Duke City Hit (13 page)

Tina thanked Penny for the coffee refill, then watched as she crossed the kitchen to put the pot back. Penny seemed trim and shapely for her age, even in a fluffy bathrobe, but the lines were ruined by the pistol's bulge in her pocket.

The gun meant Penny was in charge here. She was a boss, accustomed to getting her way, and the gun backed that up.

“Must be tough,” Tina said, “being a woman in your field.”

Penny shrugged. “Gender doesn't have much to do with it. I grew up in the business. I've never really done anything else.”

Tina stirred sugar into her coffee, careful to keep her sleeve out of the way. The blue sweatshirt Vic had brought belonged to Ryan and it hung loose on her. She kept sniffing at it, hoping to get a whiff of him, but the shirt was freshly laundered and smelled of detergent.

“Do you have to deal with criminals yourself? Face-to-face?”

“Sometimes.”

“You're not afraid of them?”

“Honey, I'm the only reason those guys get out of jail. I'm holding their balls in my hands. They don't want to do anything to make me squeeze.”

Tina felt her cheeks go warm.

“Because I was wondering,” she sputtered, “if any of those criminals could be the ones who grabbed Ryan.”

“Why on earth would you think that?”

“It must have something to do with Vic, right? People don't get snatched out of motel rooms for no reason. Only after Ryan met Vic—and you—did something bad happen.”

Penny dumped her coffee in the sink and poured herself a fresh cup. Activities that conveniently kept her back turned toward Tina.

“I want to know what Ryan's tangled up in,” Tina said. “I want to know if there's some way I can help.”

“Vic said the best thing you can do for now is stick close to me. If he gets any news, he'll let us know.”

“But until then, you can't even guess?”

“Not a clue.”

Tina couldn't keep the bitterness out of her voice as she said, “I should've called the police.”

“We'll call 'em when the time is right. Give Vic a couple more hours. If it's possible to get Ryan out of this mess, he's the one to figure it out.”

“He told me he was a paper-pusher.”

Penny hesitated, as if deciding how much to say. “He mostly works at a desk now. But twenty years ago, he was a stud. Put him on a skip, and he wouldn't come back until the guy was in custody.”

“He told us some of the stories,” Tina said. “Getting stabbed in the back and all that. But that was years ago.”

“Believe me, Vic's still very resourceful.”

“But he's only one man,” Tina said. “The police have eyes everywhere. Maybe they're looking at Ryan right now, and they don't even know he's missing.”

“Highly unlikely.”

“Maybe we should call the hospitals.”

“Take it easy, Tina. Don't assume the worst. This may be a big misunderst
anding. Vic will sort it out, then we'll decide what to do.”

Tina didn't argue. But she didn't share Penny's trust in Vic.

Joaquin Zamora shifted in his bed, stretching his muscles, the heavy covers pulled up to his chin. It was cold in the room, but Joaquin was comfortable and warm. He'd slept well, alone in bed for a change, no Rosa snoring beside him. His wife was a beautiful woman, but she snored like a grizzly bear. Her sinuses were fucked up. Too many years of doing blow.

Not Joaquin. Even back in the party days, before the kids were born, Joaquin stayed away from the product. Cocaine makes people paranoid. He couldn't have that; he had too many real enemies to fear. Ninety percent of his job was being able to judge people, knowing who to trust. He'd prospered in a dangerous business by staying sharp and cautious.

Joaquin was naked under the covers and his hand strayed to his crotch, fondling his cock, cupping his balls. Part of the morning regimen. Greeting his oldest friends.

When he awoke next to his wife, he'd often take these morning moments to give her a poke, Rosa obligingly backing up to him, half-asleep, moaning while he quickly got off. Always a nice way to start the day. Important to keep relaxed and focused. Men who got distracted by their dicks ended up dead.

Today, there wasn't a woman for miles. Just Joaquin and a half-dozen of his men, holed up together in this lodge, which was fully stocked with whiskey and steaks and cigars and beer. He could hear the big refrigerator humming in the kitchen, and the hardwood floor creaking as the men started to move around. Before long, the scent of coffee drifted under the bedroom door.

Still Joaquin waited under the warm covers. Give the men time to get a fire roaring in the fireplace, then he'd throw on some clothes and go to the kitchen. One of his lieutenants, Chuy, had been a short-order cook in his youth. Joaquin always looked forward to the pancake breakfasts the big man whipped up on these hunting excursions.

