by Dick Stivers
Captain Madrano left his concealment. The stink of gasoline swirled in the cool night. The flashlight’s beam illuminated a sickening mass of flesh and torn clothing. Spilled intestines reeked of excrement. Vinyl and auto glass and foam plastic mixed with the gore.
What remained of the head had the face of Agent Gallucci.
Confused, not believing what had happened, Captain Madrano backed away from the car. The stink of gasoline choked him. He looked down at the asphalt. Gasoline and blood flowed from the bullet-patterned automobile. The captain grabbed the flashlight from his lieutenant and looked in again.
No corpses sprawled in the back of the Dodge. And only one body — not actually a body any longer, actually a tangled spill of body parts — covered the front seat.
Agent Gallucci.
Captain Madrano had killed Colonel Quesada’s most effective North American. A North American who operated within the same agencies threatening the Families of El Salvador with investigation and indictment and slander. Though Colonel Quesada had forgiven his blunder in the mountains south of San Jose, because of the friendship of their families and their intermingled bloodlines, how could Madrano beg forgiveness for this?
Shining the flashlight down on the horror that had been a valuable informer, Madrano prepared his explanation to his father’s friend. He prepared his defense as a playwright imagines a scene, the dialogue flying back and forth between the characters, the hand gestures, the drama of emphasizing his words with soft words, then shouts, then silence.
No problem. I can explain it. The North American misunderstood or disregarded instructions.
Captain Madrano had always explained away his failures and mistakes. The students looked alike. The house numbers had been tampered with. One street looked like another. The man with the pistol and uniform had not looked like a real policeman. I’ll be more careful next time. Please do not shame my father and my family because of this insignificant and forgettable error. Please, for the honor of the army, forgive me…
If the other squad succeeds in executing the Communist family, Captain Madrano thought, all will be well. He could hear his impassioned speech to Colonel Quesada: “Gallucci’s blunder was unfortunate, but the Communists died. True, it was a quick death. It was not the justice I wanted to give them. But it is a step onward to victory of the fatherland!”
For two minutes, the men of the death squad stood in the street and waited as Captain Madrano stood motionless at the wreck, staring down at his error, mentally rehearsing the scene in which he would win the forgiveness of Colonel Quesada. The men glanced at their watches. They looked around at the darkness.
Unlike the police of San Salvador, the police of Los Angeles did not honor the extraordinary privileges of El Ejercito de los Guerreros Blancos. The men knew they faced arrest and a few days of jail. As their leaders had assured them, the administration would grant the squad immediate release — as in the murders of the North Americans in El Salvador — but the questions and publicity would be embarrassing.
They did not see the onrushing automobile until it neared them. For a moment, they stared.
Quietly, without lights, an automobile hurtled at them in reverse. The Salvadoran soldiers stared at the rear bumper and rear windows of the automobile.
Doubts restrained their reflex to fire. If the automobile had raced toward them directly, the soldiers would have raised their weapons and fired instantly.
But an attack in reverse? Four of their compatriots had departed only minutes ago. Could this be their friends returning for some reason? Then they realized the automobile had a different color and manufacturer than the vehicle their compatriots drove.
The Dodge braked suddenly. As the driver slammed the transmission into forward and smoked the tires with acceleration, the rear windows exploded outward.
A deafening auto weapon boomed. Glass floated in the air, a universe of tiny red stars as the cubes of tempered glass flashed with the red muzzle-flash of a weapon sweeping the standing Salvadorans.
As the Blancosraised their Uzis, as men dived for the shelter of graffitied walls and trash mounds, a storm of projectiles swept them. One of the gunmen twisted in the air as a pattern of high-velocity steel balls tore through his body. Another lurched and staggered as his through-and-through wounds spurted blood. Another fell screaming, his legs collapsing backward from multiple hits that shattered his knees and his leg bones.
The car screeched away. Slugs from the Blancos’Uzis sought it.
An explosion boiled upward. A wave of flame enveloped the dead Gallucci’s gasoline-drenched automobile. The soldiers heard a scream as Captain Madrano writhed on the asphalt in a hell of gasoline fire. Justice by fire lit the night.
