We stopped in the arch, and my eyes focused.
The room had a half dozen tables and chairs, a bar along the back. Two darkened flat-screen TVs were on one side opposite the painting.
The dim light from a solitary bulb illuminated a mural on the wall to our left.
The artwork was a mountaintop tableau and took up nearly the entire wall. The subject was another Aztec warrior, this one kneeling in front of a woman asleep on a bed of rock, towering juniper trees on either side, a babbling brook in the background.
The mural immediately drew the attention of anybody who entered the bar. The warrior was oversized and had been painted in much finer detail than the warrior images in the entry area or on the exterior of the building. He had long flowing hair, ropy muscles, and an exaggeratedly handsome face, thick lashes on sleepy, half-closed eyes.
The woman was straight out of schoolboy fantasyland, humongous breasts, exquisitely long legs slightly parted. She wore a barely there two-piece outfit apparently made from clouds or translucent silk.
Milo was nowhere to be seen.
McCluskey stood in the middle of the room, swiveling his head, gun in hand. His attention kept being drawn back to the mural.
“Where is he?” Eva stepped into the bar, pulling me with her. “He’s wounded. He has to be here somewhere.”
I stared at the mural, shivering from the cold. The image was so vivid, I could almost smell the mountain air and the sweat on the warrior’s chest.
“I don’t know.” McCluskey shook his head. He gave up and gazed at the mural, too.
From the side of the bar by the TVs came a faint sound. The three of us turned in unison.
Piper jumped up from behind a table. She held a pistol in her hand.
“Drop your weapons.” She aimed at McCluskey. “Both of you.”
Nobody spoke for a moment. Relief washed over me followed by more confusion. How did she get here? Had she shot Milo? Where was Milo?
“Two against one.” McCluskey smiled. “You’ll never make it.”
The expression on Piper’s face didn’t alter. She didn’t speak or change positions. Instead, she squeezed the trigger twice, two quick shots that hit McCluskey in the chest.
He dropped his weapon and fell to the floor, unaware of Piper’s Mantra: when in doubt, put rounds on target.
Eva gasped. She pulled the Glock away from me, aimed at Piper.
I jumped back, out of the line of fire.
“Don’t even think about it.” Piper drew a bead on the woman’s chest. “Drop the gun. Now.”
Eva hesitated, struggling for breath like she’d run a marathon, face etched in fear. She looked at the figure of McCluskey lying at her feet. After a long moment, she complied. The Glock clattered to the stone floor.
“Where’s Milo?” I bent to pick up the weapon. “Is he ok—”
“Shut up, Jon.” Piper aimed at me. “And don’t touch that gun.”
I froze.
Milo appeared behind the bar by the beer taps, about thirty feet away. He was unharmed.
“Piper?” He strode toward us. “What are you doing? This, we did not discuss.”
I shivered, not just from the cold.
“We were going to rescue Jon and apprehend McCluskey and Eva,” Milo said. “Now you’re pointing a gun at our friend?”
The muzzle of her weapon seemed to grow larger, and I imagined what the heat from the blast would feel like, a welcome if all-too-brief respite from the cold.
Piper was radiant, happy-looking like the day we met. She appeared well rested, at peace.
She raised the gun a notch higher, aimed at my face.
“W-w-where’s the scanner?” My voice sounded hollow, far away.
She tilted her head toward the kneeling Aztec warrior, her eyes never leaving mine.
The shoe box rested on the floor by the warrior’s sandaled feet. Because of the light and the background, it was nearly invisible. Hidden in plain sight.
She and Milo must have been in communication all along and worked out a plan—conceal the scanner, serve as backup for my meeting, take out the bad guys if it came to that.
Unfortunately, plans have a way of derailing when emotions got involved.
Eva gasped when she saw the cardboard container. Her dark eyes sparkled, unable to hide her hunger for the contents of the box.
“Put the gun down, Piper.” Milo stamped his foot. “My undying love for you, it will wane if you do not do as I say.”
