The neighborhood gradually degraded, and the clothing stores transitioned into automobile parts shops and muffler repair bays, interspersed with the odd internet café and small market. Blankets lay on the sidewalk, trinkets and obviously stolen items spread out upon them, the vendors shamelessly offering their goods for fractions of their legitimate worth. He noticed that the foot traffic had grown sparser as the district became rougher, and his nose crinkled at the pervasive odor of garbage wafting from the alleyways.
El Rey resembled a day laborer, with a stained, red Feyco baseball hat pulled low across his brow and knockoff Oakley sunglasses he’d bought three blocks back for seven dollars. He wore baggy black cargo pants and a long-sleeved burgundy rayon dress shirt, crumpled and stained as it would be from days of wearing it while pulling wire runs or laying flooring. He’d darkened his complexion with a deep base and trimmed his beard into an elaborate goatee and set of Elvis sideburns, presenting an image of a worker who was desperately trying to proclaim some sort of hipness, but failing miserably. He knew from experience that people would focus on the most memorable attributes, and the unusual facial hair would ensure that is what they remembered – the face behind it would be almost forgotten if anyone tried to describe him.
Three blocks from his rendezvous point he paused in front of a hardware store with racks of toilet seats and shower heads proudly mounted on a board outside the windows, guarded by a surly, overweight man eating a bag of potato chips. He’d caught a glimpse of a Federal Police truck moving down one of the parallel streets, which triggered an immediate internal alarm. It might have meant nothing, but his senses moved to high alert. His eyes scrutinized everything with increased intensity from behind the shades, roving over the buildings and vehicles, looking for any signs of surveillance. He didn’t detect anything, and after a few minutes of ambling down the block without noticing anything amiss, he turned the corner and made for his destination.
The streets were scarred with potholes and grooves from where the asphalt had worn bare, leaving filthy gravel or pools of odiferous liquid collected in the pits. A dilapidated Eighties American sedan adorned with Bondo and primer prowled slowly down the way, street gang thugs glaring from its tinted windows as it rolled past him. Traffic had thinned out, and instead of the manic bumper to bumper morass a few blocks back, only a few cars navigated the increasingly shabby roads.
His anxiety increased again as he glanced at the windows above street level, noting that many were open, their interiors darkened to the point where making out the occupants was an impossibility. The hair on his arms prickled under the synthetic material of the shirt as he felt a sensation of being watched. This was the wrong kind of setup for a meet, at least, according to his preferences, but it would have been a dream come true for a hit.
A cat shot out from behind a dumpster, startling him, and raced off down the street in vain pursuit of a gathering of pigeons it had spied strutting by. He watched as the emaciated feline made its play, failing to snare any of the birds as they flapped effortlessly away to safety. He could sympathize with its disappointment – he’d been there, although thankfully, only once.
With only one block to go, he still didn’t see anything overtly alarming. Perhaps he was just over-thinking it. Still, the vague sense of unease lingered, and he’d spent too many years refining his instincts to ignore them. Outwardly, he projected nothing, and if anyone had been watching him there would have been no giveaways. His gait didn’t change, nor did he seem in any way on guard, or interested in anything but making his way to whatever drab existence awaited him.
When he arrived at the rundown building that was his rendezvous, he continued walking past it, fishing for his cell phone in his shirt pocket, then shifting the empty black nylon backpack to his other shoulder as he held it to his ear. There were a number of other pedestrians on the block, most of them down on their luck, moving with the sickly shuffle of the perennially downtrodden. Mexico was a hard country, where, if you fell, you didn’t get up, and Mexico City was merciless in the way it devoured its weak. Much of the population was poor by any standard, earning a few hundred dollars a month. Districts like the one he was in housed those of sufficient means to avoid the endless shanty towns on its perimeter, but who were only one week’s pay from living on dirt floors.
He pretended to make a call, using the ruse as an opportunity to lean his head back to better study the surrounding tenements above. There was nothing of note, but he still had a buzz of disquiet in his stomach. When he reached the end of the block, he rounded the corner and continued down the alley, terminating his simulated call as he did so. His gut told him to abort, but reason failed to find any reason to do so.
As a compromise, he circled the block, noting the layout of the streets leading to and from the machine shop that was his destination. It was one large section of buildings, all two and three story, most with rebar stabbing into the sky; the rusting remnants of unfinished structural columns of future floors that had been aborted – typical for the neighborhood, with a few narrow alleys running between the shabby structures.
When he turned onto the street again, he felt more confident. He glanced at his watch, confirming that he was five minutes late – early by Mexican standards. In Mexico, you were on time if you arrived within half an hour of your appointment, which virtually nobody ever did.
Except El Rey.
He approached the opaque glass door and pushed on it, but it was locked. He spotted a buzzer by the handle and jabbed it with his thumb. Footsteps sounded on the concrete floor within the building, and forty-five seconds later, the lock rattled and the door opened. El Rey noted two security cameras angled to capture both directions on the street as he nodded at the figure inside – a gaunt, tall, fair-complexioned man, wearing jeans, cowboy boots and a western-styled shirt. The man seemed more on guard than El Rey did, which made him feel slightly better.
