Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (14 page)

“So where do I find Apostles?” I asked Marco, getting impatient as he and his pals casually dunked cheese in mugs of watery hot chocolate.

“Medellín,” he replied.

I wasn’t prepared for that. Medellín was at least three hundred klicks down the highway. “I thought we were going to find him here.”

“His people, not him. Maybe we get lucky. We go look.”

This entailed bar hopping from one dirty glass of moonshine to another. There were a lot of bars. After half a dozen of those glasses, I could see very little. After a dozen, I couldn’t care. Late in the evening, we stumbled toward a bustling establishment down on the waterfront where fellow drunks were spilling out onto the road. There was something different about this place: it was the presence of a couple of well-fed sentries out front wearing jackets. This looked promising and I sobered me up. I nudged Marco and Eduardo and our party walked farther on down the road.

“Back there. Angel’s men?” I asked Eduardo, stopping against a stack of old crates.

He shrugged, then belched. I took that as a maybe.

Whoever they were, they watched the comings and goings like they were waiting for trouble. They were
someone’s
men. I walked a dozen steps down to the water and scanned the back door to the bar. A sweeping veranda, groaning with drunks, was built over the water. A jetty adjoined the establishment and a white RHIB, powered by a couple of high-performance outboard motors, bobbed against it. The boat’s own floodlights lit it up. A couple of heavies loitered on the jetty, wearing jackets like the two at the front door.

‘Let’s go have a drink,’ I told Eduardo, who was swaying like a tree that’s not sure which way it’s gonna fall.

The bar’s front entrance exhaled a cloud of steamed alcohol, sweat and tobacco haze as Marco and I followed Eduardo inside. I avoided eye contact with the security on the door, but caught a glimpse of a machine pistol stuffed in the back of one of the men’s pants, hitching up his jacket. Inside, the bar was clogged with customers, nearly all of whom were black. The uniform was stained singlets and shorts, working men who rarely shaved or showered and whose dark bodies had been turned to gristle by a diet of hard work and
aguardiente,
the local firewater.

The place turned out to be both a bar and a whorehouse – booze on the first floor and a good time on the second. Against the walls were tables and chairs where women, who ranged in age from way-too-young to toothless grannies, sat on laps and tried to raise some interest with their hands from the men they were sitting on. A chubby middle-aged woman in a pink slip stood up and led away a drunk who shuffled behind her like a zombie. A young man immediately filled the vacated seat and accepted an auntie on his knee.

In a corner, a couple of old blind guys sat strumming ancient scratched guitars and sang for pesos. While I watched, one of them fell off his stool onto the floor. Several admirers laughed and applauded, helped him back onto his stool and rewarded him with a slug from a bottle. He picked up where he left off, barely missing a beat. Maybe it was all part of the act.

Marco materialized with a couple of bottles of
aguardiente
and a handful of glasses. We moved through the main bar. I couldn’t see anyone of interest. The veranda over the river was the last stop and I saw immediately that this was the place. Compressed drunken bodies crowded one side of the veranda while a man in a clean blue shirt and blue jeans, sitting on an old comfortable lounge chair with arms, occupied the other. A couple of guards like the ones out front and on the jetty, one on each side of him, kept watchful eyes on the locals while two young girls from upstairs took turns giving the seated man a blowjob. His head was tilted back and his eyes were closed.

“
¿Qué estás mirando, gringo?”
asked one of the man’s guards.

It took a moment to realize that I was the only gringo around and that the question, “What are you looking at?” was directed at me. In fact, it wasn’t that the guy’s clothes were clean and pressed, a novelty in these parts, or the fact that the girls plying their trade on him were still girls. It was the tattoos on his face that had caught my fullest attention, tears that began small at the corner of his left eye and grew in size as they ran down his face, growing as big as eggs. This was Arturo Perez.

“Your boss, the Tears of Chihuahua,” I said in bad Spanish. “I’ve been looking for him.”

The bodyguards exchanged a nervous glance and their hands found their shooters.

“Easy, fellas,” I said as, nice and slow, reaching around to my back pocket. I was aware of the Sig, but that wasn’t what I was after.

Guns were pulled. The veranda emptied.

My thumb and forefinger gripped a folded sheet of newsprint, brought it around. I held it out to them. One of the men took it and shook it open.

“I heard you’re hiring. I’ve come for a job,” I said indicating the front page of
El Diario
they were looking at. “That’s my letter of introduction.”

The girls tried to run off but Perez grabbed them by their necks and refocused them on their task.

