At one side of the room, a waterfall came out of the wall, and at the other end, a fireplace taller than most men. Best guns of every size and caliber lined the wall above the mantel, Holland, Rigby, Purdy, all the million-dollar works of art hung above art-carved silver-capped elephant tusks that flanked the great hearth.
“How about that boy escaping those ragheads,” Victor Malone said, taking a seat in a wide-bodied ostrich-leather sofa chair and pointing to the one across a zebra rug from him for Cesare to sit on.
A Latino man came into the room, and the boss said, “Pour us some of that good stuff, Pedro.”
The good stuff was twenty-five-year-old Macallan whiskey, and all the Hispanic men who worked in Victor Malone’s castle, he called Pedro, with a long-sounding E.
“Have a cigar? They’re Cuban,” the boss man said, and bit the end off one and lit it with a flame that popped out of the muzzle of a gold handgun with ebony handles.
“I’m not a cigar man,” Cesare said.
“But you do like those cigar-smoking women, don’t you?” Malone laughed, putting a spur deep in Alosi’s pride.
“It was a one-night stand. I used her to gain information that helped the company land contracts,” Cesare said, rationalizing his involvement with Liberty Cruz.
“Spic girl, isn’t she? FBI?” the bastard said, and laughed. “Dill weed Carlson got her canned from that job.”
“She’s Latina,” Cesare answered, then added, “I’m Sicilian, so I’m probably closer to a spic.”
“Naw, the Messy-cans, they’re the spic. You guineas and dagos is your basic wop greaseball. As opposed to the wetback, who’re the genuine greasers. There’s a subtle but distinctive difference, like fine wine, between a greaseball and greaser,” Victor Malone said, holding school on his bigotry semantics.
Like so many trophy hunters with houses filled with dead animals and their own personal jets to fly them around the world to kill more, the man who owned Malone-Leyva Executive Security and Investigations didn’t worry about feelings. He had no tolerance for even a degree of human dignity.
“I liked your testimony before that piece of shit, Senator Jim Wells. What a sanctimonious asshole he is!” Malone went on, and took a pull on his cigar.
“Pedro!” he yelled. “Where’s those fucking drinks!”
The servant ran to the room carrying a tray with a new bottle of the expensive Scotch whiskey and two fat glasses filled with ice and Macallan.
Cesare nodded and took his drink. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” the Hispanic servant said, and left as quickly as his feet could get him out of the room.
“As you may know, I decided to pull out of the war business. All that bullshit going on in Iraq, and the FBI snooping my porch,” Malone said, sipping whiskey and smoking his cigar. “Too many potholes on that road. Our own personal United States senator, you know the one that got the Marine Corps hot on rescuing that boy, Valentine? Cooper Carlson. He’s lined us up with the Department of Homeland Security.”
“Sounds quite good. I had heard that you made the deal. I look forward to the work and the challenges involved,” Cesare said. “It’s a rapidly expanding market. I can imagine a whole multitude of opportunities.”
“That’s an understatement,” Malone said. “However, I need you to stick close to Senator Carlson. Be his go-to man for me.”
“But . . . I thought I would take the lead on the DHS deal,” Cesare said, working hard to not let his disappointment show. “With us pulling out of Iraq and Afghanistan, I am very capable of running that business.”
“Son, you lied to me,” Malone leveled. “You told me you didn’t make a copy of that fucking secret plan that cocksucker Blevins swiped. And you made a copy anyway.”
Cesare sank in the chair and took a big drink of the whiskey. He knew better than to back his lie with some tall tale that Blevins had made the copy, not him. Malone knew shit. Scary shit. Like he had a set of eyes everywhere.
“I like you, Alosi,” the Malone-Leyva boss said. “But you know way too much for your own good. So I can’t fire a man like that. You get my drift?”
Cesare nodded yes.
“I thought about putting you in a car accident, kind of like that boy up in Wisconsin that we got rid of,” Malone went on. “Then I thought you might work harder and smarter if you knew I had your number and could push the button.
“Son, I don’t trust you as far as I can throw that elephant standing out there in the middle of this castle. But you are one sneaky son of a bitch, and you might just pay off someday, trying to redeem yourself.
