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

by Dustin Stevens

  Scrunching the side of my face, I gave him a non-committal shrug. “Exactly like you’d expect her to be.”

  Knowing just what I meant, he nodded slightly.

  “And you?” he asked.

  The answer to that was loaded to say the least. So much had happened in the last couple days, there was no way to possibly fill him in right now on just that part.

  To say nothing of the host of emotions roiling through me, aching to be expelled at any moment.

  Or of the years that had slid past since we’d last seen each other.

  “I take it you’re the care package?” I asked, sidestepping the question for the time being.

  “Care package, cavalry, whatever the hell else is needed right now. Just tell me where to point and shoot.”

  Opening my mouth, I began to respond. Opting against it for the time being, not knowing just how much he had been briefed on, I instead reached into the front pocket of my jeans.

  Sliding my fingers around the two objects I’d been carrying since leaving the Martin household, I placed them both down on the table beside us. Starting with the bullet, I leaned the coin against it, exactly as I had found them on the mantle.

  Leaving them there, I said absolutely nothing, watching as the same thought process I had been through in Washington two days before played out on his features.

  “You have got to be shitting me,” he whispered, his eyes flaring as he glanced up to me.

  “Nope,” Diaz said, stepping into the room behind us. The sound of her voice pulled both of our attention her way, seeing her standing with a sheaf of papers tucked against her ribs.

  Marching around to our side of the table, she dropped the stack down. Extending a hand before her, she said, “Mia Diaz.”

  “Carl Diggs,” he replied, accepting the shake. “You’re the one that took over for Hutch, right?”

  “Still have the smell of that God-awful tea he was always drinking stinking up my office.”

  Releasing his grip, Diggs rolled his head back just slightly, the faint smile returning.

  “I used to call it steaming elephant piss.”

  Eliciting a smile from me and Diaz both, we left the topic there. None of us wanted to get any further into the backstory of Hutch, what he had done or what I had been forced to do in response.

  Never could anybody say I’d been in the wrong, but that didn’t mean we wanted to dwell on it either.

  Turning back to the table, Diaz laid a hand flat on the stack of papers. Flicking a glance between us, she said, “As much as I hate to cut the reunion short, Pally just sent over Part Two of his care package.

  “We’ve got a hell of lot to do, and not much time to do it.”

  Chapter Seventy

  “Ramon Reyes.”

  Diggs said the name out loud, the inflection on it indicating neither a question nor a statement. More of an audible inner thought, wanting to hear it, giving it some life so as to better contemplate the meaning behind it.

  “Either of you guys ever heard of him?” Diaz asked. Seated at the head of the table, her body was turned a few inches to the side. Gripped in one hand was a Styrofoam coffee cup, the lower half of her arm flat atop the table.

  “Doesn’t ring a bell,” Diggs said. Matching Diaz’s pose, his body was turned sideways on the opposite side of the table. Slouched down in one of the matching chairs, he was reclined back as far as the seat would go.

  Left elbow propped on the arm of it, the same hand kneaded his forehead, his eyes pinched almost shut as he stared at the far wall, considering the inquiry.

  “You?” Diaz asked, flicking her gaze over my direction.

  Sitting directly across from Diggs, I was pulled up tight to the table. Torso only inches from the polished metal, both elbows were propped before me, chin resting on fingers laced together.

  Beneath them was a cup of coffee to match Diaz’s, the scent wafting up at me, dark roast calling out for my attention. Already on my second cup, I was making the conscious choice to ignore it for the time being, not wanting to spike the adrenaline and anticipation I was already feeling too high.

  In time, but not just yet.

  “Maybe?” I confessed, rolling the name around much the same as Diggs had a moment before. Realizing how much my coming words were about to sound like Latham’s a couple of days before, I added, “I know for a fact we tracked at least a handful of Reyes’s over the years-“

  “Ramon’s too,” Diggs inserted.

  Letting the comment go with little more than a nod, I continued, “But knowing if this guy is one of those without a visual...”

  The file that we had from the night of Ruiz’s arrest was meticulous. Done in the same manner as all of the paperwork Martin touched, every detail was committed to writing. Each step of the process that led up to the raid, a complete recounting of every minute that we were onsite.

  If ever it went to court, if someone in Ruiz’s camp claimed bad faith, it would be ready for admittance directly into evidence.

  But that didn’t help us much now.

  Not when what we needed were photographs. Clear images of every last person that had been present. The kind that would have made identifying Tres Salinas that much easier.

  Or a full roster of the guest list that night. Anything that might give us some bearing on who Ramon Reyes was and how he might be playing into all of this.

  Stuff it was easy to sit and bemoan not having with the benefit of hindsight but would have been impossible to attain with such a small attachment on the ground that night.

  Not that such a thing did anything to alleviate the growing agitation inside the room.

  “How about you?” Diggs shot back from the opposite side of the table. Tilting his head toward Diaz, he asked, “Anything on your end?”

  “Nope,” Diaz said. “Ran him through our database, reached out to field offices in Mexico City and Tegucigalpa. Nobody in the region has anything on him.”

