The Border Lords

by T. Jefferson Parker

  “What I don’t get,” said Hood, “is who tells these boys they can do this.”

  “Do what, Charlie.”

  “Kill people for money.”

  “The cartel recruiters tell them that.”

  “But what about the consequences?”

  “You’ve seen the consequences, man—a new truck for a bonus, and free prostitutes, like last week. Remember when Ray got that ten grand for a job well done?”

  “What I mean is, who tells them it’s okay?”

  “Who do they have to tell them different? Their parents either don’t care or don’t know what to do. These boys don’t go to school. Probably haven’t been inside a church their whole life. So who are they gonna listen to except each other, and the actors in the movies they watch, and the cartel dudes with all the cash?”

  Hood thought about that. “Still seems like something’s missing. Some kinda horse sense or something.”

  “You had advantages you didn’t know you had. I had them, too. Bakersfield is like Beverly Hills compared to these border towns.”

  Hood, a Bakersfield boy, nodded. Morris of the South Bronx sipped his coffee.

  By six thirty A.M. agents Janet Bly and Robert Velasquez had arrived. This was the transitional hour, when the graveyard watcher went off duty and the three-agent day team took over for another shift of interviewing firearms dealers, recruiting informants, shadowing suspected buyers and sellers, posing as straw men and illicit buyers, answering the phones and watching the young killers on live feed—all in a day’s work for Blowdown.

  “Well, look who’s up bright and early today,” said Bly. “Is that Angel with his carnitas?”

  Hood nodded, looking at Angel’s machine pistol again.

  “Sean call in?” asked Janet.

  Hood shook his head, saw the hardness in her face.

  “Then maybe he called Mars or Soriana.”

  “He’d call us first if he was in trouble,” said Hood, confident that his good friend Sean Ozburn would call Blowdown well before he’d call the ATF field station in San Diego. Ozburn was a soldier, loyal and focused.

  But six days and no calls. So the ghost of Jimmy Holdstock—retired now with long-term disability from injuries suffered in the line of duty; in his case, torture—hovered there in the war room once again.

  Then, as if that ghost had cast its long, dark shadow over the room, one of the monitors went white, then black, and the audio died.

  Hood’s attention had been drawn to it just a split second before it went blank.

  “The hell,” said Bly.

  “Don’t worry,” said Velasquez, their techie. “It’ll come back. I’m not sure what’s . . .”

  Thirty seconds later the other monitors suddenly all turned bright white, then black. And the audio feeds died with them.

  Blowdown was on its feet now. Velasquez looked down at the main control panel, head cocked. The others stared at the dead screens. They had lost camera transmissions before but never all of them at once.

  “This is what my son does when the satellite goes out during SpongeBob,” said Morris. “He just stares at the TV like he can make it come back on.”

  “It’ll come back,” said Velasquez.

  Hood dialed Buenavista police chief Gabe Reyes and asked for an unmarked unit to drive by the Agate Street safe house, and Reyes said the shift was changing right now but consider it done. Ten long minutes, thought Hood, ringing off.

  “Cops are changing shifts,” he said. “Ten minutes.”

  “We can’t lose all six feeds,” said Velasquez. “Even in a power outage, even if someone cuts the line. Those cameras have two hours of battery backup. You have to shut them down from here, or in the control panel on the side of the safe house. But I built that control panel, and I disguised it as a breaker box, and it’s got a lock, and the only people who have keys are us. So what the—”

  “I saw something on screen six,” said Hood. “Just before it went out.”

  “I was watching Angel make his breakfast,” said Bly.

  “I was seeing if Johnnie’s gravity hammer can kill brutes,” said Morris.

  “I saw something, too,” said Velasquez. “Then it was gone.”

  “The Den is only three miles away,” said Hood.

  “Wait,” said Bly, the senior agent.

  Velasquez pushed various control buttons but nothing happened. “It’s gotta be at our end. I’m going outside to check the cable.”

  “I’m with you,” said Hood.

