Lethal Vengeance

by Don Pendleton

“Forget it. Not important. What I’ve heard about the Juárez slasher, all he hunts are girls nobody seems to care that much about.”

  “They are his preference,” Prieto agreed. “But a lunatic must also live, eh? He enjoys the act of murder. Why not make a profit from it where he can?”

  “You lost me,” Jeffers replied.

  “Suppose El Psicópata hires himself out as a killer or disposal agent serving men of wealth from time to time?”

  “You mean, like the cartels?”

  “A case in point, perhaps.”

  “Why bother, when they have armies of killers as it is?”

  “Perhaps to keep from being obvious, providing the police with a diversion.”

  Jeffers thought about it. “That could work in theory, I guess. Still leaves you with the basic problem of ID, though.”

  “And if I could help with that?”

  “I’d say you don’t need me.”

  “Would it not mean advancement for an agent who could end this monster’s reign of terror in Juárez?”

  “I still work for the DEA, Captain. That’s ‘D’ for ‘drugs.’ The FBI might be able to help you out. Jack Belmont is their so-called ‘legat’ at the consulate. That’s Bureauspeak for legal attaché.”

  “And you prefer that he takes credit for recovering a missing US federale?”

  “Look, if you gave me something rock-solid, I might be able to help out.”

  “I hope so,” Prieto said. “Do you have a pen and paper, Agent Jeffers?”

  Calle Basalto

  For some reason that Bolan didn’t understand or care about, most of the streets crisscrossing in the Libertad district were named for minerals. Aside from basalt there was alabaster, chalcopyrite, cinnabar, coral and so on. Not that there were any mines or factories in evidence. The local features ran toward bars, brothels, pawnshops and the occasional facility maintained by narcotrafficantes, which had drawn Bolan to the neighborhood.

  After the ugly scene with Miguel Vergara and the FIA lieutenant he’d been forced to kill in self-defense, Bolan had tabled his attack on Kuno Carillo’s bank in favor of a Juárez Cartel target where he felt assured of finding traffickers and their soldiers at work. It was a dive appropriately called El Agujero, which translated as “The Hole.” Its stock-in-trade was an addictive buffet of drugs that guaranteed a steady clientele that came to mix and sample chemical delights whenever they had cash on hand from robberies, tricking or even selling parts of themselves, ranging from pints of blood to the occasional kidney.

  Sad to say, none of the staff or customers on site would qualify as anyone a civilized society would miss.

  For this hit, Bolan picked out the Benelli M-4 Super 90 as his lead weapon, alternating buckshot rounds and rifled slugs when he loaded the shotgun’s magazine. A shoulder holster held a Glock beneath his left arm, two spare mags beneath the right, and with the Desert Eagle on his hip, he couldn’t think of anything he’d overlooked.

  The Hole featured a neon splash outside, its name in red, above a weird abstract depiction of a mine shaft, possibly—or was it meant to be a toilet bowl with murky water circling the drain? No signage hinted at the self-destructive pleasures it conveyed, but word of mouth worked just as well and cost the operators nothing.

  Bolan thought about a back door entry then decided he would use the same street entrance favored by El Agujero’s customers. Two slouching guards out front could either try to stop him or be smart for once and run away.

  Crossing the street with the Benelli carried at port arms, Bolan was ready when the lookouts spotted him. They had five seconds, maybe less, to buy a few more days of life or let it go. Both of them preferred machismo over common sense, reaching under their baggy guayabera shirttails, seeking hidden pistols.

  At that range, twenty feet and closing, Bolan didn’t have to aim. He triggered two rounds from the scattergun, one double-aught—nine pellets, each .33-caliber—then a lead slug weighing more than half a pound. The buckshot slammed his left-hand target back against the drug club’s filthy stucco wall, enveloped by a floating mist of blood. The rifled slug punched through his partner’s chest and out the back, hurling him against the ebon-painted door with force enough to snap its lock and let him tumble back into the entryway.

