Blood & Tacos #1 (11 page)

The Tiger spun. The glow of the exploding big rig cloaked it. Banzai gunned it.

Jasper cackled on the Tiger's radio. "Feeling that Bravo mojo?"

It was time to head home.

Home was many different things for these men.

The war had bound their fates.

First in the silent pines and starvation of Green Beret survival training atFortBenning.

Then the five years "in country," suffering and dealing suffering in a jade-and-clay land, so vastly strange and horrible it often seemed only the stitching of the red-black Tiger stripe patch of the 5
^th
Special Forces Group they shared held them together.

Then the message, received inCambodiaover their stained and fading radio fromDa Nang, disavowing them and condemning them to fight their way back to a civilization they no longer understood.

Tiger Team Bravo was bound together as orphans of war.

They belonged somewhere, though. They had families.

Vaquero's home was a duplex inScottsdale. He pulled up outside in his Ford Bronco, bought with cash and rebuilt with his wife's help.

He took notice that the building's paint was already fading under the stiffArizonasun. Another chore to see to. He liked that.

He grabbed his duffel from the truck bed. A new tool set clicked inside—a Christmas present for Alexandra, his wife. It held other things he carried at all times:

The yin-yang symbol from his sensei that Alexandra had made into a keychain. The survival knife from Benning. The pair of taxidermy rattlesnake heads, dried into a fanged snarl, for luck.

Vaquero smiled at that luck as he took the stairs to his apartment two at a time. He was fortunate enough to have a simple life. Work and love were easy when unquestioned.

He never questioned, never suspected, what he found when he opened the door.

Jasper's home was not a building, but a land. He knew every copse of pine and ball cypress he drove by on that last stretch into Bayou Lafitte.

He thought of all the places that this one place contained: The flatboat docks with their twelve-foot poles where he could wile away a pair of days just drinking and trawling. The floating bars strung with Christmas lights and the hoot of zydecko music.

Today it would be a visit to his old man, though—to the stilt house cradled in the roots of the banyans he'd climbed as a kid. It was a special occasion.

That it was the holidays was incidental. Today was special because the Cartel job had won him enough money to buy his Pa his own shrimping boat. No more seasons having to put up with Buford Clemens as a sloppy, stuck-up skipper.

Jasper left the Cartel cash out in the Dodge. He took into the stilt house what he always had on him: Pair of dice. Deck of Tarot cards fromNew Orleans. Black Leatherman tool.

He had a six-pack of Abita in hand, too. He damn near dropped it at what he found inside the stilt house.

Banzai felt as at home atLong Beach,Californiaas he did anywhere else. He stepped off the bus and walked to where he could see the waves. The waves understood him and he, them.

Life and home to Banzai was like a tide: Surface and motion ever-changing, substance always the same.

Childhood had been one place after another—Sacramento, where his mother's grave was while his father was busy dying in the 442
^nd
during World War II. ThenOmaha,Kansas City,Pittsburgh, as his grandparents fled the memories of internment inCalifornia. Then back toCalifornia, to here inLong Beach, as they returned to make peace with those memories.

He glanced around the edge of his mirror shades at the dormered houses packed close alongOcean Boulevard. His grandparents were in one—they were his constant.

Banzai carried little up the flagstone path, flanked by Zen rock gardens, to their house. No identification. No cash. Only his shades and a set of needlenose pliers, useful for hot-wiring, lockpicking, stabbing.

This, he thought, was a useful life: Constantly ready for motion, with love of family as core.

After seeing what their house held, Banzai wasted no time rushing to a payphone to call Colonel Professor.

Colonel Professor had madeComptoninto his home. It had taken work.

He piloted the Tiger down Imperial, one eye on green lights popping on and off along the dashboard. Each green light meant the security measures he'd installed every one-hundred yards around his house were still alive and unviolated.

It gave him calm. Knowing his girls were safe meant the world to him.

When he had returned fromVietnam, they had become his world. Their mother had abandoned them to him. She claimed it was out of disgust over what he had done overseas. He doubted that. Why abandon the girls if that was the case?

But things were what they were. Life went according to plan.

Colonel Professor did the best he could to make it go according to his plan.

He had to. Above all, for the sake of his girls—Marsha was on her way to nursing school. Angelica hated a lot about 9
^th
grade, but gymnastics and flute were passions that saw her through the lack.

There was too much lack, too much loss in this life, for him to fail them.

He clicked a button on the Tiger's ceiling to open the iron gate of his driveway. Another button on the dash disabled the traps in the yard. A final button opened his garage.

Motion sensors along the rose-circled house's perimeter sent data by radio to the Tiger's homemade screen.

The pale-green read-out told him what he would find inside.

Colonel Professor gave himself fifteen seconds to hunch over the wheel, face split in grief, sobbing.

Then he cut himself off. He checked inside to confirm what his machines had told him. After he had seen, he picked up his phone and dialed to send out a code to his team: Threat Level Bravo.

Colonel Professor knew, even before they called back to confirm the meeting site, that his team had something else in common now.

All their families were gone.

Tiger Team Bravo assembled in the parking lot of Johnie's Coffee Shop. Even Jasper looked as grim as Colonel Professor always did.

"So cough it up, egghead." Jasper spat a brown string of dip. "Who stole our people?"

"I have some leads."

"Thought we were dead on paper, hombre," Vaquero said, shaking his head, boneless with sorrow. "Who would know enough about us to come after our families?"

"Our list of enemies is long," Professor said. "Private mercenaries operating on US soil tends to draw attention. In the two years since we escaped the war zone together, we've brought down crooked cops, Mexican gangs, industrial tycoons."

"Baretta knew," Banzai said. "He's about the only one who does. Maybe Cartel surveillance could pick up Vaquero's wife…"

"Her name's Alexandra,
hombre
. Use it."

"But my grandparents?" Banzai went on. "I've only visited them twice since we got back."

"Same with my pa," Jasper said. "He don't even have a phone or power."

"Like you say, Billy," Professor said, "Only Baretta knew enough about our families to put an enemy on them. Especially so quickly after the big rig went down. It makes sense that kidnapping our loved ones is retaliation for stealing the Cartel records."

"Well, there you go," Jasper said, nodding eagerly. "Plain as the Ace of Spades. Baretta."

Professor scowled up at the coffee shop's sign, its curving letters blinking against the brown-and-orange blaze of theLos Angelessky.

"It's when things make sense that you've got to worry," Professor said.

They found Baretta in his French Quarter loft, his high-tech ransacked into a glittering mess around him, holes through his head. The bullet had punched from one temple through the other. They left his eyes intact to bulge like the note stuffed in his mouth.

Jasper pulled it out, spread the wadded paper. He read it as Professor examined the bullet holes.

"It's in Mexican," Jasper said. He handed it to Vaquero. "You read it."

"I'm Brazilian." Vaquero frowned. "We speak Portuguese."

"Well pardonez-moi. Do you read Mexican or not, cowboy?"

Vaquero shrugged as he scanned the note. Banzai paid no heed, lost in the sepia of a photograph—one taken of his grandparents when they were in the Internment Camp inCalifornia.