Final Target

by John Gilstrap

  Irene looked a little shocked. “Are you telling me this is beyond Mother Hen’s abilities?”

  “Oh, God no. Just maybe beyond her bandwidth. We’ve got a lot of moving parts in motion here.”

  Irene pocketed the memory stick. “I’ll let her poke at it a while longer. It’s hard for me to introduce outside data into the Bureau’s IT system.”

  Gail nodded feigned understanding. Maybe she’d overestimated Jonathan’s closeness to the director. “Okay, then what can you do about helping us get a boat and a driver?”

  It was Irene’s turn to chuckle. “I’m really glad that Dom was able to give me a leg up on that one,” she said. “The simple answer is that I can’t do anything.”

  Gail cocked her head. “In the same way that I’m not really here?”

  “In this case, I mean it a little more literally. It’s not like I have my own navy at my disposal.” There was a sparkle in her eye.

  “But you know someone who does?”

  Irene hedged. “Let’s just say that I know someone who knows someone.”

  Gail felt a pulse of annoyance. It was a bad time for coyness games. “Can he find a boat? And if he does, will he know how to run it?”

  “That, I don’t know,” Irene said. “But I am confident that he will give it his all.”

  Gail shifted in her seat. “Meaning no disrespect, ma’am, you’re making this more difficult that I think it needs to be. Can you help or can’t you? Do you know someone with the skills I need or don’t you?”

  “I do. He’s something of an untried asset in this circumstance. Thing is, he’s young. And he just got out of prison.”

  Gail just stared. She couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “Don’t you want to know what he was in prison for?”

  “Um, sure. Okay, what was he in prison for?”

  “Stealing things,” Irene said. “Many things. Things that are very difficult to steal.”

  “For example?”

  “Nope. Can’t tell you that.”

  “So, he stole stuff for you.”

  More hedging. “He stole things for his country.”

  Gail saw a few matching ends to tie. “Let me guess. He got himself arrested.”

  Irene pointed her finger as if it were a gun. “Bingo.”

  “So, he’s not very good at what he does.”

  Irene shook her head. Defensively. She clearly liked this guy, whoever he was. “That’s not fair. He probably trusted someone he shouldn’t have, but he’s young. He knows better now.”

  “So he’s working for you again?”

  “Absolutely not. He never did work for us.”

  “We’re splitting hairs again?”

  “Not in this case. He was completely freelance. I don’t even know if he worked exclusively for the good guys.”

  “Bullshit.”

  Irene grinned. “Okay, we strongly suspect that he worked only for us. And we pulled some strings to get his sentence shortened. But once he was out, he made it entirely clear that he was hanging up his thief spurs. He’s done.”

  Gail crossed her arms. “So, is he a potential asset for us or not?”

  Irene winced as a thought worked through her head. “It’s hard to say. Really, and I’m not being coy. We’d love to have him back on our team—under the same terms as you guys work for us—but the three times we’ve approached him, he hasn’t said just no, but hell no.”

  Gail rolled her eyes. Honest to God, she did not have time for this. “So, it’s no.”

  “Maybe. We keep an eye on him, and we have reason to believe that while he no doubt finds life on the outside better than life on the inside, the whole ex-con thing might not be cracked up to be all that he’d hoped.”

  “Please cut to the chase.”

  “The bottom line is this,” Irene said, shifting in her seat to match Gail’s bent-knee posture. “He won’t come back to us. But maybe he’ll go back into the business he’s good at. Once he reacquires a taste, we’re hoping he’ll consider a larger scale.”

  Gail weighed her options. At the moment, there weren’t any. “Okay, give me his address, and I’ll go talk to him. Is there anything I can offer him as a deal sweetener?”

  “By the time you make contact, we’ll have a few things in place for you. Oh, and not to tell you how to do your business, but you might not want to reach out to him directly. If he says hell no again, and he knows what you look like, that might be bad for you.”

  Again, no options. “We’re out of people, Director Rivers. I’ll have to wear a disguise or something.”

  “Your choice, of course,” Irene said. “But you might want to consider that he grew up in a pretty strict Catholic family.”

  The relevance escaped her for a few seconds. And then she got it. “Father Dom,” she said.

  * * *

  “Why didn’t you tell one of the adults?” Gloria was beyond furious when she found out that five of the children had taken off in the middle of the night. Jonathan watched her cautiously, ready to step in if she raised her voice. There wasn’t nearly enough real estate between them and the scene of last night’s goat rope.

  Tomás stood tall and looked Gloria straight in the eye. “I tried to talk them out of it,” he said. “They wouldn’t listen.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Gloria insisted. The other children were just beginning to stir in earnest and seemed to be dialing in to the confrontation one at a time.

  “Because they asked me not to,” Tomás responded. “Besides, it was late, and the night was still, and I was afraid that it would create an incident.”

  “What kind of incident?”

  “This kind,” Tomás said. “In the middle of the night, with all the younger children around, I thought it might grow out of control and endanger everyone. Scorpion said I did a nice job.”

  Gloria spun on Jonathan. “And who gave you the right?”

  Jonathan held up his hands. This was not his fight. Yet.

