by Mark Parragh
CHAPTER 41
After they took Swift away, they pulled a bag over Crane’s head and cut him loose from the chair. But they left the zip ties on his wrists, and they didn’t notice the knife he’d slid partially up his sleeve.
Two men led Crane downstairs, across a tile-floored room, and out a side door. Crane felt sunlight and breeze on his skin.
“What the hell’s going on?” one of them asked as they walked.
“I don’t know,” said the other one. “They just left. Esteban’s gone. Nobody knows where Tate is. This is fucked up.”
One of them walked at Crane’s side, guiding him by his right arm. The other one sounded like he was a few feet ahead, to Crane’s left.
“Where you want to take him?” the one at his side asked.
“Outside the wall. He won’t want it in the yard.”
Crane fingered the knife, feeling the button that would trigger the blade. Tate didn’t want another body dumped on his lawn. He supposed it was reassuring somehow that Tate still worried about the landscaping after the chaos of the previous night. Though he wondered why Tate wasn’t here himself to threaten and gloat. He’d have thought Tate would want to pull the trigger himself.
They were taking him to the same gate he’d used last night, he realized. Now he could picture the surroundings. He heard the metal gate creak open, and then the hand on his arm turned him and shoved him through the gap in the wall. The man who had been guiding him would be directly behind him, positioned in the narrow doorway.
Now.
Crane dropped the knife into his hand and thumbed the button. The blade snapped out, and Crane sliced through the zip tie at his wrists. He yanked his wrists free and whirled, raising the knife, thrusting at chest level behind himself. He felt the impact of the point driving into flesh, and then the surprised gasp. He yanked the knife free and fell away to his right.
Crane hit the dirt and rolled over his shoulder. He whipped the bag off his head. The man behind him was staggered, blood spreading through his white cotton shirt. The other one, in front, had been surprised and was only now raising an automatic pistol. Crane sprang at him, leading with the knife, and tackled him before he got off a shot. They fell in the dirt and struggled for a moment, until Crane plunged the knife between his ribs and into his heart.
He ripped the pistol from the dying man’s hand, rolled over, and saw the first man staggering toward him, trying to draw his own gun from his belt. Crane shot him.
Then he lay there, forcing his breathing to slow. He kept the pistol trained on the gateway, but no one appeared to investigate the gunshot. They’d been expecting one.
Crane was outside the stone and plaster wall that partially surrounded the hacienda. He lay on a grassy slope where the builders had brought in fill dirt to level the site. Behind him were the pine woods where he could easily evade pursuit. Beyond the gateway were heavily armed cartel soldiers. But that was also where he would find his weapons, the radio he needed to summon help, and Jason Tate.
The dead man he’d taken the pistol from had another magazine in his pocket, and the other one had dropped a revolver. Crane took that as well and then edged up to the gateway and looked across the manicured lawn to the house. Surprisingly, he saw no one. He sprinted across the grass to the wall beside the door they’d taken him out through. He peered through a window and saw a spacious kitchen with stainless steel appliances and glass-fronted cabinets. Again, there was nobody there.
The door opened easily, and Crane slipped into the kitchen. He’d been through the other side of the house when he’d slipped in last night. But he’d been blind when his two would-be killers had taken him out this way. He remembered turning right into the kitchen after about a dozen steps down a tiled hallway. Carpeted stairs up to the second floor where the guest rooms were.
Swift probably knew the layout better than he did. Where had they taken her? He moved quietly to the door into the hallway. It was empty, but he heard footsteps and slipped back out of sight. A few moments later, two men hurried past, both carrying large Louis Vuitton suitcases. Whatever was in them was heavy. They passed by without looking into the kitchen and disappeared around a corner.
Crane went the other way and found pantries, a laundry room, and an electrical panel with breakers for the house’s circuits as well as the alarms and security lights. Normally, that would be quite a useful discovery, but Crane wasn’t planning to be here that long, and the time for subtlety had long passed.
