FaceOff (35 page)

Whoa.

Reilly didn’t know what the hell had happened in that truck, but half of the man’s face was red and blotchy and blistered and
some of the skin looked like it was ready to fall off. His right eye was shut.

Reilly told Garber and his daughter to run.

“I’ll do it!” the man yelled. “I’ll smash it right into the road! I’ll crack this thing wide open. You want that?”

Reilly raised an unthreatening palm.

“Come on,” the FBI agent said. “You’ll take yourself out, too. You’ll never have the fun of seeing your handiwork.”

“Doesn’t much matter now,” he said.

Behind them, other motorists on the highway slowed. A couple honked their horns.

Reilly ignored them, instead staying focused on Faustus. He couldn’t stop himself from asking, “What the hell happened to your face?”

“Hot coffee,” Faustus said. “Maybe I’ll sue.”

Reilly noticed that the truck was moving, ever so gradually. They’d all stopped on a very slight, uphill grade, and the Ford was starting to roll back. Faustus had bailed out of it so quickly he must not have put the shift solidly into park.

By the time Faustus noticed, it was too late to react.

The open driver’s door caught him on the back and threw him down onto the highway like he’d been tackled. The bottom edge of the door hit the back of his head hard enough that he did a face-plant on the pavement, arms outstretched.

He wasn’t moving. Only his fingers, twitching, releasing their grip on the cylinder, which started to roll along the asphalt toward Reilly, bumping over small stones and irregularities in the surface.

Please don’t have opened, please don’t have opened.

Reilly bolted forward, threw his body over the cylinder, trapped it below his torso, smothering it like it was a grenade. Even though it was not going to explode, it had the potential to do more damage
than a thousand grenades. The truck rolled past him to his right, the front wheels turning slightly, angling the truck’s back end toward the ditch.

As it rolled by, Reilly saw Garber and his daughter a good fifty yards away, heading for a wooded area beyond the highway’s edge. Garber glanced back, saw Reilly on the ground, grabbed Kelly by the elbow to stop her.

Reilly could just barely hear him tell her, “Stay here.”

And then he came running.

“Are you hit?” Garber shouted.

“No!”

“What about him?”

“I’m guessing dead. That door hit him hard, and then his head hit the pavement. He hasn’t moved.”

“Why are you lying on—?”

“Have you got a bag in your truck? A plastic bag? A couple of them? Anything airtight?” A thought hit him. “Evidence bags in the cruiser!”

Garber stopped, ran for the police car, grabbed the keys and ran around back to pop the trunk. It took him about fifteen seconds to find what he was looking for. Clear plastic, sealable bags, like oversized sandwich bags. He grabbed a handful and ran back to Reilly as his truck slowly backed into the ditch, the engine still running.

The agent, still keeping his body pressed to the pavement, reached up for a bag. “Give it to me.”

Garber had some sense of how serious the situation was.

“Should I start running again?” he asked.

Reilly grimaced. “Probably not much point. We’re either safe, or we’re not. You couldn’t run fast enough to save yourself.”

He worked the bag under his torso, then, in one swift motion, got up on his knees, shoved the cylinder into it, and sealed the top.

Garber realized he was holding his breath.

“You’ve got the end of the world in that bag, don’t you?”

“Pretty much,” Reilly replied. “Hand me another. I’m going to double bag it. Maybe even triple.”

“Did anything leak out?”

“If we’re still standing a minute from now, I’d say no.”

He reached out a hand to Garber, and he took it. He helped the agent to his feet, and they regarded each other for a moment. Garber kept glancing at his watch.

“Thirty seconds.”

“Give it a little longer,” Reilly said.

“If it happens, what, exactly, will happen?”

“You don’t want to know. The good news is, it’ll be quick.”

Garber kept his eye on his watch. “That’s a minute and a half now.”

“I’d say we’re going to live.” Reilly smiled. “Your kid threw hot coffee in his face?”

Garber nodded.

The smile turned into a grin. “Get her over here.”

Garber waved Kelly in. She arrived, nearly breathless, several seconds later. Shaken, but relieved, too.

Reilly rested his hands on her shoulders. “You are something else.”

Kelly smiled weakly.