This made me think about Gail Sorwick and the way she’d fought back, biting down hard. Maybe Perez was a fast healer. Maybe Gail had bitten down on someone else. Maybe Perez hadn’t been at Horizon Airport at all. Maybe someone just wanted us to believe he was there. It was a lot to suppose on the strength of a blowjob, but it reminded me why I was there and what the folks back home wanted.

Perez’s eyes fluttered open, black holes of hollow nothingness. He stared at me for a few seconds. “
Mátalo
,” he rasped with a voice that was dry and hard –
kill him
.

“Is it the hat?” It had to be the hat. I removed the I ♥ M
EXICO
ball hat and flicked it into the river. One of the bodyguards cocked his Steyr machine pistol, and came toward me. Maybe it wasn’t the hat, but I was done with it anyway. “Your shipments to the US are getting nailed,” I said, doing my best to keep the fear out of my voice. “I can help you get them through. I know the El Paso police procedures, the Sheriff’s Office procedures, I’ve worked with the Texas Rangers, US Army Special Forces, the Air Force …”

The guy with the Steyr kept coming. It might have all ended there, except for Marco, Eduardo and their two FARC buddies who pulled weapons on the bodyguards and everyone suddenly got a little more thoughtful.

“You need me,” I said into the quiet. “The Saint needs me.”

No one breathed for too many seconds. And then Perez laughed. No sound came from him, but there were creases in the corners of his eyes, the side of his mouth lifted and this gut twitched a few times so I figured that’s what he was doing. He shooed the girls off, tucked himself in and closed his fly, and then gestured to his men to take a step back. I indicated to Marco and the others to likewise stand down.

Perez’s eyes were polished black pebbles – hard, cold and inscrutable. Damned if I could read anything in them.

“You came prepared,” Perez said in English, that harsh, dry voice of his reminding me of a throat cancer survivor. “That is good.
Continuar …”
Continue.

I tried to get my heart rate under control. “Your cartel sends cargo across the border in aircraft. That’s what I’m trained for – controlling air traffic in war zones. I can get you in and out of the US, thread your aircraft through Texas airspace. I’ll get you in deeper, safer, closer to your markets. Your last big shipment was a bust, and so was the one before that. You’ve lost how many millions?”

Perez shifted in his seat and I saw a scabbard on his belt, a mother-of-pearl handle protruding from it. Was that the knife used on Ms Sorwick? Perez motioned for the page of newsprint. “What do you want for this service?” he asked as the bodyguard handed it to him.

“Same as everyone – a big house, a Ferrari, women I currently can’t afford. Maybe a little revenge.”

“Revenge?”

That got him interested. I slowly unbuttoned my shirt and took it off. “Yeah, for a total lack of appreciation. I’ve given whatever was asked for the fight for freedom,” I said as I turned around. “I’ve got nothing to show for it except for what you see here. I’m 34 years of age, got maybe twenty more years if I’m lucky before the wheels fall off the wagon. I figure it’s time to put what I’ve learned to use for an employer with a better benefits plan.”

“So you’re a killer,” said Perez, holding the front page away from his face, those hard flinty eyes of his showing signs of frailty. “You like to kill?”

“I wouldn’t say it’s a hobby.” It wasn’t the answer Perez wanted to hear. I hardened the fuck up and rephrased. “If it needs to be done, it gets done.”

“How many you kill here?” He nodded at the newsprint.

“Read it,” I said.

“You tell me.”

“Two, maybe four.”

“Was it two, or four?”

“It was a gun battle,” I replied. “People might have been killed in the crossfire.”

“What happened to the cocaine?”

“It was found.”

“Who found it?”

“A Sheriff’s deputy who died at the scene.”

“The deputy you killed?”

I put my shirt back on. “It says so right there in the newspaper, don’t it?”

He snorted, ridiculing the notion. “When you own the newspaper,” said Perez, “the news is a toy to play with.”

I never would’ve figured Perez for a philosopher.

“Why were you at this airport taking part in a gun battle?”

“Aircraft delivered the drugs. The Sheriff’s Office wanted to know how they did that undetected. I just happened to be there.” I shrugged. “Luck …”

“Luck.” Perez nodded almost imperceptibly. “If you want to work for me, you must first serve …” He looked for the right word.
“Un aprendizaje.”

“An apprenticeship?”

“
Si
.”

“What sort of apprenticeship?”

“You hand over your gun and come with us.”

“That kind,” I said. My throat moved involuntarily, swallowing a big lump of fear, the way I had felt when I was back playing Russian roulette. The fact that I had a Sig keeping my spine company was reassuring. I wasn’t happy about giving it up.

