by Scott Bell
“Where are you?”
“Get stopped and ready for takeoff. We’ll come to you. Over.”
“Roger that. I’m ready now.”
Yeager watched as the Cessna completed a turn at the end of the runway. That would be a long run for two sore and aching Marines, but it beat waiting for a bullet. “You up for this, Por Que?”
“Oh, hell yes.”
Yeager snapped out the pins of his last two grenades and chucked both of them in the general direction of the oncoming security detail. Victor did the same with all four of his. Six loud cracks fired off in rapid succession, but neither looked back to gauge the effectiveness of the grenade barrage.
They pelted down the runway, legs and arms pumping at full speed. But they still ran about as fast as a kiddie car.
Victor clapped his hand to the back of his right leg and went down. Yeager leaned down, grabbed his stocky friend around the torso, and heaved him over his shoulder with a grunt. He kept running.
Ducking under the wing of the plane, Yeager found the door already open. He dumped Victor into the right front seat then clambered over him to get in the back.
Before Yeager’s butt met the seat, the plane shuddered into motion. The single-engine Cessna growled as Cujo applied maximum throttle and then some. A hole starred the window next to Yeager’s head, the bullet passing somewhere in front of him.
“We’re taking fire!” the pilot yelled.
“Well, no shit, Cujo,” Yeager said.
Yeager shoved the window and forced it to slide open a few inches. Sticking the nose of his Wilson .45 outside, he fired at the muzzle flashes, emptying the pistol in seconds. The volume of incoming fire tripled. “Take off!”
“Working on it!” Cujo shouted.
The engine shrieked, taxed to its upper limit, as the shaggy-haired pilot worked the controls. Another bullet hit the window, and shards of glass flew and cut Cujo’s neck.
“Goddammit!”
Hail-like thumps hit the Cessna at increasingly short intervals. Another bullet came through the fuselage and hit Yeager in the chest. Its force spent, the round delivered a small punch and bounced off his vest.
“I’ve been shot again!” Yeager said.
“You win, dude.” Victor worked on trying to get a bandage around his leg.
Yeager clenched his hands on the seat in front of him and willed the plane off the ground. After another thump, something popped! in the aircraft’s body.
“Shit!” Cujo yelled. “My rudder control’s gone to shit. Hold on!” Before the last word was out of his mouth, he eased back on the stick, and the Cessna nosed up and into the air.
“Wooo hooo!” Victor yelled and clapped a bloody hand on Cujo’s shoulder. “You did it, man!”
Cujo grinned like a kid at Christmas. “You want to go back and strafe ’em again?”
“Oh, hell no.”
Yeager let his body be pushed back into his seat by gravity as the plane climbed higher. “Do me a favor,” he said.
Cujo nodded. “Sure, dude. Anything.”
“When you get up to about a thousand feet or so, circle back over the ranch.”
“Okay.” Cujo glanced back at Yeager, his eyebrows coming together in a frown. “Why?”
“Something I gotta do.”
The Cessna climbed higher, and Yeager’s body let him know how it felt about the night’s work. There didn’t seem to be a square inch that didn’t ache, from his toes to his hair.
Charlie. He smiled. She was worth every bit of it.
His thoughts drifted, and he jerked when Cujo shouted, “We’re here!”
“Bank it in a spiral to the right, directly over the barn. Por Que’s gonna want to see this.”
“See what?” Victor asked.
Below, someone had turned about half the lights back on. A couple of tiny figures milled around the back of his truck, looking in the open door of the trailer. He didn’t see anybody else in the vicinity; not that it would have mattered if he had.
Taking out a small device similar in size and function to a garage door opener, Yeager flipped up the safety cover and pressed the white button in the middle of the little black box. A half second later, the fourteen kilos of C4 that he had planted under the diesel tanks of his Peterbilt cooked off.
