Carlos ducked into the open bedroom doorway just as the left-hand door leading to Alonso’s room opened, and a few seconds later, he watched as a naked woman ran by, crying, and with her clothes in her arms.
It was the whore Alonso had been with, apparently, the American had let her live.
The girl flew down the stairs as the voices resumed inside Alonso’s bedroom. There would be more men coming, Carlos had called for them himself, but they would need time to get there. Alonso was trying to buy that time, Carlos realized, as he heard Alonso talking to the assassin casually.
While that was happening, Carlos reached over to the bed and grabbed a pillow. He then slid the pillowcase off and held it to his bleeding side, to put pressure on the wound.
Things must have become violent suddenly, because Carlos heard Alonso screaming in pain as the sounds of a struggle reached him where he hid in the darkness.
Then, the American was speaking again, but Carlos couldn’t make out the words. He then smiled as he heard Alonso, and although the voice sounded weak and strained, he was alive to speak.
Seconds later, the American rushed past the doorway and headed down the stairs.
Carlos had just stepped back into the hall to go to Alonso when he heard the American change course and come back up the steps.
He must have realized that Carlos’ was missing. Carlos looked down at one of the guard’s fallen weapons and told his hand to reach for it, to pick it up and kill the American.
He could not do it. He wasn’t a fighter; he was a thinker, an accountant, a man of numbers.
When the footsteps resumed, Carlos realized with a sense of great joy that they were receding and going downstairs, not back up to where he stood, terrified, wounded, and unarmed.
He rushed down the hall with the pillowcase clamped to his side and found Alonso lying atop his bedroom floor, broken and bleeding.
“Oh my God, Alonso, what did that devil do to you?”
Alonso could barely speak through his broken jaw and his elbows and knees had been shattered by blows. Carlos marveled that the man was still conscious given the pain he must be experiencing, but Alonso Alvarado had always been tougher than most men.
“Help... me... to... stand...” Alonso mumbled.
Carlos got down on the floor. He had just slid an arm beneath Alonso’s back when they both heard the footsteps on the stairs. When the footsteps halted, Alonso told Carlos to hide, Carlos did so, by crawling under the bed, an act that made his wound scream, and seconds later, the American ran back into the room.
The man was doing something with a metal can that was making it squeak. Carlos recognized the sound and his eyes grew large with horror.
It was the sound a can of lighter fluid made when you squeezed it, and Carlos wondered if the American madman was about to set Alonso on fire.
That was when the man shouted Alonso’s nickname while wishing him a hideous fate. The words were spoken with such vehemence and hatred that it made Carlos shiver.
“Burn in hell, Martillo!”
Carlos shut his eyes. He couldn’t bear to see his friend burn to death. However, when he heard no screams, he opened his eyes and saw that Alonso looked the same.
An instant later, he realized it was the bed above himself that had been set ablaze, and the room was already filling with smoke.
Fearing he would burn as well, Carlos scrambled out from beneath the bed, and as he did so, he saw the American sprint onto the balcony and leap out into the night, to fall into the pool below.
Alonso Alvarado looked afraid for the first time that Carlos could ever recall, and he stared up at him with pleading eyes.
“Don’t... leave... me...”
Carlos bit back his fear and reached out to help Alonso.
“We are family; of course I won’t leave you.”
Carlos managed to drag Alonso onto the balcony. By the time he shut the doors on the room, the bedroom was fully ablaze, and smoke rushed from it through a shattered pane of glass in one of the balcony doors.
With strength he hadn’t known he possessed, Carlos lifted Alonso up and into his arms. After that, he stepped atop a patio chair.
The pain in his side increased so dramatically that he nearly passed out, but he kept going and stepped up upon the marble balustrade, and after closing his eyes, he leapt as far as he could, and landed in the pool.
Both he and Alonso were laying at the bottom of the pool when their men pulled them out of it, and after receiving CPR, Alonso was revived.
Carlos crawled over to him and Alonso thanked him silently with his eyes.
The ambulance came just after the fire trucks arrived, and Alonso was loaded aboard. But before climbing on himself, Carlos spoke to Alonso’s chief man, who had just returned from a night in town.
“Has the intruder been caught?”
“No, but we will keep looking.”
“Call Hector Mercoto and tell him that Alonso has been gravely wounded, as the head of the cartel he will want to know immediately.”
“I’ve already called Hector, and he will be here very soon.”
“Good, and you have things under control here?”
Damián Sandoval smiled at Carlos.
“Do not worry; I will take care of everything.”
Carlos left the estate inside the ambulance, not knowing that he would never step on its grounds again.
In a brazen act that became a legend, Damián Sandoval used the opportunity of the attack on Alonso Alvarado to stage a coup, and when Hector Mercoto arrived to see the damage for himself, Sandoval killed the man, and the Mercoto Cartel became the Sandoval Cartel.
Thus, when Alonso Alvarado awakened from his multiple surgeries, he had been not only a gravely injured man and a near cripple, but also a man without power.
CHAPTER 7 – A guarantee
Alvarado settled into his special chair as Robert Martinez from Hexalcorp was led into his office by one of the guards.
