Knockdown

by William W. Johnstone; J. A. Johnstone

  “Yeah, something like that.”

  They didn’t really expect to hear anything else that night, but as they were about ready to turn in, Barry’s phone chimed again. He checked it and opened the computer. The same young-old face looked out from the screen, a bit wearier now, it seemed.

  Without preamble, the man said, “According to one of my sources in the DOD, a significant amount of C-4 went missing from Fort Bliss a couple of days ago.”

  “Was the army going to tell anybody about this?” Barry asked.

  “What do you think? Not if they didn’t have to. They’re conducting their own investigation, of course, hoping to recover it before anybody else knows it’s missing. All they’ve found so far is that an enlisted man, a clerk who might have been able to get his hands on the stuff, has gone missing. And he has family connections with the Zaragosa cartel.”

  Jake leaned forward over Barry’s shoulder and said, “Nobody knew about that when this guy joined the army?”

  “You think they’ve got the time and the manpower to do extensive background checks on everybody who enlists?” the man asked sharply.

  “If they did, maybe so many bad actors wouldn’t have gotten through and caused trouble later on,” Jake said.

  Barry said, “We’re not going to solve that problem tonight. Just give us the guy’s name and a way we might be able to get a line on him.”

  “His name is Carlos Molina. His cousin Paco Reyes is a low-level cartel soldier. Reyes could have put pressure on Molina to steal those explosives. Molina’s parents are both still alive, and he has two little sisters. Reyes could have threatened them if Molina didn’t cooperate, too.”

  “A guy would do that to his own family?” Jake said.

  “Somebody who’d work for the Zaragosas would do just about anything,” Barry said. “Send me the address of Molina’s family.”

  “Already done. You’ll be heading for El Paso tomorrow?”

  “No,” Barry said. “Tonight.”

  He closed the computer, looked at Jake, and added, “Aren’t you glad we got something to eat? Now we can keep going all night if we need to.”

  CHAPTER 28

  Despite it being the middle of the night, Barry made a call ahead, so somebody was waiting when he pulled up to a huge, cinder-block building in one of El Paso’s industrial areas.

  The place had an oversized door. It rolled up as a motor hummed, and Barry drove into a vast garage.

  Even before Jake opened his door, he detected the sharp tang of paint fumes. They started a dull ache behind his eyes. He hoped they wouldn’t have to be here for long.

  “Big Mike!” Barry greeted the tall, burly man in coveralls who met them. “Good to see you again.”

  They shook hands. Mike ran an admiring gaze over the truck and let out a low whistle.

  “What model is that?” he asked. “I don’t think I’ve seen one just like it before.”

  “You haven’t,” Barry told him. “It’s a prototype. The Z1000.”

  “Sweet. And what a beautiful paint job.”

  “Yeah, that’s the problem. It’s too sweet, too eye-catching. I need you to rough it up for me.”

  Mike pressed a ham-like hand against his chest and said, “Rough it up? That’d be a sin, Barry!”

  “Maybe so, but that’s what I need.”

  Mike gave him a searching frown. “You hot, Barry?”

  “Warm,” Barry qualified. “I have friends working to take some of the heat off, but in the meantime, the last thing I need is for some eager-beaver state trooper to pull me over.”

  Mike nodded, sighed, and said, “You got it. I can give you a completely different color if you’ve got a few days.”

  “We don’t. Do what you can to make it not stand out, and in the meantime, we need another vehicle.”

  If they had been able to double back to Hachita, they could have gotten his pickup, Jake thought. Plus, the pickup was registered under a false name. Some of his uncle’s natural caution—some people might call it paranoia—must have rubbed off on him. The pickup wouldn’t put the cops on his trail. But the place would have been swarming with law enforcement officers by then, and they hadn’t wanted to risk it.

  Mike frowned and said, “I got an old panel truck you can use, if you want.”

  “That’s perfect,” Barry said. “Nobody pays any attention to those.”

  Mike pointed to the brown truck on the far side of the garage, then dug the keys out of his pocket and handed them to Barry.