  They emerged through the back door into the young light of morning, Hood first, his hand on the sidearm holstered on his hip. They walked quickly, looking up at the black coaxial cable fastened along the fascia board above the eaves. It entered the field station through a hole low on the eastern wall, and Hood could see the cable and the hole and the nest of gray steel wool crammed in to keep the rats and snakes out. Velasquez knelt down and tugged at the cable, then shrugged and stood.

  They checked the circuit breaker panel and the relay boxes and the splitters and the transformers for the coax and the telephone landlines, and all of these Velasquez said were fine.

  “The problem is at the Den,” he said. “Unless some fine citizen plowed a car through a phone company switch box between here and there.”

  “What did you see on monitor six?”

  “I don’t know, Charlie. It happened too fast.”

  “It’ll be on the tape.”

  “Monitor six is the side yard,” said Velasquez.

  “Where the control box is,” said Hood.

  They exchanged looks and went back inside.

  The screens were still dead. Hood could tell by the forced calm of her voice that Bly was talking to Soriana out in San Diego. Bly was impulsive and Soriana was deliberate, and this tried her patience sorely.

  She rang off and lowered her cell phone. “Soriana says give it five.”

  “I’d go right now,” said Hood.

  “I would, too,” said Bly. She was a stout woman whose sweet round face the years with ATF had started to harden. “He’s afraid the narcos will make us if we drive by looking like tourists. But we’ll give it five, all right? Because he’s the boss. Yes. Five seconds, that is. You guys ready?”

  Dyman Morris, once a point guard for NYU, made it to the door first, swinging an armored vest off the coatrack like a kid going out to play in the cold.

  A few minutes later Hood was guiding his Durango down Agate Street, looking at the little crowd of people standing outside the Den in the dawn’s early light.

  3

  The neighbors greeted them with tales of gunshots and screams and a guy smoking off in a black Range Rover, so the Blowdown team went in through the wide-open front door.

  Hood followed his autoloader into the kitchen where Angel lay nearly decapitated by a shotgun. The blasts had also torn the stove hood open and flung a storm of flesh and blood against the wall. The machine pistol was gone and the tortilla lay, shriveled, black and smoking, on the griddle.

  In the living room Ray and Johnnie had taken multiple rounds and they lay in ribbons on the floor. Johnnie had gotten his gun up, or at least a gun lay next to him. It was one of the silenced .32 machine pistols that no one at ATF had ever seen until late last year. The Halo game had gone into sleep mode, its Gregorian chant soundtrack swelling across the room.

  Hood and Morris moved through the house as a team. Hood had that nobody-alive-here feeling but his stomach and nerves were stretched tight. Like Anbar, door-to-door, he thought. Like a drug tunnel he’d once found himself trapped in by unhappy gunmen. They covered the empty house quickly, then backtracked to the living room where Hood shut off the video game and the chanting stopped.

  He peeked through the blinds and looked outside at Bly and Velasquez. The two agents were helping the Buenavista cops seal the scene against the public. The agents looked cooperative enough right now, but Hood knew that in just a few minutes they would seal the scene against the Buenavi
sta cops and bad feelings would arise. That’s how it went down when the feds were in town.

  Hood found another of the strange machine pistols in Ray’s bedroom. He stood in front of a bedroom window and let the strong morning sunlight illuminate the weapon. The stainless steel planes threw off the light like the facets of a gemstone. He unscrewed the noise suppressor and retracted the telescoping handles and set aside the curving fifty-round magazine. Now the gun looked very much like the ones that he had seen being packed for shipment at the Pace Arms factory in Costa Mesa. He read the engraving on the frame: LOVE 32. That was it. No serial numbers, no manufacturer grip marks, nothing else.

  “Who names a gun ‘Love 32’?” Hood asked.

  “Beats me, Charlie. But it’s a sweet carry. Easy to conceal and basic, like a Mac, but it’s got elegance. Reminds me of one of my kid’s Transformer toys.”

  “Angel’s was on the kitchen counter but it’s not there now.”