“What do you want?” he demanded.
“I’m the Don’s friend,” El Rey said, as instructed.
The man gestured for him to come in, eyes roving over the street as he stood aside, before he locked and bolted the door behind him. El Rey saw that there were wrought iron bars on the interior of the door, as well as the front window, both of which had been painted black to defeat prying eyes. As they made their way towards an office at the back of the space, dimly lit by a few weak bulbs dangling from the ceiling above, he registered that the shop was empty, essentially vacant.
The cartel man edged through the office door and motioned to an industrial steelwork desk, upon which sat several cardboard boxes, two hand grenades and a silenced pistol.
“Here’s everything.”
El Rey carefully inspected each item before placing it into his backpack. He checked the magazine on the Beretta nine millimeter pistol and verified that it had a full clip, and set it back on the table after chambering a round. The final box was fourteen inches by twelve. He opened it and gazed at the two cream-colored rectangles sitting in form-fitted foam before carefully closing the lid and replacing the three oversized rubber bands that secured it in place. The entire inspection took under two minutes.
Once he was loaded up, he turned to his host. “Where are the security camera feeds for the front?”
“In the back. Follow me…”
The man walked out of the dingy little office to the rear of the shop, where a piece of plywood sat on top of two milk crates. On the makeshift support were a computer and two monitors, next to a CD-Rom recording device. He pressed a button, slid the CD out and handed it to El Rey, who took it and dropped it into the backpack with the rest. As he did so, his eyes detected movement on both of the screens, one which was the alley in the back, and the other the front entrance cameras on a split screen. A group of heavily-armed Federal Police were creeping against the wall on both sides of the building.
The man’s eyes grew wide with shock.
El Rey instantly sized up the situation and whispered to him, �
�Is there a roof exit?”
He nodded and motioned at a steel ladder mounted to the back wall running up to a hatch in the ceiling two stories above their heads. El Rey joined him in peering up into the gloom, and then in a flash slashed the man’s throat with a stiletto he’d palmed while the man had been distracted by the vision on the two screens. He stepped back to avoid the arterial spray of blood as the man crumpled to the concrete floor, twitching as his life ran out of him.
Not pausing to wait for the impending battering of the front and rear entrances, El Rey ran to the ladder and began climbing.
~
Cruz watched the men deploy from one of the windows down the block, cringing when a woman stifled a scream at the sight of the heavily-armed officers moving into position. They knew the building had cameras, so the first order of business was to knock them out. They’d had no choice but to leave them working until the beginning of the operation – anything else would have alerted whoever was in the building.
The squad arrived at the doorway and stopped. It was out of his hands now. All he could do was wait.
At the shop entrance, Briones held a can of spray paint overhead and quickly hit both lenses with a blast of flat black primer, rendering them instantly dark. He listened in his earpiece as a whisper told him the same had been done at the rear emergency exit. There were no cameras on the roof, so the two men who had gone up a neighboring building’s access way to cover the machine shop were safe from observation.
Shifting against the uncomfortable Kevlar bulletproof vest, Briones gave a signal with his left hand and tossed the paint can into the street before un-holstering his service pistol.
Cruz murmured into a radio handset, giving the go-ahead for the team in the rear. He glanced at the time and saw that the assassin had been inside for four minutes. They’d captured him on film, but he knew it wouldn’t do them much good – with sunglasses and the baseball hat and all the facial hair, he could have been Cruz’s brother after a three day drunk.
Two officers sidled up to the door, slapped explosive charges to the hinge locations and pulled back to the shelter of the wall, where Briones was waiting. Three seconds later the charges detonated with a sharp crack and the assault was on. Two other men slammed through the glass with a cement-filled iron pipe, knocking it inwards, and then the team shouldered its way inside, weapons at the ready, expecting to be fired upon.
Guerrero was first to notice the movement at the rear of the building, and then sunlight streamed in. It was the other team blowing the back door. The rear team spotted the corpse on the floor at the same instant Briones ran for the ladder, not waiting for confirmation that the building was empty. He thumbed on his com earpiece and warned the men on the roof, demanding a confirmation even as he reached the ladder, but got no response. Taking a deep breath, he ascended the steel rungs, Guerrero and another officer following behind him. The wall fastenings creaked ominously under the strain.
“Stay down there until I get to the top. This fucking thing is about to tear off the wall,” he hissed through clenched teeth, when only a few rungs from the trapdoor at the top. He craned his neck skyward and caught sight of the lock.
The bolt was open. He had a sinking feeling even as he threw it wide and peered around cautiously, training his gun as best he could. There was nobody on the roof. He pulled himself up and out and saw a boot sticking out from behind a ventilation duct twenty-five feet away. Moving in a crouch, he quickly reached the body. Dead, shot in the face. Ten feet further away, another corpse lay on the hot surface in a pool of blood.
Fresh blood.
He swung around wildly, straining for a glimpse of the assassin, but didn’t see anything. Then he heard a thump from behind him, and he spun just in time to spot a figure in the distance leap across the roof to another building on the other side of the alley.