Perez stood. He might have been taller than a garden gnome, but it’d be close. He took the pearl-handled blade from out of its scabbard, the blade long and thin and hand beaten so that it appeared to be crawling with tiny worms – Damascus steel. He twisted it in the air so that the blade’s edge caught the light. I had no doubt that it could split a hair.
“Dile a tus amigos … Si siguen primero te mato, y luego matarlos.”
Tell your friends if they follow, first I kill you and then I kill them.

From the look on the faces of Eduardo, Marco and the others, who had all been keenly following proceedings, I knew it was something I didn’t have to repeat.

The bodyguard with the Steyr patted me down, took the Sig and the spare mags. He tried to take the DEET. “Hey!” I said, attempting to snatch it back. Perez gestured for the bottle, holding out his hand. The bodyguard gave it to him and the boss took a sniff. He squeezed some into his hands and rubbed it on his neck, then indicated to the bodyguard to return it to me. If I was going to be taken hostage, I wasn’t gonna do it scratching bites and slapping at insects.

Perez led the way through the bar, the place falling silent, and picked up his men working the front door. We then went down the side of the bar, onto the jetty. The boat’s motors were fired up before we got there. My FARC buddies stayed on the veranda, Marco, Eduardo, nor any of the others making any gestures of farewell. I’d seen faces like theirs before, gazing down on a coffin as the dirt was shoveled onto the lid. As far as they were concerned, I was already dead.

The trip north, back to the Gap, was long and uneventful, except for a brief moment when the engines were set to idle and we drifted with the current. Perez got up, stretched and then shot two of the bodyguards, the men working security on the bar’s front door. Perez stretched again. One of the men rolled into the water of his own accord, pulled by gravity, and sank. The other slumped where he sat, severely wounded. Perez gripped the overhead bar and started kicking him in the head. The man slumped sideways, his head on the seat, and then Perez really went to work, stomping on it again and again and again. He just kept stomping. The man was dead several times over. Somehow I had the impression that the show was for my benefit. No one said anything, but I assumed this was punishment for allowing me and my FARC friends uncontested access to the veranda. Perez finally pushed the bloody mess overboard, took out a handkerchief, wiped his hands and shoes on it, and also tossed it over the side. While he wiped, his head was angled in my direction. No smile, no frown. I assumed he was giving me the death stare, his eyes hidden behind Ray-Ban sunglasses, the seventies retro ones with large square frames.

The remaining bodyguards seemed not to notice any of this, like it was standard operating procedure, and just went on with whatever they were doing, which was to watch the world float by. Wouldn’t they be thinking that next time it could be them rolled into the river? I was. I assumed that was the point.

Eventually, one of the men produced a black bag and placed it over my head. My hands were also pulled behind my back and cuff-locked. The bag was reassuring. They’d hardly bother if I was gonna follow the other two into the drink, right?

The boat changed direction several times, and the salt smell of the sea was replaced by the damp decay of the jungle. Around an hour later, sweat streaming down my face, the bag came off. It had to be well after midnight. Up ahead, movement. We pulled up to a floating pontoon where a couple of armed men wearing US Army BDUs and night vision goggles stood watch. They came to attention and saluted Perez as the boat drifted near and tied us up while the boss disembarked. He had a quiet word to one of these men, who immediately shoved an AK in my face. “Turn around,” the man ordered in Spanish. I did as I was told.

In English, Perez said, “Before your apprenticeship starts, first we must examine your credentials.”

“Be my guest,” I said.

“If you have lied, I will cut you and the pain you will endure will far exceed any pain you have felt before.”

Arlen’s briefing about what it was like to be flayed came to mind and I swallowed involuntarily. I knew my bona fides would be checked sooner or later, but that didn’t make me any less nervous. Through Juan de Jesús, the Saint of Medellín, the cartel would have access to reliable news sources at
El Diario.
And then there were all the people supposedly on the take in El Paso. The barest hint that I wasn’t a genuine fugitive from justice, a killer who’d crossed to the dark side, and things would get ugly in a hurry.

The sentry accompanied me through what appeared to be a military-style, semi-permanent forward operating base crawling with armed guards and dogs, to a cluster of portable buildings set in a clearing hacked out of the jungle. The buildings were all draped in camouflage netting and painted with what I guessed was probably some kind of infrared-defeating coating. The sentry unlocked the door with the key, motioned me inside, and turned on a red light set on the wall beside the door. The smell of the place reminded me of the docks back at Turbo. The centerpiece was a floor-to-ceiling welded steel cage, a massive padlock securing the door. There was a bucket inside the cage, which accounted for some of the smell. On the floor outside the cage, a plastic-wrapped bundle of bottled water.

