Then he heard it.
Bears don’t rack shotguns.
She was close enough to see the black rifles in the men’s green hands, slung forward from the hip, a wide strap over their shoulders. Lewis must have seen it too, even without night-vision. The two men were on the road, starlight glinting off the windshield of the van behind them, dash lights showing the driver’s body, knuckles on the steering wheel.
Fire leaped from the rifles in Lewis’s direction. Fully automatic weapons, she couldn’t guess the number of shots. His shotgun boomed once. She took aim and emptied her magazine. One of the men went down, but the other swung his machine gun toward her. She saw the fire sweeping in an arc coming her way and threw herself behind a log. The goggles came off when she went down. Branches rained on her back as bullets tore the forest apart. The second machine gun started firing again. She had only wounded the man.
She ejected the spent magazine but was afraid to lift her hip to get at the spare strapped to her leg.
The curtain of bullets dropped lower, found the log and ripped it apart. She pushed harder into the earth, pressing a cheek into the ground, making herself flat. Something dug into her face, needles piercing skin, her flesh on fire. A goddamned cactus. She took it, eyes watering, chewing her tongue to keep from screaming.
A break in the clatter of machine guns, silence, the shower of twigs and branches stopped. Then magazines snapping into place. She rolled, snatched the extra clip on her thigh, and slapped it into place. She armed the pistol and lifted it above her head, the butt on the ruins of the log. She fired without looking. She got off she didn’t know, eight, ten rounds, and Lewis’s shotgun exploded twice—he was alive!—before the machine guns started again.
It sounded closer. One of them was walking toward her. She was sorry she’d given her position away wasting bullets.
She tilted the barrel at where the shooter would stand when he came to finish her. She might be able to fire once.
Behind her a rifle cracked. More shots. Breaking glass.
It was Serena with a hunting rifle.
The machine gun fire lifted, hitting branches higher on the trees. One gun stopped. Then the other. She heard the van’s doors opening and looked up to see a man pushing another man inside, then closing the door behind him. The van backed away fast, tail lights lighting the road and making trees glow red. A gun fired from the passenger window, two, three bursts. She dropped behind the remains of her log. When she lifted her head again the van was pulling a K-turn right before the arroyo. One knee bent, both hands on her pistol, she used her last rounds. Metal pinged down there. Glass cracked. Then the van was gone.
“Denise?” Lewis’s shadow stepped from the forest onto the starlit pan of the hard clay road.
“I’m good. You?”
“Standing and breathing. I think you hit one.”
“I know I did. Did you hear what they said right before they fired?”
“‘The lawyer put us in a trap.’”
“I told Marcy Thornton if they came out here again they’d find me. She must have forgot to pass that along.”
Serena showed them the bullet holes through Hunter Hayes and Kellie Pickler posters in her girls’ bedroom at the end of the trailer, the last room down the hall from the kitchen. She tugged a mattress off the box spring and put her finger in a tear, a bullet inside.
“Javier may feel guilty for what happened to you, Denise. It makes no more sense than blaming yourself for not saving Miguel. Javier was two hundred miles away. If he’d been there, you would have watched your brother dying next to your boyfriend.” She ripped off the posters, revealing the holes in the home’s metal wall, the pink insulation inside. “But my daughters don’t owe you anything. What do I tell them about why someone shot up where they sleep?”
“I’m sorry, Serena.”
“Javier’s even now, comprende?” Her looks softened. “You’ve got cactus in your face. Follow me.”
In a bathroom, Serena ordered Aragon to hold still as she used a tweezer to pull cactus spines from her cheek. Then she told them to leave, she’d clean up, get new posters from town, lie to the girls she’d redecorated their room as a surprise. She’d plug the walls with extra insulation and find something for a patch.
But it wouldn’t work. The girls would want their own posters and take down Mom’s. They’d see the holes and ask and she’d have nothing to say.
Aragon used the house’s landline to report the shooting to her sergeant, then the Sheriff’s Office. There was only one way out of the canyon, the interstate. Travelling east or west, a van with the windshield shot out should be easy to find. She asked her sergeant to get someone at the gate to Silva Enterprises just in case the van got through.
Next she called Rivera’s cell. She needed help she couldn’t get elsewhere. He didn’t answer. She called twice more and settled for voicemail. As she was leaving a message, his number showed as an incoming call.
“Where are you?” she asked.
“I was sleeping. I left my phone in the living room. Sorry it took so long to answer.”
She told him about the fire fight. “Machine guns, Tomas. We don’t have anything to match that.”
“We do. But we don’t have a SWAT team on standby. It’s a volunteer crew in the Santa Fe office. I’ll call them out and get over to Silva’s place. Can you meet me there? We’re getting the forensics on Cassandra Baca. Some things we really must consider.”
“I’m in the truck. Lewis is heading to the office. Our sergeant wants him to brief the chief in person.”
“But you’re okay? Nobody hurt?”
“One of them is wounded. My sister-in-law is pissed. Lewis is talking to his wife, asking about his girls. I’m still shaking. A machine gun is a very scary thing, Tomas. There’s nothing you can do but wait to die.”