  “Thanks. We’ll take good care of it.”

  “Shoot, you couldn’t hurt that old thing!”

  Jake said, “Don’t tell him that. He’ll take it as a challenge.”

  “Come on, Junior,” Barry said as he started toward the truck. He tossed the keys to Jake. “You drive.”

  They had left their semi-automatic rifles in the big rig, but each man was armed with a pair of 9mm pistols, as well as backpacks with other gear they might need. According to Barry, this was more of a surveillance mission than anything else—but there was no way of knowing what they might run into.

  Once they’d left Big Mike’s garage in the nondescript old truck, Jake said, “Is that guy on the up-and-up?”

  “It didn’t look like a chop shop to you, did it?”

  “No, but I guess I’m just naturally suspicious of anybody who knows you.”

  “That would include you, you know.”

  “I’m suspicious of myself half the time,” Jake said. “What about Big Mike?”

  “He’s clean,” Barry said. “He handles jobs for me and other operators. A buddy of his is a world-class mechanic. They’re sort of a tag team when it comes to automotive matters for guys in our line of work.”

  “So you trust him?”

  “Absolutely.”

  Jake listened to the truck’s engine and said, “I’ll give him credit. He, or his buddy, have this old beater running like a top.”

  “Mike wouldn’t have anything else.”

  Barry got out his phone and studied the information his nameless friend had sent him. He read an address to Jake and went on, “That’s where Carlos Molina’s family lives. We’ll keep an eye on the place for a while to see if he shows up there.”

  “Your friend said the army was conducting its own investigation. Don’t you think we’re liable to trip over some of those on their own stakeout?”

  “Please,” Barry said. “If they’re there, we’ll see them, but they’ll never see us. We’ll just stay out of their way and hope they don’t get in ours.”

  The GPS in Barry’s phone directed Jake to a lower middle-class residential neighborhood. It was still a couple of hours before dawn. He slid the truck up to the curb, which was crumbling in a few places, and killed the engine and lights. Quite a few cars and pickups were parked along both sides of the street, but there were a number of open spaces, too.

  “The house is three up on the other side of the street,” Barry said.

  “Got it.”

  Nobody was parked in front of the Molina house. An older pickup was in the driveway. Jake estimated that most of the houses in this neighborhood had been built in the sixties or seventies. From what he could tell, they were well kept up, the sort of neighborhood where people had pride in their homes, even if they didn’t make much money.

  Jake got a pair of night vision binoculars from his pack and studied each of the vehicles parked along the street for as far as he could see in both directions.

  “Doesn’t seem to be anybody in any of them,” he reported as he stashed the binoculars. “My guess is they all belong to the people who live along here.”

  “More than likely,” Barry agreed. He was using regular binoculars to scan the houses, looking for lighted windows. He saw a few, but the lights inside the houses were dim, as if someone were sitting up reading or watching TV or surfing the Internet. Overall, the neighborhood was quiet and peaceful.

  “I thought El Paso was supposed to be full
of crime,” Jake commented quietly.

  “Parts of it are. But parts of it are just like places anywhere else.

  Jake didn’t say anything else. He concentrated on the house where Carlos Molina’s family lived instead. Time passed. They got thermoses of coffee from the backpacks and sipped them.

  Then, when the sky in the east was starting to turn gray, a car with a lowered chassis came along the street with its headlights out. It drifted to a stop at the curb in front of the Molina house.

  “Is that a lowrider?” Jake asked in a half-whisper. “I didn’t know they had such things anymore!”

  “Some hombres follow the traditions of their forefathers,” Barry said.

  He had his own night vision glasses out now and used them to study the two men who got out of the car and started across the neatly kept lawn toward the house.

  “That’s Molina,” he reported after a second. “And the fella with him is his cousin, Paco Reyes. We got lucky, Jake. Maybe we’ll stay lucky and those boys can tell us what happened to all that C-4 that went missing.”