  A blast of music from The Hole apparently drowned out the street noise. As he passed his first two leaking kills, Bolan saw doped-up patrons dancing to chaotic sounds that issued from an old Rock-Ola 434 Concerto jukebox, likely worth more at an auction than the club itself. Instead of golden oldies featured at the opening of the old TV show Happy Days, however, this one had been stocked with songs—if you could call them that—from shrieking death metal performers out of Europe and the States. None of it appeared to be in Spanish, but the celebrants were too far gone to care.

  Bolan’s next blasted round, more buckshot, hammered the jukebox like a wrecking ball and brought the entertainment literally to a screeching halt. Some of the dopers still kept jiggling for a few more seconds and then began to look around for explanations to the sudden ringing silence. While they tried to get a grip on present-time reality, the club’s bartender—tattooed from his hairline to his chest as far as Bolan could determine—reached under the bar and came out with an SMG that could’ve been an Ingram MAC-10 or 11, or possibly a knockoff from Brazil or South Africa.

  Whatever the label said, the weapon measured less than one foot long and would be capable of emptying its magazine in something like a second and a half. Aiming the piece was problematic, but it was the kind of “room broom” meant to clear a space of living targets in the time it took most people to realize they were about to die.

  Bolan brought the Benelli to his shoulder for this shot and slammed a solid slug into the bartender’s forehead, blowing away the back of his skull, spraying a shelf of liquor bottles and the backbar mirror with his brains. The dead man’s trigger finger clinched as he was falling, spraying thirty-odd rounds through the dazed, disoriented crowd.

  The Executioner circled around the blood-streaked bar, no other guards in evidence, and found a grungy backroom kitchen that no self-respecting sewer rat would patronize. The ancient stove burned gas and had a pilot light in lieu of an electrical ignition switch. He snatched a cup of tepid coffee from a nearby counter, doused the pilot, then turned on the gas to all four surface burners and the filthy oven down below.

  All it needed was a spark, but first Bolan went out to give The Hole’s pathetic regulars a fighting chance. He shouted in Spanish then English, “Get out!” twice. A handful started for the exit, while the rest that hadn’t suffered gunshot wounds stood gaping at him, as if waiting for the next act of a Grand Guignol performance that allowed audience participation. One of them actually started to applaud.

  Bolan shouted in both languages again. “Get out of here! The place is about to blow up!” When that warning fell on deaf ears, he fired another shotgun blast into the ceiling, bringing down acoustic tiles, and started shoving wasteoids toward the street exit.

  One stumbled past, trying to light a hand-rolled joint or cigarette, and Bolan snatched his Zippo lighter, flicking it to life and backtracking to reach The Hole’s kitchen entrance. He tossed the lighter through, made sure its flame was still burning on impact with the floor, then double-timed it to reach the street outside.

  A scrawny woman with pupils the size of dimes plucked at his sleeve. He shrugged her off and kept on going toward his RAV4, reaching it just as the night caught fire behind him, a shock wave lifting El Agujero’s roof and spewing flames into the sky.

  As Bolan settled behind the Toyota’s steering wheel, he palmed his cell phone, speed dialing Rodolfo Garza’s private number. This time Garza answered for himself, without a flunky standing in.

  “What now?” he asked.

  “Your hole’s burning,” Bolan replied. “The club, I mean.”

  “Da
mn you!”

  “If you want to cut this short, find me El Psicópata,” Bolan said. “Captain Chalino Prieto can likely help you out.”

  He didn’t give Garza time to answer, cutting off the call before he put the SUV in gear. Its clock told him the time was fifteen minutes shy of 1:00 a.m.

  Was Brognola still breathing? Or was Bolan’s rescue mission rolling toward the black hole of revenge?

  Chapter Ten

  Calle Navojoa

  Captain Prieto had supposed—or hoped, at least—that he would never see this place again, yet there he was, called back by one of his superiors to view the site where three FIA officers lay dead, victims of murder.

