On The Grind ss-8

by Stephen Cannell

  We w ere inarched to the rear of the warehouse, where a young, tattooed vato on a forklift was moving a stack of heavy pallets piled high with cartons of canned goods. For some reason he was lifting one pallet at a time off the pile, then repositioning it only a few feet away.

  A group of 18th Street Locos stood around watching. After the last one was moved, I finally saw the reason. The pallets had covered a framed, four-foot-square hole in the poured concrete floor. Inside the opening I could see a staircase that led down into a tunnel below the building. It was lit by fluorescent tubes that ran along the east side of the ceiling.

  Manny Avila pulled a cell phone out of his pocket and spoke softly. "Or ale ahora, esse."

  A few minutes later a heavy wooden box was handed up out of the tunnel and passed to the waiting 18th Street Locos. It was placed on a fresh wooden pallet. Seven more boxes followed. They were each about four feet long by three feet high and were made of reinforced pine nailed together with heavy two-by-four side braces. Russian writing covered the sides of each box. More of the AK-100 machine guns that Agent Love had been tracking.

  Eight boxes came out of the tunnel and were loaded onto the pallet. I estimated from their size that they contained six submachine guns each. Then four men I hadn't seen before came up the stairs. I wondered how they had carried the heavy crates.

  "Inside," Manny Avila said, and pulled Rocky up from the box he'd been leaning against.

  I was pushed forward, with Rocky directly behind me. We were led down a short wooden staircase, which descended about twenty feet. Once we reached the bottom, we were standing on the floor of a long, well-lit tunnel. Sitting before us was a small trolley, which ran on half-gauge tracks. Question answered.

  "Walk," Manny ordered.

  With two gangsters in front of us and two in back, we started down the tunnel, leaving Manny Avila near the staircase, watching us.

  The tunnel narrowed and descended on a ten-to fifteen-degree slant. After descending for about a quarter mile, I estimated we were another twenty feet down, leaving Calexico behind, heading toward Mexicali, where we were undoubtedly going to be murdered.

  Chapter 53

  The tunnel became damp, collecting ground moisture the farther down we went. At its deepest spot we were forced to slog through almost an inch of blackish brown water before making the slow climb back up on the Mexican side.

  Somewhere well past the halfway point Rocky stumbled and fell into me, knocking me into the vato guard in front. The man spun and in the next few seconds it got very busy. He started raining blows onto me. I ducked and dodged, with my hands cuffed helplessly behind my back. He ended the short, vicious routine with a right hook, which caught me high in the forehead, the part of the skull where the bone is the thickest. I heard one of his knuckles break as the punch landed. He screamed in pain. Rocky was being wrestled to the ground a few feet to my right. For the next couple of seconds we were back to back, sprawled across the narrow-gauge tracks on the tunnel floor.

  Then I felt something sharp poking me in the kidney. I moved my cuffed hands up to the middle of my hack to try to stop it and got jabbed again, this time in my left palm. Why the hell was Rocky stabbing me?

  I finally figured it out. He had somehow gotten his hands on a sharp piece of metal. He jabbed it out again and this time I caught it in my right hand and wrapped my fingers around it. It was a four-inch nail, which he'd probably pulled out of that gun crate he'd been leaning against in the Calexico warehouse.

  Just then I was snatched back up to my feet. The punk with the busted knuckle was standing in front of me, cradling his hand and glowering angrily. He finally pulled out his gun with his good hand, then slammed me in the head with the flat side of the automatic.

  "Carechimba hijueputa," he shouted, then hit me with it again. I went down on one knee, and struggled to retain consciousness. As I teetered there, half out of it, I fought to get my head to stop spinning.

  "Flaquito," he screamed and spit on me.

  Rocky and I were then pulled up to our feet and pushed roughly through the dimly lit tunnel. I managed to slowly collect myself during the next few minutes.

  The air was damp and fetid, despite the ventilation tubes punched into the tunnels ceiling every fifteen feet or so. Whoever designed this thing knew what they were doing.

