Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle (71 page)

Ned answered, trying to sound tough. “What do you want?” he asked in Spanish.

“I have been sent to pick up El Espagueti,” the little man said in a thick accent. “He has work to do.”

“Who sent you?”

“I don't know the guy's name,” the little man said angrily. “One of the Jalisco guys . . . tall, ugly, bad skin . . . I forget his name. You know, the guy who spits when he talks.”

Ned laughed a little. “And who are you?” It was beginning to occur to him that none of the parties who'd like to get their hands on him would be stupid (or cunning) enough to send this guy to his front door. No, depending on who it was, he'd either be surrounded by an army of cops or someone would bomb the house or an assassin would sneak in. It just would not happen this way.

The man on the intercom sighed. “They call me El Chango.”

Was this a joke? He knew a lot of Mexicans were religious and superstitious, but did this mean they thought he—an American—believed in ghosts? Maybe it was a warning: “Do what they say or end up like El Chango.” As the initial shock wore off, Ned realized it was just more likely that northern Mexicans call all indigenous Mexicans, or at least the Guatemalan ones,
chango
just like they called any non-Hispanic whites
guero
whether or not they were blonde.

Before Ned had collected his thoughts enough to formulate an appropriate answer, the little man spoke again. “He gave me a note to read to you—it's in English even,” he said. Ned could see him reach into his pocket and pull out a piece of crumpled-up paper. The new El Chango read from it intently. “Gate chore hass to ta ranjowsessho . . . esshowl.” He returned to Spanish. “Some of these words, they are very hard, I am not even totally fluent in Spanish, but English is like it came from the moon for me.”

Ned laughed and hit the lock release on the wrought-iron gate. “Come in, El Chango,” he said. “I just stepped out of the shower and need to get dressed.”

“I would actually prefer to stay here if it is okay with you, sir.”

“Suit yourself,” Ned said, then turned to put his clothes on. He packed his gun, his cell phones, and a little bit of cash, and went outside. The new El Chango smiled. Ned was surprised to see that the man's head did not come up to his own chin. He was wearing a Cleveland Indians baseball cap.

“We should hurry,” he scolded. “I've been buzzing you for about ten minutes.” Then he directed Ned to a car even worse than his own. It was an old Ford Maverick painted in a snazzy-for-the-early-seventies blue-on-blue two-tone and Ned had to admit it was in remarkable shape considering its age. It had been well cared for every day of its long life.

Once in the car, the Mayan started taking a familiar route out of town to the ranch house. He asked Ned, “Are you a driver or a shooter?”

“Driver,” Ned said without hesitation, though in fact, he did not know that he was either. He just knew he did not want to be a shooter.

“They tell me I'm a shooter,” El Chango II said with a chuckle. “But I had never picked up a gun in my life before this month. A machete I can use, but a gun . . .”

“It's easy,” Ned said. “Just point and shoot.”

“Easy for you to say, growing up in America.”

“What do you mean?”

“I've seen your movies and TV shows,” he said. “Everyone carries a gun and there are shoot-outs all the time . . . I honestly don't know how any of you people manage to stay alive for very long.”

“It's not really like that.”

“Sure it is.”

“No, it's not,” Ned said. “I never even saw a gun until I joined a gang.”

“See? You were jumped into a gang!” said the Mayan. “Who was it? The Bloods? The Cripples? The Cosa Nostras?”

“Nothing like that,” Ned grinned. “And I wasn't forced to join anything.” Then he thought for a minute. “What about you? You talk like I'm a gangster and you're an upstanding member of the community. In case you haven't noticed, we're working together.”

“Did they kidnap you?”

“As a matter of fact, they did, smart guy.”

El Chango II looked genuinely shocked. “Really? I thought you were some kind of boss or something.”

“Nope, kidnapped at a fake police checkpoint,” Ned told him. “Some guys dressed as Federales were shaking me down for bribes, then there was a gun battle and the next thing I know, I was being brought to the ranch house and I have been working for these guys ever since.”

“You got kidnapped to sell . . . not even sell, just deliver . . . weed?” El Chango II said to him. “An American? Working as a delivery boy in Mexico? That makes sense to you?”