  “Where did they go?” Gloria asked.

  “To the Gabays’ house. They thought they would be safer there.”

  Gloria reared back. “That’s madness!”

  “That’s what I told them. They would not listen. They wanted me to go with them, but I said no. Scorpion is taking us to America.”

  Gloria looked at Jonathan with wide eyes. “America?”

  He shrugged. To his immediate right, he heard Boxers growl.

  “We have to go get those children,” Gloria said.

  “We’re not doing that,” Jonathan replied. He could almost feel the wave of relief pouring off of Big Guy.

  “But they’re in the jungle. They might be hurt.”

  “They were safe, and they chose to leave,” Jonathan said. “I’m sorry, but they are not my responsibility. I have no authority over anyone who does not want to stay. We talked about this already.”

  Jonathan changed his stance to address the larger crowd. “I hope you all are paying attention,” he said. “I will do everything I can to protect all of you, but only if you want my protection. Stay close, do what I say, and we’ll all get out of this just fine. Do something stupid like your friends did, and you pay for your own consequences.”

  Gloria seemed near tears. “But what about Hugo and Mia and Tia and—”

  “You are perfectly welcome to chase after them if you wish,” Jonathan said. “I will not—cannot—stop you.”

  He understood that he’d flipped the deck on her and put her in a spotlight that made her uncomfortable, but these were important lessons that needed to be learned. Quickly.

  Gloria’s face showed everything as she explored her options. The fear was there, and so was the embarrassment.

  “There’s nothing wrong with choosing survival over the alternative,” Jonathan said. “There’s never shame in living.”

  Gloria didn’t move. It seemed clear to Jonathan that she’d made up her mind to stay with him, but she didn’t know how to transition a
way from her indignation.

  “Can you make sure the children are ready to travel?” Jonathan asked. “To the degree that it’s possible, bind things or tie them down so we get as little rattle as we can.”

  She blinked.

  “Now, please,” Jonathan said, taking care to smile.

  Gloria gave a quick nod and then went to work corralling kids. And she did it quietly.

  “Hey, Tomás. Can we speak with you for a second?” Jonathan said.

  “We?” Boxers said.

  “Shh.”

  From his gait, it was clear that Tomás didn’t know what to expect. He moved hesitantly, casting looks over both shoulders, though Jonathan wasn’t sure why. “Yes, sir?”

  Jonathan put his arm around the kid’s shoulders and nudged him away from the others. “Big Guy and I need to talk to you privately.” He led Tomás fifteen yards away from the bustle of the others breaking camp.

  When they pulled to a stop, Jonathan changed his grip on the boy’s shoulders and positioned him at arm’s length. “Swear that you will tell me the truth.”

  “I swear it.”

  “You disappoint me,” Jonathan said. “You overheard something you weren’t supposed to be listening to. You promised not to share it, but then you shared it, anyway. I want to trust you, and you want to be treated like a man. Your actions make both of those things very difficult.”

  Tomás shifted his eyes to the ground. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t know—”

  “Sorry is too easy a word, son. We don’t know how it will end for those other boys and girls—maybe we never will. But you need to understand that if you’d kept your promise, they’d still be here. At least for now.”

  “Jesus, Boss,” Boxers said in English.

  Jonathan’s words landed on Tomás with the desired effect. The boy looked humiliated, ready to cry.

  “Now,” Jonathan said, “you need to suck it up and move on. What’s done is done. But learn from this.”

  Tomás nodded. “I will.”

  “And never lie to me again.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Jonathan held his gaze for a few seconds, then extended his hand. “What’s done is done,” he said.

  Tomás seemed grateful. He shook Jonathan’s hand.

  “Now, I have a question for you,” Jonathan said.

  Tomás’s face lit up.

  “Tell me about Saint Agnes. What’s your story? How did you end up here?”

  CHAPTER 12

  Tomás Rabara had been only twelve years old when Alejandro Azul’s thugs forced their way into his house in the middle of the night with their guns and their knives and their shouting. He’d been asleep when they arrived, and his first true awareness of the attack had come when the thugs threw open his bedroom door and dragged him out of his bed by his hair.

  In the fuzzy blur that remained of that memory, he could hear his fourteen-year-old brother crying and begging for help from the bed next to his. He heard his older sister screaming, her voice adding to the chorus already being sung by his mother.

  “Ow! Stop!” he remembered yelling to the men as their hold on his hair tightened even more and they dragged him across the length of the house and into the front yard. His mother and father were in the street by the time Tomás became aware of his surroundings. They’d stripped his father naked. They’d pressed him against the pavement, and they were binding his hands with duct tape. Tomás’s mother screamed for mercy, and one of the thugs hit her and said something that made the others laugh.

  Then Tomás was thrown onto his stomach, and they taped his hands behind his back. And then they taped his ankles and his knees, and they propped him up against the brick post that defined the beginning of his driveway in the suburban neighborhood, which always reminded him of the neighborhood where Elliott lived in that old American movie E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial.

  Some neighbors tried to go back to their homes, but the thugs wouldn’t let them.

  In memory, time was a blur of noise and sound and pain. He remembered seeing neighbors gathered around and the cartel murderers yelling at them about setting an example.