  I'd been through a few captured drug tunnels in the past and they usually looked like fun house exhibits where the floors and walls serpentined all over the place. Somewhere around the middle of the passage there would be a hard left or right to accommodate the fact that the diggers tunneling in one direction had to make a sharp course correction to meet up with the ones coming the other way. This tunnel was straight and true. It had been carefully engineered, attesting to the organization behind this smuggling operation.

  We finally reached the far end, where another staircase waited. Rocky and I were stopped. The celador in front of me snatched up a phone mounted to the wall at the base of the staircase.

  "Es Ramon. Tengo los prisoneros."

  Ramon listened for a moment, hung up, then climbed the stairs and opened a reinforced wooden door.

  We were led up into a carpeted basement hallway. Halfway down the corridor Ramon opened another door and flipped a light switch. Then we were pushed inside what looked like a very large laundry area containing several commercial-sized washers and dryers. There were two long folding tables in the center of the room attached to the floor with metal brackets. Along one wall were several porcelain sinks.

  While his partner pointed an automatic pistol at me, Ramon removed my handcuffs and recuffed my wrists in front of me through a wrought-iron wall brace that supported a huge metal drying rack that contained half a dozen small, three-foot-square Mexican blankets. Rocky was cuffed to a similar rack on the opposite side of the room.

  The four guards started patting us down, stealing everything we had in our pockets. One of them saw my belt, which had a silver buckle. He undid it and pulled it off, taking the satellite transmitter with him. Then they left, closing and locking the door behind them. I was pretty sure they were just outside waiting, so I kept my voice low.

  "I thought you were trying to kill me in that tunnel," I whispered.

  "You said you wanted a nail. Now get going and pick these cuffs, homes."

  I shifted the nail carefully between my index finger and thumb, making sure I didn't drop it. Then I went to work on the new Hook-fast stainless steel handcuffs that were securing my wrists to the thick metal bracket.

  Chapter 54

  It only took me two minutes to pop my handcuffs open. Once I was loose I moved across the laundry room and freed Rocky. We both started looking around for anything we could use as a weapon. Almost everything in the room was bolted down.

  I finally pulled one of the large commercial dryers away from the wall and found a heavy extension cable coated in an eighth of an inch of black rubber. It had a heavy rubber-encased plug on one end. I disconnected it and started to knot the end of the cord around the plug until I had a three-foot cord with a tennis-ball-sized monkey knot at the end.

  While I was doing this, Rocky hunted around in back of the washing machines and finally came out with a two-foot-long brass pipe. Not much of an arsenal but it was better than being chained to a wall and getting beat to death.

  "You got a way you want to do this?" he asked.

  "Lets make some noise. We'll pretend we're still chained to these racks. Once they're inside, whammo-take them from behind."

  "I like it, homes."

  I positioned myself where I was before. I had the knotted extension cord stuffed under my belt where I could yank it out quickly. I nodded at Rocky and he started banging on the front of one of the washers that was pulled away from the wall. As Rock returned to his place by the drying rack across the room, we heard the door being unlocked.

  A second later two of the G's rushed in, guns out. After a quick glance at us, they turned their backs and studied the room
.

  As they were trying to figure out how the hell one of the washing machines got moved, Rocky and I stepped quietly away from the metal racks.

  "Hey, Ramon," I said softly to the vato with the broken hand who'd pistol-whipped me. He spun quickly and I let him have it with my makeshift mace. The monkey knot hit Ramon flush in the throat. His Adam's apple cracked loudly, sounding like a Ping-Pong ball being crushed. The gun fell from his fingers, clattering to the cement floor.

  I didn't see Rocky's guy get it because Ramon immediately dropped to his knees with both hands clutching his throat. He started gasping for breath, then gagging. I had one eye on the door waiting for the other two thugs to come busting in.

  A second after Ramon hit the floor, he pitched forward, his face turned purple, and he began writhing at my feet. I stepped forward and scooped up his gun-a state-of-the-art nine-millimeter Kimber automatic with a four-inch barrel and a laser sight.

