Cartel (14 page)

"No," Scott said. "We stick together, remember?"

She took a deep breath and nodded.

The Suburbans were each only half a block away. Scott and Benny sprinted across the street, heedless of the traffic. Scott knew there was no sense looking back. They would make it into the slum or they wouldn't. The SUVs would run them down or they wouldn't. Bullets would find them or they wouldn't. He heard tires squeal. He heard horns blare. But he didn't hear any gunshots.

The two of them plunged into the City of Skeletons.

The shantytown was a labyrinthine of ramshackle homes and narrow twisting alleyways, most not wide enough for a single car to pass through. Mountains of rotting garbage rose up all around them. The stench of putrefaction was so strong it made Scott gag. Most of the hovels were constructed from a hodgepodge of wood, tin, tarpaper, and cardboard. Some had only canvas tarpaulins for roofs. Candles and oil lanterns provided the indoor lighting, while cook fires, most in trash cans, lit the passages between the homes.

Scott and Benny ran past scores of people sitting on plastic crates and overturned buckets, eating, drinking, and smoking weed. One man lay on the ground with a syringe stuck in his arm. His skin had turned gray, and Scott could smell the decomposition from twenty feet away. Most likely the man had been dead for several days. No one else seemed to notice. Several of the men they passed shouted in Spanish and made catcalls at Benny. Even some of the women. But nobody tried to stop them. No one wanted the kind of trou-ble they were running from.

When they were a few hundred yards into the slum-with no city blocks, distance was hard to judge-Scott heard vehicle horns and angry shouts behind them. Then a single gunshot, followed by screams. He and Benny kept running. "They're still coming," Scott said. His damaged ribs felt like someone was twisting a knife between them.

"How are they following us?" Benny gasped.

"They're tracking us," Scott managed to say between ragged breaths, his right hand pressed against his side in a futile attempt to somehow contain the pain.

"How?"

Scott slowed to a walk and tried to catch his breath. He glanced at all the sweaty brown faces staring at him and thought that his might be the whitest face any of them had ever seen in the City of Skeletons. Then he caught a whiff of cooking meat. The smell made his mouth water. He realized he was starving. Almost twenty-four hours had passed since he'd eaten anything.

Nearby, Scott saw a short, powerfully built man with heavy Mayan features squatting over a makeshift barbeque pit. The pit was fashioned from the rusted bottom of a gar-bage can and had chicken wire stretched across its top. Three young children squatted next to the man and were looking with hungry eyes at four skinned and gutted rats that lay skewered and sizzling on the wire grill.

"Don't stare at them," Benny warned.

As Scott turned away he tasted bile rising in the back of his throat. It burned as he choked it back down. He pulled his cell phone from his pocket. "They're tracking my phone."

"Are you sure?"

"That's the only way they could have followed us with-out having eyes on us." He threw his cell phone high over the nearest shack. A couple of seconds later it landed with a thud. Two kids from one of the nearby hovels darted toward the sound. The value of the phone could probably support a family here for a month. Scott looked at Benny. "I need your phone."

"No," she said, taking a step away from him. "A neigh-bor is watching my daughter. She has to be able to reach me."

"If they catch us, they'll kill us."

Benny put a hand over the front pocket of her jeans where she kept her phone. "How could they possibly have my number?"

"I don't know that they do, but I do know that we have computers that can pluck phone numbers out of the air."

"I haven't even used it."

"You don't have to make a call," Scott said. "It just has to be on."

"I can't." Benny shook her head. "My daughter."

"How long do you think we can keep going?"

For several seconds Benny didn't move. She just stared at him. Then she pulled her cell phone from her pocket. Still, she didn't hand it to him. Scott didn't say anything. The decision had to be hers. Finally, she threw her phone after his.

The two Suburbans were wedged into a narrow, filth-covered...alley, for lack of a better term, stopped bumper-to-bumper, nearly half a mile into this...this what? Cesspool? And these alleyways, paths, goddamned game trails-whatever the fuck you wanted to call them-weren't even wide enough for one vehicle, yet they were the only way to navigate through this shithole. Gavin couldn't legitimately call it a neighborhood. It was some kind of barrio slum, filled with mounds of rotting garbage and the absolute dregs of the human race. Just breathing the fetid air made him want to retch. Goats in Afghanistan lived better than these assholes.

