Shoot 'Em Up (11 page)

A battered red Playmate cooler sat at the top of the stairs. It didn't seem all that heavy.

It was buzzing.

Like my head.

I carried it over to the wood table on the corner of the porch and set it down. The faint droning continued. I pressed in the white button of the cooler and pushed the lid up.

It stuck.

The stench was immediately recognizable. Through the three-inch strip of open cooler, a human head, corneas fogged to gray marbles, stared sightlessly outward. Flies buzzed at the nostrils and mouth.

I shoved the lid all the way back.

And heard an ominous, metallic
snick
.

Followed by a long hiss and a sharp
crack
.

The burning acrid reek of chemicals seared my nose and mouth. I turned to run and fell off the porch. Landing hard on my stomach, I rolled underneath, scrambling to tuck up tight against the house.

The explosion ripped above. The concussion jammed my eardrums into my head as it squashed the air out of my lungs.

Dust and splinters and shards of plastic and metal rained down on the porch above me. I felt it more than heard it.

I didn't realize I wasn't dead until seconds after.

I lay there. Not thinking, feeling more than hearing the ringing in my ears.

No flash, no fire, just a noxious chemical smell.

I rolled onto my back and stared up through the porch slats. The lights had been shattered. My whole body smarted.

“Maisie!” AJ grabbed my leg.

“Is anyone hurt?”

He shook his head. “Are you?” It sounded like he was talking underwater.

“No.” I crawled out from under the porch and dusted my hands off on my pants. My ears were ringing.

I surveyed the damage.

Chac and Jefe had flashlights out. Wood screws, hex nuts, nails, and pieces of the cooler were embedded in the siding of the house. Windows and porch lights were shattered.

Chac reached out to pull a wood screw buried head-in in the doorjamb.

“Don't!” AJ rubbed his forehead. “It's probably been soaked in rat poison. So even if the explosion didn't kill you, the shrapnel might.”

Moonlight reflected off a small ivory piece on the porch. I looked closer.

A human tooth.

“El Cid?” Esteban lifted half of the head with his knife. Jefe trained his flashlight beam on the sight. Viscous goop dripped from the head onto the steps.

“Oh Jesus.” AJ put an arm around my shoulder, turning us away from the carnage. “We need to talk.”

We walked around to the back of the house. “Lucky Jefe parked the car back here,” I said. The lights in the kitchen still worked.

“Always does,” AJ said as we sat down. “What happened?”

I pointed at the second blue ice chest. “I heard you ask for the cooler from the front. I went to get it. A small red one was on the top step of the porch.”

“Fucking assholes!” AJ spat. “They fucking droned us.”

“You're serious? They dropped it off by remote control?”

“Yeah. We have eyes a mile away on either end of the dirt road. Assholes. These guys are all about the toys.” He ran a hand over his shaved head. “Back to the cooler . . .”

“I saw the head inside before it blew. Hispanic male, he had little plus-sign tattoos on his cheekbones.”

“Goddammit!” AJ braced his hands on his knees and dropped his head. He took several deep breaths. “Galo.”

He dug his cell out of his pocket, dialed, and stood up. He turned away, talking triple-time into the phone.

I was glad I couldn't understand a word of it. My head was pounding and I was shivering. I grabbed the bottle of tequila. I had a hard enough time getting the cap off, so I skipped the glass and took a slug straight out of the bottle.

It tasted like chemicals.

AJ hung up. “I'm sorry this happened.” He sat down next to me.

I slid the tequila in front of him. “Not your fault. I was lucky.”
Damn lucky.
“No one got hurt.”

“Except Galo.” He took a swig. “Fucking El Eje.”

“I'm not sure, but . . .” I cleared my throat. “I think his eyelids had been, er, removed.”

AJ traced the wood grain of the table with his fingers for several seconds. “La Bestia Que Llora,” he murmured. “Burn in hell.”

La bestia que llora
definitely sounded like something I needed to remember. I said it over and over and over in my head.

He was rattled.
Who isn't?

I pressed the advantage. “What's happening, AJ?”