  To be strictly honest, two of them—Sergeants Allende and Solana—were not lying anywhere. Both still remained as he’d last seen them still alive, handcuffed to chairs, but now slumped over with their brains blown out by point-blank pistol shots. The medical examiner and coroner had waited for him to arrive before releasing either victim from his bonds and starting a detailed examination of their wounds.

  “These burns,” the ME said to no one in particular. “Contact with some electrical device, I’d say. Some kind of prod, perhaps, or a cattle prod or a stun gun.”

  He’d been right the first time and the cattle prod—not a department-issue stun gun—was safely hidden in Prieto’s cruiser, swaddled in a towel and wedged beneath a spare tire in the trunk.

  The captain had no fear of its discovery, but he was troubled by the third corpse found in the abanonded body shop. He’d left Bernal to finish with the sergeants and dispose of them, but something—someone—had to have interrupted him. Whatever happened next could only be surmised, although Prieto had a fair idea from scoping out the scene.

  Bernal’s primary service weapon lay some twenty feet from where his corpse reposed, but he had reached his backup piece—an Astra 680 revolver with a two-inch barrel, chambered for .32 Smith & Wesson Long rounds. He’d drawn the little gun but hadn’t fired it before the intruder who’d surprised him at his chore of murder put him down.

  The real question: who had that been?

  Prieto knew it had to be someone with the capability of tracking down Bernal when he was out of touch with headquarters and cleaning up Captain Prieto’s mess. Whether Bernal was questioned prior to death—and what he might have said in a futile attempt to save himself—remained unknown.

  Prieto took for granted that the killer had not been another member of the FIA. Those who were conscious of his unofficial dealings with the city’s two contending drug cartels would give him a wide berth, the sole exception being someone from the agency’s Internal Affairs Unit. But if that were true, and the rat squad was closing in on him, why was Prieto free to move around Juárez instead of sitting in a small interrogation room downtown?

  No. There were too many corrupt officials higher on the FIA food chain than he was, and he’d served them faithfully—at least, he had before this last assignment had blown up in his face. For that Prieto blamed the two dead sergeants, useless morons that they’d been, and briefly wished he could stand over their bodies now, perhaps to kick them or to shower them with his urine in a final gesture of contempt.

  Another possibility—that someone from the FIA had stumbled onto his collaboration with El Psicópata—seemed nearly impossible. Of course, Bernal had known of the connection, but Prieto’s lieutenant was tangled up in that relationship, as well. Even if he had planned to blow the whistle on Prieto, Bernal would have wound up in a prison cell beside him, sentenced to the statutory maximum for all he’d done to keep the monster out of custody, serving Prieto’s needs and those of his cartel allies.

  Unless...

  What had Bernal revealed to the last person who’d seen him alive? Before he’d reached his backup weapon and died trying for one final shot, had he confessed his part in dealing with El Psicópata, or prehaps endeavored to heap all the blame upon his captain?

  Prieto had already tried to in vain to find the lunatic this evening. In business dealings, he had always reached El Psicópata via telephone, a number that remained in service. But the butcher wasn’t answering his urgent calls. Prieta had visited the last known address that he had for the unbalanced lady-killer, but El Psicópata had departed. The new renters didn’t even know his name, and the apartment manager complained that his late tenant had skipped out with rent unpaid, no forwarding address supplied.

  Bernal had reached him yesterday by phone, arranged to hand over the gringo whom Allende and Solana snatched by accident, but the delivery had been effected at a rest stop along MX 45, not at El Psicópata’s residence. Prieto had thought nothing of it at the time, but now he understood the lunatic was slipping out of his control, at least to the extent of making sure Prieto didn’t have his new address.

  The next step, following procedure, would have been an all-out search using the killer’s given name, if he was fool enough to use it when acquiring shelter for himself. That would take time, demanding FIA resources that were strained already with the murders of three officers now piled on top of wholesale slaughter targeting the city’s top two narcotrafficantes. As for searching on his own, unaided by his agency’s full range of tools, Prieto knew it could take months, possibly years, to find one man among the city’s 2.5 million identified inhabitants.