An enormous fireball mushroomed through the roof of the barn and billowed out of the doors. The two cartel people by the truck were first knocked down then turned into human candles. Chunks of metal roofing spiraled into the sky and fell back to earth a long way from where they’d started.
“Holy Mother of God,” Victor breathed.
Yeager chuckled. “Looks like I’m out of the trucking business, huh?”
“No shit, man.”
The flames soon engulfed the length of the truck trailer and spread to the surrounding warehouse. Within minutes, the entire building was belching fire and smoke.
“Damn, man,” Victor said with awe. “Do you know how much money and dope you just destroyed?”
“No. And I don’t give a rat’s ass.” Yeager leaned back and closed his eyes. “Take us home, Cujo.”
CHAPTER 37
Austin, Texas
Nita had wanted to be naked when she bashed in John Stone’s head because washing blood off skin was easier than getting it out of her clothes. Earlier, with Steven, she’d ruined a perfectly good pillow by firing a .380 bullet through it.
She washed her hands in the kitchen sink and cleaned the crystal decanter she’d used as a mace, removing her fingerprints. She found a spot of blood on one breast and another on her abs, both of which she wiped off with a dish towel.
Using the towel, she opened cupboards until she found a plastic tub of disinfectant cleaning wipes. She opened the lid and pulled out several sheets of moist towelettes. Her reflection in the window over the kitchen sink caught her attention, and she gave herself a quick, wicked little grin like a girl who’d made off with the whole cookie jar, her parents none the wiser.
Slipping back into the living room on bare feet, she used the cleaning wipes on Stone’s flaccid penis, removing all traces of her saliva. She inspected his body and the area surrounding it. Finding two of her long black hairs nestled in his curly pubic hair, she plucked them out and tucked them into her purse. If there were more lying around, she couldn’t find them. What she needed was a good vacuum cleaner, but she’d have to risk it.
Besides, she planned to be long gone before anyone came looking.
With the dishtowel, Nita wiped over everything she could think of having touched then trotted back to the kitchen. She pulled a black trash bag from the same cabinet where she’d found the wipes and threw the dishtowel inside it.
Back in the living room, she added the plastic ties they’d used on her wrists to the bag then took a quick look around for anything else that needed to go. All she wanted to do was obscure the trail as much as possible and make it a tad bit harder for the cops to put her at the scene of the crime.
She could reasonably argue self-defense, given the kidnapping. But explaining Steven’s dead body in her apartment would be harder. Oh, well.
So many things to do, so little time. She had to rent a U-Haul and swing by the bookstore. In the warehouse waited twenty-nine cardboard boxes full of cash. Getting the money separated from the books and packed away in the shelves with the store receipts had taken three hours on Saturday night. It would only take thirty minutes, tops, to load them in the U-Haul and zip out of there.
When Steven had told her to leave the money and that they’d go back later and get it, she saw the road ahead as if revealed by the hand of God. Why share when she didn’t have to? So she’d unloaded the cash but left the skids of books on the truck for Charlie. Her redheaded friend would offload the pallets and never know the real treasure had been inside them.
After that, all Nita had to do was get rid of Steven, which had made her horny as hell for some reason, then load up the money. Unfortunately, she’d stopped by the store to measure what size
truck she needed before heading to the U-Haul place, and the morons had shown up.
Satisfied with her preparations, Nita dressed quickly. She sat on the hearth to pull on her socks and shoes. Stone’s glassy eyes appeared to be staring right at her, one slightly askew from the dent in the side of his head.
Standing, she removed Steven’s flash drive from her pocket and cupped it in her palm. His twelve million on top of the cash in the boxes would take her a long way away from any potential prosecution. She would be deep into Mexico within twenty-four hours and in Argentina by the end of the week.
It was too bad about Charlie. No way the two numbskulls would let her live. Call the cops after I get across the border? Yeah. Maybe.
