Suicide Mission

by William W. Johnstone

  The man stumbled from the hit. His finger must have jerked the trigger as he fell. Bullets sprayed out of the weapon and chewed into the sidewalk, throwing dust and concrete splinters into the air.

  A woman coming out of the church screamed and flung herself back through the doors. Tires screeched as people driving by spotted guns being waved around and either stomped the brakes or hit the gas to get themselves out of the line of fire, depending on where they were.

  Bill tracked the Browning to the side and squeezed off two more rounds. The shots made the cartel men scramble behind their car for cover. They returned the fire, but the bullets whined past him.

  He turned to see if Catalina had made it to the truck and was surprised when the engine roared and the vehicle lurched away from the curb.

  Blast it, she was taking off and leaving him here to shoot it out!

  Bill said, “Son of a—!” and sprinted after the pickup. More shots roared from the cartel gunmen.

  The truck’s tires spun a little on the pavement as Catalina gunned the engine, and that was the only thing that slowed it down long enough for Bill to dive and catch hold of the tailgate. He dropped the Browning inside the bed and hung on for dear life with both hands as the truck began to pick up speed and dragged him along the street with it.

  He knew if he let go, the fall might bust him up even if the gunners didn’t shoot him. With an effort, he managed to get his feet under him and kicked hard with them at the same time as he used all the strength in his arms to haul himself up. He got a booted foot on the rear bumper and vaulted up and over the rear tailgate.

  When he jolted down into the pickup’s bed, he felt the impact go through him, shaking him all the way down to his teeth. He lay there catching his breath and getting his wits back about him as Catalina sent the pickup fishtailing around a corner.

  After a few moments Bill rolled over and looked around for the Browning. He spotted it and reached over to grip the pistol. He felt a little better once it was in his hand again.

  He heard a couple of thuds and knew the sounds came from bullets hitting the tailgate. It was specially reinforced, like the rest of the truck’s body, so the slugs didn’t penetrate it. He looked up as another round struck the back window. The bulletproof glass starred but didn’t shatter.

  The sound of the bullet striking the glass right behind her head must have spooked Catalina into jerking the wheel. The pickup’s tires shrieked as it veered sharply across the road into the lanes of oncoming traffic. The move threw Bill hard against the sidewall.

  Brakes screeched somewhere close by. Metal crumpled in a grinding collision. Since Bill didn’t feel the pickup shudder from an impact, he assumed the wreck involved other vehicles trying to get out of Catalina’s way.

  He braced himself and sat up as the pickup weaved back into the right lane. The car containing the surviving cartel gunmen was about fifty yards back, speeding recklessly after them.

  One man leaned from the passenger window in the front, another from the rear window on the other side of the car. They fired their pistols as the driver tried to close in on the fleeing pickup.

  Bill didn’t figure the car had bulletproof glass in the windshield. Using a two-handed grip, he drew a bead on it and fired four shots as fast as he could.

  His hunch proved to be correct. The windshield spider webbed from the first bullet, then exploded inward with the second. Bill wasn’t sure where the other two rounds went, but judging by the way the car suddenly slewed to the side and smashed head-on into a parked SUV, he figured they had hit the driver . . . which was exactly what he’d intended.

  No more shots came from the wrecked car as steam spewed from its smashed radiator. The other two gunmen had to be badly shaken up, at the very least, if they weren’t injured or dead.

  Bill saw a road sign with an arrow on it indicating that they were coming to U.S. 90. He knew that was the highway that ran almost due east to San Antonio. He tapped on the truck’s rear window with the barrel of the Browning and called, “Catalina!” intending to tell her to take the turn.

  Instead she twisted on the seat and brandished a gun at him, causing him to fall back and exclaim, “Whoa! Catalina, it’s me!”

  The pickup swerved back and forth again, tossing Bill from side to side, before she got it under control. He pulled himself up to the window and told her, “Pull over! Let me up there!”

  He thought for a second she was going to ignore him, but then the truck began to slow. She steered it to the side of the road in front of a strip shopping center that contained a tire store, a pawnshop, a tattoo parlor, and a consignment store.

  Bill worried that as soon as he got out of the back, she might take off and try to leave him again. She was easily spooked, that was for sure.

  But that wasn’t really fair, he told himself. Most people would panic if somebody started shooting at them. It took naturally steady nerves and plenty of experience to stay cool under fire.

  When he was younger he would have just put a foot on the side and jumped out of the back of the pickup. These days he had to be a mite more cautious. He climbed over the tailgate to the bumper and dropped to the ground from there. Then he hurried forward to jerk the passenger door open before Catalina could floor the gas and take off.

  The door was barely closed behind him when she did just that. The gun she had waved at him was on the seat beside her. Bill saw that it was a .45, the classic Colt Model 1911A1.

  He pointed through the windshield and said, “Take 90 East up here.”

  She slowed to make the turn onto the highway, then accelerated again. Bill turned to look behind and see if anyone else was following them.

  “Are they still back there?” Catalina asked in a tight, nervous voice.

  “Don’t see anybody chasin’ us,” Bill said. “How’d you start this truck, anyway?”

