Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (12 page)

Hopping across the aisle, I tailgated the threesome as it hurried to the front door and only just managed to get there in time to see Matheson whisked away in a wheelchair. I kept following. If the overhead signs were any indication, the uniformed escort was speeding him to Inmigración. Walking fast, I managed to keep them in sight, at least right up to the time when they opened a door marked
DO NOT ENTER
and disappeared behind it.

I gave the door a push. Locked from the other side, damn it. A female Inmigración officer materialized and waved me on. Not having any alternative, I joined one of the lengthy queues leading to a bored passport clerk, filled out the paperwork and waited my turn. Matheson was gone, his escape aided by the authorities. There was no reason to be surprised about that. The folks he worked for had multi-story houses full of cash and almost everyone has their price.

The Cool Room was back at the top of the list. I collected my Sig from baggage and took a cab to a place called Casco Veijo, the Old Town, where this former CIA agent Panda had put down some semi-retirement roots.

Speeding along the waterfront, I had a mind that there were at least two Panama Cities. One was a vaguely futuristic steel and glass version that could have been a set in a cheesy sci-fi flick. The other was a partially renovated old Spanish settlement across the bay. Neither seemed occupied by the people living in Panama City who, from what I could gather, appeared to collect in the spaces between the two, like plaque.

It was pushing ninety degrees by the time I reached the Cool Room, a hideaway occupying the ground floor of a three-hundred-year-old building, tropical plants sprouting from cracks in its ancient external walls. The bar itself was a cavernous dark room with exposed wood beams and raw stucco walls. Beneath the bar’s swirling ceiling fans, away from the sun, the temperature dived fifteen degrees or so. Louisiana swamp blues and ice-cold beer were being served, the latter pulled from buckets of crushed ice for tourists sitting at tables or perched at the bar.

A local girl worked the bar – full lips, big brown eyes, dark skin, short-cropped black wiry hair, athletic. She wore loose gym shorts and a thin mauve undershirt that advertised her nipples as she jiggled along to ‘Polk Salad Annie’. She could take a seat at my pool bar any time she liked.

“¿Qué te gustaría?” she asked me with a little head and shoulders movement, timed to the music.

“Un cerveza, por favor,” I said, motioning at the bottles of Atlas keeping a pair of English tourists beside me company.

She bobbed behind the counter and came up with the beer, ice sliding down its frosted sides, and popped the top of it reverse-handed with a bottle opener hanging from a hook. She placed the beer on the bar on an Atlas coaster. I gave her five bucks. “Speak English?”

“Maybe,” she replied, implying it depended on what came next, and handed over my change.

“Keep it. Panda here?”

“Who?”

“I have an appointment,” I replied.

“How is your name?”

I knew what she meant. “Cooper.”

Walking away, she was on her cell a heartbeat later, I assumed, calling Panda. There were plenty of exits in case I needed to leave in a hurry. I counted seven and was working out the best lines to them when a tall guy wearing a Panama hat, smoking a cigar and carrying a beer gut supported by his belt, darkened one of them. He looked older than his mug shot. There was a telltale nod in my direction from the barmaid. The big man came over and sat in the space the English tourists had by now vacated.

“Got some ID?” he said.

I showed him my passport. He flicked through the pages, ending on the one with my photo. He told me to take off the hat. I took it off.

“Welcome to Panama, Mr Cooper,” he said, satisfied, handing back the passport. “Been expecting you, but maybe not so soon.” He held out his hand and we shook. It was a large warm hand as soft as bread dough.

“Nice place you got here,” I remarked.

“Retirement’s been good.” He glanced down at his gut. “A little too good.”

My eyes went for a tour of the bar and couldn’t help but linger on the barmaid as she placed a glass of something clear with ice and mint leaves in front of Panda.

In case I had any ideas, he said, “That’s Claudia. She’s French, from our Paris station. Used to kill for a living until she started to enjoy it. The garrotte was her weapon of choice. This is the pasture they put her out to. Chin-chin.” He air-toasted me and took a slurp of his drink. “Not quite the same when it’s water, though,” he said with a shrug. “The ol’ blood pressure’s stratospheric these days. Ironic now that I’m in this low-pressure existence, out of the life. You? Guessing – I’d say your BP’s around one-ten over sixty and your resting heart rate is somewhere in the fifties.” He nodded to himself. “Gun battles, car chases … That shit keeps you fit. Pilates is for turd burglars.” Another toast. He drank, sucked on the cigar and filled the immediate area with smoke that smelled like the guts of something washed up on the beach.

