Gil Mason/Gunwood USA Box Set

by Gordon Carroll

She could tell that Majoqui really hated violence and that he would only use it when he had to, and even then, only for good. Everything was turning out just as she'd hoped, just as she'd prayed. The universal goddesses were smiling down on her — on both of them.

  After Dashon left, they made love again and he was so gentle, so caring. She hugged Miranda to her, remembering his passion and warmth. She had been right to feel safe with him. No one would hurt her while he was near and she felt certain that her heart was in no danger. He just didn't feel like the kind of person to play with someone's emotions. He wasn't like her old boyfriend Kyle. He was real and genuine and good.

  Not only was he brave, but he trusted her. He told her about his childhood and how he had to join the gang in order to survive. He told her about his mother and the men and how he protected her from them once he was old enough. How he supported her so she wouldn't have to be a prostitute anymore.

  She'd seen the awful things the news said about him, about killing the man and woman and the police and the nurse, but he'd explained that it was all a lie. That they were trying to set him up for what they, the police, had actually done. He said they did things like this all the time, blaming the gangs for their own crimes. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time and so they were using him as cover.

  Tamera had seen a thousand crime shows on TV and at the movies where the police and the government did things just like this. Even Kyle used to say how everything was a conspiracy. Kyle used to take her to parties where the pot was plentiful and the discussions sooner or later always turned to politics. Nearly everyone at these parties would say that 911 was an inside job sponsored by the Bushes. They'd show videos and pictures proving there was no airplane that hit the Pentagon and they'd say that fire couldn't burn hot enough to melt steel and there had to be explosives secretly hidden throughout the Twin Towers for them to fall the way they did. They even showed scientific proof of how the wispy lines of vapor in the sky from jets weren't contrails like she'd learned in school, but rather were chemicals the government had been secretly spraying for decades to give people cancer and to keep them pacified. Chemtrails they called them. It was weird stuff, but they had lots of proof for what they said and Kyle believed it and even though Kyle was mean and hurtful, he was very smart. Smarter than she was.

  Majoqui was even smarter than Kyle, and he was nice. If he told her the police were lying then they were lying. She trusted him.

  Tamera gave Miranda a final hug, then jumped up off the bed and started getting dressed. She had to work tonight.

  Majoqui sat outside the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office, parked in Tamera's yellow VW. He had purchased a laptop with a wifi device so he could search the Internet. With just a few key strokes, he had learned the shifts and times of shifts of the commissioned deputies and where headquarters, as well as the scattered sub-stations, were. Even better, he had found an app that turned his also recently purchased smart phone into a police scanner, complete with the Cherokee County SO's radio frequencies.

  He didn't know what kind of personal vehicle the sergeant drove, or even his name, but he knew the face. That and the fact that he was a K9 officer and that he would have to have a specially equipped police vehicle for animal transport. Also… Majoqui never forgot a face. And he would certainly never forget this man’s face.

  So he waited and listened, and before it could even get dark, he saw the blue and gray minivan pull up to the front entrance and pass a card before a sensor, opening the gate. It was him.

  Majoqui typed in the license plate of the minivan and after punching in the stolen credit card number he'd gotten from his brothers from Hollywood, the sealed record on the sergeant’s personal information opened up and he had his name, address and home phone number. A few more keystrokes and he even had a visual image of the man's house from Google Maps.

  Majoqui rubbed his cheek, feeling the thin metal ring he'd looped through the stitch holes. There was pain. The bones in his cheek and jaw seemed to be healing, but his eye still drooped and the vision was bad. This Americano police officer had stood between him and his goal. Twice he had thwarted him. He had caused him pain and disfigurement, but worse even than all that, he had made Mara look fallible. And that could not be tolerated.

  An example was to be set with the banker and his family. This sheriff's deputy… this Gil Mason… he had stopped that. It seemed only fitting to Majoqui that the example be made with him instead.

  And so it would be.

  15

  As sergeant of the K9 Unit, I set up the schedule and training regiment for my people and their dogs. There are eight K9 handlers other than myself; six men, two women and a mixture of German Shepherds, Dutch Shepherds and Belgian Mals.