  I turned to check on Rocky. He'd knocked out his guy and was frisking him for a gun. He pulled out a nine-millimeter Clock, then used the cuffs to lock the guards hands through the leg of the bolted-down metal table. He shoved a towel, which he'd found inside one of the dryers, into the vatos mouth.

  Ramon was still writhing on the floor, making an odd keening sound. In the Marines, we'd learned that the larynx was one of nine vital kill points. I didn't have time to try an emergency tracheotomy. Seconds later he was gone, his mouth stretched wide in a silent scream.

  Rocky checked the square-muzzled nine-millimeter Clock he'd just taken off his man. While he was doing that, I looked out the doorway into the hall. It was empty. Apparently they'd only left two men to guard us.

  "Okay, let's see how quickly we can get out of here," I said.

  "Hey, Scully. The blankets hanging on those racks-you know what I think they are?" I shrugged. "Horse blankets."

  I was mystified. "So what?"

  "There's gotta be horses around here," Rocky explained. "There are places that horses can go that cars or Jeeps can't. I remember this area from before. There's a chain of mountains between Mexicali and Ejido Tabasco. It can't be too far. If we could get there — "

  "On horses? You out of your mind?"

  "What's your problem? Didn't you ride as a kid?"

  "Hell, no. I was raised in a damn orphanage. I rode stolen bicycles."

  "If we can get to the rocks near here on horseback, they can't follow in vehicles. I'm pretty sure the Hills of Tabasco are close."

  He was probably right. If we tried to get away on foot, we wouldn't get far. If we stole a truck, they would hunt us down in Jeeps. "Let's deal with it once we check this place out," I said.

  We exited the laundry and climbed a flight of stairs up to the ground floor of the building. We came out in a large tack room that was loaded with bridles and fancy, silver-studded saddles and martingales hanging from pegs on the walls. When we opened the back door of the tack room, we stepped into an impressive new barn with at least ten stalls, each holding a beautifully brushed Arabian Thoroughbred. Aside from the animals, the barn appeared to be empty. I could hear a radio playing nearby, tuned to a Mexican music station.

  "Hang on," Rocky whispered, and moved toward the stalls.

  "Where you going?"

  "Gonna go select the two best horses," he whispered.

  I groaned and held his back, aiming my newly acquired Kim-ber out the open door of the barn. It took several minutes for Rocky to pick our mounts. He chose a huge bay and a dappled gray, putting on their bridles and leading them out of the stalls into the center section of the barn. As I held the reins, he began to saddle up, getting equipment out of the tack room and first placing a blanket, then a huge silver-adorned Mexican saddle on each animal. When he had cinched up both, he pointed to the big dappled gray.

  "The gelding is yours," he said. "His name is Humo Blanco. It was painted on the gate of his stall."

  "White Smoke?" I said. "Must be a dope dealer's horse."

  Rocky nodded and mounted the bay.

  "Wait a minute," I told him. "Don't want to leave the other horses here so those assholes can follow us."

  Rocky held my reins as I moved back toward the stalls and opened all the doors, shooing the rest of the horses out. I slapped the last horse on the withers and shouted loudly. The entire herd took off, heading out the front of the barn. I mounted White Smoke and followed Rocky as we cantered out of the building. It was all I could do to stay in the saddle.

  I had actually been on a few swayback park-ride-type horses in the past, but I was still pretty busted up and my scrotum felt like it had been attacked by wolves. White Smoke and I got off to a bad start. I was dude-ranch material at best. Rocky, on the other hand, rode like it was in his DNA.

  Once we got out into the open, I could see that the barn was part of a huge complex that sat right next to the border. Farther away on the horizon, I could see the twin towns of Mexicali and Calexico.

  The expensive ranch we were escaping from was located on a grassy patch of land right at the edge of the Baja desert. There were beautiful corrals and low, tile-roofed buildings surrounding a large Spanish-style hacienda and courtyard. The main house was three stories with a red-tile roof and arched doorways.

  I didn't use up much time admiring the spread because almost immediately half a dozen men in windbreakers carrying long guns began running out of the houses into the yard. I knew from the way they cradled their weapons at port arms that they were trained bodyguards. Some of them jumped into Jeeps. Others tried to stop the eight fleeing horses with no luck. As the last of the unsaddled Arabians cleared the courtyard, Rocky and I followed. We streaked under a large arch emblazoned with the words CIELO RANCHERO — Heavenly Ranch.

