remain questionable to fainter hearts. Yet I stand by my decisions. I helped people who were unable to help themselves, taking the fight to those who would hurt them, and yes, sometimes my methods were unorthodox. But I’d never taken a criminal’s money to hurt a woman desperately seeking to be reunited with her abducted child. That was the big difference between Marshall and me, it seemed, and he’d lost the right to be considered my friend. Now I could only think of him as an enemy.

  I told them what I knew of his fighting prowess.

  ‘That was a long time ago,’ Rink said, unimpressed. ‘He didn’t come across as all that special. Way I saw it, he fucked up big style.’

  ‘He underestimated us is what he did. I’m pretty certain he didn’t know who – or what – he was up against, and miscalculated the number of gunmen he needed to finish us. Think about it: most drivers, unprepared and taken in by the lights and the police uniform, would’ve been sitting ducks. He’d have taken them out as they sat wondering why the police had stopped them. It’s why he chose a sawn-off. One shot would have ripped through the interior of the car and probably got everyone inside with one blast. It was pure luck that you spotted the gun and realised what he had in mind.’

  ‘Lucky, yeah,’ Rink agreed. ‘I suppose if he hadn’t been juggling that flashlight as I hit the gas, things might’ve turned out differently.’

  Kirstie was watching us from below the peak of her cap. Her jaw was set in thought.

  ‘How’d he know where to lay his ambush?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ve been thinking about that,’ I said.

  ‘And?’

  ‘If he’s involved with the people who were monitoring us at the border, I guess they could’ve plotted our route across country from there. That’s supposing they know where it is we’re going, and why.’

  ‘And if he isn’t? There was nothing random about that ambush. I haven’t your experience, but it’s clear to me they were waiting to ambush and murder us.’

  ‘Let’s hope that he isn’t on Molina’s payroll or snatching Benjamin’s going to be impossible,’ Rink said.

  ‘He has to be working for Jorge . . . who else could it be?’

  I had another idea. ‘Give me your purse, Kirstie.’

  ‘My purse? Why?’

  But she handed over her handbag and I emptied the contents on the floor of the van. ‘Anything among that stuff you don’t recognise?’

  Kirstie shook her head. There were the usual items you’d expect a woman to carry. I concentrated on the bag, checking zipper compartments, running my fingers along the stitched seams. I found nothing unusual.

  ‘Your carry-on bag next,’ I said, handing over her purse so that she could shovel her belongings back inside. She snatched up a couple of tampons that she palmed out of sight with sleight of hand.

  ‘What exactly are you looking for?’

  ‘Your bag, please?’

  She put two and two together. ‘You think that someone slipped a tracking device inside it?’

  ‘It’d be one way of knowing which route we took, and plotting where to ambush us along the way.’

  ‘But who’d have the opportunity? You’ve been with me since I got off the airplane in Tucson.’ She hit me with a challenging stare, almost as if I was the one under suspicion.

  ‘Let’s not jump to any conclusions until we know for sure there is a bug, eh?’

  My examination of her bag was more thorough this time, because her carry-on was more likely to have been compromised than her purse. On the flight, she would have slung it in an overhead compartment, and there’d have been an opportunity to slip a bug inside it. It would explain why I hadn’t spotted the watchers I’d expected when shadowing Kirstie at the airport and beyond: why chance being seen when they could monitor her movements from afar? It was all sound logic, except there was no device. I checked her cell phone, but found nothing unusual about it, and even Molina wouldn’t have the necessary contacts to infiltrate her cell network provider to continually track her position.

  I handed back the phone.

  ‘What now?’ Kirstie asked, her mouth curling into a smile. ‘A full body search?’

  ‘No need for that.’ I got a look from Rink that said: ‘Spoilsport’. ‘You might want to check your pockets and collar, just in case someone slipped a bug on to them when your clothes were still in your carry-on bag.’

  ‘What exactly am I looking for?’

  ‘It’ll be small, probably with a wire aerial attached. I think you’ll know if you find anything out of place.’

  Kirstie ran her hands through her trouser pockets, then she leaned forward for me to check her blouse collar. Everything came up clean.

  ‘So there isn’t a bug?’ Rink said.

  ‘Not one that I can find.’ Giving Kirstie my own cheeky smile, I said, ‘Maybe you should check your smalls next opportunity you have.’

  She rolled her eyes, but her exasperation was an act. ‘I showered and changed back at the motel. I’m pretty sure I’d have spotted trailing wires coming out of my underwear.’

  ‘When you two are finished flirting, maybe you’ll start thinking a little straighter.’

  I was about to deny the flirting, but, actually . . .

  ‘I think we’ve established that you’re not bugged, Kirstie,’ Rink said, ‘but there’s something we haven’t considered.’

  ‘The rental car?’ It was obvious when I thought about it.

  I’d left it parked at the airport hotel while we took Kirstie in the van to our hotel in the sticks. Only once she was safely in the lodge and we’d made our plans had I gone back to fetch it. If anyone following Kirstie witnessed our actions when bundling her in the van, they could quite easily have attached a transmitter to the car they’d seen me arrive in. We had been certain we weren’t under surveillance, but what other answer was there? The reckless attack by Marshall and his cronies made me think our enemies amateurs. Now I had to reconsider. I banged on the panel separating us from the cab. ‘Stop the van first chance you get, Harve.’

  ‘
What’s wrong?’ The separating wall muffled Harvey’s voice.

  ‘Hopefully nothing.’

  Within a few seconds the van decelerated and angled off the road. The tyres rumbled over rougher ground, the bumps and jerks shaking our bones through the bench seats. The van swayed as it came to a halt. I opened the back doors. ‘If anyone wants to stretch their legs, now’s a good time.’

  I got out, followed by Kirstie and Rink. Without me having to ask, Velasquez appeared on the right, followed a moment later by McTeer, taking up positions where they could view the road from both approaches. Sometimes I forgot how valuable they were as colleagues, but this time I was glad they were along. Harvey opened his door and stepped out. I don’t know how he did it, but he always looked pristine, as though a personal style expert had just dressed him. In comparison, I felt like a mess, what with the dried blood on my shirt from my earlier head wound, and my clothes being rumpled and stained. Made me wonder if Harve had a grooming kit in his laptop bag, because he was even freshly shaved, and, as he approached, I got a waft of expensive cologne.

  ‘How sure can you be that the van wasn’t compromised?’ I asked.

  Harvey gave it some thought. ‘There was a time when we were all inside the motel just after Velasquez and Mac arrived when someone could have got to it,’ he admitted. ‘Why, what are you worried about?’

  ‘Tracking devices.’

  ‘To put a bug on the van, they’d have to have known where we were in the first place. You think someone followed us back to the motel?’

  I wasn’t thinking that way, but it wasn’t yet time to voice my concerns.

  Rink was making his way round the van, crouching and feeling along the sills and wheel arches, the easiest places for someone to attach a magnetic device. To spare Harvey’s neat clothing, I went down on my back and checked the undercarriage. I didn’t expect to find anything and didn’t. Rink had finished his check with similar results.

  ‘The van was locked the whole time we were inside,’ Harvey pointed out, ‘and they couldn’t have got under the hood without triggering the alarm. I don’t think they got to the van.’