  “I’ll bet we can solve that one.”

  Blowdown had suspected for some time that the sicarios in the Den were using these silenced weapons on their jobs—several witnesses had reported that the guns were all but silent. Hood held the Love 32 in his hand and turned it once again into the morning light. This was what Ozburn had gone undercover for. Risked his life for. A gun. Hood shook his head.

  A moment later all four met in the side yard. The side-yard camera, hidden within a functioning motion-detector light, had been yanked from the wall and thrown to the ground. The wires dangled from the wall base. Velasquez swung open the door to the faux circuit breaker box. It was partially hidden by a riot of wisteria vine that had crept from its trellis to the eave of the house. The key was still in the control panel lid and Velasquez turned to his team with a woeful look.

  “It’s been disabled,” he said. “System off. By someone who had a key.”

  Within an hour Blowdown was sequestered with Soriana and Mars back in the Buenavista field office war room. Hood told the story while Velasquez compiled video recordings of the last minute for each of the six monitors.

  The videos from the first five cameras showed nothing unusual. But monitor six—trained along the side-yard wall of the Den—did register a quick disturbance.

  Hood’s heart hovered, then fell.

  “Oh, shit,” said Bly.

  “Freeze it,” said Mars. “I can’t make it out.”

  “No way I’m seeing this,” said Morris.

  Velasquez backed up the video and froze a frame midway through the brief movement: Sean Ozburn reaching up to camera six, a smile on his face, and his hand about to close over the lens.

  Hood watched in disbelief but his disbelief couldn’t change the truth.

  There was Ozburn: tall and well muscled, with a head of long blond hair that reached his shoulders, a gunslinger’s mustache. He wore his usual biker clothes and boots and a black bandana. Arms tattooed—Mom, Seliah, the Stars and Stripes, a soaring eagle. In the foreshortened wide-angle image, a combat shotgun dangled from his free hand, down near the bottom of the screen, small as a toy. No doubt who it was: badass Sean, meth and gun specialist with Aryan Brotherhood connections, La Eme connections, friend of the North Baja Cartel.

  Supervising agent Frank Soriana, a stocky and often jolly man, looked at the Blowdown team as if they had all, including himself, just been sentenced to death.

  Mars, his morose subordinate, stared down at the cheap carpet.

  Velasquez played out the rest of the video in slo-mo and the team watched Sean’s hand come up and cover the hidden camera; then the screen flashed bright white, followed by black.

  He played it through in slow motion again.

  “When’s the last time you talked to him?” asked Soriana.

  “Six days ago,” said Hood.

  “What about Seliah?”

  “Two days ago. She wasn’t any more worried about Sean than usual.”

  “Talk to her again. Tell her what’s happened. Tell her we need to find him.”

  “Do that sooner than later,” said Mars, not looking up from the floor.

  Hood dreaded it. Seliah Ozburn was a friend.

  “Robert,” said Soriana. “Burn a video of Ozburn onto disc and another onto stick and delete every other copy. Every single one, including the master backup. I want the disc and the stick five minutes ago.”

  Velasquez moved toward the main control panel.

  Soriana turned his back to the team and took a call. He listened a moment. “Tell CNN and the Union Tribune those are baseless rumors. Tell the L.A. Times and CBS the same thing. I don’t care what Buenavista police told them.”

  Back still turned, Soriana rang off and punched in a number from his contacts. “Chief Reyes? Frank Soriana, ATF. Hey, look, we’ve got a situation here with your men making noises about ATF and the shoot-out in Buenavista. Can you tell your guys to leave ATF out of it? We don’t need this, Gabe, not after last year. You hear me, don’t you?” There was a long silence; then Soriana said, “Thank you, Chief. We appreciate that a lot. Call me when you know what the heck happened out there, okay?”

  He snapped his cell phone closed and turned back to them.

  “Silence to the world, people. If this gets out, Sean’s a dead man and Blowdown is finished. But if we can keep a lid on it for a few days, Ozburn still has cover and we’re still in business. It’s our only chance.”