“So you get a reprieve. Make the best of it.”
—
Jack Valentine had caught the American Eagle to Charlotte from Albert J. Ellis Airport outside Camp Lejeune, and connected to Dallas on an American Airlines Boeing 757. The Bombardier 700 ride to Charlotte left him cramped in a narrow cabin filled with homebound Marines, most of them dressed in jeans and sport shirts. A handful of Army guys wore their battle-dress uniforms, which Marines call utilities. Gunner Valentine, however, was the only military person aboard wearing a class-A service uniform.
Elmore Snow had taught Jack almost from day one that when he traveled, he ought to proudly wear the dress green with ribbons and badges. It helped Marine Corps recruiting and made a positive impression on everyone. Gunner Valentine found that it also made an especially strong impression on some flight attendants, who would sometimes lavish him with extra frills, the so-called “phase that pays.”
A flight attendant a few years ago, waiting by him in Reagan National, had explained to Jack what the “phase that pays” meant, after she had struck up the conversation, slathering on the flirts with the good-looking Marine while they killed time. After that, Jack began to pay attention to how flight attendants smiled and winked at him, and he played into their game, getting himself another warm cookie or that little extra tuck on his pillow.
When he boarded his plane to Dallas, he had not taken two steps inside the front hatch when the lead attendant, a tall and attractive blonde named Pandora, caught him by the arm and set him in a first-class seat. The class-A uniform paid the dividend. As she thanked him for his service, Jack smiled back and asked, “Phase that pays?”
Pandora laughed. “You’ve been talking to someone.”
Jack kept smiling, and she brought him lots of extra good stuff, warm cookies and more, always delivered with a gentle touch of her hand on him.
From Dallas to El Paso, Jack sat just past the wing on the left bank of seats on an American Eagle Canadair commuter jet. One side of the cabin had two seats, side by side, and the other side had a single line of seats. It gave Gunner Valentine the best of both worlds, an aisle slot with a window. While he missed the hot towels and warm cookies, and generous cocktails Pandora had served him in first class on the big plane, this flight wasn’t so bad. A nice seat by himself where he could watch the dry Texas world below race by at 250 miles per hour, and think.
Jack raised the lid on his MacBook Pro notebook that he had bought himself as a graduation gift upon departing The Basic School at Quantico. He opened a document he had begun writing, a worksheet and list of objectives he planned to have his MARSOC platoon accomplish in the next ten months as they prepared to go downrange. This time to Afghanistan.
He had as of yet told no one about the deployment. Of course, Elmore knew, and so did Cotton, Billy-C, and the rest of Jack’s old detachment. Colonel Snow had moved them and another detachment into the newly formed platoon, Gunner Valentine’s first command. Fifty Marine special operators plus their armorers, supply chief and crew, and a hard-charging staff sergeant from Chicago they called Bugsy, who ran the office with a lance corporal clerk named Dugan. However, Jack had not breathed a word to anyone outside his MARSOC band of brothers.
Ten months out, family, friends, and especially
Liberty, didn’t need to get their worry caps on just yet. Especially after his eventful tour in Iraq. So the newly installed MARSOC platoon commander kept his next trip downrange to himself. He’d tell Mom and Dad, and Liberty, soon enough.
Jack had taken off his blouse, draped it over his lap, and had hardly gone to work on his deployment plan when a healthy, trim young flight attendant with STACEY emblazoned in black letters on the silver nameplate pinned to her uniform interrupted him. “Want me to hang that up?”
She took the blouse off his lap before he could answer, and the Marine looked up as she walked away with it, her tight, firm ass moving all too nice under her snug-fitting blue uniform skirt. As Jack watched and liked what he saw, he answered to no one who could hear him, “Sure.”
Stacey had long wild curly blond-tipped hair that brushed off her shoulders, dark underneath the blond, and even darker eyebrows, but bright blue eyes like turquoise jewels. Jack couldn’t help but stare at her pretty face as she came back toward him.
