“What exactly are ya lookin’ for?”
The gringo crouched down and took out an old Government Model 1911 pistol, checking the action to make sure it would cycle the rounds properly. “This’ll do.”
“You’re kiddin’ me. I thought you wanted somethin’ to shoot.”
The gringo stood up, hiding the pistol in the small of his back. “I’m lookin’ to protect myself. Not start a revolution.”
“Hell, I got one-a those under my mattress I coulda sold ya.”
“How much ya want for it?”
“A thousand,” Dupree said. “And that’s at a Steelyard discount. I take a lotta risk keepin’ this shit around.”
“It’s a fair price,” the gringo said. “Got anything to drive?”
“Well, if ya want somethin’ clean, it’s gonna take a couple of days and run you at least ten grand. I don’t deal in cars, and the Mexicans I do business with are gonna charge at least that when they realize you’re in a hurry.”
The gringo pointed to a battered green 1971 Dodge pickup parked near the building. “That run?”
“Yeah, it runs good, but it’s mine, and I don’t really wanna sell it.”
“I’ll give you nine grand, cash, for the pistol, the truck, and two boxes of cartridges.”
The doubt in Dupree’s eyes was plain to see. “When?”
“Right now.”
“You on the run from the law?”
“I’m on the run from a lot more than that. We got a deal or not?”
Dupree crouched down, taking two boxes of GI ball ammo from the locker and handing them to the gringo. He slammed the lid shut and stood up. “Remember, amigo, you get caught with so much as a bullet in this country, and you’re goin’ to jail.”
“Got it.”
They covered the locker over with sand and rolled the VW back into place, scattering the tire tracks with their feet. Then the gringo set his pack on the hood and unzipped it, counting out nine thousand dollars in used $100 bills.
If Dupree was shocked to see so much ready cash, he didn’t let on.
“We gonna deflate the tires?” the gringo asked, handing over the money.
Dupree took the cash and turned for the shop. “They’ll be flat again in half an hour. I’ll get your keys.”
The gringo reached in the open window of the car to snatch an old tan ball cap from the passenger seat. “Canyonlands, Utah” was stitched to the front of it in brown lettering. “How much for this?”
Dupree turned around. “Smell like cat piss?”
The gringo took a sniff. “Nope.”
“In that case, it’s free.”
The gringo pulled on the cap and followed him into the shop.
59
A frustrated Clemson Fields arrived at Villalobos’s motel and knocked sharply at the door to room 11. Villalobos was not answering his phone, and there were pressing problems in Mexico City. He needed a man he could depend on to neutralize Ortega before the guy realized his wife and kids had probably been chopped into little pieces and showed up at the US Embassy in hysterics, blabbing everything he knew about the Alice Downly affair.
“Come on, Villalobos, open up.” He stood, looking around. Villalobos’s car was parked right in front of the room.
Putting his ear to the door, he could hear music inside. “Hey!” He thumped the door with the heel of his fist. “Late night or what? Open up. We’ve got trouble down in DF.”
There was a small restaurant across the street, so he crossed to the road to check if Villalobos might be eating breakfast. The man was not there, so Fields went back to the room. He thought briefly to involve the motel manager, but an old instinct left over from the Cold War told him he’d better not. He went to his car and took a lock-pick set from his briefcase.
“I haven’t picked a lock in ten years,” he muttered, glancing around before fitting the needles into the lock. Luckily, the lock was old, so he was able to get the door open in under three minutes.
Fields slipped into the dark motel room and switched on the light. What he saw made him catch his breath. Propped on a pillow, Villalobos was tied naked to the bed with strips of torn sheet, his arms and legs outstretched, a blue condom over his shriveled penis, and his chest covered in blood that had spurted from his severed jugular vein. His empty wallet lay on the table near the door, and a blanket was thrown over the television which was on, playing Mexican music.
For the first time in his thirty-year career, Fields felt the impulse to run, but he ordered himself to remain calm. He’d been in a similar situation in East Berlin in 1980. “This is no worse than that,” he told himself. “And I’m not being hunted by the KGB.”
He peeked through the curtains to be sure no one was watching the motel and stepped into the bathroom. A bloody white hand towel lay on the floor. He found five or six strands of long, dark hair on the shower stall floor, but this was an almost useless clue. Eight out of ten women in Mexico had long dark hair.
“Murdering whore,” he mumbled, moving back into the room.
Realizing he had no way to safely dispose of the body, he unplugged the television and stood with hands on his hips, looking at the corpse. Villalobos’s dark eyes stared down at his shriveled genitalia. “Thank God this is Tijuana,” Fields said to himself. “In any other city, this would draw a lot of attention.”
He searched Villalobos’s bags and discovered that the murderer had stolen his silenced H&K pistol. At least he didn’t have to worry about the police finding the weapon in the room.
Five minutes later, Fields was sitting at a red light, wondering what to do about Ortega. “Damn it.” Now he had no choice but to call the clowns from Baja.
60
Midori walked into Pope’s office unannounced and shut the door. “We need to talk about Fields.”
Pope looked up from his computer, rocking back in his chair. “Have a seat.”
She took the chair before his desk. “He’s run amuck. He just called the boys from Baja.”
“I’m aware of that.”
“They’re maniacs.”
The CIA director took off his glasses, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “Fields has a tough job down there right now. As you know, my primary Mexico assets have gone off the grid. So he’s doing the best he can with what he’s got to work with.”
“You mean he’s doing the best he can to cover up the fact you had Alice Downly assassinated.”
Pope let out a sigh. “It would appear that I’ve trained you too well.”
“Tell me why you did it, Robert.”
“I’m trying to stabilize the border. Downly wanted to escalate hostilities. The president was in support of sending Special Forces troops into Mexico, and I couldn’t talk him out of it. Such an escalation would get out of hand, and many, many innocent people would die.”
“So it’s mathematics?”
“Life is mathematics.”
“No. Life is breathing human beings. And you’ve lost sight of that.”
“You’re wrong,” he said quietly. “I’m the only person in this town who hasn’t lost sight of it. What is one life weighed against thousands? Or hundreds? Or even just dozens? We kill based on numbers, and numbers never lie. You know that as well as I do. Are you upset because I weighed the life of an American woman against the lives of hundreds of Mexicans and found her wanting?”
“You broke the law.”
“We break the law every day. That’s our job.”
Aware she was losing the battle of logic, Midori changed her tack. “Do you know that Fields is using Mariana to get to Jessup?” She noted the hint of surprise in his eyes. “You didn’t, did you?”