Snyder, Camp, and Gavin were dismounted and set up in a tight defensive triangle around the two vehicles. Buck was still behind the wheel of Gavin's Suburban, and Dwayne, who'd gotten sufficiently patched up to make him-self at least partially useful, was behind the wheel of the sec-ond Suburban. Marcus and Cyril, the tech geek, had wan-dered off with some kind of handheld signal tracking device to find Greene's phone, which had in the last ten minutes gone pretty much stationary behind one of these pigsties.

In just the few minutes since Gavin and the others had stopped and climbed out of their SUVs, at least fifty of the savages who lived in this dump had surrounded them. Gavin could smell the stink coming off their bodies.

A woman, rail thin, with no tits, a scarred face, and arms covered with leaking sores, strolled up to Gavin and almost brushed against him. He shoved her away with a gloved hand. "Get back."

Undeterred, she said something to him in Spanish, in what he guessed was her best effort at a seductive, sultry voice. He stared at her. A fucking hooker. In here. Of all places. If he squeezed her, he wondered, would puss ooze out from her needle tracks? "Get the fuck back," he told her, waving her away with the muzzle of his M-4. She shrugged, mumbled something else in Spanish that ended with the word gringo, and melted back into the sea of brown bodies.

Where the fuck was Marcus and that geek bastard?

Gavin scanned the crowd, looking at these wretched, brown-eyed, brown-skinned, dumb-as-dirt motherfuckers. Knowing it was just a matter of time before one of them upped with a gun. Then he and his men would be caught in a real shit storm.

There was some movement behind the crowd, along with curses in Spanish and English. Then Gavin saw Marcus shoving his way through the cordon of stinking human flesh with Cyril following close behind him. Marcus held up a cell phone.

"Greene's?" Gavin asked.

Marcus nodded. "Found a kid back there hiding with it under a pile of shit."

"What about the Mexican cop's phone?"

Cyril held up a second phone. "Found it too."

"Those motherfuckers," Gavin said.

The crowd was growing larger every second and press-ing closer. A bottle sailed through the air and shattered against Gavin's Suburban.

"We need to exfil this shitsty right now," Marcus said.

A shirtless teenage boy stepped up and threw an empty quart beer bottle straight at Marcus. Marcus ducked and the bottle hit the second Suburban. Before the kid could dissolve back into the tide of hostile faces, Marcus lunged forward and grabbed him by his bushy hair. After dragging the teen into the narrow no-man's land that surrounded the two SUVs, Marcus shoved him down to his knees and pressed the muzzle of his M-4 against the back of the kid's neck. He scanned the crowd. "Throw one more fucking bottle and I put a bullet through Jose's head. Comprende?"

No one threw anything else.

One by one the contractors piled back into the Subur-bans. Gavin remained outside until everyone else was in. The others covered him, their rifles jutting through the open windows as he climbed into the passenger seat. Then the Suburbans raced out of the slum known as el Ciudad de Esqueletos.

Scott had the feeling he was crawling out of a deep, dark hole when he and Benny finally walked out of the shanty-town and found themselves on a busy highway.

"Any ideas?" Scott asked.

Benny nodded. "One." Then she stepped out into the nearest lane of traffic and waved her arms at a fast-approaching taxi. The taxi skidded to a stop just a couple of feet from Benny. The driver stuck his head out the window and shouted at her in Spanish. She pulled her Policia Feder-al badge from her pocket and waved it at him. He didn't seem very impressed and kept talking shit. Then she showed him her pistol and he shut up.

Benny turned to Scott. "Do you have any money?"

"Just dollars."

"Dollars are better than pesos."

The climbed into the back seat of the taxi from different sides. Behind them horns were blowing. The driver ignored the horns. He looked at Benny in the rearview mirror and asked her something in Spanish. She gave him an address. The taxi pulled away.

"Where are we going?" Scott asked.

Benny smiled. "You'll see."

Scott hated when people answered questions like that. But he leaned back into the cracked vinyl seat, laid his head on the rear deck, and closed his eyes.

* * * *

When Scott opened his eyes again the taxi had stopped. He shook his head to clear the cobwebs. "Where are we?"

Benny didn't answer. Instead, she asked the driver, "Cuanto?"

The driver looked at her in the rearview mirror. "Dolares o pesos?"

