Cartel (23 page)

He wondered why the sirens even bothered him? Nor-mally, they were a welcomed sound, the herald of help on the way. Of the cavalry charging to the rescue. This time it was different. He hadn't done anything wrong. He'd killed the man in self-defense after the man had murdered Glenn Peterson. In fact, every shot he'd fired had been justified, last night in Nuevo Laredo, today in the tunnel, and just now in this hotel room-all of them in defense of his own life or of Benny's life. The logical part of his brain was telling him that he wasn't in any more trouble now than he had been in yesterday afternoon when the SAC suspended him and took his badge and his gun. But the deeper part of his brain, the part that ran on emotions and instincts, was screaming at him to run.

As if reading his mind, Benny said, "We have to go."

The sirens were close now. Almost on top of them. Then from below, Scott heard the sound of rubber squealing on pavement. He edged up to the railing and peered over. A marked Laredo police car, blue emergency lights flashing but no siren, charged up the hotel's U-shaped driveway and slid to a stop at the main entrance. The cruiser's front doors opened and two uniformed officers jumped out just as a sec-ond police car turned into the driveway.

Scott dropped the dead man's cell phone on the con-crete balcony and crushed it under his foot. Then he and Benny ran out of the room and sprinted down the hall. Several hotel guests were standing outside their open doors looking for the source of the gunshots, but none of them interfered as Scott and Benny ran past them. They just gawked.

Benny slowed at the elevator lobby. "No," Scott said. "We need to take the stairs."

They kept running and crashed through the steel fire door at the end of the hall. Flying down the stairs two, sometimes three, steps at a time, they were on the mid-flight landing between the fourth and fifth floors when Scott realized what he had missed. He stopped on the fourth floor. Benny stopped beside him. They were both breathing hard. "Why are we stopping?" Benny asked.

"He had two guns," Scott said. "Two Glocks."

"I know," Benny said. "I saw them."

"No, what I mean is, why did have two guns? Nobody uses two pistols at the same time. That's just in the movies."

"He did."

Scott opened his mouth to reply, but then his mind flashed back to yesterday afternoon, to his office and his meeting with Special Agent in Charge Robert Stockwell. "I need your badge and gun," the SAC had demanded after telling Scott that he was suspended. Scott remembered toss-ing his badge and credentials on the desk. The heavy DEA badge landing with a thud. "And your gun," Stockwell said. Scott had told him that his duty weapon, a .40-caliber Glock, was in his desk drawer. And Stockwell had pulled it out and laid it on the desk. That was the last time Scott had seen it.

Upstairs, the man who had killed Glenn Peterson had two identical Glocks. The killer had fired both, and Scott knew by their sound, that distinctive heavy bark, that both of them were .40 calibers. And he was willing to bet...

"That was my gun," Scott said. "And the other one had to be Glenn's. He thought I was coming alone. That's why he didn't kill Glenn right away. His plan was to shoot us both, each with the other's gun, then pull the gag and the tape off Glenn and walk away. Let the cops find us and create their own scenario, something involving us killing each other."

"But why would anyone believe that?"

"The media," Scott said. "The media would sell it for them. Whoever's behind this would leak a story about us be-ing crooked, or gay, or one of us screwing the other one's wife. Or maybe I just went psycho after being suspended."

Benny looked back up the stairs. "We can go back and get it."

Even in the concrete stairwell they could hear the sirens.

"No," Scott said. "We have to keep moving."

"Where are we going?"

"I don't know."

But they kept running, down the stairs to the ground floor. They stopped at the bottom to catch their breath. Then Scott peeked out the fire door and scanned the lobby. It was crowded with employees and guests. Four uniformed cops were waiting for an elevator. Blue police lights flashed out-side the front doors.

"The police are in the lobby," Scott said. "But they're not looking this way. We have to find a back door."

She nodded.

Scott eased the stairwell door open halfway and slipped through it. Benny was right behind him. Neither of them looked in the direction of the front doors or the elevators. They walked like they belonged there and knew where they were going. Except they didn't. But they kept moving. Past the restrooms to a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.