  We have a complete training field on the north forty of headquarters, with an obstacle course, jumps, an indoor kennel and even a mock house to practice things like attic insertions and building searches. It was a training night, so all the guys were waiting for me when I finally showed up. I had to stop off at the firing range to qualify with a couple of my spare guns since my primaries had been confiscated… again… for the shoot team's analysis and ballistics report, so I was a little late.

  Athena Marie walked up to me, a quirky grin on her lips.

  "Glad you decided to show up, boss. We weren't sure you were going to. Heard you had a rough night."

  She was wearing a shroud over her badge, we all were, in honor of the officers that had been killed last night. The shroud is a black band that fits diagonally across our badges.

  "Pretty rough, yeah," I said, thinking back to the mutilated face of the banker's wife and hearing the muffled cry of the little girl as I jolted her broken arm.

  "I read the report," she said, the smile gone. "You did everything right."

  "And still there's seven dead people and two kids without parents."

  "Not your fault," she said. Athena was like a daughter to me. She put a hand on my arm. "You want to talk about it?"

  I shook my head, my eyes feeling wet, as I remembered how I'd broken down with my wife. "Not now, not yet, thanks." I did a mental head shake and forced a smile. "So what do you have going on here?"

  Athena nodded. "We started without you." She pointed to the hurdles where Tom Boilenger was running his dog, Cobra, through a set. Her dog, a spiffy little sixty-pound Mal named Brutus, sat at her side looking up at me with fearless eyes.

  "I see Tom working," I said, "what about you?"

  "Somebody had to take charge, Sarge."

  "I knew you were bucking for my job."

  "Ha! Have to deal with these morons for a lousy six percent raise? Forget it."

  "Ah, but you forget the power."

  "Double ha," she said with that same quirk. She was all of five feet, five inches tall and weighed maybe a hundred and ten. But she was a giant when it came to confidence. "I've got Greg and Matt suiting up and Brian and Cliff laying tracks." She pointed to Paul Graves who was out in a field maybe fifty yards out. "Paul's setting some evidence and Cassandra is scoping out some places down by Inverness for area searches later."

  "Wow, maybe I should be late more often."

  "Maybe you should."

  "You sure you're not bucking for that extra six percent?"

  She laughed again and looked down at Pilgrim. "Hey, boy, you're looking a little fat," she looked at me, tapped my stomach. "I guess what they say about masters and their dogs starting to look alike after a while is true."

  I held out my hands. "It's the vest. Besides, any healthy animal would look heavy next to that starved mongrel you call a dog. You ever feed that poor beast?"

  "You're just jealous," she looked down at Pilgrim again, "both of you. What are you feeding him anyway?"

  It was my turn to grin. "Malinois."

  "That big honker couldn't catch Brutus if he ran on two legs."

  I couldn't argue with that. Brutus was quick as lightning.

  "How about drugs? Any set out yet?"

&n
bsp; "Let's see," she said, "there's meth, coke and pot in the house and we've got X, heroin and shrooms in the cars."

  I nodded. "Nice job. Let's start with the cars. Pilgrim hasn't worked narcs for nearly a week."

  We headed over to the house. There was a built-on garage that was really more like a barn. It held the shells of three cars set on dolly-like wheel systems so we could easily move them around. There was no glass, and the seats, door frames, center consoles, airbag holders, radios, speaker compartments and dashes were all removable for easy access to hide things in.

  I put Pilgrim in a sit in front of the first car, then gave him a hand signal and said "kilo". He went to the front license plate and began sniffing. He searched the whole driver's side front panel, sniffing the outside air around the car, moved to the rear, and came up the other side, finally finishing back at the front license plate. Without waiting for another command, he started on the second vehicle.

  "That one's a blank," I said. We mix up cars with and without drugs so the dogs don't start thinking every car has drugs in it.

  Pilgrim was paying a lot of attention to the next car's passenger's side wheel well. He stuck his head deep into the well, just above the tire, and then sat with his nose pointing toward the space.

