Pescador’s eyes burned into the side of Galvan’s head. The Federale was shrewd; if his prisoner had found a way out, he would happily take advantage.
That stacked up just fine with Galvan—as long as he was the first man out, the first one on his feet. That ought to be enough to win the day, if the day was still winnable.
Pull this off, you’ll have the upper hand.
Guess that gives me two.
The upper and the left.
Here goes nothing.
He loosed a gut-deep scream and slammed his shoulder against the box. A thin spiderweb of cracks spread out across the window.
That was a start.
Galvan reared back, took a deep breath, steeled himself to go again. The thing’s sharp corner had punctured his skin, despite Galvan’s efforts to hit it head-on. He felt the trickle of blood, knew he couldn’t afford to lose even that much.
Before he could throw himself at the window again, Pescador decided to pitch in. He kicked Galvan square in the middle of the spine, propelling him into the glass with more force than Jess could have hoped to muster on his own, and the panel gave. The shards sprayed the ground, like a mouthful of shark’s teeth, and in rushed the hot air.
Let’s hear it for teamwork.
Galvan crawled free, snatched the largest dagger of glass, leapt to his feet, and whirled. Blinked back the stars, the spinning Looney Tunes bluebirds. Crouched before the car’s gaping wound, heart pumping double time.
He didn’t have long to wait. Pescador’s head emerged a moment later, and Galvan wasted no time pressing the ice-pick-sharp weapon to his jugular vein.
“Stand up reeeeal slow.”
Pescador raised his palms to shoulder height in an instinctive surrender signal and did as he was told. Galvan quickstepped sideways to give him room, the blade never straying from the softest part of the Federale’s neck. He eye-checked the angles, tried to figure out how he was going to do this.
Got it.
In one swift motion, he slid his abbreviated right arm up the back of Pescador’s shirttail and threaded it through the neck opening, yoking him up.
“Don’t move,” Galvan whispered, applying a little pressure with the shard and drawing a single fat drop of blood. “Don’t even think about it.”
He heard sounds, close by, from the direction of the road—doors opening, boots finding ground—but Galvan refused to look. Nothing could stop him from finishing this, right now. While he still could.
Pescador heard them, too. He tried to turn his head, and Galvan pressed harder. The drop of blood pooled larger, wobbled.
“You wanna look at something, look at me.”
The Federale complied, and Galvan treated him to an evil grin.
“Remember what I told you, motherfucker?”
Dark blobs moved in Galvan’s periphery, then resolved into black-clad men. He turned Pescador a hundred and eighty degrees, the cocksucker’s body a shield against whatever came, and found himself staring into the barrels of more assault rifles than he cared to count. He searched the glossy pull-down face shields of the men wielding them for some clue, some idea what he was dealing with here, but found only his own reflection.
He looked ghastly. Insane.
Felt that way, too.
Embraced it.
Come on down!
Welcome to the Ruckus.
Galvan jerked Pescador closer. These had to be the Federale’s people, his backup squad.
But if he had this kind of hardware at his disposal, why would he use those bikers?
It didn’t add up. Something must have caused the accident that had awakened Galvan, and a collision with the van these men had jumped from, the one parked by the roadside twenty feet away, was the only plausible possibility.
A rig like that didn’t get in accidents by accident, Galvan thought, trying to trace the facts to their logical conclusion as fast as he could. They’d run Pescador off the road. Tried to kill him.
The enemy of my enemy . . .
Is a mystery.
Guy like Pescador probably had no shortage.
Or maybe it was Galvan they were after. He glanced down at the box, lying amidst the shattered window glass, and heard the beating of the heart within. Or imagined he did.
This was all taking too long. Galvan flexed every muscle left at his disposal and waited for somebody else to make a play.
It happened fast. The soldiers parted like the Red Sea, and through their midst strolled a short, stocky guy in cheap sunglasses who looked for all the world like he should have been ushering tourists onto a chartered fishing boat.
He popped a toothpick between his lips and gestured at Galvan.
“Por favor, amigo, drop your . . . whatever that is.”
“The hell I will.”
The man sighed, removed his shades, and blinked at Galvan. “My men could kill you a hundred times over, comprende? My business is not with you. It is with your friend there.”
He flashed a set of large, even white teeth. “Hola, Luis. Cómo está, hermano? Remember me?”
“I’ll kill him,” Galvan blurted. “Ease off, or I’ll slit his fucking throat.”
The jefe regarded him with what seemed like a new level of interest. With delight, even—unless Galvan was way off, which he very well might have been. He needed a goddamn scorecard to keep track of the players, never mind sussing out who wanted what.
“Would you?” he mused. “Tell me, if you don’t mind, why is that?”
The situation was spiraling out of control—not that Galvan had experienced anything resembling control in quite some time. He could feel the last reserves of strength ebbing in him, see the sunbursts pinwheeling across his field of vision, feel his wound throbbing.
There were angles here he wasn’t seeing, motivations he was too far gone to grasp.
“I tell you what,” Galvan eked out, acting on instinct, running on vapors. He threw a head nod at the Beemer’s wreckage. “First things first, there’s a girl in there. Get her out, and make sure she’s all right. Then we can talk.”
