South

by Lance Charnes

  He’d been a punk kid. Not gangs, but angry at the world. At the cops, for hassling him because he was brown and wore a hoodie. At how his dad broke his back day after day and brought home hardly anything, while the gabacho owner lived in a big house and gave money to politicians who wanted to throw people like Luis and his family out of the country. At how Alvaro kept telling him, “You better go to college or you’ll end up like me.”

  Even back then, college was a mirage for a kid in a two-minimum-wage household, getting dimmer with every tuition hike. So he joined the Army, the only way a poor kid could afford college. He was an angry soldier in his first tour in the ‘Stan. He took out his anger on the Afghans—some who deserved it, some who didn’t—got a couple medals, a couple reprimands. It was like he belonged there.

  On his second tour, two things happened. He met Ray, the big brother he’d always wanted. And he met Bel. She was the first girl who never let him run her over, the first one who didn’t fight fair, the first who’d tell him exactly what she thought of his attitude. Before he even felt himself falling, he was crazy in love and planning babies and houses and careers and wasn’t angry anymore. She’d given him a future and made him smart enough to take it.

  Nobody—nobody—was going to hurt Bel or take her away from him.

  The SUV stopped in front of a chain-link gate. Their headlights picked out a sicario opening a padlock on the other side. Luis squinted into the lightwash on a green sign next to the gate: “Aduana de Mexicali, Baja California, Área Restringida.”

  Mexican Customs. Brilliant. No one would look for them here.

  They cleared the gate, drove past what must have been a couple hundred seized cars, trucks, RVs and a few semis, the headlights flashing off dusty windows and dirty chrome. Sicarios lurked in the shadows, the moonlight picking out the barrels of their assault rifles and their NVG lenses. A couple FBI windbreakers went by. Up on a nearby rise, he recognized the floodlit crossing station where he’d met McGinley that morning. They finally stopped at the end of a prefab metal warehouse that appeared to be an unintended shade of dirty tan, flanked on its long sides by shiny black, white and silver SUVs. The guests.

  Bel was in there. Luis could sense it, feel it inside him. She was there, and he was going to get her out.

  “Okay,” the driver said in Spanish, “this is it.”

  “Yes it is,” Luis said. Then he drew the pistol and shot both men in the head.

  72

  TUESDAY, 18 MAY

  McGinley was near to certain he’d wear out the soles of his boots on this airport ramp before those peckerheads in D.C. made up their minds about anything. The big do down south was about to start. Of course, if Ojeda didn’t cough up the location, nobody was going anywhere.

  “Sir?” The comm tech leaned out of the oh-so-subtle black van a few feet away. “The CI’s back on the scope.”

  About damn time. McGinley jogged to the van, ducked his head through the side door to look at the screen. The tech pointed to a green crosshairs on the road map of Mexicali. “Is he moving?” McGinley asked.

  “No, sir. I mean, a little, a few feet here and there, but that’s all.”

  Well, well. Ojeda was just on the other side of the line. “What’s that place he’s at?”

  The tech switched the map to a satellite image, used his fingers to zoom in. “Can’t tell, sir. Lots of cars, a couple warehouses. A storage yard?”

  McGinley’s phone rang. He checked the screen, then barked, “Where the hell are you?”

  “Mexican Customs impound lot off Zorilla,” Ojeda whispered back. “Right on the border. I can see the crossing from here. Are you coming?”

  McGinley stepped away from the van. Mexicali lit up the sky maybe three hundred yards south, staggering distance after a good drunk. Hell, his team could walk there if they took a mind to it. “I’m working on that,” he finally said. “Has the dance started?”

  “I don’t know. We just got loose from our pickup. There’s sicarios all over the place and some FBI. Someone’s going to find the bodies we left. There’s not much time.”

  I know that, McGinley was about to say, but he reckoned Ojeda knew he knew and the man was in the middle of it down there. “We’re in the air when we get clearance, not before. You got any more names you can feed me? Sweeten the pot?”

  “We haven’t been inside yet. Everything’s guarded. We didn’t want to start anything until we knew what you guys are doing.”

