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  And I was tempted. Between Jim lying in the parking lot, naked and dismembered, and Little Bob all shot up in the hospital, I wanted to ram my knife to the hilt in his eye socket and wrench it around until he stopped squirming.

  But then, as I looked down at him, his trousers soaked in urine, blood, and puke, tears mingling with the blood and bruises on his face, one eye swelling shut, something changed. I didn’t feel sorry for him, not quite. He was still a scumbag and a murderer, who had been party to the sadistic murder of one of my best friends. But at the same time, he was a sniveling, terrified kid, zip-tied to a chair and utterly helpless.

  And I’d damned near murdered him myself out of rage. I almost felt sick. I took a step back, folded my knife, stuffed it in my pocket, then turned on my heel and left him there, his chin on his chest.

  I stepped out of the barn and looked at the sky, taking a deep, shuddering breath. I liked to think that I’d only ever killed people who were trying to kill me, though that wasn’t actually true. That Qods Force Colonel in Kurdistan suddenly nagged at me. I’d shot him in the back of the head after Haas had been done with him, and buried him in a shallow grave.

  Now, having come so close to killing another captive in cold blood, I suddenly realized how much time and energy I’d spent since either trying to justify that killing or just to forget it.

  “Well, is he still alive?” Tom asked, forcing me to compose myself and shelve my reverie for another time. He was smoking what had to be his tenth cigarette of the day, at least.

  “He’s still alive,” I replied tiredly. “I didn’t even carve anything off him. So, you can get off my ass about it.”

  He didn’t say anything, but just nodded and took a deep drag on the cancer stick. I got the sudden impression that he was giving me a moment. “Did he talk?”

  “Yeah.” I turned back toward the house. “It sounds like some of the cartels didn’t like our interference down south. They sent some reps north to hire these assholes to deal with us. Shithead back there tells me that they met in Pueblo.”

  “It’s certainly enough of a shithole for a bunch of cartel types to blend in there,” Tom mused as we walked back toward the house. “Are you sure he was telling the truth, or telling you what he thought you wanted to hear?”

  The truth is that information extracted under duress is always somewhat suspect. I was fairly sure the kid had spilled his guts; he wasn’t trained, he wasn’t nearly as hard as he thought he was, and I’d sufficiently terrified him that unless he was a damned good actor, he hadn’t had the time or the mental acuity to just make stuff up, especially after I’d rattled his brains with those punches. But confirmation of the truth of anything extracted during any interrogation took time, time that we really didn’t have.

  “He was convincing enough,” I said, after a moment’s consideration. “That’s no steely-eyed operative in there. That’s a scared, wounded kid who thought he was a lot tougher than he is. I’m sure he didn’t tell me everything, but he wasn’t ready to get the hell beat out of him when he started bowing up. I think I shocked him hard enough that he wasn’t holding anything back. Might have forgotten a few things, but not deliberately holding it back.”

  “Hmm.” He glanced sideways at me, and while I didn’t meet his eyes, I could still see the wheels turning. I was calm now, at least outwardly, but Tom had seen me walk back there brimming with fury. I was waiting for him to say something about whether or not I was justifying my own rage-induced violence as some kind of calculated interrogation technique, which it wasn’t. But he didn’t. Maybe he bought my façade. Maybe he knew that he didn’t have to say anything.

  “Pueblo, then,” he said, dropping the burnt-out cigarette to the dirt and grinding it out with his boot. “Nothing more specific than that?”

  “No, I didn’t get the impression that he was much more than outer cordon security for the meet that set up the hit,” I answered. “We still need to see if we can get some descriptions, but I don’t think he knows much. He just knows they were Mexicans, and they had security.”

  “We’ll get Raoul on him, but we aren’t going to have much time. We’re going to have to turn this guy over to the sheriff’s department once they get here.”

