Gil Mason/Gunwood USA Box Set

by Gordon Carroll

  Majoqui locked the door behind him.

  All the lights were out and the home was quiet. Majoqui crept up the stairs to the master bedroom. Inside was a woman in her mid-forties, sleeping soundly. On the nightstand were pictures of the woman with a child, a young boy. In the picture the woman looked younger. Majoqui hoped that meant the boy was at least a teenager now. Majoqui was not a big man. He didn't need large-sized clothing.

  Majoqui searched the room, his eyes fully adjusted to the dark. In the distance, he heard numerous sirens coming into the area. Coming for him. But he was safe.

  He had hoped to find something he could crush the woman's skull with. He had the guns of course, but he did not want to take the chance of damaging them. In the end, he simply clamped his hand over her nose and mouth. She tried to fight, but it didn't last long. He held her for several minutes after she'd given up and gone limp, just to make sure.

  He found the boy in the back bedroom. Asleep. He was around fifteen and taller than Majoqui, although more slender and with a touch of acne on his cheeks and nose. In this room Majoqui found many blunt weapons. He finally settled on a metal baseball bat that sat in a corner with a brown leather mitt draped over the knob. Gently, he pulled the sheet up over the sleeping boy's face and head.

  Afterward, Majoqui made himself a sandwich from the kitchen and washed it down with a soda. In the bathroom he found peroxide and bandages and made short work of the stab wound. It still seeped blood, but although it was deep, he had been careful not to hit anything important. He popped a few aspirin and dragged the dead woman into her son's room.

  The woman's bed was very comfortable and he'd almost fallen asleep when he remembered the dead deputy's phone. He called Tamera, told her he was out and would be contacting her in a few days. He hung up, took the battery out of the phone and dropped it on the floor. He stripped, pulled the covers up over his shoulders and was asleep before the last of the police sirens had stopped wailing.

  34

  Majoqui has escaped. I lay in my bed watching the newscasters on the television screen overhead. And for the first time in weeks… I felt… something. A spark. Life. Emotion. Hate.

  For the first time since losing my family I had a reason to live.

  Revenge.

  Revenge is mine saith the Lord.

  Not this time. This time it's mine.

  I would kill Majoqui Cabrera.

  I moved my trembling fingers to the hospital phone and called my lieutenant, Michael Braden. I still had only limited use of my motor skills and it took me three times to get the number right. He answered after the second ring.

  "Hello?"

  "Did you hear?" I asked.

  "Yeah, the Sheriff called a few minutes ago. I'm watching the news now."

  "I want on it."

  "Gil, you can barely move."

  "I'll get better… fast."

  There was a long pause.

  "Gil, buddy, it's just not possible. You know that."

  "I'll be out of here in a week."

  "No, Gil, it's not just that. You're too close. You're personally involved. You have to know there's no way on Earth we can let you have any part in this investigation. It would be automatic grounds for a dismissal of the case, or even if we somehow won, for an appeal. Not to mention how it would leave us open to civil litigation. You just have to sit this out and let us do our jobs."

  There was another long pause before I spoke.

  "There won't be a trial, Mike."

  "Stop talking, Gil. Go to sleep. I'll come see you in the morning."

  He hung up on me.

  I pushed the buzzer for the nurse. She appeared at my door almost immediately.

  "Yes?"

  "I need to speak with the physical therapist."

  A puzzled expression came over her face. She looked at her watch.

  "You mean now… tonight?"

  "Yes. Right now."

  "I'm sorry, but they only work in the daytime, Mr. Mason."

  "Then help me into a wheelchair and take me to the gym, or the physical therapy room, or whatever you call it."

  She shook her head. "I wish I could help, but I have other patients to take care of. And besides, the physical therapy room is closed at night. I'm afraid you'll just have to wait until tomorrow."

  I could feel the blood pumping in my temple and I had to fight down the impulse to scream at her. Instead I lay back and closed my eyes.

