Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (10 page)

The rookie and the corporal were exchanging glances. They’d cooked something up for sure. Hell, I’d given them enough time to serve a three-course meal. I needed to re-establish control.

KER-BLAM!

I fired the Sig out through the window. The Dodge swerved in the dirt, clipped a bank.

“Shit! Hey! Whadaya doin’, for Chrissakes!” yelled the corporal.

“We’re nearly at the place where you’re gonna drop me off. I just want there to be no doubt in your minds that the weapon I’ve got trained on my hostage back here is the real deal. I see your hands move off the wheel, or your partner’s leave the dash, and the next shot will be tickling some ribs. Maybe yours.”

“Okay! Okay! We’re just driving!” the corporal yelled. “We weren’t gonna try and jump you or nothin’.”

Not anymore they weren’t. Hands were back where I wanted them, where I could see them.

“We’re getting close. Veer off to the left.”

The Dodge bumped over the rough dirt road, taking the fork, the corporal wrestling with the wheel, the rookie bracing himself against the dash. Ahead, suddenly, was the barrier fence. But the hole cut out of the mesh … Where was it?

“Why are we here?” the corporal wanted to know, looking left and right. “What are you looking for?”

“Put your headlights on the fence,” I told him.

He brought the vehicle around. The high beam picked out a section of mesh that was black instead of the usual all-over rust red.

Shit, yesterday’s breach had been efficiently welded back in place.

“Someone seal up your escape hole, loser?” ventured the corporal. “Why don’t you just hand over the gun and give yourself up now, and I promise you I won’t stomp all over your head when you’re in my holding cell.”

“Very kind of you,” I said. “But some idiot judge is gonna give me a stainless-steel ride to hell for sure. Why don’t I just kill you all now, leave your bodies here for the coyotes, take the car and run? Dead men ain’t gonna testify, yo.” Channeling gangster chic, I was almost enjoying myself.

“Th … there’s a gap in the fence,” said the rookie, swallowing loudly.

“Shut the fuck up, Roy,” the corporal told him.

“You were saying, Roy. Something about a gap in the fence?” I said, nice and pleasant.

Silence.

“Roy?” I cocked the Sig’s hammer – there’s no mistaking that sound.

“Ten miles down the road, further east,” Roy blurted. “The fence just comes to an end. No guards, nothing. You just walk around the end of it and you’re in Mexico.”

“Roy!” the corporal snapped.

“Do tell. How big’s the gap?” I found it hard to believe. What was the point of having a fence at all if there were gaps in it?

“’Bout fourteen miles long?”

“What?”

“Yeah. Friend o’ my pappy has a ranch on the border there. Sits on his porch with a cold beer and waits. He got the southern property line bordering Mexico rigged with seismic and motion sensors so he can detect the couriers coming across at night with backpacks full of cocaine and whatever else.”

“What’s he waiting for?”

“A clean shot. Um, I forgot to mention he sits there with an old M1 Garand equipped with a night scope.”

“I said
shut the fuck up
!”

Around twenty minutes later, by my reckoning we had to be almost there. “How much farther?” There were almost no streetlights out here where the cotton fields bordered the roadway on local Route 20. And pretty much the only traffic was the passing of Border Patrol vehicles every fifteen minutes or so. A sign announcing the town of Fort Hancock slid by. From what I could see, that’s all the town consisted of – a sign.

“There’s a track coming up on the right soon that’ll take us across the irrigation channels,” said Roy the Rookie.

“Y’know, all this accommodating you’re doing,” the corporal told the kid, “it might be considered aiding and abetting.”

“Actually,” I countered, “by being cooperative while I hold a loaded gun to the head of this extremely average man I have here in the back seat, Roy’s just guaranteeing that I let y’all live. So Roy, no doubt there’ll be some inquiry about all this. You just make sure you tell ’em how threatening I was and you’ll be okay.”

“Yessir.”

The corporal grunted.

“We’re close, now,” said Roy. “Slow down … That’s it there.” He pointed and the corporal eased on the brakes and turned off the main road.

We drove along the narrow unsealed track crowning the irrigation canals. We cut ninety degrees left and right half a dozen times before coming out onto a broader track that ran along the bank of a dry sandy canal.

“Where does the fence end?” I asked.

