Deadly Dozen: 12 Mysteries/Thrillers (205 page)

“You kidding me? You’re just some chick with magic tricks.”

“What I just did to your boys?” Lena snarled. “That’s just a preview, and I’ve got a lot of others like me supporting my cause. It’s all going down tonight. Make the right choice, you can be on our side. Otherwise...” She glanced over at the gun on the floor.

It floated up and over to touch each of the men’s foreheads, one at a time, finally returning to press against Roberto’s.

He scoffed. “Yeah. Right. That ain’t real.”

“Let’s find out, shall we?” Lena said.

A bead of sweat rolled down his face as he sat silent. Joey grabbed his arm.

“Papi, come on—it’s for real!”

He didn’t need to examine it , he was convinced. “Okay, okay. So, what’s the job?”

“Just two hits,” Lena said. “One of them, Miguel’s been trying to get for some time now, the other is an easy target.”

“Who?”

Lena pointed to the middle of the conference table, where a pair of three-dimensional images appeared.

“Lito Guzman!” Mark pointed to the one on the left. “I capped him in Mission Valley!”

“Apparently he survived.” These boys needed to be more thorough. But in all fairness Lena hadn’t known what happened that morning until last night when her tracking device—the cell phone she gave Nick—enabled her to access the traffic cam footage. Either she’d trusted Nick too much or there’d been a huge disconnect between them.

“Nah, man, no way!” Mark said.

“He had some help,” Lena said.

“What kind of help?”

She glared at Miguel Suarez. “You haven’t explained to them yet?”

He shrugged. “Like they’d just take my word.”

He was right. For these guys, the concept of a round planet would probably be a stretch. Better show rather than tell.

“All right, Joey. Pick up the gun.”

He complied. Lena pointed at her chest.

“Shoot me.”

“What?” Joey said.

“You want to know what kind of help Lito had, I’m going to show you. Now, shoot me.”

“Whatever.”

Just before he squeezed off a round, the others covered their ears to shield them from the blast of a weapon fired inside a room. At the same moment, Lena became invisible while standing in front of Miguel.

But Joey had squeezed his eyes shut and fired off three consecutive rounds. One of the bullets hit Lena’s invisible and molecularly altered body, and fell to the carpet in the form of coin-like slags.

With Lena gone from his sight, Miguel spilled out of his chair expecting bullets to hit him square in the face. He hit the wall spewing Spanish expletives and scrambled backward, butt on the floor, until he realized he couldn’t go back any further.

Lena reappeared, bent down and picked up the flattened rounds, then with one hand lifted a trembling Miguel to his feet.

“Sit.”

Stunned, he obeyed but almost missed the rolling leather chair.

Roberto looked bewildered. “What are you saying, Lito has a guardian angel?”

“Had.” Lena circled the table, then stopped and confronted them all. “Well, boys—are you in?”

They all grunted some form of an affirmative.

“Excellent. Now, the first part of your assignment is simple.” She drew their attention to the holographic image of Lito Guzman. “Kill him.”

Another round of grunts. She brought up another image.

“This is Hope Matheson. Kill her.”

“Aw, come on. A lady?” Roberto said.

Lena slammed her fist on the conference table. It split in half, the two parts collapsing into the middle as the men rolled back their chairs.

“I don’t have time for this! Kill her, or join the sheep in the slaughter!”

“All right, all right!” Roberto said. “We got this, okay? We got this.”

It was enough. Lito Guzman had changed sides and would no longer destroy thousands of lives. And Hope Matheson, if she lived to overcome her depression, might encourage millions to the enemy above. Starting with her speech tonight. As for terminating Nick, she wasn’t about to trust these goons. She’d handle that her own special way.

“Just one thing,” she said. “You’ve got to do it before the end of the night. My informants tell me both Lito Guzman and Hope Matheson will be attending Hartwell’s event at Cabrillo Stadium.” She gave them a conspiratorial smile.

Not one of them smiled back

“I got an in with Lito’s sister,” Joey said. “She’s mad enough with him to want what you want.”

“Good,” Lena said. “Do this to my satisfaction, and you’ll be given authority over all of southern California, reporting directly to me.” She trained her eyes on Miguel: “Do you have anyone with sniper skills?”

“I’ll get him there tonight. But there’s a problem,” he said. “We don’t have tickets and I’m pretty sure they won’t let us bring guns into the stadium.”

Lena opened the palm of her hand. Miguel handed out the tickets that appeared. By now they barely looked surprised.

“Just show up.”

CHAPTER SIXTY-EIGHT

LENA TELEPORTED TO NEW YORK HARBOR to clear her mind after her frustrating meeting with the cartel leaders.

Everything was going as planned. Serena—Raven—had reported that after the little hiccup with the Coast Guard and the Marine Corps, the package was en route to the installation site. Nevertheless, a last-minute check was in order. Lena dialed the number but it rolled over to voice mail.

She tried again. And again.

Finally, Yuri Kosolupov answered his cell phone.

“Are you ignoring me?”

“Stop calling!” His voice was barely audible. “We’re in the middle of configuring the packages—there are security guards in the corridors. I’m shutting my phone off. Call you later.”

“Yuri, wait!”

Click.