“You should have told me you had partners, Stevie.” Nita kicked Stone’s heavy coffee table and sent his bourbon glass tipping over the side to spill on the hardwood floor. “Oh well, live and learn.”
She tossed the thumb drive in the air, caught it, and slipped it back in her pocket. Time to get the hell out of here.
Stone’s pants lay in a tangled wad around his ankles. Nita dug in a pocket and found a ring of keys, one of which looked like it might match the Jag sitting in the front driveway.
“Thank you, Mr. Stone. This might be worth one blowjob.”
She skipped to the front door, trash bag in one hand, keys in the other. She wrapped the plastic bag around her hand and opened the door, stepped out, and pulled it closed behind her.
“Freeze! Police!”
A flashlight pinned her shadow to the door. Nita jumped and sucked in a quick breath. Two cops flanked her, guns drawn.
Baja Peninsula, Mexico
In a heavily guarded estate in Baja, Mexico, a man held his phone in one hand while the other hand fiddled with a letter opener on his desk, spinning it in circles. “Enrique…” His tone was like that of a parent disappointed with a child’s report card. “This is very distressing news. Everything is gone? The product and the facility?”
“Sí.”
“The truck?”
“Totally destroyed, Señor.”
“The money?”
“Missing. We don’t know where it is.”
“Do we know who has done this thing to us?”
“Not yet,” DaSilva said. “Oscar Cruz is being brought here now for questioning about the cash. But his people could not mount an attack of this scale. DEA? CIA maybe? It has to be agents of the United States, no? I will find out. Trust me.”
“I do trust you, Enrique. That is why you have the position of importance that you do. However, your performance in this matter has been… less than favorable.”
Silence on the other end of the line. The man spun the letter opener and let it build. After fifteen seconds passed, he said, “Find out who did this, Enrique. Make them suffer as they have made us suffer. Your position of trust with me depends upon it.”
The man from Baja ended the connection.
Luis Cordoña found himself face down on the asphalt of the courtyard with a splitting headache. He brought one shaking hand up to feel his forehead and nearly screamed with the pain. A jagged wound tracked up from above his left eye to his hairline. Blood and grit caked the wound, and it throbbed with a hammering thud with every heartbeat.
Struggling to a sitting position took almost everything he had, and trying not to puke took the rest. When his eyes focused, they nearly fell out of their sockets.
The courtyard had turned into Hell. Flames totally engulfed the barn and the trailer. The outbuildings were burning as well. Tendrils of fire shot into the air, launching sparks into the night sky.
Dead men lay everywhere. The empty rocket launcher had a dent from a bullet notched into one side. A ricochet must have come off the launcher and hit my head.
Motion to his right caught his eye, and he saw a vision. An angel in a white gown drifted toward him from the house. Then she came closer, and he realized it was Serena, wearing nothing but a sheet and looking stunned.
Luis found the courage and strength to get to his feet. “Here, Serena. Come here.”
She walked over to him, almond eyes wide, mouth open in wonder. “What happened?”
“We were attacked.”
“I want to go home.” The girl shivered, and her teeth started chattering.
Luis gathered her in his arms and held her close. “We will go. I will take care of you. Do not worry, little one.”
“You there!” The silver-haired big shot looked a little chewed up. He was much less intimidating with his clothes blackened and dirty and his hair blown in every direction.
Serena stiffened in his arms. “That man,” she whispered, “h-he hurt m-me.”
“You there,” the big shot repeated, demanding and arrogant. “Let go of the puta and come help. We must find out who did this.”
“Sí, Señor,” Luis said and let go of the trembling Serena. “Wait here a moment, my sweet,” he whispered to her.
“Come on,” the big shot snapped. “We have a lot to do. First we must—”
Luis pulled his old Army .45 from its holster and shot the silver-haired man until the magazine ran dry and the slide locked back.
Serena fell back into his arms, and Luis waited until her shivering stopped. He took her to one of the hacienda’s many cars. He drove away, turning east toward the orange thread of sunrise painting the horizon, planning to never look back.