  "I'll call it there," I said.

  "So would I," Athena said.

  I went over and said "yes" and dropped his yellow knobby ball toy in front of his nose. The ball is attached to a sturdy nylon cord with a handle so I can play tug-of-war with him, which I did briefly. He's a strong dog and it takes a lot to play tug-of-war with him. I gave him the out command and he released the ball. I took him to the front license plate of the last car and sent him to find the drugs again. This time he went back and forth several times between the driver's front side door seam and the rear side door seam. He finally settled on the front door and I opened it for him and sent him in to search the interior. I taught him to search a car in sections, beginning with the door panel that is open. Pilgrim sniffed it and continued on inside, methodically checking his patterned sections. He finally alerted on the radio, really sniffing it hard, and then indicated by sitting and staring at it.

  "The radio compartment," I said.

  "Close," said Athena. "Get him to sniff closer to the steering column." That's the way it is in K9 training. I'm the trainer and have the final say, but we all help with every dog and with every handler. That can be hard sometimes because cops tend to have an ego to begin with and when you're on an elite team like K9, the ego's can sometimes swell outside of skull capacity. I make it a strict rule to check our egos at the door when we come in for K9 training, because it has to be all about the dogs and reading them correctly. When I trained dogs in the Corps, a missed IED would get Marines killed. Out here on the streets it's no different. You miss a bad guy and he could shoot you in the back as you walk by.

  I pointed toward the dash near the steering column and Pilgrim obediently followed with his nose, sniffing in quick little huffs that allowed the alar fold on the inside of his nostrils to open, forcing air to flow through the upper area of the nasal passages. When a dog exhales, the air takes a different path, blowing out the side slits and keeping the scent still trapped in his nose for better detecting. Pilgrim followed the scent up the column to the wheel and finally over to the center, sniffing along the small seams where air escaped from around the airbag compartment. He sat and stared at the steering wheel.

  "What's in there?" I asked.

  "Point six grams of heroin."

  "That was a little tough for him."

  "Yeah, a lot of the dogs hit it right where Pilgrim did, by the radio."

  I looked down at Brutus. "Let's see Brutus run it." Brutus was pure money on drugs, by far our best narcotics detection dog.

  Athena grinned. "Find drugs," she said to her dog. Brutus bolted to the car and started his circle of the vehicle. He sniffed the seam of the driver's front door and started pawing it.

  There are two disciplines of narcotic dog indicators; passive and aggressive. Pilgrim is a passive indicator, in that when he finds the strongest odor of narcotics, he sits and stares and maybe pokes his nose at the spot. An aggressive alerter, like Brutus, doesn't sit. Instead, he starts pawing, or biting, or scratching at the spot. Both disciplines are equally effective, but each suits different dog psychologies. The only trouble I've found over the years is that aggressive alerters make finding training locations more difficult because the dogs are a bit more destructive. Oh, and we never, ever train bomb dogs to indicate aggressively; for obvious reasons… those reasons being — boom and BOOM!

  Athena let him in and he went straight to the steering wheel and started digging at the center pad.

  "Show off," I said.

  "When you got it, flaunt it," she said.

  My phone vibrated. "Sergeant Mason."

  "Hey, Gil it's Jim Black. I just got done talking to Las Vegas PD. Looks like your three boys, if they are connected with our suspect, did get in a tussle with some Crips down there."

  "How'd it happen?"

  "From the security tape, the Crips were inside a convenience store. Four of them. One of the Thirteens came in and got some beer. He was tatted all over and one of the Crips flashed him a sign, just looking for trouble. He found it. The Thirteen was wearing an open vest, showing his chest and arms. You'd never expect a weapon on him. But he had one alright. He undoes his belt buckle and snaps his wrist and the darn thing turns into some kind of sword. He nearly takes off the sign flasher's arm and then whips right into the other three. Cuts two of them pretty bad, then robs the teller and picks up his beer and leaves. Very slick… scary slick."

