by Peter Nealen
Hancock’s face didn’t even flicker. Acosta frowned, his mouth tightening under his mustache, as he gripped Gomez’ shoulder with a heavy hand. “Me too, mijo, me too,” he said. “Do you have a place to stay?”
“That’s why I came to get him,” Hancock said. “We work together.”
Acosta nodded, and handed Gomez a card. It was a simple, white business card with Acosta’s name and contact info atop a raised New Mexico sun. “If there’s anything I can do to help, don’t hesitate to call me,” he said. He gave Gomez’ shoulder another squeeze, and then headed back toward his own car. It was a silver G-wagon; Acosta wasn’t one of those low-profile millionaires.
“Come on,” Hancock said, starting toward the F-150 he’d parked in front of the county jail, pulling his keys out of his pocket. “There’s ammo in the truck.”
Neither man said anything as they got in. Hancock started the truck and pulled away, heading for the Comfort Inn at the edge of town, while Gomez pulled the box of 9mm out of the center console and started re-jamming his magazines.
They drove right past the hotel, heading into the desert. “All right,” Hancock said, glancing in the mirror. “Tell me what happened. Every detail.”
“I don’t have a lot of details yet,” Gomez said. “But my mom and dad were murdered, along with my kid brother. My sister’s missing.”
“You have a theory.” It wasn’t a question.
Gomez stared out the window at the desert for a moment. “Just before the Transnistria job, there were some gangsters following my sister around,” he said. “My brother tried to warn them off, but they beat him up. Or they started to. I was close enough to intervene. I didn’t wade in; I drew down, and they backed off, but they told us that we’d crossed the wrong people, and we’d pay.
“We were followed back to the ranch. They broke off before I could take a shot at them, but they were always there after that. There was a lot more traffic around the place than usual, and a lot of young Mexicans ‘getting lost’ and leering at my sister when they could see her.”
“Any idea who they are?” Hancock asked.
“One of the ringleaders I know is related to a family down south, in Chihuahua,” Gomez said. “The Espino-Gallo family.”
“You know anything about them?”
“Not a lot,” he replied. “There are rumors that they were involved with the Juarez Cartel, but nothing beyond that. They’re rich, though, and they seem to come and go across the border without much worry about the Border Patrol.”
“Well, Wade headed down to your place as soon as he got here,” Hancock said. “We figured that it would be worthwhile to check it out and see what’s going on. The rest who could break away are gathering at the hotel as we speak, except for Carlo, who’s up in Silver City scoping out logistics in case we’ve got to go hot.” He glanced at Gomez for the first time since getting in the truck. “Is this going to go hot?”
Gomez didn’t reply at first. He just stared at the desert, his eyes flicking every few seconds to the rear-view mirror, looking for a tail that, so far, wasn’t there. “I think so,” he said. “I don’t know why, but Thomas is more worried about me getting violent than about finding my sister and the animals who killed my family.”
“That’s another factor we’ve got to take into consideration,” Hancock said. “Has he got a rep for corruption? Or is he one of the ‘just keep the trouble somewhere else’ types? Is he more worried about his apple cart getting upset than he is about justice?”
“I don’t know,” Gomez admitted. “I don’t know him well. I only had a couple of brushes with him, before now.” His expression didn’t change as he added, “They weren’t pleasant, granted. He doesn’t like me.”
Hancock just nodded. It wasn’t like the Blackhearts had often had a lot of information to work with on their jobs overseas.
“We’ve got some serious recon to do, then,” he said, “before we make any decisions on courses of action.” He was watching the road and the rear-view mirror. Hancock was clearly as concerned about being followed as Gomez. “We’ve got to step carefully; this is the US. Little bit different ROE than we’ve gotten used to.”
Gomez just nodded, then changed the subject. “How’s Sam?”
Hancock’s expression tightened, just a bit. “He should be waking up soon.”