“Just coming up on it. Mexico starts the other side of the Rio Grande out the window there.” He nodded to his right at a dry, sandy depression.

“
That’s
the Rio Grande?” I said.

“Yessir.”

“What happened to all the water?”

“Cotton’s thirsty.”

On the far side of the riverbed, on the Mexican side, lay a network of irrigation channels and, around half a mile beyond it, a large farmhouse commanding several fallow fields, its old whitewashed walls supporting what appeared to be a thatch roof. Nothing moved that I could see.

“Looks peaceful.”

“That’s because the Sinaloa Cartel has killed all the law enforcement and murdered or run off all the farmers so that they can occupy the farmhouses and use them as staging posts for the drug couriers,” the corporal said. “If they catch you, as I’m sure they will, they’ll laugh while they rip your arms and legs clean off your torso, and then they’ll leave all your bits and pieces scattered on the freeway for the crows and vultures to pick over.”

“So what you’re saying is that my only option is to turn myself in to you before this goes any further.”

“I’m glad you’re comin’ round to my way of thinking,” said the corporal. “No one’s been hurt. You’ve been nice and reasonable. You got no alternative from where I sit.”

“And you’ve got a severe case of goldfish brain. You seem to have forgotten about all those deputies I gunned down at Horizon.”

“You okay back there, sir?” the corporal enquired of Chalmers, changing tack.

“He’s still breathing, aren’t you?” I prodded Chalmers in the ribs with the Sig maybe a little harder than I needed to.

Chalmers bared his teeth and snapped, “You’ll get yours, asshole. I’m just praying I get to see it.”

“Okay,” said Roy. “This is it.”

I glanced out the windshield and saw the end of the fence. The rookie was right. No guards, no razor wire, no lights. It just … ended. I recalled it looking like a freight train. Edge on, it seemed almost flimsy. A single, hopeful camera sat perched on top of the mesh aimed at the fourteen-mile gap that yawned beyond, which was almost funny. Almost.

“Pull up on our side of the fence,” I said. “Keep those hands where I can see ’em. You too, Roy.” I reached out and had the door unlatched before the Charger had come to a halt. I backed out of the vehicle and kept the weapon trained on Chalmers. “Out of the car,” I told the officers, “or the guy in the ten-dollar suit gets it.”

“We’re gonna hunt you down,” the corporal promised me.

“What? Over there?” I asked him, gesturing south. “Sure you are. Now get out.” I opened his door. The corporal stumbled onto the dirt and placed his hands behind his head, his face white with rage. “Walk where I can see you, past the front of the car, and keep walking till I tell you to stop.” I kept one eye on the rookie. His hands were still welded to the dash. “Your turn next, Roy. You know the drill.”

“You’re not going to kill us, are you?” he asked.

“You, no.” I nodded at Chalmers. “Him, maybe.”

The officer carefully took his hands off the dash like it might suddenly all fly apart beneath them, opened his door and got out.

“Follow your supervisor,” I said. “Hands behind your head.”

When he started to walk, I breathed easier. The setting sun had become a red-hot coal plucked from a forge, smoldering moodily on the horizon. The night to come would be cool.

“Go join your friends,” I instructed Chalmers.

“There’ll be payback for this, Cooper,” he hissed as he shuffled out of the back seat on his butt bones.

“You’re taking this way too personal,” I said as I helped him to his feet. He shrugged his elbow out of my grasp. “That’s far enough!” I called out to the officers and then leaned in and removed the Charger’s ignition keys. Ten yards away the officers stopped and turned, hands still behind their heads.

“You really murder all those people?” Roy called out as I approached. It was my first opportunity to get a good look at him, the corporal, too. He was a kid of no more than nineteen with glasses, acne and teeth that reminded me of a beaver’s.

“That’s what they say,” I replied. I walked up to him, removed the cuffs from his belt, then took the corporal’s, a jowly man in his mid-fifties with a gut and a flat-top haircut.

“You’re gonna regret this, son,” he said.

“Maybe,” I said. “Gimme the keys.”

“In this pocket,” the corporal said, motioning with his chin to the pocket on his shirt.

I reached in and took them. I looked at the kid. “Yours?”

“Same, same,” he replied.

With their keys in my possession, I removed Arlen’s cuffs from Chalmers’ wrists, then handed the officers’ cuffs back to them.

“Now let’s put these on and make a nice daisy chain, shall we?”

