The Third Rule of Ten: A Tenzing Norbu Mystery

by Hendricks, Gay

  The third area was the pharmaceutical section, mixing ten-gallon Ziplocs of prescription drugs with sealed blocks of cocaine and kilos of crystal meth. I didn’t spend too much time there. I’d seen it all before.

  I walked to the farthest wall and aimed my square of light.

  Unbidden, an ancient chant of protection sprung up from my soul: Palden Lhamo, Protectress who performs all pacifying deeds, pacify my illnesses, hindrances, and ghosts.

  I counted ten launchers—old but recently cleaned and oiled. Maybe a yard in length, and six inches in diameter, they were shaped like tubes, Army green, with two aiming sights on top, a narrow strap at one end, and a pair of black handles, one equipped with a trigger, jutting underneath like deadly fins. I carefully hefted one. It weighed about 20 pounds, unloaded.

  I moved the light to read the stenciled information on the side of the launcher, but I already knew. I was looking at an RPO-A, a Russian Shmel, or rocket-propelled flame-thrower, launcher of thermobaric grenades. I had read about them around the time of the second Iraqi invasion. What stopped my heart were the grenades. Each rocket-shaped missile was silver, the front tipped with brass metal, the back sprouting bent wings. The payload was mustard yellow, striped with black. The colors of danger. The colors of death. The source of the heat.

  With their enhanced, vacuum-packed blast, these weapons completely obliterated whatever they hit and were catastrophically lethal to any personnel caught within their radius—they literally sucked all the oxygen out of anyone unfortunate enough to live through the initial explosion. Short of nuclear warheads, no other weapons were as destructive, pound for pound, or as horrific.

  And Chaco, aka Carnaté, had ten of them. No wonder his neighboring cartels wanted to make nice to him. I tried to place another call, but of course the combined concrete and earth blocked any signal. I tried to snap some pictures, but between the darkness and my shaking hands, I knew they would prove to be of little to no use.

  But I had my answers. And so did Gus, once I could reach her and tell her what I’d seen. She finally had her boots on the ground, her eyewitness, her human intel.

  And I was finally ready to land my killer whale.

  CHAPTER 22

  “You’re familiar with firearms?” I pointed to the Heckler, steady in Sam’s hand, Goodhue at the other end of the barrel. I’d returned to the chopper to implement the first step of my plan and had found Sam taking his guard duties very seriously.

  Sam frowned. “Not really. We had a shooting range next to my college. I was pretty decent back then, but I’m out of practice.”

  “Better than Mark here, by a mile,” I said.

  Goodhue snorted. I’d freed him from the straps, and now he slumped, still cuffed and very sullen, on the edge of the gurney.

  “What was in that hole, anyway?” Goodhue said. “What did you find?”

  “Stuff,” I answered. No need to set off a panic. “So here’s what I need, Mark,” I continued. “I’d like you to give Chaco a call.”

  His body jolted as if tasered.

  “That idea scares you,” I said.

  “No shit, Sherlock. What am I supposed to say to him? ‘Hey, Chaco, I fucked up. Can you come down here please, so the crazy Tibetan can arrest us both?’ That’ll go over well.”

  Who said anything about arrest? I thought. I motioned my gun at him, just to remind him who was armed.

  “Tell him that you just discovered the Feds have been watching this building for months,” I said. “That they’re onto him. Tell him you found me here, nosing around, and you did what you had to do. Tell him he needs to get down here—now.”

  “You want me to set him up,” Goodhue sneered.

  “Hey,” I said. “This is no time for you to suddenly grow a moral center.”

  He held up his cuffed hands. “Okay,” he said. “I’ll call. I’m screwed either way at this point. But take these off first.”

  I unlocked his cuffs. He rubbed his wrists, as I retrieved his phone from his pocket, unsurprised to see it was the same make and model as the guard’s—and the arsenal of phones below. I powered it on and handed it over. “Put it on speaker.”

  He fidgeted, waiting for a signal. Then his phone let out three short squawks. He squinted at the screen. “Chaco just called, five minutes ago.”

  “Even better,” I said. I waggled my gun. “Do it.”

  He punched the number. It rang twice before Chaco’s voice shouted, “Si? Si?”