“He’s on the roof. Two officers shot dead up here. I am in pursuit. Heading northwest,” he cried into the earpiece, and then sprinted to the edge of the building. He jumped across the three foot gap between it and the neighbor, and then repeated the process at the next building. When he arrived at the alley, he skidded to a stop. It was at least ten feet to the other side, maybe more. Briones glanced across in frustration and saw a blur of movement a hundred yards away. He fired his pistol three times at the area in the hopes of a lucky shot, but knew he hadn’t hit anything worthwhile. He realized even as he did so that he’d made a critical mistake in not snatching up one of the dead men’s rifles – a mistake that would haunt him if the assassin escaped.
“He got across the alley, and he’s on the next group of roofs. Can we get a helicopter here? Get the men to cordon off the northwest block, now,” he screamed.
His earpiece crackled.
“Can you make it across?” Cruz’s voice sounded tinny in his ear.
“Negative. I don’t know how he did it. He must be able to fly,” Briones said in frustration, straining futilely for a better shot at his quarry.
But El Rey was nowhere to be seen.
Chapter 21
El Rey locked the door behind him and turned on the air-conditioning before placing the backpack on the coffee table. He’d worked the question of how the police had known about his meeting over and over as he’d made his way back to his apartment, and come to the conclusion that there weren’t many possibilities. Either someone in Aranas’ camp had talked, or the man he’d killed at the warehouse had sold him out. In the end, it didn’t matter. He was safe. But he was also furious. That had been far too close. And it reaffirmed every belief he had about what a bad idea dealing with unknown quantities was.
He paced the length of the living room, calculating how to proceed. The raid had been a big operation, and he’d only escaped by a miracle. But he got the sense that the miracle bank was running low, and he wouldn’t be so lucky the next time.
Fucking Cruz. The man was an annoyance and was fast becoming a real impediment. And the woman hadn’t told him anything – which had lulled him into complacency. That couldn’t stand.
He went into the kitchen and opened a drawer, retrieving a phone from its depths.
Dinah’s voice sounded guarded when she answered.
“Hello?”
“Listen very carefully. Don’t talk. Your boyfriend just launched an operation to capture me. It failed, of course, but now I’m upset. I feel like you haven’t been keeping to your side of the bargain – you didn’t warn me. That makes me want to hang him upside down and peel his skin off.”
“I…I didn’t know anything about it! You have to believe me…”
Dinah sounded like she was telling the truth. No matter.
“Shut up. I said don’t talk. Here is what you are going to do if you want him to be breathing this time tomorrow. Get me information. Figure out where the leak came from that alerted them about the meeting. Failure on your part won’t be tolerated. Get me something, or our deal is off, and I’ll make sure the last thing you ever see is his rotting corpse skewered like a pig.”
“But how am I supposed to find that out?”
“I don’t know, nor do I care. Just do it. Tear his office apart, or wherever he keeps his papers at home. Tell him you desperately want to know everything about today’s operation or he’ll never have sex again. Whatever you do, it better be good, because I’m out of patience. You have twenty-four hours.”
He hung up and tossed the phone back into the drawer. That might shake something loose. Maybe she was telling the truth, or maybe she had been feeding him inconsequential minutiae. Whatever. She needed to perform, or he’d see to it that the pair of them regretted every moment of their last breaths.
Now he had to make the call he’d been considering since he’d leapt across the buildings like a demented free-runner. He went into the bedroom, emerged with another phone, and pressed a speed dial button. Don Aranas answered.
El Rey took him through the morning’s events, omitting that he’d killed Aranas’ man at the rendezvou
s. That would be attributed to having happened during the police raid, and he didn’t see any reason to rock the boat. Aranas sounded worried – mostly about the viability of the plan moving forward.
“I have no concerns over our arrangement. I’m planning to close the contract in the agreed-upon time,” El Rey assured him. “I think it’s worth probing to see if you can find the source of the leak, though. I don’t have to tell you that it’s not in your best interests for your confidential information to find its way into the hands of the Federales. Even after this is concluded, you still have a problem.”
“I’ll take steps.”
“I’m also working on some avenues. I’ll keep you apprised of any progress I make,” El Rey finished, having delivered the message he wanted to send.
Aranas had to deal with his issue, or he’d be in constant jeopardy. He didn’t have a reputation for tolerating disloyalty, and El Rey had no doubt that he’d do whatever was necessary to find the traitor and silence him permanently.
~
“The man is really superhuman,” Briones declared in frustration towards the end of the staff meeting. “I still have no idea how he made it across that alley. I mean, it’s obviously possible to do, but I can’t imagine throwing myself into the air in the hopes I made it. Two stories is a long way down…”
“No, he’s not. He’s flesh and blood, just like you and I – like everyone in this room. He simply reacts differently than we do. And that has to stop. I made a critical error by not having more men on the roof. I underestimated El Rey. A mistake I will never make again,” Cruz spat.
“It was a one in a million chance that he’d discover the assault in time to escape. The odds of alerting him with a dozen officers tromping around on the roof was far greater. It was the correct call,” Briones reasoned.
Revenge of the Assassin Page 16