“What’s the latest from El Paso?” I asked. “You know anything about Lieutenant Colonel Wayne?”

“Friend of yours?”

I nodded

“Wayne … One of the guys shot at the El Paso hospital overnight.”

“Yeah.”

“From what I heard, a bullet creased his head. He was lucky. The shooter must have thought your pal was a goner and left it at that. He put two rounds in the rookie on guard duty. It was the second bullet killed him.”

Okay, I could relax a little about Arlen. “I just shared the flight down here with the shooter.”

“Matheson was on the plane?”

“In the seat across the aisle.” I flicked a chunk of ice off the counter.

“You wanna back it up to the truck park and tell me what happened?”

I filled him in on the gun battle at dawn between Deputy Matheson and me, and Panda drew the only possible conclusion – that Matheson was on the payroll of the cartel that shipped the drugs north and perpetrated the massacre. “But what I don’t get,” I said, “is why he’s not hiding away somewhere – like in a deserted Norwegian fjord. He failed. Why confront his employer? You just know what his reward’s gonna be.”

Panda considered this, puffing on the burning dead thing between his lips. “Security might not have been his role. He might’ve been on the books just to observe and report. Fleeing south like he has – he’s essentially defected. And, as a law enforcement officer, he’s got the credentials being actively targeted by the cartels for recruitment. There are plenty of buyers. What he knows is invaluable to gangsters with upcoming operations over the border. And the first thing the Sheriff’s Office should be doing is changing their operations and protocols to make sure whatever Matheson has is rendered obsolete.”

“It gets better. Matheson’s uncle is the commander back at El Paso.”

“Really? At the Sheriff’s Office? Well that’s embarrassing,” Panda observed with a grin. After considering that bit of news for a few seconds, he added, “It’s also going to increase the nephew’s worth.”

“It’s a problem for me if Kirk Matheson’s boss is this Angel of Medellín. One of the first items on the list will be how the shipment was discovered by a certain OSI agent.”

“Well maybe his failure to pop you when he had the chance is your best defense. The fact that he missed the opportunity is not something he’s gonna brag about.”

I was thinking the same thing just as it came out of Panda’s mouth.

“Maybe you should’a just taken care of him on the plane,” he concluded.

I didn’t ask Panda how, exactly, but I suppose he was thinking I could’ve just asked the flight attendants to hold the guy while I shanked him with a plastic bread knife and had them open the hatch while the pilot and I threw the body out. The CIA always has the answer … I changed the subject. “So, Juan Apostles.”

“The Saint of Medellín. You wanna know where he is.” Panda signaled Claudia to freshen the drinks. “The short answer is I don’t know.”

Singing along to Ray Charles’ “Georgia”, Claudia changed out the empty bottle of Atlas while I tried to picture her with someone’s blue bulging throat between her hands and couldn’t quite get there.

“He doesn’t stay in one place too long and his schedule is random. Last week he was in Bogotá. This week …” Panda shrugged. “But I know where you can find some of his cronies.”

“Like the Tears of Chihuahua?”

“Unlikely. But you never know your luck.”

“Go on.”

“Have one of his people take you to him.”

“Get myself taken hostage?”

“You’re a fast learner, Cooper.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the idea, but it was a plan and that was more than I had. “So where do I start?”

“A town called Yaviza down the Pan-American Highway, on the edge of the meanest place on Earth.”

“I’ve been to some pretty mean places,” I told him, not that I wanted to get in a pissing contest with him about it.

“Yeah, right,” he said, brushing my mean places aside. “The Darién Gap, where you’re going, beats them all. If the drug traffickers, kidnappers, guerrillas and/or corrupt soldiers hiding out there don’t kill you, the snakes, wasps, septic cuts and/or gastroenteritis will. It’s the 21st century and they’ve sent rovers to Mars but they still haven’t built a road through the Darién Gap connecting North and South America. Too dangerous.”

“They’ve sent a rover to Mars?” I said. “Which model?”

Panda looked at me like he wondered if he’d truly heard what I just said. I could have told him that they also haven’t developed an effective test for prostate cancer that didn’t involve a rubber glove and lubricant, so I considered I’d gone easy on him.

“Head down the Pan-American Highway until you get to a town called Yaviza,” he repeated. “The bus won’t take you any further. Across the Rio Chucunaque there you’ll find a bar frequented by killers, drug runners, communists, nationalist militia, smugglers, insurgents and birdwatchers.”