The guy pooched out his lips and nodded. “An honorable request,” he declared. “I like you already.” He snapped his fingers. “Sacar la de allí.”
Two of the gunmen stepped forward. Within moments, they had extracted Betty from the car. She emerged bloodied but intact. Galvan watched as they led her out of sight, toward the van.
“They’ll look her over,” the boss assured him, following Galvan’s gaze. “We got a first-aid kit in there and everything. Now then. About our friend here.”
CHAPTER 41
Nichols and Cantwell sat in the van. In the silence. He’d refused to step outside, shaken his head resolutely through all Fuentes’s feverish yammering. Being powerless to intercede in an act of premeditated carnage was one thing. Blessing it with your eyeballs was another.
Maybe Cantwell had stayed put in agreement or in solidarity. Or maybe she was hoping the Mexican would leave the keys in the ignition and they could light out like a couple of teenage joyriders and resume the hunt for Sherry Richards. You never knew with her.
The SWAT team had piled out to assess the damage, and cause some more if need be. Nichols slumped in his seat, knees up on the dash, bracing for the report of weapons. Cantwell, framed in his side mirror, stared off into the middle distance, away from the impending action. She looked as drained and disheartened as he did.
But far more beautiful.
When this is all over, Nichols told himself, and then shook off the thought.
Don’t get ahead of yourself, cowboy. It’s gotta end first.
And when it does—assuming the both of you are still alive—she may never wanna see your mug again. So don’t go booking dinner reservations yet, champ.
How are you even thinking about this right now?
The rear doors clicked open, and Nichols turned in time to see two of Fuentes’s men settle a teenage girl clad in a pink bra onto the lip of the floor, hand her a bottle of water, begin tending to the bruises and contusions spread over every visible plane of her body.
Here she was—the innocent he’d feared was in that car.
The next girl, as Fuentes had put it.
Sherry Richards 2.0.
This changed everything.
Nichols jacked open his door and sprinted toward the wreckage of the Beemer.
Cantwell was already on her way.
The troops were clustered around something, in a loose crescent. Weapons at the ready, but only raised to half mast, as if the target were a parade of turtles.
“Out of my way,” Nichols barked, summoning whatever authority was his. The men parted, used to taking orders, and Cantwell fell in behind. Five long strides and the sheriff was standing next to Fuentes. Staring at a tableau he couldn’t begin to understand.
The diminutive, half-conscious Mexican at the business end of the shank had to be de la Mar. It was the six-two gringo with the bloody, blackened arm stump and the murderous intention that had Nichols puzzled.
“Who the fuck is that?”
Fuentes shielded his mouth with his hand, spoke soft and confidential. “Yo no sé, but sometimes life gives you lemonade, eh? He ices Luis, we ice him, the paperwork practically writes itself.” Fuentes brushed his hands together. “Nice and clean.”
He raised his voice.
“Go ahead, amigo! Finish him! We’re all on the same team here!”
The guy’s eyes darted wildly, from Fuentes to Nichols to Cantwell, and then from gun to gun to gun. The wound was either fresh or infected. Either way, the sheriff thought, this dude was viewing the world through a scrim of delirium, and it was a miracle he was even vertical—to say nothing of the fact that he’d survived the crash, escaped the car, bested de la Mar.
Strangely and suddenly, Nichols recognized something in the guy. The gringo might have been little more than a collection of frayed nerve endings and desperate impulses right now, but whoever he was and whatever his beef, this was a man of fortitude and courage. A man who was about something. No other way he’d have made it this far. He was not someone to be manipulated and gunned down for Fuentes’s convenience.
Nichols took that thought a step farther: no one was.
Fuck this, he decided. I’ve made too many compromises already.
He turned to face Fuentes’s battalion. “Lower your weapons.”
The men looked to Fuentes. Fuentes regarded Nichols.
“What the fuck, cabrón?”
“I wanna find out what he knows.”
It was the last thing the cop wanted to hear, with this so close to being a done deal. An order started to form itself on his lips, and Nichols stepped deep into his old friend’s personal space and peered down, into his eyes.
“Don’t make me ask twice.”
Fuentes took his measure. Nichols answered with a gaze that was all steel, no give to it whatsoever.
Fuentes responded in kind.
“What about the ‘next girl’?” Nichols whispered. “If you care about her even a little bit, Miguel, you’ll let me find out who he is. What he’s seen. And if you don’t . . .”
He let the implication hang there, like the sword of Damocles.
Fuentes narrowed his eyes, trying to find a way around the request that didn’t require forfeiting his honor. Finally, the cop relented.
“Hombres, retirarse.”
They lowered the hardware until it dangled by their sides. A symbolic gesture; it would take less than a second to reestablish their kill shots. But Nichols would take what he could get.
“You got one minute, Sheriff.”
“Fair enough.”
Time to put some skin in the game.
He walked over, flashing his palms to show he meant no harm, and took up position between the guns and the gringo—careful to keep himself more than an arm’s length from that six-inch blade of glass.