With my face up against the cage, the jailer patted me down and this time the DEET was confiscated, no ifs or buts. Then he shoved me into the cage and tossed a couple of bottles of water in behind me, pulled a knife and stuck the blade through the bars at waist height. I turned and offered my hands and he sawed through the cuff locks. That was something, at least. He departed, pulling the door shut behind him. The air hummed with mosquitoes.

Great.

There wasn’t much to do except sit in a corner, pull my collar up around my ears, close my eyes and hope that whoever said things always looked brighter in the morning wasn’t just making shit up.

*

He or she was making shit up. The sun rose an eternity later and turned the prison into a steam room. Midges flew in under the eaves and finished what the mosquitoes left behind. The bucket was full and the water bottles were empty. “Hey!” I called out. “HEY!”

The door opened almost immediately. Maybe I should have complained earlier. An armed man came in, a different guy to the one who’d put me in the cage. He cracked the lock, opened the door and pointed at the water bottles. I took one, opened it, poured water over my head and grabbed a second for drinking. Standing at the doorway, the guard grunted, wanting me to follow.

Out in the bright sunshine, I could confirm that this was indeed a military-style FOB, but with a few interesting differences. Most of the people, all of whom were dressed in jungle camouflage, were getting around on dirt bikes. There was also a runway obscured from above by netting and moveable floats sprouting vegetation. It was a reasonably long strip – over two thousand feet was my initial guess – long enough for medium-size, multi-engine aircraft. Off to one side of the runway, hidden under netting, were a couple of large hangars and several smaller ones. A platoon of armed men in BDUs jogged past, sounding out some unfamiliar verse in Spanish, interrupting my low-level snooping. They ran toward the jungle, all in step. Where the bush seemed impenetrable, the troop stopped and peeled back a mass of camouflage netting, revealing two lines of Yamaha dirt bikes. The men hopped on the machines, kicked them over and then roared off to tackle an obstacle course.

Another grunt from the guard told me to catch up. He led the way to a portable building not unlike the one that housed the cage. The guard knocked on the door and opened it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to go inside but the options for exercising free will were limited. I walked in. Perez was sitting behind a desk, a laptop in front of him. He waved me at the chair on the opposite side of the desk. The guard left, closing the door as I sat.

Perez opened a drawer, pulled out a pistol and aimed it at me. I flinched, which he seemed to enjoy, his features assuming their imitation smile, and then he let the weapon swing down, his finger in the trigger guard so that the handle faced me. It was my Sig. Reaching forward, I took it. Perez placed the spare magazines on the desk, the ones confiscated, along with my cell and wallet. I figured my status as a cop killer had checked out.

“How about the mosquito repellent?” I asked him.

He frowned, hesitated, then went back into his drawer and the bottle of DEET was placed on the desk beside the magazines. He seemed reluctant to hand it back. Maybe weapons were easy to come by here but relief from flying insects not so much. “Okay,” I said, feeling reassured. So far, so good. I looked over the Sig, finding a round in the chamber and the magazine fully loaded, just as I’d last seen it. I leaned forward to re-holster the weapon in the small of my back. “Does this mean I’m in?” I asked.

“You make a delivery,” Perez said.

Hmm, that didn’t answer my question, but at least that knife of his was still in its scabbard. He stood up and stared at me a moment. I couldn’t help but notice that there was no light in those eyes, no reflection, no humanity. They were the eyes of a living corpse, if such a thing were possible; gateways straight to hell.

I stood too, towering over him, and then as he walked past I fell in behind him, shortening my stride. Outside, over the last five minutes, activity had ramped up some. Around fifty men were clearing the runway, rolling the camouflage to one side, and the doors of the larger hangar had been pushed back. Guarding the skies were a couple of sport utility vehicles with .50 anti-aircraft guns mounted in their trays. Only one was manned by a young woman, dressed in BDUs. She yawned and flicked a cigarette butt onto the ground.

A small tractor towed an aircraft from the deep shadow within the hangar. My heart rate spiked when the aircraft it was towing revealed itself in the sunshine – a King Air, painted buzzard black. I pictured Bobby Macey, the sole survivor at the Horizon Airport massacre, burned raw by the desert sun, lying in a hospital bed with her raised broken leg. And that made me recall the sight of Gail Sorwick sprawled under a tent on the apron with her dead husband and kids around her, the cuts in her back and CSI’s breakdown of her final moments.

