Cartel (13 page)

Scott rolled out of the way, and Benny charged through the doorway dodging bullets. Without stopping she reached down and pulled Scott to his feet. "Let's get the fuck out of here," she yelled, much louder than necessary. Probably, Scott thought, because all the shooting had knocked out her hearing.

They were in a stockroom in the back of some kind of store. It was cramped and dark, with rows of high shelves, all packed with merchandise. Electronics? Auto parts? Scott couldn't tell. All he knew was that they had to keep moving. Stopping, even for a few seconds, meant death. He charged through a curtained doorway and plowed smack into a high counter. Bouncing back from the impact, he collided with Benny as she was coming through the curtain and knocked her down. He reached to help her, but she waved him off. "Keep going," she said. "Find us a way out."

They were in the front of the store, the customer area. The counter ran from wall to wall. Scott scrambled over it. Benny was back on her feet and followed him. A heavy, old-fashioned cash register rested on the counter. Scott picked it up and hurled it through the plate glass at the front of the store. Then he and Benny stormed through the shattered window.

The street outside was four lanes and still busy even at this hour. Scott grabbed Benny's hand. "Come on." They sprinted across, angling left toward a dark, empty side street. Tires screeched and horns blared. Two cars piled up. But Scott and Benny made it across. The side street was narrow and without sidewalks. Scott didn't slow down. They kept running until the darkness swallowed them.

Marcus slid behind the steering wheel and slammed the door of the Suburban. He turned and looked through the hatch in-to the rear compartment. Cyril was helping Dwayne in through the right-side rear door. A dark blood stain covered the lower part of Dwayne's T-shirt and the top of his pants. "Bitch shot me," he said through gritted teeth. "Fucking cunt shot me."

"How bad?" Marcus asked.

Cyril pulled the door closed and helped Dwayne lie down on the floor in front of the space-age surveillance con-sole. He raised Dwayne's shirt. Blood, bright red against Dwayne's white skin, pulsed from a black hole on the right side of his lower abdomen, three inches above his hip. Cyril slid a hand behind Dwayne. It came back bloody. "Through and through," he said. "I doubt it hit his kidney."

"How do you know?" Marcus asked.

"Because he'd be dead by now," Cyril said. "Or close to it."

"Fucking nine-mill is like a BB gun," Dwayne said. "Barely even felt it."

"You'll feel it later," Cyril assured him.

"Put a pressure bandage on both sides," Marcus said. "Then slap some hundred-mile-an-hour tape on it." He looked directly at Dwayne. "Charlie Mike?" Meaning, can you continue the mission?

"Hooah," the ex-Special Forces soldier said. "Ain't the first time I been shot."

"Probably first time by a woman."

"Fucking gash," Dwayne said. "Can't believe she shot me."

Cyril dug a first-aid kit out of a gear bag stashed in the back of the compartment. "What did you think she was go-ing to do, fuck you?"

"I don't know, but I'm sure as shit going to fuck her soon as I catch her," Dwayne said. "Then I'm gonna fuck her up."

Gavin's voice broke over their headsets. "Where are my goddamned targets?"

Marcus keyed his mic. "We got one wounded. Standby for a location on the targets."

"You have a man down?" Gavin said, his tone incredu-lous.

"Roger. Nine-mill in the side. We're patching him now. He's ambulatory and Charlie Mike."

"It doesn't take two men to patch one hole," Gavin said. "Get me a location on the targets now."

Marcus glanced back at Cyril and shrugged. Then he climbed through the hatch into the rear compartment with the other two men. "I'll finish patching him," Marcus said. "You track the targets."

* * * *

Scott and Benny turned off the first side street and ran down another. After two more blocks they slowed down. Scott was breathing hard and his side hurt. He looked around. Cars lined both sides of the narrow street, but there was no one out. Almost all of the houses were dark. This was a working-class neighborhood where people had to get up early.

Concrete walls surrounded every home, most of them topped with chunks of broken glass, and iron bars protected every door. Kidnapping and home invasion were growth in-dustries in Mexico, particularly along the border.