“Really, you are,” Sean Reilly said. “You ever need anything, you just name it.”

Kelly thought a moment. She said, “I never did get my chicken nuggets.”

T
he genesis of this story goes all the way back to 2009 when John and Jeff discovered a shared love of fishing, while contributing a short story to an anthology called
Hook, Line & Sinister
. Then, in 2011, the two hung out together on a deepwater fly-fishing trip to East Cape and Cerralvo Island in Baja California. Every day for a week the anglers set out at dawn in
pangas
(Mexican fishing boats) seeking tuna, dorado,
roosterfish, amberjack, pompano, or whatever else might be biting. Their guides were a fantastic and personable collection of skilled pilots and fishermen, mostly from one extended family who lived in the nearby village of Agua Amarga.

When they were approached with the concept for
FaceOff,
both immediately glommed on to the idea of John’s Wyatt Hunt (
The Hunt Club, Treasure Hunt,
and
The Hunter
) and Jeff’s Joe Trona (
Silent Joe
) teaming together. Both characters were close to the same age, athletic, and were more or less involved with law enforcement, so putting them together on a fishing trip to Baja was a no-brainer. As soon as the two characters showed up on the page together, the chemistry was clear and palpable. John and Jeff quickly discovered that if those two characters actually existed in real life, they would probably be buds. Friendship aside, though, this is a thriller anthology, so the story needed an adventure that would place the heroes in danger.

Jeff had done quite a lot of research into Mexico’s
narcotrafficantes.
Headlines from around the world attest every day that there is a serious problem with drug trafficking in that part of the world. So what could be better, fiction-wise, than to have these gangsters threaten a tightly knit extended family of hardworking fishermen? And what would poor fishermen possess that could possibly lure the local
narcotrafficantes
out to their village so that they could steal it? These good people don’t do drugs. They’re not political. They fish and play baseball. But there is one other little-known, and only partially explored, commodity in Baja California that would draw the attention of gangsters.

Gold.

A hidden stash that could rejuvenate a little fishing town, providing money for a new electric generator to make ice and run refrigerators, to power streetlights, and buy new motors for the
pangas
. But the
narcotrafficantes
have also heard rumors of gold. Where it’s hidden. Who’s hiding it. They won’t hesitate to torture and kill to get their hands on it.

What’s to stop them?

Just two Americans, Wyatt Hunt and Joe Trona, down in Mexico on a fishing vacation.

W
YATT HUNT MADE IT TO
his gate in the International Terminal of LAX with an hour to spare before boarding would begin for his noon connecting flight to La Paz. He was traveling light, with one brand-new light-brown-on-dark-brown carry-on duffel bag into which he’d stuffed nearly two grand’s worth of new fly-fishing gear, his toilet kit, and two changes of clothes, long pants of good wicking material that with a zip converted into shorts and two long-sleeved shirts, the latter items newly purchased from REI against what was forecast to be debilitating heat—eight hours a day on the water, no shade, average temperature around 110.

It was September and his party of ten, all unknown to him, were going after dorado, roosterfish, various tuna, and the occasional marlin, sailfish, or shark. None of these fish would weigh less than ten pounds, and some might go to a hundred or more. Hunt, a lifelong fly-fisherman in streams for trout in the half-pound
range, was skeptical about the ability of his new gear to handle fighting fish of this size and caliber, but he was game to try.

In any event, he was a gear freak and the new stuff—ten-weight and twelve-weight rods, reels holding over a hundred yards of sixty- and eighty-pound test backing, barbed and artistically feathered hooks the length of his fingers—was undoubtedly cool. He’d gone out with a fishing pro at San Francisco’s Baker Beach four times over the past month, trying to master the casting technique known as double-hauling, essential if you wanted to reach surface targets in salt water. He was still far from expert, but at least felt he wouldn’t completely embarrass himself.

With time to kill and slumping a bit after his five
AM
wake-up, he grabbed an open chair at the end of the bar, stuffed his duffel down under his feet, and ordered a large cup of coffee. When he’d finished about half of it, he turned to the guy next to him—a portly, pale, bald guy in a bright red and green Hawaiian shirt. “You mind watching my duffel a minute?” he asked. “I’ve got to hit the head.”