I grinned at Chalmers. He ground his teeth back at me.

No one moved so I leveled the Sig at the spook, which won some compliance. “What’s your eyesight like?” I asked Roy.

“Long sight’s okay,” he answered, “now I got these here glasses.”

“Good.” I lobbed the Dodge’s ignition keys and the cuff keys twenty or so yards down range and watched them kick up a puff of dust beside a dry bush. “You got that?” I asked him.

“Think so,” he replied.

“Oh yeah, one last thing … Drop your pants. All of you.” Chalmers’ lips were as narrow as his eyes when I looked at him and said, “
This
is the personal bit.”

Okay, so it wasn’t purely about embarrassing Chalmers, though how was I to know the guy favored pink undershorts with red rockets on them? The main reason for the parting request was that the officers’ belts bristled with various items including cans of pepper spray and Tasers. I wanted those things beyond easy reach, and around their ankles seemed easiest.

I jogged back to the cruiser as the three of them cuffed together struggled to work collaboratively to dress themselves. Away to the north, the local road tracking the fence, Route 20, was clear for the moment, but a Border Patrol vehicle would be along presently to help them out. Maybe that’s why they seemed in such a hurry to get their clothes back on. A mile and a half beyond 20, traffic streamed steadily along a major road, headlights beginning to penetrate the twilight.

“That I-10 up there?” I asked Roy.

“Yeah.”

“It’s close.”

“The closest it comes to the border for hundreds of miles.”

“Opposite the break in the fence. That’s convenient.”

“For who?” he asked.

“Figure it out, Roy.”

I opened the trunk. The shotgun, a Remington 870 pump, was where the corporal said it was, along with the AR-15, the semi-auto version of the M4 carbine. I took the bolt from the rifle and threw it into an irrigation channel, and put the rifle back in its rack. The Remington I used to blast a hole in the radio before jacking out the shells and grinding them into the dirt with my heel. Then I removed the mags from the deputies’ Glocks and Colt. 45 in the floorboards, scattered them a distance away, ejected the chambered rounds and gave them the same treatment before tossing the weapons back where I found them. The bullets from the Smith & Wesson followed. I considered taking a knife, or maybe a blackjack, but decided against it. I did, however, souvenir a bottle of water. Bridges now well and truly burned, I jogged down to the riverbed.

“We’ll get you, Cooper!” the corporal called after me.

I was thinking he could get me a cold beer because, even though the overhead griller had dropped below the horizon and the temperature would eventually drop, the air was still warm and the sweat was streaming down my face.

As I walked, dried-out cotton stalks crunched underfoot and the kicked-up dust smelled of manure and dirt. The farmhouse beckoned maybe a klick to the south, its solitary light a magnet. I wasn’t sure what I’d find there, though hopefully it wouldn’t be armed and looking for me. Picking my way across the open ground, the comments Chalmers had made about my killer personality began to echo in my head. Was Chalmers right about that? Was I just a killer, no better than many of the people I killed? Was I no different to this Perez character, for example? Was the fact that Uncle Sam paid my salary the only difference between him and me? The woman I loved, Anna Masters, was also dead because of me, as were a couple of other women I’d met recently. The truth, if I were to be honest about it: I was bad news, plain and simple.

I halted in the middle of the field, taking a moment to put a stop to the self-analysis and assess the situation. All was quiet, except for my own doubts. What the hell was I doing, aside from heading toward more death and destruction? Not much, only I couldn’t go back. The shootout at Horizon had taken that option off the table. I could only go forward. Toward the farmhouse.

Hazy mental images of the people I’d killed were replaced by ones of the ghosts who needed me to speak for them. There was Gail Sorwick, flayed post mortem, her killer’s semen in her mouth. There were her husband, her two kids and the other twenty-four innocent people at Horizon Airport murdered to cover an incoming load of cocaine. And yeah, even Sponson. The guy had deserved a prison cell. He hadn’t deserved to be killed in cold blood. Someone had to have the last word on their account; balance the books for them. Like it or not, that someone would be me, Vin Cooper – unmarried, childless, motherless and fatherless. No ties and no tears. Maybe it wasn’t much in the way of balance, but it was
something
, wasn’t it? The internal debate was unconvincing, especially as the side looking to justify my presence in Mexico knew that I really didn’t have a choice.