They kept walking. It took Scott a couple of minutes to catch his breath. Benny had been pretty winded too, but she recovered more quickly, Scott noticed with a bit of embar-rassment. As soon as this case was over, he was going back to the gym. "You have any more mags?" he asked.

"Mags?" Benny said.

He mimed loading a magazine into a pistol. "Magazines. Clips."

Benny slid a full magazine from her jacket pocket. "Just one more." She popped the empty mag out of her Beretta and shoved in the fresh one.

"We have to get off the street," Scott said.

"What about your truck?"

"They'll be watching it."

"How did they know we were at the post office?"

"They must have followed us from your house. Maybe from the café."

"I thought you were just being paranoid," she said.

"Me too."

Tires screeched in front of them. Three blocks up, one of the Suburbans barreled around the corner. The engine roared and the headlights lashed out as the SUV charged straight for them.

"Son of a bitch," Scott said as he grabbed Benny's arm and spun them both around. But they only made it two steps before the second Suburban slid around the corner two blocks ahead and accelerated toward them. "Shoot the driv-er," Scott shouted.

Benny raised her Beretta and fired several shots. But even as bullets pockmarked its windshield, the four-wheeled juggernaut didn't waver; it just kept coming.

Scott scanned the cinderblock walls that lined both sides of the street. They were of varying heights and painted in an assortment of colors. He spotted one that looked clear of embedded glass. It surrounded a two-story house. "This way," he said and ran toward the wall. Benny followed him.

On the sidewalk, Scott braced his back against the con-crete wall and laced his hands together to form a stirrup. "Climb up," he said.

Benny turned and fired several shots at the nearest Sub-urban, her bullets punching holes in the windshield and forc-ing the SUV to swerve into a parked truck. For a few sec-onds Scott dared to hope that the Suburban would be disa-bled or the driver killed, but the crash was only a glancing blow and the big vehicle recovered quickly and continued its relentless charge.

Benny stepped into Scott's cupped hands, and he boost-ed her up until she could climb onto his shoulder and clam-ber over the wall. Then it was Scott's turn. He looked up at the wall. It was eight feet tall with a smooth surface. He realized he might not be able to climb it. The two Suburbans were almost on him, half a block in either direction.

Adjacent to where Scott stood on the sidewalk, an old Ford Fairmont was parked at the curb. Scott scrambled onto the hood and up to the roof. On either side of him, both Suburbans were breaking to a stop. The one to Scott's right was spinning slightly, the driver angling the passenger side toward Scott. The passenger window was coming down. The man behind the window extended his arm. There was a pistol in his hand.

Scott sprang off the Fairmont's roof and leaped toward the wall. The eight-inch-wide coping struck him in the gut and knocked the wind out of him, and for an instant he tee-tered on top before slipping backward. He managed to stop himself from falling all the way back to the sidewalk by clinging to the top of the wall with his forearms and digging the toes of his shoes into its face, which, although smooth, had a gritty texture that gave him just enough traction to hang on.

Then a gunshot exploded behind Scott, and a chunk of concrete erupted from the wall and struck his forehead. Ce-ment dust blew into his eyes. He kicked his right leg up and over the wall, hooked his knee on the coping and yanked himself over with one huge pull. He tumbled sideways over the wall and landed hard on his right side on the flagstone courtyard.

A burst of machine gun fire from the street shook the wall, but the bullets didn't penetrate.

Benny crouched beside him. "Are you all right?"

Scott was too short of breath to speak so he just nod-ded. As Benny helped him to his feet, pain, like a hot knife, cut through his ribs, so bad it made him gasp.

"Can you keep going?" she asked.

"No choice," he said. But he wasn't really sure he could.

Benny ejected the magazine from her Beretta and dropped it into her palm. She showed Scott. The indicator on the back of the magazine showed five rounds left. They were definitely in deep shit. She shoved the magazine back into her pistol.

Scott looked at the house. It was dark and still. Gun-shots were so common in Nuevo Laredo that no one was go-ing to come outside to investigate them. Or to help. He doubted anyone would even call the police. Emergency phone calls could be traced back to their source.

A shadow cast by a streetlight swept across the court-yard. Scott spun around and saw a man standing at the gate. The man raised a rifle to his shoulder. Benny fired a single shot. The bullet sparked as it struck one of the iron bars and sent the man jumping back behind the wall.