  CHAPTER 29

  Molina knocked on the door. Jake could tell by the way he did it that he was trying to be quiet about it. After a moment, a dim yellow light came on in what was likely the house’s living room. The glow illuminated the two young men standing on the small concrete porch.

  From where they were, Jake and Barry couldn’t tell who opened the door, but when Molina and Reyes went into the house, the man who had answered their summons lingered. Short, thick-bodied, he was probably Carlos Molina’s father. He closed the door.

  “What do you think they’re doing here?” Jake asked.

  “I don’t know, but I think it’s a good idea if we try to find out.”

  Barry had already popped the bulb out of the dome light, so the interior of the truck remained dark as they opened their doors and slipped out. They pressed the doors closed with faint clicks rather than slamming them, then cat-footed across lawns toward the Molina dwelling.

  The houses were fairly close together on this street, with hedges separating very narrow side yards. Jake and Barry moved through deep shadows in the side yard of the Molina house toward a lighted window at the back.

  All the windows had bars on them. Tranquil though it looked, the neighborhood probably had its share of crime—maybe more than its share. But at the lighted window, the pane inside the bars was raised a couple of inches to let fresh air in. The curtain was pulled, so Jake and Barry couldn’t see in, but they could hear what was being said.

  The voices spoke in Spanish. A woman asked what was going on. A man rumbled in reply, “It’s Carlos and that no-good Paco.”

  “Carlos!” the woman exclaimed. “Is he all right?”

  “He looks fine.”

  “What does he want?”

  “I don’t know. To talk to us, he said. About something important.”

  “I’ll get dressed. Tell them to wait. Don’t let them leave!”

  “I can’t stop them if they want to go,” the man said. “Paco has a gun.” He added some uncomplimentary things about Paco’s parentage and the fact that he was in a gang, then said worriedly, “Carlos has a gun, too. It’s all that Paco’s fault!”

  Jake and Barry heard Señor Molina hurry back out. Barry motioned for them to head back to the front of the house. They stepped up carefully onto the porch and knelt in front of the big living room window. With a light on inside and none out here, their shadows wouldn’t be visible against the glass.

  The curtains were pulled over this window, too, but there were a couple of gaps. Jake leaned close to peer through one of them. He saw Carlos Molina pacing around nervously while the other young man, Paco Reyes, sprawled in an armchair as if he didn’t have a care in the world.

  Molina was stocky and muscular with close-cropped dark hair. An army haircut, for sure.

  Reyes was skinny, with a bowl haircut, a thin mustache, and a little wisp of beard on his chin. He reminded Jake of a praying mantis.

  Barry took a small piece of equipment out of his backpack, ran a wire with a suction cup at the end of it to the glass, and pressed it into place. He handed Jake a small, wireless earpiece and slipped one just like it into his own ear. When Jake inserted the comm device into his ear, he heard a reedy voice say in English, “—easy, man. We got nothin’ to worry about.”

  “You don’t know how stubborn he is, Paco.”

  “It’ll be all right. Just think about how much money we’re gettin’ paid.”

  “I can’t put a price on how much my old man means to me!”

  “No, no, dawg, that ain’t what I mean.” Reyes leaned forward in his chair. “Just tell him you’ll pay him however much he’ll lose in wages by stayin’ home today. You can afford it, right?”

  Molina paused in the pacing that was carrying him back and forth, in and out of Jake’s line of sight. He scratched at his chin and said, “Yeah, I guess so. Maybe.”

  He turned as his parents came into the room followed by two girls, one an older teen, the other probably twelve or so.

  “Hey, I didn’t mean to wake up you two,” Molina said to the girls, who had to be the sisters Jake and Barry had heard about.

  “Carlos, we’ve been so worried about you,” the older girl said. She came over to him, put her arms around his neck, and hugged him. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah, I’m fine,” he said as he returned the hug.

  The girl turned to look at Reyes with a disapproving frown. She asked, “What’s he doing here?”

  “Hey, girl, is that any way to act when your cousin comes to visit you?” Reyes said. “We used to be friends, remember?”