  How many more were out there, living in Juárez and its suburbs, trying to minimize what social scientists now called their “footprints,” working off the books or not working at all, with no phones listed in their names, no bank accounts, no taxes paid or credit cards in use, except ones they had stolen?

  Oh fuck! Even thinking of it made the captain weary, turned his stomach, but he couldn’t put it off much longer. Stalling only made things worse, and if the situation kept unraveling, Prieto knew that it could be his own head on the chopping block.

  Explanada Policía Federal

  Reluctantly, Miguel Vergara had returned to headquarters and sought out Daniela Maldonado with another plea for help. She’d stared at him as if he were insane, then couldn’t stop herself from quizzing him.

  “The dark web? Are you serious? With all the other shit going on tonight? On top of all the cartel fighting, did you know three FIA detectives have been murdered?”

  “I heard something on the radio,” he grudgingly admitted.

  “Shot down at the same address I gave you earlier, Miguel.” She kept her voice pitched low, almost a whisper, and her glare was furious.

  “I can explain that, Daniela.”

  “No! Don’t tell me, damn it! You’ve put my career at risk, Miguel. What if we both wind up in prison over this?”

  Seeing no easy out, Vergara leaned in close and said, “It’s worse than you imagine. I can’t spare the time to tell you all of it right now, but if you help me one last time, I promise—”

  “What? To rescue me from whatever it is you’ve dragged me into?”

  “Daniela, there are more lives still at stake.” Keeping it brief and cutting corners, he pressed on. “It started when an American Justice Department agent was abducted from El Paso. You won’t find his name on your computer, since his kidnappers were FIA, but they came back with the wrong man. To dispose of him, it seems they gave him to El Psicópata.”

  “What!” Maldonado railed then caught herself, glancing around and lowering her voice again. “Are you insane, Miguel?”

  “I wish it all was a fantasy, but it’s true. The two cartels aren’t killing each other—not yet, at least. Their men are being killed by a friend of the missing man. Unless I find the Psychopath soon—”

  “Oh my God! Will you listen to yourself?” Maldonado interjected. “How many policemen have been hunting him for years and getting nowhere?”

  “But I’ve got a plan they haven’t tried so far.”

  “We’re back to the dark web again?”

  Vergara nodded. “
You know better than I do what happens where it’s safe from prying eyes.”

  He knew the basics. If the internet was thought of as an ocean, 5 to 10 percent of its pages were on the “surface”—that was, sites accessible to anyone without restriction, such as Google, Wikipedia, eBay and Amazon. Beyond that strata, 90 to 95 percent of legitimate pages—the “deep web” in techie parlance—required passwords or paid subscriptions for such services as email, online banking, government services and most social media content. Finally, the “dark web” comprised roughly .01 percent of all existing sites, included such black-market vendors as Silk Road, AlphaBay Market and ShadowCrew—all now defunct—along with sick porn sites, drug traffickers and, on the up side, communication networks for endangered human rights activists.

  “What do you hope to find in all that muck?” Maldonado asked.

  Trying not to smile, Vergara replied, “I think El Psicópata may have friends.”

  In fact, Maldonado had uncovered several, though it had taken time Vergara feared he could not afford to lose. Some cheered the woman-killing monster, posted photos of his crimes clearly obtained by some illegal process from police files, and encouraged him to claim more victims in disgusting ways. Among those bottom feeders, one stood out, an individual who claimed intimate knowledge of the killer but refused to share it, earning threats and insults from his dark web peers.

  * * *

  After more digging, Corporal Maldonado had procured an address for the ghoul who called himself El Psicópata’s greatest fan: a hovel in Colonia Medanos. Vergara now stood outside a door daubed with graffiti reading Pervertido—pervert—which was only partially expunged.

  He tried the doorbell, found that it was dead, then knocked and waited, the sound-suppressed Beretta clasped behind his back.

  The door opened a crack and one eye showing jaundiced sclera peered at him. “What do you want?” a husky voice inquired.

  “Jesús Enriquez?”

  “Never heard of him.”