I got moving again and took to some night shadows when I came to within a dozen yards of the farmhouse. Its windows were open, but the light had mostly been blocked by black plastic taped over the openings. Dim yellow light leaked from a crack here and there. Music and the low hubbub of people murmuring escaped along with it, carried on the smells of tobacco and pot smoke. I circled around the building. Up close, it was less house and more combined stable, storehouse and garage. The doors were all closed. A beat-up delivery van, an old Toyota Land Cruiser and a newish black Hummer H3 were parked out front. As I was considering whether to break cover and attempt to steal one of them, some double doors were flung open and a big group of men ambled out to the vehicles. A quick headcount set the number at twelve. One of the men moved like the
jefe
or head guy. He was tall and sinewy the way addicts get when they’re more interested in a fix than food. He wore a cowboy hat over the greasy ponytail down his back and held a pump-action shotgun in the crook of his arm. His round buddy, who was maybe eating the boss’ helpings as well as his own, wore a dirty sweat-stained trucker’s cap and carried a large-caliber black revolver in a holster slung low on his thigh. A long knife held in a scabbard kept his other hip company. The eleven men with him appeared unarmed, though it was impossible to be certain about that in the low light. They were, however, all carrying backpacks and the way they carried those packs told me they weren’t light. Couriers.

Tubby with the revolver opened the side door in the van and the men with the backpacks piled in, the vehicle sagging low on its axles with the extra weight. When they were all squeezed in, the revolver guy slammed the door shut. He then ran around to the driver’s seat, climbed behind the wheel and fired up the vehicle, which spluttered into life like someone had their hands around its neck, choking it. The
jefe
waved his pal goodbye and went back into the shed, the van chugging off and coughing smoke, all lights doused.

I kept an eye on the vehicle till the night threw an invisibility cloak over it. The couriers were heading for the border. Once across Route 20, assuming they managed to slip between the clockwork-like border patrols, it was a short walk to the I-10 where, no doubt, there’d be a rendezvous and the drugs handed over. There was nothing I could do about it. Maybe that friend of Roy’s “Pappy” would get lucky. Strangely, I felt a pang of concern for the couriers, maybe because they seemed a different animal to the
hombres
with the guns – poorer, shorter, more compliant. They moved like men who had no choice. Maybe we had something in common.

The music playing inside the barn was part folk, part rock and all Mexican. Someone turned up the volume, which suited me fine. I left the darker shadows for the lighter ones around the vehicles and tried the door to the Toyota. Unlocked. I pulled it open and a wave of old beer, sweat and cigarettes rolled out. The interior light flickered on. The ashtray was stuffed with a mound of butts, and in the floorboards Oreo wrappers, empty potato chip bags and Corona bottles. The Sinaloa Cartel had to be pretty confident that its territory here was nice and secured because the keys were in the ignition. I backed out and went over to the driver’s door on the Hummer. It too was unlocked, but no keys in the ignition. Leaning in, I felt around under the dash for the hood release, pulled it and heard a
clunk
. Lifting the hood, a handy light came on. Sparkplug leads beckoned so I grabbed a handful, wrenched them out like weeds and quietly re-latched the hood.

No one came out of the barn to see who was stealing the Toyota when I fired it up. Maybe they were just sitting around in there sucking on Coronas, listening to tunes, pulling bongs and gorging on Double Stuf Oreos and Lays barbecue chips. My foot found the gas pedal, and I crept outta there, keeping the speed to around ten miles per hour till the tires found themselves on something more than a driveway.

The main road I eventually located was dark with only occasional lights, which made me wonder if it was, in fact, a main road. But then a federal Highway number 2 sign flashed by, along with a sign that said fifty kilometers to Juárez. So now I had a car to go with the destination: a bar called the Cool Room down in Panama City, Panama. Exactly how far did I think I’d get in a stolen cartel car? I opened the center console and found a box of twelve-gauge double-aught shotgun shells, the dregs of a packet of nuts, a greasy US ten dollar bill and a screwdriver. I kept the screwdriver and shoved everything else back in the console.

