Connor (In the Company of Snipers Book 5)

by Irish Winters

  “Alex Stewart,” Ramirez hissed. “Owner of assassins and liars.” He pushed away from the table, his arms across his chest and his black eyes hooded.

  That statement alone was excellent news. So. Ramirez had heard of Alex Stewart and no doubt, his company of ex-military snipers. Alex rolled his shoulder, his senses on high alert and every nerve engaged. Let the showdown commence.

  “Miguel Ramirez. Owner of drug dealers. Arsonists. Murderers.” He leaned his elbows, interlocked his fingers and stared back. “I know we’ve never met before, but I believe we know each other well. I also thought you might like to see some pictures.”

  When Ramirez didn’t answer, Alex reached down into his bag. Immediately, Biker Boy pulled his weapon, a pearl-handled Colt revolver.

  “You’re scaring the locals,” Alex murmured as he revealed the thick envelope of photos in his hand. “You might want to put that toy away before someone calls the police.”

  Alex tossed the envelope to Ramirez, but Ibarra was quick. He intercepted the envelope in mid-air and opened it. The second he saw the pictures he glanced at his boss, his nostrils flared. He handed the photos off to Ramirez, but Alex caught the glint in his eye. Ibarra was pissed now, too. Good deal.

  Instant contempt flashed across the table when Ramirez glanced at the first photo. His breath hitched. He fingered through the stack without taking them out of the envelope.

  Alex allowed him time to understand the new rules of the game. Every single picture in that envelope depicted someone near and dear to the cartel boss’s heart. In one photograph, his beautiful wife Alejandra stood in her rose garden, tending to her pink and yellow flowers with a smile on her sweet face in the gold of early morning light.

  In another shot, his dark-haired three-year-old daughter, Sophia, played with her dolls on the red brink veranda. Her little dog, Pepper, was dressed in a doll dress with a china tea set on the blanket beside him. Pepper didn’t look happy, but Sophia’s smile was radiant and as motherly as a three-year-old could be. Another photo showed five-year-old Christina sound sleep in her bed with her arms wrapped around a floppy stuffed teddy bear. At night.

  And finally, the very arrogant Sonoran Cartel boss looked at a photo of his own bedroom suite, complete with lace-shrouded windows, vases of freshly cut pink roses everywhere, and Alejandra’s champagne-colored peignoir laid across the foot of the huge brass bed. His bed.

  One brow spiked high with anger. The longer Ramirez looked, the more his refined appearance changed. His right eyelid developed a tick. His upper lip lifted into a deadly sneer. By the last picture, he was the epitome of an angry rattlesnake, full of poison and coiled to strike.

  “You have been in my home,” he ground out between clenched teeth.

  “Have I?” Alex asked nonchalantly.

  “Do you have any idea who you’re playing with?” Red-hot hatred flashed across the cheery red-and-white checkered tablecloth.

  “Stop the bullshit, Ramirez. You can’t touch me, and you know it.” Alex kept his voice calculating and steady. “I’m not the guy in Mexico taking these shots now, am I? Besides, you know damned well I’m not playing.”

  Ramirez kicked the table leg beside him. “I ask you one more time, Stewart. WHAT DO YOU WANT?”

  His roar caught the attention of every diner in the place. Eyebrows raised. A server ducked nervously into the kitchen.

  “Calm down,” Alex replied, his voice still friendly. “These are just a couple of snapshots.”

  “They are of my children. My wife!” Ramirez spit venom.

  “Yeah. You’re right. They are. Pretty good photos if I do say so myself. You have a lovely family in Herm-o-sill-o.”

  Ramirez trembled with suppressed rage. “What. Do. You. Want?”

  Ibarra hadn’t moved since he’d looked at the first pictures, but Biker Boy tensed for action. Alex had no doubt he’d take the first shot if he were dumb enough to try.

  Alex leaned over the table conspiratorially toward Ramirez and whispered, “Well, I’ll tell you, old buddy—”

  “I am not your buddy, cabeza de mierda!” Ramirez cursed him. “Pendejo!”

  “What you really want to know is how I got these pictures. Right?” Alex asked casually, ignoring the slur.

  Ramirez’s eyes seethed, but he didn’t answer.

