Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (11 page)

I was distracted from this doomed mating ritual by the arrival on my tray of a burrito and coffee. I hustled the tray back to a table and sat, the guy in the suit seated roughly opposite.

On the TV behind me the ads ended and the news began. I took a large bite out of the burrito and, while I chewed, watched absently as the businessman produced a newspaper from his briefcase. He checked the front page first, which gave me a look at Sports on the back. The main story featured a guy by the name of
El Bruto
, a
lucha libra
wrestler in a black latex mask with long pointed silver teeth drawn where his mouth would be and angry silver brows over silver-outlined eyes. He looked fierce and pissed about something. I wondered what the face was doing beneath the mask, other than sweating. In the photo,
El Bruto
was dressed in a business suit, suggesting that he never took his disguise off. Did he take a shower in it? I took another bite of the burrito and pondered my next move, a drive to the airport and a flight south to Panama.

I lifted my eyes from the burrito and found myself staring at a face I recognized staring right back at me on the front cover of the
El Diario
newspaper, the businessman having turned the paper round to check out the exploits of the Brut. It took around a second before I realized that the staring face was mine. Maybe the delay was unfamiliar context. Maybe it was the fact that I was smiling, not something I do all that much – smile for the birdie. But this was the photo snapped a number of years ago on the occasion I made captain, back in the day when I believed taking on more responsibility was worth faking a smile for. Apparently, just as Arlen and Chalmers had planned, the news about what I’d supposedly done at Horizon Airport was out.

I turned to check on whether the guy at the counter could see the newspaper and what he intended to do about it if he observed that the customer he’d just sold a sausage and egg burrito to was a wanted felon, but he’d disappeared back into the kitchen. I did see, though, having turned around, that my face was now also up on the TV. Jesus, I was surrounded by me. A photo of Deputy Kirk Matheson replaced my picture. Footage of El Paso Police Department cruisers with their lights flashing outside Thompson Hospital came next, overlaid by a photo of a Sheriff’s deputy whose face I didn’t recognize, followed by a portrait of Arlen. Much of this was a new development, as far as I could tell. Something had happened at the hospital, and not something good. The volume was low and it was difficult to pick words out of the report, delivered in rapid-fire Spanish, accompanying the photos and the footage. I heard
policía
,
Aeropuerto, matanza
or massacre and
que mata
or killing. But it was a single word spoken over the picture of Arlen and the deputy that made the burrito, sausage and egg jag in my throat. The word was
muerto
, Spanish for “dead”.

What the hell had happened? The conclusion I could draw from what I’d just seen and heard was that Arlen had been killed at the hospital. Was that right? I stood to go to the counter and ask if the volume could be goosed when movement out in the parking lot distracted me. A black Mercedes sedan with big chrome spinners accompanied by a Silverado crew cab had stopped out front and a bunch of unsavory types were piling out of the pickup. They were having a pow-wow with the kids who’d tried to boost the Land Cruiser’s wheels from under me. Maybe those kids were
halcones
, intelligence gatherers paid by the cartels that Gomez had warned me about. If so, I was in trouble. And then I realized that the kid’s ringleader, the Artful Dodger in his purple tank top, was pointing at me. Several of the men who were gathered around him immediately skipped and jogged to the restaurant’s front door, hooting with delight and not ’cause Mickey Dees was making hotcakes. I was now well and truly awake. Scoping the joint quickly, I hoped to spot another exit. There had to be a door at the back of the kitchen and maybe windows in the johns. But before I could make a move, several low-lifes had burst through the front door, cutting off any attempt at escape. One held a mace, not the chemical in a can type, but the type they used to wield back in the days when men sat on horses dressed in metal armor: a length of heavy metal pipe with a perpendicular spike through the end of it. His pals carried a more modern assortment of weapons: semi and automatic firearms and so forth. I didn’t like the way this was shaping up. One of the men, a short wiry type in an Abercrombie & Fitch tee and loose jeans with fuzz on his top lip walked up to me and stuck a submachine gun in my nose, but I couldn’t take my eye off Sir Galahad with the mace. He was looking at me and then back at the businessman like he was saying eenie meenie minie moe to himself, making up his mind one way or the other.