“Colombia, Bolivia, Ecuador . . . They treated the Mexican cartels like shit, paying them nothing to get the drugs into the U.S. And so the cartels like El Eje and Grieco unified and waited. Waited until the South Americans became dependent upon their lines of distribution.” AJ raised a shoulder. “Eventually, Mexicans said, ‘
No mas.
No more. You will pay us what we want or we will not distribute.' And it worked. For a time.”

“But you think the drone was from El Eje.”

“Oh, I know.” He smacked his fist on the table. “Carlos and I believe a more civilized methodology works to the advantage of all. Tampico is safe, the people are happy. We take our cut but we're not greedy.”

Stannis had a toast like that.
Be a bull or a bear but never the pig.

“El Eje wants Tampico,” AJ said. “They are as primitive and crude as an ISIS tribe. Which is who they're actually recruiting.”

“How do you fight that?”

“Marketing. Every vicious South American mercenary I've ever met has watched Marvel,
The Matrix,
and all Tarantino's shit. The promise of technology and exclusivity is how I'm building Carlos's private army, Los Cinco-Sietes,” AJ said. “The Five-seveNs.”

“What's with the name?” I asked, even though I already knew.

“They're named after the guns. FN Five-seveNs. I wanted something specialized, sophisticated. Not the same old blinged-out shiny-shit Mexicali bang-bang. Slajic scored a shipment of The FN Five-seveNs M2Ks. Fucking beautiful guns, with thirty-round mags.”

“That ammo's not easy to come by.”

AJ nodded. “That turned out to be a benefit—moving us in a different direction.”

“Which is why you're here. Isn't it?”

“I don't follow . . .”

“Fredo. Do you really think I don't know what you're doing here?”

The blood drained from my face.

I raised the tequila bottle to my lips.

AJ put his hand on my shoulder. “Stannislav Renko sent you here as a test.” His mouth split in a mean, knowing smile. “And as your loyalty to him is absolute, so is my respect for him and the business interests we share. I did not send a Cinco-Siete to assassinate Coles.”

Really? It wasn't me? That's the best you got?
“I didn't say you did.”

“The fact that you're here says that Renko does.”

Sometimes having lawyers in the family was a win-win.

AJ opened up this avenue of inquiry, after all. I presented the facts. “The gun—Five-seveN with the Grieco custom black diamond on the safety—it's one of your Cinco-Siete's, yes?” I said. “The man who fired it, Grieco's.”

“Juan Echeverría wasn't one of the Cinco-Sietes. Hell, he's not even a
sicario,
” AJ protested. “Echeverría's aim was so bad, if he threw a rock at the ground he'd miss.”

I nodded. Juan wouldn't have made my Top Ten list of potential assassins, either.

“If we wanted Coles dead, Maisie, he would be.”

“You must see how this looks. Coles and Renko go way back.”

“Echeverría's a fall guy. El Eje kidnapped his family, gave him the gun and orders to go after Coles.” He sighed. “It's Diego Rivero Lavayén's gun.”

“How do you know?”

“Because until last week, he's the only Cinco-Siete who'd gone missing. I recruited Lavayén from Bolivia. Disappeared about six weeks ago. We found his head in a cooler at the shipyard, naked body hanging from one of the Tamaulipas entry arches.” He turned his head, throat working. “The torture Lavayén suffered . . . blessed by the damned.” He closed his eyes. “
La bestia que llora
. Fucking bastards. They were careful to keep him alive. Made it last for days. . . .”

“Why would El Eje want Coles dead?”

“To put the heat on us. They want Tampico.”

“C'mon, AJ. You're trying to tell me El Eje is trying to take over the Port of Tampico by assassinating an American politician? Really?”

“It's not about Coles.” Color flared in his cheeks. “They're trying to discredit us with Renko and Slajic. If the Serbs blackball us, where the hell are we gonna get what we need?” He grabbed the tequila bottle and poured, swearing under his breath.

It didn't explain the Cinco-Sietes's gun that shot Cash. But one doesn't search for the squall behind a windfall.

I stood up and walked out from beneath the covered patio.

The
snap
of the glass in the cooler echoed in my head. I knew exactly how Cash felt coming around that corner.

I put my hands in my pockets, concentrating on looking nonchalant and not puking up tequila and Chac's carne asada. My fingers closed around a small plastic rectangle. “Hey, AJ.” My right ear had a raspy, blown-speaker reverberation when I spoke. “Do you have a computer?”

