The Devil You Don't Know (American Praetorians Book 4)

by Peter Nealen

  My sights settled on a guy in a white tank top, with a skull painted over his face and a pistol in his hand. Boom. Down. Move to the next silhouette. Scared kid. Empty hands. Move on. Fancy cowboy suit, lots of bling. Looks like a narco. No weapon, scared eyes. Move on. Two in the open-bottom collared shirts, hefting AKS’s with folded stocks. Boom, boom, boom, boom. A pair each, center-mass. They go down. Move on.

  It was like shooting fish in a fucking barrel. They weren’t prepared to get hit there, and I’m pretty sure half of them thought the other half was pulling a fast one. Even as they toppled, skulls blasted open, ribs smashed, lungs shredded, guts sucked inches out of exit wounds, I saw a couple of them shoot each other, just as my sights settled on the one with the shiny semi-auto. I shot him anyway, smashing two holes in his torso as he fell.

  A few of the unarmed partiers got caught in the crossfire, but not from lack of trying not to shoot them. Some fell to the panicked fire of the narcos. A few moved into the wrong place at the wrong time, and caught one of our rounds. I’m pretty sure a couple caught one of our bullets that overpenetrated, punching through a narco or sicario and into them. Collateral damage had been inevitable going into this.

  The shooting stopped. The place was a slaughterhouse. Smoke hung in the air over a floor littered with broken bodies and splashed with blood and viscera. The air stank of gunpowder, blood, shit, and fear.

  We moved out onto the floor. There were still a few unarmed party-goers huddled by the wall, or sitting or lying on the floor, shell-shocked. The chick who had fallen when her sicario boyfriend got it was just staring at his corpse uncomprehendingly. Two of the band members were dead on the stage, one with an AK still clenched in his hand, another with a SIG pistol lying nearby.

  To my relief, I only counted a handful of unarmed bodies. It could have been a lot worse. I knew my conscience was probably going to bother me about this op later, but we’d done what we could to avoid killing anyone without a weapon. The message sent by hitting this particular target wasn’t one we could pass up. We weren’t fighting people who gave a shit about such things as innocent bystanders or accountability, after all. And when you got down to it, we’d probably gotten fewer noncombatants killed in this bloodbath than in your average “precision” bombing of a terrorist meeting. Collateral damage is a lot easier to stomach when it’s being observed—or ignored—from thirty thousand feet.

  We found Jose Ortega in the far corner. He was still breathing; in fact he’d only taken a round in the knee. I wasn’t sure if it was one of ours, but he wasn’t going anywhere regardless. He was struggling to fix a jam in that massive, gold-plated Desert Eagle. I lifted my rifle, laid the iron sights on his forehead, and stroked the trigger. The rifle boomed, flame spat in the dim, smoky air, and Ortega’s head snapped back, a puckered red hole just above his nose. Blood spread slowly from the ruin of the back of his skull, looking black in the dim, lurid light.

  I stood over the corpse, noticing that Ricardo Menendez had been nearby. Menendez had a FiveSeven in his hand, the slide locked back on an empty magazine, and was lying on his side, bloody froth around his lips. He’d been lung-shot and had choked to death on his own blood.

  Menendez wasn’t my primary concern. He was a bonus. It was Ortega who would deliver the first part of the message. I reached in my pocket, pulled out a piece of paper, and set it carefully on the corpse’s chest. It was one of the printouts of the wet-work ads, the most recent we could find. Raoul had circled the price, and scrawled in Spanish what roughly translated to, “If you want a piece of us, you’re going to pay a lot higher price than that.”

  Chapter 20

  We left Los Valientes standing. As much of a statement as burning it to the ground might have made, that death card was going to make a bigger one. We still emptied the cash registers and smashed all of the equipment in the kitchens and bars, as well as lights and sound equipment. We probably did a couple small fortunes’ worth of damage, on top of the assassinations.

  Word was going to spread. And spread it did. Like wildfire.

  Two days later, as we were going over the plan for the next raid, Pablo Gutierrez, the hostel’s owner, came pounding on the door. Keeping my HiPower just out of sight, I answered it.