As dawn chased the shadows from the bedroom, Joaquin could make out the trophy on the far wall, an eight-point buck he'd bagged three years before. The taxidermist had mounted the head so the deer was looking off to the left, as if it had heard a twig snap over there. That thought always made Joaquin smile. Last sound that deer heard hadn't been a fucking twig. It had been the ripping sound of an automatic rifle, Joaquin putting ten bullets in the buck before it could fall to the leaf-strewn ground. The bullets faster than a deer, faster than
gravity
.

Joaquin wanted to get another buck today. He'd been unlucky during the autumn hunting season, and this trip would be his last chance of the year. He hoped the weather cooperated. The forecast hadn't looked good the night before.

If the weatherman was correct, Joaquin and his men could get snowed in at the lodge, even though they had two four-wheel-drive vehicles parked out back. Snow would ruin the hunting, but it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. They could stay indoors by the fire, drinking and playing poker, while they waited it out. Joaquin could use the break. He'd been under a lot of strain lately.

All businesses have their stresses, but not many jobs include the possibility of instant death on a day-to-day basis. Joaquin's enemies kept sending people to test him. Watchfulness wears on a man.

Someone erupted into laughter in the next room. The sound made Joaquin smile. There promised to be lots of laughs over the next few days, no matter what the weather brought.

Bracing for the chill, he threw back the covers and leapt out of bed. He pulled on the jeans he'd left heaped in a chair. Shivering, he yanked a sweatshirt over his head, then stepped into his slippers.

Joaquin went to the window and looked out at the river that tumbled through the narrow canyon. Clouds were pushing into the area, but he could still see a slice of blue sky.

Today, he thought, is going to be a good day.

If you spent a million bucks to build a log cabin, Vic thought, you'd end up with Joaquin Zamora's hunting lodge: a rambling firetrap made of varnished logs and cedar shingles, with a covered porch facing the sunrise. Smoke curled from a chimney crafted of rounded stones, no doubt taken from the Rio Chama.

The lodge sat next to the rippling river on the one patch of flat ground at the bottom of the steep-sided canyon. Vic squatted behind a juniper on the eastern slope, across the river from the lodge, watching it through the scope of his rifle.

A couple of hunters had stepped outside earlier; one took a steaming piss off the porch. They were back inside now, staying out of the bitter cold. Vic was dressed as warmly as possible, with only his face exposed to the icy wind, but he still shivered inside his coat. He couldn't stay out here for hours, waiting for Zamora to show himself. The storm clouds were closer now, rolling over the mountaintops, pregnant with snow.

He took his face away from the scope for a minute, resting his eyes. Morning light crept down the facing slope. As the sunlight hit the lodge, the honey-colored logs seemed to glow.

Movement on the porch. He put his eye to the scope, and saw three men amble outside. All three were Hispanic, with goatees and ducktails and black sunglasses. They wore bulky camouflage coats and insulated pants and lace-up boots that clumped on the wooden porch. Even with the scope, it was hard to tell one man from the other.

The one in the middle held a steaming white mug. Vic briefly craved coffee, but put it out of his mind as he shifted from one face to the other. The men were whewing and laughing about the cold, their breaths clouding the air around their heads. The one with the coffee took off his sunglasses and wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist. In the seconds before the shades were back in place, Vic got a good look at his squinty eyes and high cheekbones. Definitely Zamora.

Vic peeled the glove off his shooting hand. The rifle was freezing, the trigger an icicle. He centered the crosshairs on Zamora's chest. Took a breath and let it out slowly.

He squeezed the trigger, and his view through the scope blurred.

As the crack of the rifle shot echoed around the canyon, Vic looked up from the scope and saw a man fall. It wasn't Zamora. One of the others had stepped in front of him just as Vic fired.

He rammed another round into the chamber, but it was too late. Zamora plunged into the lodge, the heavy door slamming behind him.

The other man, the beefiest of the three, pulled a pistol from his waistband and pointed it around, trying to see where the shot had come from. Vic didn't worry about him. The sun was in his eyes, and Vic was out of pistol range anyway. Nobody would try to splash across that frigid river to get closer.

He swept the rifle back and forth, looking through the scope, hoping against hope that Zamora would pop up somewhere, trying to make a break for it.