Lena slammed her fist down so hard it made a long crack in one of the spears in Lady Liberty’s crown. He
cut her off
? After she sent one of her Nephilim to bail his sorry butt out of military detention?

Simmering in that old rage she had embraced years ago, Lena tried calming herself with the knowledge that in just a little while, the debts would come due.

There was hell to pay.

CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE

“GO AHEAD AND OPEN IT.” The old man sat across the table from Maria in a corner of the Chula Vista public library, his hands on a walking stick, his deep brown eyes gazing at her from beneath sagacious white eyebrows.

Maria looked at the manila folder. What would Lito think if he knew she was with a representative of their sworn enemies, however ancient? But it was Juan Suarez who had contacted her, claiming he had information connected to her late fiancé.

“I have wanted to speak to you for so long,
mi cariño.
” He heaved a weary sigh. “But not until I had proof. Alfonso knew something Carlito has kept from you your whole life.”

She thumbed through the pages, newspaper clippings, glossy photographs faded over time, then stopped at a middle-aged woman and a man posed on the porch of a house with a white balustrade and a red tiled roof. Sitting on the woman’s lap was a little girl who could not have been more than two or three years old. The three of them seemed vaguely familiar.

“Who are these people?”

“Don’t you know?”

She shook her head and stopped at a newspaper clipping. The headline read:

PABLO AND ANTONIA SUAREZ GUNNED DOWN AT HOME

“Pablo was my only son,” Juan Suarez said.

The profound sadness in his eyes softened Maria’s angry thought about how many Guzmans the Suarezes had killed. She looked again at the family photo. The mother’s eyes were sad. The father looked like a man used to throwing his weight around, just what she’d expect from the Suarez syndicate leader. The little girl—

Maria saw it.

Something she hadn’t noticed before. And the sight filled her with joy. At the left side of the patio chair a large black Labrador looked up at the little girl.

“Rosie!”

“Of everyone in the picture, you remember Rosinante?” Suarez said

“Rosi…nante?” It didn’t take long for Maria’s smile to fade. A sickening dread hollowed her stomach and crept up her throat.

“So you
do
remember.”

She gripped the edge of the table, unable to speak the word that kept repeating in her mind:
NO! no, no, no...
She was plummeting, spinning into a vortex of emotions, memories, impossibilities as she pieced it all together.

“Soy tu abuelo, mi querida,”
Suarez’s eyes were bright with intensity, his hand quivering so violently the cane tapped the floor in an eerie ostinato.

“My…my grandfather?”

“Your true name is Maria de Los Angeles Hernandez Perez de Suarez.”

“De Suarez?” The name caught like grains of sand in her throat. “It can’t be. I am Maria
Guzman
! I know who my father was, my mother, even my brother Carlito!”

The old man sighed. “And yet, you remember the house in the picture and the dog I gave your father when he was a young man, do you not?”

She nodded. That was the only thing keeping her from storming out of the library, cursing this old man.

“I am sure you’ll remember your Papi putting you on Rosie’s back and riding her like Don Quixote’s faithful steed.”

It was true. She remembered it all—the house, Mama’s sweet-smelling hair, Papi’s strong hands that threw her into the air and never failed to catch her.

“It’s so hard to believe.
How
?”

“Your mother and father...” Her grandfather’s voice faltered. “They were killed in cold blood, a hit by the Guzman family. But the killers didn’t know there was a two-year-old child in the house. They took you back to the Guzman’s and raised you as their own.”

“No…”

“They are not your true family, Maria. They executed your parents and burned down the house. Pablo and Antonia were illegal immigrants—they had no birth certificate for you, and no one outside of the Suarez family knew of you. And what with the nature of our business, no one ever told the authorities anything about the missing baby.”

“Stop it! I don’t want to hear any more.”

“Don’t you see? Alfonso told Carlito he knew the secret and threatened to tell you. For that, Carlito had him killed. The Guzmans are evil, Maria. Lito is evil.”

At last Maria understood why Lito had always been so controlling. To him she was a child of the enemy, unworthy of the Guzmans’ love and respect. Everything kind he’d done for her—every expression of love from him and the pretenders that styled themselves her parents—had been a lie.

“I don’t know what to do,” she said, her voice dropping to a dreadful whisper. The warmth of the old man’s leathery hand comforted her as it wrapped around hers.

“The time has come for you to return to your true family.”

“But...they all know me as Maria Guzman.”

“Don’t worry about that. Only one thing matters right now.”

With the back of her hand Maria wiped furious tears from her eyes.

“After more than twenty years, your time is finally at hand.”

“My time?” Maria hugged her arms as a chill from the air conditioning blew over her.

“To avenge your parents’ death.”

#

Ten minutes later, Maria was on her way to meet with her cousin Joey Hernandez. Lito was not her brother, after all, never had been.

He would pay for his sins and those of
his
father. And if heaven denied entry to those who honored their parents by avenging them, so be it. Her eyes were open now. After the initial shock, she could see more clearly than ever before in her life.

What she did not see was the old man walking briskly back to the silver Lexus parked in a secluded alley, reaching through the glass window to touch the head of a dead man whose likeness he had stolen, and transforming into the white mist of a demon named Morloch just before he vanished.