“Go the other, Bub,” I thought.

I braced for whatever was coming next. The guy with the machine pistol pushed me in the chest with his free hand, backing me up against the wall. When I got there, the two Mickey D’s employees were already lined up, hands above their heads. The businessman was still seated, now surrounded by the new arrivals. The man with the mace seemed to have made up his mind, circling him.

The leader of this little mariachi band appeared to be a guy in his early twenties: shaved head, loose-fitting tank top and covered in tattoos – even on his bald head. I recognized several iterations of MS-13 inked on his skin, indicating that he was a member of
Mara Salvatrucha
13, the organization that boasts it’s the world’s most violent gang. He was yelling at the businessman. I got the impression they knew each other. He took the man’s briefcase, opened it and quickly rifled through the contents before tipping them over his head. Pens, magazines and other stationery items rained down. The bald guy then jerked the businessman to his feet. He stood hunched on the spot until several of the gangbangers started pushing and pulling him toward the restaurant’s front door. They kept this up till they reached the guy’s Ford and then the thug with the mace went to work, using it on the vehicle’s doors, the spike leaving craters in the metalwork.

And just when I thought this was going to be the end of the show, the mace guy turned around and swung the weapon into the businessman’s chest. Blood erupted from him, a red gusher, horizontal like an opened fire hydrant. The businessman dropped to his knees, one hand trying to staunch the blood, the other held out in front of him to maybe stop another swing. The assailant walked behind him, limbered up with a practice swing and then launched the mace two-handed into the businessman’s temple. In baseball terms, it was a textbook hit, the batter following through on the swing so that his hands ended up around the region of his opposite shoulder, the bat pointed down his back at the ground. If it’d been a ball he’d have knocked the skin off it, but it was skull and brains whacked in this instance and most of them were now sliding down the stolen Land Cruiser’s duco ten feet away. A couple of pals patted the killer on the back, all of them grinning like he’d just upped his average.

The kid in my face with the machine pistol also grinned and, satisfied by a job well done, sauntered to the counter. The
Gerente
rushed to serve him – a Big Mac, and five cheeseburgers, essentially everything that was in the rack. The kid tossed some bills on the counter, leaving the change, and walked out with a spring in his step to join the guys who, bloodlust spent, were now all climbing slowly back into the Silverado like they were a little exhausted. I watched the burgers get handed around, the
jefe
with the all-over ink taking delivery of the Big Mac. He got into the Mercedes and both vehicles drove off together, leaving the dead businessman on the asphalt as shoppers and employees began to trickle into the lot.

The woman who worked at the restaurant was shouting at the ceiling, angry and distressed – in shock. I flicked through the phrasebook before opening my mouth and, though I could guess, asked the manager who those people were:
“¿Quiénes eran esas personas?”

With a look on his face like he was chewing something rotten, he said,
“Cartel de negocios.
Quizás
Sinaloa. Que el hombre,
él era un contador – vino aquí a menudo.”
I took that to mean: “Cartel business, maybe Sinaloa cartel. He was an accountant and came here often. I shit on all of them.”

Maybe it wasn’t an accurate translation but I gathered he wasn’t a fan of either the businessman or the visiting breakfast club and didn’t see much difference between them. He then got on the phone to the authorities, the
Federales
probably – the army, the law hereabouts. Time to bounce.

I abandoned the remains of the burrito, snatched the front page of the paper, stuffed it in my pocket, and went outside and watched shoppers giving Mickey D’s a wide berth, not even stopping to gawk. There was nothing to be done for the remains of the dead businessman on the asphalt except perhaps throw a blanket over him, if only I had one. I wondered what his crime was. Did he maybe forget to add all the zeroes? Was he skimming? Or was he just working for the opposition?

I took another look at the Land Cruiser. I had to leave it and not necessarily because its door panels looked like the meat department at a supermarket. It no longer had its wheels.

*

I paid the woman from Mickey D’s fifty dollars to give me a ride to the airport and another fifty to say to anyone interested enough to ask that she’d dropped the gringo off at the bus terminal. A hundred bucks was a lot of money in Juárez. I hoped it would buy me a little silence.