Piper aimed the gun at the woman by my side and said, “You want it, don’t you, Eva?”
Eva didn’t speak.
“Go ahead and take it.” Piper smiled. A long pause. “Just like you took Jon.”
No one said anything. Her words swirled between the three of us, smoke from a condemned man’s cigarette. The Aztec warrior’s muscles glistened with sweat.
“They will come for us, yes?” Eva said. “Because of what has happened in the desert and what is in the box, they will never let us rest.”
Stress had made her accent more pronounced. She sounded like what she was: a scared young woman from Mexico whose days were numbered, collateral damage in the wars between the narcotraffickers and the governments on either side of the border.
Piper nodded. After a moment, I did the same.
“Are you going to kill me?” Eva said.
Piper didn’t reply. One side of her mouth curled upward in a lopsided smile. Milo shook his head and made a clicking sound with his tongue, a sign he was frustrated and fearful at the same time.
“Piper.” I held out one hand. “Give me the gun.”
My arm shook, teeth chattered.
“Choices have been made, Jon.” Piper tightened her grip on the weapon. “Every action has a consequence.”
“Please.” I eased a step closer. “Think about all the kids you wanted to visit.”
She swung the muzzle toward me. Her trigger finger whitened, and the Aztec warrior seemed to smile.
Seconds ticked by. Nobody moved. The tension in the room grew, thick enough to slice with an ax.
“Stop.” Eva stepped forward. “I didn’t take him from you.”
Piper looked at the woman we’d driven across Texas, her expression a mix of distrust, relief, and weariness.
“Nothing happened,” Eva said. “Please let me go. I just want this to end.”
“You and me both.” Piper rubbed her cheek with the back of her free hand.
I realized that Piper’s face was ashen, the radiant image from a moment ago just an illusion like so much else. She was as spent as I was.
“Put the gun down, Piper.” I sidestepped across the room, moving around McCluskey’s body, and retrieved the shoebox.
Eva began to cry. She knelt beside McCluskey as Piper slumped her shoulders and dropped the pistol on a table top. Milo sighed in relief.
“We’re going to leave now, Eva.” I opened the box, verified the scanner was still there. “You need to leave, too. The police will be here soon.”
Eva lay across McCluskey’s body, cheek on his shoulder, crying.
Piper hugged herself, eyes empty.
Eva looked up at me. “You are not going to arrest me?”
“No.” I paused. “I’m not a cop anymore.”
A sense of relief washed over me as I spoke those words.
Piper and I were still on the hook for the two dead cartel thugs at the warehouse in West Dallas and Eva was the only witness who could absolve us. I should have wanted her to be locked up so she could testify on our behalf. However, based on the events of the past few days, I doubted she’d live more than a few hours in custody.
“You felt something for me, didn’t you?” She brushed tears from her cheek.
“What’s past is past.”
“You thought I felt something back there, yes?”
I touched the scanner, rubbed a finger along the burnt plastic.
“You are nothing.” She spat the words out. “I’ve been with
real men—Lazaro and Keith. They know how to treat a woman.”
A drug smuggler and a drug addict. Eva didn’t make very good choices. No wonder I’d been drawn to her.
Milo came up behind me. “We need to roll, Jon.”
“I will tell the cartel about all of you,” Eva said. “And they will kill you.”
“Or, here’s a thought,” Piper said. “I could just shoot you now.” The pistol lay on the table, but she made no move toward it.
“Enough death.” Milo shook his head. “Too many souls lost over this matter.”
I nodded in agreement as Eva sat up and pulled a small-framed pistol from underneath McCluskey’s jacket, the dead man’s backup gun.
She aimed at my face. “Give me the scanner.”
Milo swore. Piper’s face flushed red with rage. Her gun was a long three feet from her grasp. My weapon, the one Eva had taken from me and then dropped, was on the floor nearer the entrance to the bar than to where I was at the moment.
