by Bill King
Gwen nudged Cortez on the arm to get his attention.
“Look, there’s Gracie, sitting by herself,” said Gwen, nodding her head in the direction of stunningly attractive woman wearing an expensive red silk dress. “Let me introduce you to her.”
She grabbed ahold of his hand and seemed to pull him over to Graciela’s table.
“Gracie, I want you to meet Pete Cortez,” said Gwen, smiling playfully, but the stern look in her eyes caught Graciela’s attention.
“I’m very pleased to meet you, Pete,” she said, instantly recognizing him from the videos of the Laredo Border Patrol operations center. She smiled easily and extended her hand for him to shake. “Are you a friend of the groom?”
He had noticed the odd eye communication between the two women but attributed it to girl talk. After all, it was a wedding, which meant that, statistically, about ninety percent of the people in the room were going to get lucky that night. He figured Gwen was just showing him off as her captured man-trophy for the evening.
“No, I’m with the FBI office here in Houston,” he said, trying to explain something he did not fully understand himself. “The father of the maid of honor happens to be an old college friend of the Director in Washington, so here I am…for what reason, I have no clue, but here I am, nonetheless.”
“Yes, but you have to admit it’s a wonderful opportunity for a party and to get to meet new people,” said Graciela, smiling graciously as she quickly regained her composure after the shock of coming face to face with the FBI agent who might somehow disrupt El Indio’s grand plans for the Rancho. “Well, you two have fun. I’m sure we’ll see each other again.”
With that, she picked up her purse and began walking quickly toward the exit. She had an important call you make.
◆◆◆
Reggie Calhoun was still angry, even after twenty-four hours had passed. Not upset. Angry. He couldn’t get the bad taste of the previous day’s meeting out of his mouth. The director of the Investigation’s Division had told him, in no uncertain terms, that he needed to wrap up the Cortez investigation within the next seven days. One way or the other, he had said. He didn’t want to hear any excuses.
He took another sip of scotch and set the heavy glass down on the bar top in front of him. The problem was that, while the director didn’t care, Calhoun did. In his mind, Pete Cortez symbolized everything that was wrong with the Bureau. He was a loose cannon, a cowboy, a man who felt that the end always justified the means, especially when it came to people he considered criminals. The man had no respect for the system, for the process. All that concerned him were results.
“Not once during my fifteen years in the Bureau have I ever been in a fistfight, much less a knife fight or a shooting,” said Calhoun to the woman seated next to him in a crowded Irish bar in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, DC. It was Saturday night and the woman was a colleague of his in the Investigation Division, a mousy-looking blonde attorney in her mid-forties. “Not even once. Cortez, on the other hand, seems to think he can use the entire world as one big anger management therapy session.”
“Reggie, sometimes you just need to let things go,” she said in a sympathetic tone, touching his forearm lightly with her right hand. “Maybe it really was self-defense. It sure seems that way to me, anyway.”
“But a seven-inch blade is illegal in Texas, which is where the incident occurred. Just because he apparently happens to be an expert at knife fighting doesn’t mean that we should turn a blind eye to this wanton violation of the law. The FBI needs to set the example for the rest of society.”
He was staring glumly down at the rich mahogany bar, both hands absentmindedly slowly twirling his glass of scotch round and round. Calhoun had hated people like Cortez his entire life and, now that he was in a position to do something about it, he had no intention of letting the opportunity pass.
“Well, that’s certainly true, especially nowadays,” she said, looking him squarely in the eyes. “It’s just that I hate seeing you like this. You’re going to give yourself an ulcer. Tell me, what can I do to help?”
He raised two fingers and motioned toward the bartender to bring them another round. The man behind the bar nodded and grabbed a couple of clean glasses.
“I’ve known guys like him all my life, guys who try to get by in life and in their careers by the threat of physical intimidation, rather than using their minds.”