  “Chance to what, sir?” asked Hood.

  “To find his ass and arrest him. You with us or not on this one, Charlie?”

  “I am us.”

  “We don’t have all the information,” said Mars. “There’s more here than we’re seeing.”

  “I’ve already seen enough,” said Soriana. “Find him. Tell me what you need to do the job. Do nothing else in this life until you find Sean. Dyman, Robert, get over to Ozburn’s cover house ASAP. Maybe you’ll find some clue as to what the hell got into him. Hood, Janet—talk to his wife. She’ll know more than she thinks she does.”

  4

  Seliah Ozburn climbed down from the lifeguard stand at the Orange County Aquatics Center in Irvine and walked toward Hood and Bly. The open swim had just ended and the kids were splashing and laughing and climbing out.

  She wore a big straw hat and sunglasses and a long-sleeved T-shirt against the sun. Over the last year and a half she and Hood had become friends and she was an affectionate woman, but today she offered no hug in greeting, and no handshake or smile.

  “Is he still okay? Why are you here if he’s okay? You said he was fine.”

  “He’s all right but there’s a problem, Seliah,” said Hood. “Can we talk?”

  “I want some shade. There’s a few minutes before the next group.”

  They sat facing one another in white resin chairs in a wedge of shade along the locker room wall. The fall afternoon was hot. Hood knew that Seliah lifeguarded year-round, and also taught swimming here at the complex, and was a senior summer lifeguard up in Laguna Beach. She’d been a freestyler in college, third in the Pan American Games her senior year. She was fit and beautiful.

  Hood told her about the video of Sean and what they found at the safe house a few minutes later. She said nothing. He said the video was definitive and the neighbors’ descriptions fit Sean, right down to the tatts and the biker vest and a cut-down shotgun. She listened without interrupting, hat low, sunglasses on, unreadable.

  “He wouldn’t do that. He’s a Christian. He protects his soul—doesn’t ignore it. He’s the most moral man I know and I do not accept this. Has he been framed?”

  “We’re pretty sure he did it,” said Bly. “He’s right on camera, and there are witnesses who described him in some detail.”

  “Did anyone see him murder anyone? Did anyone shoot video of that?”

  “No, Seliah,” said Hood.

  “Then I’ll wait for irrefutable evidence.”

  “What you should do is prepare yourself for the worst,” said Hood.

  “The worst is the c
artels bag him and do to him what they did to Jimmy Holdstock. And if that happens to Sean, I’ll never forgive you or the holy trinity of ATF. Sean would, but I won’t.”

  “That’s why we need to find him,” said Hood. “Pretty much right now.”

  “You’ll arrest him.”

  “We’ll give him every chance to explain.”

  “Oh, shit on both of you. You’ve convicted him already. You’re supposed to be his friends.”

  Seliah stood abruptly and her plastic chair tipped. Hood caught it with a finger and set it back upright. He had come to know Seliah as a calm and gentle person, even with a husband working under deep cover, and her anger now surprised him. She had always behaved as if her husband needed protection from his employers, an understandable stance among the spouses of people with dangerous jobs. But Hood had never seen her angry at ATF like she was now.

  “We are your friends,” said Bly. “And friends don’t let friends commit triple murders.”

  Seliah sat down again, then pulled off the hat. Her shiny white, straight hair fell to her shoulders, cut on a glamorous diagonal. She took off her sunglasses and hung her head, and Hood watched the tears run off her nose. Hood set a hand on her shoulder and she shrugged it off.

  “When did you see him last?” asked Hood.

  “It’s been two weeks,” she said, holding Hood’s gaze.

  “You guys had no hall pass for that one.”

  “None whatsoever. It wasn’t the first time. Those precious days kept us sane. Kept him alive.”

  Hood wasn’t surprised. The UC agents were known for sneaking away sometimes—even from their handlers. “Where?”

  “San Francisco.”

  “When did you talk to him last?” Bly asked.

  Seliah didn’t look up. “This morning.”