They found more holes in the mobile home. All the lights on now, even in the barns and bunkhouses. In the wooden deck and stairs at the front door, bullets had splintered steps and railings. The picture window had almost been blown out, three holes near the bottom left corner. An inch higher and Serena would have had shattered glass all over her living room.
With her back to the house, Aragon looked down the straight stretch of road to where the van had been close to two hundred yards away. Serena had fired from the porch. The sound of breaking glass, she’d hit the windshield, the scope worthless at night, using starlight to aim.
“We should stay,” Lewis said. “Down around the bend where she won’t see. At least till dawn.”
“We should stay until Javier gets back. But she won’t let us.”
The damn steering wheel had been slippery with blood. Now the blood was sticky and messed up his phone’s screen.
He didn’t like using his personal cell phone so soon after a job. Bullshit there were no records somewhere that would put him close just by turning on the phone. And somebody, somewhere was listening, recording everything said. You talked about these things with only people you trusted, face to face, no one else around, with lots of machinery screaming or deep in the woods.
Nothing like this had happened before. Benny needed to know.
Rigo said, “I’m an hour out. Junior’s dead. Abel just died next to me. I’ll be driving my Olds. The van’s shot to shit.” The phone slipped from his hand. He found it in his lap, blood pooled under his balls: Junior’s from when he got killed driving the van slowly behind him and Abel. One rifle shot through the windshield. Going in at his Adam’s apple, tearing all those veins and arteries when it blew out the back of his neck.
Benny’s voice down there with the blood, asking, “Junior and Abel?” Rigo brought the wet phone to his ear, hoping it wouldn’t short out. “Yeah, both of them. That lawyer, she’s dead next. Make sure the gate’s open.”
Twenty-six
Benny went out front to unlock th
e gate. None of the businesses around here were open this late. But cars were parked across the street. A black panel truck drove past. He saw its brake lights before it went dark at the end of the block. Then a light blinked inside. No doors opened. No one got out.
Marcy Thornton had led them into an ambush? She had assets like that? Not likely. Those cars across the street, the black truck, it was police. She was working with them and knew what was waiting at the outfitter’s ranch.
He checked the monitors in the room Abel had built, seeing more cars at the back of the lot, a man getting out, walking up to the chain-link fence, rattling it, looking in.
He went out front and locked the gate he’d just opened.
In his office, he got Rigo on the phone. There’s cops everywhere. I don’t want the gate open, give them an invitation. You’ll be okay. They’re looking for the van. Flash your lights to let me know it’s you, then hit the gas. I’ll open and close fast. Drive straight back to the hangar.
The police would be watching all the time now. That had never happened before. Maybe they were outside his house, too. And Rigo’s. And Abel’s. They’d notice he wouldn’t be coming and going. Abel Jr., the school would report him truant.
The future in those two, gone. No one to take over the business, all he and Rigo had built. He sat in the security room, the black and white images of the gate, the fence, the street, and the police cars. Abel’s notebook there, he’d been studying on how to do the job better, learning so much from the television shows that showed real cases.
None of that he’d ever use.
Benny Silva ripped pages from the notebook and fed them into the shredder in his office. Above him was the painting of the conquistadors massacring Indians, his Spanish sword on the wall above his desk.
He wanted Marcy Thornton to see that sword shining, him flipping it back and forth, reflected light in her eyes making her bring a hand up. But she couldn’t. Rigo would be holding her, her shirt undone showing the ribs and tit over her heart.
Rigo bringing in two dead bodies. Then what? They couldn’t do funerals, no way to explain how Abel and Junior got shot. The cops would figure out it had been Rigo blowing past them. After that they’d stop any car leaving the gate with some excuse, maybe have dogs to tell them what was in the trunk.
It would be nice if they could sneak Abel and Junior out so they could be buried somewhere secret. He and Rigo could visit them, maybe once a year on this very day.
But that wasn’t going to happen.
Benny went through the door at the back of his office, staying inside the buildings and fences screening him from the cops on the street. He went to the hangar at the back of the lot. El Puerco needed time to warm up.
Aragon tapped on the window. Rivera reached up and covered the dome light in the panel truck he was using as his command post. She got in next to him. The gate to Silva’s place was down the street and closed.
“Hey,” Rivera said.
She’d expected more. “Anything?”
“Benny or his brother came out,” Rivera said. “Jiggled the lock, cover to look around. He knows we’re here.”
She lifted a water bottle from the console. “I’m really thirsty. Like I ran ten miles in the sun. Drained. I’ve never been so scared.”
He kept his eyes on the windshield. She waited for something from him.
“At least I didn’t shit my pants,” she said.
The water was good, really good. Something in it. Citrus and sugar.
“We’ve got all approaches covered, between us and SFPD,” Rivera said. “There’s a team out back. Still no sign of the van. State Police has choppers over the interstate.”
She took another swig. “Any reports from ERs?” What was that on her tongue?
“Nobody coming in with gunshot wounds. How do you know you hit someone?”
“I saw them go down. They got back up firing. Those goddamn machine guns. I don’t ever want to face that again. But the way they dropped, I hit something critical. Look.”