  "All right. I want to see the physical therapist first thing in the morning."

  She told me she would make sure he got the message and left the room. As soon as she was gone, I opened my eyes and gripped the side bars of my bed. My muscles felt like pasta left in water overnight. My arms, shoulders, and chest muscles shook and trembled as I pushed up, lifting my weight from the bed.

  Up-down, up-down, up-down. I did five dips before my arms gave out and I crumpled into the bed. Sweat rolled down my face and fire shot through my triceps. The room swam before me and lights sparked behind my eyes. My breath rasped in and out of my lungs like I was some ancient asthmatic.

  I waited thirty seconds and started my second set.

  There was no time to waste. I had a man to kill.

  35

  Tamera Sun reached into the bag and found the cell phone at the bottom. She took it out and looked at it. Excitement bubbled inside her. She knew Majoqui would be calling her soon. The Mara member had been a boy this time. He couldn't have been older than twelve and had no visible tattoos yet. He had dropped off the plain paper bag and left without speaking a word. But Tamera had seen the news reports.

  She didn't know where Majoqui was, but she knew where he wasn’t… in jail. And she knew that nothing would keep him from getting in contact with her.

  Slipping the phone into her jean's pocket, she brewed a cup of tea, pet her cat's fur and turned on the TV. All the local stations were talking about the escape and the big shoot out. She sat on the loveseat with Miranda curled in her lap. The tea was hot and she took it in tiny sips. She was so nervous she considered smoking some pot to calm her, but decided against it because she wanted to relish the feeling of knowing that they would be together very soon.

  Tamera had quit her job nearly a month ago at Majoqui's request. Majoqui never ordered her to do anything, he was too much of a gentleman for that. He would simply suggest to her that she do something. The idea of refusing any of his requests never entered her mind. He was the man… and he was a real man. So unlike the other boys she had known. He made her feel like a real woman. He made her feel like a princess. She felt completely safe with him. And she would do anything for him.

  The phone vibrated in her pocket.

  Majoqui peered through the curtains as Tamera answered the phone. The police had been conducting house to house searches for several hours. Twice they had rung the doorbell and twice they had tried calling into the house. Both times they had left. There was no forced entry, no sign of a disturbance, all the doors and windows were locked and so they could only conclude there was no one home. They had left, but Majoqui was sure they would be back, and eventually, they might decide they had to get inside to make certain he wasn't there. But that would not be until someone called in to the police saying the woman had not shown up for work or the boy had missed school or family members were worried about them. And so, for the meantime, he was safe.

  Tamera answered the phone. He talked to her soothingly for several minutes and then gave her the instructions for where and when to pick him up. After that, he napped for several hours. He would not leave until evening. The boy's clothes would help, as would the red hair dye he found in the woman's bathroom, but the dark was his best friend now that they had pictures of him.

  At three o'clock he raided the refrigerator and made himself a nice lunch. There was no beer, but he did find several bottles of red wine. Majoqui was no connoisseur, but he liked his drink less sweet than Sangria. Still, it wasn't bad and it did give him a slight buzz.

&n
bsp; Speaking of which, he could already hear the flies in the woman's son's bedroom, even through the closed door. It was amazing to Majoqui how the insects could always manage to find the dead. There wasn't even any smell yet. And still, there they were.

  Majoqui finished his lunch, watched some television, mostly about himself, and slept off and on for another three hours. The police didn't come back, and even before it was completely dark, their cars had deserted the neighborhood.

  At nine-thirty a yellow Volkswagen puttered its way down the street and stopped five houses down. Majoqui locked the door behind him and started toward the car.

  He had an empire to build.

  36

  Three weeks had passed since my first set of dips. I could walk, even jog, for brief periods of time. I used real weights and could bench about one-fifty. Still a long way from my usual sets of three-twenty-five, but progress.

  Majoqui Cabrera was still free. A middle-aged woman and her son had been murdered in their home the night he escaped, just a short distance from the crash, and it was obvious he’d stayed there for at least a day. There had been no sightings of him and the common consensus was that he fled back to South America.