  Spread on the table before us was the sum total of everything Pally had been able to cull together in the last hour. Since hammering down a location on both Ruiz and whoever it was that Salinas had been communicating with, he’d concentrated his entire focus entirely on that.

  An effort that had yielded a great deal, most of it grossly at odds with what we were expecting.

  “Fruit of the Desert Winery,” Diggs said, each word bearing no small amount of frustration. Tossing a thin stack of papers onto the table, he continued working at the skin of his forehead, oblivious to the pages spilling across the polished wood. “Are they serious with this shit?”

  Unable to disagree, or to offer anything more on point than what he’d just said, I nodded twice in agreement, chin rocking atop my fingers.

  For the better part of three days, I’d been sprinting headlong at this thing. At times feeling like a pinball bouncing around inside a machine, I had thrown myself from West Yellowstone to Snoqualmie and back. Had made a pitstop in Spokane, spent a few hours in the Beaverhead, and was now sitting outside of San Diego.

  Sometimes it felt like I was bumping along without a flashlight in the dark, others like I was taking a chainsaw to anything in my path. Only in the last couple of hours were things starting to come together.

  And now this.

  A visit from Jones and Smith, and a trace on Ruiz’s phone that put him standing in a damn vineyard. In the desert.

  “Has to be a front, right?” I said. “I mean-“

  “What are the odds somebody would go to the time and expense of putting something like that in the damn desert?” Diggs said without glancing over.

  “It’s also legit, though,” Diaz said. Raising a couple of sheets of paper in her lap, she kept her gaze aimed down, scanning over what Pally had sent. “They are fully incorporated in California. Pay their state and federal taxes on time.”

  All of this we had already been over twice before. Just as we had ascertained that the listed CEO of the organization was a man named Ramon Reyes,
a moniker just generic enough in this part of the country to be legit or completely fraudulent.

  No way of knowing either way, Pally digging away on it but thus far unable to find much of use.

  The instant we had first gotten a location on both Ruiz and the number programmed into Salinas’s cellphone, Diggs and my initial reaction had been to load up. To jump directly into whatever vehicle had brought Diggs to the headquarters and head out.

  Take any firepower we could get our hands on and go pay the man a visit. Give him our answer to the unspoken challenge left on Martin’s mantle. Show him what happened when he dared come after our team, eight years later or not.

  Both so charged on adrenaline and anger, we were each already teetering on the line as was, the sight of one another being the nudge we needed to go charging off into the desert.

  Fortunately for both of us, Diaz had been there to serve as a voice of reason.

  To her credit, not once did she try to tell us we were wrong. She never claimed we shouldn’t be upset about what had happened to Martin, shouldn’t be seeking active retribution on the man that had come after us and had the audacity to leave a calling card behind to mock us.

  What she had done was point out that in doing so, we would be going after a location we knew nothing about. Under the full light of day.

  Pissed or not, neither of us were stupid. We’d survived in the lives we had for a long time by always doing our diligence, being prepared for whatever we walked into.

  If this was going to go like all those previous missions, we had to approach it in the same way. We had to hang onto the angst and emotion of losing our friend, letting it simmer just beneath the surface without allowing it to become our primary fuel.

  “Okay, let’s come at this from a different angle,” I said.

  Unlacing my fingers before me, I extended a hand. Grabbing up the file on Ruiz again, I drew it over and flipped it open, snatching the photo and flinging it out in the center of the table.

  Starting in on the small stack of pages affixed to the opposite flap of the folder, I riffled down through them, finding what I was looking for.

  “Back when we were running surveillance on Ruiz, the power structure was set up with him obviously at the top,” I said. “Beneath that, he split everything into two sides – shipping and production.”

  “Right,” Diaz said. “On the shipping side, his guy was Jorge Martinez. After Ruiz got pinched, Martinez tried to get on with a different cartel in the area. Got caught in the crossfire.”

  Twisting his seat to get a better look at her, Diggs asked, “Literally, or figuratively?”

  “Literally,” Diaz replied. “Less than six months after Ruiz went away, he ended up in a ditch along the side of the road somewhere.”

  How she knew this, neither one of us bothered pressing. Unable to find the requisite empathy for such a disclosure, we moved on, my attention immediately going back to the pages before me.

  “The other one, the one covering production, was Martine Valdez. Anything there?”

  “Prison,” Diaz replied. Clearly having had the same thought as me already, she consulted a printout on the table beside her, scanning it almost to the bottom before adding, “Pinched year before last.”

  “North or south of the line?” Diggs asked.

  “South,” Diaz answered. “One of those places where sentencing is just sort of left open-ended, because they don’t really expect most people to make it out alive.”

  Over the years, Diggs and I both had seen exactly what she meant. While her assessment might have seemed harsh, it was in no way wrong.

  Nor was the underlying assumption that whatever strings had been tugged to get Ruiz free would be extremely ineffective trying the same thing down there. Valdez was as good as done.

  “Great,” Diggs said. Rolling his focus over my way, the overhead lights glinted off his shaved head. “We still have no idea who Ramon Reyes is or why he was the first person Ruiz went to see when he got out.”

  With every word, I could sense what Diggs was getting at. Trying to decipher everything at play here was pointless. We weren’t still with the DEA, weren’t trying to build a case.

