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  “He was shot four times and stabbed at least once,” Brett explained as I went to the bedside. “He gave as good as he got; we found his pistol with the slide locked back, and enough bloodstains on the ground to suggest that he got at least three of them.”

  I looked down at him. Bob Sampson had joined the team just before Kurdistan, and had gotten the nickname “Little Bob” because the team had had two Bobs, Bob Fagin having been one of the original Praetorians, and we’d needed some kind of differentiation between them. Also, unlike Bob Fagin, Little Bob was a giant of a man. Bob Fagin had been dead for years, but Little Bob was still Little Bob. He tended to surprise people when he talked, since his voice was soft and high; he wasn’t feminine, but he could have been a schoolteacher, just to hear him talk. It had made his callsign of “Sasquatch,” given his size and hairiness, that much funnier.

  I shook my head. “Dammit, Little Bob,” I muttered. “Still getting your ass shot off. I thought you’d learned to duck since Iraq.” Little Bob had caught a round in the side during our final confrontation with the survivors of the Project.

  I turned to Brett, and nodded toward the two cops outside. “I’m sure he’s in good hands here, though I’d suggest getting some more firepower out front. These assholes aren’t fucking around, and if they make another try for him, they’ll bring the hate.”

  He nodded, his expression hooded. “We’ll have two deputies out in the parking lot twenty-four hours a day,” he promised, “with patrol rifles and shotguns.” He squinted at me for a second. “I’m tempted to ask you guys for some backup, knowing what kind of hardware you’ve got on that ranch, but somehow I suspect you’re going to be busy.”

  “Ask me no questions, Brett, and I’ll tell you no lies,” I told him. “Trust me, it’s better this way.”

  He sighed. “Dammit, Jeff, my job’s to enforce the law. And you’re not exactly setting my mind at ease that I’m going to be doing that properly if I leave you guys be.”

  I looked back at Little Bob for a second. “I’ll make you a deal, Brett,” I said. “If the FBI and half a dozen organized crime and terrorism task forces descend on this place in the next twenty-four hours, and go after the bad guys instead of trying to lock us up for shooting a bunch of poor, oppressed brown guys with automatic weapons, then we’ll hold our peace and let the justice system do its thing. If not, then we’ll handle things the best way we know how.”

  He looked pained at that. The truth was, I think he knew that no such thing was going to happen. The Mountain States had been left nearly autonomous for several years now, especially as several of the major cities had descended into near-anarchy following the dollar’s collapse and the subsequent disintegration of the welfare system. Even assuming that none of the string-pullers Stateside were involved, Federal law enforcement just didn’t have the manpower to deal with everything on its plate.

  I could feel the rift opening as Brett composed himself. He was caught between a rock and a hard place. We were friends, and one of us had been murdered, another at death’s door. But his duty was to the law, not to his friends. Conversely, he didn’t have nearly the manpower or the firepower to keep us from doing much of anything, and he knew it. It had to stick in his craw.

  Unfortunately, as much as we really wanted to maintain the relationship we had built with local law enforcement, we knew enough about the reality of the situation to know that going through the system was no longer an option. The war had just come home, and we were going to have to fight it or lie down and die.

  I clapped him on the shoulder as I left the room. “Thanks for keeping an eye on Little Bob, Brett,” I said. “I promise we’ll do what we can to keep as much of the trouble to come as possible away from here.” He just nodded stiffly, probably thinking that it was a little too late for that.

  I felt my shoulders start to slump as I stepped out into the parking lot, where Bryan was waiting with my truck. Dammit. I had hoped that Brett would be on our side, and losing that support hurt on a personal level, not just because of the strategic pragmatism involved in befriending the department.

  That thought was all that the horror needed to start getting past my otherwise ironclad self-control that had kept me from being overwhelmed by what had happened. I was shaking a little, my eyes stinging, as I climbed behind the wheel. For a second, I just sat there, my hands on the wheel, staring at nothing. Bryan glanced at me once, then looked out the window, giving me some space, at least for a moment.

