The Monarch (11 page)

If she was lucky, there'd be something here she could trace back to the owner. A serial number, a make and model—­something. With the contents out, it just seemed like a run-­of-­the-­mill metal briefcase. The outside was silver aluminum with two latches, each with a keyhole. The inside was lined with black felt and the lid had a ­couple pockets for files and such. Emily looked in the pockets but couldn't see anything. Just to be sure, she reached in and ran her fingers along the bottoms of the pockets. The first one was nothing but more felt. But in the corner of the second pocket, the one that used the lid as its backing, her finger caught on something.

Emily rooted through a kitchen drawer until she found a flashlight, hoping the batteries weren't dead. The light was dim, but still alive. Before it died, she shone it into the briefcase's pocket. There, in the bottom corner, sticking out through a tiny tear in the felt, was a loop of wire.

Something electronic was hidden in the briefcase.

She dropped the flashlight and backed away.

How could I be so stupid?

This wasn't her first time around the block and it certainly wasn't the first time a source had tried something like this. She tried to run the night through her mind—­where they'd been in the room and what they'd said. It had been such an emotional roller coaster that she just couldn't remember it all.

Emily decided against ripping the case apart to get a better look at whatever was secreted inside. The less whoever put it there knew, the better. She was pretty sure she hadn't said anything she didn't want the masked man to know in its vicinity, and it had spent most of the night in the oven. But if the device was sensitive enough, it might have picked up her conversations with Dan at the kitchen table. Assuming it was a listening device and not a bomb. Stranger things had happened; which was why the case went back in the oven.

With paranoia firmly set in, Emily went out into the hall taking only her own cell phone. She made a quick call and returned to her apartment, being careful not to slam the door. If it was a listening device, she didn't want them knowing she'd left. If it was a bomb, loud noises were generally a bad idea, though the more she thought about it, the more she doubted the bomb idea. Still, once her writer brain got rolling it was hard to stop it.

Emily changed her clothes and got into bed with Wagner's file. She propped herself up on some pillows and flipped the file open. For over an hour she read through pages and pages of commendations, reprimands, promotions, and demotions. Wagner's career read like a bouncing ball. Reading between the lines, Emily discerned that he was a man who did what he thought was right, regardless of protocol or the chain of command. Not quite a maverick, but definitely not someone who worried about politics. Normally, he'd be the type of man Emily respected. At the moment—­sizing up her opponent—­it worried her.

 

11

FCI Yazoo City

Yazoo, Mississippi

2:00
A.M.
Local Time

L
EW FELT MORE
than heard the driver's door slam. He'd actually fallen asleep after lying in the plain wooden coffin with the taped-­up Colero as a pillow. By the time he'd shaken the sleep grog from his brain, he felt the truck pull out and head down the short drive to the prison gate. His training in Iraq, thanks to all the kidnappings of Americans, had included how to determine direction and orientation of a vehicle with a bag on his head. He was pretty sure this wasn't what the instructors had had in mind for his training, but he was grateful for it, nonetheless.

Colero mumbled something under his tape gag.

“Here we go,” Lew said quietly, holding the gun at the ready. He'd given up on his fingerprint idea when it just got too hard to hold the darn thing with only two fingers.

Less than a minute later, the van's brakes squeaked to a stop. The door slammed after the driver got out and Lew heard muffled voices for a while. This was the hard part. The waiting. The next sound they heard would either be the driver's door slamming after he got back in, or the dreaded click of the van's back door as a guard opened it to check inside. It could go either way. Lew figured if Quinn was on the level he would have called ahead to the guard. But with the near riot still fresh in the guard's mind, he might decide to check inside the van anyway.

All Lew could hear was the pounding of his own heartbeat in his ears. It reminded him of a time before he'd met Jonathan, before his life had taken a downward spin. His unit was clearing a village in Kuwait when mortar fire hit them. Almost his entire squad was killed except for him and this kid named Olsen, though Olsen had lost most of his left shoulder in the attack. When the shelling stopped, Iraqi troops had come in on foot to check for survivors. Lew pulled Olsen into a ditch and then pulled several dead bodies on top of them. The kid couldn't stop moaning from the pain, so Lew had choked him out to save his life. That's when the boots came out the back door, less than three feet from where they were laying.