A few miles farther along, the highway bisected a rat hole called Práxedis G. Guerrero. Compact single-story bars, convenience stores and repair shops crowded the roadside, almost all of which were darkened and/or abandoned. I turned into a side street and kept driving till I found what I was looking for, parked and grabbed the screwdriver. A listless dog appeared from nowhere to watch me pull the tags off an old Chevy, but didn’t hang around to see me exchange them with the Land Cruiser’s. I figured the swap might inject the Toyota with an extra twelve hours of life before either a cop or a cartel road-block stopped me to ask uncomfortable questions.

The drive to Juárez was uneventful and gave me time to go back to thinking about the circumstances that had conspired to maneuver me into this mission. In particular, I thought about Commander Matt Matheson and his nephew, Kirk, the deputy who murdered his work chums at the Horizon Airport truck yard. Were the two men cut from the same cloth? And what about Bradley Chalmers? I didn’t like the guy, and I sure as hell didn’t trust him. What game was he playing at? What was his angle? There was no doubt in my mind that the weasel would have one. I smiled at the way I left him, pants around his shoes, both cops looking at his ridiculous shorts, the rage on his face amplified by the realization that if he said anything, he’d blow my cover. Now there was a memory to cherish.

*

Juárez began with a long stretch of cheap diners, poles and overhead wires. There wasn’t much light to see by, and I figured there probably wasn’t much to see anyway, so instead I drove around hunting for a place to hide out for the rest of the night.

I woke just on sunrise, laid out on the Toyota’s bucket seat with my knees pointed at the roof lining like an astronaut on the launch pad. I’d been dreaming that I was in El Paso with an earthquake shaking the road. My eyes opened at pretty much the same time as the Land Cruiser jolted an inch or so vertically skywards. My fingers reacted, digging into the seat upholstery. Maybe the earthquake was no dream. But then, just outside, I heard someone dredging up phlegm from around their toenails, which altered my suspicions somewhat.

Sitting up, I saw three kids in the process of jacking up the back of the car in order to pilfer the wheels. I cracked open the door, which initially gave them a fright. But then the Artful Dodger, their leader – a kid with oversized jeans, white Nikes the size of loaves of bread on his feet and a purple tank top with the number 93 on it – began shouting at me and spitting on the car, creating a diversion so that the other two could recover their hardware, the jack. I opened the door wider and they all immediately took off, running across a vast expanse of gray concrete servicing a rundown mall, hurling the Spanish equivalent of four-letter words behind them as they ran.

I stifled a yawn and closed the door.

The parking lot had been a broad black void of darkness when I arrived during the night. And it wasn’t that much more inspiring now that the soon-to-rise sun was throwing some light around the place. The lot was an empty wasteland around the size of four football fields. Several other abandoned vehicles dotted the area like turds dropped by mechanical giants. Directly in front of my parking spot was a Mickey D’s, a Sears towering behind it. As I watched, feeling sorry for my aching back, two vehicles pulled in off the main road and slotted themselves between the faded parking lines closest to the restaurant’s entrance. The drivers, a short square man and a woman of similar proportions, both wearing McDonald’s uniforms, got out of their cars and shuffled toward the Golden Ass sign lit up out front. The man squashed his face up against the glass to see who was inside, but he needn’t have bothered as he was the first to arrive. He unlocked the door and held it open for the woman behind him.

I was hungry, but I figured it would probably take them half an hour or so to warm up the machines, or whatever they did before opening to the public. But then a new Ford Taurus turned up, a guy in a gray business suit got out and went inside, and my stomach growled. “What are you waiting for?” I told myself.

The air inside the restaurant was cool and smelled of sugar and cleaning solvents. The businessman had already placed his order and was walking back to a table. I approached the short square guy behind the counter. A badge on his shirt said
Gerente
– manager.

“
Buenos
días
,”
he said, raising his eyebrow at me, which I understood to mean “what can I get you?”

I replied with a
buenos
días
of my own and ordered a
huevo y salchicha
burrito by pointing at the overhead picture with egg and sausage in it, and a
café
negro
.

He said,
“Si.”

I said, “
Gracias
.” Easy. Who needs a phrasebook? I paid and loitered, waiting for the order to be filled. But before heading off to see to it, Señor Gerente aimed a remote at a TV monitor installed for the restaurant’s customers and it came to life with an ad for shampoo. It began with a woman flicking her hair around. Then she smiled seductively at the male mannequin now inside her personal space. There appeared to be more on her mind than split ends and dandruff, but her male companion looked about as feminine as she did so good luck with that, I thought.