The front door opened, and two other hunters came out onto the porch. Neither was Zamora. Both carried AR-15 rifles. They didn't bother to battle the sun's glare as they tried to aim. They blindly pulled the triggers, the rifles chattering as bullets raked the hillside, kicking up stones and dirt.

Vic shot one gunman between the eyes. He fell over backward, still holding the trigger, and bullets ripped through the shingles above the porch, spraying splinters into the air. The other rifleman stopped to reload, which gave Vic a second to work the bolt. The crosshairs settled on the man's chest just as he brought up his freshly loaded rifle to spray more lead over the hillside. He never got the chance.

The one with the pistol shouted and hammered against the wooden door, but the men inside wouldn't open up for him. Vic focused on that door, hoping Zamora might peek out, but he knew it was a lost cause.

Bad luck. No other way to look at it. For that bodyguard to step in front of Zamora at just the right moment to catch the bullet? Odds were a million to one.

An engine roared to life on the far side of the lodge, where a long gravel driveway stretched away to meet the highway in the distance. Vic kept watching, waiting for the vehicle to appear.

Gunshots popped to his right, and he lifted his eye from the scope to see a man coming around the end of the lodge. This guy wasn't spraying randomly. He had a semiauto rifle up to his shoulder, sighting along the barrel, aiming at Vic.

Dirt and weeds kicked up a few feet short of Vic's position. He pointed his rifle at the gunman and fired without using the scope, mostly trying to scare him into hiding so he could watch for the escape car. The bullet hit the man in the knee and he went down, screaming.

A black four-door Jeep appeared on the far side of the lodge, racing away on the dusty driveway, quickly out of range.

The wounded man wailed in Spanish, calling on God to help him. Vic was tempted to shoot him again to stop the noise, but there was no point in it. No point in staying here any longer, either.

Zamora was gone. Vic had failed. And Ryan was as good as dead.

Penny was shocked by Vic's voice over the crackly telephone connection. He sounded croaky, as if holding back a sob. She'd known Vic since she was a child and she couldn't imagine him shedding tears. But that's how hard he'd fallen for Ryan and fatherhood.

“Slow down, Vic. I'm not following you.”

“One of Zamora's bodyguards stepped in front of him just as I fired. I took him out, along with a few others, but Zamora got away.”

“Shit.”

“They got on the highway going toward Albuquerque. I'm driving now, too, but they've got a big head start. And it's starting to snow.”

“Oh, Vic.”

“I think I can outrun the worst of the storm, but it won't even slow them down. They've got four-wheel drive.”

“Be careful. You can't do Ryan any good if you drive off a mountainside.”

Vic coughed. “I had my chance, and I blew it. If any harm comes to that kid, I'll never forgive myself.”

“There's still time.” She glanced at the kitchen clock. “We've got nineteen hours until the deadline. You can get back to Albuquerque and find Zamora.”

“If he's even going to Albuquerque. He could pull off on some side road, go visit a friend, whatever, and I'd never find him in time.”

“No,” she said. “He'll run home like a rat goes to his hole. That mansion in the North Valley is an armed fortress surrounded by thorns. He'll think he's safe there.”

“He could be right. If he's got enough men and guns, there's no way I can get to him.”

“You always find a way, Vic.”

“Sure. If I can set up, watch the target, wait for an opening. But we don't have that kind of time.”

“You'll think of something.”

“My mind's a blank, Penny. I'm focused on driving through this snowstorm. If I let the thoughts in, I start seeing Ryan. All the different ways he could be hurt, maybe die. And there's not a damned thing I can do about it.”

“Come on, Vic. You've still got time to find Zamora.”

Penny glanced over her shoulder. Tina could emerge from the bathroom at any moment. She didn't want her to hear Zamora's name.

“I'll do the best I can on these slick roads,” Vic said. “See you in three hours or so.”

“Anything I can do to help you get ready?”

“Get on Google Earth and find aerial photos of Zamora's house. Maybe I can see a way in.”

“Will do. Anything else?”

“Just take care of Tina. I'll see you soon.”

Penny dropped the phone into her robe pocket. The other pocket was weighed down by the gun Vic had left with her. She padded along the hall to the bathroom and listened at the door.

Water running. Tina sniffing back tears.

She probably hadn't heard a thing.