  “Señor,” he said frantically, “You have to go. You cannot stay here. Por favor, you must go!”

  “Calm down, Señor Gutierrez,” I said. “Haven’t we given you enough money?”

  He shook his head. He looked pants-wettingly terrified. “It is not the money, Señor,” he said, the thin edge of panic in his voice. “They say that El Torcido is in Culiacan. He has already killed, Señor, and he says he is looking for gringos.”

  “Slow down, Señor,” I said, “come in.” I ushered him through the door. I hadn’t heard of anyone known as El Torcido, but Mexico is a big country, and with something close to a hundred different narco groups, there was no way to keep track of all the vicious characters roaming around. “Now, tell me what is happening,” I said, as I closed the door behind him.

  Pablo Gutierrez was a small man, and the few times I’d seen him, he always seemed to have a worried look on his face, but now he was really, down to the bone scared. He wrung his hands as the words spilled out. “El Torcido is a killer, Señor,” he explained. “He killed for the Guzman-Loeras, and for the Carillo-Fuenteses, and for the CAF. He has killed for anyone who will pay him enough. He is a monster, Señor,” he insisted, looking up at me. “They say on the news that he has killed a family of gringos at the Casa Primavera, and that he painted a message for the gringo soldiers who killed Jose Ortega in their blood on the walls. He said he will find them, and kill any gringo he sees until he does. Por favor, Señor, you have to go.”

  I looked over at Raoul and Eddie, who had come to the door at the sound of our conversation. “We can take care of ourselves, Señor Gutierrez,” Raoul said calmly. “There are plenty of us, and we can defend ourselves.”

  Gutierrez shook his head. “No, you do not understand, he does not come alone, he never comes alone,” he protested. “He brings a gang, always. They are almost as crazy as he is. They are terrible, Señor. And they will be armed.”

  I wasn’t going to let Gutierrez know just how much firepower was crammed into his hostel. But I didn’t want to have to move, either. “Have you seen any sign that he knows we’re here?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied, in a tone of voice that suggested he didn’t find that fact all that comforting. “But others have seen you here. Sooner or later he will find out that you are here, and if he has not found his prey by then, he will come and kill you, too.”

  “We still have work to do here,” I said. “We’ll leave soon enough, but you understand that I can’t just put everything aside because there might be a threat.” Of course, El Torcido, whoever he was, was looking for us specifically. We knew that. But Pablo didn’t need to. “Of course, this place is yours, so if you insist that we leave, we will leave. It will just mean we have to find another place in the city to work from, though.”

  He looked miserably at the floor. He was a good guy; I think he was genuinely afraid that his guests were going to be gruesomely murdered. He had no way of knowing that his guests were a pack of hardened professional killers in their own right.

  “I won’t force you out if you are determined to stay,” he said. “But you should listen to my advice; it is not safe for Americans in Culiacan.” He turned and left, with the air of a man who expects to have to attend a funeral soon.

  “Since when is it safe anywhere we go?” Eddie said almost as soon as the door closed.

  “He doesn’t know that,” I replied, as I looked at Raoul. “El Torcido? Ring any bells?”

  He nodded. “Unfortunately, yes. ‘The Twisted.’ He’s made quite a name for himself in the last couple of years. He started out as a low-level sicario for the Sinaloa Cartel, but made enough of an impact through sheer, inventive, psychotic savagery that he’s moved up to working as a freelancer who
can charge just about anything for a killing. He sounds like a real sicko. Torture, dismemberment…there have even been rumors of cannibalism, though I haven’t heard if anyone’s pinned those down as true, or just legend. Either way, he sounds like somebody who heard about Hugo Hernandez’ face getting stitched onto a soccer ball and thought, ‘That’s good stuff, but I think I can do one better.’

  “Of course, that’s been the story of Mexico for the last decade—bloodier and bloodier one-upmanship.”

  I led the way back into the main living area, where we had printouts and tablets scattered around a makeshift sand-table. George and Marcus had gotten eyes on one of Gray’s suspected FARC advisors that morning. Fortunately, they were outside the city proper; Los Hijos appeared to be using a farm owned by Sergio Ortega out to the east as a training center.