  “Maybe another time.” Alex picked up his cap and phone and stood to leave.

  “Sit!” Ramirez hissed.

  Alex sat at the edge of his chair. Almost obediently.

  “I will play your game, Mr. Alexander Stewart,” Ramirez muttered with restrained politeness. “What can I do for you?”

  “The thing is that I like Utah. I like it a lot. It’s the kind of place where a man can step away from the city, breathe in fresh mountain air every morning, and feel like he’s living in paradise.” Alex crossed his arms as he leaned forward again. “But then someone like you shows up and decides he’s going to make a big name for himself.”

  Ramirez’s upper lip twitched.

  “He starts leaving trash around the state. He dumps a few bodies. He floods the street with meth, coke, horse, and every other brand of his kind of dirt. And then he trots his ass back to Mexico to spend quality time with his pretty little wife and beloved daughters, like what he did in America was all in a day’s work.”

  Ramirez stared, his eyes black and cold.

  “He thinks he’s untouchable, doesn’t he, Miguel?” Alex’s voice turned deadly when he finally used Ramirez’s first name.

  The powerful man glared across the table. “I will not ask you again. What is it you want?”

  “For starters, you’ve got two trucks out on I-80. Call your boys off. Make ’em stop. Right now.” Alex didn’t blink. “No more fires.”

  Ramirez pulled his cell phone from his inner suit pocket without breaking eye contact with Alex. He spoke only a few words before he hung up and laid the phone on the table in front of him. Biker Boy made a move for his gun, but Alex was quicker. All Biker Boy felt was the barrel of the SIG suddenly pressed against the bottom of his jean’s zipper. Awareness glinted across his face. He looked knowingly at Alex.

  Alex winked. “Be damned sure you’re a faster gun than me,” he said quietly. “You won’t even be able to sing soprano with the equipment you’ll be missing.”

  Biker Boy lowered his weapon beneath the tablecloth.

  “That’s better,” Alex whispered. “Good boy.”

  “What else?” Ramirez snapped. “Why did you really come here? What do you want?”

  “Me? If it were up to me,” Alex was ready to play, “I’d just want you to die. You killed eleven Mexican citizens like they were nothing—”

  “They were nothing! They were stupid farmers, that’s all. Mexico is full of them!”

  “And beheading people?”

  “You cut the head off the snake, you solve the problem!”

  “And what else? You burn the state of Utah down and take over? Is that what’s going on? Is that why you’re here? You moving on up or something?”

  Ramirez snarled. “Why are you here? Just to threaten my family? Me? My children?”

  “Where are my agents?” Alex demanded.

  “What agents?”

  “The man and woman your guys grabbed when they attacked my team in the canyon. Where are my people?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about!”

  “You do, too. You kidnapped them. Where are they?” Alex’s fist hit the table, his anger uncontrolled for a scant second.

  The game changed. Ramirez’s eyes went blank. Expressionless. Like a snake’s. He stared back at Alex, his voice devoid of his previous disgust. “I don’t know what you are talking about, Mr. Stewart. I took no agents. What use could I possibly have for your people?”

  “Cut the crap!” This time it was Alex who raised his voice.

  Ramirez dabbed his lips with his napkin and folded it before he stood to leave. Ibarra and Biker Boy followed suit. Like a sli
ck cat with a mouse, the cartel boss smiled as if he suddenly knew a secret. “I think I am ready to leave now. You are not the kind of man who would hurt women and children. We have nothing more to discuss.”

  “Fine. Go. If that’s a risk you’re willing to take, have a nice day, but if they were my family....”

  Ramirez walked away.

  “Would you like to talk with them?” Alex asked.

  The arrogant cartel boss kept walking until Alejandra Ramirez’s voice called out to her husband from the speaker of Alex’s cell phone.

  Ramirez spun on his heel. “You have my wife?”

  Now it was Alex who played the part of a snake, his lip lifted in a sneer.

  Ramirez came swiftly back to the table and snatched the phone out of his hand. “Alejandra! Is this you? Are you safe? Where are the girls? How? They... What?” He listened for a moment. He choked, his eyes full of fear. Frantically, he spoke with his beloved wife. “No, you are not making sense. Speak slowly. Please. I will be right—”

  The call disconnected. Ramirez stared at the phone, visibly deflated. Tossing it back to Alex, he sat again. Ibarra and Biker Boy stood behind him.