At the airport I bought a suitcase and some random clothes to throw into it. I also bought a ticket for the first available flight to Panama City, Panama. I’d just missed the direct flight, but I could make the Copa Airlines flight with a stopover in Mexico City. I took it and put my Sig through checked luggage, the reason for buying the suitcase and the crummy clothes. From a tourist concession I also bought a trucker’s hat with I ♥ M
EXICO
on it, passed immigration and security without any problems and headed for the gates. Once inside, I hung around in the departure lounge for an Aeromexico flight headed to Houston as there was a TV monitor in the lounge tuned to CNN. My clean-shaven happy face was soon on screen again although, fortunately, the face currently below the I ♥ M
EXICO
hat was far from clean-shaven and happy. The volume was low but audible:
“… the US Air Force officer then took two police officers and a bystander hostage and forced them to drive him to the border, where he released them,
” the reporter said.
“El Paso Police are working on the assumption that he has gone into hiding in Juárez and are working with authorities there to apprehend him.”

I hoped not and pulled the peak lower over my eyes.

“And in the latest development, El Paso law enforcement is also looking for this man, Sheriff’s Deputy Kirk Matheson, wounded in a shootout with the fugitive Air Force officer earlier last night.” A current official photo of Matheson appeared, clean-cut and ready for duty in front of the Star of Texas flag. “Matheson is believed to have fatally shot a fellow deputy, Renaldo Ortiz, a 21-year-old rookie, and wounded US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Arlen Wayne during a daring escape from El Paso hospital where he had been placed under guard …”

Hey, wait a minute – Arlen shot and Matheson split? I wanted to find out more about it but a couple of
Federales
showed up in the lounge, sniffing around, which forced me to retreat. Arlen was wounded, which meant he was alive. Saying that he was “wounded”, however, covered everything from a scratch to quadriplegia and the report said nothing about what kind of condition he was in. I fought off the desire to call his cell as he’d be in the hospital himself now and the call would go to message bank. And what was I gonna say? I’ll be over later with a box of chocolates and a dirty magazine?

The other big news – Matheson was on the run. Or more accurately, given his wounds, a slow painful lurch.

A female voice over the loudspeakers announced in Spanish that this was the last call for passengers on the Air Panama flight to Mexico City. She was talking to me. I went to the gate and found the lounge empty, the passengers apparently already on the plane. The middle-aged female flight attendant said, “Lucky last, Mr Cooper,” cracked a smile and let me pass.

The flight to Mexico City was uneventful on account of I slept from wheels up to wheels down; two hours of dreamless recovery time. At
Benito Juárez
International, the airport at Mexico City, I had an hour to kill and murdered it in the departure lounge sawing a few more zees off the log.

This time I was one of the first aboard the Boeing 737 and dropped into my allocated aisle seat over the wing. Feeling refreshed and wide awake, I flicked through the airline magazine while my fellow passengers filed in and found their places. There was an article on Montego Bay, Jamaica. I’ve never been to Jamaica. It looked like my kind of place. The featured resort had my favorite kind of bar – it was in the pool, the barkeep serving bikini models. There was an unoccupied seat between a blond and a redhead and I mentally put my name on it. There were more pictures, mostly of beaches and golf courses so I went back to the bar. The girls were still there, waiting for me but, second time around, it just wasn’t the same. My brain wandered again to the situation in El Paso with Arlen. He must have gone to the hospital to check on Matheson; maybe to ask the bent deputy some questions. How had Matheson managed to get hold of a gun? Maybe he created a disturbance, tipped over some equipment, the guard poking his head in the room to see what was up. From there, a little faked distress and the guard could’ve come close enough for Matheson to grab his sidearm. I could visualize the scenario like I’d witnessed it.

I glanced up at the passengers coming down the aisle. And that’s when I saw Kirk Matheson. I couldn’t believe it. Did the guy have a doppelganger? It just seemed so odd to see him ambling sideways down the aisle, dragging his carry-on behind him. I gave myself a mental shake. Had I conjured the guy up out of my own mind? I was thinking about him and, poof, suddenly the fucker was right in front of me. Could the same trick possibly work with Victoria’s Secret models?