“Okay. You win.” I handed Eva the box, fumbling a little, just enough to cover my index finger turning the master switch to ON. “You take the scanner and forget all about us.”
Eva grabbed the box and licked her lips, dollar signs practically swimming above her head.
“Do we have a deal?” I tried to look sincere.
Eva stared at the blinking lights, clearly not understanding what they represented. She smiled triumphantly, stood, and ran from the bar, the device tucked under her arm like a football.
When the front door slammed shut, Milo said, “That was close. Now, we should depart in an expedient manner.”
I looked at Piper. “Are you coming with us?”
“You let a damsel in distress get away,” she said. “How out of character.”
I shrugged.
“Holy crap.” Piper shook her head. “You turned it on, didn’t you?”
I nodded.
No one spoke. The three of us stared at each other for a moment then dashed out of the bar and jumped into Milo’s van. Eva was nowhere to be seen. Milo put the vehicle in gear, and we sped away.
A few minutes later I heard the whomp-whomp of a chopper’s rotors over the sounds of traffic. At a stop light, I looked up and saw a large military-style helicopter flying overhead.
Paynelowe had come for its scanner.
EPILOGUE
“The chief business of the American people is business.”
—President Calvin Coolidge, January 1925
“This may sound trite but I firmly believe it to be true: the business of America is business, that is, making money. And money is a good thing because it provides for all of us through taxes. When I’m elected, I will make it a priority to revamp the banking laws so that it’s easier for investment money to move across the border in both directions. Imagine if you will, a border without barriers.”
—US Senator and presidential candidate Stephen McNally, speaking at a private fund-raiser at the Laredo Country Club, Laredo, Texas, August 2012
- CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR -
Every federal law enforcement outfit except one employed private contractors.
The US Secret Service.
The man who’d knocked on the door of Milo’s safe house looked like an agent in a protective detail. Average height, extremely fit, clean shaven. He wore a gray suit tailored a little loose in the middle, an attractive but bland tie. Sunglasses and a radio earpiece in one ear.
I’d opened the door but hadn’t stepped outside, one hand on the Glock hidden in my waistband. I’d slept for the past eighteen hours straight, but my body felt like an old man’s, my mental acuity dull as a butter knife. Piper was still sacked out in the back bedroom.
It was ten in the morning, two days after my encounter with Eva Ramirez at the Shrine of the Blessed Sacrament. We’d been keeping a low profile at Milo’s. Piper was morose because Imogene’s number had been disconnected, and we were both more than a little irked that we hadn’t secured any sort of a payday for all the work we’d done. The lack of money was balanced out by the fact that we weren’t in jail or dead.
The agent held up his badge. “Are you Jon Cantrell?”
“Maybe.” I frowned. “Who wants to know?”
After the last week, nothing surprised me anymore, certainly not the Secret Service dropping by.
The media, hopped up on stories about cartel violence and a rogue group of DEA contractors, went ballistic over the discovery of Keith McCluskey’s body in a Mexican-food restaurant in Dallas. Days before, Paynelowe had reported him killed in a desolate section of Coahuila, not far from Presidio, Texas, a DEA hero shot down on the front lines of the War on Drugs.
No one knew what happened to Eva or the scanner. Milo’s sources indicated that the chopper had landed and a group of agents had dispersed across the streets of East Dallas. Shots had been fired. A couple of junkies claimed they saw a woman in a white blouse lying dead in an alley, a swarm of blue windbreakers surrounding the body. Neither Paynelowe nor the DEA commented.
Hollis and the district attorney’s office left messages at the Main Street Dash: Piper and I were off the hook for the two dead thugs at the warehouse as well as for anything that had happened in West Texas. Apparently, Paynelowe’s new contract was in serious jeopardy, and they had leaned on the district attorney, desperate to keep us off the witness stand. The Dallas police and the DA, reeling from the discovery of Sinclair’s body along with a substantial amount of cash and his ties to organized crime, had been eager to play along.
