King of Swords (Assassin series #1) (30 page)

It was the type of area where the residents kept to themselves. Nobody wanted to know what you were doing, and it was best not to be curious about their affairs. It was a place the unwashed came to die, enslaved by heroin and methamphetamines and alcohol. AIDS was a near-constant among the intravenous drug users, and corpses being hauled out by the coroner’s office was an almost daily occurrence.

Obregon’s ear bud crackled as the com line came to life.

“Car headed your way.”

He squinted in the dark and watched as a battered twenty year old Buick LeSabre trundled to a stop near the shack. A man swung out of the car, clad in a filthy white undershirt and soiled pants, accompanied by an obese woman in an ill-advised tank top and shorts that strained to contain her modesty. They cackled with inebriated laughter, and the man veered to the front door, which consisted of a slab of plywood held in place by two rusted hinges. He fished a key out of his pocket and unlocked the padlock securing the chain that acted as the door lock, and was caught unawares by the bright floodlights from the assault team as they flashed their dazzling focus on him.

“Stop. Put your hands up. Do not move. This is the Federal Police. Repeat, do not move,” Sergeant Obregon instructed through a handheld megaphone.

The couple froze in place, and within seconds, were surrounded by armed men, weapons at the ready.

Twenty seconds after it started, the operation was over. The man was clearly not the one in the photo, given that he was emaciated, filthy, reeking of cheap tequila, and with a profile more akin to a living skeleton than a human being. After a few minutes of interrogation, it also became obvious that nobody lived with him in the little hothouse. The sergeant entered, to be confronted with a soiled mattress, a reeking bucket with a lid fashioned from a piece of sheetrock being used as an ad hoc toilet, and a few odds and ends. Illumination was provided by a single light bulb dangling from a wire affixed to the corrugated tin ceiling with a rusty nail. Two holes in the wall with rebar bent to serve as security bars afforded scant ventilation. Obregon gagged at the smell wafting from the dirt floor.

As expected, this was a dead-end.

The team packed their gear and loaded into the black pickup which had been called in after the operation was terminated. They headed back to the station.

It was unlikely they’d get any traction from circulating the photo around the local prostitutes and drug dealers, but at that point it was the only option they had left. At Cruz’s behest, they’d erected road blocks at several key intersections, ostensibly as sobriety checkpoints but in reality to spot-check suspicious travelers; but those were long shots, at best. As the night wore on, the officers grew increasingly frustrated. It was obvious their target had either gone to ground, or had somehow eluded them.

Wherever he was,
El Rey
wasn’t there.

~ ~ ~

Cruz wasn’t surprised. While the badge photo had been a lucky break, their losing streak in the case had held, and it had been too little, too late. That was how things had been going from the outset. The assassin always seemed to be one step ahead of them or had benefitted from pure luck, such as getting fired before they collared him. Cruz began to have a little empathy with the men on the
El Rey
taskforce who’d made zero progress in over a thousand days.

He’d met with them and turned over the photo, in the slim hopes their network could generate a lead, but that was unlikely given they had no presence in Baja. In typical fashion, they hadn’t even considered sending personnel to Baja once the photo was in hand, preferring to question whether the likeness was even
El Rey
, considering that it didn’t resemble most of the sketches. In truth, Cruz couldn’t prove it was him any more than they could prove that it wasn’t, so it was a classic stand-off. They obviously felt that Cruz was encroaching unfairly into their investigation, while he believed they were incompetent asses. Relations remained cordial, but strained, and Cruz expected nothing helpful.

The rest of the week was similarly frustrating. There was no buzz on the streets, the flesh trade had yielded no leads, and
El Rey
didn’t buy drugs from any of the local substance purveyors. The team continued to go through the motions, but each day brought an increasing sense of hopelessness, as the opening date of the G-20 summit loomed with no progress on their end.

The only good news was that Cruz’s chest wound was healed and hardly ached at all any more. The leg was also mending, albeit grudgingly. He’d been to the physical therapist’s for instruction on exercises he could do, and religiously performed them every morning and evening.