  “I could throw a rock and hit you, but I gotta get some ol’ boy out of his cocktail party to tell me I can do it.” He heard his voice getting all parade-ground and stopped to bring himself down. This was the higher-ups’ fault, not Ojeda’s. “I reckon what I’m saying is, if there’s something you gotta do, you do it, don’t wait on us. We’ll help if we can. Right now you’re on your own, amigo.”

  Ray followed Casillas around the Zeta side of the warehouse, meeting the people who would run his life from now on. Casillas introduced him to Zambreño, the deputy presidente of México Unido, the Zetas’ political front, and Salgado, the commander of western-sector security forces. There were representatives of Los Halcones—the group that supervised product distribution—and Los Mañosos—now the security forces’ logistical branch, in charge of buying weapons and ammo. All wore designer suits and ties, looking very official and respectable. Getting used to it, Ray guessed.

  He glanced across the cement floor to the other side of the warehouse. The El Norte delegation, a bunch of dark suits, clustered behind a screen of FBI SWAT heavies. There was supposedly a State Department guy over there, and a Bureau Deputy Executive Assistant Director, some kind of White House rep, and all their horseholders and advisors.

  All they needed now was the star of the show.

  Casillas nudged Ray away from one of the Zeta suits. “Ojeda and the woman haven’t arrived yet,” he said. Ray had to lean in to hear him.

  “Your guys were handling that, not me.”

  “I’m aware of that. They were collected at the agreed time and place, but we’ve heard nothing since. I need to know: can Ojeda be trusted?”

  Could he? The old Lucho was dependable as the sunrise, but this new version Ray had dealt with for the past couple weeks? He’d taken this job way more seriously than Ray had ever expected, which could be bad news. Casillas didn’t need to know this, not yet, at least. “If he says he’ll do something, he’ll do it. He won’t do anything stupid while you have his wife. They’re crazy about each other.”

  “While we have his wife,” Casillas corrected. “You have to remember you’re a part of our family now.” He touched his phone pod, murmured a message, then gripped Ray’s shoulder. “Speaking of family, we need to talk soon about finding you a wife. Someone respectable, someone who could be, shall we say, First Lady of Baja.”

  What?

  “You can have mistresses, of course, that’s understood. But you need someone suitable for a wife. We’ll talk when this is done.”

  A wife? They’d taken his power, his house, his friends, Keira. Probably his freedom. Now they were going to marry him off? It wasn’t a joke; Zetas didn’t have a sense of humor. As Casillas towed him toward yet another suit, Ray felt the walls closing in on him.

  Luis and Nora crouched behind a dust-caked, twenty-year-old Freightliner semi parked nose-on to the warehouse’s end. They’d taken the guards’ weapons and body armor. The Range Rover sat in the middle of a line of abandoned cars.

  How much of McGinley’s message should he tell Nora? Hearing that the cavalry might stay in the stable could make her throw away her guns and walk into that warehouse. He didn’t know if he could stop her, or even if he should try. Bel was in there, waiting. Ray had said he could get the boy out, but Luis didn’t believe Ray could deliver on anything anymore.

  A phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out; it had been the driver’s. “Si?”

  “The boss wants to know where you are.” A low voice, speaking Spanish.

&n
bsp; Just what Luis had been afraid of. “Yeah, we’re on López Mateos,” he said, pitching his voice lower and roughing it up as much as he could. “Some tonto in a truck got in a wreck right in front of us, you know?”

  “How much longer?”

  “Fifteen minutes, maybe twenty. We’re stuck, we’re by the Teatro, you know? No way around.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  Nora nudged him as he put the phone away. “What was that?”

  “They’re checking up on their boys.”

  “What about McGinley?”

  “Talking to Washington.”

  “Oh, great.”

  They couldn’t just sit. Someone would find the bodies, or discover there was no wreck. Then the place would come unglued. “Let’s recon. Maybe we’ll see something useful.”

  “Maybe pigs will fly,” Nora grumbled.

  When the Zetas came for Bel and Paul and Peter in their cement prison, Bel had a plan to not get trussed up like a turkey.

