Cartel (37 page)

The man nodded. "Padre Rodrigo."

Benny said something in Spanish that included the word tío, and the man nodded.

"If he comes," Scott said and pointed to the bottom of the refrigerator, "please help him."

The man nodded again.

"But nobody else," Scott said.

"Sí," the man said.

Scott knew Father Rodrigo wasn't coming, and he was pretty sure Benny did too.

Ten minutes later they were all eating tacos in the dining room. Scott was sure they were the best tacos he'd ever eat-en.

They said goodbye at the back door. The woman gave each of the children a couple of sugar cookies wrapped in foil. Benny and Victoria took turns kissing the woman on the cheek. Scott shook hands with the man. "Muchos gracias, señor."

The man nodded. "You are very welcome."

An alley ran behind the restaurant. They followed it to an-other alley, turned right, and stopped just short of the next street. They stayed in the shadows, outside the circle of light cast by a nearby streetlamp. The street was dark and desert-ed.

"You weren't kidding about the police not coming to this neighborhood," Scott said. "Half a dozen people shot in-side a church and not one cop car in sight."

"They've been told to say away," Benny said.

Scott looked both ways along the empty street but couldn't get his bearings after traveling a couple of hundred yards underground. "Do you know where the car is?"

Benny pointed left. "That way." Then she slipped the Beretta from the back of her pants.

"Remember," Scott said, "you only have two bullets."

Benny nodded. "I'll make them count."

Scott turned to Victoria and the children. "There's a car we can use parked a few blocks from here."

"Where are we going?" Samantha asked.

"Home, sweetie," Scott said. "We're going home."

"Are those men still chasing us?"

"I don't think so," Scott said. "But we still have to be careful. And quiet." He pulled out the empty Beretta.

"Aren't you out of bullets?" Jake asked.

"You saw that, huh?" Scott said.

"I was watching you."

"Let's hope the bad guys didn't notice." Scott looked at Benny. "You ready?"

She nodded.

Scott led them down the sidewalk. Victoria and the three kids were behind him. Benny was last. They walked through two empty blocks. A car drove past and Scott tensed, but nothing happened. Just punks with Latin techno blasting from the speakers and rattling the windows. As Scott neared the next intersection, Benny gave a low whistle. He glanced back and saw her signal for him to turn left. He turned and kept going. Everybody stayed close and walked in the shadows as much as possible.

At the next street, Scott stopped when he recognized the intersection. The cross street was the one the church was on. The one where they had parked the car. The church was a block to the right. He looked left and saw the Oldsmobile at the end of the next block. He turned and led everyone to-ward it.

Scott was twenty feet from the Oldsmobile when two men stepped out from the shadows at the edge of the side-walk. Jones and G.I. Joe. Both pointed pistols at him, Beretta M-9s, just like the ones Scott and Benny were carrying, except the guns these guys carried probably had plenty of bullets in them.

G.I. Joe's suit jacket was soaked in blood, and his right arm hung limply at his side. Blood dripped from his finger-tips onto his shoe. The pistol was in his left hand, but he held it steady.

Victoria screamed when she saw them. Scott reached back and nudged her directly behind him.

For several seconds Scott and the two men just stared at each other. Then Jones sighed. "Are you really going to make me say it?"

"Say what?" Scott asked.

"Put your pistol down on the sidewalk. Set it down easy. Don't drop it. The way things are going for me today, if you drop it, it will go off and I'll get killed by an accidental discharge."

"I'd sure hate for that to happen."

Jones smiled. "Point taken."

Scott didn't move. Just stared at the CIA man.

So Jones aimed his pistol directly at Scott's face. "I meant what I said."

Scott set the empty pistol on the sidewalk. "There aren't any copies," he said. "None that I know of, anyway. And no emails. Even if I had wanted to send it to somebody, the file is too big to email."

"You could have used Dropbox or some other file-sharing website," Jones said.

"I didn't."

"But you were able to watch it, right?"

Scott nodded. "On an old donated computer in the church rectory. Check it out. It doesn't even have an Internet connection."

"I believe you."

"Even if I had a copy, I wouldn't use it," Scott said. "The safety of my family is a lot more important to me than what's on that video."