32
Flat in the back seat, Lyons snapped a safety belt around his waist as Uzi slugs hammered the Dodge. Slugs hitting the trunk lid shrieked across the sheet steel and through the interior of the car to shatter the windshield.
Behind the car, he heard the pops of 40mm grenades killing the Blancos. An orange flash colored the darkness.
Blancanales lay flat in the front seat, his head below the level of the car’s windows. He did not steer the car. He only held the steering wheel straight as his foot kept the accelerator to the floor.
The bodywork’s steel, the spare tire and the seats protected both men from the lightweight 9mm bullets. Hurtling away from the wild auto-fire of the Blancosat sixty miles per hour, the Dodge swerved from curb to curb on the empty street of the desolated suburb until a front wheel went up a driveway. The undercarriage scraped concrete as the car jumped the curb. Bouncing across lawns, crashing through shrubbery, the car smashed into the arson-gutted frame of a house.
Ashes and stucco and framing fell. Unsnapping his safety belt, Lyons looked around. A fire-charred wall leaned on the front and one side of the Dodge. Tangled bushes screened them from the view of the Blancosa block behind them.
Lyons smelled gasoline. “Pol! Out of here!”
“You need help?” Blancanales asked as he kicked a door open.
“Not me, I thought…”
“Don’t think. Move. This car’s about to burn.”
Pushing aside boards and branches and sheets of stucco, they staggered to the lawn. Lyons scanned the street and other yards, his Atchisson on line. The gray dome of the sky cast a half-glow on the neighborhood. No one had pursued them.
The flaming hulk on the next block lit the street and house fronts. Silhouettes dashed from cover to cover. Wounded men clawed at the asphalt, pools of blood around them shimmering with flamelight.
Blancanales keyed his hand-radio. “Wizard. We’re out. Which way are they moving?”
“They’re not! What a crew of losers. They’re panicked and screaming.”
“We’re on our way…”
“Make distance!” Lyons hissed. “Here comes a distraction…”
Blancanales saw Lyons point his silenced Colt at the rear end of the Dodge. The jacketed slug sparked off the concrete foundation of the wrecked house, then the leaking gasoline roared.
Thrashing through shrubbery, they left the flames behind them. The gas tank exploded, a fireball churning into the night. They dropped low as the street went bright with the orange light.
Two Blancosran from the wild firefight. The moment of rising flame illuminated their sweat-shining, panicked faces. One man limped badly, his strides awkward. The second man ran past the first, made no effort to help his compatriot as the man’s wounded leg buckled.
The wounded man called out as he struggled to rise from the street. “Armando! Armando, ayudeme… ayude…”
Armando did not turn or slow in his sprint.
Lyons glanced to Blancanales. “Prisoners?”
“We’ll leave them for the police.” Blancanales let his borrowed CAR rifle hang on his shoulder as he sighted his Beretta.
Bursts of slugs tore Armando’s legs, a steel-cored 9mm shattering one knee, another low-powered 9mm breaking the shinbone
of the other leg. Lyons scored only one hit on the falling death-squadder, but the merciless .45 ACP hollowpoint exploded through the man’s thigh, the expanding disk of spinning metal decelerating in a microsecond to liberate 400 footpounds of shock force. Blood and muscle and bone sprayed from an exit wound three inches in diameter.
The limping man behind Armando took the next bursts, a .45 ACP ripping away a foot and breaking the other leg. Nine millimeter slugs from Blancanales’s selective-fire pistol punched through his knees.
Screaming, moaning, calling out in incomprehensible Spanish, the men thrashed on the sidewalk. Blancanales pulled lengths of prepared nylon cord from his pocket and started toward the wounded Blancos. Lyons jerked him back.
“Leave them. We don’t owe them any tourniquets. The more blood they lose, the less chance they’ll shoot the sheriffs when they get here — which will be in about one minute!”
Sprinting ahead, Lyons dodged from shadow to shadow. At the corner house, he dashed up porch steps and stood behind a brick column. Over the sights of his Atchisson, he surveyed the scene on the next block.