  He could no longer see his mother, but he heard her screaming and pleading from behind him, inside the house. He thought he heard his sister, too.

  He looked around, and there sat his older brother, Fulo, similarly trussed, but his face was an empty mask. He just stared into the night.

  The men who attacked them were clustered in the street, and they talked about betrayal and the high price it brought. The man who talked for the group—Tomás later came to know him as Alejandro Azul himself—told the crowd to accept what they were about to see as an example of what would happen to them if they committed the same crime as Pedro Rabara.

  From where he sat, Tomás could not see the center of the crowd, could not see his father. But he could hear his voice as he pleaded for mercy—not just for himself but for his family. He did not deny doing whatever he had been accused of. In fact, he promised never to do it again if Mr. Azul would give him just one more chance.

  Tomás struggled to stand, but they’d tied him in such a way that he could not find his balance.

  The crowd shifted and a murmur rumbled through it as more people tried to get away, but they stopped when a ripple of three rifle shots split the night.

  “Stand still and watch!” yelled Alejandro Azul.

  “No, please!” his father yelled. “Please no! Please!” The yell became a shriek, and the crowd surged backward as the night filled with the stench of burning gasoline. Tomás still could not see the flames, but he saw their glare and the horrifying dancing shadows that they threw through the night.

  And his father’s screams. Oh, God, the screams.

  “Shoot him!” someone yelled from the crowd. “Have some decency.”

  But the shrieking continued, and a new stench combined with the smell of burning fuel.

  And then the shrieking stopped.

  Tomás’s world stopped.

  Even as the flames continued to burn and the stink continued to roll over him.

  “Where are the sons?” Alejandro shouted to the crowd.

  The neighbors who had been crowded in front of him—the neighbors at whose houses he had dined, and with whose children he had played—parted and pointed. “Here they are,” one of them said.

  Through the opening between and around legs, he saw the flaming remains of his father’s body, the truck tire they’d wrapped around his shoulders still clearly visible in the inferno.

  Then legs filled his field of vision. He noticed the high gloss on the man’s shoes and the sharp crease in his trousers. The man stopped in front of Tomás’s bound bare feet. “Do you know who I am?” the man asked.

  Tomás said nothing. He stared at the shoes. He watched as one of those shoes pressed slowly but heavily on Tomás’s exposed toes. The pain shot all the way up to his knee.

  “I asked you a question,” the man said.

  “Alejandro Azul,” Tomás said quickly. He remembered shouting it, actually.

  The man lifted his shoe, and the pain went away.

  “Is it true that you are the Rabara boys?”

  An unseen fist seemed to grab Tomás’s guts from the inside and twist them. He nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Sir.”

  “What about this one?” Azul asked, tossing his chin toward Fulo.

  “Yes, sir. He’s my brother.”

  “Can he not speak?”

  “S-sometimes,” Tomás said. “He gets nervous.”

  “Then let’s end his misery,” Azul said. A pistol appeared in his hand, and from a distance of less than five feet, he fired a bullet through Fulo’s face.

  Tomás yelled, and he tried again to run but could only roll to his side. That effort drew a stunning kick to his tailbone that somehow sent a bolt of pain through his whole body. He howled and arched his back against it.

  Azul grabbed a fistful of the front of his pajama top and pulled him to a s
itting position, then nailed him there by kneeling on the boy’s thighs.

  Azul’s face was so close to his own that it was hard to focus on his features. The man’s breath smelled of mouthwash.

  “It’s a shame that a family must bear the burden of the father’s sins,” Azul whispered. “Your father is dead because he betrayed me. Your brother is dead because he was the oldest son. Your mother and sister will be dead after my men are done with them.”

  Tomás’s heart felt like it might bruise itself beneath his ribs. He closed his eyes, awaiting his bullet.

  “But you will live,” Azul said. “Someone must carry to others the news of the suffering that comes to those who cross me.” He paused. “Open your eyes.”

  Tomás willed himself to comply.

  “I have friends who tell me that small mercies such as this are foolish,” Azul said. His tone was even softer than before. “They say that to leave a son alive is to invite revenge in the future. Do you believe this to be true?”

  Tomás could not find his voice. He shook his head.

  Azul climbed off the boy’s legs and pointed to his father’s still flaming corpse. “This is a terrible way to die, isn’t it?” he asked.

  Tomás sensed that the man wanted a real answer, so he forced his vocal cords to work. “Yes.”

  Azul grabbed Tomás’s head by both ears, and he twisted them hard, eliciting the yelp that he no doubt sought. “There are worse ways, however. And if I ever hear the slightest rumor that you are coming for me, you will learn all about them. Do you understand?”

  “I—I understand,” Tomás whimpered.

  “Try not to feel too bad about all of this,” Azul said as he stood. “We are all dogs in search of masters. Now you have found yours. If I let you live, do you promise to be a good boy?”

  Tomás nodded.

  “Say it.”

  The boy made a point of memorizing every detail of Azul’s face—the scar on his cheek, the creases around his gaunt mouth—as he croaked out his answer. “Yes, I promise,” he said.

  “To be a good boy,” Azul pressed.