  As the rest of the teams present looked up, I outlined what Gutierrez had told us. “Thoughts?” I asked.

  “Let him find us then kill him,” Eddie said flatly. “It sounds like we’d be doing the world a favor, and if we’re trying to make a statement, I can’t think of a better one than killing off the feared mass murderer who’s hunting us for the reward.”

  There were nods all around. It was appealing, in a violent sort of way. People like El Torcido were a cancer; no one in their right mind would shed a tear if they died, and a lot of people would breathe a sigh of relief. Eddie was right, too. We had just declared war on those who stood to benefit from the reward on our heads. Killing off the bogeyman should get a lot more people’s attention.

  “All right,” I said. “Let’s start looking for a good ambush site.”

  There are a couple of problems with planning an ambush aimed at someone who is actively hunting you. One is endemic to battle planning regardless of the situation—the enemy always gets a vote. The other is simply that in this case, the enemy is looking for you at the same time you are trying to let him find you, only at a time and place of your choosing. You might not have the time to make that arrangement work. And while El Torcido might have been a psycho, he was also a consummate hunter.

  We ran out of time. And, unfortunately, we weren’t going to be the only ones to pay the price.

  There were only six of us still at the hostel; Eddie, Jim, Herman, and I were still working on planning the attack on Sergio Ortega’s farm, and Larry and Little Bob were on security at the front and rear of the building. Everyone else was out on reconnaissance, roaming in twos and threes, looking for a suitable place to try to draw in The Twisted and his cronies. Raoul was out doing his information operations thing, planting bogus stories about the phantom gringos who had slaughtered every narco in Los Valientes. Mia was out doing the same in a different part of town. The idea was twofold—spread fear about us while simultaneously misdirecting the hunters who would be hitting town as the news got around that there was an eighty thousand-plus Bitcoin bounty to be had in Culiacan.

  “Jeff! Eddie!” Larry yelled from the front. “We’ve got company!”

  We hadn’t survived that long by hesitating when confronted with a situation gone to shit. Without a word, we had snatched up the rifles leaning against the kitchen table and were running for the front of the house.

  Larry was at the window above the garage, with his FAL leaning against the wall and an M60 held across his lap so he could quickly bring it up and fire through the window. He just nodded toward the outside.

  The hostel was set in the neighborhood of Chapultepec del Rio, just across the highway from Cuidad Universitaria. It was a pretty affluent place, with a whole lot of modern, cubist houses set very close together, most of them painted white. The hostel was one of them, and the other house across the street was pretty much identical. It didn’t look like the kind of place you’d expect a lot of shocking violence to happen.

  But there were two cars and a Ford pickup truck sitting on the street outside, with all of the men riding in them wearing bandanas over their faces. All of them were looking up at the hostel.

  “Yeah, this doesn’t look good,” Eddie said. “Think it’s El Torcido?”

  “Who the fuck knows?” I answered. “We don’t know what he looks like. We don’t know what his goons look like.” Sitting there staring at them wasn’t getting us into a better position. I pulled out my phone and sent the pre-loaded text message “Prairie Fire” to the rest of the teams out on recon. They almost certainly wouldn’t get back in time before the shooting started, but at least they’d know that shit was going down.

  The other question, even as I checked my rifle and moved to a different window, was just how these fuckers had found us. That one got answered pretty quickly.

  A big, beefy man got out of the pickup. I almost immediately pegged him as El Torcido. I could have been wrong, but as he looked up at the windows, there was just something very off about him. Something about the way he looked up at us made the hackles rise on the back of my neck.

  Of course, when he hefted Pablo Gutierrez’ severed head, the tongue hanging out, split down the middle, and the eyes gouged out, that pretty much removed any doubts I had, and explained how he’d found us. Somebody, possibly a young halcone, the underage lookouts working for the cartels, had told him, or somebody who relayed the information to him, that Pablo was housing some gringos. So he’d tortured Pablo to death and then come here.

  So here was where he was going to die.