***
Don Hart remembered the day he’d lost his leg with an immediacy and vividness that he was afraid was never going to go away. Even though he’d suffered a severe concussion from the blast that had blown his leg into tattered bits of meat and shattered bone, he could still remember the ugly black billow of smoke, dust, and frag, just before everything had gone dark. He could remember waking up a few moments later, being dragged through the dust, the first warning pangs of the pain that would become almost intolerable starting to lance through what was left of his smashed limb.
He remembered the feeling of helplessness as his brother Marines had worked on him, cinching the tourniquet around his ragged stump and trying desperately to keep him awake even as shock threatened to shut his body down. He could never quite remember if there had been a firefight going on at the time or not; as hard as he wracked his brain, he couldn’t recall anything beyond his little bubble of pain and concerned men passing in and out of his line of sight, the heat and the dust making things that much worse.
Those parts he could remember, he remembered with perfect recall, every time he shut his eyes. The days, weeks, and months to come were a bit hazier, but the pain, the weakness, the helplessness and feeling of being nothing but a burden, a man who was no longer entirely a man…those were still plenty strong. The devil in his mind made sure of that.
That was why he’d started drinking. He hadn’t been able to when he’d still been in the hospital, undergoing surgeries not only for his leg, but for the internal injuries that had also been inflicted by the blast. He’d been warned about self-medicating with alcohol, but he’d ignored it, finding that if he got drunk enough, he could fall asleep without reliving that awful day. Then, if he stayed drunk enough, he could kind of tune the memories out.
He knew he was an alcoholic. But it was how he had coped for so long that even after he’d joined the Blackhearts, he didn’t know what else to do.
Until Sam got hit.
Seeing Sam Childress, the good-old-boy backwoodsman with a big mouth, suddenly struck down, alive but unable to walk from a bullet to the spine, had been like something of a dash of cold water to the face for Don. He’d had a rough go of it, but he could walk, if stiffly at times. Sam would never walk again, unless they could get him one of those exoskeletons that they were working on for paraplegics. And even then, it wasn’t going to be the same.
More importantly, Don had been there. He knew exactly what it was going to be like for Sam to wake up and find that he couldn’t use his legs anymore. And as much as he really, really, desperately didn’t want to relive all of that, he knew that there was no other Blackheart in a position to help Sam through what was to come.
The sound from the bed was a cross between a groan and a croak. Don was getting pretty good at getting up from a chair quickly, even with his prosthetic leg, and he was at Sam’s bedside in a moment. Childress’ eyes were open beneath his shock of black hair, though they still weren’t very focused. He was still in a hospital gown under the covers, and though he didn’t have an oxygen tube in his nose, he had several IV tubes and various diagnostic wires running from underneath the gown.
“Sam?” Don said quietly. He was proud of how firm his voice was; it had been days since he’d had a drink, and the withdrawal symptoms were evening out. It meant more nightmares, but the need to be there for his friend was helping with that, too. “How you doing?”
It took Childress a minute to even work up the spit to reply. He was still drugged to the gills; they’d had to do some serious work, trying to repair the damage done by one of the other bullets, one of the ones that hadn’t hit his spine. He’d b
een on death’s door when they’d gotten him Stateside.
“I still can’t feel my legs,” he said slowly. It seemed to take a long time to get it out. He couldn’t really say much more than that, but there was a whole lot of pain, horror, and despair in those words.
Don found his hand and gripped it, as tears started to form in the corners of Childress’ eyes. Sam wasn’t an emotional kind of guy, but suddenly losing something of yourself would overwhelm even the toughest, and he wasn’t exactly at his best, not with the painkillers and leftover anesthesia still running through his veins. “I know, buddy,” he said. “I know.”
For a while, that was all he could do. Just stand there and hold his friend’s hand. But it was something.
He wondered what the rest were doing, down in New Mexico. He felt vaguely guilty for not going, but at the same time, he knew that his place was here. Somebody had to look after Sam, not only to make sure none of their mysterious rivals took a crack at him, but also to help him through this. If he’d been left to just the doctors and therapists, he might not make it.
Good luck, guys. I’ve got to stay. Gomez is our brother, but so is Sam.