"So I have, in effect, permanent leverage over you," Jones said, lowering the pistol. "Because no matter what happens, I, or one of my associates, could always get to your family."

"Exactly," Scott said, feeling the faintest glimmer of hope. "You won. You have the video. Which means it doesn't exist. And never has."

"You make a good case," Jones said. "Maybe you should have gone to law school instead of joining the DEA. Think how different your life would be right now."

"That's exactly what my wife tells me," Scott said, won-dering how this guy knew so much about him. "Maybe I will."

Jones laughed. "I'm not sure how to take that, the fact that I sound like your wife." He rubbed his eyes with his left hand like a man who was very tired. "As for law school...I'm afraid that's not going to happen. I'm sorry." He aimed the pistol at Scott.

"Wait!" Benny said as she stepped in front of Scott, her hands raised in surrender. "He's telling the truth. We don't have any copies. We're not a threat to you."

Scott opened his mouth to tell Benny to get out of the way, but then he noticed the Beretta stuck in the back of her pants, just a foot in front of him, grip angled to the right. An easy draw for him.

Jones reached into the pocket of his suit coat and with-drew the flash drive. Holding it by the lanyard, he said, "You people are still acting like this is what's important. This is not what's important." As he talked, the pistol in his other hand drooped until it was pointed at the sidewalk. "I'm sure that someone, somewhere, has a copy. If not you, then someone else. And it will get out. That's why this is not what's important. What is important is-"

Scott snatched the pistol from Benny's pants. Benny shouted, "Everybody down!" as she ducked and spun around behind him. Victoria said something to the kids. Scott sensed a lot of movement behind him, but he ignored it. His brain was in hyperdrive, totally focused on finding the white insert on the Beretta's front sight and lining it up with his target.

Then G.I. Joe fired.

Scott saw the muzzle flash but didn't hear the shot. He didn't feel anything either. That was good. Maybe he hadn't been hit. Then his front sight was on target, tracking up G.I. Joe's midline, past his chest, throat, chin, and mouth, and settling on his nose. Scott aligned the front sight with the notched rear sight, going for the instant kill of a headshot but giving himself a couple of inches to spare.

Several years ago, he had attended an advanced tactical shooting course taught by a former member of the New Zea-land SAS. The ex-SAS trooper had insisted that his students fire only headshots. His argument was that it was always worth the extra second it took to aim for the head and de-stroy your opponent's central nervous system by putting a bullet through his brain.

The other way bullets typically kill people, by inflicting damage to the circulatory system, takes longer. A grown man can take up to sixty seconds to bleed out, so even someone with a fatal wound to the circulatory system can fire a lot of rounds before he dies, as eight FBI agents found out the hard way in Miami in 1986 when they took on two bank robbers in a close-quarter shootout that left two agents dead and five others wounded. But no one can shoot back with a blown-out brainstem.

Scott pulled the trigger.

The bullet hit G.I. Joe under his left eye. Blood, bone, and brains exploded from the back of his head and his body collapsed on the sidewalk like a watermelon dropped from ten stories. Scott shifted his aim. But Mr. Jones was already firing. Scott counted two flashes before he got his sights lined up. Then a third flash just as he squeezed the trigger, their two muzzle flashes merging into a solid ball of fire.

Behind him Scott heard a scream. He glanced back, normally a fatal mistake when facing a still-standing oppo-nent. But he was out of bullets. And those were his children back there.

Benny was down. Hit hard and curled up in a ball on her side. Her black Polo shirt was already soaking wet. The three kids were on the ground too, but not hurt. Victoria was sprawled on top of them. There was no blood on Victoria.

Scott turned back to face his targets. G.I. Joe was dead. Jones was gone. There was blood on the street where Jones had been standing. The flash drive was on the ground, the lanyard splashed with blood.

Benny screamed in pain. Which meant she was still alive. Scott double-checked all three kids. They were terri-fied but unhurt. He saw Victoria push herself up to her knees and check herself for wounds. She was okay too.

Scott grabbed his son's arm to get his attention. He pointed to the Oldsmobile. "Get the girls in that car. In the front seat. All of you."

