“Three days?” Hunter demanded, unbelieving.
Jase nodded. He was counting down the minutes. Hell, the seconds.
“What went missing?” Hunter asked. “Guns?”
“Maya stuff. Or Aztec. Or what’s that early one?”
“Moche? Olmec? Mixtec?”
“Whatever. I don’t know diddly or squat about that stuff. That’s why I need you.” Suddenly Jase put his face in his hands. “Ali told me she’s pregnant. I was grinning at the moon. Then this. I don’t know what to tell her. It’s not like the missing stuff is gold or coke or anything, but Brubaker’s dick is in a knot and it all has to do with politics. How do you explain politics to a pregnant mother with children to feed and a husband who’s about to get sacked?”
And I’m your Hail Mary option, Hunter thought unhappily. Damn, Jase, no wonder you’re halfway to panic.
Hunter took the remaining chair at the tiny kitchen table. Their knees knocked. The men automatically shifted to make room. They had been raised around small tables in small kitchens.
“Walk me through it,” Hunter said. “How did ICE come across the artifacts?”
“About two, three weeks ago,” Jase said, rubbing his eyes like a man who hadn’t had enough sleep. “Around the first of December. I’m out there supervising a training session at the Matamoros crossing. Everything is dry like burned toast. Everyone out there is swearing and edgy. Beagles start howling just because they’re so miserable.”
“Beagles? What, you’re gonna lick the bad guys to death?”
“Those beagles are unstoppable. Noses that won’t quit. Stubborn and cute as puppies. They’re a lot more tourist-friendly for airports and cruise-ship terminals than your average German shepherd.” Jase glanced up from his coffee. “Politics, you know. Nobody’s afraid of beagles. Ali swears she’s gonna steal one and take it home to the kids.”
Hunter almost smiled. “Okay. You’re out on a beagle training session. Then what?”
“It’s a joint training session. ICE and DEA, getting along just like stepbrothers. But when the president tells you to play nice, then you damn well don’t get caught playing dirty.”
“What happened?”
“We get a stake-bed truck with plates out of Quintana Roo. The dogs freak. Howling and pawing the air and stretching leashes all over the place. All we see are commercial bags of concrete and some boxes of tools.”
“Coke?” Hunter asked.
“Yeah, the dogs hit on coke stashed with the concrete bags. But not a lot of it. A few kilos, nothing like a full shipment.”
Hunter’s mouth quirked at one corner. “And the dumb driver swears he didn’t know coke from concrete mix, right?”
“How’d you guess?” Jase asked dryly. “The coke was packed amateur, and it looked like at least one of the packages had gotten messed up before it was wrapped. Dogs locked onto the smell of the coke even though it had been doctored with kerosene or jet fuel.”
“Bad night for the driver,” Hunter said.
“I suppose, but he seemed almost relieved to get caught. Was real eager to talk. Acted like we would protect him from the witch doctors. He gave us the address he was supposed to be taking this load to.”
“He talked before he had a lawyer?”
Jase shrugged. “He didn’t care about lawyers. All he wanted was to get away from the shipment quick as he could. We processed him the snitch route, even ran a transfer to Cameron County custody on an empty charge just so he wouldn’t be kept with us or labeled as a DEA collar. He got shanked anyway within a few days.”
Hunter whistled softly. “Someone is connected like muscle to bone.”
“Welcome to the border, where money is black, coke is white, and you never know who’s got a rocket in his pocket.” Jase’s voice was weary rather than bitter. The border was what it was—a war zone.
“Who did the hit?”
“Some gangbanger from the Latin Kings out of Harlingen.”
“Did he give a reason for the killing?”
“Said the dude looked at him funny. He’s already in for life on killing four people, including two kids asleep in their beds, but he’s not giving up whoever told him to do the driver from Quintana Roo.”
“Not even to get some time shaved off a life sentence?”
Jase looked like he wanted to spit. “Cameron County’s D.A. is ambitious. He wants to run for governor and makes no secret of it. You don’t score a lot of points by making deals with kiddy whackers.”
“You can get a lot of points for nailing whoever ordered the whack.”
“Bird in the hand, man. Can’t guarantee what’s in the bush.” Jase drank some cooling coffee. “The ADA went ahead and tried to make a deal. The gangbanger acted like he was alone in the room.”
“Which tells me that whoever gave the order for the hit on the Q Roo driver pulls some serious weight. Is it a Latin King?”
Jase shook his head. “Ain’t none of the LKs ever had a lick of interest in the artifact trade. The amount of coke we found might get someone killed, but…” He shrugged, the liquid movement of a man whose ancestors came from both sides of the border.
“So would a handful of dirt,” Hunter said.
“Yeah. The driver didn’t have a drug background. Pretty much a Q Roo dirt farmer, not someone the Kings would be dealing with directly.”
“What about the artifacts? Do you think they were the real cargo?”
“DEA must have. They sneered at the five kilos of coke. That’s a lot of personal use, but not really a blip on DEA’s radar. But they were real eager to hand the artifacts over to Mexico for a big gold star in their good-neighbor file. So was our very own AIC Brubaker.”
Hunter shook his head and spit out a single word. “Politics.”
“Oh yeah. There was the usual pushing and shouldering. Then we cut a deal. DEA got the drugs and ICE got the artifacts. Since they weren’t evidence of anything prosecutable—the driver was dead—Brubaker fast-tracked the artifacts for the repatriation photo op.” Jase breathed out from the soles of his feet, deflating. “Man, I wish I’d given them to the feds. They’re politically radioactive.”
Hunter sorted through what he’d been told. “So the coke was the driver’s payday for taking everything over the border?”
“That and the lives of his family. You know how it works.”
Hunter grimaced. He knew. He just didn’t like it.
“The artifacts,” Jase continued, “weren’t carelessly wrapped like the coke. They were all tight and in sacks of concrete mix just like the kerosene-laced dope was. At first we thought the packages were opium tar or something else thrown in for the trip up. The shapes were really odd.”
“What about the address the driver gave you before he was shanked?”
“We checked it out.” Jase swallowed hard, remembering what he really wanted to forget. “I saw things in that place I’m not ever going to un-see.”
For a few moments Jase stared at his coffee cup, trying not to remember the unspeakable. He did anyway. “It wasn’t a single psycho rocking out. No bodies. Just blood everywhere, places you can’t believe blood would get. Blood from more than one person, more than ten. Fresh. Old. Blood and candle wax and rotting flowers.” He shook his head, hard, trying to throw off memories. “That place was…evil.”
“What’s the theory? Gang bloodbath? Death cult? Killing ground for rent?”
“ICE will take bets on any of those. We’re assuming the bad guys got word that the shipment had been popped, figured that the house was next on the list, so they ran like the cockroaches they are.”
“And resumed business in another place,” Hunter said grimly.
“Don’t they always? Hell, for all I know, they have lots of places like that house. The drug business lives on blood as much as money.”