"We have to move," Scott shouted. Then he lurched down a paved path that ran along the side of the house. His ribs felt like they were on fire.

The concrete wall surrounded the entire property. In the back yard, they found a narrow iron gate, but it was chained and padlocked. There was nothing near the wall they could use to help them climb over it. Scott nodded at the top. "I'll boost you up."

"What about you?" Benny said.

"There's no way I can climb it." He reached out a hand. "Give me your pistol. I'll hold them off as long as I can."

"Bullshit," she said. Then she stepped up to the gate and fired a bullet point-blank into the padlock. The lock burst apart and fell to the ground. Benny yanked the chain off and pulled open the gate. "We stick together."

Scott and Benny stepped through the gate and found them-selves in another back yard. The house was smaller and the walls that ran along the sides were shorter. They crept past the dark house, careful to duck as they went by the windows so they wouldn't get their heads blown off. In the front yard, Scott boosted Benny over the shorter wall; then he managed to climb over the iron gate and half-jump, half-tumble down onto the narrow sidewalk.

The four-lane street was busier than the one they had just left. On the other side of the street and a block away was a construction site surrounded by a makeshift fence cobbled together out of corrugated sheet metal and scrap lumber.

Pointing to the site, Scott said, "Let's cut through there. At least they can't follow us in those SUVs."

They dodged between cars as they crossed the street. At the construction site, Scott found a gap between two pieces of sheet metal and forced them farther apart. He held them open as Benny squeezed through. Then he followed her and the two sheets of corrugated steel snapped back together.

The construction site took up the entire block. The earth had been dug down five feet and a layer of concrete had been poured. The site looked like it was in the early stages of being excavated to form the foundation for a large building. In the darkness, it looked a lot like a graveyard, with the dim outlines of heavy equipment and piles of construction mate-rials standing like giant tombstones.

Scott clambered down the steep dirt embankment. Then he turned around to help Benny. "Be careful," he whispered when she stood next to him. "Last thing we need are nails through our feet." She nodded, and they began to thread their way across the dark construction site. Scott heard the sounds of traffic coming from the far side. If they could find a crowd maybe they could finally shake these guys.

Scott took the lead with Benny treading carefully be-hind him and holding onto the back of his shirt. He probed with each foot before committing to a step. Their progress was slow. He really was worried about nails, holes, and all of the other thousand things that might reach out and grab them. Finally they reached the other side and climbed the embankment to the fence. They stopped to rest, both of them breathing hard, and Scott was sure it was more from fear than from exertion.

"Why are they chasing us?" Benny asked.

"It's got to be the video."

"But why are Americans chasing us in Mexico?"

"I don't know," Scott said. And that was the truth. He pressed a hand to his chest and felt the flash drive beneath his sweat-soaked shirt. "But I think the answers are on this flash drive."

"Who do they work for?"

"Probably for the U.S. government."

"But you work for the U.S. government."

"I'm a cop," he said. "These guys aren't."

Benny shook her head. "I don't understand."

"To be honest with you, neither do I."

She was quiet for a minute. Then asked, "What are we going to do?"

"Get out of this hole and find out what's on the video." He kicked the crude fence until one of the sheets of corru-gated steel popped loose from the scrap lumber frame and fell onto the sidewalk. Then he and Benny stepped through the opening.

Both of the Suburbans were racing toward them.

* * * *

"Shit!" Scott yelled.

The two Suburbans were closing in, one from each di-rection. Each two blocks out.

"How did they find us?" Benny said, and Scott could hear the hopelessness in her voice.

Directly across the four-lane boulevard was a sprawling shantytown. A slum in the heart of Nuevo Laredo. Scott pointed to it. "We can lose them in there." He grabbed Ben-ny's arm, but she pulled away from him.

"That's el Ciudad de Esqueletos," she said. "The City of Skeletons. Even the policia don't go in there."

"We're not the policia," Scott said. "Not right now. We're two people running for our lives."

"You go," she said, pointing back at the hole Scott had knocked in the fence. "I'll hide in there."