“Yeah, but we're not on the grid, babe.”

I pulled a thumb drive out of my jeans pocket. “Aww. That's too bad. I guess we won't be needing this.”

“What's on it?”

“
Zero Effect, Time Bandits, The Unbelievable Truth,
and
Touch of Evil.
”

AJ grinned. “You're a pretty cool kitty.”

We spent the night grim-faced and shoulder to shoulder on the sagging double bed watching movies.

* * *

AJ passed out at 4:27 a.m. I eased off the bed, picked up my travel vanity case, and snuck into the bathroom. After the bomb, they'd drawn straws and Chac ended up spending the night in the MDX. The other two sacked out on the couches in the front room.

I turned on my iPhone. Chac still had the SIM card, but the rest of it was still operational. I dug through my vanity case for an empty Ziploc bag and plastic gloves—equally useful for fake tanning or evidence gathering. Into the bag went cotton balls, Q-tips, Kleenex, and tweezers. I shook the three Oxys out of an RX bottle, rinsed, and dried it.

I slipped out the back door and crept around the empty side of the cabin. The sky was growing light, but the sun wasn't due up for a while. I flipped on the camera and snapped some orientation shots, then put the gloves on and went to work.

A chemical bomb.

Hank had given me a vague idea of how explosives worked, but it was a case of my da's that had me swiping down the door, table, and leftover base of the cooler for residue with every absorbent material on hand.

The Ziploc bag was filled in minutes.

A chemical bomb needed a detonator. The barest rays of sun were lightening the sky. I searched for a solid five minutes before finding the striker impaled in the porch post behind me. It took some convincing, but after shredding my gloves, I got it out and into the Rx bottle.

For good measure I threw in a couple of screws, hex nuts, and plastic shard of cooler.

And the tooth.

After a somber brunch and good-byes with AJ, the Hermanos Hansons and I got into the MDX. Jefe, as before, behind the wheel. Esteban, riding shotgun this time, immediately turned on the music. Chac sat next to me. The M21s and AKs at their sides were just a fact of life, the atmosphere in the car as carefree as a sunny day.

In their minds, at least, I'd passed muster.

A position I wanted to stay in. “Did you see the movie El Cid named you after?”

“
Sí, yes,
” Chac said. “Is very funny.
Slap Shot
!”

“
Slap Shot
!” Jefe and Esteban echoed.

Chac said, “Mexico team is no good. They must see
Slap Shot
. They need Hermanos Hanseen.”

Jefe and Esteban began shouting like the Hanson brothers—in the Spanish-dubbed version—which cracked us all up.

“You are from Chicago, yes?” Chac nodded. “You have team?”

“Chicago Blackhawks.” I gave a double bicep flex. “The best.”

He smiled. “Would like to see game someday.”

I didn't have the heart to tell him hockey had evolved since the 1970s. “You guys get to Chicago, I'll get you into a game.”

Jefe said something. Chac and Esteban nodded in serious agreement.

“What?” I asked.

“He says Mr. Renko is lucky husband. But not”—he searched for the word—“careful with you.” He shrugged. “This not a good business for a woman.”

Chac, Jefe, and Esteban were, in fact, not brothers, but cousins. My Spanish was too weak to follow the lineage, but safe to say they knew a heckuva lot about Carlos Grieco and AJ Rodriguez.

“So El Cid is Carlos's son?”

“No. Nephew. Carlos's sister, his favorite, she marry the Spaniard. They live in New York City. El Cid is Americano. But his mother is killed on street like a dog. Very sad.”

I knew the rest. AJ was sent to UCLA, where he graduated early and got his MBA in business.

We were back in Juarez before I was ready. Time flies when you're not sweating that you're about to be killed en route. And consciously avoiding any thoughts about smuggling eleven pounds of heroin across the border. And about whether Nyx actually had my back.

“Chac?” I said in a voice too low for Jefe and Esteban to hear. “I've never done this before.”

“What?”

“Taken drugs across the border.”

“Have no worry, Señora Renko.” He reached over and squeezed my hand. “El Cid make easy for you.”

* * *

We pulled into a ranch. Or at least I assumed it was, from the horses and corral and trailers. Chac handed me my SIM card back. “Do not use until El Paso.”

