Delta Ghost

DELTA GHOST

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Tim Stevens

Copyright 2014, Tim Stevens

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License Notes

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Cover by Jane Dixon-Smith at
JD Smith Design

M
averick County, South Texas

In the forty-seven years Diego Salazar had been privileged to walk God’s earth, he’d killed approximately thirty men.

It was an estimate, because although in the past few years Salazar could recall and tally with precision the lives he’d personally ended – the four cartel thugs at the exchange outside Albuquerque, the three suspected informants within his own organization, the Venezuelan son-of-a-bitch who he’d surprised one afternoon in the bed of his, Salazar’s, dear departed wife – there was another time, before, when the killings had been less clearly defined, less targeted. When the deaths had been more impersonal, occurring as they had in the heat of battle and under orders.

But thirty sounded about right to his ears.

Still, whatever the number, Salazar had never looked forward to a killing the way he looked forward now to putting a bullet through the head of Oscar Flowers.

The late-morning July sun beat down, soaking the arid landscape in brittle heat. Even the hardy mesquite trees that were scattered across the plain seemed to droop under the merciless pounding, as if finally admitting defeat. Salazar wore nothing on his head. His shoulder-length hair, barely flecked with gray, was a source of pride for him, and he wasn’t covering it up for anything, not even the fireball in the sky.

Oscar Flowers, on the other hand, hid his shaved scalp under a Stetson that would have just about passed muster on a beefy good ol’ boy from Houston, but looked completely ridiculous balanced on the neck of a whip-thin expatriate from San Salvador. Flowers wore black jeans and a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt, stupidly, as if inviting heatstroke to do its worst. He stood, fifty feet away, flanked on either side by two goons, crude humanoids who looked like a kid had thumbed them out of lumps of flesh-colored Play-Doh.

Salazar stood alone. In his right hand was a pigskin suitcase. In his left, down by his side, he held a cell phone, his thumb poised over one of the keys.

Flowers raised his head, slowly. His feet were placed apart, his arms slung by his sides. Beneath the brim of his Stetson he wore mirror sunglasses.

Oh Mary, Mother of God
, thought Salazar.
He thinks he’s Clint Eastwood. Except he’s got the details wrong. The sunglasses. The clothes.

Oscar Flowers. The idiot who’d anglicized his decent, honorable Salvadorean name, Flores, into something silly and girlish. Who’d watched too many Sergio Leone movies about cowboys, and too many modern TV shows about ordinary guys who became ice-cool drug barons. Who’d consciously adopted the persona of a ‘coconut’, dark on the outside but white on the inside.

Flowers needed to die. Not just because he’d screwed Salazar over during the Eagle Pass deal, when the bundles of cash Flowers had handed over had been several hundred thousand dollars lighter than they should have been. It was chickenfeed, compared to the overall haul. But Salazar never forgot, or forgave, a double-cross. Not even if it involved a single greenback.

No. Flowers deserved to die mainly because he was a traitor. If there was a single rule that bound the organizations involved in the narcotics trade across Mexico and Nicaragua and El Salvador and Honduras and further south to Colombia, it was this:
you never went native
.

You could accept the
Yanqui’s
dollar. Indeed, you could milk it for all it was worth. You could befriend him, ally with him, kill your own people to satisfy him.

But you never, ever,
became
him.

Salazar took ten measured paces forward, reducing the distance between him and Flowers and his men to just twenty feet.

He lifted the suitcase.

“One million dollars,” he said.

He chunked the suitcase down in the dirt at his feet.

The four men flanking Flowers reacted as though Salazar had drawn a weapon. They dropped into crouches, two of them bringing out handguns, the other two moving closer to the man at the center, Flowers, as though he was a precious bloom they’d been sworn to nurture.

Flowers held up a hand and the men backed off. He walked forward until he was ten feet from Salazar.

He pointed the tip of a snakeskin boot at the suitcase between them.

“What, precisely, are you buying?”

Salazar said: “No cross-traffic with me or my organization, ever again, for the rest of your life. No encroaching on my turf, ever. No attempt to send business my way, or to steal my own clientele. And, of course, no word to anybody,
ever
, about our association with one another.”

Flowers tilted his head, expertly, so that the light flashed off his shades like a punctuation mark. “One million bucks.”

“Yes.”

“In shitty denominations, I’m assuming.”

“One-hundred dollar bills,” Salazar said. “Ten thousand of them. They’re clean, but you’ll be able to launder them further. It’s a generous severance package, Oscar.
More
than generous. Take the money, forget about me, and I’ll forget about you, and we’ll all be happy.”

Flowers peered at him for a long second, his eyes invisible behind the mirrors.

He stooped, with his face still raised to Salazar, and picked up the suitcase.

With his left thumb, Salazar hit the speed-dial key on his cell phone.

The first shot cracked across the horizon, and Salazar was on the move, stepping to his left and slipping his right hand inside his light cotton jacket and drawing out the Colt M1911 pistol. But there was something wrong, something about the direction of the gunshot he’d heard, and in a moment he grasped what it was.

The shot had come from in front of him, not behind him.