Martinez was fifty-two, an American, an ex-Marine, and a man who would do anything that he thought would further his rise up Hexalcorp’s ladder.
He was in charge of expanding the company’s business, and in the three years he had held the position, he had nearly doubled Hexalcorp’s client base.
He did this by offering Hexalcorp’s considerable corporate muscle to anyone who could pay, and most of that new business came from criminals and despots around the world.
Hexalcorp’s leadership turned a blind eye towards the practice, but Martinez had been warned that all transactions had to be sanitized by being filtered through dummy corporations and third parties.
As long as Hexalcorp appeared spotless, Martinez was given a free hand, and it was because of him that Hexalcorp was closing in on replacing the leader in the field.
The leader was Burke, the Burke Corporation, which held the name of its founder, Conrad Burke, a man who, unbeknownst to Martinez and Alvarado, was an acquaintance of the man they now hunted, Tanner.
Malena Alvarado was seated near her husband and she eyed Martinez with an intense gaze.
Both she and her husband looked angry and had recently suffered the loss of their son and also Malena’s brother.
Martinez knew that if he was able to deliver Tanner to them, that he would have a client for life.
“What is the status of your search for Tanner?” Alvarado asked, as Martinez sat across from him.
“I have a team in Texas just waiting to get a location on Tanner. If the man sticks his head up, they’ll chop it off.”
“This team of yours,” Malena said. “How many men are in it?”
“There are four, and they will find Tanner and kill him.”
Malena laughed, and Martinez thought that it sounded as if it carried a touch of madness. When the laughter subsided, she spoke.
“Tanner has killed over a hundred of our best men and you send only four after him? That’s next to useless.”
“With all due respect, Señora Alv
arado, I disagree. My team is just that, a team. These men were the best when they served their country overseas and now they are the best that the free market has to offer. They’ve studied Tanner and they understand that he’s a formidable and very unconventional warrior. They will not be easily fooled or misled as others have been, and they will kill him. It’s just that simple.”
“I want a guarantee,” Alonso Alvarado said.
“A guarantee?”
“Yes, a personal guarantee, and by that I mean if your men fail to kill Tanner, you will never leave this compound alive, do you accept the terms?”
Martinez leaned back in his seat and folded his hands together.
This was not the first time he had been asked to pledge his life as a guarantee of his men’s success, and it probably wouldn’t be the last.
“I agree, but when they kill Tanner, I want all of your security business, and, I would also like the opportunity to invest with you. I’m sure if I gave you money to invest in your operation that you could triple it in no time.”
Alvarado nodded in agreement.
“If you kill Tanner for me, you’ll never have to worry about money again, and I’ll make certain that you rise to the top of your company as well.”
That last perk was unexpected, and it brought a smile to Martinez’ lips.
“We have a deal. Tanner will die at the hands of my men. I guarantee it.”
Malena stood and stared down at Martinez.
“Someone will die, of that we’re certain.”
***
In Texas, Martinez’s elite team of operatives were cleaning their weapons inside a motel room, as they waited to hear word of Tanner’s whereabouts.
The four men were Steve Bennett, the Strike Team leader, Roger Wilson, Hakeem Brown, and Mortimer Simms, who just went by Simms because he hated his first name.
They had fought in two wars together and knew each other nearly as well as they knew themselves.
The four men grew up in different sections of America and had vastly different backgrounds, but they were a family as well as fellow warriors.
Bennett, their leader, grew up an army brat and later joined the Marines. He was thirty-eight, while the others were either a year younger or older than he was. Bennett had dark hair to go along with his good looks, as did Roger Wilson. Wilson had grown up in Los Angeles as the son of a single mother, who was a failed actress and an alcoholic.
A black man, Hakeem Brown was rich and the son of a Philadelphia publishing mogul. Hakeem’s father had jumped aboard the Hip-hop craze early and made millions by creating magazines and websites that catered to the fans of that style of music.
Hakeem was given two million dollars on his twenty-first birthday, but Hakeem was a soldier at heart, and other than the condominium he owned in Key West, Florida, the money went virtually untouched.
Mortimer Simms looked nothing like his name. He was a huge blond guy from Chicago with muscles upon muscles, and had competed in bodybuilding contests before joining the Marines after the events of 9/11.
Hakeem reassembled his weapon and checked the slide action.
“This Tanner is no joke, Steve, how do you plan to handle him?”
Bennett fed rounds into a magazine as he answered.
“I think the way to defeat Tanner is to be patient. The man is a wrecking ball, but even a wrecking ball is harmless once it stops swinging.”
“All right, we’ll be patient, but what’s that mean?” Simms asked.
“It means, gentlemen, that once we find Tanner we do nothing. With the price he has on his head, adversaries will keep coming at him, and we will let them wear him down and exhaust his resources before we make our move.”
Roger Wilson smiled.
“This sounds like what we did in Detroit a few months ago, with the gangbangers.”
“That’s right, we let them waste their ammo on that rival gang, lose a few men, and then they were easy pickings, and as good as he is, Tanner is still just one man.”
Hakeem slid his weapon back into the shoulder holster he wore.
