by Jack Slater
“What is this place?” Trapp asked once they were seated once more.
Their host gestured at one of the younger men, one of the two who had stood behind him when they’d first arrived. He looked up somewhat uncertainly, then away when it was clear he wasn’t needed. “Lieutenant Ramirez over there. It’s his family’s farm. They’ve had it in their family for four generations.”
“Where are they?”
“Somewhere else.”
“That’s fair,” Trapp agreed as a new thought occurred to him. “What about your men – do they have families as well?”
Hector inclined his head sadly, the gravity of his shared predicament inked in his eyes. “Some. They will be coming here, where we can protect them.”
“Why not now?”
“Their houses: are they being watched?”
Trapp frowned. “I don’t know.”
“Nor do I.”
“I see.”
“Tell me, Jason, why are you here?” Hector asked after a short pause.
That, Trapp mused, was an exceedingly good question. He didn’t need to be here. His president had asked, of course, and that was as good a reason as any – as good as any he’d ever needed – but he’d served his time. Nash would have understood if he declined.
Was it an addiction to this life, he wondered? A fear of what came after?
His answer, when it came, was weak and transactional, and it was clear that Hector thought the same, even if he was too polite to say. “Because someone asked me to.”
“And that’s enough?”
“I’m here, aren’t I?” Trapp replied, a bit of bite in his voice now. “Why are you here? You could run. Maybe claim asylum up north. You’d get it.”
Maybe, he didn’t say.
Hector looked toward the closed door behind which his wife and daughter had disappeared. “Do you have any children, Jason?”
He was suddenly conscious of Ikeda’s presence by his side. “Never found the time. And my line of work’s a little dangerous for that kind of thing.”
“So is mine.”
Trapp unconsciously glanced around the dimly lit farmhouse, causing Hector to sigh gently.
“Yes, perhaps you’re right. And still, if I could go back and do it all again, I would still make the same decision. Can I make a suggestion, Jason?”
Trapp glanced at Ikeda, whose face was inscrutable. When he looked back, he realized that Hector had seen it. And the look of unspoken understanding passed over the young Mexican’s face. So he saw that too.
He gestured gruffly. “Go ahead.”
“Don’t close a door before you’ve truly tried opening it. You might like what lies on the other side.”
“I’ll take that under advisement,” Trapp replied shortly. “But what about this present mess? What are you doing to get yourself out of it?”
Hector stood and clapped him gently on the shoulder. “That is a question for tomorrow, perhaps. We’ll speak in the morning.”
36
Lieutenant Ramirez tossed him the keys underarm. Trapp snatched them nimbly from the air, determining their position more on instinct than eyesight, given the darkening gloom of night. They jangled as they disappeared into his callused palms.
Ikeda regarded him with a raised eyebrow. “Sure you don’t want me to come?”
“Need to clear my head, that’s all,” he replied. “I won’t be long.”
“Fine,” she sighed. “But damn if I wouldn’t kill for a swim right now.”
“What about the river?” Trapp asked, jerking his thumb in a direction that was vaguely over his shoulder, where the river Lerma flowed.
“That thing?” she said, wrinkling her nose. “No thank you. It’s more of a drainage ditch than a river, at least this time of year. And God only knows what’s in it. Fertilizer, human waste, take your pick.”
“And here I thought you were tough,” Trapp laughed.
“Get out of here before you find out,” she said, gritting her teeth with more irritation.
He did exactly that. The Jeep Cherokee was parked on the edge of the property and was unlocked when he reached it. He liked that – it said a lot about a place. It had once been a stone-baked red, though the chassis was so dented, scratched, and aged by the region’s relentless sunshine and the vicissitudes of farm life that the original paint job was barely visible. It had to be at least two decades old.
And that was before you saw the thick coat of dried mud and grit that painted most of the rear, including the windows.
Trapp climbed in, adjusted the rear mirror, and started the engine. Old as it was, it turned over without a hitch, and he was rewarded for his effort with a throaty rumble. It was a stick shift, which he preferred. Felt more like driving that way.
He fed the engine a little gas and selected first gear, creeping through the farmyard slowly to avoid accidentally murdering one of the many free-range chickens that treated the place as their own. It wasn’t so much that he minded snapping a chicken’s neck – he’d grown up in a place not too dissimilar from this – it was just that he preferred his chicken butterflied, not pancaked.
Second gear took him back to the main road, and he started driving nowhere in particular, following a sedan about thirty yards ahead, and in front of an SUV whose headlights looked about twenty behind. With the windows down to allow some of the night air to whistle through the car and some Mexican love ballad blaring on the radio, Trapp felt a tension he didn’t know he felt begin to subside.
It was always like this in the days and hours leading up to an operation, he knew. In the moment, when the bullets were flying and grenades began to fly and he didn’t have a choice if he wanted to live – then he felt no fear. But the waiting, damn he hated it. Knowing what was to come and knowing there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.
That’s why you had to savor moments like this. Moments where you could forget all of the hell out there in the real world and just remind yourself what you were doing this for in the first place.