“Classic male privilege,” she replied, warming to the subject. “Even in the FBI, after all this time, it’s still a male-dominated profession that’s in dire need of an expanded viewpoint.”
“Exactly,” he said, picking up the fresh glass of scotch that the bartender had just set in front of him. He took a sip and wiped his lips with his left hand.
“I think Cortez’s actions speak for themselves,” she said, taking his hand in hers. “Maybe we just need to rephrase the narrative, put a fresh interpretation to it. We’re lawyers, after all. We’ve done that all our lives.”
He held her hand and squeezed her fingers lightly.
“Well, we had better get to work,” he said. “It’s Saturday night and we only have until next Friday. The clock’s ticking and time is running out.”
◆◆◆
Chapter 31
IT WAS SATURDAY EVENING in Laredo and the hallway clock in the old, rundown County Jail complex read eight-fifteen. Walking down the brightly lit corridor were three deputies. They were accompanied by a tall, muscular man named Carter, who had flown down from the U.S. Marshal’s office in Houston. Sandwiched in between them was a short man with a parrot beak nose, who was wearing an orange jumpsuit.
“Where are you taking me?” asked Chucho, concerned but not afraid. “Am I being transferred? Where am I going?”
“We’ll tell you once we get you to the airfield,” said Carter, who gave Chucho a slight shove in the back to get him moving again. “Until then, just keep your mouth shut and do as you’re told. Let us worry about the details.”
“Where is my lawyer?”
“He’s speaking with the Assistant U.S. Attorney,” said the marshal, his eyes scanning the hallway for any hint of danger. Even in a secure facility like the Webb County Jail, anything could happen. He knew that from personal experience. “He’ll meet you at out at the airfield.”
As they passed by the door to the men’s restroom, one of the deputies paused briefly and announced flippantly, “Last chance to drain the lizard for the next hour or so.”
“I need to take a piss, especially if I’m going on a trip,” said Chucho, who stopped in front of the door and raised his handcuffed hands up in front of his face. “I promise I’ll be in and out in less than a minute.”
The deputies looked to Carter for guidance. The tall man nodded.
“Fine,” he said, looking anxiously down at his wristwatch. “One of you deputies go with him and make sure you have eyes on him at all times. Make it quick and don’t take off his cuffs. He can hold his little pecker with both hands.”
Chucho pushed open the door with his shoulder and walked into the restroom. A sheriff’s deputy followed two steps behind him. The marshal and the other two deputies remained in the hallway, right outside the door, which slowly swung closed. Guys don’t generally like to congregate in the bathroom unless they have urgent business to attend to.
Chucho walked straight over to one of the urinals, unzipped his fly with his handcuffed hands and pulled out his equipment. He let out a sigh of relief. The sheriff’s deputy stood about three feet behind him, waiting for Chucho to finish his business, and probably didn’t feel a thing.
As soon as the door to the corridor had closed behind them, a slightly built man with dark hair and a neatly trimmed mustache silently stepped out from one of the stalls. Knife in hand, the heavily tattooed man quietly slipped behind the officer and covered the deputy’s mouth with his left hand while slashing his throat with the knife in his right.
Chucho spun around quickly at th
e gurgling sound coming from the deputy as he was being gently laid down on the floor by the killer, inches from the doorway so as to slow down anyone trying to enter. His eyes lit up with excitement, thinking El Coronel had sent someone to rescue him. The look in his eyes quickly turned to panic, however, the moment before the Sicario deftly slashed the razor-sharp blade across Chucho’s throat, severing his jugular vein and rendering him speechless.
He lost consciousness immediately and bled out moments later.
The Sicario, or assassin in Spanish, had been contracted hours earlier by El Indio for the princely sum of five million dollars, with the stipulation that he must complete the job within twenty-four hours. López Navarro had no doubt about the skill of the man, whom he knew only as “Thirty-Five.” He had never failed him in ten previous assignments and was, without question, the best that money could buy.