  The gunman at the door told them to lay face-down on the floor and put their hands behind their backs, while his partner snapped handcuffs on each of them. When he got to Bel, she took the left cuff without a sound, but when he touched her right wrist she screamed in Spanish, “Ow! That hurts! Please, not so tight, my wrist hurts, please.”

  The guy crouching next to her hesitated. She looked up to the sicario by the door—frowning, half-confused, she’d blown his programming—and pleaded, “Come on, please, just a little loose, okay? Please? My wrist hurts so bad.”

  Maybe it was her face—she’d made Paul describe it to her, as horrifying as it felt—or maybe the helplessness she’d thrown into her voice, but after a moment the guy by the door nodded. The gunman next to her loosened the cuff until she could tell there was a good quarter inch or so of play all the way around. Perfect.

  Their blindfolded ride in the back of a van took maybe twenty minutes. Every stop, turn and curve doubled her full-body ache. Guards led them outside, then into what must have been a large building that echoed with their footsteps, then into a stuffy, smaller room that smelled dusty. They looped her handcuff chain around something that felt like metal shelves, then slammed and locked the door. After a while, she heard the muttering of voices outside.

  Bel slid down the metal corner post of whatever she was locked to until she could reach her blindfold. She tugged it up so she could see out of the eye that wasn’t swollen shut from last night’s beating. Knowing the guy she’d stabbed had died had made the beatdown easier to take.

  They were in a storage room. She, Paul and Peter were each chained to one of three metal shelf units, which were bolted to the back wall. A window covered with brown paper was set into the wall facing her, next to the door. The backlight on the paper revealed the concrete floor’s general grubbiness and the rust patches on the shelves. A dead light bulb hung from the ceiling in a metal cage. Random junk littered the floor and some of the shelves.

  Including pipe. Three-foot pipe segments on the shelf behind Paul, a couple still with fittings. Weapons.

  She slid back up the shelf’s corner post until she could touch her right cuff with her left hand. She carefully worked the cuff off, scouring the skin on her thumb until she was finally able to slip it free. The only good thing about having big wrists and little hands. She picked her way across the floor, scraped up a bottom corner of the paper, and peeked out.

  The big, echoing room was a warehouse. A bunch of Latino guys in suits milled around, shaking hands and talking. Behind the talking suits were rows of tall metal shelves full of crates and a few odd items—a set of golf clubs, a baby stroller, a dismantled toilet. Sicarios in gray camouflage and black hoods stood to the left with their guns ready. She couldn’t see a way out. Damn it!

  There was Ray, over on one side of the talking suits, with a little guy dressed like an urban cowboy. The same guy who was at the mall? She wondered whether she could ask to see Ray, try to talk him into letting her go. No, that wouldn’t work. She’d treated him like shit ever since he got Lucho tangled up in the Cartel. Too bad she’d never learned to smile and shut up.

  She tip-toed to Paul. “Are you okay?” she whispered.

  He nodded. “How did—”

  Bel put her fingers to his lips. “Shh.” She checked his cuffs—too tight for him to get out—then moved to Peter. The poor little guy was trembling and his blindfold was wet. She whispered, “It’s gonna be okay,” then gave him a hug.

  “Where’s daddy?” he whimpered.

  “Right here,” Paul stage-whispered. “It’s gonna be okay, buddy, just hang tough.”

  She could get Peter out of the handcuffs easily, but what then? She wouldn’t leave without them both, she had no idea what to do once she got past the door, and there was a lot of firepower out there that wouldn’t be glad to see them.

  Bel was about to go back to her shelf when she decided to find out if she could see anything different through the window’s other corner. She peeled up the paper’s edge to find herself looking at more suits. But these were different, dark and stodgy instead of the flashy, stylish outfits the narcos wore. And all these guys were Anglos. Then she noticed their guards: dark blue utilities, helmets, M4 carbines. “FBI” in yellow on their body armor.

  FBI? Here?