  Jim was dead. That cantankerous old bastard had become a fixture of life since before I’d taken over the team from Alek, several years before. He’d been an older, retired Special Forces NCO, who had joined up ostensibly because there weren’t any other jobs available for a guy who’d been in the gun club for twenty-two years, though I’d gotten to know him well enough to know that most of that claim was bluster. Jim could have done just about anything he’d put his mind to. He could even have been in Brett’s place, easily. He’d wanted to stay in the game, and he’d been damned good at it. He’d been a stolid, quiet professional, who’d had a way of tempering my own hot-headed violent streak without ever saying very much.

  And now he was gone, murdered in the night by a bunch of vicious little fuckstains for standing against some very, very bad people. I felt the familiar spark of rage start to glimmer through the roaring blackness of grief and despair, and fed it. It was the only way I knew how to cope, to keep my head above water.

  My phone buzzed in my pocket, yanking me out of my reverie. I hauled it out and stared at the screen for a moment before the number registered.

  I almost didn’t answer it. But I finally hit the “Accept” button and lifted it to my ear.

  “Yeah.”

  “Oh, thank God,” Mia said. “Are you all right?”

  Mia had been the Cicero Group intel specialist that Renton had sent down to support us in Mexico. She was a pro. She was also very pretty, knew it, and used it to her advantage at all times. We’d shared a weekend at a high-end hotel in Veracruz on surveillance. She’d done a good job of convincing everyone around that we were a couple, which had made it a little awkward for me and the rest of the team. I will admit, she made me a little nervous. I was never entirely sure what her angle was.

  “I am,” I replied after clearing my throat. “Though not everybody else is.” I paused a second. “Wait a minute. How do you know what happened?”

  “I don’t,” she replied. “Or, I didn’t until you just confirmed it. I just avoided getting snatched by three gangbangers in a van half an hour ago. I put two and two together.”

  “We got hit this morning,” I confirmed, somewhat back on solid ground. Hearing her voice and the note of stark relief in it when I’d answered the phone had thrown me a little. “Most of us are secure, but Jim’s dead and Little Bob’s critical.”

  “Oh, dammit,” she said. She paused for a moment. “I’m on my way to you. I’ve got some territory to cover, so it’s probably going to be a day or two, but I think we’ve got a better chance if we stay close.” I couldn’t object. “I’ll see you soon. And Jeff? Stay safe? Please?”

  “I will,” I replied, somewhat by rote. I had no intention of “safe” having much to do with our actions over the next days or weeks. “I might not be here by the time you get in, but Tom will know to expect you.”

  She didn’t reply right away. I could almost see the look on her face as she once again put two and two together. “Make sure you let him know where you’re going,” she said finally. “I’ll see you soon.” She hung up.

  I looked down at the phone and sighed. I was pretty sure that meant she intended to link up as soon as possible, and even lend a hand. Trouble was, I still didn’t know if she was being sincere, or still running whatever agenda the Network had laid out for her. We were all pretty sure she’d been put with us in Mexico as a watchdog, and we still couldn’t be sure that that role wasn’t continuing.

  I started the truck up and put it in gear. There
was a gangbanger back at the ranch who had some questions to answer.

  Chapter 3

  The wrecked, bullet-riddled cars had been dragged away from the gate by the time we got back. With the uproar in town, the sheriff’s department hadn’t showed up yet, though I was sure they were on their way. It was going to take them a while, though.

  I pulled the truck up in front of the porch and got out. Tom was waiting in the doorway.

  “Where’s shithead?” I asked. The fury was burning pretty hot by then; I’d been feeding the flames most of the way back from town. It might not have been the healthiest way of coping, but as long as it kept me from breaking down, I was going to stick with it. I had so damned much bottled up grief and fucked-up shit in my head by then that I didn’t dare open that floodgate. That way lay madness and fatal alcohol poisoning.

