The position had not come easily. She’d spent fifty-five days in Artesia, New Mexico, taking courses in immigration and nationality law, criminal law and statutory authority, Spanish, Border Patrol operations, care and use of firearms, physical training, operation of motor vehicles, and antiterrorism. And no, they hadn’t let her fire a gun at community college. This was by far the most exciting thing she’d done in her short life. And now, as her pulse rose, she had further confirmation of that.
“What did you think? We were the puppy patrol up here?” she asked one sicario she’d busted last week. “They just handed me a gun and told me to stop the bad guys?”
Ironically, her mother wholeheartedly approved of her job and expressed how proud she was that her daughter had become a law enforcement officer, especially since, as Mom put it, “There’s always been such a fuss about protecting the border.”
Her father, on the other hand, was about as thrilled as a football fan without beer. Dad had always been a quiet man who’d spent a quiet life as a tax attorney in a quiet office on the outskirts of Phoenix. He enjoyed quiet weekends and was the antithesis of the alpha male. He just couldn’t see his daughter handling a weapon when he never would. At one point he’d even quoted Gandhi and gone so far as to tell her that men would no longer view her as feminine, that she’d have trouble dating, and that some might even question her sexuality. And then, of course, she’d get fat. All cops did. Border Patrol officers included. She had never forgotten those words.
Austin was a lot like her: single, pretty much a loner, with a strained relationship with his parents. He was a workaholic and a by-the-book kind of guy, except when it came to their relationship. He’d already hit on her, but she wasn’t interested. His facial features were severe, his body just a bit too doughy for her taste. She’d gently let him down.
“All right,” he said. “I’m calling for a second unit. You’re right. This could be big.”
“Roger that,” she said. “Get Omaha involved and the ATVs. Send them GPS.” Omaha was the call sign of the Black Hawk helicopter that supported their unit, and the three guys who drove the small, rugged all-terrain vehicles that propelled them at high speeds across the heavily rutted desert.
He rolled over, about to key his handset, when he just bolted up and started running. “Hey, you! Hold! Border Patrol!”
She turned and called after him—
As a gunshot sent a lightning bolt of panic straight through her chest.
She rolled away from the mound, drawing her weapon, and found two men standing near their SUV, both Mexicans clad in denim jackets. One with grizzled hair held a pistol that was probably a Belgian-made FN 5.7, a gun nicknamed the mata policía, or cop killer, in Mexico because it fired a round that could penetrate police body armor. The other guy clutched a long curved fillet knife. The knife wielder smiled, flashing a single gold tooth.
The first guy screamed in Spanish for her to freeze.
She was panting.
Austin lay on the ground with a gunshot wound to his chest. His armor had, indeed, failed to protect him against that pistol. He was still breathing, clutching the wound and groaning softly.
The guy with the knife started toward her. She looked at him, then at the man with the pistol, and suddenly fired at him, striking him in the shoulder, even as the pickup truck roared within a hundred yards.
She got to her feet as the guy with the knife went for his buddy’s gun, which had fallen to the dirt. She was about to shoot him as the pickup truck drew closer and gunfire flashed from the passenger’s side, rounds ricocheting near her boots.
She took off running for the gully ahead, practically diving for it, not looking back, just running, the sound of her own breath roaring in her ears, her pulse thumping hard, her footfalls rhythmic across the rocks and dirt. The plan was to get far enough away, then pause to get on her radio.
But she didn’t dare stop now.
A shriek echoed across the valley, and she couldn’t help but stop, whirl around, and there he was, the knife man, holding up Richard’s decapitated head for the men getting out of the pickup truck to see. They all howled as she swung around and dropped down into the gulley, listening as they got back in their truck.
She hit the dirt, dug herself in deeply behind a shrub, and tucked her warm pistol into her chest. She willed herself to control her breathing and heard her father’s voice in her head: “You’ll die like a dog out there, and no one will remember you.”
But then the sound of hope, the truck engine growing not louder but fainter. A miracle? They weren’t coming after her? Had they run out of time? She reached for her radio’s handset, and, pricking up her ears once more, keyed the mike.
“Road Runner, this is Coyote Five, over.”
“Susan, what the hell is going on out there? No contact?”
“Richard’s dead,” she whispered.
“I can’t hear you.”
“I said, ‘Richard’s dead’!” She hit a button on her wrist-mounted GPS. “I need everyone over here!” Her voice cracked as she fed him the GPS coordinates, and then she turned off the radio and listened once more to the truck engine beginning to fade into the wind.
3 FERTILE GROUND
Dante Corrales hated being away from home in Juárez, mostly because he missed his woman, Maria. He kept flashing back to last weekend, to the way she’d lifted her legs high in the air and had pointed her polished toenails, to the purring she’d made, to the claws she’d dug into his back, to the way she spoke to him and the expressions on her face. They’d made love like hungry, violent animals, and Corrales felt dizzy as he relived that moment yet again, standing there, inside the burned-out Pemex gasolinera, watching as the men unloaded the banana boxes, removed the blocks of cocaine, and placed those blocks inside their backpacks. There were twenty-two runners supervised by Corrales and five other sicarios. Their group was known as Los Caballeros, The Gentlemen, because they had a reputation for being exceedingly well dressed and well spoken, even as they lopped off heads and sent corpse messages to their enemies. They were smarter, braver, and certainly far more dangerous and cunning than the other enforcer gangs attached to the rest of Mexico’s drug cartels. And as Corrales liked to joke, they were just polishing their machismo!
Some of the shipment, Corrales knew, had gone up to Texas, moving through Brewster County, and he’d just received a call from his lead man, Juan, who said they’d had trouble. His team had encountered a Border Patrol unit. One of the guys Juan had hired for the run had chopped off a border agent’s head.
What the fuck was that?
More epithets escaped Corrales’s mouth before he could finally calm down and remind Juan that he was not supposed to hire any outside guys. Juan said he’d had no choice, that he’d needed more help because two of his regulars had not shown up and were probably drunk or high.
“The next funeral you attend will be your own.” Corrales thumbed off the phone, swore again, then tugged at the collar of his leather trench coat and picked a few pieces of lint from his Armani slacks.