When he caught himself staring, Gunner Valentine blinked, and said as she came past him, her hand gently patting his shoulder, “Thanks a lot.” Then he added with a smile, “Phase that pays?”
Stacey laughed and headed to the aft of the plane. A few minutes later, she wore a blue apron and pushed a drink trolley up the aisle with the other flight attendant, a young, slim, redheaded girl named Patricia. Skinny but athletic, with a nice rack and can.
Jack took a Dr Pepper and a pack of pretzels. As Stacey pushed past him, she nudged his shoulder with her butt, and chortled. When he looked up at her, a big grin on his face, she gave him one of those smiles.
“What do you do in the Marines?” Stacey asked Jack a half hour later, and about that much time left in their flight to El Paso. She had wandered down the aisle, as if she was making a second check for trash and empty cans when she stopped by the Marine’s seat.
Closing his notebook, Jack looked up at her, and shrugged. “Mostly sit behind a desk these days, I suppose,” and pointed at the rank on his collar.
“Sure a lot of fruit salad and glitter on your jacket for a guy who just sits behind a desk,” Stacey said. “I recognize your face.”
Jack was surprised. “You do?”
“You’re that guy,” she said. “They had your picture in TIME magazine. I read the whole story. Al-Qaeda took you prisoner and you escaped and rescued some girls the insurgents had taken into slavery. The story said two of them got killed, but one made it out alive with you. That senator. What’s his name?”
“Carlson,” Jack offered.
“Yeah, that’s it. Carlson from Nevada,” Stacey continued. “He called you a special kind of hero.”
“Don’t believe everything a politician says,” Jack said. “I’m nobody special. Honest!”
The flight attendant smiled big and knelt by Jack. “We’re laying over in El Paso tonight. The flight crew. Patricia and I split a room. We’re at the Del Norte Hilton.”
“Nice place,” Jack said, and looked again at her blue eyes and the dark underlayer of her curly blond hair. She had him tempted.
“So, with us landing fairly early,” Stacey said, then blushed bright red. “If you have a friend . . . Patricia and I want to go dancing. Or if you don’t have a friend, maybe you can dance with us both?”
Then Stacey quickly stood up, beet-faced, and rolled her eyes. “I’ve never done this before, so I feel a little awkward. Hitting on you?”
“Hey, that’s cool,” Jack said, and instinctively gave her a pat on the hand. “I haven’t been home much in the past fifteen or so years, so I wouldn’t know where to start when it comes to picking places to go dancing. Besides, I have family and friends waiting to see me. I doubt I’d have time. But wow, it really is tempting. Seriously.”
Stacey reached in her skirt pocket and took out a silver case with her personal calling cards inside it. She took one out and handed it to Jack.
“My cell number’s on the card, also my address in Dallas, and my email, too,” she said. “Think about it and maybe give me a call. Even down the road if you can’t make tonight.”
She walked away before Jack could say anything else. He looked at the card and didn’t quite know what to do. So he tucked it in his shirt pocket and opened his computer.
As the plane began to descend, it banked into a standard rate turn, entering the terminal control area approach. Gunner Valentine looked out the window and saw El Paso coming below. He found his notebook case and tucked the MacBook inside, then looked straight down. His hometown.
Below, like looking down on a bad dream, he saw the Devil’s Triangle. City fathers and law enforcement had worked for years to improve El Paso’s notorious hood, but it still remained the hood. Land of Barrio-Azteca outlaws, drugs, violence, whores, addicts, chronic gloom, and short lives. A ways over, but still in the valley, Jack could see his own neighborhood. Coronado High School just past it, where he had played his glory days of football. Liberty Cruz had cheered him as he ran long for touchdown passes.
On the hill, he saw the plush streets where Liberty had grown up. The rich hood, where the money flowed. Most kids there went to private schools, but Paul Cruz had sent his daughter to the public schools. Deep down, Jack liked Liberty’s dad, who never forgot his poor roots and did a lot of lawyer work helping the poor kids in the real bad hood, down in the Devil’s Triangle.
“Fucking shit hole,” Jack grumbled under his breath as his eyes followed Hondo Pass from Dyer Avenue to Gateway Boulevard, and the blocks and blocks of poverty, violence, and crime they surrounded.