  "A belt sword? Never heard of that. Thirteens usually go for machetes and Saturday night specials."

  "Yeah," said Jim, "weird. The dude was good and fast. It was like a magic trick, only gory."

  "Any pictures?"

  "Plenty on the guy with the sword, and some blurred photos of the guy in the front seat, nothing on the guy in back. We got the plate too. Turned out to be a steal, but off a different car. They were in a green SUV and the stolen plates come back to an Accord."

  "Okay, send whatever you've got to my phone. Who knows, maybe I'll run into them."

  There was a pause.

  "Gil, don't take this the wrong way, but your part in this is really done. You should leave it up to the Denver Dicks and us now."

  There was another pause, this time from me.

  "Look, Jim, there are a lot of people dead here, people that maybe wouldn't be dead if I'd shot a little straighter or a few more times. I'm going to have to live with that and it's going to be tough, but maybe it'll be easier if I help you put him away before he hurts anyone else."

  "I understand all that, Gil, I do. But this can't be a personal vendetta thing or you could mess up the whole criminal case."

  "It's not, Jim. I just want to help catch this guy, that's all."

  "Alright, Sarge, only keep me posted on anything that comes up."

  "Absolutely."

  A few minutes later my phone vibrated and I downloaded the pictures of the guy with the sword and the fuzzy picture of the man in the passenger's front seat of the green SUV. Jim even sent me the entire video from the convenience store. I love technology, maybe even more than Kip from Napoleon Dynamite. The guy with a sword also had a tattoo of a tear dripping from the corner of his left eye, showing that he'd done time somewhere. That meant he was in the system. And if he was in the system, I could find him.

  16

  The rifle was better than he had asked for. It was a custom Les Baer .308 with a twenty-four inch barrel and a Mag-Pul adjustable buttstock. It was also equipped with a Vortex 6.5 20X50 mm PST tactical scope and the standard Harris bipod on the front underside of the handguard. Three, twenty-round magazines, all filled with Federal 168 grain Gold Medal Match ammo were included. The heavier bullets would ensure a straight, flat trajectory with maximum penetration, which was important since they wo
uld need to punch through the heavy glass of a car's windshield.

  The motorcycle was a bit flashier than he'd wanted, but it would do. It was a 2009, Kawasaki Ninja ZX-10R, with a stack design liquid cooled, 998 cc inline four-cylinder engine and could go from zero to sixty in 2.84 seconds. It was glossy black and looked like pure speed.

  The brothers had done well. They had secured both items quickly and efficiently. And the witch woman that sat across from him was best of all.

  She was the real thing. He knew it the instant he walked in the room. A priestess of the highest order, a Lyanifa. He crossed himself and whispered a quiet Hail Mary under his breath. Her right eye was blind, staring about in a gummy sea of opaque cataract. But her left was midnight black and could pierce to the soul. She was ancient, her wispy hair as white as her dead eye, with gnarled fingers and arthritic knobs for knuckles. Her dentures were a size too big for her shrunken gums and hideously white against the nicotine color of her skin. Wrinkled lips, smeared lavishly with bright red lipstick, left pinkish stains on the butts of the filtered cigarettes she chain smoked as she read his palm, the cards spread out before them.

  Power radiated from her like waves of heat and Majoqui basked in it as she blessed him and chanted over him and said the secret words that would shield him and give him protection from those who would do him harm.

  Her wrist was a withered stick, covered in leathery sinew, as she picked up the knife and slit the chicken's throat with practiced ease. The blood flowed hot and fast into the bowl, the fowl's talons twitching as she dropped it to the floor, and stared with her one eye as the contents told their futuristic tales.

  Majoqui feared no human, no weapon. He had stared “señor death” in the face many times and never looked away. Only the supernatural held the mystery that was able to spark fear in his soul. He felt that fear now as she smeared her fingers in the mixture of goat and chicken blood and entrails. She had severed the goat's genitalia, as well as his heart and liver, and added them to the bowl, along with three medallions that she first prayed and chanted over before lying them carefully next to the dead animal's manhood, the source of his strength and pride.