“Okay.” I put it in the zippered pocket of my backpack. Chac and I got out and went to the house.

A man wearing a six-shooter on his hip, old-school John Wayne style, moved aside so we could knock on the battered screen door.

We entered a kitchen with peeling linoleum and cabinetry with so many layers of paint that the doors must've grown an inch in thickness over the years.

An old man as weathered and stringy as rawhide sat at a round kitchen table with an enameled blue tin coffee cup. There were no other chairs.

His rheumy brown eyes looked me over from head to toe.

I was wearing a Burberry Brit denim cropped jacket, white tee, and biscuit-colored jeans over my distressed calf-hair, square-toed Donald J Pliner boots.

He shook his head and called, “Consuela!”

A teenage girl in a shapeless print skirt and a Taylor Swift T-shirt came into the kitchen and went straight to his side. He said something. She straightened and waved a hand at me. “You come.”

Consuela took me into a tiny bedroom. A single bed held a multicolored quilt with primitive appliqued pillows. A ratty teddy bear was the only decoration. There was no furniture except for a battered dresser. She opened the bottom drawer and took out a beaten pair of Wrangler jeans and an old, polyester-blend Western snap-shirt. “Put on.”

I did. Snug, but not uncomfortable. The girl carefully folded up my old clothes while I put my boots on. I reached for my jean jacket. Consuela shook her head.

She gave a small sigh and pulled out a red canvas jacket from the top drawer. From the look on her face, it was a favorite. I slipped it on.

She held out my clothes to me.

I shook my head. “For you,” I said without enthusiasm. I didn't want to trade my jacket, either.

She looked doubtfully at my clothes. “
Gracias
.”

When did this adventure become a D-level version of
Traffic
? I was still taking my suitcase home.

“Hang on.” I dug my wallet out of my backpack. I had two thousand dollars in hundreds from Nyx for incidentals. I held up five hundred dollars and pointed at my clothes. “Can you get those in my suitcase?”

“
Sí!
” She took the money, went to the bed, and jammed it inside the moth-eaten teddy bear's leg. Still holding my clothes, she opened the window and put her leg over the sill. “You go back now.”

Back in the kitchen, a pile of papers sat on the table.

The old man patted his hand on the stack, then removed a set of car keys from his shirt pocket. He tossed them on the table.

Chac picked up the papers and the keys. “
Gracias
.”

“
De nada
.”

We walked outside the small ranch house. I looked back over my shoulder to see Consuela climbing back into her bedroom window.

Chac and I passed several beat-up-looking junkers. “You drive
transmisión
manual,
sí?
”

“Sure thing.”

He picked up the pace. We were almost trotting now, past the corral to a barn on the other side. “
Remolque, sí?
”

“I don't understand.”

On the other side of the barn sat a faded tan Ford series pickup from the late eighties. Not quite old enough to be an antique. Attached to it was a five-foot-by-fourteen-foot rusted livestock trailer. Chac hit the trailer with his hand. “
Remolque.
”

“Nope,” I said. “I've never driven a trailer.”

“Ah!” He waved a hand at me. “Is easy.”

He handed me the keys and had me take it for a spin. I practiced backing it up to a sort of narrow pen, only messing up two out of three times, for cripe's sake, before Chac said, “Good. Stop now.”

I got out of the truck, only mildly sweaty after my air-conditioning-free test run. “So, I'm good to go, yeah? Now what?”

Chac walked me around to the front of the truck. He handed me a hand-drawn map with no road names. He spread open a big paper map. “You keep in your head,
sí?
”

Men's voices and metal
clanks
sounded in the background. I squinched my eyes shut, trying to focus. “No,” I said. “No. I need to see.”

He thought it over for a minute, then penciled in the names on the El Paso side. “You follow us to crossing at Juarez.”

“Thank you.”

A snorting bellow broke the air.

Then shouting. Lots of shouting.

I stepped to the side of the truck. To my abject horror, three men were prodding out one of the biggest, maddest animals I'd ever seen in my life. He'd turned broadside toward the chute and trailer, shaking his head from side to side, hair standing up on his back. He stopped, digging his horn into the dirt.

The men fell back.

“Is Miura fighting bull. Toro Bravo. The best,” Chac said. “You drive careful,
sí?
”

A wave of heat splashed over me, like I was a lobster dropped in a pot.

