Cartel Queen
Page 10
Now it was time for payback.
Stone hopped over the adobe wall dividing the house from the street and approached the patio door on the side of the house. No lights shined within. It was late enough that everybody was in bed and sound asleep.
Stone didn’t bother with stealth. He smashed the patio door near the inside handle with the butt of the SIG, reached in to unlock the latch, and passed through the open door.
Dark house. Furniture all around. He moved carefully, found a hallway and followed it around a corner to the master bedroom.
The doorknob turned easily in his hand.
Morales and his wife slept soundly, the woman snoring a little. Stone approached carefully to make sure he got the right one. Morales slept on the side closest to him, his mustache visible even in the low light of the room’s corner night light.
Then the man rolled over.
Stone lowered his gun. A child slept between them, a little girl, by the look of her, and Stone’s mind flashed back on another little girl of his recent acquaintance, and, further back, his teenage self.
He let out a sigh. This is what Preston had meant. He knew that Stone wouldn’t be able to pull the trigger knowing Morales would leave behind a child.
There wasn’t even an argument to make, although Stone could make the argument backwards and forwards.
But there were other ways to get even.
Stone put his gun away. The master bathroom was behind him, and Stone quietly rummaged through the medicine cabinet and a drawer to find a tube of red lip stick.
Across the bathroom mirror he wrote:
Resign or next time I won’t let you live.
For added emphasis, he removed a cartridge from the magazine of the SIG-Sauer and placed it on the bathroom counter.
The point would be made.
That was enough.
Devlin Stone exited the way he entered.
Stone sat with a drink in the cabin of the Cessna Mustang, which Preston had ordered ferry Stone to Mexico and back home. The drone of the engine was slightly muffled by the cabin’s insulation.
His cell phone rested on his lap; the ear piece plugged into his left ear remained silent as he waited for Brad Preston to come on the line.
“Did you shoot him?” Preston said.
“You knew I wouldn’t,” Stone said. “Was that what this was all about?”
“No.”
“What was the point?”
“What did Asaf Cohen tell you in Tel-Aviv?”
“He told me to stay detached. Not get too emotionally involved.”
“That was the point. You can’t go around blasting everybody, Devlin. Sometimes the enemy needs another kind of comeuppance, or we need to, sometimes, bring them in as allies. Understand?”
“No.”
“Your father understood.”
Stone glanced at the eagle’s head ring on his right hand.
“That didn’t stop the enemy from murdering him. If the two of you had done more killing than talking, maybe--”
“That’s enough,” Preston said, but Stone didn’t hear the rest of his sentence.
He ended the call and yanked out the earpiece in disgust. He was tired of talking. The only language an enemy understood was a bullet in the head.
He finished his drink and sat staring at the eagle’s head ring for a long time, wishing his father could speak through it to tell him whether he was right or wrong.
The adventure continues . . .
Devlin Stone returns in ZERO HOUR.
A mission of vengeance pits Stone against a cyber-terrorist threatening to unleash Armageddon.
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