“Nothing down here makes sense,” Ned snapped back, but he got the other man's point. It was an unlikely story, so he quickly changed the subject. “What about you, tough guy?”

“Some guys from up here took over my family's avocado farm to grow weed; kicked us off. Well, actually they offered us jobs as pickers and dryers, but my old man was way too proud to allow that—so they shot him and hung his body up in the town square as a warning to others. It looked like a really good time to get out of Chiapas, so me and a bunch of my friends took a bus to the capital. Nobody would hire us Mayans for anything, even to push a broom, so we kept going north, hoping to cross into Texas. They say you can work there the same hour you show up.”

“Then what happened?”

“Got on a bus in Zacatecas that was stopped by some masked men with guns on a deserted stretch of road. They made everyone get out; put the girls and young women in one truck, young men in another, left the old people behind. I saw the men with guns pay the driver.”

“Sounds like they have a going concern,” Ned told him, thinking that he now knew of at least one source for the endless supply of girls at the ranch house. “A business that never runs out of supply or customers.”

“Yeah, that's what I thought too,” El Chango II said. “Never saw the women again, but they split the men into two groups—one group was supposed to carry product over the border and the other was to train as
sicarios
; you know, killers.”

“Why didn't you go over the border,” Ned asked. “Sounds exactly like what you wanted.”

“I did ask,” the Mayan sighed. “But they only wanted guys with families, so that they had an incentive for them to come back. They knew that if I crossed, I would be picking strawberries in Texas and forgetting they ever existed.”

“So because you didn't have a family, they gave you a gun and trained you to be an assassin?”

“Yeah, they gave me a wooden gun at first—just to get used to it—then a real one.”

“So,” Ned paused. “Have you shot anyone?”

El Chango II studied Ned's face. Satisfied that he was not a boss or someone else who would get him in trouble for answering honestly, he laughed. “Nah, I went on a job once and just fired in the air,” he said. “Nobody noticed and when they saw my clip was empty, they all bought me drinks.”

“Who were you shooting at?”

“Don't know. They don't tell me. They just put me in a van with some other guys, took us to a big house, and told us to shoot anyone we did not recognize.”

Ned laughed. “Very professional.”

“Actually, the other guys were,” the Mayan said with a shrug. “They were very organized, almost like it was a military operation. I guess they just brought me along for laughs. What about you?”

“Me?” Ned was surprised that El Chango II wanted to know about him. His own life seemed boring in comparison, but he assumed he was exotic to the man and didn't want to disappoint him. “All I do is distribute weed around the neighborhood.”

“What? And you have a house like that?” He seemed shocked, maybe a bit angry.

“Yeah,” Ned said sheepishly.

“They have plans for you, buddy.”

“That's what everyone tells me.”

* * *

“He's not here,” Meloni told Tovar and O'Malley. “Although I appreciate your diligence in checking out every angle of every clue, I really don't think we're gonna find Aiken in the tri-state area, the mid-Atlantic, or anywhere around here. Let's face it: the perp has fled the scene. So where is he?”

“We have to find the bike,” O'Malley said. She was still disappointed that the bike she went to go look at had not turned out to be Aiken's. “He loved the bike. He bought it when he had no money. He restored it—to show-stopping quality—even though he made just a hair better than minimum wage. And after he sold it, he stole it back with a great deal of danger to his own personal safety. You find the bike, and I'm sure Aiken will be close by, trying to get it back.”

“We can't find the bike,” Meloni pointed out. “Nobody seems to have seen it. Unless you can provide something to make me think it still exists, we have nothing.”

“Sure, but we also have to find the girlfriend in Moldova,” said Tovar. “Aiken is a sucker for the opposite sex. Not that he's a skirt chaser, just a sucker. Didn't he risk everything he had for the little girl he met hours before? Didn't he bring his girlfriend along when he tried to get over the border into Canada? The guy is a romantic to an almost ridiculous fault. Not exactly your grade-A gangster tough guy. Get to the girl or the girls, and you get to him.”