“Birdwatchers?”

He shrugged. “The area is full of rare birds. Amphibians, too. If humans would just vacate the place, it could be a veritable Garden of Eden.”

“A killer’s a killer. How will I recognize the Saint’s brand?”

“Ask, I guess. You carrying? For your sake I hope it’s something heavy and semi automatic.”

“Sig 228.”

“Standard ball too, I suppose.”

I nodded.

“Hmm … Where you’re going, the nice neat holes government-issue ammo makes won’t do you any favors.”

*

I stayed overnight in the Casco Veijo, at a hotel Panda recommended. Sometime before midnight, I was woken by a knock on my door. It turned out to be Claudia.

“I come with a present, from Panda,” she said.

How thoughtful. I hoped she’d left her garrotte behind and opened the door wider, an invitation to come on in.

“Non, merci,”
she said, handing over Panda’s actual present – a box of hollow points for the Sig, the kind of ammo governments who’d signed treaties don’t issue to their militaries, the kind that leaves behind corpses with gaping wounds and minced skin and bone.

“Tell Panda thanks,” I said. And then, just in case, “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

Claudia was gone before I finished the question. I guessed that meant no.

The following morning, prior to boarding a bus for the border, I bought a bottle of eighty percent DEET mosquito repellent, the whining, biting critters being the worst thing about the jungle. I also bought a rucksack – easier to travel with than a suitcase and it made me look more like the tourists I saw at the bus station heading pretty much everywhere except southeast toward Colombia. The Darién Gap, around two hundred miles down the road, had a bad rap. Seemed the only folks going in that direction either lived there or hid there.

Panamanian police armed with submachine guns stopped the bus at three separate roadblocks, boarded and checked everyone’s papers. As the only gringo in sight I received particular interest, in particular what my business might be in Yaviza. I told them birdwatching and they responded uniformly along the lines that I was a crazy motherfucker with bats in my belfry. Several tried to talk me into going back to Panama City where it was less likely that I would be abducted or killed for sport. But, as I explained, there were no yellow-bellied sapsuckers in Panama City so what choice did I really have.

After one puncture and a burst radiator hose, the bus coughed into Yaviza ten hours later, three hours behind schedule. I eventually found a hotel, which was really just a cot in a room that smelled of urine, out the back of a cinderblock house with spaces in the blocks for windows and a single light bulb hanging from the ceiling, surrounded by insects. The guy who sold me the room, a
mestizo
Indian in dirty shorts with no front teeth, drew my attention to the floor where there was a mosquito coil on a plate with a box of matches and this, I gathered, was proof that this room was Yaviza’s answer to the Ritz. I wasn’t so sure about that until I slapped on some DEET and took a stroll around the town to get my bearings. The place was small, poor, tired and dark, with no public street lighting. It had ‘end of the road’ written all over it. In fact, the Pan-American Highway, a mighty network of roads that spanned the continents of North and South America for a distance of over twenty-nine thousand miles, fizzled out in Yaviza, becoming a kind of driveway that kinked to the left and turned into a dirt path spotted with dogshit.

Cars and even scooters were rare in town, exhausted and insect-ravaged horses having taken their place. Indeed, horses had been outnumbering motorized vehicles for the last hundred miles or so giving the impression that, as the bus rolled down the highway, it was also heading back in time.

Dinner was a hand of bananas and a Coke purchased from a woman nursing a crying infant, sitting in front of a small general store stocking old products with faded packaging, the roller shutter at half-mast in front of heavy vertical steel bars. Behind the bars was an old TV sitting on a box, a soap playing. Every handful of seconds, in order to hear what was happening on the program, the woman would
shush
the baby and give it a slap on the leg, which would only make it cry some more.

And then a gunshot rang out, a rolling boom with a hard crack at its center that took me by surprise, along with Yaviza’s dog population that began a howling, yapping chorus. Leaving the bananas and the Coke behind, I moved in the direction of the sound, my hand going to the small of my back to check that the Sig was where I remembered putting it. No one else was on the street. The woman quickly relocated herself and the baby behind the bars, pulling the shutter closed behind her.

Heading for the source of the gunshot took me straight to the river and a pedestrian suspension bridge spanning it. Stopping to listen, I could hear the hubbub of men talking, carried on the cool night air, but on this moonless night I couldn’t locate the source. I walked across the bridge, which allowed a better view of the river bend. A couple of hundred yards upstream, a yellow light appeared, partially buried in black shadow. That had to be the place, the bar Panda had talked about. I crossed the bridge and found a pathway down by the river.