  It didn't matter. I would find him. Wherever he was.

  My father-in-law tried to see me twice more, both times I refused.

  I was out of the hospital and back at the house. When Jolene and Marla were alive it was a home, now it was only a house. A place to eat, sleep and work out. Nothing more.

  I slept on the couch and hadn’t gone into our bedroom or the nursery since coming back. I bought new clothes and showered in the guest bathroom.

  The dreams were mostly bad. I kept reliving the event… that's what the shrink from work called it… the event. At first it would happen almost constantly, and in the mornings, I would be more tired than before I went to sleep. But slowly it got better, to the point where I would wake up in a sweat only once or twice a night. Again… progress.

  The doctors hadn't signed off for me to return to work yet, but that didn't stop me. I started making calls and calling in debts. I had every cop I knew squeezing their snitches and contacts to get a line on Majoqui. Sooner or later something would turn up. I have friends in the FBI, DEA, military intelligence, even the CIA, and they were all keeping tabs on their wire taps, drug deals and gang surveillance.

  No one could remain completely anonymous, not these days, but Majoqui was doing pretty well. MS 13 had always been one of the toughest gangs to crack. They were brutal on snitches and fear had a way of shutting people’s mouths. But Majoqui had somehow taken that fear of talking to a new level.

  My K9, Pilgrim, was bored out of his mind. At Cherokee County we take our dogs home with us. They are owned by the County, but they live with their handlers. Athena Marie had taken care of him while I was in the hospital, and even now she came over twice a day to help me feed and pick up after him. She also brought me the latest news on Majoqui and MS 13. And although there had been no news on Majoqui, MS 13 was another matter.

  I finished the last of twenty pull ups, my arms shaking like I'd done a hundred, and let my feet drop to the floor. Athena had rigged the pull up bar across the doorway of the kitchen.

  Wiping the sweat from my forehead with the bottom of my shirt, I staggered over to the table and sat heavily in the chair. My heartbeat was a hundred and forty and it felt like there wasn't enough air in the whole house to get my breathing back to normal.

  "Don't die on me, Sarge," said Athena, as she filled Pilgrim's bowl with water.

  "Rehabilitation ain't as fun as it's cracked up to be."

  She laughed. "Isn't that the truth. I broke my wrist when I was fifteen and had it casted for three months. My wrist was as thin as a pencil when I got it off and felt like it was made of glass. The simplest things were nearly impossible and I felt like I had to baby it all the time. The exercises they gave me to strengthen it looked so easy on paper, but they hurt like crazy."

  She gave Pilgrim a pat on the head and looked over at me. "You're doing good though, boss. Last week you couldn't do five pull ups. At this rate you'll be back to normal in a month."

  Normal. No. I would never be back to normal.

  I nodded, keeping my true feelings to myself. "Thanks for the chin up bar. It's been a real help."

  She brought me a glass of ice water and sat next to me at the table. "My pleasure. Now to work." She flipped up the screen on her laptop and punched in her password.

  "There've been seven different reports of MS 13 moving in on other gang's turf. And not just the Bloods and the Crips either." She navigated the touchpad and brought up a series of news reports. "Yesterday, a Son's of Silence member got half his hand cut off by a machete as he was conducting a business transaction that may or may not have involved a certain crystal substance."

  I scanned the report. "Anything to indicate Majoqui was involved?"

  She shook her head. "No, but none of this started until he escaped."

  I nodded. "The question is — is he behind all this or is it just a result of them seeing fertile territory when they came out to help him? If he's the brains, he has to still be in the state. If not, he could be back in South America."

  "Yes, sir. That is the question."

  "We have to push harder," I said. "Whether he's here or there, somebody had to have seen something. Any word on the yellow Volkswagen?"

  "Our guys are stopping every one of them they can get reasonable suspicion on. So far nothing."