  “Goodhue here. Can you hear me? Where are you?” Goodhue asked.

  “Oh. You! Good. Escúchame, listen. I’m close!” Chaco’s raised voice was barely audible over the choppy metallic whine in the background.

  Sam widened his eyes and pointed up, rotating his index finger. So, another helicopter was on its way.

  “My guy at Homeland contacted me!” Chaco yelled. “Is she still in surgery?”

  Goodhue shot me a glance, and I nodded. He said, “Yes.”

  “Good!” Chaco said. “She’ll be my bargaining chip, if necessary. Lemme speak to Fernando. He needs to send word. We have to move some product, and we can’t do it alone.”

  That was going to be a challenge. Unless Fernando had nine lives like his boss, his current status made further communication difficult. Goodhue looked wildly in my direction for a cue. I mimicked puffing on a cigarette.

  “He went out for a smoke.”

  “Mierda,” Chaco said. “What about the Chink? Is he dead?”

  So he knew I was here. Again, Goodhue looked to me for a cue. I nodded and mimed the throat-cutting gesture.

  “Yes.” Then Goodhue improvised—brilliantly, to my mind. “We dumped the body nearby, in the bushes.” Goodhue was starting to get the hang of this. He’d given me a good idea.

  “Mierda,” Chaco repeated. “I wanted to kill that hijo de puta myself! Okay. I won’t be long.” Chaco disconnected.

  As if on cue, the guard’s phone buzzed in my other pocket. I checked the screen—it wasn’t Chaco this time. It was Gus. Informative Gus, as it turned out. Clever girl, she’d used the only cell phone that worked here, the number I’d used to call her from earlier.

  “Ten? Listen. You need to get out of there. We’re staging a raid.”

  “Who?”

  “ATF, plus FBI. Plus the local militia. Somebody from inside Homeland tipped us off. Said Carnaté, aka Chaco Morales, was on his way down there.”

  So Chaco was about to relearn a hard lesson: nobody’s to be trusted; everybody lies.

  “Gus, listen.” I lowered my voice, glancing at Sam and Goodhue. “You were right. I found the underground facility. I got inside.”

  Her breath caught. “Tell me.”

  I stepped out onto the broiling landing pad. “Russian rocket launchers, ten of them. With thermobaric payloads. Plus enough arms and ammo to take down the entire Southwest.”

  “Flamethrowers? Mother of God,” she said. “Homeland’s sending two Hueys as backup. I have to warn them off!”

  Two Hueys, one aeromedical transporter, and a chopper of unknown origin—at this rate, the sky was going to resemble the 405 at rush hour. Or a row of sitting ducks.

  “Good idea,” I said. “And while you’re at it, can you tell your trigger-happy cohorts to hold off on doing anything crazy? We don’t want another Waco. Tell them at least seven civilians are still here. And one of them is Bets McMurtry.”

  I grabbed Sam, and together we forced Goodhue to help us drag the guard’s body a good 20 yards away from the entrance. We placed him in a thick scrub of desert chaparral. Now we had a body to go with Goodhue’s story.

  “Could you tell what kind of helicopter that was?” I asked Sam, as we tossed dirt and brittle creosote branches on top of the corpse until he was mostly obscured.

  “Sounded lightweight. Single engine, probably,” he said. “Probably two-passenger, max.”

  Good to know. That meant Chaco wasn’t bringing his troops with him.

  I hustled them back insid
e the building and ordered Sam to keep an eye on Goodhue and an ear to the sky, as I ran to the operating room at the opposite end.

  I pushed inside, stopping at the doorway. Both doctors, as well as Nurse Delgado, were hunched over their patient. Three heads snapped up in unison. Kestrel’s right hand held a bloodied instrument.

  “Trouble coming,” I said. “How soon can you finish?”

  A muffled “Goddammit!” erupted from under Kestrel’s surgical mask. He collected himself. “Half an hour,” he said. “Now get lost.”

  “Is there another way out of here? For the patient, I mean?”

  I spotted the emergency exit just as Gomez pointed it out.

  “Good. The minute it’s safe to move her, take her straight to the EMS chopper,” I said. “Then get her to a real hospital, as fast as you can.”