The King Air was heading for the threshold where half a dozen men stood around, all of whom were dressed in non-military clothing and carried an assortment of small arms: AKs, H&K light machine guns and so forth.

“Wait,” Perez told me.

I stopped and he continued walking toward the gunmen. The men gathered around him and a hurried briefing ensued. Some of them looked over at me a couple of times during their chat like I was the topic of the discussion. Perez gestured me to join them so I wandered over.

“Your
aprendizaje …
” Perez growled. “It starts.”

“What do I do?” I asked.

“You help.”

He handed me a machete and walked off. I looked at the rusting blade, then over at the men. They all had them in long scabbards over their shoulders. Were we going somewhere to clear something? I had questions, mostly about my job description, “Help” being pretty open-ended, especially where these folks were concerned. I sensed asking for specifics wouldn’t lead to answers. In my hand, the machete’s wood grip was already slick with sweat.

The tractor arrived and did a one-eighty with the aircraft, bringing it around so that it pointed down the runway. One of the gunmen disengaged the tow bar connecting the plane’s undercarriage to the tractor, which then roared off back to the hangar.

“Gringo,” one of the gunmen snarled in Spanish, nodding at the aircraft’s open cargo door. His tattooed head was shaved and cratered with infected bites, possibly mosquito but maybe something nasty and tropical, something that laid eggs. Maybe that accounted for his mood. His name was Carlos.

I went over to the plane and climbed aboard. Inside, strapped to the floor beneath netting, were two pallets of what appeared to be plastic-wrapped bricks of cocaine, maybe eight hundred pounds of the stuff, a barcode attached to each brick.

Most of the gunmen took seats along one side of the fuselage. I took a seat opposite. Up in the cockpit, a pilot was already at the controls, running through checks. A high-pitched whine shivered through the metal against my back. The propeller began to spin. It picked up speed fast and the aircraft quickly filled with jet turbine roar and kerosene fumes. Then the second engine went through its start routine.

The door slammed shut. We sat there for a minute or two, the heat and humidity in the close confines soaring while the pilot waited for the gauges to show the right numbers. And then he released the brakes, the engine note sharpened and the plane surged forward.

A minute or so of steep climbing later, we leveled off at around fifteen hundred feet and hooked several aggressive turns. We flew around like that for maybe ten minutes before the pilot set the aircraft up in a steep descent. Wherever we were going, it was local, somewhere in the Darién Gap. For all I knew, given the erratic flight path, we could have been no more than a few miles from Perez’s base.

The King Air’s propellers screamed a high-pitched snarl. The jungle filled the porthole opposite and I braced for impact, guts churning, but then the aircraft leveled out and the wheels kissed the dirt an instant later. The pilot hit the brakes, reversed propeller pitch for a full emergency stop, and the aircraft bucked and jumped on the uneven ground before suddenly pirouetting on its axis to eat up some energy and finally coming to a dusty stop. The pilot cut the engines and looked back at us with a grin. Asshole.

The door in the side of the plane opened and three armed men with dirty faces stuck their black-bearded heads in, grinned and jauntily said,
“Hola, amigos!”
The leader of our party, Carlos, the guy with the bites, likewise made some friendly noises, went up to them, shook a hand and climbed out. The rest of us followed. I heard some talk exchanged with our hosts about this being a quick turnaround job and were there any other folks around to help unload the cargo? One of our guys walked to the edge of the runway where the jungle began and took a piss. Seemed like a good idea. I followed, found a tree of my own and used the time to scope the place. I wondered where we were exactly. The jungle here was thick. It reminded me of the territory Marco and I had hacked through. The landing strip was short, surrounded by triple canopy, the tallest trees off either end towering green skyscrapers. The pilot hadn’t been showing off. Much.

A shed the size of a double garage was set down one end of the strip – the far end. The three young Fidel Castro lookalikes were joined by half a dozen more just like them who came from the shed toward us, two of them pushing a trolley. Our guys had taken the netting off the cargo in the King Air and were starting to stack the bricks closer to the cargo door. One of theirs picked up a brick and felt the weight. He seemed okay with it. And that’s when the shooting started. Carlos just started unloading on the people pushing the trolley. It was a signal and suddenly all our people were shooting.

A Castro clone, one of those who welcomed us, put his hands up, eyes wide and frightened, and started begging for his life. The response was a strike from a machete, a horizontal swing from behind that almost but not quite took his head off. It toppled to the side, hanging weirdly on his chest by tendons and tangled black beard, swinging back and forth, blood spurting in gouts from severed arteries in the neck as the body toppled slowly to one side and twitched.