“Mister Hawkins is outside.” He spoke the name like it was supposed to mean something to me. “He’d like a word with you, if it’s all right.”
“Who?”
“Patrick Hawkins.” The agent cocked his head. “You watch the news much?”
“Not if I can help it.”
“This will only take a few minutes,” the agent said. “And some very powerful people would consider it a favor.”
“Maybe we could set something up later. It’s been a rough few days.”
“Nobody’s going to hurt you,” he said. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”
I waited for a couple of seconds then stepped onto the porch.
“If you please, sir.” He pointed to my waistband. “Leave the weapon inside.”
After a moment’s hesitation, I tossed the Glock on the side table by the front door and followed the agent to the two black Suburbans idling in the street. Both had tinted windows and a forest of antennas on their roofs.
“I gotta pat you down.” The agent gave me a sheepish look. “Sorry.”
I held out my hands, and he performed a very quick and thorough search, letting me keep my phone and keys.
The rear door of the second Suburban opened and a man in his twenties wearing khakis and a golf shirt jumped out, smart phone in one hand, a tablet computer in the other. He looked like a congressional intern or a model in a Dockers commercial.
“Don’t know who you are, but you’re screwing up the schedule.” He pointed to the rear door. “Make it quick.”
I hopped in the back of the SUV, took the only available seat. Dockers Dude shut the door and remained outside.
Inside, the air-conditioning was turned to high, cooling the rich aroma of General Motors leather and takeout food. In the front sat what appeared to be two more Secret Service agents. In the third row, a man in his forties sprawled with his feet extended, fingers tapping on a cell phone.
In the second row, in a club chair next to me, sat a pear-shaped guy with a barely there comb-over. He wore an ill-fitting double-breasted suit that had a greenish tint and looked like a Men’s Wearhouse special, circa 1992.
The pear-shaped guy had a file folder in his lap, a half-eaten McDonald’s Quarter Pounder in one hand, a cell phone in the other. A Bluetooth headset wrapped around one ear.
“Yeah.” The man, obviously in the middle of a call, cut his eyes my way. “He just got here. We’re getting ready to talk.”
He nodded, took a bite from the burger, and continued his phone call.
“Nebraska? That’s only five electoral votes.” He chewed several times and swallowed. “What the fuck do I care about Nebraska?”
I glanced around the interior of the vehicle. The agents were keeping a watch on the street. On the console rested what looked like a newer model of the scanner I’d given to Eva Ramirez, the item that had initiated all this fuss in the first place. Guess some agencies were getting the devices for field use after all. The guy in the back was still working the keyboard of his phone like a fifteen-year-old girl right before the big dance at school.
“Then you tell Rove he can suck my left one.” Hawkins, still on the phone, put his burger down on top of the folder. “That backstabbing SOB picked the losing team this time.”
My gaze fell to the floor where a letter-sized manila envelope rested by a grease-stained McDonald’s sack. My name had been scrawled in black on the outside of the envelope.
“The demographics for the focus groups in Iowa were all fucked up, too.” Hawkins snapped his fingers at me, pointed to the envelope. “There’s got to be some Chinese people somewhere in that state.” He was quite the multitasker.
I picked up the envelope, opened it. Removed a small packet, maybe six or eight pages.
The first sheet was on Department of Homeland Security letterhead, a job description for the position of assistant chief of staff at the Office of Counter-Narcotics Enforcement in the DC headquarters.
The suggested resume, job skills, and requirements read like it had been written with me in mind, minus of course getting fired from the Dallas Police Department and subsequently working as a hand-to-mouth contractor. The pay range was well into the six figures and included full benefits.
The next two pages were an application for the job, already filled out with my name and information. They had used the apartment at the Cheyenne that nobody had known about as my home address. Under references, they had listed three people I’d never met: the chief of police for the City of Dallas, the regional head of the DEA, and the special agent in charge of the Houston FBI office. Each name had next to it what was noted as a personal cell number.
The Contractors Page 36