Lew had thought he was going to lose his mind from the anxiety. Especially when, to make sure, one of the bastards had strafed the pile of dead bodies with his AK–47. Two of the slugs went straight through Olsen's head, and one of them pierced Lew's leg. Even so, he'd kept perfectly still and quiet. The enemy wandered around the village for two more hours before they left. It was another hour before Lew could get up the courage to climb out of his hole. He put a tourniquet on his leg and walked almost four miles back to base, every one of his buddies' dog tags in his bloody pocket.

And here he was again, hiding with a supposedly dead body in a cheap pine box built for one. After what seemed like an eternity the driver's door opened and closed again. A few jostling minutes later, Lew knew he'd just escaped from prison. But he wasn't free just yet. He surmised that somewhere between here and the coroner, the van would stop. Either because the driver was in on it or because the men who wanted Miguel Colero's dead body had forced him to stop.

Lew couldn't see Colero's face in the dark, but every now and then he heard a muffled grunt and knew the drug lord was trying to talk under his gag. Lew thought about it and realized that if they were ambushed before he could figure out what to do, having Colero free, talking, and on his side might buy him some time, if not save his life. And if Colero went all stir-­crazy, Lew'd just rap him in the mouth with the gun and put the tape back on. A win-­win scenario, Lew style.

“You got some big
cojones
, I'll give you that, Katchbrow,” Colero said when his mouth was untaped. As Lew continued cutting him free, he could tell from the volume Colero was using that he was going to behave. “What's the deal?”

“The warden sold you out,” Lew said.

“
Cabron
,” Colero hissed.

“Well, there's more,” Lew said, trying to keep his bearings by feeling the turns of the van while he talked. So far, they seemed to be on course.

“Like what?”

“Like he hired me to kill you.”

“Didn't think someone like you would have a problem with that. Maybe I read you wrong,” Colero said.

“You didn't,” Lew said, taking neither pride nor guilt in who he was. “But the big issue now is where are we going?”

“
Sí
. Good question.”

“Either your enemies are going to meet us and carve you up—­and I'm guessing anyone who happens to be with you—­or we are headed for the coroner, and when they crack this puppy open we're going to have some fast talking to do.”

“You can bet we ain't goin' to the coroner,” Colero said. “They must have moved the date up,” he said more to himself.

“They?”

“
Sí
, there was a reason I needed to be dead and out today.”

“I figured as much,” Lew said. Just then he felt a turn and an acceleration that wasn't on his mental schedule.

“What is it?”

“Looks like you're right. We just turned away from downtown. And picked up speed.”

For once, Colero was quiet.

T
HEY HEARD THE
driver plead for his life, a gunshot answering him. Then someone pulled open the cube van's roll-­up door. Lew tried to peer out through a crack but it was the wrong angle. From the voices he'd heard before they shot the driver, he thought there were three of them. No doubt, one of them was the competition come to claim his crown from Colero. And his pound of flesh.

Somebody shouted in Spanish just before Lew heard a bolt pulled back. The bolt on an automatic weapon.

The repeating of the automatic weapon was deafening in the small space. The smell of gunpowder and ozone made it hard to breathe.

Splinters and smoke filled the air as the shooter yelled like an animal, filling the pine box with holes. When he finally stopped, he kicked the lid off the low-­grade coffin. It took some time before the air finally cleared. When it did, Lew imagined the shooter's smile disappeared.

“Impossible!” The shooter sputtered. Lew pictured the three men leaning forward and seeing that the only thing in the pine box was coroner supplies now perforated worse than peg board. Supplies that had been in two storage cupboards at the back of the van's cargo area just two minutes earlier.