They stepped through the door and found themselves at one end of a long service corridor. At the far end stood a pair of stainless steel swinging doors that looked like they might lead to a kitchen. In front of the doors the corridor turned right, and Scott hoped it would lead them to a back way out of the hotel.

Scott and Benny were halfway down the corridor when a man and woman turned the corner next to the double doors and walked toward them. Both were Mexican. The woman was dressed in a hotel maid's uniform. The man wore jeans, a denim work shirt, and an old straw hat. The service corridor was narrow. They would have to pass shoulder to shoulder. The man took the woman's hand and guided her behind him. They were a couple, Scott thought. He was probably picking her up from work. Both of them avoided eye contact with Scott as they approached.

Just before they passed each other, Benny, who was two steps behind Scott stepped into the middle of the corridor and blocked the Mexican couple's path. She said something to the man in Spanish. Scott only understood two words, señor and ropa, "mister" and "clothes."

The man looked at Benny like she was crazy.

Scott grabbed Benny's arm. "We have to get out of here."

Benny ignored him. She pulled a wad of hundred-dollar bills from her pocket and counted out five. Pushing the bills toward the man, she addressed him again in Spanish.

He answered in Spanish and waved her away.

"Whatever it is you're saying to him," Scott said, "you're pissing him off." He pulled her arm. "Let's go."

She jerked away from him. "We need their clothes."

"Their clothes?" Scott said. "Why would we-"

"Because the police are looking for an Anglo DEA agent and a Mexican policewoman," Benny said. "No one is looking for a Mexican laborer and a hotel maid."

The man tried to push past Benny. But now that Scott understood what was going on, he stepped into the man's way. "Señor," he said. But his Spanish failed him. It didn't matter. The man was beyond the point of listening. He put a big meaty hand on his wife's shoulder and turned her around. Then they headed back the way they had come.

Scott ran after them and grabbed the man's shirt. He spun around with a cocked fist, but before he could throw it, Scott shoved his pistol under the man's chin. The man froze. Scott nodded at the hundred-dollar bills in Benny's hand. "Plata o plomo?"

Scott and Benny walked out of the Radisson Hotel through the rear service entrance. Right past two uniformed Laredo cops sitting in a marked police cruiser. The cops never even looked at them.

"I told you it would work," Benny whispered.

And she had been right. No one was looking for a day laborer and a hotel maid. The man's pants had been a good six inches too big in the waist, so Scott had kept his own jeans and had only taken-or had he stolen?-the denim work shirt and battered straw hat. The maid's uniform was a simple tan dress with a white collar, a couple of sizes too big for Benny so that it fit her more like a sack. Benny kept her own hiking boots.

Their pistols were tucked under Scott's new oversized work shirt, and the brick of cash was divided up and stuffed into the pockets of his jeans.

"I need new clothes," Benny said.

"Why?" he said. "You look good in that dress."

He meant it as a joke, but the look she gave him made him glad he had both pistols.

Two blocks from the hotel they got into a taxi.

* * * *

When Gavin and Jones stepped off the elevator onto the seventh floor of the Radisson Hotel, a uniformed Laredo po-lice officer stood guard in the small lobby. He was a skinny kid with a bad complexion, who looked like he only had to shave every other week. "This floor is closed," the cop said in a cracked voice that sounded not quite out of puberty.

Gavin and Jones were dressed in dark suits, white shirts, and "power" ties. Jones flashed a set of phony credentials. "Homeland Security."

Gavin wondered how many sets of credentials Jones carried and if any of them were real.

"Sorry, sir," the kid said, then pointed down the hall. "Crime scene is that way. Though it's standing room only from what I hear."

"Why's that?" Gavin asked.

"Lots of feds-" The kid looked embarrassed. "Federal agents, I mean. Bunch of DEA and a couple from the FBI."

Gavin was a little concerned at the mention of the FBI. Going cowboy in Mexico under State Department cover was one thing. But now they were north of the river, where there were actual laws and people-like FBI agents-who were serious about enforcing them. He glanced at Jones, but the man seemed unperturbed.

"We need to see the prisoner," Jones said.

The cop shrugged. "I'm sorry, sir, but there ain't no pris-oners."