  I ran back to Sam and Goodhue.

  “Sam, get the chopper ready for liftoff,” I said. “How many passengers are you licensed to carry?”

  “Six,” he said. “Including the pilot.”

  “Perfect,” I said to Sam. Bets was going to need all the medical expertise she could get. The authorities could deal with the despicable Kestrel and his criminal cohorts later. “Keep the gun,” I added. “Just in case. Now go.”

  Sam met my eyes. “Good luck,” he said. He hurried outside.

  “What about me?” Goodhue muttered.

  “You made this mess,” I answered. “And now you need to clean it up.”

  We waited, ears trained for the sound of approaching machines, airborne or otherwise. Goodhue fidgeted, scuffing the soles of his shoes on the floor in a rhythmic alternating pattern, as if his legs were already running.

  I needed him calmer. I tried to distract him.

  “You’re a smart guy, Mark. I’m sure you could succeed anywhere. Why break the law?”

  “I told you already,” he said.

  “Tell me again.”

  You wouldn’t understand,” he said.

  “Try me.”

  “Fine. Here’s what they don’t teach you in B-school. Anyone can do okay. But there are only three ways to get rich—fuck-you rich—assuming you weren’t born with a fuck-you rich daddy. One: be first—first to trade Bibles for land in Hawaii; first to find oil. Two: be better—find and keep the edge. Think Steve Jobs or Warren Buffett.”

  Or Chaco Morales.

  “And the third way?”

  “Cheat. Find the hole and dive in fast, before they plug it.” His face twisted with rage. “Fuckin’ Bets and her fuckin’ housekeeper. We had the perfect win-win solution here, you know? Clara Fuentes was an illegal. Her presence was a huge political liability. So was McMurtry’s suddenly failing health. So why not use the one to fix the other and make both problems disappear? But, no. Bets freaked out. She was determined to find Clara, no matter what. I told her to drop it, but she wouldn’t. Next thing you know, she gets a fuckin’ private dick involved. For a fuckin’ illegal alien!”

  A distinctive rotary whine, distant but increasing in volume, chopped through the atmosphere. I moved Goodhue to the side window overlooking the helipads. I craned my neck. A lightweight, two-person helicopter was coming in low to land, green and spindly, like an insect. It circled over the guard’s camouflaged body once. I was grateful we’d completely covered him.

  I took two steps back, out of eyesight.

  “Chaco,” Goodhue nodded, peering through the glass.

  “Meet him on the helipad and then bring him this way, through the front door,” I said. “Tell him Fernando’s inside, awaiting instructions.”

  Goodhue hesitated, then shrugged. “Okay.”

  He started out.

  “Mark?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re not going to tell Chaco I’m here, are you?”

  He shook his head.

  “Say no,” I said.

  “No.”

  “Then go.”

  He stepped outside and waded through the heat. I watched from the window. The helicopter touched down with the delicacy of a butterfly coming to rest.

  A distant overlapping roar announced the imminent arrival of more helicopters.

  Chaco jumped out of the chopper, and Goodhue ran to his side. Chaco clapped Goodhue on the back and started to walk in my direction. Then Goodhue made a huge mistake. He must have panicked, or thought he could save himself, because he took off running, waving his arms at the deeper throbbing noise in the sky.

  Chaco spun, whipping a gun out of his pocket, a blur of metal. He took aim and dropped Goodhue with a single shot to the back. Goodhue pitched onto his face and lay twitching on the dry earth. Chaco walked over, nudged him with a boot toe, and delivered a second bullet into the base of Goodhue’s neck. The twitching stopped.

  Be first. Be better. Or cheat. Mark Goodhue chose to cheat, and for that he paid the price. You never know how long it will take for the wheel of karma to circle back around, only that it will. This time, the loop was lightning-quick, the death blow of karma from behind.

  Chaco stood up, and I shuddered at the dead look in his eyes. No feeling. No remorse.

  The thumping, pulsing noise above grew louder. Was this good news or bad? I couldn’t see where these helicopters were, or if they belonged to friends or foes.