  I didn’t give him time to gloat. Neither did Larry or Eddie. There was no coordination, no conversation. We just shouldered our weapons and opened fire, almost at the same instant.

  He was barely ten meters away. That was an easy headshot, and all three of us took it, Larry with a five-round burst. Seven 7.62mm, 147-grain bullets did a number on his skull. There wasn’t much left of El Torcido’s head as he toppled backward onto the pavement.

  It was kind of an anticlimactic end for such a well-versed purveyor of terror. If he’d expected the sight of the landlord’s head to make us freeze, he’d badly miscalculated. His sudden, violent demise did have that effect on his gang; maybe they'd thought he was invulnerable or something. It killed all of them.

  Larry laid into that 60, putting long, fifteen-to-twenty-round bursts into each vehicle before moving to the next one. He raked the line of cars and the truck, then swept back the other way. A couple of the masked men scrambled out of the vehicles to try to get away. I lined up one that was trying to half-run, half-crawl, already dripping blood from his face, and shot him twice. Eddie’s rifle barked next to me, sending another one to hell before he could get four paces.

  The rattling roar of the 60 went silent; Larry had emptied the entire box into the vehicles, one of which was starting to burn. We waited a few moments more while he reloaded, then I spoke for the first time since The Twisted and his gang of killers had showed up. My voice sounded like a dead rasp in my own ears, even though the one-sided slaughter had lasted maybe thirty seconds. “Start packing everything up. We’re leaving.” There was no way we could stay there now; this was a hard compromise. Even though we apparently no longer had to worry about El Torcido, the bullet-riddled corpses and vehicles out front would be kind of a giveaway.

  I resolved to retrieve what was left of Gutierrez’ head on the way out. He deserved a halfway decent burial, at least. He hadn’t asked to get sucked into this shit.

  As always, we were already prepared for a quick bug-out. We’d gotten pretty smooth at it over the last three or four years, seemingly constantly moving from safehouse to hide site to safehouse. Unless it was in immediate use, everything was packed up already. It was just a matter of throwing what gear wasn’t on our bodies or otherwise in hand into the gear bags and throwing the bags into the trucks in the garage. We were ready to move in five minutes.

  Even as I piled into the big F250 that we’d commandeered as soon as we’d gotten to Culiacan, I was sending out another message to the rest of the teams. “Stay behind secure, but site compromised. Pushing to ORP as fallback position, rally up there.”


  The Objective Rally Point was an abandoned gravel pit in the hills to the northeast, about three and a half klicks from Sergio Ortega’s farm. We had originally intended to move there immediately prior to launching the attack on the training grounds. Now we were just moving that timeline up a little.

  We roared out of the garage only minutes ahead of the fire trucks. The burning car was fully involved by then, and the stink of burning human flesh was wafting on the breeze along with the more bitter smell of burning gasoline, plastic, and rubber. It was going to be interesting to see what the local news made of that scene. An empty house, bullet holes everywhere, and a bunch of gunmen mowed down in the street. I hadn’t taken the time to leave one of our little leaflets on El Torcido’s corpse.

  Still, I doubted that anyone in the know was unaware of who he was hunting. The message would be implicit.

  We didn’t leave the city immediately; we had to make sure we weren’t being followed first, by either the cops or the narcos. We drove north, weaving through the residential areas for over an hour before Eddie and I were both satisfied that we weren’t being followed. Only then did we head back down to cross the river via the Boulevard Isla Musalá bridge. There wasn’t any smoke rising from the direction of the hostel anymore by the time we passed the campus. I wondered how long the bloodstains would stay there.

  From there, we sped across the Isla Musalá, crossed the river again, and headed down through the rest of the city before turning onto the road heading east, into the hinterlands, the farms, and finally the mountains.

  It was a struggle not to go faster. There were cops in certain places, heavily armed and wearing full body armor, with their faces almost uniformly covered with balaclavas. It didn’t seem like Culiacan was the safest place to be a cop. Elsewhere, there were gangbangers of several different persuasions, judging by the colors, but most were just as heavily armed and also keeping their faces covered. Fortunately, none of either set tried to stop us. Only once we were out of the city itself did I start to breathe a little easier.