"Dolares," she said.

"Quince," the driver responded.

Scott was almost positive that meant fifteen. He pulled out his wallet.

"Give him ten," Benny said.

"But didn't he just say fifteen?"

She smiled at him. "You're getting better. But ten is enough."

Either the driver didn't understand English, or he was afraid to piss off a woman with a gun. But he didn't contra-dict Benny. Scott handed him a ten dollar bill and said, "Gracias."

The driver nodded. "De nada."

As soon as Scott and Benny were out of the taxi, the driver stepped on the gas hard enough to catch a little bit of a scratch with one tire. Then Scott realized they were stand-ing in front of a church, but looking around a little more, he thought he understood why the cabbie was in such a hurry to leave. Back in the United States, social scientists would call this an economically-challenged neighborhood with under-developed infrastructure. Cops would call it a drug-infested war zone full of gangbanging shitheads.

It wasn't nearly as bad as the slum they had just left, but it was still pretty rough. Every house and business had bars on the windows, and the streets were littered with trash. Graffiti covered nearly every wall, and young men with lots of ink hung together in little groups, all staring at them.

Benny pointed to the church. "It's named after San Ju-das Tadeo. In English you call him Saint Jude the Apostle."

The church looked abandoned. The white stucco façade was faded and cracked and tagged with spray paint. A rusted iron gate was closed across the wooden front door and secured with a padlocked chain. Above the door, a large circular window was partially boarded up with a weathered sheet of plywood that didn't quite cover the entire circle.

"Why are we here?" Scott asked.

"To see someone," Benny said. Then before Scott could ask her any more questions, she led him down a narrow alley that ran along the side of the church. Scott saw broken bot-tles, beer cans, food wrappers, even a couple of deflated condoms littering the ground. The smell was a nauseating mix of urine, vomit, and feces.

The rectory stood behind the main church. Benny knocked on the iron-bound wooden door.

"Are you really here to see a priest?" Scott asked.

"Yes."

"If it's because of that guy in the alley, if you hadn't shot him-"

A barred viewing portal in the upper part of the door jerked open and a weathered tanned face peered out at them. Then the portal snapped shut. Scott heard a bolt slide back and the door opened. A man in his sixties stood in the doorway, wearing black pants, a white tank top, and a pair of freshly shined black shoes. His dark hair was streaked with gray and hung to his shoulders. The man smiled as he stepped out and wrapped his left arm around Benny's waist and kissed her on both cheeks. A sleeve of tattoos covered his arm. Benny and the man traded greetings in Spanish. Scott caught the words tío, which he knew meant uncle, and sobrina, which he was pretty sure from the context meant niece.

Then Scott saw a big revolver in the man's right hand, held low and partially concealed behind his leg. His right arm also bore a sleeve of tattoos. The man backed out of the way and welcomed Benny and Scott inside. Nobody said anything about the gun.

The den was small but neatly furnished. The man closed the door behind them and slammed home the iron bolt. For a moment he stood there looking at them, the big revolver still in his hand. He was thin and muscular and had a craggy face, pockmarked with acne scars. The tattoos covering his forearms were faded and the ink had blurred around the edges. Scott thought he looked like a 19th century Mexican bandit. All that was missing were the crisscrossed bandoliers of ammunition across his chest.

Benny looked at the man and pointed to Scott. "Tío, this is...my colleague, Scott, an American DEA agent." Then she turned to Scott. "And this is my uncle, Padre...Father Rodrigo."

Scott glanced at the revolver.

The priest shrugged. "I live in a bad neighborhood." When Scott didn't take his eyes off the big pistol, Father Ro-drigo said, "Do you know guns?"

"Sort of," Scott said.

The priest handed him the revolver. "It's a 1909 Colt, forty-five long."

Scott examined the .45 caliber revolver. It was old and heavy and had seen a lot of use. The original blue steel finish had been rubbed off in spots, and the wooden grips were worn smooth from handling and stained dark brown by a century of sweat and oil. But the gun was clean and it looked serviceable. He opened the cylinder and saw six brass cartridges staring back at him. The ammunition was from the Federal Cartridge Company, and the headstamps read, "F-C 45 Colt." Scott snapped the cylinder closed and handed the revolver back to the priest. "It's a beautiful gun."