The man with the mustache walked over to Chucho. He placed his hands under the dead man’s arm pits and dragged the little troll into one of the stalls, leaving a smeared trail of blood in his wake.
The killer knew that he probably had less than a minute to finish up and make his getaway before one of the other lawmen came looking for them. He reached his latex-gloved hand inside Chucho’s mouth and, with the deftness of a surgeon, sliced off the little man’s tongue, a not-so-subtle message to potential future informants. Holding it like a brush, he dipped the tongue into the dead man’s blood on the floor and wrote the number, thirty-five, on the mirror before tossing the tongue into the sink.
He quickly walked into the corner stall, locked the door behind him. He stood on the stool and removed the aluminum grate covering the air intake vent. With the deftness of a gymnast, he pulled himself up into the air duct and replaced the grate, leaving several drops of metal-bonding epoxy glue on the metal to buy him some extra time to cover his escape. Thank God for old buildings, he thought to himself, as he began to silently slide his way through the air duct to freedom.
The entire event had taken less than sixty seconds.
◆◆◆
“Holy crap,” shouted the Deputy U.S. Marshal as he struggled to push open the door into the staff men’s room, which was being blocked by the weight of the now dead deputy against the doorway. After a few seconds, he was able to push the door open wide enough to slip through it. The dank smell of blood and urine permeated the room. “What the hell just happened in here?”
The two sheriff deputies who had also been waiting out in the hall followed him in. Of course, the first thing they noticed was the body of their fellow deputy on the floor, blood pooled all over the floor. They opened one of the stalls and found Chucho propped on top of one of the toilets, his throat slashed, his orange jump suit now saturated in blood.
One of the deputies, the fat one, noticed that the door to the second stall was locked and tried to burst through the door by slamming his shoulder into it. The steel door held firm. After several tries, he got down on all fours and peeked underneath the partition.
“This stall is empty,” the fat deputy shouted to his smaller colleague. “Jonesy, slide underneath the partition and open the damn door.”
Jonesy did as he was told, gasping for air as he immediately realized that, although there was no blood on the floor of the stall, a succession of poor marksmen throughout the day had left the floor covered with sticky, dried urine. Nevertheless, ten seconds later, the door was open, revealing the large air vent at the top of the back wall.
“That must be how whoever did this got out of here,” said Carter, pointing to the metal vent that was painted the same color of green as the rest of the walls. “Does anybody know where it goes?”
The two deputies shrugged their shoulders and shook their heads slowly back and forth. Carter stood on the toilet stool and tried to remove the grate covering the air vent, but it wouldn’t budge.
“What a colossal goat screw,” cursed the marshal. He had never lost a prisoner in all his years with the Marshal’s Office, but this one would almost certainly wipe away fifteen years of exemplary service in one fell swoop. “Somehow, it seems he even managed to lock the damn thing behind him. Somebody find a crow bar or bolt cutter or something to pry this damn thing open.”
Sound travels perfectly down an aluminum air shaft and “Thirty-Five” struggled not to laugh as he carefully replaced the air vent grate in the supply room three doors down from the men’s room. He calmly, but quickly, changed into the custodial uniform he had hidden in the room an hour earlier and carefully checked his hands and face in a mirror to make sure he didn’t have any telltale traces of blood on him.
He then grabbed a mop and bucket, opened the supply room door, and rolled a cleaning cart out and into the hallway.
As he nonchalantly walked by the men’s room door, he could hear the agitated voices of the deputies inside, trying to figure out their next move. Several more deputies rushed down the hall and pushed past him as they scurried to find out what the commotion was all about. He glanced down at his wristwatch. Four minutes and five seconds had passed since Chucho had first stepped into the men’s room.
The Sicario continued on down the hallway to the end of the corridor, where he turned right and headed towards the front lobby, abandoning the cleaning cart just before he got there. His ballcap pulled down low to cast a shadow across his face, he smiled and waved at the security guard sitting at the front desk, who was not yet aware of the incident in the men’s room.