Devil’s Triangle had changed Jack’s life forever. Not the hood but the thugs the hood had bred. One bad night. That’s all it took. One really bad decision by an angry, seventeen-year-old Jack Valentine.
As the plane made its final descent into El Paso, Jack wondered how his life might have turned out had he not gone to Sonny Gomez’s bloody bucket biker bar that night, so many years ago. On the positive side, however, it did put him on the tracks that led to the Marine Corps and this life he now led.
_ 20 _
Red neon from the sign outside slashed through the front door of the El Gomez Club as Jack Valentine and three big boys trailing at his heels pushed their way inside the filthy dive and headed to the bar.
Two buzz-cut cholos in high-belted khaki pants and untucked blue-plaid shirts, single buttoned at their tattooed necks but wide open from there down, beer bellies protruding, stretching tight the rib knit of their wife-beater undershirts, stepped aside and watched as the four teenagers ambled past them.
“¡Hijole! ¿Que la chingada?” one whined in subdued breaths to the other, knowing trouble had just walked in.
“That baboso’s back again?” the other sang back.
“Pendejo must not have got his fill,” the first one said.
“Looks like he brought help this time, ese,” the other said, and they both nodded like bobbleheads, watching.
Across the nasty saloon, a yellow light shone over a game of Nine-Ball that fell dead quiet. Every eye in the joint now watched the outlander quartet belly up.
This stinking swill house with the red neon flashing GOMEZ outside sat at the corner of Norton Street and Hondo Pass Avenue on the top end of what Texans in El Paso in 1988 called “the Devil’s Triangle.” Bordered by Hondo Pass on the north, Gateway Boulevard on the west, and Dyer Avenue on the east, this wedge of slum blocks had the reputation of the worst of the worst in an already rough city sharing the same stretch of border with Ciudad Juarez, Mexico.
Lives sell cheap here in this Paso del Norte outlaw hood. Drugs and guns flowed like the piss and beer at Sonny Gomez’s gangsta water hole. Sane people avoided this slice of ugliest El Paso life, but anyone calling a barely seventeen-year-old Jack Valentine and his three sixteen-year-old fellow Golden Thunderbirds from the Coronado High School football team anything rese
mbling sane or even remotely rational tonight had better think again.
“Chui,” Jack fired through clenched teeth at Sonny Gomez, a middle-aged motorcycle head tending bar with jailhouse tattoos on both thick arms and a black Fu Manchu wrapping his tight-pressed lips. “I want Chui.”
“Just like I told you last time you came in here making trouble, ojete. I don’t know nobody called Chui,” Gomez growled at the kid.
Jack panned his eyes at the holmes leaning on cue sticks surrounding the pool table, ready for another brawl.
“El burro sabe mas que tu,” Jack said loudly for the audience, showing them his Latino side, then glared at Sonny Gomez. “Tu eres mas feo que el culo de un mono.”
“Vete al infierno,” Gomez let go, his voice thick, gravelly from years of heavy smoking and bad whiskey, and he laid a baseball bat across the bar as he said it.
“I’ll go to hell, monkey butt, and take you and those cabrones with me,” Jack snarled back, and gave the boys at the pool table the stink eye.
“You looking for Chui?” a voice from the dark back corner called out. A girl squealed as the Latino hood pushed her off his lap, and she flopped bare-assed on the floor.
The mid-twenties gang lord zipped his pants and buckled his belt as he walked into the light that shrouded the pool table and the thugs gathered round it.
“I’m Chui,” he said, cold-eyed, deadly, still walking toward the bar, cool-dude gangsta style. “What you need with me, pendejo?”
Behind him, nine Barrio-Azteca soljas fell into a loose echelon and sashayed to the bar with their boss banger.
“I came here to kill your murdering ass,” Jack said, and his three sixteen-year-old large-bodied wingmen shouldered up behind him, scared shitless. Reality suddenly sucked all the air out of their overinflated cajones.
“Murder?” Chui frowned. “That’s some serious shit, ese. Who did I supposedly murder?”
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