  We rode out into the desert, close behind the eight escaping horses. In less than a minute, four Jeeps full of armed men were racing under the arch, pursuing us, less than two hundred yards behind.

  Chapter 55

  As we rode away from Cielo Ranchero, I was pumping so much adrenaline I didn't even feel the beating Horace had given me. I struggled to stay behind Rocky's bay, eating a lot of dust in the process.

  The other fleeing stallions were fanning out, each heading in a separate direction. As Rocky had predicted, there was a low chain of mountains about half a mile to the southeast. If we could get our horses up into the rocks, we would be able to leave the pursuing Jeeps behind.

  As I was calculating those odds, the first shots rang out. They made a flat popping noise, like a distant backfire. I pulled my Kimber and shot back. The instant I fired, White Smoke shied to the left, almost throwing me off. It looked way easier when John Wayne did it. My balls were engaged in round two, taking a brutal pounding on the silver pommel. I tried to ease this by getting into the horse's rhythm, but no matter what I tried, I was in agony. Every time I glanced back the Jeeps were closer.

  "We aren't gonna make it," I shouted. "We need to find a place and make a stand."

  "Over there " Rocky shouted and pointed to the right, where, about two hundred yards away, there was a tin-roofed line shack surrounded by a low adobe wall. It looked like some kind of storage shed for field equipment. Rocky wheeled and rode in that direction. I followed, bouncing like a rag doll in the saddle.

  We made it to a spot behind the building. We didn't want our horses to get hit when the shooting started, so we turned them loose, slapping their flanks. They bolted, running away into the desert.

  When I looked up, the Jeeps were now about five hundred yards away, slowing down and spreading out, attempting to surround us on three sides. Without warning, Rocky aimed his automatic at the closest Jeep and started firing.

  "They're too far away. Save your ammo. We only have one clip each. Let 'em get in closer, then make every round count."

  We hunkered down behind the low adobe wall and waited. In the distance, I saw the Jeeps coming to a stop. They were still about three hundred yards away, not out of range for a nine-millimeter handgun, but unless we
got damn lucky, an impossible shot.

  Several of the bodyguards were already out of the Jeeps and taking cover behind the fenders of their vehicles, aiming their long guns across the hoods at us. Then a voice blasted from an electronic bullhorn.

  "Throw down your guns. Put your hands in the air! You won't be killed if you give up."

  "Is that Manny Avila?" I asked.

  Rocky said, "Whoever he is, he's got a great sense of humor."

  "This must be his place. That rancho is probably the Avilas' Mexican gun-and drug-running base. They smuggle their contraband through that tunnel, then truck it up in produce vans and distribute it in L. A." Rocky didn't respond. His eyes were locked on our assailants. "Look, if Manny Avila is in that Jeep and we can get our hands on him, we could really change the dynamic here."

  "How the hell we gonna do that?" Rocky said, cocking a worried eyebrow at me. "They're just gonna lay back and pick us off with those carbines."

  "Hold them back, but don't waste too many rounds. I'm gonna try and get inside this shed."

  "Why the hell are — "

  I didn't wait around to explain. I headed for the front door of the line shack. Gunshots rang out almost immediately and little pieces of adobe dust flew off the edge of the building as I rounded the corner. I got to the front door, shot the lock off and, as bullets peppered the wall and wood above my head, I dove inside.

  The shed held mostly field equipment-a big pipe wheel sprinkler that watered grass, lots of rusting metal farm stuff. Where's that spare submachine gun when you need it?

  As I rummaged around in the junk, I heard the Jeeps moving again. The engines revved and growled as they moved in closer. Then I heard two more shots from Rocky's handgun.

  I started pawing desperately through the mounds of junk stacked in the shack. There wasn't much, but I had come in here with an idea and finally found something I thought might work. It was a small pewter hose nozzle with a trigger, which was shaped roughly like a gun.