He headed back the other way down the hall and nearly collided with a stocky woman in a gray maid’s uniform. She shrieked, and Crane caught her wrist and spun her, twisting her arm behind her back. He showed her the gun, and her eyes went wide.
“Please!” she cried.
“What’s going on?” he demanded. “Where is everybody?”
“I don’t know,” she gasped. “Everyone is leaving. They say Esteban sent them to the airplanes.”
“Who’s Esteban?”
“The narco boss. Most of them are gone. The rest just work for Mr. Tate, like me. Please.”
“I’m not going to hurt you,” said Crane. “What about Tate?”
“He stays,” she said. “There’s someone coming. He’s to meet them.”
“The woman with blue hair. Take me to her, and I’ll let you go.”
She nodded. “I know where they took her.”
Crane let her lead the way, holding her arm and keeping her in front of him. She took him through a dining room to another guest wing, separated from the main living areas. They walked up a flight of stairs and to the end of a hall where she nodded toward a closed door. Crane noticed it had heavy hinges and close clearances to the metal frame. It was reinforced metal behind a wooden facade, he realized. There was no lock on the handle, but there was a separate deadbolt.
“Do you have the key?”
She took a ring from her pocket and fumbled nervously with a key before the deadbolt clicked back.
Crane moved her around him while still gripping her wrist with his left arm. With his gun hand, he pushed the handle down, and then kicked the door open.
Inside was a bare room with a tile floor and barred windows. In the center was a heavy wooden chair, and behind it, pointing a pistol at him, was Swift. She quickly lowered the gun as she recognized Crane.
“Why, John! How lovely to see you again.”
She came around the chair, and Crane saw blood on her T-shirt. “Don’t worry, it’s not mine,” she said. Then she tossed the gun away. “And that’s empty, anyway.”
Crane stepped in, pulling the maid behind him. He noticed two bloody bodies piled in a corner. The maid gasped in horror.
“Looks like you’ve got things under control,” he said.
“Oh, sure. I just couldn’t get out.”
“This is a lot more secure than the place where they kept me,” he observed.
“Jason’s a lot more afraid of me. And he’s right to be. Shall we go? Is she coming?”
Crane shook his head and released the maid. Then he and Swift headed back toward the main areas of the house. She noted the revolver in Crane’s belt and said, “How thoughtful of you. May I?”
Crane handed her the gun. “You sure that’s not overkill?” he asked. “You know, given how much more intimidating you are?”
She opened the cylinder to check the load and then snapped it shut again. “Don’t be peevish, John. It’s not attractive. And it’s my reach that scares him, not my combat prowess. If you need a handicap, you’ll notice you’ve got the automatic. I’ve only got four shots here.”
At an intersection, she turned a corner without hesitation and led him down a short hallway to a closed door.
“Where are we going?” Crane asked.
“To get your things. They let me look them over before I went up to talk to you.”
She opened the door, and then Crane heard her sharp intake of breath. She whipped up the revolver and fired two shots into the room.
“Come on,” Swift said quietly. She led the way into the room, and they closed the door.
“Put a chair against that,” she said. Then she stalked into the middle of the room with the revolver leveled.
They were in a living room in a wing of the house opposite the one where Tate lived. A huge bay window looked out past the front foyer and across the lawn to the garage. The furnishings were very expensive, hand-carved wood and coffee-colored leather. And two of Tate’s staff lay wounded on the floor.
She strode quickly to the nearer of them. He was reaching for an MP-5 submachine gun on the floor.
“No!” she said, as if scolding a puppy that had done its business on the carpet. She put her foot on the gun. “Your things are in the hutch over there,” she called over her shoulder.
Crane opened the cabinets and found his pack with his equipment laid out on top of it. The weapons were useful enough, but the main thing was the radio set. He pulled the headset on and switched it to the backup frequency Jessie Diamond had given him. It was a lot to ask that she was still nearby and listening on that frequency, but it was what he had.