“You’re no True Native, are you?” Nichols began. Hostage Negotiation 101: open with something the subject can agree to. Keep things conversational.
Not that he’d ever done more than flip idly through the manual while shoveling down a Subway twelve-incher at his desk.
The gringo’s face erupted into a snarl, and Nichols flashed on the rabid raccoon he’d had to wrangle last spring out in the Denny’s parking lot, a definite lowlight of his years serving and protecting.
“I’m as American as anybody,” the man spat. “I was born right here.”
Nice clean opening, dickwad. Bob Nichols, ladies and gentlemen: the smooth-talkingest smooth talker in the history of law enforcement.
“No, no—what I mean is, you’re not a part of that biker gang. The ones who—”
“Fuck them.” He yanked de la Mar a little closer, and the line of blood banding the Federale’s neck widened.
“That’s a nasty-looking injury you’ve got there,” Nichols observed in the mildest tone he could muster. “How’d you happen to—”
“Who the fuck are you?” the gringo interrupted. “Whaddayou want?”
“I can help you. But first, you’ve gotta put the weapon down.”
He started shaking his head violently before Nichols could even get the sentence out. “Uh-uh. Not interested. I’m gonna kill this son of a bitch.”
Nichols stepped closer. Into harm’s radius, if the guy got hostile.
“You do, and you’re dead. That’s not a threat—it’s a fact. It’s what the guys with the guns want. You understand? They’ll kill you, or they’ll take you straight to the worst fuckin’ prison you can possibly imagine and throw away the key.”
No harm in planting a backup plan in Fuentes’s mind, Nichols thought. He cocked his head, searching the gringo’s face for signs of comprehension.
A dim spark fired behind the guy’s eyes. What he was fighting through right now, Nichols could only imagine. Cause-and-effect reasoning was probably too much to ask. Or perhaps, the sheriff thought suddenly, self-preservation had been the wrong card to play. Dude wasn’t blind. He saw the guns. Maybe it wasn’t a failure to understand or a refusal to believe what Nichols was telling him.
Maybe he didn’t give a fuck.
The gringo opened his mouth to speak, but before he could, de la Mar’s eyes triple-blinked and popped wide open. “Fuck you, putos,” he croaked. “Que están todos muertos. Do you know who—”
Just as abruptly, his eyes fluttered closed, and he went quiet.
Nichols jumped into the void while he could. “He did that to your arm, didn’t he?” he asked, the answer obvious by now.
Should’ve led with that, master negotiator.
The man’s upper lip twitched, baring the incisors, wolflike. Nichols took it as a yes.
De la Mar came to, finished his sentence.
“—the fuck I am?” His eyeballs rolled sideways, tried to buttonhole his captor, then slammed shut again. If the gringo noticed, he didn’t care.
Fuentes’s patience with this little social experiment was wearing thin. “Wrap it up, Nichols,” he called out. “One way or another, this has gotta end, me entiendes?”
Nichols took another step toward the American, who responded by dragging de la Mar another pace away. However far gone he might have been, dude still had a firm grasp on spatial relationships.
Which was an important thing to remember about a madman with a knife.
“Look,” Nichols said, changing tacks, remembering a little tidbit about implanting the narrative you wanted, telling a guy the version of his life you wanted him to believe, “you obviously got a real strong reason to live. If you didn’t you’d be dead a couple times over by now. Am I right? Yeah? You wanna
tell me what that reason is?”
The gringo goggled at him, but the sheriff could see that the remark had landed. Good—Nichols believed it himself. They were getting somewhere.
Just not fast enough.
“Ticktock,” Fuentes called, as if reading his mind.
“I can help you,” Nichols said again, remembering the truth-in-repetition thing. “If you wanna make it out of this, you’ve gotta trust me.”
The lips closed over the incisors, and something in the man’s eyes settled, came into focus. Nichols glimpsed a fierce intelligence, muddled by pain and adrenaline.
“Why should I?”
It was a clear-cut invitation, the best thing you could hope for in this situation. Nichols’s response was pure reflex, the words out of his mouth before he could think better of them.
“I’m a cop.”
“So’s Pescador.
“Pesca—”
“This asshole.”
“You got a point there. What’s your name?”
“Galvan.”
That was good. A name was progress.
“I’m Nichols. And I’m trying to help you, Galvan. I got a feeling you’re a stand-up guy. You’re just stuck on the wrong side of this one, aren’t you?”
The eyes stayed lucid. He was sizing Nichols up, running whatever manner of background check a man in his position could spare the energy for. Nichols held his gaze, inviting the scrutiny, hoping he’d come up clean.
“If I told you even half of what I’ve seen today . . .”
Galvan trailed off, then snapped back into the moment with renewed vigor and forced de la Mar’s to his knees.
“Try me,” Nichols implored, trying to recapture his attention.
Galvan shook his head without looking up, focus trained squarely on the Federale now. Whatever connection Nichols had forged, it was evaporating fast.
“Listen, Galvan. Pescador dies either way. The only question is whether you wanna live. These motherfuckers came to kill him, and if you do it for them—”
The Dead Run Page 25