Chapter 6
John Wade had been a Ranger most of his career in the Army. Most of that time, when he hadn’t been an instructor, or running new arrivals to Ranger Battalion through RASP, the Ranger Assessment and Selection Program, he’d been doing Ranger things, which were mostly focused on long-range assaults, airfield seizures, and door-kicking. He’d never been in RRD, the Ranger Recon Detachment.
That didn’t mean he didn’t know how to run recon, however.
He’d parked a few miles away from the Lazy GR, the Gomez ranch. Pulling a set of ATACS desert cammies out of his duffel, along with the MP5 that he’d paid the price of a car for, he’d quickly changed, thrown a light patrol pack on his back and a boonie hat on his head, and headed into the sagebrush.
That had been just about at sundown. Now he was on the ranch itself, lying prone among the sagebrush and cactus, watching the ranch house.
He was a lot closer than he would have liked, but the terrain had necessitated it. There wasn’t much high ground around the house or the corrals on the side he’d approached, so to get a good view he’d had to close to within a hundred yards of the place.
After the deaths of the Gomez family, the ranch should have been deserted, or at best occupied by a few illegals squatting on their way north. It wasn’t abandoned, but this bunch definitely wasn’t just a bunch of illegals using it as a hideout, either.
There were four vehicles parked outside the house, all expensive 4x4s. Even the Jeep Wrangler had been extensively customized. These weren’t coyote vehicles. Wade didn’t consider himself an expert on much of anything except combat, but he was sure enough of that.
The lights in the house were all on, and what sounded like loud mariachi music was echoing out into the desert. A couple of young men, dressed in jeans, t-shirts, and black vaquero jackets, were leaning against the tailgate of the Ford Raptor, drinking beer. Another came out, a dark collared shirt only buttoned at the collar, and pissed off the porch. Loud shouting in Spanish and what sounded like a woman shrieking followed him out through the door.
Moving slowly, he drew out the camera that he’d brought along in his pack. It wasn’t a phone, but an actual HD camera, with the flash disabled. In moments, he had detailed shots of the men outside, the vehicles, and their dispositions around the house.
He waited in place for a couple more hours. Even Wade, as notoriously intense as he was, could be patient when the situation called for it. He wanted to see if anything else developed. But the party just went on, finally dying down around three in the morning.
Satisfied that he’d gotten what information he was going to get for the moment, Wade started inching backward through the brush, until he got to a low depression in the ground where he could get his feet under him. Still staying low and moving carefully, he headed back to the truck. Brannigan was going to want to see those photos.
***
“Just offhand, that doesn’t look like friends and family gathering in the wake of a family tragedy,” Brannigan said grimly.
He was leaning over a laptop with Gomez, Hancock, and Wade, in Wade’s room in the Comfort Inn. Gomez was flipping through the photos Wade had taken; they weren’t the best quality, given the light and the lack of a flash or night vision, but they were clear enough to tell what was going on.
“No police tape, no signs that it was ever a crime scene,” Hancock mused, rubbing his chin. “Hell, there’s no sign that the sheriff has been anywhere near the place.”
“They sure have that ‘narco’ look, though, don’t they?” Wade commented. “You know any of ‘em, Gomez?”
“No.” The younger man’s voice was flat, dead. He was staring unblinkingly at the photos.
Brannigan studied him for a moment. The deaths and his subsequent arrest hadn’t seemed to draw Gomez out of his shell much. It was making him wonder a little. “What about the vehicles?” he asked. Do you recognize any of them? Anything that might help?”
Gomez just shook his head silently as he tabbed through the photos.
Hancock straightened. “Well, this is damned peculiar,” he said. “We’ve got at least a triple homicide and what looks like a kidnapping. The sheriff doesn’t seem to be in any hurry. Instead of being sealed off as a possible crime scene, the victims’ house is the scene of a party being thrown by people the sole survivor doesn’t know. And furthermore, if not for the fact that the supermarket’s security cameras were digital, and backed up to a third-party cloud server, the recording that showed that Gomez had defended himself would have been buried in the sheriff’s evidence locker—if not destroyed—before Mr. Herrera could even get here.”