  “That was before you turned into such a sleaze,” the girl snapped.

  Señor Molina said, “Anita, you and Elisa go back to your room. I just wanted you to know your brother is safe.” He cast a disapproving glance at Reyes, too. “At least for now. Who knows what that one has gotten him mixed up in.”

  Reyes stood up and said, “I didn’t mean to cause trouble by comin’ here. Maybe it’d be best if I just left.”

  “That would be a good idea,” Anita said.

  Reyes jerked his head toward the door. “Come on, Carlos.”

  “Not yet,” Molina said. “I haven’t done what I came here for. Papi, I have to talk to you . . . alone.”

  Señor Molina drew himself up straighter.

  “Anything you have to say to me, you can say in front of your mother,” he told his son stiffly.

  “No,” Molina insisted. “This is just for you to hear.”

  Señora Molina spoke to her husband in Spanish, telling him it was all right. She came over to her son, hugged him, and told both girls to hug him again as well. They did so, and then the woman ushered them out, all of them leaving with some reluctance.

  When Molina, his father, and his cousin were alone in the living room, the fugitive soldier said, “Papi, you can’t go to work today.”

  The older man stared at him in utter confusion.

  “Not go to work?” he repeated. “I always go to work. You want me to lose my job?”

  “No, but you got to call in sick today. Just today. That’s all. You can go back to work tomorrow.”

  Señor Molina shook his head and said, “That’s crazy. Why would I do that?”

  Reyes spoke up, saying, “Because we’re tryin’ to do you a favor, viejo.”

  “Watch it,” Molina snapped at him. “Don’t talk to my father like that.”

  “Look, man, we shouldn’t even be here,” Reyes said. “You know what those guys would do to us if they found out what we’re doin’. You know how they are about anything that throws a wrench in their plans.”

  He drew a finger across his throat in a curt, meaningful gesture.

  “I don’t care,” Molina said. “They can’t go ahead without my help. And I’m not going to let my father get hurt.” He turned back to the other man. “Look, something’s going to happen tomorrow. Today, I m
ean. Later today. And you can’t go to work at the yard.”

  On the porch, Jake and Barry exchanged a glance. “Yard” could mean rail yard. And that brought things right back around to the railroad connection.

  Señor Molina looked intently at his son for a moment, then said, “Carlos, what have you done?” He jerked a hand toward Reyes. “What have you let this jackal talk you into?”

  “Papi, please—”

  “Get out of my house,” the older man said. “If you’re mixed up in some trouble with this animal, I won’t have it touching the rest of my family. Get out, and count yourself lucky that I don’t turn you in.”

  “Papi—”

  Reyes broke in, “You’re not gonna change his mind, homes. I told you it was a bad idea to come here.” He sighed and shook his head. “Now we gotta make sure he don’t talk to nobody.”

  Jake stiffened. Reyes’s words set off alarm bells in his mind. But it was too late for either of the men on the porch to do anything. Paco Reyes reached under his shirt, pulled out a pistol with a silencer screwed onto the barrel, and shot Señor Molina in the head.

  CHAPTER 30

  The murder of his father was such a shocking, unexpected act that all Carlos Molina could do was stand there and stare in horrified disbelief at the red-rimmed bullet hole in Señor Molina’s forehead. After a second, the older man’s knees buckled and he crumpled to the floor.

  Reyes swung around, thrust the gun toward his cousin, and fired twice more, putting both rounds into Molina’s chest. Molina staggered back, tripped over a coffee table, and went down hard to the floor.

  The silenced rounds might not have been loud enough to warn Señora Molina and her daughters that something was wrong, but the crash certainly was. Reyes pivoted toward the opening between the living room and the hall that led to the rest of the house, obviously ready to gun down the females as they rushed to see what was wrong.

  By that time, though, Jake was already at the front door, ramming it open with his shoulder and lunging into the house. Reyes twisted toward him, eyes so wide with alarm—and possibly drugs—that they seemed on the verge of popping out of their sockets.