  I nodded, grimacing. “And they’re not too far behind us, either.” I was momentarily tempted to say fuck it, and hide the kid from Brett until we’d wrung him dry. But that would ultimately mean we’d have to dispose of him later, and after what I’d just almost done, I wasn’t ready to do that again. And if Brett found out we were withholding a prisoner from him, and were interrogating him, there’d be hell to pay.

  “I hope you didn’t mark him up too much,” Tom murmured quietly. Anyone else, I would have figured they were being a bit squeamish, but with Tom, I knew that he was thinking about long-term consequences for the company. He was a ruthless, cold-hearted motherfucker when it came to looking after the company’s interests, and if bad guys got hurt, as long as it didn’t adversely affect the company, he generally didn’t give a shit. But this was a dicey situation, to put it mildly.

  “He’s hurting,” I admitted, “aside from the holes we already shot in him. And I’m sure he’ll tell Brett and the rest that I beat him up. I’ll fess up to it. Call it heat of the moment.”

  “I’d rather you weren’t around,” Tom answered. “Brett can’t make things awkward about hauling you in for assault and battery if you’re not here.”

  “Brett’s already nervous about what we’re going to do,” I told him. “If I don’t own up to shitstain’s bruises, it’s going to further damage what little relationship we’ve got left with him. He’s already afraid we’re going to go behind his back and start killing people.” Which was precisely what we were going to do; this was out of Brett’s league. “Besides, I wouldn’t worry too much about Brett trying to throw me in jail. You haven’t seen Jim’s remains, yet. I have, and so has Brett. I think he’d be more suspicious if I hadn’t worked the kid over.”

  “I hope you’re right,” Tom said, as we stepped up onto the porch. “I don’t want to have to bail you out and then have you break bail to go narco hunting a state and a half away.”

  Even as he was speaking, two sheriff’s department cars pulled up to the gate, one of them stopping next to the shot-up cars, the other easing through the gate to approach the house.

  “Well, I guess we’re about to find out, aren’t we?” I said.

  I was true to my word, and took Brett to see the captured gangbanger myself. The kid was conscious when we walked into the barn, though one eye had swollen shut. He looked like he’d been through the meat grinder.

  As I had rather expected, when he saw the badge, he first froze, then immediately started babbling. “That guy tortured me!” he yelled thickly.

  “Shut the hell up,” Brett cut him off before he could really get going. “I saw what you and your buddies did in town. You’re in a lot more trouble for that than he will be for hitting you a couple times.” He stepped forward, pulling his handcuffs off his belt. “You got something to cut these zip ties?” he asked me.

  Without a word, I stepped forward and pulled my knife out. The gangbanger flinched a little as I did, and Brett’s eyes flickered. He noticed. But he didn’t say anything as I cut the captive free.

  If the kid had had any ideas about making a run for it, they were quickly dashed, as Brett had ahold of one of his arms as soon as I cut it free, and slapped the handcuffs on quickly, reciting the kid’s Miranda rights in a dead, robotic tone that suggested that his heart really wasn’t in it.

  He hauled the gangbanger out of the barn to the car, and stuffed him into the back seat. The kid seemed to have decided that omerta was the better part of valor under the circumstances, though I had no doubt that as soon as he got in front of a lawyer, he’d be telling a hugely embellished version of the beating I’d given him. It wouldn’t be entirely inaccurate. It also probably wouldn’t get him off, though it might get me in trouble. He couldn’t cl
aim police brutality, since I was a private citizen, but wrongful imprisonment and assault and battery were possible.

  With the prisoner safely in the car, Brett turned and looked me in the eye. “You should have told me you had a live one when we were in town,” he said.

  I just shrugged. I couldn’t think of anything in particular to say that would reassure him that I hadn’t been holding a prisoner illegally for the sake of interrogating him using violence and the threat of worse violence. In large part, because if I tried to say that, it would be a bald-faced lie.

  He sighed. “Given everything else, I think I can arrange for no charges to be pressed, even if this little turd makes a big deal out of it. I’m sure Tom knows some good lawyers, too, in case it does become a problem. It should be an open and shut case of self-defense, and anything that might or might not have happened after can be fairly easily put down to severe emotional distress. I can’t say I wouldn’t have worked him over even worse, after seeing what they did to Jim.”