Brannigan didn’t look at him, but kept watching Gomez. “I smell a rat, all right,” he said. “The question is, exactly what’s going on? We can’t just move on a county sheriff without evidence, and even if we had evidence, just how much do any of us want to talk to the Feds? I’m sure that Van Zandt can give us some top cover, but this is shaping up to be a hairy situation even without the security wrinkle.”
Gomez looked at him then, and his eyes were as dead as his voice. “Are we just going to give up, then, Colonel?” he asked.
“Hell no, we’re not, son,” Brannigan replied. “We’ve just got to step carefully. We need more information.” He laid a hand on Gomez’ shoulder, unknowingly mimicking Acosta’s gesture. “We’ll make sure that these people pay, and we’ll get your sister back. We just need to know where to point the guns when the time comes.”
“George, Joe, and Kevin are out in town, seeing what they can pick up,” Hancock said. Wade snorted.
“The odds of hearing much in a small town like this?” he said. “Even if Kev wasn’t black, locals in a town this size aren’t likely to open up to outsiders.”
“Gomez is the only local we’ve got, and he’s known,” Brannigan pointed out. “Even if people were going to open up to him, he’s already in the middle of it. They might keep their mouths shut just to try to avoid trouble.” He gusted a sigh. “We’re going to have to see what crops up; in the meantime, once Santelli gets back down here, we need to set up surveillance on the sheriff and the house. I want to know what’s going on, if only to call in the Feds later.”
He looked around the room. “In the meantime, I don’t like sitting here in the middle of town. Gomez, do you know of a better place to set up our base of operations? Somewhere out of sight?”
Gomez nodded. “I know just the place,” he said. “I’ll send the others the location, then we can get out of here.”
***
George Jenkins wasn’t happy. It wasn’t just that he was stuck cruising around a tiny Podunk town in the desert, though that was definitely a factor in his irritation. Jenkins didn’t like small towns. Or the desert.
If asked, that was the whole reason he’d give. And ordinarily, he’d leav
e it at that and not even think any further about why he was pissed, driving around a speck of a town in a county that didn’t even have five thousand people in it, in the middle of the New Mexico desert. He would rather be in a big city, on or near the beach, with lots of women who appreciated the fact that he’d been a SEAL.
In the same breath, he would have insisted that part of being a SEAL meant having his brothers’ backs, any time, anywhere. And that was what was really bothering him. He knew that he’d talked a big game about it in the past, even going so far as to say things like, “Brothers will help you hide the bodies,” or, “Better tried by twelve than carried by six.”
But this was giving him the jitters. This wasn’t like dodging Kokang Communists and trying not to get stopped and questioned by the Chinese, or working side-by-side with Mexican Marines in one of the shadiest alliances he’d ever seen, or even dodging Transnistrian militia and Russian Spetsnaz. This was potentially facing real trouble on American soil, and it was making him think that there had to be another way. They were overreacting. Maybe Gomez really had just flown off the handle. Law enforcement would handle it. He was fine with being there for Gomez for the funeral, but Brannigan seemed to be thinking that they were going to be in for a fight.
The potential consequences were weighing on his mind. Sure, if some people found out about his merc business, he could be in some trouble. But the Blackhearts had operated far from the usual places, and the odds of a Raven 23 situation, where they were identified and charged with murder, were pretty long. But this was tempting fate, and he suddenly wasn’t sure he wanted to play anymore. Federal prison felt a lot closer, playing surveillance games inside the US. And that would definitely put a crimp in his lifestyle.
That conflict was going back and forth in his brain while he sat in his rental Xterra across from the sheriff’s office. It had been easy to talk big, to put brotherhood above anything else, when he wasn’t about to risk everything. And for what? Sure, Gomez was a brother, but it wasn’t his family. He wasn’t sure that the close-mouthed former Marine was worth risking prison for.