He glanced into the rearview mirror as the SUV behind indicated right and executed a messy, slightly too fast turn onto a side road. This far out into the country, though they occasionally passed through sets of traffic lights, the route was not blessed with the glow of streetlights. He didn’t really mind. It was easier to lose himself this way.
“I wonder what you’re saying, buddy,” Trapp murmured as he listened to the radio, tapping against the steering wheel as the singer crooned his lyrics with impossible haste. Even if he could make it through the accent – which he suspected he could not – at this pace he could only make out one word in ten.
Still, it sounded good.
At a crossroad up ahead, he saw the traffic lights dance from green to amber to red and watched as the sedan stepped on the gas, even though it had no chance of making it in time.
“Asshole,” Trapp muttered, knowing that a decade before, as a younger, less world-weary man, he would probably have done the same.
And who are you kidding? He grinned to himself. At his age it’s all testosterone.
By contrast, he stepped on the brake and downshifted through the gears until the Cherokee was stopped at the red light. He briefly toyed with the idea of stepping on the gas on the other side and seeing how far this baby could go but discounted it. No sense getting himself hurt the day before an operation.
It happened more often than you might think. He shook his head. Testosterone.
Up ahead, the sedan’s taillights winked around the corner, and Trapp found himself entirely alone in the darkness, his own headlights lighting only a small pool of asphalt in front and nothing to the sides. There was no one behind him. Just him, the Jeep, and Casanova on the radio.
The red light didn’t linger long. He glanced up, saw it returning back to amber, and fed a little gas into the engine.
He only got a second’s warning. Just a flash in the rearview mirror and the rustle of movement closer than it had any right
to be.
How–?
It was instinct that fueled his reaction, pitiful as it was, rather than anything more studied. Trapp looked over his shoulder, the muscles on his forehead wrinkling his brow as he tried to work out what the hell was going on.
And then the rope looped around his throat, and whoever was in the back pulled tight, levering their weight against the back of the seat and yanking with all their might. The hard, man-made fibers dug into his skin with terrible force, the ligature forming deep, dark, bruised welts that began to bloom almost instantly.
Trapp understood his predicament in an instant. And just as quickly, the horrific reality dawned on him that if he did not do something fast, then the decision would be taken out of his hands. Whoever was attempting to kill him was good. That much was made perfectly clear by the fact that he hadn’t detected their presence this entire drive.
In the background, the singer crooned his lullaby, a discordant, almost satirical soundtrack to the life or death struggle taking place inside the Jeep’s cab. The engine – on the verge of stalling – started making its displeasure known.
What the fuck do I do?
Trapp knew that the only thing that had saved him so far was that last second turn of the head. It meant the rope was biting into the side of his neck rather than his windpipe. But it would only buy him a couple more seconds of inaction.
Trapp tried forcing his torso forward, stiffening his core and attempting to lever his way out of the problem. The motion caused him to step a little on the gas pedal, trickling a few droplets into the combustion chamber, where it ignited and jerked the Cherokee forward a few feet.
But that was all it got him.
Behind him, his unseen assailant applied even more pressure on the rope, enough that the nerve endings on Trapp’s neck were beginning to cry out in agony. His fingers scrabbled around the side of the seat, but to no avail. He couldn’t pry his way out of the problem. He couldn’t turn. He couldn’t push himself forward – there was nothing he could do.
Panic invaded his brainstem. Inside his chest, his heart worked overtime, sending adrenaline pumping through his system as a veil of darkness began falling over his eyes.
“Not today!” he choked – at least he meant to. Whether the words came out or not he didn’t know. But that wasn’t the point.
Trapp stepped on the gas, reaching blindly for the gear lever and somehow putting it into third rather than second. The engine squealed in protest, but there was enough gas flowing through the system for it not to matter. The engine of the Cherokee started picking up speed. It was impossible to say how fast, but probably not very.
Behind him, a man said something like, “Puta!”
Truthfully, that too was impossible to say. He could no longer even hear the soothing sounds of the man lost in the agony of love, or the description he couldn’t understand about a woman he’d never met.
The Cherokee kept picking up pace. Trapp forced it through fourth gear, then into fifth, and jammed the gas pedal down. How long had this been going on?
Ten seconds?
Twenty?
It felt like a lifetime. And it would be unless this worked.
Trapp forced his eyes open as the man behind him switched to desperation, yanking the rope left and right in his attempts to finally end his life, scoring his delicate skin ever deeper.
The mantra repeated over and over in his mind.
Not today.
With hundreds of yards of open road ahead of him as far as he could make out, Trapp gave the gas pedal a little extra attention, coaxing as much speed out of the Cherokee’s engine as it had to give.
At his side, his fingers searched for the seat lever. And a horrifying thought hit him.
Please, just don’t be electric.
It wasn’t. His fingers clutched around good, cold, old-fashioned steel. And at the precise moment that he found it, he stepped his entire weight onto the brake pedal, just as he yanked the seat lever back.
A lot of things happened all at once.