A few minutes later, crouched among the trees, I reconnoitered a shack that was part cinderblock, part corrugated steel and surprisingly large. As I watched, two men dragged a third out the door and dumped him in the shadows. Once they’d left, I worked my way over to those shadows and found a warm corpse with a head, what was left of it, turned to mush.

The windows were screens of rough cinderblock lattice that let in light, air and mosquitoes, same as my hotel. If the noise coming from inside and the number of horses tethered to the trees was any indication, there had to be quite a crowd in there enjoying itself. Someone shouted and then a couple of glasses shattered. A scrawny
mestizo
kid in a cowboy hat and faded jungle pattern camos came out and loitered in the doorway, sucking a bottle of beer, a 12-gauge Remington pump on his hip. I took a deep breath, waved the cloud of mozzies out of my face, stood up and walked out of the shadows. The kid caught a fright, almost choking on his beer when he saw the gringo with an I ♥ M
EXICO
ball cap emerge from the darkness.

“Mine’s the chestnut bay over by the poison ivy,” I said to his open mouth as I stepped onto the landing. “See she gets a carrot, will ya?” I flipped him a quarter. The kid was paralyzed with indecision long enough for me to walk past him unhindered and through the front door.

Inside, it reeked of booze, sweat, body odor, stale tobacco and weed smoke. And the dozen or so characters in the joint looked like it smelled – unwashed jungle-living desperadoes without a shred of dental hygiene between them. The furniture was rudimentary – packing crates for tables and the chairs short-cut logs stood on end. The booze being poured came from unbranded bottles. This was one bar that had never seen NASCAR or a promo girl and, on the positive side, no Canadian ice hockey either. One other point worth noting: it was suddenly very quiet in there and everyone was looking at me. I made eye contact with a man holding a bottle. Maybe he was the barman. “Miller Lite, Bub,” I said, breaking the ice.

Things went downhill pretty quickly from there. Two men pulled revolvers with barrels almost as long as their arms and stuck them in my face. I heard the words
“cabrón”
and “motherfucker”,
cabrón
meaning a number of things including “he-goat” and “asshole”. Motherfucker needed no translation.

“Quiero ver Santo de Medellín, Santo de Medellín!”
I said as I was pulled across the room, my hands above my head, and thrown down behind a table awash with booze and cigarette ash.

One man pulled my head back while another pushed the barrel of his revolver into my mouth and the Sig was ripped from the concealment holster.

“Why do you want to see the Saint of Medellín? What business do you have with him?” The voice was soft-spoken with a lisp.

Hands patted me down, found some loose rounds for the Sig in a thigh pocket and pulled them out along with my wallet and the bottle of DEET. “He’s clean,” someone announced in Spanish.

The muzzle of the .44 Magnum barrel in my mouth was warm and tasted of metal and gun oil. Recently fired. I thought of the body lying out in the shadows with the mushy head. I said something, or at least tried to, but it’s hard to make yourself understood with a mouth full of Magnum. The barrel was removed. I spat saliva and gun oil onto the floor. “I said he needs me.”

The man with the soft-spoken voice scoffed. “Why does the Saint of Medellín need
you
?”

“He’s at war with Texas law enforcement. I can help him win.”

“Who are you that you can make this promise?”

“When was the last time you looked at a news broadcast?” I said, trying to get a peek at this guy doing the negotiating.

Someone slapped my face.

“You answer questions,” said the soft voice, lisping over the esses, “you do not ask them.”

“I was a federal agent. I killed some deputies yesterday. Turn on your TV. You got a TV?”

“So you’re a cop killer? Why you do this?”

“To help the Saint.”

“Why?”

“Money,” I said. “Only reason there is.”

The man doing all the talking took the seat opposite, my wallet in his hands. He was one ugly son of a bitch. In his late fifties or early sixties, a cheek and part of his lower lip had been shot off, the old wound gnarled over with white and purple scarring, explaining the lisp. From the exhortations of his pals, I gathered his name was
El Mala Cara
– the Bad Face. That was putting it mildly.

He examined my driver’s license. “So you leave your country behind, your employer, your family, Mr Cooper. That’s a big move. Why?”

“You want a sob story?”

“
Si
– unless you want me to kill you right now.”

Hard to refuse. “I got no family. I live alone in the burbs of DC. And Uncle Sam’s not exactly forthcoming with the financial rewards so fuck him, right? I saw an opportunity. I took it.”