“Zookeeper, this is Ocelot,” he murmured. “Come in, Zookeeper. You out there?”
He spotted a heavy wood and velvet chair in the corner and hauled it to the door. But so far nobody had come in response to the shots. It was strange, he thought. It was as if nobody knew what to do now, so they were either panicking or just pretending everything was normal.
“Crane!” said Jessie’s voice in his headset. “Crane, is that you? Are you okay?”
“I’ve been better, but I’m okay. It looks like the airstrip here is clear. Can you get here?”
“I’m staged about forty minutes away. Wheels up in five. Are you okay until then?”
Crane confirmed that his F2000 appeared to be in working order and checked the ammo load. “Yeah, things have quieted down. If we’re lucky, I’ll have a passenger for you.”
“Looking forward to it,” said Jessie, and Crane heard her starting up the Short’s engines. “Be ready to dust off in forty-five. Zookeeper out.”
Crane put his MHS pistol in his belt in place of the .45 and closed the hutch.
“So you’re still after Jason?” said Swift. She’d knelt down to retrieve the MP-5 and held it in one hand with the revolver still ready in the other. The two men lay still, looking up at her in fear.
“That was the plan,” said Crane. “Is that going to cause problems between us?”
“Not a one,” she said. “It’s not like he’s on my Christmas list, and it will drive Turnstone to distraction.”
“Turnstone?”
“Major player in Team Kilo,” she said with a broad smile. “See, you’re learning things already! I’m in the process of reducing him to ashes. So let’s go find Jason.”
She turned back to the nearer of the two wounded men lying on the floor.
“Where can we find Jason Tate?”
The man shook his head. “I don’t know.”
Swift shot him in the chest.
Crane flinched in surprise, and the other man screamed. Then he trembled as Swift turned to him.
“But I bet you know, don’t you?” she said sweetly.
The man stammered and trembled. “Please,” he said, “please.”
Crane was going to protest, but then, through the sweeping picture window, he saw one of the garage bay doors pivot upward. A brightly colored desert rally truck roared out on huge, knobby tires. Crane caught a glimpse of the driver before the truck fishtailed onto the gravel drive and sped away. It was Jason Tate.
Swift was looking out the window now as well. “Never mind,” she said to the terrified man on the floor. “Found him.”
Then she stood up and hurried toward the far door. “They keep some ATVs around the back,” she said. “Follow me!”
CHAPTER 42
Crane opened up the ATV’s throttle and sped down the access road toward the front gate. Swift was about fifty feet ahead, checking over her shoulder to see what was keeping him.
They shot through the gate and headed down the gravel road. The dust Tate’s truck had kicked up was still settling.
Swift was a capable rider. She kept up an almost reckless pace, and Crane fell in beside her. They whipped around the first switchback in a shower of gravel and raced down a long straight that gradually descended down the mountainside.
They reached another sharp reverse, and Swift signaled for a stop. “We’ll never catch him this way!” she shouted as Crane stopped alongside. She pointed down the steep slope to where the road passed by. It was a forbidding run of scree and tree trunks. Crane gave it a dubious look.
“How bad do you want him?” she shouted. Then she gunned the engine and veered off the road. Crane watched her slide down the slope, the ATV’s wheels throwing off tiny avalanches of loose stone as she skidded around a pine tree.
If she could do it, then so could he, Crane told himself. He spurred the ATV forward and went over the edge of the road with a stomach-jarring drop. It was as much a fall as a controlled descent. He fought to keep the ATV under control, remembering how notoriously easy they were to roll. Ahead of him, he saw Swift gun the engine and slew her ATV sharp to the left as she bounced onto the road. A moment later, Crane followed suit. He let out a breath and sped after her.