  “You probably shouldn’t be saying stuff like that,” I pointed out. “Prejudicial, or some such.”

  He laughed hollowly. “I won’t tell anybody if you don’t,” he said. He looked down at the dirt for a moment. “I probably should tell you not to leave town for a while, in case we need you to come in, but I’d probably be wasting my breath, wouldn’t I?”

  I nodded. “We’ve got some work to do. And the less you know about it, the better.”

  He sighed again, shaking his head, as he looked back at the car and the gangbanger in the back. “Just promise me one thing,” he said. “If whatever you’re going to do is likely to lead to more stacks of dead bodies in my county, you’ll let me know.”

  “I’ll do the best I can,” I told him. “Although—and I never said this—if we play our cards right, this should be taken care of far away from your jurisdiction.”

  He gave me a bit of a rueful look. “I’ll believe that when I see it,” he said, as he went to get back in the car. “After all, this happened here. I’m not convinced this little dustup is all over.”

  I couldn’t disagree with him, either.

  The deputies stayed on-site for hours, carefully documenting everything, even the skid marks from where we’d moved the shattered car away from the gate so that we could get out. Every piece of brass, every bloodstain, every impression of a body, every piece of bloodied, shattered glass was carefully marked and photographed. Each of the gunfighters on the gate was interviewed, though their statements were as bare-bones as possible, and the self-defense aspect of shooting the wounded gangsters who had tried to point weapons at us was always stressed. After seeing the spectacle of Jim’s mutilated body, I didn’t think any of the deputies were terribly interested in finding reasons to go after any of us. It was still a delicate balancing act.

  No sooner were the sheriff’s department vehicles out of sight down the road than my remaining team and I were packing to head to Colorado. If they thought we’d hurt them in Mexico, they hadn’t seen anything yet.

  Chapter 4

  “Damn, these guys ain’t even trying to blend in, are they?” Jack muttered.

  “No, they aren’t,” I replied from the back of the van, where I was already snapping pictures. We’d done a few recon passes just by driving through the neighborhood, with the passenger looking like he was texting while he took pictures with his phone, but the bigger Nikon provided better quality, and the van meant that we could get better pictures in general. Trying to be discreet with the phone usually meant that the angles were poor. Sitting in the back seat of the panel van, I had a lot more freedom of movement.

  Right at the moment, my viewfinder was filled with a relatively fit young man with a pencil mustache and immaculately gelled hair, wearing shiny pants, an equally shiny black shirt open nearly to his sternum, and a short, white jacket. A thick gold chain around his neck and mirrored aviator sunglasses completed the image. I couldn’t see from our vantage point, but I was sure there was a pistol in his waistband. The handful of other young men around him weren’t as fancily dressed, though they were still wearing that sort of northern Mexican, garish, semi-formal attire that, to someone looking closely, screamed “sicario.” These guys weren’t the baggy-clothed local hoods, any more than the other groups we’d picked out over the last few days.

  We’d been in Pueblo for a week. It had been a week of long days, longer nights, and not much sleep.

  We’d had very little to go on, initially. I knew a few guys who had done some work down around Pueblo in the past, and they’d offered a little bit of general atmospheric information, the most useful being the fact that the gangs were mostly centered on the East Side. They hadn’t been kidding; it hadn’t taken long to see that the East Side was essentially a no-go zone for anyone who wanted to avoid trouble. Even the local cops steered clear.

  As we had cautiously ventured into the East Side, generally either driving through in the beater vehicles we’d bought with cash up in Wyoming, or shuffling through on foot, disguised as one of the numerous derelicts haunting the town’s street corners, we’d started to build a picture. It was, necessarily, incomplete. There’s only so much you can put together by observation over the course of only a week. Really getting down into the nitty-gritty of an area’s human terrain takes months. We didn’t figure we had months.