"I understood the perpetrator was arrested on scene," Jones said.

So had Gavin. That was the point. The plan had been a rush job, and Gavin's man Dwayne had been tasked with ex-ecuting it. But it was certainly doable. Kill the two feds, each with the other's gun, and dress the scene to make it look like they'd killed each other. Why had they killed each other? Who cares? Let the local cops speculate as to why. Gavin had told Dwayne that if the Mexican cop was with Greene, he was to kill all three of them and make it look like a love triangle. The more the merrier. Because nothing fueled speculation like sex.

Except Dwayne had goat-fucked the plan by getting himself killed, and Greene was still alive.

Now they were onto the even more hastily-devised Plan B, which assumed that Greene, and maybe Alvarez, had been arrested after the double homicide in room 718. All Gavin and Jones had to do was stroll onto the crime scene so Jones could pull his Homeland Security card and take pos-session of the flash drive, which, of course, would be said to contain stolen classified government documents. Then Gavin, Jones, and the flash drive would disappear. Except that even that plan was taking it up the ass because, accord-ing to this rookie cop, no one had been arrested.

So how the hell had the DEA agent and the chica got-ten out of the hotel with Laredo police swarming all over it? The dude wasn't Batman. Or was he? Was he really that good? Or was he just that lucky? Some old gunslinger, Jeff Cooper or Bill Jordan, one of those jarheads who killed the shit out of the Japs during the Big One, said, It's better to be lucky than good, but when your luck runs out, you better be good. So how good was this fucker Scott Greene?

Hearing Jones haranguing the pimply cop jerked Gavin back to the land of the living.

"I told you to check again," Jones said.

The cop was shaking his head. "There's just no need to, sir. I'm absolutely, one hundred percent certain that no sus-pects have been taking into custody."

Gavin shot a sideways glance at Jones, who was staring at the cop. Jones's face was red and a blue vein bulged from his temple. Gavin had never noticed the vein before. He wasn't sure how old Jones was, late thirties, forties, maybe even fifties. It was impossible to tell. Gavin wondered how likely it was that Jones was about to stroke out on him. If that happened, he wasn't going to bet his freedom or his life on Jones's fake credentials holding up under intense scrutiny. Once the ambulance got here, Gavin would slip away in the confusion and skedaddle back across the border.

"...these federal agents and police after them, I can't im-agine they'll get very far," the cop said, and Gavin realized he'd zoned out again.

The good news was that Jones hadn't had a stroke. He was still listening to the kid. Gavin focused on Jones's fore-head. The bulging vein had receded.

"Thank you, officer," Jones said. Then he turned around and jabbed the down button for the elevator.

Good, Gavin thought, no confrontation with the FBI. But no flash drive either. The elevator car dinged and the doors opened. As he followed Jones into the car, Gavin wondered what Jones was going to do next. The CIA man hadn't told him what was actually on the video they were chasing, but whatever it was it had to be bad. Really bad. The Agency wouldn't expend this kind of effort and take this much risk unless whatever was on that video was devastating.

There was no situation that Gavin could envision in which the video could impact him directly, but any devastat-ing revelation that cast the U.S. government in a bad light might lead to a policy shift in Washington, and a policy shift could impact Gavin directly. The company he worked for, Dynamic International, was making millions of dollars from its Mexican contracts. He didn't want that to end. So he was willing to do whatever it took to maintain the status quo, and if that meant icing a couple of DEA agents and a Mexican cop, well...collateral damage was a hard fact of war.

Father Rodrigo was late for afternoon confession. Not that it really mattered. There was very little chance anyone would come. Still, he was always waiting in the church, whether any penitents showed up or not.

But today he was five minutes late because he'd had trouble finding his keys. He only had three keys-the church, the rectory, and his old truck-and they were on the same ring. He preferred to think that he had simply mis-placed them due to the disruption of his daily routine that his niece and her American colleague had caused when they had shown up so unexpectedly last night, but that probably wasn't the truth. He had been losing, or misplacing, things more and more lately. And just last week he had momentarily forgotten Señora Calderon's name when she dropped off a dish of enchiladas for him.