  Tom jerked a thumb toward the back. “In the barn.” I just nodded tightly and started around the side of the house. “Jeff,” he called. I stopped and turned back to look at him. “Try to leave him mostly intact,” he said. “We’re probably going to be making local law enforcement plenty uncomfortable in the near future as it is. Let’s not make matters any more tense than we have to.”

  I just nodded, keeping my teeth together. Tom and I had clashed in the past over similar admonishments. He’d done a good job running things back at home, but those of us out on the pointy end tended to bristle at “suggestions” about how we should run ops. I had to remind myself that Tom was right here with us on the chopping block, and that he hadn’t hesitated to grab his own rifle and join us at the gate.

  The barn was about a hundred yards behind the house. There were actually three of them; two hay barns and a horse barn. The hay barns had been converted into team rooms and temporary barracks. We’d considered keeping the horse barn as it was; there had been some talk about keeping a few mules and horses for training, in the event that we found ourselves in a situation like the SF guys in Afghanistan back in the early ‘00s. The idea had been scrapped once we’d found out how much it would have cost in time and money to keep the animals.

  So, the barn had been turned into a gym. Given that it was big enough that even we couldn’t fill the entire thing with weights and racks, about a quarter of it had been turned into storage and the other quarter into a dojo, with pads on the floor and walls and heavy bags hanging from the rafters.

  I headed for the storage area, where a sort of cubicle of lockers had been built. Inside that little cubicle, hidden from the rest of the barn, the captured gangbanger was sitting, zip-tied to a chair with a burlap sandbag over his head. Two shop lights were standing in the corners, aimed at him.

  His wounds had been hastily bandaged. He wasn’t at any risk of bleeding out, not yet. It also didn’t look like anyone had been in there since he’d been strapped to the chair. Tom had left him to stew and think about what was coming.

  Tom had a vicious streak of his own.

  I walked up to him and yanked the sandbag off his head. “Nap time’s over, fucker,” I snarled.

  He winced at the sudden brightness and squinted up at me. “Hey, what the fuck man?” he said, feebly jerking his hands against the zip ties. “You can’t do this. I got rights!”

  I laughed without humor. It was an ugly sound, even to my own ears. “Rights. Sure. Keep telling yourself that, asshole,” I said. I took a step in front of him, momentarily blocking the work light that had been shining in his eyes. I must have been little more than a looming silhouette, but this kid still didn’t understand just what kind of trouble he was in. He didn’t get it, not yet. “It’s only going to make this last longer.”

  “Man, fuck you, puto,” he said, trying to spit at me. He’d lost a good deal of blood, though, and he was dehydrated. He managed to almost reach me with a pathetic spray. I kept my face carefully impassive. “You can’t do shit to me.”

  I let him eyeball me for a moment, letting him start to bow up, get some of his confidence up. As long as he could stare me down without my reacting, the more he’d start to think he really was as tough as he wanted to be, the bullet wounds in his body notwithstanding.

  Then I hit him.

  It was a good punch, a hard right hook that took him right in the cheekbone and popped his head around so hard he might have gotten whiplash from it. I followed it up with a vicious left and then another right, then hooked an uppercut to his chin that snapped his head back hard enough that the chair tipped over and he landed heavily on his back on the dirt floor.

  I stepped over him, grabbed him by the hair, and hauled him upright again. Holding him up with my right, I punched him three times in the groin, my teeth gritted with the sheer, killing fury that was driving my fist into his body. Right at that moment, I didn’t give a fuck about information. I wanted to punish this son of a bitch, and I was relishing doing it with my bare hands.

  I let go of his hair and stepped back. He doubled over and retched violently, puking what little was left in his guts on his shoes. When he had nothing left, and was just dry heaving, I grabbed him by the hair again, twisted his head back, and pulled my folder out of my pocket. Snapping it open with a flick of my wrist, I held the point less than an inch from his eyeball.

  “Rights?” I gritted. “You’d have rights if the cops had you. You’d have rights if the Feds had you. But I’m not a cop, and I’m sure as hell not a Fed. I’m a fucking mercenary. And considering you fucks just murdered and mutilated a very good friend of mine, I’m off the clock. So, I don’t even have an employer to make the rules about what I do to you. Think that over very, very carefully before one more word comes out of your fucking sewer.”