The guard looked up from his magazine just long enough to buzz the cleaning man through the final security checkpoint.
As he stepped out into the warm summer evening, “Thirty-Five” looked at his wristwatch one last time. Four minutes and fifty-eight seconds had now passed since Chucho had first stepped into the restroom. The assassin smiled inwardly with the satisfaction of an artist at a job well done.
He lit a cigarette and calmly walked two blocks down the street to where he had parked his recently stolen pickup truck.
◆◆◆
Graciela sat down on a silk cushioned wrought iron chair in the gardens surrounding the Hotel Granduca. The temperature had cooled down into the mid-seventies and the soft evening breeze felt good against her skin. She had left her wrap draped across the back of her chair in the ballroom. She took a sip from the fresh glass of champagne she had snatched from the waiter’s tray as she left the wedding reception.
She removed her phone from her red silk clutch purse and tapped the familiar number for El Indio.
“Gracie, my dear,” the old man on the other end said in a cheerful, fatherly voice. “How was your friend’s wedding?”
“It was beautiful, Tío Memo, but that’s not why I’m calling.”
“Well, I didn’t expect to hear from you tonight but, as long as I have you on the line, I may as well tell you that our little friend, Chucho, is no longer a problem.”
She paused for a moment, not quite knowing what to say. She had not expected such quick action. Tío Memo never ceased to surprise her.
“Thank you, Tío,” she said, crossing her legs and smoothing her dress as she took another sip of champagne. Her eyes quickly scanned the immediate area to make sure she was alone and could not be overheard. “You’re not going to believe who I ran into tonight at the reception dinner. FBI Special Agent Pete Cortez. I recognized him from one of the Border Patrol video feeds.”
“It is indeed a small world, my dear,” the old man said. “What was he doing at the wedding?”
“It turns out that Hanna Pettis’ father and the American FBI Director were friends in college. Cortez was there as a liaison of sorts with local security and law enforcement. He and Gwen Thompson were assigned to sit next to each other.”
“Do you read something ominous into that?”
“No, it’s probably just Gerty playing matchmaker, putting two singles together.”
“Did your friend Gwen know who he was, particularly in relation to us?”
“Oh, yes, she had met him briefl
y while at the Border Patrol headquarters in Laredo last month. She made sure she brought him over to my table to introduce him. She probably just wanted to study his face for any hint of recognition when he met me.”
“Was there?”
“No,” she replied. She motioned with her right hand to a waiter passing by the swimming pool carrying a tray of champagne glasses. “He’s either a very good actor or he had no idea who I was. I believe it was the latter.”
“Excellent,” he said in a warm, soothing voice. “Let’s hope you’re right. Eliminating an animal like Chucho is one thing but taking out an American FBI agent would be quite another. Keep a close eye on the situation and let me know if you even begin to think it is becoming worrisome.”
◆◆◆
“What the hell do you mean, he’s dead?” said Cortez in a hushed, angry voice. The sound from the Tejano band was deafening, so he placed a finger over his left ear, hoping to eliminate some of the background noise. He stood up and walked away from the table where he had been sitting with Gwen Thompson. “How? When?”
Bobby Janak repeated what he had heard from the deputy U.S. Marshal who had flown down to escort Chucho to the Federal Detention Center in Houston.
“Sounds like the killer also had a sadistic streak running through him,” said Cortez, who by now was anxiously pacing back and forth out in the lobby area. “Slashing their throats is one thing—that’s a killing move—but cutting out a tongue is a message move. There’s no other way to interpret that. Whoever hired him is sending a message to any future informants.”
“Speaking of messages, he left another one, too,” said Janak. “He dipped Chucho’s severed tongue into a pool of his blood and wrote the number three-five on the mirror in the men’s room. Then he just pitched the tongue in the sink.”