The other surprising occurrence was that Dinah had taken to calling every few days to follow up on the case and to see how he was doing. Cruz was unsure how he felt about that. It had been two years since his family’s heads had been shipped to him, and life inevitably had to move on, but it had also
only
been two years since the tragedy, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for anyone new in his life. He felt guilty over his attraction to her, but also recognized that it was mutual – he could tell by their conversations, where Dinah had subtly but unmistakably indicated interest; women didn’t call regularly to see how you were doing out of a sense of charity. Even though he’d been off that horse for some time, he still hadn’t completely forgotten how to ride.

Cruz woke up every day with a sense of impatience, and a tremor of doom, as the days to the summit counted down. He’d made scant progress and wasn’t kidding himself. At the rate they were going,
El Rey
would succeed in his objective, and life for every man, woman and child in Mexico would forever change, as their neighbor to the north exacted retribution for the nation’s savagery and the cartels ruled the day. That was a future Cruz didn’t want to see, and it was that prospect that kept him getting up early to fight to prevent it with every ounce of energy at his disposal.

~ ~ ~

The Acapulco night cloyed hot and humid, the air scented with the distinctive verdant aroma of the tropics. Off in the distance, the lights of the waterfront strip twinkled as partygoers celebrated their Friday fiesta; dancing and drinking until the oncoming dawn chased them to bed. The town was in decline from its heyday in the Sixties and Seventies, when the Hollywood set had made Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta must-go-to destinations, but it still saw its share of celebrants from Mexico City due to proximity – at a hundred and eighty miles away, it was the closest accessible beach resort, and still a popular getaway for those seeking a respite from the densely populated
Distrito Federal
– the term used by locals for Mexico City and its surrounding environs.

Cartel violence had sullied the reputation of the seaside paradise. It had joined the ranks of notoriously embattled areas like Morelia and Culiacan, as roving gangs of armed thugs terrorized whole neighborhoods, and the cops either stayed away or were on the drug traffickers’ payrolls. Still, the tourist zone along the water was relatively safe, and travelers from the southern Mexican states went there in droves, ignoring the sporadic outbursts of violence.

Booming music and peals of laughter drifted up into the hills, the din amplified as it refracted off the inky water.
El Rey
jabbed at the button to raise his driver’s side window so he could hear himself think. He’d been in town for two days and had finally connected with his contact; a minor underworld facilitator who claimed to be able to get him anything he wanted, and had proved useful doing so in the past. The beauty of this transaction, if consummated, was that the local network could reliably get the items he required into Baja with no problems. That was worth the supplier’s substantial premium, because delivery was as much of an obstacle as securing the required materials.

The industrial section of Acapulco was ominously dark and seething with menace. It was infamous as an area where people disappeared, where headless corpses with bound hands cropped up all the time. Even a predator like
El Rey
experienced a sense of trepidation sitting alone outside the deserted warehouse at midnight, waiting for the appearance of his host. He’d had a discussion with the man over the phone, where a price had been agreed upon, along with detailed specifications for the order, but he’d wanted to be paid in cash, as was increasingly the case due to anti-money laundering provisions in the formerly compliant banking industry. So El Rey had gathered a knapsack and seventy thousand dollars, before driving southwest from Mexico City, sticking to the toll roads in order to avoid the ever-prevalent banditos who haunted the free roads.

The last few times he’d needed something special he couldn’t get in Culiacan or Mexico City, this contact had arranged for the goods to come into Manzanillo, the main port on the Pacific side, yet another dangerous town in the trafficking chain that ran up the coast. All shipments from South America that came up the west coast offloaded at Manzanillo, so it was a natural hub for criminality and violence. The customs officers there were legendary for their corruption, and it was considered foolhardy to ship into the port without an established connection, which the contact clearly did.