Yeager plugged a finger in one ear and pressed the phone hard against the other one. “Hey.”
The plane rocked and bounced with turbulence, the flight characteristics skewed by the big .50-cal mounted on the wing and a number of whistling holes in the fuselage.
“Hey, yourself.” Charlie’s voice was distant, crackling and broken.
“I thought I’d failed, and you’d—I thought I’d lost you. How’d you get away? Did they hurt you?”
The pause lasted too long.
“Charlie, what happened? Are you okay?” he asked.
The plane rattled and bumped. Victor cursed.
Yeager shot him a hard look and whispered, “Be quiet.”
Victor slanted a pained look, but said nothing.
The phone whined and popped with static. “Talk to me, Charlie. Are you okay?”
“Yeah. Yeah. I’m okay.”
Even with the background noise, Yeager could hear an undercurrent in her voice that was anything but okay. Shouting into a phone wouldn’t help. A solid chunk of ice settled in his belly. “All right. But if they hurt you…”
“I can’t… I can’t talk about it right now.”
“Okay. All right. How’s David?”
“Shook up, but he’s fine.”
Yeager waited. When Charlie didn’t continue, he said, “So I’ll see you soon?”
“Yeah. Let me… let me get myself together. Look, I have to go. The cops want to ask me some more questions.”
“I’ll call you when I land.”
“Okay. Yeah,” Charlie said. “Call me then.”
EPILOGUE
They left him there. That surprised him very much. Not as much as the devastation surrounding him, of course, but he was still shocked that they just left him.
The sun was an orange ball in the morning sky, and already the day was very hot. Oscar Cruz wandered into a downstairs bathroom of the Hacienda Del Norte and relieved himself. He used the marble washbasin to run water over his battered face, cooling the soreness. His captors had not been gentle when they pulled him from his bed. His ribs still ached from the beating they had delivered.
When they had arrived at the hacienda, they found nothing but the dead, including a silver-haired man Oscar assumed was the boss. His two captors had shouted at each other, paced around, and shouted some more. Their eyes bulged, and the fear-sweat drenched the pair of them. Eventually, they had just shoved him to the ground and left.
Very surprising.
Oscar was alone with the dead. He returned to the rear courtyard and examined the former boss—if
that was who he was. He found a wallet with a black Amex card, a huge wad of cash, and not much else. Very bizarre.
Looking up, Oscar froze, mouth open. The burnt-out hulk of a trailer protruded from the shell of a barn. Smoke spiraled up, and the reek of charred chemicals made his eyes water. The truck and barn were fused in a blackened mass. He could make out no words anywhere on the vehicle to say where it had come from or why it was stuck in the hacienda’s barn.
The only building left standing was the stables. Curious, Oscar went to see if there was anyone alive in there who could tell him what had happened.
Yeager pushed through the terminal exit doors at Austin’s Bergstrom Airport. He spotted Charlie, and an immense weight lifted from his chest. They hugged, and he clung to her slender body the way a drowning man clutches a life preserver. An island in the river of flowing passengers, Yeager held fast and let the darkness fade away.
“We missed the Pinewood Derby,” Charlie murmured into his chest. “I thought David would be upset, but he said, ‘Maybe Mr. Yeager could help me build a really fast car next year.’”
Yeager’s throat clenched, and no words formed in his head.
“What do you say, Mr. Yeager? Do you want to stick around and help us build a car?”
Yeager squeezed his eyes shut. “You have any bookstore jobs for an ex-trucker?”
Charlie leaned back so he could see her wicked smile. “I think we could find a position for you. What do you say, truck-drivin’ man? Want to go home and submit your application?”
“Yes,” he whispered. He cleared his throat and tried again, louder, with confidence. “Yes, Charlie, I do.”
“Okay then.” She took his hand and led him to the exit. “Let’s go home.”
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