The older gentleman, already drinking something with an umbrella in it, looked down at Hunt’s duffel and broke an easy smile. “We are urged not to leave our baggage with strangers, are we not?”

“Constantly.” Hunt had covered his half cup with a napkin and was already on his feet, now suddenly in a bit of a hurry. He lowered his voice. “I promise it’s not a bomb. You can look if you want.”

“I’m going to trust you,” the gentleman said. “Go already.”

On the way to the men’s room, Hunt not for the first time found himself reflecting on the fact that in many ways, and despite his own demise, Osama bin Laden had basically won the first round of the War on Terror. Already that morning, Hunt not once
but twice had to take off his shoes and belt, empty his pockets, and assume the position in the TSA’s X-ray machine. A victim of his early-morning fatigue in San Fran, if they hadn’t just changed the rules again, he’d also have donated to the cause the Swiss Army knife he’d forgotten in his pocket—which would have been the third time that had happened.

Even if he acknowledged the general reason for it, the whole thing pissed him off.

As if the geezer next to him was going to steal his duffel bag. He didn’t look like he could even lift the thing. As if anybody, for that matter, in the secured area for boarding, was an actual threat to take anybody else’s luggage.

Caught up in his internal rave, Hunt ran with it. Let’s see: first, your potential thief needs a valid boarding pass with photo ID, then he’s half stripped and X-rayed, and he’s going along with this runaround because of the very off chance that some random person will leave their baggage “unattended”—Hunt loved that word!—and that he would then have an opportunity to steal it. And then what? Leave the building with his loot? When had that happened? Had it ever happened? Could it ever happen? Who thought of these things? What was the average IQ of a TSA employee anyway? Or of the goddamned director of the Department of Homeland Security, for that matter?

Room temp at best, Hunt was thinking as he exited the men’s room . . .

. . . just in time to see a guy about his own age and size, in jeans, a work shirt, and a San Diego Padres baseball hat pulled down low over his eyes, strolling toward the security gates with Hunt’s pretty damn distinctive duffel bag slung under his left shoulder. Jesus Christ!

“Hey!” Hunt yelled after him. “Hey! Wait up, there!”

The guy kept walking.

Hunt broke into a trot.

The other man was at least sixty feet away from Hunt and now almost to the exit. The thief moved with an easy grace, taking long strides, neither slowing down in the least nor speeding up, but moving, moving, moving. He would be at the exit within seconds.

When he had to, Hunt the athlete could move, too, and now he turned on the speed, closing the gap between them, calling out, “Stop that guy!” to no one in particular, but drawing the attention of every traveler in the terminal. He finally caught up just as the guy was arriving in front of the exit gate.

Hunt came up behind him and with a lunge grabbed at the duffel, getting a hold on it. “Hey! Hold up! What do you think you’re doing?” Hunt pulled at the strap.

The guy held on, whirled, and threw an elbow that Hunt barely ducked away from. But in that one fluid movement, Hunt realized he was dealing with a strong, lightning-fast, and trained fighter. Hunt himself had a black belt in karate and this guy, even hampered by the heavy duffel, was coming on as at least his equal, in any case a force to be reckoned with. Now he had Hunt backing away, and like any experienced fighter he kept coming, dropping the duffel and coming around with a right chop that Hunt knocked away with his forearm. It felt like he’d stopped a tire iron.

Squaring up now, ready to press an attack of his own, Hunt got his first good look at the man’s face, and it stopped him cold. Nearly half of it bore the scars of a serious burn injury, almost as though the skin had been melted away.

It immediately took the fight out of Hunt, though his breath was still coming hard. “What the hell are you trying to do?” he rasped out.

The other man spoke with an unnerving calm. “What am I trying to do? You just attacked me. I was defending myself.”

“You were walking out with my duffel.”

“That’s not your duffel. It’s mine. And I wasn’t walking out anywhere. I was going to buy a newspaper”—he pointed—“at this shop right here.”

Meanwhile, three TSA officers had broken through the ranks of onlookers and one of them—Hillyer by his name tag—advanced on them, arms spread out, asserting control. “All right, everybody. Easy. Easy now. What’s going on here?”