“It sounds good to me, and once we bag him, why don’t we hang at my place in Florida. Martinez promised us some time off.”
The men all agreed. They were already looking at Tanner as if he were bagged and tagged. They were overconfident; a trait they shared with many of Tanner’s deceased enemies.
CHAPTER 8 – The Four Horsemen of the ridiculous
The head of security for Chemzonic was a man named Jack Rockford.
Tanner researched Rockford through an Internet search of Oklahoma Real Estate and found Rockford’s house. The home was a mansion that resembled a castle and had to be worth millions.
Tanner was certain that Chemzonic paid its head of security well, but he doubted that they paid that well, at least on the books.
If Rockford was receiving payments for working with or for The Alvarado Cartel inside Chemzonic, it meant that he was helping to cover up whatever was going on there.
Tanner guessed that they were manufacturing precursor chemicals that could be used in making methamphetamine, but that sort of thing would be almost impossible to keep hidden from government regulators and plant inspectors.
That would seem to indicate that people were on the take, or maybe Chemzonic had figured out a way to conceal their illegal activities. In either event, Jack Rockford would have the answers, answers that Tanner could squeeze from the man.
But why do it?
It would certainly cause Alvarado, who was Martillo, grief, but so would killing the man. And the faster Tanner found Tanner Six and figured out what was going on, the sooner he could continue to Mexico and kill Martillo.
Tanner sighed in frustration. He had tried to reach his mentor, but was only able to leave a message for him. That indicated that the man might not be at his home. In any case, he would have to wait for him to make contact.
That meant that Tanner would be sitting instead of moving, and if he was going to be delayed in getting to Martillo, he might as well do something with the time.
Tanner drove past the palatial home of Jack Rockford once more and then headed off to find the man.
***
News of the bounty on Tanner’s head was spreading throughout the criminal underworld and any punk that learned of it began to fantasize about what they would do with the money.
In Enid, Oklahoma, a biker club calling themselves The Tin Horsemen gathered around a pool table and stared at a drawing of Tanner’s face.
They weren’t really a biker club, but just four guys with motorcycles.
After they realized that the names Iron Horsemen and Steel Horsemen were already in use, they went with the name Tin Horsemen, because after all, they reasoned, metal is metal.
The “club” leader, an idiot going by the name of Scar, jabbed a finger at the drawing of Tanner that was on a flyer, the flyer also stated that Tanner was worth a million dollars.
“We’re gonna find this dude and get that money.”
The other three men all nodded in agreement. They did that a lot, and if Scar had pointed at an old wanted poster of Billy the Kid, the men’s reaction would have been the same.
They were followers, and had been following Scar around since the third grade. They would probably continue to follow Scar until the day they died, and, given that their current target was Tanner, their deaths could be imminent.
Like Scar, the three men went by nicknames. They were Wound, Bruise, and Abrasion. Abrasion considered himself the cerebral one of the group, but he had a sub-100 point IQ like the rest of them.
The four idiots were all twenty-one-years-old. They had gone through life trying to get as much money as they could, without actually having to work for it.
They lived together in a converted garage behind a home that belonged to Scar’s mother, and they routinely raided the house for food. The poor woman’s food bill was more than her mortgage, but she loved her son and had always given him anything he wa
nted. Since she wasn’t rich, that consisted of a drafty garage and free food.
The four wannabe bikers also shoplifted on occasion. Their lives of petty crime had started in high school, where they used to extort money from their fellow students by charging a protection fee.
If you failed to pay the fee, you would find your locker broken into and your things missing or trashed.
They tried using this tactic in the real world when they dropped out of high school in their senior year, but the local mob explained to them in no uncertain terms that they already controlled the protection rackets.
That lesson came with a broken leg for each of them, and ended their dream to forge a criminal empire, but now they were considering going after Tanner, and the thought of claiming the million-dollar bounty on Tanner was overriding any semblance of good sense they had.
Abrasion wiped his nose with his sleeve as he spoke. He was on the short side and skinny, as were Bruise and Wound. Scar was taller, and it was this attribute that caused the others to follow him. He had always been bigger than they were, like an adult, and so they assumed he knew more.
“A million dollars, and it says dead or alive, so we don’t even have to kill him.”
Bruise pointed at Tanner’s eyes.
“He looks mean.”
“He’s a killer,” Wound said. “So yeah, he’s probably mean. But Scar, how are we gonna find this guy? He could be anywhere.”
Scar sent his men a crafty grin.
“Ain’t we somewhere?”
The others thought that over and nodded.
“Well, Tanner’s got to be somewhere too, and if he comes near this somewhere, he’s ours. All I’m saying is let’s be ready for him.”
“Ready how?” asked Abrasion.
“Simple, we keep the bikes filled with gas, load up some supplies in case we have to move, and then we’ll go hang out at McGinty’s. Them mob guys drink there, and if this Tanner comes around, they’ll know about it, and then we’ll know about it too.”
Wound rubbed the back of his neck nervously.
“Those guys don’t like us, Scar, and I don’t want my leg broken again.”
The TANNER Series - Books 10 -12 (Tanner Box Set Book 4) Page 3