He could still see dust in the air ahead, heavier here. They were closer. Then he caught a flash of movement in the distance as they cleared a rise in the road, and he recognized the truck. It had probably been hand built from the ground up, with a fiberglass skin of a body over a welded tube frame. It was fast too, he realized as they lost sight of it again. Tate might be a worthless human being, but Crane had to admit he was a good driver. Even after Swift’s shortcut, they were going to have a hard time catching him.
Crane glanced down the mountainside and saw the road coming back below. Another switchback ahead. He assessed the slope between him and that stretch of road. It wasn’t appealing, but he’d survived one run down a slope like this.
He pulled up alongside Swift and shouted, “Get close! Pressure on him!”
She grinned and nodded, and then took off as Crane slowed and looked for the best place to descend the slope.
There, he thought. Below, the road bent around a rock outcrop. It would hide him, especially if Swift was giving Tate something else to worry about. And there was a spot where the road crested a small rise and then sloped more sharply down for a few hundred feet. It would do, he decided, if he could get there in time.
Crane guided the ATV over the edge and started down the slope, more carefully this time. The trees had been thinning out as they descended toward the desert floor, but the scree was especially loose here, and he felt the rear wheels trying to slide out. He steered into it and released the throttle, letting gravity do the work. In the distance, he heard engines and then a burst of gunfire from Swift’s MP-5.
Crane bounced and rattled down the slope, carefully steering into the skids as the wheels sent stone skittering down the mountainside. As he reached the road, he heard another burst of gunfire. He got off and quickly pushed the ATV across the road, looking back up at the bend and rise and choosing his spot.
When he found it, he aimed the handlebars at the crest of the rise. He left the ATV running and ran to the outcrop. From there, he could see the truck coming closer, Tate driving like a madman. He caught a glimpse of Swift close behind him now. She fired another burst at the truck. There was no way she could aim—Crane was surprised she could stay on the road at that speed while steering with one hand and shooting with the other. But she was definitely giving Tate something to think about.
Crane ran back to the ATV. He stood beside it, leaning over to hold the handlebars, and raced the engine. As Tate’s truck came around the outcrop, Crane had the revs up at the redline. He pu
t the ATV into gear and ran with it as it accelerated forward. It quickly outpaced him, and Crane let it go, sending it flying like a rocket straight into the front of the truck.
Tate must have seen just a flash of color coming at him in the corner of his eye. He instinctively veered away an instant before the ATV slammed hard into the forward quarter of the driver’s side with a sickening crunch. The truck went off the road, skidding up the rocky grade Crane had just come down.
For an instant, it seemed Tate might manage to keep control of the truck as it fishtailed through the loose stone. Then the back end slammed into a pine tree and the truck slewed sideways. The tires caught, and the truck rolled up onto two wheels for a moment and then went over. It rolled once and then a second time as it tumbled back down toward the road.
Crane watched it roll as Swift braked to a stop beside him. The truck ended up on its roof in the middle of the road, the front end facing back toward them. They ran to the wreck. A roll like that in the middle of the Baja 1000 wouldn’t be all that remarkable, Crane expected. The bodywork was a lot less shiny, but he expected the frame and a racing harness would have protected Tate.
As they approached, Tate pulled himself free of the wreck, crawling out onto the gravel on his back. He saw Crane coming and reached back into the truck. Swift stopped and raised her MP-5.
“Don’t shoot,” Crane shouted. “I need him!”
Tate brought out a scarred AK-74, twisting his torso toward Crane. The muzzle caught on the doorframe, and he was still trying to aim the rifle one-handed when Crane kicked it away. The rifle clattered off the bodywork and tumbled away as Crane bent down to catch Tate’s arm and haul him out of the truck.
He dragged Tate to his feet. Tate yanked his arm free and threw a wild haymaker that Crane sidestepped.
“Going to have to do better than that,” he said.
Tate shook off the effects of the crash and took a deep breath. He gave Crane an unconvincing grin and shook one hand at him. “Yeah, yeah, it’s all right.”