Our eyes met. Mine slid off his face and out the window. Did he recognize me? I took another glimpse. He wasn’t staring back so I figured not. Instead he was attempting to wrangle his carry-on into the overhead locker, his seat a row in front of mine and on the other side of the aisle. He was doing this one-handed – right-handed – on account of I’d fired a bullet into his left shoulder before breakfast this morning. I hadn’t been sure about the location of the wound, but now that he was close I could harden up on some of those details. Everything about Matheson – from the exhausted way he moved to his washed-out pallor – told me he was in a world of pain, the analgesics administered in the hospital long since worn off.

A flight attendant came up to help him stow his bag as he was obviously in a bad way; no color in his face, the sweat beaded across his forehead and cheeks. The rim of his blue shirt collar was dark with absorbed perspiration. The guy could barely keep his eyes open, his eyelids hanging heavy and his jaw slack.

Speaking from first-hand experience I knew that pretty much all movement for him would be excruciating. An innocent bump from a passerby would be enough to send him to the edge of unconsciousness. Taking a deep breath would be enough to make him want to faint. I gave myself a mental pat on the back. And now the asshole was right here, helpless as a baby, a fellow fugitive headed south. I got up from my seat, went over and sat heavily down beside him, my shoulder banging into his. Oops! I heard the suck of air between gritted teeth and felt the flinch shudder through his body. I gave him a great big smile. “Hey, sorry about that,” I said. “Not a lot of room in here, is there? They keep building ’em smaller and smaller. Or maybe it’s me getting bigger and bigger. Ha ha. A few too many Buds, right? Say, you’re American, ain’t you? Me too. Where you from? I’m from all over …”

Matheson turned away from this physical and verbal onslaught, showing me his back.

“Sir, do you have the right seat?”

I turned and saw the flight attendant from the air bridge back in Juárez, furrows through her dry, powdered forehead. A Mexican woman with a stern face that looked like it had seen everything and would prefer not to see any of it again accompanied her. Both of them were staring down at me. Damn it, I was just getting into the swing of things here with Matheson. I pulled my boarding pass and made like I was checking it. “Oh, gee … Musta got confused. Sorry ’bout that.” I bounced out of the chair, giving Matheson another good jostling on the way up, and crossed the aisle back to my rightful place.

It was no big deal. I had the next three hours to play with the guy, time enough to figure out what I was going to do with him and maybe exact a little payback for Arlen and the several members of El Paso law enforcement who were now checked into the morgue on account of him. But it wasn’t going to be all fun and games. The fact that he was free and headed in the same direction I was presented a problem: he was the only survivor, aside from myself, of the shootout in the truck yard. He knew the truth about what had happened and could blow my good-cop-gone-bad cover to any interested party.

I kept my eye on Matheson but, as far as I could make out, he hit the hay instantly and didn’t wake till the plane was on descent to Panama City International. The jerk hadn’t even given me the pleasure of accidentally on purpose bumping into that wounded shoulder of his on his way back from the head.

He pressed the button for service. A flight attendant came up to him, went away and came back a moment later with a plastic cup of water and waited for him to drink it.

Matheson had escaped from lawful custody in the hospital, I figured, because he believed he was safer south of the border. (I wondered if he’d still believe that if he’d caught what I’d seen in the Mickey D’s parking lot.)

He threw back some pills and washed them down with the water. He handed the cup back to the attendant, slumped in his seat and closed his eyes. Not long after that, we’d landed and were taxiing to the gate. I decided to stay on this fucker’s tail and see where it led. Panda and the Cool Room could wait.

Most of my fellow sardines were in the aisles shuffling forward with their carry-on when two uniformed men with the word I
NMIGRACIÓN
on their shoulder tags fought their way in against the tide, looking for someone. They stopped at Matheson’s seat and asked to see his passport, which he handed over. They checked it quickly, retrieved his bag from the overhead locker, helped him to his feet and led him away, the passengers parting in front of them like maybe Moses had a hand in it.