No Blancosexposed themselves. No auto-fire broke the sudden quiet. A scream rose, faded to a whine.
Blancanales joined him. As Lyons squinted into the shadows of a driveway — did he see a man moving, a car door opening — he heard Blancanales whisper into his hand-radio.
“We’re on the southwest corner. Where are they?”
A 40mm grenade cracked. No auto-fire answered. Blancanales whispered into the radio again. “Wizard!”
“Wait a second!” Gadgets answered. The radio went silent for a moment.
Lyons watched a driveway where the overspreading branches of a tree created a pocket of darkness. He saw a shadow move. Could it be only the rising and falling flames from the burning car?
Gadgets’s voice returned. “Dudes, I’m all tangled up in wires. I’m monitoring three radios and trying to kill people, too. I got to get an assistant…”
“What do you see?” Blancanales interrupted.
“I don’t see anything. But I’m hearing things. The goon squad’s forming up for a breakout, so watch out.”
Bracing the Atchisson against the column, the auto-shotgun’s sights on line with the tree’s night shadow, Lyons reached out with his left hand and pulled Blancanales’s radio close enough to transmit his whisper.
“You got the scanner on?”
“Most definitely! Sheriffs’ copter on the way. And they’re assembling superior firepower. They know they got something badhapp’nin’ in dis nadaland.”
“Talk English, will you!” Lyons told him.
“You English? I’m not. Why should I talk that talk?” Gadgets answered.
An engine revved. Lyons saw a car accelerate from the darkness of the driveway. He did not fire.
“Hold off, Politician,” Lyons cautioned his partner. The burning hulk in the center of the street blocked any straight-line escape. Keeping his right hand on the Atchisson’s pistol grip, his eyes on the car, Lyons found the uppermost pouch on his bandolier. He pulled out a seven-round magazine of one-ounce slugs.
A 40mm grenade missed the car, plopped inside the house. Then Gadgets fired three-shot bursts of 5.56mm slugs.
A side window shattered. The driver whipped a hard right turn, putting the flaming Dodge between his car and the unseen rifleman, then raced for the end of the block.
Fishtailing through the intersection in a floored-accelerator left turn, the escaping Blancoshurtled directly into Lyons’s and Blancanales’s weapons. In one long explosion of 12-gauge fury, Lyons full-autoed seven rounds of high-velocity steel through the windshield. He dropped the empty magazine and jammed in the magazine of slugs.
Blancanales scythed the interior with a line of alternating military and hollowpoint 5.56mm, all thirty slugs tearing through the interior.
As the careering, out-of-control car failed to hold its high-speed left turn through the intersection, Lyons pounded the car with semi-auto steel-cored slugs. A door panel collapsed inward, gore sprayed from the far side. The car passed only ten feet away. Lyons snapped two more slugs through the shot-out back window as the car full of dead and dying Guerreros Blancoscrashed into the house.
Lyons jumped from the porch. He crouched and aimed at the gas-tank filler cap. The slug tore through the sheet metal. He aimed the last slug lower, fired into the gas tank.
No flames came. Pocketing the emptied magazine, he reloaded. Left-handed, he took an MU-50G mini-grenade from his thigh pocket. Not taking his right hand from his Atchisson’s pistol grip, he stuck a finger through the cotter pin’s ring, jerked it free.
A sound came from inside the car. A groaning, a gasping. A wounded Blancotried to form words. Lyons called out: “Does it hurt? Don’t you like it?” He pitched the grenade under the wreck. “Go back to where you came from!”
As flames and choking black smoke rose into the gray night of Los Angeles, Lyons, Blancanales and Gadgets sped away.
33
Floyd Jefferson waited in the dark. As a game to keep himself awake, he listened to the sounds of the old hotel and the city outside. He heard the raspy breathing of Senor Rivera, asleep in a chair a few steps away, the long butcher knife clutched in his hand. The senora and the three girls slept in the bed, their arms around one another, the quiet sound of their breathing like distant waves. One of the girls moved and the old springs of the bed squeaked.