“Kill him,” advised one of the men with a permanent sneer and my Sig shoved down the front of his pants. He was looking at the cap on my head. Maybe he didn’t like Mexico.

“I do not believe his lies,” said someone else behind me.

“Okay, why would I walk in here otherwise?” I replied. “That would be a pretty stupid thing to do.”

“
Si
, maybe you are stupid,” someone agreed.

Old Fuckedface stared intently at me, summing things up, weighing the odds. He stood up. “You like games?”

I shrugged. “Hide the sausage, rummy …”

A man was wrangled into the seat opposite me, the one just vacated. This guy was different to the rest. His clothes were threadbare and civilian. He was bearded, blond and flecked with gray. And he was clearly shitting himself. “No, no, no, no …” he said over and over, his eyes ranging wildly around the room.

He was a captive or hostage or maybe both.

A large black revolver was slammed onto the table in front of me, sending a wave of the spilled booze off edges of the box. A Magnum .44, the Smith & Wesson Model 29. The Dirty Harry model. I didn’t like where this was going. “You don’t like rummy?” I asked.

Mala Cara
picked up the weapon, flicked out the cylinder, ejected six rounds and put one back. He spun the cylinder, flicked it back in and cocked the hammer. At around this time I realized the room was putting money down. Amazing how fast things had gotten bent out of shape. The odds were simple – one in six that someone was gonna get their head blown off. The Magnum was handed to the man seated opposite, the captive. Mr Fuckedface was betting that someone would be me.

“Shoot. Do it,” he told the captive.

One of the men pressed a pistol against the captive’s head and cocked the hammer. I heard a pistol cocked against my own head. The captive aimed the Magnum at my nose, the black void of its muzzle as big as a rat hole.

“Do it,” said Fuckedface.

The Magnum was shaking in the captive’s hands. “No, no, no …”

“Do it.”

I was breathing hard. It had to be thirty degrees but I was cold, the temperature of fear. One chance in six. Dirty Harry’s revolver was oscillating quite a bit, the captive fighting the inevitable, his finger white on the trigger. It was shoot or be shot.
Go ahead punk. Do you feel lucky?
As a matter of fact, no, not really.

El Mala Cara
drew his own pistol and pressed the muzzle into the captive’s temple. “Do it. I count to three. One.”

Sweat streamed down the captive’s horrified face along with tears, his forefinger moving the trigger.

“Two.”

“Fifty to a hundred million,” I said. “That’s what I’m worth to the Saint. How much you gonna win if I get shot? A hundred bucks? What will the Saint do to you when he finds out how much money you cost him?”

No one bought it.

“Three.”

I held my breath. Frogs croaked, mosquitoes hummed, river water gurgled, a horse blew air across it lips.

Click!

Nothing. Silence. I couldn’t even hear the frogs croaking. The Magnum’s hammer was resting in its seat, having come down on an empty chamber. The release of tension exploded into a cheer, winners and losers contributing to the exultant roar.

I figured I had maybe a second to act, two at most.

The guy standing over me with a pistol at my head was looking at his chums, toasting someone, a winner who bet on an empty chamber. I grabbed the barrel of his gun, which was pressed against my skull, twisted and pulled it. He reacted, squeezing the trigger, and Mr Bad Face’s eye became a burst of red spray as his head flew back. The guy holding the pistol’s handgrip had no idea what was going on. I re-aimed, pulled again. The barman went down this time, shot in the hip, the ultra-close range resulting in the top of his leg and buttock being blown away.

Panic swept the room. Other folks started firing just to get off a shot. Keeping my hand on the pistol, I came under the guy’s outstretched arm, turned and swung my forearm into his elbow joint and heard it crack. He screamed, released the weapon and took a few steps toward one of his pals, who then shot him in the neck. Maybe they weren’t friends.

And then all went quiet, a different kind of quiet to the one that greeted my entry. This one was punctuated by groans and a few whimpers.

“Okay,” said a voice in English. “You want the Saint, I take you to him.”

I looked over. It was the kid on valet parking duties at the front door. He seemed pretty relaxed given the bloodbath around him and was holding his shotty by the barrel, the stock below his knees. I grabbed the hostage by the collar, dragged him to his feet and made for the exit, stopping by Mr Even-More-Now
Mala Cara
to reclaim my wallet, cell and money, pick up the bottle of DEET kicked against a wall, and to prize my Sig from the hand of a dead guy lying on the floor and staring at the ceiling. The loose rounds were in his top pocket. He wouldn’t be needing them either.