  Every city has gangs. They’re part of the wildlife of any urban area, regardless of ethnic makeup. Even the Middle East has gangs, though with the way that part of the world has been going for the last few decades, it’s often hard to pick them out from the Islamist insurgents—often because they’re the same people.

  Different cities, of course, depending on local culture and law enforcement, have differing levels of gang problems. Pueblo had a bad one. There were dozens of local gangs, apparently into all sorts of narco trafficking, extortion, car theft, or just plain young, belligerent assholes being violent for the sake of being violent.

  But the landscape had changed recently. The out-of-towners, who, even those less flashy than White Jacket out there, stood out if you were paying attention, were only part of the equation.

  It was becoming harder, at least in the States, to pick out who was Mara Salvatrucha. The leadership network of MS-13 had, in recent years, started to urge their cells to downplay the extensive tattooing and distinctive clothing—usually with the number “13” plastered all over it—in favor of a lower profile. It was a matter of practicality and an expanding capability. Mara Salvatrucha wasn’t just a gang. It was an international criminal empire, though more of a cellular, corporate one than a hierarchical one. There was still plenty of room for violence and intimidation, but they were finding that the violence was, if anything, more effective when the victims couldn’t see it coming from a mile away.

  There were still indicators, though. And if we were reading them right, MS-13 was taking over Pueblo. Big time.

  They were everywhere, and we had observed numerous examples of local gangs taking their orders and offering a cut of their take to the MS-13 guys. It was subtle enough to probably be invisible to anyone who wasn’t looking—and a lot of the locals didn’t want to look—but after a while you could pick out the tax collectors and enforcers making their rounds. Sometimes there was some posturing, but it was usually violently quashed by the MS-13 enforcers. There had been five shootings and six stabbings that we knew of within a half-mile radius of where Jack and I were presently parked, just in the last few days.

  But if MS-13 was enforcing its rule in Pueblo, even they appeared to defer to the outsiders. We didn’t know exactly which cartels were represented, though I had a feeling that White Jacket was tied in with Guzman-Loera. He had that northern Mexico hilljack flashiness about him. The Sinaloans had been poor Mexican rednecks until they had gotten filthy rich off a combination of narcotics, extortion, and bloody violence, and it still showed.

  White Jacket and his entourage piled into a shiny, gold-chased Hummer and the equally garish
Escalade parked beside it. They pulled out of the driveway and headed down the street. Jack didn’t turn around, but asked, “Do you want to follow ‘em?”

  I scanned the house that they’d come out of. A one-story, orange stucco job with an open porch and a relatively large yard, it looked no different from any of a dozen residential homes. But there were faces in the windows, and though they were too far away and it was too dark inside to tell, I was sure that there were guns there, too.

  “Nah,” I answered. “I think we’ve got our target house. This wasn’t just a meet; this is their safehouse. We’ll want to confirm that White Jacket and his buddies are on-site when we hit it, but if not, we can move on to another target. It’s not like we’ve got a shortage.”

  Jack snorted. “True enough.” Jack was relatively new to the team; he’d joined up just before Mexico. The sandy-haired former Ranger and SF Weapons Sergeant didn’t talk all that much, and when he did, he tended to be rather acerbic. He was plenty competent, if a bit of a belligerent son of a bitch.

  “I’m calling everybody in,” I said. “Time to get this show on the road.” Putting the camera down, I pulled out my phone, a burner pre-paid job, and banged out a quick mass-text. Salt Creek House. 2300. Everyone.

  Jack just sat there behind the wheel, leaning back so that he wasn’t that visible, shaded by the sun visor in the windshield. We wouldn’t move for a while; if we drove away too close to White Jacket, it might raise suspicions. We didn’t want our targets to be suspicious. We wanted them fat and happy, ready for the slaughter.

  I took a few more snapshots, then pulled out my notebook and got back to planning. The book was already crammed with notes, sketches, and checklists. I kept my eyes roving outside the van’s heavily tinted windows, but my focus was on what was to come.