Wild Fire: A Suspense Thriller (A Hawk Tate Novel Book 6)

by Dustin Stevens

  The prison system wasn’t one we worked with extensively, though I was familiar with how the process went. A continuation of whatever work we had put in, we were often kept appraised of the various steps, letting us know when one we had apprehended made it back out on the streets.

  An eventuality that didn’t happen often, but we needed to be aware of when it did.

  “Yeah.”

  “None of that listed here,” Diaz said. “Just one day, the magic parole board fairy waved a wand and poof, the guy was able to walk out a free man.”

  Handfuls of responses came to mind. Vitriolic barbs. Angry rants. Full-on venting.

  One at a time, I pushed them aside. Much like the photo of Ruiz now flipped upside down, I knew that succumbing to them, voicing whatever I was feeling, would only end badly.

  Pressure I couldn’t release, causing me to either implode or do something very stupid.

  Turning my attention back to the pages before me, I shuffled forward to the part of the narrative outlining the night in question. A joint operation between us and a team from the field office in Mexico City, there had been ten of us that stormed the grounds that night, the entire thing as close to textbook as an operation could go.

  Never before joining the DEA had I even heard the term quinceañera. From what I could gather, it was something akin to a bat mitzvah in Jewish culture or a debutante ball back where I came from.

  An event to mark an official passage of a child into adulthood.

  Specific to Spanish and Hispanic culture, the quinceañera was a celebration of a young girl’s fifteenth birthday. A time when she was officially anointed a woman, one of the largest milestones in her life.

  An event that, if the pained cries of Tres Salinas were to be believed, was held in his sister’s honor.

  “I read through that file after you called with a name a couple days ago,” Diaz said, drawing my attention upward. “Seemed like a hell of a ballsy play.”

  She didn’t add anything more, though she didn’t need to. Already I knew exactly what she was getting at, my focus rolling forward as I stared out the windshield at the traffic growing steadily thicker around us.

  Allowing my eyelids to sag slightly, I put myself back in the moment. Having relived that day no more than a hundred times in the last forty-eight hours, I could still hear the sound of a mariachi band drifting through the air. The smell of roasted goat still filled my nostrils.

  More than three hundred people were on hand for the celebration that afternoon. All decked out in their Sunday best, they had gathered at the estate of Junior Ruiz, turning the place into a veritable town square.

  Games on the lawn for children. A stage and dancefloor for entertaining. Enough tables and chairs to accommodate everybody without feeling cramped.

  “Biggest damn party I’d ever seen. Hundreds of men, women, children, all packed into a spread that must have been five acres or more.”

  Even with the narrative report open on my lap before me, I didn’t bother to look down. Every detail of that day was seared into my mind, one of the last major scores I was a part of, washing out not much more than a year later.

  “Middle of August, hot as hell, everybody sweating so bad we could barely grip our weapons. Thousand ways it could have - and maybe even should have - gone to shit.”

  Without commenting, Diaz signaled, drifting over into the right lane.

  Overhead, signage announced a freeway split, the road we were just on leading into the city, our new route sweeping us toward the north.

  “In the days leading up to it, Martin and the lead from the Mexico City office had gone back and forth. The other guy had been some military hard-ass type. Wanted to wait for nightfall, bring in a huge contingent. Full-on SWAT tactical team with riot gear and tear gas.”

  “Jesus,” Diaz muttered beside me, the word just barely penetrating my train of thought.

  “Martin wouldn’t hear of it. Kept telling him if we wanted to do that, we would have picked any other night. Just lined up our best against Ruiz’s best and had a damn shootout.”

  Yet another reminder of how politics within the Administration really worked, I remembered sitting in the small house we’d commandeered in Baja for the operation. Ten grown men, all hopped up on testosterone and adrenaline, counting seconds, waiting for the signal to go.

  “Kept telling the guy the crowd was actually the best coverage we could ask for. Go in there with a small team under the light of day to keep everybody from panicking. Make it very clear we didn’t want violence, we were only there for Ruiz.”

  In my periphery, I could see her curly hair shift as she shook her head.

  “And with it being that kind of gathering, so many innocents around, Ruiz wouldn’t be likely to let it get ugly,” Diaz inserted.

  “A full-on Godfather type thing.”

  “On this the day of my daughter’s wedding,” Diaz recited, quoting the movie without bothering to attempt a Brando accent.

  “Exactly,” I agreed. “Even if it wasn’t his daughter, he was the figurehead. El Jefe, as he liked to go by.”

  Nodding slightly, Diaz let it pass without comment. Falling silent for a moment, she seemed to chew on what I’d just described, both hands gripping either side of the wheel before her.

  “I mean, logically the approach makes sense...”

  “But if it goes south, it goes all the way south?” I finished, flicking a glance her way. “Believe me, we were all aware. More than once the three of us had private conversations standing outside that house, but Martin was convinced he was right, and we trusted him enough to have his back.”

  As the youngest man on the crew, it wasn’t my place to push back. If anything went sideways, most of the flack that came down would be siphoned off long before it made it all the way to me.