Startling awake, Senor Rivera straightened in his chair. The glow from the window revealed his look to Floyd. Floyd lifted his left hand in a mock salute. His right hand remained closed around the slick-tape grip of the sawed-off shotgun.
Letting his hearing travel the hotel, Floyd listened to the sounds of flushing toilets and faint voices. The solid brick walls blocked most of the hotel sounds. But outside the window, the noises of Los Angeles created a three-dimensional texture of late-night life.
A siren wailed. Floyd listened as it approached, growing louder, reverberating in the stone and glass canyons of the downtown boulevards, then fading as it continued away. He heard voices from the street, the screeching of tires, a blasting car radio.
Silence came, all the other sounds inexplicably absent. Small claws skittered on the steel of the fire escape outside. Shuddering, Jefferson looked toward the window. Rats.
He did not need to see them to imagine them. After five nights without sleep, the sounds of their claws created glowing rats on a giant fire escape in the theater of his mind.
Cool, kid. Be cool. You got worse than rats out there. Maybe. If his friends the “specialists” did their number, the goons would notbe out there.
Five days? Had it been that long? Two nights in Miami. The night before he and Mr. Holt planned to fly to Washington. The night in that traitor Prescott’s office. And tonight.
A few hours’ sleep in Miami. No sleep the night before Washington — thought I’d be making international news, couldn’t sleep thinking about that! No sleep the night at Prescott’s, not with the goon squad waiting. And tonight.
Maybe he could sleep on the plane. When Pol and Ironman and Wizard get back, everyone gets on a plane north, finds a place to hide out while they splash the newspapers with this story!
What a story. Jefferson looked at Senor Rivera. A proud, hard-working man. His grandfather a ladinopeddler. Traveled around selling things. His father a shopkeeper, kept his little store open dawn to midnight to pay his son’s way through college. Senor Rivera made it big. Lawyer, mayor of his town. Made the mistake of thinking the government really wanted land reform, to stop the Communist revolution by letting the farm workers and sharecroppers buy the land they had worked all their lives. An idealist. Land reform is the law, therefore he types up the forms and passes out the titles.
One bullet for him.
The senora and the girls. Four bullets for them.
Maybe even a bullet or two for me, thought Jefferson. Oh, boy. And I pay for it.
Horror-images flash
ed inside Jefferson’s head. Stop thinking about that!
Tapping his feet on the linoleum and humming an old Puerto Rican song his mother sang years before, Jefferson stroked the shotgun. The cold steel comforted him.
They can kill me, but they can’t hack me. At least, not while I’m alive. They won’t do to me like they did to Senor Rivera’s son.
Gouge out his eyes, hack up his body, carve off his balls and choke him to death with them. Choking to death on his own flesh.
The images came out of the darkness at Jefferson and he startled awake. Senor Rivera shook the young man. His face floated in the darkness as the Salvadoran whispered, “You slept…”
“Ah, thanks. No good… can’t sleep. No way. Not until we know…”
“Morning will come soon. Then we go to another place.”
Jefferson shook his head. “No, sir. By morning it’s over. One way or another.”
“Perhaps.”
Glancing at his watch, Jefferson saw that only forty-five minutes had passed since Prescott knocked on the door of the other room.
Talk about the long night of the soul.
Knocking broke the silence. The reporter bolted to his feet. His sneakers silent on the linoleum, he crept to the door. He had to listen for voices. If his friends had returned, if they had already eliminated the Guerreros Blancos, they would return to an empty room — because a minute after Blancanales had escorted Prescott downstairs, Jefferson, in a flash of inspiration, had run down to the desk clerk. If Prescott knew the address and room number of the Riveras, the Blancosdid also. Twenty dollars bought another room for the Riveras. With a bed. And without the stinking carpet.
Don’t want the Team to come back and find us all gone. A paranoid nightmare!
Putting his ear against the door, Jefferson listened. By force of habit, his right index finger stroked the not-quite-closed bolt of the shotgun. “Unlocked Carry,” Pol had called it.