Victoria was already kneeling beside Benny and rolling her onto her back. Benny howled in pain, then started curs-ing in Spanish. There was a hole in her shirt just below her left collarbone.

"Check for an exit wound," Scott said.

Victoria slid her hand inside Benny's shirt and across her bare shoulder. Her hand found something high on Ben-ny's back. Victoria looked like she might throw up, but she kept her hand where it was. "It went all the way through."

Scott knelt beside them. "Help me get her in the car."

They carried Benny to the Oldsmobile and laid her in the back seat. Victoria climbed in beside her. "Put pressure on both sides of the wound," Scott said.

"With what?"

Scott scanned the passenger compartment of the Oldsmobile, hoping to find an old towel or a T-shirt. Even napkins or paper towels would help. He saw nothing. "Use your hands."

"We need to get her to the nearest hospital."

"Not until we get across the border," Scott said.

Victoria was going to say more, but Scott shut the door. All three kids were in the front passenger seat. The girls sit-ting side by side, and Jake, kneeling on the floorboard facing them, trying to buckle them in.

As Scott ran around the car to the driver's side, he spot-ted the flash drive lying on the bloody sidewalk. He picked it and shoved it in his pocket. Then he saw G.I. Joe's Beretta pistol, still clutched in the dead man's hand. Scott pried it loose and checked the magazine. He saw the back of a 9mm cartridge peeking out from the hole next to the engraved number "10." At least ten in the magazine and one in the pipe.

My lucky day, Scott thought as he shoved the pistol into the back of his pants and ran to the Oldsmobile.

Scott slid behind the steering wheel and dug the keys out from beneath the floor mat. He cranked the motor, yanked the gearshift down into DRIVE, and stomped the gas pedal. The Oldsmobile coughed and shuddered as it built up speed. Two blocks ahead there was only one SUV parked in front of the church. Before, there had been two.

At the first cross street, Scott eased off the gas, spun the wheel over and half-slid into a wobbly right turn. Then he jammed the accelerator all the way to the floor. The two girls beside him were craning their necks to see over the dashboard, and even Jake, who was crouched on the floorboard in front of them, was peeking his head up to see where they were going. "Keep your heads down!" Scott said.

Both of his kids responded by scrunching down lower, but Rosalita looked at him like she didn't understand. Only then did it occur to Scott that she might not speak English. Then Samantha shocked him by laying a hand on Rosalita's shoulder and saying something to her in Spanish. Rosalita ducked her head. Taking his eyes off the road long enough to glance at his daughter, Scott said, "You speak Spanish?"

"We're learning it at school," Samantha said.

Scott looked at his son. "Did you know your sister spoke Spanish?"

Jake shot his dad a gap-toothed grin and said, "Sí, se-ñor."

As the Oldsmobile blew past a cross street, Scott tried to get the name from the street sign, but either there was no sign or he had missed it. He glanced into the back seat. Vic-toria had taken off her blouse and turned it into a makeshift pressure bandage. She was squeezing Benny's shoulder with both hands, one on the entrance wound, the other on the exit wound. "How is she?" Scott asked.

Victoria, her face, chest, and hands smeared with blood, looked up at him. "I don't know. But she's still breathing."

"Dad, look out!" Jake shouted, and Scott snapped his head around. A car was crossing the street in front of them, and the Oldsmobile's headlights reflected the red Alto sign coming up on them way too fast. Scott stomped the brake pedal. It was mushy and went almost to the floor before the brakes caught and the wheels locked up. The girls snapped forward against their shared seatbelt, and Jake whacked his forehead on the glove box and yelled, "Ouch!"

"I told you to keep your head down," Scott said.

"But, dad..."

Scott swerved and missed the other car by less than a foot. He stepped on the gas again and saw that the street was clear ahead for at least a block. He glanced into the back seat. "Hey, Benny, are you okay?"

Victoria had managed to brace herself against the back of the front seat and had somehow kept Benny from tum-bling onto the floor. "It would help both of us a lot if you would drive a little more carefully."

"I'll work on that," he said as he turned around.

"By the way, Scott," his wife said, "this better not be your girlfriend I'm taking care of back here."