  Even knowing that, that he would be the one brought under scrutiny later, forced to testify whenever the case made it to court, Martin had not backed down.

  “We rolled up on that place with ten men that day,” I continued. “Outside of a pair of old ladies cursing at us in Spanish and some kids screaming, there wasn’t a bit of trouble.

  “Not a single shot fired or drop of blood spilled.”

  Returning my gaze to the file before me, I flipped to the last page. Seeing it had nothing more than what I had already been carrying around in my head for years, I dropped the papers back into position and flipped the file closed.

  “In all the years of running with the FAST unit, it was the cleanest bust we ever executed. Nobody got spooked. No one got trigger happy or tried to make a run for it.”

  Falling silent, I clocked a mileage sign along the side of the road informing us that Miramar was just two miles ahead.

  “Does make you wonder though, doesn’t it?” Diaz asked.

  “What’s that?”

  “Why the hell this is how Ruiz decided to retaliate.”

  Chapter Fifty-Nine

  The city of Escondido sat thirty miles north of San Diego, a straight shot up the I-15. One of countless smaller dots on the map filling the space between San Diego and Los Angeles, it was a place I had heard of many times but never actually been to.

  With good reason.

  Appearing to be little more than a suburb that had grown larger than it ever intended to, the place resembled a bunch of strip malls holding hands. One street after another of the same sorts of small businesses grouped together, interspersed with fast food joints and open lots of sand and gravel.

  All of it weathered into a uniform state of faded color, years of being blasted by the desert elements having taken a toll.

  The better part of a day’s digging still hadn’t turned up many of the answers we were looking for. Despite the combined efforts of Diaz and Pally, neither had been able to break through whatever invisible barriers existed in the cyber world to determine how or why Junior Ruiz had been given his walking papers.

  A fact that – based on my combined experience with the two �
�� led to me believe that no such thing existed. That whatever had come together to put this all into motion had occurred in the realm where things were discussed but never committed to writing.

  Where backtrails weren’t just hidden, they were never created.

  “So how does this go?” I asked.

  Holding Diaz’s phone in my left hand, I had the screen tilted up so she could see it. Scrawled across it was a map with a thick blue line pointing the way, an automated voice telling us each time we needed to make a turn.

  “How’s that?” she asked, glancing from the screen up to me before moving her attention back to the road.

  “Esmerelda Ruiz,” I replied. “What if we get up here and Junior is sitting on the couch in the living room?”

  “He won’t be.”

  “But what if he is?”

  We both knew I was just playing devil’s advocate, that there was no way what I was asking could come to pass, but it was a scenario that at least needed to be discussed.

  The last three years of prison records displayed that not a single letter or phone call had been made or received by Ruiz. Not on birthdays or holidays. Never to inform him of a death or birth or engagement.

  During the first part of his stay, interaction with the outside world had been limited, but it existed. The occasional visit from his mother. A call coming in from his sister.

  After that, absolutely nothing.

  Without that, or the usual paperwork that Diaz had alluded to that normally accompanied a release, it made the obvious choices for where to go next a bit thin.

  “I talked to the office down in Mexico City last night while you were flying,” Diaz said. “After Ruiz was taken away, Baja became the Wild West for a while. Lot of smaller players tried to step up, few bigger names from other parts tried to move in.

  “Got the impression it was pretty ugly.”

  More than once we’d seen similar situations play out. The kind of thing that long after the fact, armed with the benefits of time and distance, made me wonder if what we were doing was really even a good thing.

  Sure, we were removing a criminal from the streets. We were eradicating whatever evils he might have been responsible for, but it wasn’t like we could do anything about existing demand.

  Or human nature, for that matter.

  We might have taken Ruiz out, but how many lives were lost because of it, if the people of Baja were any better for it, were questions we’d probably never know the answer to.

  “His crew?” I asked.

  “Guy didn’t have anything definitive on file,” Diaz replied. “Seemed to think they had disbanded, kind of scattered to the winds. Few familiar faces popped up in various places, but nothing concentrated.”

  That too I took without surprise.

  The nature of the business and all that.

  “In one thousand feet, turn right,” the phone instructed.

  Slowing the car a bit, Diaz drifted into the right lane, a bus stop lined with torn paper signage passing by. Behind it stood a taqueria with a name I’d never heard of before, a ragged line of customers already stretched out the door.

  Above, the morning sun pounded down, a glare so bright it was almost white moving across the windshield.

  “Ruiz had to go somewhere,” I said, bringing the conversation back around to my original question.

  “Yeah, but he won’t be here,” Diaz said. “At most, he would have asked her to pick him up. Wanted to make everything look legit, but he wouldn’t have risked involving her in whatever he’s got going on.”

  She didn’t bother expounding on the last sentence, trusting I already knew what she was playing at.

  Despite the radio silence Ruiz had undergone the last few years, there was no way he was suddenly granted his release and the message was left on Martin’s mantle without him planning something big.

  Almost like he’d been given a clean slate, a fresh start, and he was making sure to right old wrongs before embarking on it.