  There was real fear in his eyes, though one was swelling shut where I’d hit him. He wasn’t looking at me, but going cross-eyed looking at the point of the knife that was poised to put one of his eyes out. He didn’t say anything.

  “I didn’t say you could take forever at it, cockbag,” I told him. “Either you start talking, or I start cutting pieces off you, starting with your eye.”

  I hadn’t meant to, but the knife blade must have moved fractionally closer to his cornea as I spoke, because he squeezed his eyes shut, as if his eyelids could block the razor-sharp steel.

  “I don’t know anything, man!” he all but screamed.

  “Bullshit,” I replied relentlessly. “Say goodbye to your fucking eyeball.”

  I am not by nature a sadistic individual. But right at that moment, it didn’t matter. Nothing did, only the hate roaring in my ears and turning my vision red, and the vision of Jim’s butchered corpse.

  The sudden acrid stink of piss filled the small space, competing with the stench of his vomit, even as he tried to squirm away from the threat of my knife. Between the zip ties and my iron grip in his hair, though, he couldn’t move. The point touched his eyelid.

  “Stop, stop!” he screamed. “Madre de Dios, stop!” He squeezed his eyelids tighter shut. Tears of terror leaked out. “I’ll tell you anything, man, anything! Just don’t cut me!”

  I eased back the knife ever so slightly, but tightened my grip on his hair. “Well, then,” I said, “start talking.”

  “What do you want to know?” he sobbed.

  “Everything,” I rasped. “Who sent you? Where are they? What was the job?”

  “I don’t know who they are, man.” I tightened my grip fractionally as a warning, and he tried to shake his head frantically. “I swear, man, I don’t know! They were Mexicans, that’s all I can tell you!” He paused a moment. “They were important; they must have been, if they could even get a meet with us, much less hire us. They might have been narcos, I don’t know.”

  “How many? Did they have bodyguards?”

  “Six, maybe? I don’t know.” He shrieked as I jerked his head back again. “Six! There were six of them, six of the important pendejos.”

  “How much security did they have?” I asked.

  “I didn’t count ‘em,” he said. Tears were still leaking from the corners
of his eyes. He was terrified, and the pain of the blows I’d given him had to really be setting in by then. “But yeah, yeah, there were guards!” I barely had to move even a little to elicit a response from him. Any shift in my stance or my grip was a threat.

  “Give me a ballpark figure,” I pressed.

  “I don’t know…thirty, forty?” He sobbed. “Please, man, I don’t know!”

  “What did they tell you?”

  “I just got what Miguel told us; I wasn’t in the meeting itself,” he said. He looked up at me through streaming eyes and saw me tilt my own head warningly. “They said that you guys had killed a bunch of their friends down in Mexico, and that we needed to send a message for them, you know? A message that it’s a bad idea to fuck with them. They didn’t have to tell us anything else, except where to find you.”

  I could believe that. Mara Salvatrucha had a well-earned reputation for brutality going back years. They used guns, but they also had a taste for using machetes. They would have taken any suggestions as an insult, and anyone dealing with MS-13 would be wise not to insult them.

  Of course, we’d killed quite a few of theirs in Arizona, Mexico, and Central America, too, though it was anyone’s guess if this cell had heard about it. MS-13 wasn’t exactly a hierarchical organization with a well-established intel apparatus. They were more of a franchise.

  They must have gotten paid a lot to venture this far north, though. I’d heard of some narco activity in Billings, but for the most part, the Mountain States weren’t a hotbed for cartels. Maybe because the local “habit” of choice was homemade meth, and there just wasn’t a large Hispanic population for the Mexican and Central American gangsters to blend in with.

  Which led me to my next, and most important, question. “Where?”

  He hesitated for the briefest moment before he sobbed, “They’re in Pueblo.” He had to have pretty well despaired by then. He had to know that if we let him go, he was a dead man. He probably figured that he was a dead man, anyway.