  “Please tell me what else you want,” Ramirez said. “I will do anything.”

  Alex leaned forward, his voice low and menacing against the soft ambience of the affluent restaurant. “I want you to go back to hell where you came from, Ramirez. Leave Utah. Leave Arizona. Leave this country. Never come back. Never set so much as a toe across the border again.”

  The cartel boss nodded, no longer willing to look his adversary in the eye.

  Alex leaned closer. “You and your familia are not safe, my friend. I can reach out and touch you anywhere. Anytime. If I find that you lied to me, I will do every single thing you’re afraid I’ll do. To your wife. To your children. To you. Every single bloody thing.”

  Ramirez stood to leave. “Come. We go,” he said to his henchmen.

  But he didn’t make it to his lovely estate in Sonora, Mexico, with its finely decorated walls and lavish gardens. He’d barely stepped out the door of the fine eatery when the Utah Task Force apprehended him and his two armed cohorts. It was pouring rain by then. He looked good with his face to the sidewalk, his hands cuffed behind his back and rain reducing him to the thug he truly was. Damned good.

  Governor Baxter met Alex outside the restaurant with a grin and a big handshake. “Well done. You had him going. I think Ramirez really thinks you’re holding his wife and daughters.”

  “Modern technology is amazing. At least, that’s what my techies tell me.” Alex shouldered his bag, his weapon again safely stowed from sight, and the cell phone with the recording his techies had spliced together from Mark’s audio feeds tucked into his jacket pocket.

  “Well, they’re right. With everything he told you in there, Ramirez will die in prison. Smart thinking, by the way, to call my number and leave the line open before you went in. It worked.”

  “It did until I needed him to think I had his wife on the phone,” Alex groused, wishing he’d been better prepared. A Tattle Tale would’ve made all the difference. Or two phones. Or an umbrella. “Did your men apprehend the guys setting the fires?”

  “They did. They’ve arrested the four arsonists involved, all Ramirez’s men. You’ve got good people working for you, Alex.”

  “I do.”

  “Of course, I’ve still got a state on fire.”

  “And I’ve still got two missing agents.”

  “I need a drink. Come over to the house for a nightcap?”

  Alex declined. “Not until my people are safe. Goodnight, Governor.”

  Walking back to his hotel, he called Mother and Ember. Thunder boomed overhead, but what the hell. The rain felt good. “Ramirez fell for it,” he told his East Coast office.

  Both techies were on speakerphone. “Great!” they replied in unison.

  “Do me a favor. Call Mark. Tell him thanks for the work his team did collecting those audio feeds and pictures. And thanks for patching together a seamless conversation. Each of you did a good job. Damn good.”

  “We’ll call him right away. Anything else?” Mother asked.

  Alex scrubbed a hand over his tired wet head, his cap drenched through. “Tell me you found Izza and Connor.”

  “We will find them,” Ember answered softly. “You know that, don’t you?”

  “I do,” he added quickly.

  That’s what she needed to hear, so that’s what he said.

  Sixteen

  Izza cringed. Every blinding stab of lightning and crash of thunder drove it home. Jamie was gone. His bright brown eyes forever closed. He’d never tease or tickle her again. He’d never take a beating for her either. He’d never come home.

  It hit her like a ton of bricks that day at Mountain View Memorial Gardens, the day she had to walk away and leave him behind. From that moment forward, she was alone in a bitchin’ cruel world.

  Closing her eyes against the storm and praying it would end as quickly as it had sprung up didn’t help. Neither did burying her head against her arms to block the thunder.

  BOOM! There was no place to hide. No escape for bad girls who lied to their fathers.

  CRASH! No salvation for those who stole out of the refrigerator because they were hungry.

  Bang. Bang. BANG! And Jamie’s body kept falling no matter how tightly she squeezed her eyes or shut her heart.

  “Hey.” Connor’s gentle mellow voice reached across the barren cave.

  “What? Did you throw up again?” she snapped. He didn’t know how close she stood to the edge of not wanting to live. He’d never know.