  Easing into the turn, Diaz accelerated forward. The assorted businesses and throngs of people that had lined the major thoroughfare behind us fell away, replaced by residential streets. Along either side, single-family dwellings of similar architecture passed by, the exteriors and vehicles parked in the driveway putting it solidly in the middle class.

  A far cry from the hacienda spread we had poured into that night eight years before.

  “In five hundred feet, your destination will be on the left.”

  Chapter Sixty

  The body of Ramon Reyes had already been taken away. One of the advantages of being on a spread that was so heavily rooted in agriculture, there were plenty of pieces of heavy machinery to make it easy. Within an hour of it taking place, a hole had been dug in one of the back fields. Body dropped in, it was filled in with dirt and covered over with assorted plant debris, no sign left behind that anything had ever taken place.

  Overnight, one of the house staff had come through and scrubbed the stripes of blood and brain tissue away from the stucco railing of the balcony.

  Now eight hours later, the only signs that anything had even taken place was the scent of gunpowder and the copper tang of blood in the air.

  Already both were faint, the sort of thing someone would only notice if they knew to look for it.

  And had smelled it enough times before to recognize it in an instant.

  Standing a few feet down from where he’d been the night before, Junior Ruiz stared out over the fields below. Morning sun on his skin, it brought a thin veneer of sweat to his skin, the moisture touched by the occasional puff of breeze passing through.

  Cigar in hand, he drew in a deep lungful of the sweet smoke, holding it for several moments, savoring the flavor before pushing it out in a plume before him.

  “I had almost forgotten how good those things smell,” Arlin Mejia said, stepping out onto the veranda. Hands clasped behind him, he was already dressed for the day.

  Pulling up a few feet away, he stopped just short of the balcony rail, his gaze running parallel to Ruiz’s.

  “And I’d almost forgotten how good they taste,” Ruiz commented, glancing down to the hand-rolled smoke wedged between his index and middle fingers.

  One of the few vices he’d ever allowed himself, he’d picked up the habit when just a teenager. Something that his father had supposedly done years before, it was one of the few positive memories of the man his mother had ever imparted.

  That alone being enough to get him started.

  Simple enjoyment being enough to keep him going thereafter.

  “Reyes,” Mejia said, letting his distaste for the very name show in his delivery, “never abided such things. Man wouldn’t drink a cup of coffee in the morning without getting into a damn staring contest, as if we were all supposed to be impressed by his restraint or something.”

  Cocking an eyebrow, Ruiz glanced over to the side. Never before had he heard of such a thing, but based on what he knew of the man, he couldn’t say he was shocked.

  Much like the opulence of the spread they were on, the ridiculous attire he wore, it was all part of some cultivated image. An exterior intended to spackle the enormous holes beneath. Things like Mejia, a lifetime employee of Ruiz, ascending so quickly to become Reyes’s right hand. Or the way that an informant had appeared from nowhere to inform him that Ruiz was being released. Or that Ruiz had walked right up to Hector on the street, fully aware of his presence.

  That the practice of parlay had fallen by the wayside long ago.

  All things that someone focused on the proper aspects of the business should have picked up on right away.

  Lifting the cigar, Ruiz motioned to the warehouse in the distance. Swinging his hand around in a half-arc, he included the various satellite structures around the property.

  “Walk me through this. What the hell is all this stuff?”

  A mirthless chuckle was Mejia’s first response. “What you are looking at is the Fruit of the Desert Vi
neyard. A fully functional winery producing a Sauvignon Blanc and, as of yesterday, a Cabernet.”

  Feeling his eyebrows lift, his ire spiking in kind, Ruiz remained silent, refraining from asking the obvious question of why someone involved in the cocaine business would go through the time and expense of setting up a vineyard deep in the desert.

  “After what happened with you,” Mejia continued, “and all the press the situation at the border has been getting lately, he was afraid that just running a straight-up operation here like we had in Baja would be problematic.”

  Waving a hand before him, Mejia added, “So he came up with this system. Dissolving the incoming drugs into the wine during the production process.”

  A time or two over the years, a similar thing had been pitched to Ruiz. The reasoning behind it was pretty simple. By putting the cocaine into the wine, it received the double benefit of undergoing far less scrutiny and becoming much easier to mask.

  Unless a dog was trained to sniff for the altered scent, they would never pick it up.

  Border patrols and customs agents would likewise have needed to be briefed on how to assess liquids, relying on spectral light scanners to determine that what was inside wasn’t strictly wine.

  “Jesus,” Ruiz muttered, shaking his head slightly.

  “Yeah,” Mejia agreed.

  While those things might have made for a reasonable opening to a pitch, the problems with such an approach were too numerous to be ignored.

  Trying to retrieve the drugs upon arrival. People overdosing from drinking the wine by mistake.

  The cost and oversight of setting up a vineyard and running it like a legitimate business.

  Turning away from the spread, Ruiz put his back to the wall. Folding his arms, he kept his right hand cocked upward, the cigar a few inches from his chin.

  “Who is supplying the product?”

  “New group, out of Peru. Only arrives when we’re ready to produce a new batch. Comes in on ships, gets trucked here, is put straight into vats.

  “Total time in its raw state, less than a couple hours.”