Instantly, the soothing tunes of the radio were wiped out by the scream of the Cherokee’s tires on the road, and a thousand old coins, discarded pens, pieces of rope, and old farm machinery suddenly started flying forward in the car, propelled by their own momentum.
And, of course, the person behind him wasn’t left out.
That was the bit that even Trapp’s oxygen-starved mind wasn’t looking forward to.
He took his foot off the brake just in time for the entire weight of what had to be an adult male – and a large one – to crash into the back of his seat, and without the resistance of the seat mechanism, which collapsed inward like the jaws of a pair of pliers, squashing him against the steering wheel.
The horn let out a long, mournful groan, a plaintive cry for help, and then burned out – leaving a ringing in Trapp’s ears.
Without anyone holding the wheel, any gas going into the engine, or pressure on the brake, the Cherokee began to wobble wildly on the road as it surged forward, out of control. But he didn’t have time to focus on that. His hands reversed their earlier motion and went for the rope, tugging it away from his neck with all his might.
Trapp met no resistance. His attacker was still too startled by the sudden change in his relation to gravity. He ducked out of the noose and instantly twisted in his seat, jamming his thigh against the steering wheel and smashing his entire weight into his seat back, forcing it into the other direction.
The man behind – it was a man – loosed a guttural grunt as the plastic collided with his face. His fingers were still wrapped uselessly around the two ends of rope, and it was only now that they gave way. Trapp didn’t wait for him to regain his senses. Regardless of the fate of the Cherokee, now quickly careering off the road, his only focus was on the guy behind.
It was difficult to fight inside the confines of the car, but he managed to get one good punch into the man’s temple, striking with vicious force for all that he could only draw his elbow back a few inches. His assailant’s skull rocked backward, cracking against the rear headrest with a thud that echoed even over the roar of the engine.
Trapp’s brain practically began to overheat with all the demands being made upon it. He shifted down a gear, dropping the speed to around forty miles an hour, and twisted the wheel right and left, making sharp turns in the center of the dark, empty road.
“How do you like that?” he yelled through gritted teeth as he clutched the wheel with one hand, peering back over his right shoulder only to see a dark-haired man lunging toward him once again.
“Crap,” Trapp muttered, stomping hard on the gas pedal and jerking the steering wheel violently to the right.
The combined effect on the motion of the Cherokee upset his joy rider’s balance, and though his outstretched fist still made contact with the side of Trapp’s head, it was only a glancing blow as the man was flung across the SUV’s rear seats, his shoulder colliding with the rear door.
Trapp spun the wheel to the left this time, sending the man in the other direction. With his free hand, he scrabbled for his seat’s lever. It was still unlatched, and the back of the seat had now fallen away from him. He was now only remaining upright by virtue of his grip on the steering wheel and an exertion of core strength that was beginning to test his aging frame.
He leaned sharply forward, using the still-attached seatbelt to pull the seat back with him, and clicked it back into place. The angle wasn’t ideal, but then, nothing about the situation was. He glanced up into the rearview mirror, hoping he had half a second while the man recovered.
But already, his unknown passenger was coming for him again, fist clenched, teeth bared in a vicious snarl as he launched himself over the center console.
Trapp howled something inchoate as he stomped on the brakes for a second time, now with all his might. The Cherokee’s tires screeched loudly – or perhaps it was the brakes themselves – and the Jeep skidded wildly across a section of road that was s
cattered with loose stones.
The wheels locked.
Time slowed.
Every fraction of a second felt a minute, every minute an hour.
The edge of the road was approaching fast, and while the vehicle wasn’t headed directly for it, it was only a matter of seconds away. Trapp knew that he had to take his foot off the brake, to somehow regain control of this skid, or they would both die.
Just a little longer…
His passenger’s frame soared, entirely airborne, through the space between the two front seats. At first, the man’s fist was outstretched, his expression almost feral, but that quickly changed. Perhaps it was just Trapp’s mind filling in the details as his body’s position shifted in midair from something that almost resembled a javelin to one that was entirely comic. Roadrunner flailing off the edge of a cliff.
And then the crown of his skull collided with the windshield with a sickening thud.
Trapp took his foot off the brake just in time.
37
Trapp cast one last glance into the Cherokee’s backseats as he spun the truck back into the farmyard, a trail of dust behind him in the rear lights and pebbles rattling against the chassis. His prisoner was still exactly where he was supposed to be – trussed with his own rope and Trapp’s belt.
He was also deeply unconscious, with a trail of blood flowing freely down the side of his face from a wound lost somewhere in the forest of his dark hair.
“Little help, guys?” Trapp murmured under his breath, hammering the horn in the center of the steering wheel and repeatedly flashing his headlights as he closed on the farmhouse.
Almost instantly, he saw three men emerge, all armed. He suspected that the shooter on the roof had had a bead on the vehicle ever since he got within range.
Good. After this, they would need to post double patrols. How this guy had gotten so close, Trapp couldn’t understand. And how he’d found the farmhouse in the first place was another question entirely.