  Nora steadied the steel drum while she watched for guards. Luis balanced on top of the barrel, trying to wipe clean a spot on the window so he could see inside. A dusty semi-trailer screened them from the road, but gunmen patrolled everywhere and it was just a matter of time before someone spotted her or Luis or both.

  Luis had surprised her in the car. He took out those two men without any hesitation. He’d been such a calm, steady presence that she’d never imagined he could turn into a stone killer just like that. Then she remembered the cartel safe house, how he’d become Action Hero when they were attacked. If this was how he reacted when someone he cared about was in danger, she was glad for all that time he’d spent bonding with Hope.

  The clack of a fake camera shutter made her look up. Luis held his phone’s back against the window; the screen’s glow washed over his face. She braced the barrel with both hands to keep it still. Two more clacks, then Luis hopped down next to her.

  “What did you see?” she whispered.

  “A bunch of American government types and a bunch of Cartel guys. I didn’t see Paul or Bel.” He used his index fingers to type on the screen. “There, just sent them to McGinley.”

  Boots scraped on gritty concrete to Nora’s left. She spun, bringing up her stubby rifle. Two chatting cartel gunmen stepped out of the moonlight into the semi-trailer’s shadow. Both faced the wall and got busy with the flies on their camo utility pants. She stood like a rock, kept her breathing light enough to not drown out the sound of them peeing against the metal warehouse wall. She mentally rehearsed what to do if either of them spotted her. Luis became a large stillness next to her, his rifle also ready.

  The nearest guard finished, shook, buttoned up. He pulled a water bottle from his thigh pocket, unscrewed it…and dropped the cap. It clicked against the warehouse’s concrete apron. “Chingado,” he grumbled.

  Look down, Nora told him. Not over here.

  The gunman scanned the ground around his feet, looked to his right, froze. He and Nora locked eyes for a moment. “Ay—”

  Nora shot him once through the dark hollow of his left eye. The suppressed rifle made a thud sound, like dropping a sandbag. The man crumpled, his rifle clattering against the cement. Another thud told her Luis had killed the other guard before the first one had finished falling.

  They dragged the bodies farther into the shadows, relieved them of their extra ammunition. Nora knew she ought to feel bad about this—she’d killed someone in cold blood who didn’t have a chance to defend himself—but she couldn’t. They’d have done the same to her. As far as she was concerned, she was back in Somalia and these people were Shabab. The Army had stopped trying to capture the Somalian radicals
before she got there; the unofficial order was “kill them all.” She and her unit had done just that, not that it had helped in the end.

  “Let’s go,” Luis whispered. He pointed toward the warehouse’s far end.

  “How long are we going to wait for McGinley?”

  “Until he shows up, we run out of time or we figure out how to do this without him.”

  As much as she wanted to, she couldn’t argue with that.

  McGinley checked the pictures on his slate, then forwarded them to the intel weenie in the van with the comm tech. “Run facials on these,” he told the man. “You’re already late.”

  Good work, Ojeda. The two pictures of that mob of Mexes might just shake something loose back in D.C.

  “Sir, this third shot’s of Americans.”

  “I don’t give a damn,” he snapped. “Do it anyway.” He turned to the comm tech. “Chop the gunship to that yard for a look-see. They can stay on our side of the line if they want. Tap the video and drag it over here.”

  A couple minutes later, the better of the two beauty shots of the cartel boys flashed on his slate. Over half the faces were tagged with names and links to their files. He poked at a couple with vaguely familiar names. The guest list for that hoe-down had some heavy hitters.

  Then he saw it: “Alcala.” Weasel-faced bastard was smiling right into the damn camera, like he knew it was there. I’m coming for you, son. “Intel! Send that thing to O’Hanlon and the DEA.”

  “Sir,” the comm tech said, “the gunship feed is coming to you.”

  McGinley poked the throbbing red icon on his slate. An oblique infrared view of the customs yard filled the screen, a targeting reticule in the center, readouts at the bottom for altitude and heading and distance to target. Bright little green bodies went this way and that, most of them not in any great hurry. He whistled; there sure were a passel of them. Two heat sources moved along at a good clip by the half-bright warehouse. Ojeda and Khaled?