Lew and Colero, each in a separate cupboard, kicked the doors open simultaneously. They came thrusting into the cargo area before the assassins knew what was happening. Lew fired his pistol once, hitting the gunman in the middle of his face. His head snapped back and flesh and cartilage exploded up into the air, backlit by the moonlight outside the truck. Lew kept pulling the trigger, but nothing fired. He quickly realized that Quinn had fucked him too.

One of the remaining men turned and ran around the corner. Lew knew that had to be the boss, who apparently wasn't so brave when the chips were falling. The other man reached for the gun hanging in the holster under his arm, but Lew was on him before he could unclip the leather. He hit him at a full run, the two men sailing through the air out the back of the truck and slamming down on the side of the road, Lew using the attacker's midsection as a landing pad for his knees and all two hundred and twenty pounds of his bulk.

Colero, still wearing most of the duct tape Lew had sliced so he could move his arms, jumped out the back screaming and went after the other man, who had run up the side of the truck toward a black Escalade parked across the road. Lew didn't care about him right now. Despite shooting bile and snot into the air on their landing, the man under Lew—­who was no jockey himself—­was still going for his gun. Lew grabbed the holster and fought with the man. Then he realized he still had the pistol in his other hand.

“Ah, fuck it,” Lew said. The gun might have been empty, but it was still a useful weapon. He raised his fist and slammed the barrel down straight into the attacker's eye socket. The one-­eyed man screamed and let go of the gun in his holster. “Big mistake.”

Lew snatched the gun out of the holster, stood up, and put two shots into the screaming henchman. The screaming stopped.

He turned in time to see Colero coming back around the end of the truck. Behind him, he could see a man lying in the road, lit up by the van's headlights. From the way the body was lying he could tell its back was broken. His head also seemed to be facing the wrong way.

“Guess I wasn't wrong about you after all,
amigo
,” Colero said with a smile.

“How the hell did you . . .” Lew looked at the small-­statured man and realized there was far more to him than a ­couple of colorful names. Then he saw that Colero was holding a gun similar to Lew's, each pointed at the other man.

Maybe I didn't think this all the way through.

Time stretched out. Steam rose in the cool night air from their sweaty faces, the corpses littering the street, and the still running engines of the two vehicles. They were on some back road in southern Mississippi. Lew knew if you died there, the only ones that would find you would be the gators and the survivalists.

“What now,
compadre
?” Colero asked, his gun leveled.

“The way I see it there's only one question,” Lew said, eyeing Colero. He figured if the drug king had wanted him dead he would have been in the ditch by now. And it never hurt to have friends in low places.

“And that is?”

Lew dropped his weapon to his side. “I don't suppose you'd let me take the Escalade?”

Colero smiled and dropped his gun as well.

“I like you, Katchbrow. You don't say too much. You can obviously take care of yourself too.”

“Seems to me all I've been doing lately is taking care of you,” Lew said before he closed the van's back door. He picked up the first man he'd shot under the arms. Colero did the same with the other man. Together they dragged them off the side of the road into the brush.

“That's my point,” Colero said. “I could use a man like you.”

“Sorry, I like the girls,” Lew said.

“I'm serious,
cabron
. Money like you've never seen,” Colero said. They headed up to drag the other body off the road.

“I've seen a lot,” Lew said. He had the shoulders and Colero had the feet of the strangely folded wannabe drug lord. They swung him several times and then let go, watching him sail into the tall grass. The shape of that man reminded Lew not to push this
little
guy too far.

“I could change your life, Katchbrow. Come with me.”

“I can't,” Lew said, wiping sweat off his forehead with his shoulder.

“Ah, I know that look. Unfinished business. In that case—­” Colero pulled a pen and paper out of his pocket and wrote something down before tearing off a sheet of paper and holding it out to Lew. “Here. For when you're done.”

Lew looked at the paper and saw it was a phone number.

“Good luck,” Colero said, holding out his hand. Lew shook it. He couldn't think of any situation where he'd need to call a drug dealer, but he stuffed the number in his pocket anyway and drove off into the night.