A brown car, older American model, turned onto the street, moving at about the speed limit, not too fast, not slow enough to look suspicious. Behind the gate inside the business’s yard, a man, it looked like Benny, not his more muscular brother, stepped into the light and moved quickly to the gate. The car accelerated, the engine raced. Benny swung the gate open, then threw it shut behind the car. She saw him fastening the lock, looking their way, then heading around the back of the building, following the car that had not stopped out front where the parking spaces were.
Aragon said, “I bet that was Rigo driving. So who was in the van?”
Rivera checked a text message. “They got a license plate. Hold on, yeah, Rigoberto Silva.”
Aragon cracked the door, letting the dome light go on, no point in worrying about it. “I want to go in there. Why are all the lights on out back? Is that steam?”
“You can’t go in.” Now Rivera was looking at her. His eyes were different, not really connecting deep within her. She wasn’t sensing Miguel in him anymore. “That’s why you’re being sued. Entering and searching Geronimo’s ranch without a warrant.”
“It stopped a killer.” She rolled her tongue in her mouth, thinking about the taste of the water.
“If it had gone to trial, it would have derailed the case. Everything you found would have been suppressed.”
“Calm down. What was it you said we had to talk about, the forensics that came back?”
“Get back in. This might take a while.”
She closed the door. They sat in the glow from streetlights a little distance away.
“They recovered buccal cells from the bite wounds on Andrea,” Rivera said.
“That’s good, right?”
“They ran the DNA against the samples you collected, from Montclaire, the water glasses in the courtroom from Thornton and Diaz. They got a positive match, ninety-nine-plus percent certainty.”
“And? Why are you stringing this out?”
“The buccal cells came from Lily Montclaire.”
Montclaire lying to them every step of the way. And she had bought it. The time wasted. Bullets from machine guns sending wood chips into her face, somebody out there shot, maybe dying with her bullet inside them. Her relationship with Serena destroyed, probably Javier next when he returned home and saw bullet holes in his kids’ room.
“They can do that, get buccal cells from a bite mark that long after?” she asked.
“They got DNA from Thornton and Diaz on the girl’s clothes you secured from the Baca residence. But the DNA in the bite wound, that’s all Montclaire.”
She pulled out her phone and called Lewis, told him the news, and said he should wake up Lily.
When she was done she turned to Rivera. He was drinking from the water bottle.
“We know she was with Cassandra Baca,” she said. “Lily didn’t deny that. Why lie to us about the bite? Hell, she admitted to procuring, to everything else.”
“Dumping more on Thornton? Maybe shame?”
“Lily doesn’t know that word. I think it’s the first one, dumping more on Thornton. You want to be in on questioning her?”
“She’s screwed for witness protection. It’s time we consider her in an entirely different light.”
Rigo had Abel and Junior in the trunk of the Olds, wrapped in the plastic they’d intended for the model. Abel had been shot twice, once through the thigh, another in the ass. It was the bullet in the thigh that had killed him, the big artery in the leg cut in two. Junior’s head was barely hanging on, just the skin on the side of the neck keeping things together.
Rigo added fresh tape so the sheets didn’t open when they lifted them out. He did most of the work. Benny wasn’t much help. They got Abel and Junior onto a cart with wheels.
Rigo brushed his hand over the trunk’s c
arpet.
“They always find something,” he said. “You can’t beat forensics. I like this car. Only twenty thousand on the second engine. But it goes to the crusher tonight.”
Benny was able by himself to push the cart to the lift that fed El Puerco.
“There’s no other way, Rigo,” Benny said. The look on Rigo’s face reflected the sadness and anger in his own heart. He saw Rigo’s scar as a second frown. “We say they went to Mexico. A trip, father and son. Abel got the idea and just wanted to take off. Fishing season down there, deer hunts on a private ranch, no limit, we’ll think of something.”
“When they don’t come back?” Rigo tugged the plastic and touched Abel’s cheek.
“Things happen down there. There’s a war, bodies in mass graves, people getting stopped on roads. It’s a crazy country.”
“That lawyer. We bring her here.”
They lifted the plastic sheet with Junior first and rolled him into the broth. Abel went next, pushing Junior below the surface, the boy under his father. They could see the acids already working when bodies rolled and fingers broke the surface.
Benny closed El Puerco’s heavy stainless lid, like the top of an enormous pressure cooker. Rigo worked the dials, pressed the red switch. The needle on the temperature gauge rose, steam escaped from a place under the lid where the seal was worn.
The plastic from the trunk went into the incinerator. Rigo drove the car to the crusher. Benny sat at the controls and watched the Oldsmobile turning into a block of metal and rubber.
“Busy for middle of the night,” Aragon said into her phone, Rivera listening from his panel truck. She stood at the fence around Silva Enterprises, the front gate a half block behind her, another half block to the end of the property. “Machines turning. I hear metal, glass popping. Lots of chemical smells. And steam out of that big metal building at the very back. It just went rushing up the stack like a pressure valve was opened. I’m going in, Tomas. No, not now. We need to talk to Montclaire. But I’m going when I figure how to do it.”
Compromised Page 22