  Frustration was making me crazy. I felt the blood pumping at my temples. I always hated being an armchair quarterback. I work my best out in the field where I can look into a suspect's eyes and hear the timber of his voice. Relying on others is hard. I had to get out on my own.

  "Anything else?" I asked.

  "Just this, and it may be unrelated." She pulled up a grainy black and white security video. "An Aurora detective sent me a video stream. He was working a gas drive off call and checking the video surveillance when he happened to see it." She stopped the feed and pointed to a man at the counter. His face was away from them, but he had collar-length dark hair and was wearing an untucked plaid shirt and dark jeans.

  "What about him?" I asked.

  "Watch," she said.

  As the clerk finished ringing up his items, the man reached back for his wallet, pulling his shirt up on the side in the process, revealing a wide swatch of belt.

  "There," said Athena. "See the shine? How it doesn't bend? And look how wide it is."

  I nodded. "The belt sword. That Aurora detective has a good eye. I wouldn't have caught that."

  "Me neither," she said. "We sent out pictures of it after the night club massacre and even included a website that shows video of it in use, but still it was a great catch."

  I stared at the screen.

  "What do you think," she asked, "is it him?"

  I shook my head slowly. "I don't know. He's about the right height and weight. The build and stance are similar. But I can't be sure. I need to see his face. Any other angles?"

  "No, that's all he had."

  "Run it back and freeze on him as he leaves the store."

  She maneuvered the touch pad.

  "See how he never looks at the camera?"

  She scrunched her lips. "Maybe, or it could just be bad luck for us."

  "Could be, but he's a smart little bad guy, cunning. It's the kind of behavior I'd expect from him." I stared some more. I could see his neckline and a slight portion of his right jaw. "There's not enough. I can't tell. When you get a chance, download it and send it to my phone."

  There was nothing conclusive, but it might be him. It was something, maybe. I looked at the grainy image a final time. If it's you, I thought, I will get you.

  Pilgrim lay under the table as the two of them talked. He missed Jolene and Marla. He couldn’t know what had happened to them or where they had gone… just that they were no longer a part of his life. And that made him sad. Marla use
d to sneak snacks to him and he would ride her around on his back… she weighed almost nothing. And she hugged him and rubbed her face in his fur. He would lick her face and make her giggle and crawl away from him before returning for more. But now there was no little girl to play with and no Jolene to scratch his head and rub behind his ears and sing her quiet songs while she cooked or did the dishes or worked around the house. Now there was only the Alpha and he was different. His voice was different. The way he moved was different. Even his smell was different. It wasn’t just his injuries. It went far deeper than that. Pilgrim could sense where he hurt… the damage to his physical body. But his true hurt lay somewhere Pilgrim couldn’t see or hear or smell. Somewhere hidden. Somewhere bad. Pilgrim wondered if it might be the same place that kept Jolene and Marla from him. If he could know where that place was, he would find them and he would kill wherever or whatever kept them from him. He wanted only that it be like it used to be, with little Marla playing with him and Jolene and her beautiful voice and the Alpha watching over them with Pilgrim at his side.

  Athena and the Alpha continued to speak at the table above him. Their voices were animated and he heard something in the Alpha’s voice he hadn’t heard since Jolene and Marla left… excitement. He listened closer. Yes, excitement, but not the type of excitement that used to often meld with his tones. Different. Filled with hate and anger. Pilgrim had never really hated anyone. He loved the hunt and the fight and the vanquishing of an opponent. But he’d never really hated anyone. So the emotion was hard for Pilgrim to fully comprehend. To make sense of. But the loss of Jolene and Marla and the change in the Alpha’s behavior was affecting him as much as it affected the Alpha, planting the true seeds of hatred into the nexus of his soul.

  Pilgrim’s animal brain explored the emotion and pain and loneliness that invaded his world, stripping away his natural confidence and happiness until a slow burning flame flared in his heart and he began to understand, at least on some level, what the Alpha felt. What true hatred is.