El Rey
assumed that this shipment would traverse the coastline via shrimp boat or small freighter before changing craft somewhere off Manzanillo, and then move north into the Sea of Cortez from there. The logistics of the smuggling didn’t interest him, as long as the items arrived in time, which is why he was willing to pay this source double the price asked by less-established providers.

A Toyota Sequoia with a bank of spotlights across its roof pulled around the corner and rolled to a stop at the curb in front of the warehouse. Four men got out, surveying their surroundings before approaching the building and unlocking the multiple locks on the heavy steel entrance door. Two of the men took up a position on either side of the entry and stood with their hands in their loose sweatshirt pockets, the bulges of their pistols obvious.

El Rey
waited to ensure that was the total welcoming party, and then pulled up the street with his lights out until he was twenty yards away. He opened his door and stepped onto the pavement, slick from a cloudburst a few minutes earlier.

The synthetic soles of his Doc Marten boots gripped the surface securely. He walked confidently towards the two men, the bag and his free hand clearly visible so as to avoid any accidental bouts of nervous shooting. After a brief confirmatory discussion, one of the men made a cell call, and a few moments later, the door opened and his source welcomed him into the dank interior.

“Greetings, my old friend. Glad to see you. You found the place with no complications?” Gerzain, the vendor, asked.

“No problems.”

Pleasantries concluded, they walked through the depths of the cavernous expanse until they arrived at a set of wooden crates. Another man waited nearby. Gerzain gestured to him. He approached with a crowbar and wedged it between the crate and the sealed top, then expertly pried it loose. Gerzain reached in and brushed aside the straw packing material, and stood back so his favorite client could inspect the goods. El Rey moved to the crate and crouched down, rubbing his hands along the cold smooth surface of the contents. He stood and nodded to Gerzain, who smiled with pride.

“Nice,” El Rey said.

“You only need the one? I’m having a double-discount sale tonight…” Gerzain offered.

El Rey considered the proposition, but then shook his head.

“And the rest?” El Rey asked.

“Being manufactured. It’s a very unusual request, and will take every bit of the two weeks I quoted you.”

“No problem delivering everything to Cabo?”

“Nope. On time and on budget. Guaranteed,” Gerzain assured him.

El Rey tossed him the bag of money. Gerzain smiled and began walking to the door. “Can I get you anything else? Hand grenades? Machine-guns? A tank?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Not tonight. You going to count it?”

Gerzain turned to face him, grinning, a happy man indeed.

“No need. I trust you.”

~ ~ ~

Cruz could now walk without crutches, using only the stainless steel cane that Briones had acquired for him, and following his doctor’s orders, he walked as much as possible. He’d been driving into the office every day now, after going stir-crazy in the apartment for the first week. He was feeling increasingly fit as time went by.

He’d commandeered another Dodge Charger, and had the doors reinforced with half-inch steel plates at a local body shop – he’d learned a valuable lesson from his OXXO shoot-out, namely that having something that would stop all but armor-piercing rounds could be a life-saver. It still hurt him to operate the gas and brake pedals, but he was willing to suffer in order to regain his lost mobility.

The hunt for
El Rey
had gone exactly nowhere, and as the pages of the calendar turned and the summit raced towards them, Cruz’s agitation level increased further still. He knew his hunch was right – the photo had proved it in his mind, even if the other agencies downplayed it. When he’d tried CISEN one final time they’d actually laughed at him when he’d shown them the photo and the sketch. His pride still stung from that one, but he wasn’t in this for ego. They had the photo now, and hopefully would distribute it to their personnel leading up to the event. All he could do was push. The director had mocked his efforts, pointing out that the photo looked like a generic Mexican male under thirty-five, especially given the goatee. Not to Cruz, though, but perhaps he was too close to this now. He’d done his best, and would continue the hunt even if CISEN thought he’d lost it.

Cruz forced himself out of the office every night at eight, and was awake by six. One advantage of residing in downtown Mexico City was that he could walk out his front door, turn right, and arrive at a really great coffee shop within a hundred yards. It had quickly become a favorite way to start the day, and the stroll was good for him.