  She made a scoffing sound and said, “I’ve been able to hotwire a car since I was twelve years old.”

  “And get it started that fast?”

  “If you dawdle around stealing cars you’re liable to get caught.”

  Bill couldn’t help but wonder why she’d been stealing cars when she was twelve, but he supposed the question didn’t have any bearing on their current situation.

  “It’s about a hundred and fifty miles to San Antonio, straight ahead,” he told her. “The truck’s got plenty of gas. We can make it by nightfall, but we might want to drive around a little once we get there, just to let it get good and dark before we go to ground.”

  “What if I have something I need to pick up?”

  “Do you?”

  “Well . . . no. To be honest, all I have are the clothes on my back. But I wondered what you’d say.”

  “Everything else takes a backseat to keepin’ you alive. Once we get where we’re goin’, somebody can bring you anything you need.”

  She nodded. She seemed to be calming down. It probably helped that they were putting some distance between them and the border.

  They couldn’t go far enough to get completely out of reach of the cartel, though. Those evil bastards had connections all across the country.

  Catalina probably hadn’t thought about it yet, but she might have to spend the rest of her life looking over her shoulder for cartel gunmen, depending on the importance of the information she possessed.

  “You have any idea how those fellas found you?”

  She shook her head as she kept the pickup at a steady pace now, three or four miles above the speed limit.

  “No. I thought I’d be safe in a church. Someone must have spotted me and called in a tip. I’m not sure how they knew it was me, though. I didn’t think they have any pictures of me to spread around, just my name and description.”

  “It doesn’t really matter,” Bill said. “Those fellas were after you, that’s for sure.”

  “Yes, I recognized two of them. They worked for the same men Marty worked for.”

  “Marty . . . ?”

&
nbsp; “I told you, Martin Chavez. My friend. The one they killed while he was trying to get me safely across the border.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” Bill said. “Chavez was the computer guy for the cartel?”

  “One of them. He worked for the local branch, for a man named Pablo Estancia.” Catalina’s lip curled with disdain. “An animal, I should say. A pig.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet he’s not a very nice fella. All this trouble, it’s about your friend Marty’s computer work?”

  “And something called El Nuevo Sol.”

  “But you don’t know what that is?”

  “I don’t have any idea,” she said. She seemed to hesitate, then took one hand off the wheel and slid it into one of the pockets of the tight jeans she wore. When she brought it out she was holding something. She held it out toward Bill and went on, “But the explanation might be on this.”

  The thing she held was a flash drive, not even as big as one of Bill’s fingers. But his instincts told him that whatever data was stored on it, there was a good chance the information was worth killing for.

  His instincts warned him of something else, or maybe he just heard an engine being gunned somewhere behind them. Whatever prompted him to do it, he turned his head and looked back along the divided highway.

  A black SUV was coming up fast behind them, and everything about it screamed trouble.

  CHAPTER 11

  Bill would have taken the flash drive from her for safekeeping, but before he could, she stuck it back in her pocket. As tight as those jeans were, he didn’t figure he could dig it out without quite a bit of trouble, not to mention embarrassment. She might fight him for it, too, and he couldn’t risk that while they were speeding along the highway with her at the wheel, weaving in and out of traffic.

  “Somebody else is after us, aren’t they?” she asked as she glanced at the rearview mirror.

  “Looks like it,” Bill admitted.

  He pulled the Browning from its holster, dropped the double-stack magazine, and topped it off with shells he took from his pocket. There was still one in the chamber, so when he slid the magazine home, the gun contained fourteen rounds in all.

  The Browning was a classic. As a rule the trigger pull was a little stiff, but he had worked his over until it was smooth as silk. And its high capacity in 9mm was the main reason he had carried it for years.

  There were no rules in a gunfight. You never knew how many people you’d have trying to kill you or how many rounds you’d need to deal with them. So more, generally, was better. A simple but true concept.

  “There’s a crossover comin’ up,” Bill said, pointing it out to Catalina. Along this stretch, U.S. 90 was a divided highway but not a freeway with entrance and exit ramps. There were crossovers where major side roads came in.

  “You want me to turn?” Catalina asked.

  “Can you make it without hittin’ your brakes until we’re right on top of it?”

  The disdainful snort she let out told him what she thought of that question.

  Bill gestured toward the Colt on the seat and said, “Mind if I borrow your gun?”

  “All right, but I don’t have any extra ammunition for it,” she said. “Just whatever’s in it.”

  “That’s all right. I’ve got ammo, once we’re somewhere I can get to it.” The crossover was coming up fast. “You always go around gunned up?”

  “No, I took it off one of the men trying to kill me last night . . . after I killed him.”

  Before Bill had time to digest that, Catalina slammed her foot on the brake pedal, spun the steering wheel, and skidded into the turn at the crossover. For an instant Bill thought the truck was going to roll over, but its superior suspension did its job and kept the tires on the road.

  “Brake!” Bill shouted.

  Catalina hit the pedal again. The pickup’s tires screeched as it slid to a stop in the crossover. Bill twisted around on the seat, reached up to throw the sunroof open, and stood up on the seat with guns in both hands.