  We knew where Junior Ruiz was. We knew he was responsible for killing Martin and for trying to kill me.

  That was enough.

  Or, at least it would be if we weren’t currently sitting in a DEA facility, its acting director right beside us.

  Shifting my focus back to the file, I pressed the middle and index fingers on my right hand together. Using them as a scanner, I made my way down the page before me. Not seeing what I was after, I moved to the next in order, finding it equally void of what I needed.

  Same for the one after that.

  “What are you looking for?” Diaz asked, her voice barely penetrating as I kept my focus downward.

  Opting not to respond just yet, I made my way through the last pages in order. Seeing nothing, I flipped the stack back over to the beginning, lifting my face to see Diaz and Diggs both staring intently my way.

  “There’s a name we’re missing in here.”

  “And you think they might be Reyes?” Diggs asked.

  “No,” I replied, “but I think they might be able to tell us who he is.”

  Chapter Seventy-One

  The desk that Ramon Reyes had had specially manufactured was ridiculous. Not only was it a monument to opulence and excess, an infatuation with everything that didn’t matter, it failed to perform the task for which it was designed.

  Conducting business.

  Long ago, Junior Ruiz had learned that in an industry such as theirs, the way a man presented himself was of paramount import. Not the way he dressed or the size of his home or the way he drank his damn coffee. Those were all the sorts of things someone as out of touch as Reyes would seize on.

  What really mattered was the way he interacted with others. Not how they saw him, but how they perceived him to see them.

  Only when someone felt they were being treated as an equal would they perform their best. Would they offer their loyalty.

  It was how he had first gotten Burris to begin doing his bidding in Lompoc. The way he had managed to rise above the fray of the infighting in Baja, putting the drug wars on hold, getting all of the local heavyweights to back him as the one true El Jefe.

  How he had managed to secure someone like Arlin Mejia to serve as his mole, secretly keeping an eye on things, keeping morale up among his loyalists while he was away.

  And the reason he was currently seated on one of the sofas in the center of office. Eschewing the ridiculous desk nearby and the disparate heights of the chairs, he stared straight across, looking Mejia square.

  In his hand was the remainder of the cigar he had started earlier, smoke curling up from the tip of it, a thin haze floating across the afternoon rays of sunshine angled in through the open windows nearby.

  “So these men,” Mejia said, “Jones and Smith-“

  “Or so they said,” Ruiz replied. Using the hand still gripping the cigar, he waved it in front of him, an unspoken signal that he knew the names were bunk.

  The sort of thing everybody tended to revert to when they were trying to circumvent the truth, but names nobody actually used anymore.

  “Right,” Mejia agreed, “they were the ones that orchestrated your release.”

  “Yes,” Ruiz replied. “Which is why when Esmera called, that’s who I figured she meant.”

  Accepting the information, Mejia nodded once. “Any idea why?”

  Again, Ruiz waved the cigar. He was fully aware of the reasoning behind springing him, though for the time being it would have to wait.

  They had more pressing matters to discuss at the moment.

  “We’ll get to that later,” he said.

  “Okay,” Mejia said, not offering the slightest pushback. Seated with one leg crossed over the other, his forearm extended atop the arm of the couch, his body was completely rigid. “But they weren’t the o
nes that came to your sister’s door?”

  “No,” Ruiz said. “A man and a woman. Badges, but no uniforms. She said they gave their names and organization, but she was shitting bullets, didn’t catch them.”

  Grunting softly, the same click that Mejia always made when responding to something, he nodded once more. “DEA?”

  “Almost definitely,” Ruiz replied. “Description of the woman she gave me matches up with the agent in charge of the local headquarters.

  “The man, well...”

  Raising the cigar to his mouth, Ruiz closed his lips around it, drawing in a long pull. Letting it fill his cheeks, he allowed the flavor to roll across his tongue before slowly pushing it out.

  As he did so, he shifted his gaze toward the windows, the late afternoon sun coming in at an angle. Painting everything in a straw-colored hue, it promised that the sun’s descent wasn’t far off, just a couple of hours before dusk would be upon them.

  “Tate,” Mejia said.

  Without the slightest bit of inflection on the end, there wasn’t a hint of uncertainty. A statement rather than a question.

  Picking up on the delivery, Ruiz flicked his gaze back to Mejia. Saying nothing, he sat and waited, knowing there was more forthcoming.

  Perched in the same pose, a single muscle twitched in Mejia’s cheek. His nostrils flared slightly as he pulled in air, his bony shoulders rising a fraction of an inch before slowly releasing.

  “I got a call earlier this afternoon as well. A message from Tres.”

  The last Ruiz had heard, Tres was en route to clean up the other man that had been sent north and failed. Having checked in to report that it had been finished, he was said to be going silent until his return.

  Throughout the events of the last twenty-four hours, Ruiz had forgotten all about the man, assuming he was still making his way south, per the reported plan.

  A plan that had obviously been cut short somewhere along the way.

  “A message?” Ruiz asked.

  “Yes,” Mejia replied. “Via a lawyer, some public defender out of Montana.”