Red heat shot up my neck and burst in my cheeks. I couldn't cool down. I moved away from Chac, fanning myself ineffectually with my hands.

“Chac, I don't think I—”

He raised a hand and dipped his head. “Is best way, Señora Renko.” He tapped his nose. “The dogs they no smell the product.”

I heard the metal
clinks
and
clangs,
then cheers.

Chac barked an order at a short, lard-tailed kid standing by the fence. He pointed at the steaming pile the bull had just dumped prior to trailer entry.

The kid waved, picked up a shovel, and jogged out to the pile. He scooped up a blade full of the manure, hay, and gravel. He squeezed through the open gate and the closed trailer, holding the full shovel high and close like it was going in a pizza oven. I watched as he walked straight up to me and tossed it on my shins and boots.

“
Gracias!
” Chac said to the lard-tailed kid.

“Wha!” I gaped, shaking my legs, trying to get the warm stink off me. “What the—”

Chac turned to me. “You are ready now.”

* * *

In the cab of the truck was the map to my destination in El Paso, as well as the
veterinario
papers for El Toro Bravo. Who I was now calling Benicio, in the hopes that by sending him friendly karmic thoughts, he'd behave himself.

Benicio clattered from side to side in the trailer.

I trailed the Hanson brothers back through Ciudad Juárez, damn glad I hadn't let Chac pawn me off with his not-to-scale scribble map. I wouldn't have made it ten blocks without getting lost.

As it was, I spent the half hour white-knuckling the wheel at the slightest sway of the trailer.

Up ahead, Chac rolled down the window and indicated that I should take the next right turn. With a honk and a wave they disappeared.

I turned and joined the massive traffic jam at the Paso del Norte Bridge.

I crawled past a dozen matte-black pickup trucks filled with soldiers in back, clad in full battle rattle and neoprene ski masks to hide their identity from drug traffickers.

I sat there, waiting my turn in the far lane, slow-baking in the cab like one of those asinine fake-news stories where they bake chocolate chip cookies on the dashboard. Hell, Benicio might be BBQ by the time we got to El Paso.

Surprisingly difficult to do when you had a couple of hours in line, watching Border Patrol search the vehicles ahead with mirrors on little rolley sticks and men with German shepherds.

Five kilos carry a minimum sentence of five to twenty-five years.

I pulled forward another car length. And another.

Benicio gave a whopping triple kick into the side of the trailer. The
clangs
echoed through the holding lot.

A mustached border patrolman waved me forward. He approached my open window. “Good afternoon.”

“Hi.” I gave him a perky smile and handed over vet papers, truck and trailer permits, passport, and driver's license.

He took the stack back to his desk and did whatever it was that they do with them.

Benicio shuffled from side to side in the trailer. I could see it rocking in the rearview mirror.

I gave a chuckle-gasp.

Benicio bellowed and kicked some more. The two German shepherds whined and stutter-stepped.

The guard looked up from my paperwork, disapproval creasing his face.

He went back to the papers.

On the plus side, I was already sweaty as hell with no AC. Minus side, the Border Patrol's two German shepherds were now going positively apeshit. Over which—the heroin or the bomb residue—I had no idea.

The border patrolman went to the side of the trailer, shaded his eyes, and peered in. Benicio's hoof kicked again. The patrolman came back to my window. “Señorita McGrane? Step out of the truck.”

I opened the door and hopped down from the seat, as chipper as all get-out. “Yes sir?”

“Come with me, please.”

We walked around to the back of the trailer. He swung open the top panel of one of the doors. “Ma'am, this bull—he is sick, no?”

The bull chuffed and groaned. Benicio was in the head of the carrier, separated from the rear doors by a chest-high fence of open bars.

My eyes bulged.

It looked as if an outhouse had exploded.

“Uh . . . Not sick-sick. Only carsick,” I lied, hoping bulls could suffer from motion sickness. “Benicio doesn't like to ride.”

“Benicio?”

I bit my lip and smiled. “Del Toro. Benicio del Toro . . .”

“Ha! I see,” he said.

Benicio's tail raised, firing a spattering cannon. The guard raised his arm in front of me like a protective mother as we skittered backward.