  In the eastbound lanes of the highway, the black SUV that had been pursuing them slowed violently in an effort to make the turn, too, but it had been going too fast and slid past the crossover.

  As it did, Bill saw that the rear window was down and the barrels of two weapons protruded through it as the men inside tried to get a shot.

  Bill opened up first. The Browning and the Colt both roared and bucked in his hands. Glass flew as bullets smashed the driver’s window. What was left of the window was suddenly covered with crimson as slugs pulped the driver’s skull.

  The automatic weapons disappeared from the rear window. Bill knew that his slugs must have smashed the gunmen back across the seat.

  With no one controlling it, the SUV went into a wild spin. One of the wheels dipped into a drainage ditch at the side of the road, and suddenly the vehicle was airborne, flipping over and over until it crashed on its top in the median between the eastbound and westbound lanes. The SUV rolled a couple of times before it came to a stop, still upside-down. Flames licked up from its undercarriage.

  The silence that followed the crash was broken by the wail of sirens not far off. Citizens would have reported all the shooting going on as the chase stretched across Del Rio, and now the cops were closing in.

  “Go,” Bill told Catalina as he dropped back onto the seat. “Get off the highway onto the side roads. Keep turning every couple of blocks.”

  “I’ve run from the cops before, you know,” she said as she drove out of the crossover.

  “I’m not surprised, what with you stealin’ cars when you were twelve.”

  “Well . . . I didn’t actually steal any of them. I was just the lookout. But my friend who did boost them taught me how to hotwire an ignition.”

  “Some friend.”

  “You don’t know,” she snapped. “You weren’t there.”

  “Yeah, I reckon that’s true.”

  Bill reloaded the Browning, then checked the Colt’s magazine. He was pretty sure he’d emptied it, and sure enough, he had.

  Catalina made a right after going a couple of blocks, then a left after two more blocks. She kept up that pattern, working her way north and east of the highway, and after a while Bill couldn’t hear the sirens anymore. He was confident they had given the slip to any law enforcement pursuit. That was good; he wouldn’t have wanted to waste hours trying to get everything straightened out. Not to mention the very real danger that some of the cops might be in the cartel’s pocket.

  They found themselves on a county road outside of town that ran between seemingly endless cultivated fields. Unless somebody who worked for the cartel had the ability to hack into the feeds from Defense Department surveillance satellites or Border Patrol drones, they were fairly safe from detection out here, Bill thought. Of course, he couldn’t rule out that possibility. Still, there were only so many things a man could worry about.

  “Keep going east,” he told Catalina. “After a few more miles, we ought to run across a road that goes back to the highway. We’ll take it.”

  “We might be able to take back roads all the way to San Antonio,” she suggested. “You can call up the maps on your phone so we won’t get lost.”

  Bill shook his head. “My phone won’t do that. All I have is a cheap burner that can’t be traced easily.”

  She gestured toward her purse that was lying on the seat beside them and said, “You can use mine.”

  “Son of a—” Bill grabbed the purse and dug out the phone. “These have GPS chips in ’em so they can be tracked.”

  A farm truck loaded with produce was coming toward them on the two-lane blacktop. Bill opened the sunroof again.

  “What are you doing?” Catalina asked. As he stood up and stuck his head and shoulders through the opening, she exclaimed, “Hey, that’s my phone!”

  He threw the phone into the load of grapefruit that filled the back of the farm truck as the two vehicles met and passed each other.

  Catali
na glared at him furiously as he lowered himself onto the seat again.

  “That was my phone!” she said again. “It had all my numbers in it!”

  “Numbers of people you’ll probably never be able to see again,” Bill told her bluntly. “Chances are they weren’t using it to track us, but if they are, they’ll think we’ve doubled back.”

  “Oh.” Catalina still didn’t look happy about what he’d done, but evidently she understood the need for it. “I did that earlier today. Doubled back, I mean. I tried not to leave much of a trail, though.”

  “It’s hard not to leave some sort of trail if somebody’s determined enough to find you. Best we can hope for is to slow them down enough for us to make it somewhere safe.”

  Catalina sighed and said, “I’m not sure anywhere in the world is safe.”

  “Well, we’ll do the best we can.” Bill held out his hand. “You want to give me that flash drive?”

  Catalina didn’t reach for her pocket.

  “That drive is my only bargaining chip,” she said with a stubborn look on her face. “If I turn it over to you, you won’t have any reason to keep me alive.”

  “Other than the fact that I’m not in the habit of lettin’ no-good scum like the cartel murder innocent women.”

  “You should have figured out by now, Bill, that I’m not exactly what anybody would call innocent.”

  “Well . . . relatively speakin’,” Bill said. “And I give you my word, I won’t let anything happen to you if I can prevent it.”

  She thought it over and finally nodded.

  “I guess you’ve already proved that I can trust you.” She glanced over at him as she drove. “I’m sorry about trying to, you know, run out on you back there at the church. I guess I just lost my head.”

  “You’ve been through a lot,” Bill told her. “It’s understandable. When’s the last time you slept?”

  “I don’t know . . . Yesterday sometime, I guess.”

  “It’ll take us at least a couple of hours to get to San Antonio,” he said. “Let me drive, and you can get some sleep.”