  Either way, I needed to get Bets and her medical team out of there, ideally without Chaco knowing I was still alive. Whatever her politics, she was a human being with a beating heart, and she and the others didn’t deserve to die a violent death. That was Chaco’s form of justice, not mine.

  I sprinted back to the operating room. Bets was lying on a narrow movable gurney now, tubes connecting her to a portable IV. Nurse Gonzalez was attaching a bag of clear fluid.

  “It’s done?” I said.

  Kestrel nodded, peeling off his surgical gloves.

  “We’ve got to get her out of here. I need scrubs and a mask,” I told Gomez. “Now!”

  He pointed to a metal cabinet.

  In less than five minutes, two doctors, a nurse, and a Tibetan orderly were wheeling Bets McMurtry to the waiting EMS helicopter.

  Chaco was slowly dragging Goodhue’s body toward the same scrub that housed the guard. He straightened, and glared at us.

  “Faster,” I said. We ran the gurney to the open helicopter door. Sam was waiting.

  Chaco dropped Goodhue and fumbled for his gun.

  “Quick! The edge of the sheets!” Kestrel gasped. “One. Two. Three. Lift!”

  Using the sheets as a sling, the four of us maneuvered Bets inside and placed her on the helicopter gurney, Nurse Delgado manning the IV behind us.

  A bullet clanged off one side of the chopper. Bets’s eyes were closed, her face ghost-pale. Kestrel and Gomez elbowed the rest of us away so they could minister to her. I wondered if she would make it. Either way, I had cleared my own karma, as far as she was concerned.

  Chaco was a different story entirely. I ripped off my hospital mask and grabbed my gun. I moved to the helicopter door in a stoop, keeping out of sight, my .38 drawn, but Chaco had stopped shooting. I peered outside as the blades began to rotate.

  “Ten! Buckle up!” Sam yelled.

  Chaco’s face had darkened to a murderous hue.

  The engine whirred. “Ten!”

  He was staring straight at the gap in the ground, where I’d pushed open the trap door leading to his hidden bunker of death. He started toward it.

  I chose that moment to slip onto the tarmac and crouch-run my way horizontally toward the other chopper.

  Sam lifted off, the roar sounding in my ears as my mouth filled with grit. I watched through stinging eyes as they banked steeply and flew away. A wash of relief flooded my heart area. I did a body count: two dead, five escaped, two still at large.

  Plus me.

  I reached Chaco’s small helicopter and dove inside. I had my Wilson pressed to the pilot’s temple before he had time to react.

  “Take us up,” I said. “UP!!!” I jabbed my finger at t
he sky, just in case he didn’t speak English.

  The distinctive hum started again, like a swarm of metallic mosquitoes.

  “STOP!” I heard through the loud crackle of a bullhorn. “FEDERAL AGENTS!”

  I located the source: several men standing on a slight incline about a football field’s distance away. The shouter, a Feeb in sturdy shoes, lowered his horn. Behind him, armed ATF agents were scrambling for their guns. Behind them, a half dozen more suits were trying to get signals on their phones. They’d apparently all just arrived in a herd of black Range Rovers, any hubbub swallowed up by all the chopper noise. Now a bouncing black jeep materialized from behind the incline, and several heavily armed Mexican federales spilled out. I was witnessing the build-up to a potentially disastrous goat-rodeo, as Bill liked to put it.

  Assess risk, my mind screamed. Which was worse, the fools on the hill or the maniac behind me?

  Then we lifted off, and I realized that this was worse. In fact, this was my worst nightmare. I was flying straight up in a tiny helicopter, and the helicopter, as far as I could tell, had no doors.

  Down below, the mix of Mexicans and Americans milled around chaotically, as if waiting for someone to tell them what to do. With no phone signals, that was tough. Finally, they formed a ragged line and started a slow, halting advance.

  I couldn’t find Chaco anywhere. I had a very bad feeling about that.

  I fumbled for the guard’s flip phone. I had a signal again. I called Gus.

  “Ten!”

  “All civilians are free and clear,” I said. “Most of them are also criminals, so make sure you have a shit-load of handcuffs at the other end, along with an ambulance.”

  “Got it,” she said.

  “But Chaco’s gone underground. I’m sure for a Shmel. Tell your guys to back off!”

  “What about you?”