“Well, the little girl doesn't know anything, or won't talk. And the girlfriend is somewhere in Eastern Europe—if she hasn't escaped from her hellhole of a country again,” Meloni said. “So we can't find her.”

“But if we could . . .”

“Yeah, if we could find the girlfriend, if we could find the bike, everything would be great,” Meloni said. “But we haven't found anything. Until we do, we have to work with what we have. Tovar, you keep investigating Andersson, Hawkridge, and the guy who bought the Indian off Aiken. O'Malley, talk with the CIA, see what we can get on the girlfriend. Keep an eye on the little girl and just find out whatever you can.”

They both agreed. Pressure from Harrison and open criticism from other officers had made Meloni even more desperate to get to the bottom of Kuzik's murder. Not only would it shut his detractors up once and for all, it might also get him out of Philadelphia.

* * *

When Ned and El Chango II arrived, the ranch house was buzzing with activity. There were more SUVs and pickup trucks than usual, along with a pair of cube vans Ned had never seen before. Both of them were decorated with business names and logos—one for a fruit-and-vegetable supplier, the other a home-electronics retailer. Men were everywhere. Some were dressed as soldiers, others as Federales, and a few as Sonora state police. But most were in jeans.

It appeared as though the hard work of loading the trucks was over and that the men were waiting for further instruction. Ned could tell they were nervous by how many of them were pacing about. El Chango II found a parking spot, and the two walked toward the house.

They were greeted by El Ratón, who spoke only to Ned. “Ah, Espagueti! You will be with El Martillo, in the white Suburban,” he said, pointing to a giant truck that had men around it. “Since you are American, I expect you know how to use this,” he said, handing him an AR-15 assault rifle.

Ned had never touched that kind of gun before, but was pretty sure he could find the safety and the trigger—or at least ask someone how it worked. “What about him?” he asked.

“Who?” the big man answered, confused.

“El Chango,” Ned said, pointing at his driver.

El Ratón looked at Ned as though he was crazy then, glanced derisively at El Chango II. “Who cares?” he laughed then walked slowly toward another SUV.

Ned went over to El Martillo and his crew. They acknowledged him with nods. “We're just waiting for the order,” Martillo told him.

Ned nodded and asked what his job was.

“Just ride in the back and shoot at anyone you don't recognize.” He felt much less nervous now that he realized that they did not expect much of him. It appeared that his participation in this mission was more of a rite of passage for him than anything of strategic import for the organization.

“I don't recognize most of these guys,” Ned said with a chuckle.

“Yeah, and I bet we all look alike, too,” said one of the other men in his team.

Ned could do nothing but smile. He felt that anything else would have invited violence.

Breaking the tension, Martillo told Ned only to shoot at anyone who was pointing a gun at him and told the guy who spoke to him, La Lágrima, that he could be included in that group. Ned laughed, La Lágrima did not.

Martillo's cell phone rang. He answered with a few okays, snapped it shut, and told the guys to get into the trucks. The giant SUV he instructed Ned to get in had three rows of seats. The driver looked to be Mayan and was unarmed. The guy in the passenger seat was dressed as a Federale and carried an AR-15 like Ned's. Ned guessed he was a sharpshooter. Ned himself was sandwiched between two guys with AK-47s in the second row and Martillo was in the back row with two other guys who appeared to be armed only with handguns.

Theirs was the third in a convoy that took the Cuerta highway east out of Nogales, and was waved through two separate police checkpoints. As the city shrank behind them, Ned looked out at what appeared to be endless rolling mountains and hills covered with nothing but sand, dirt, and the occasional cactus or scrub. This land was not good enough for any type of farming or even ranching and so was just left to itself. Other than the mounds of garbage every few yards, it looked as though humans had abandoned the area long ago. The road seemed to take the path of least resistance, snaking around boulders and hills, making every mile toward the destination seem like five in actual driving.

The drive took hours and the men began to loosen up once they were deep into the desert. One of the third-row guys pulled some water bottles out of a cooler in the back and handed them out. The men put their guns at their sides and started talking. None addressed Ned directly, but he figured out what they were all doing.