  “I just thought you’d like some company. It’s getting kind of cold in here.” He reached his arm toward her from where he lay. Was he freaking serious? He wanted to snuggle? Now? Dumb ass.

  She turned away, shaking like a leaf in the wind, but damned sure he’d never see it. “Leave me alone.”

  Another explosion of light and noise pillaged the world outside. It was an assault by nature against nature, the elements of earth and sky at war with each other. Any minute now some part of the desert landscape would be blown to bits. Soldiers would fall. Men would die. Jamie would—

  That was the problem with loud noises, car backfires and thunder. One minute she was perfectly fine, adapted into civilization like normal people. But the next, she was on the floor having a heart attack and trying to hide. The littlest thing jerked her back to Iraq and its twenty-four-seven nightmare. Some kind of a switch automatically flipped in her mind, and when it did, it sent her into full-blown panic mode. It made her look like she was crazy. Maybe she was. Every crack of lightning meant Jamie kept falling. Kept dying. Kept leaving....

  The cave lit with a bright white flash that illuminated every timber and dusty corner. Lightning stabbed the ground while thunder followed with fierce detonations like hellfire bombs dropping from high overhead. Panic sucked the air out of her lungs. Fear made it impossible to swallow. A whine escaped, but thunder masked it just in time not that anyone could’ve heard it with all the noise going on outside. Izza steeled every muscle and nerve to not allow another show of weakness. Connor could not know.

  “Come here, Izza,” he said kindly. “You know I won’t hurt you. Just for tonight. Please?”

  “I said no already. Stop asking! Damn! You’re so stinking stupid!” She jerked herself around until he could only see her back, but it didn’t change anything. The storm raged and she was afraid. Her resolve trembled as much as her fingers digging into her arms.

  A tumbleweed burst through the curtain of rain at the cave’s entrance. She startled. Ambush! But no, she steeled her mind to stop lying to her. It was just a plant, but the damned weed’s attack was followed by a blinding laser show of horrific snaps, crackles and booms. Thunderous blasting caps shook the walls of the cave. A yelp escaped her lips. An image of cannons and RPGs flashed through her mind. The battle couldn’t have sounded closer or more frightening. S
he had no weapon and she was outmanned! How many damned enemy soldiers were out there?

  The nightmare persisted. Jamie fell. And fell. Over and over again. She ground her fists to her temples to block the hysteria creeping into her soul. If only—

  “Come on, honey. I’ll keep you warm. Let me help you, just for tonight.” The calm in Connor’s voice reached across the cold space between them. His open arm invited her to safety again. Just like last time.

  “No.” She shook her head in denial. Every storm had to end. It had to. It was just a matter of holding herself together until—

  CRACK! Thunder shook the earth with a loud negatory at her lie. She shot a quick glance over her shoulder. Damn, Connor looked like hell. That dried bloody gash in the middle of his face gave him more of a troll appearance. Two blackened eyes didn’t help. Surfer boy was gone. Some scary looking Halloween freak had arrived, but the tenderness in his blue eyes hadn’t changed. The kind and gentle man was still there. He never did know when to let go. Not once that other night, either. Just held her. Saved her. Loved her.

  No! I can’t! I won’t! I—

  Mother Nature interrupted with another thunderous volley that reverberated as loudly as the cannons in the clouds, only it was not really cannons, only—it was. Another whine swelled up from her soul.

  I’m so damned tired of being scared. Alone....

  She scurried over to Connor, still angry and her chest heaving in panic. Izza stopped. How could she admit to—?

  BOOM! Connor didn’t even flinch at the terrible noise, but she did. The tenderest emotion shifted across his face, and she had to put a stop to it right then and there.

  “I hate you,” she said, but even she noticed her usually harsh declaration sounded more breathy and scared than angry.

  “I know. It’s okay. You can hate me and still be warm at the same time.” He reached for her hand like he was asking her to dance, the dummy.

  “And I’m not your honey,” she declared. He needed to understand. Just because she might be having a weak moment didn’t mean anything. Nothing. Not a single thing! She glanced toward the entrance where a curtain of rain glistened. The howling wind scoured the bomb-cratered earth clean. Lightning lived and Jamie—