At Salazar’s back, a ridge rose to a height of thirty feet at its peak. He’d positioned his four men among the outcroppings of rock that broke up the contour of the ridge. Each man was armed with a Zastava M91 sniper rifle, a Serbian military weapon. Salazar had gotten a batch of six of the rifles at a discounted price from a Belgrade expatriate he’d met in Mexico, a man who’d presented himself as a retired army officer but who Salazar assumed was a war criminal on the run.

The speed-dial call Salazar had made was to one of the snipers, his cue to take out whichever of Flowers’s bodyguards he had in his sights. The other three riflemen would follow suit, shooting down the remaining goons. Leaving Flowers as the last man standing, until Salazar stuck the barrel of the Colt in his mouth and forced him to kneel and beg like a dog and likely piss his pants before Salazar pulled the trigger and sprayed his brains all over the hot sand.

That was the plan. But as the flashes of light from the rocks in front of Salazar reached his consciousness, he understood Flowers had second-guessed him.

Flowers normally went around everywhere with the same four bodyguards. But this time he’d brought additional insurance.

A scream from behind and above Salazar told him that one of his men was down. He didn’t turn, didn’t pause, but fired the Colt twice, three times, into Oscar Flowers, two in the chest and, in case the little bastard was wearing a Kevlar jacket, one in the head. Before Flowers’ body hit the dirt Salazar was already diving for the suitcase.

The handle was wrenched from his hand as a high-velocity round struck the case.

Salazar didn’t stumble after it, didn’t nurse his stinging fingers. He ran, weaving and ducking, to the left, where a cluster of rocks invited protection. The air had erupted in the crash of rifle- and handgun fire. One of Flowers’ heavies fell and twisted in Salazar’s path, his torso a bloody mess, and Salazar leaped over the body and sprinted for the rocks until he thought his heart and lungs were going to burst from his chest.

He dove behind a boulder, rolled and pressed himself against it with the Colt extended. He surveyed the scene.

Flowers had hidden an unknown number of men on the slope of the mesa behind him. It was impossible to tell, but from the explosions of light Salazar estimated there were three or four of them. They must have been in place already when Salazar and his entourage had arrived, a half-hour before the appointed time of the rendezvous. Salazar had though his early arrival would give him an advantage. Clearly, he hadn’t gotten there early enough.

From the clatter of the gunfire issuing from Flowers’ side, Salazar guessed his men were armed with assault rifles, probably M16s, rather than sniper guns. What they lacked in range and precision they made up for in sheer, relentless firepower. The walls of rock surrounding Salazar flung the barrage of noise crashing back at him so that he was almost paralyzed by the overwhelming torrent of sound.

Using the outcroppings, he sidled further to the left at a crouch, his Colt aimed two-handed in the direction of the mesa.
There
– there was the outline of a man’s head, one-quarter visible at the side of a boulder. Salazar took aim, fired. The shot whined off the rock, chipping shards from it, but the head jerked away in time.

Shit.

He’d heard one of his men go down with a scream. That left three of them, plus Salazar. His snipers had taken out, he saw, all four of Flowers’ bodyguards. Which meant they were up against at least three, possibly four, men with automatic weapons.

Salazar wasn’t a gambling man, but if he had been, he’d reckon the odds at fifty-fifty.

A hail of gunfire smashed and splintered the rock he was pressed against and he cringed and huddled against the smooth expanse, fury and terror sending his heart rate soaring. His best hope, he realized, was to stay put, to wait for one of the enemy to emerge and advance upon him, trying to get a better angle of fire, which would allow one of Salazar’s snipers to shoot him down.

But he guessed Flowers’s men were too smart for that, and a fresh bout of gunfire exploded from the slope of the mesa as they resumed blasting away at the places where they’d pinpointed Salazar’s snipers. With the side of his face pressed against the rock he was hiding behind, Salazar watched the stretch of ground he’d vacated when the firing had started. Where Oscar Flowers lay in the dirt, the suitcase with the million dollars ten feet from him.

Salazar had considered bringing a decoy suitcase, filled not with banknotes but with scrap paper. But there’d been the possibility that Flowers would send one of his men into the open to check the contents of the case before he himself emerged, and Salazar didn’t want to screw up the plan before it even got going.

Now, though, he stared at the dusty, torn pigskin and wished like hell he could just abandon it.

He realized that Flowers’ men had shifted on the slope of the mesa so that the rock he was behind was directly between them and his own snipers. It meant that the stretch of dirt where the suitcase lay wasn’t in the line of fire. But there was no way he could risk breaking into the open and making a run for it. Flowers’ men would swing their guns across and shred him before he got halfway to the suitcase.

Salazar blinked, his eyes blurring with dust and smoke.

He thought for a moment he was hallucinating.

A figure had appeared in his line of sight, sprinting in a zigzag pattern from somewhere along the slope of the mesa. It reached the suitcase and stooped and snatched it up, stumbling a little as if unprepared for how heavy it was.

The figure continued its run, slower now, towards the rocks in the distance.

Salazar gave a yell and pointed the Colt at the figure’s back. He fired, but his stinging eyes and a fresh barrage of automatic fire from the enemy threw his aim off. He heard a yell of pain from one of Flowers’s men, followed by another scream from one of his own snipers. They were engaged with each other, and seemed oblivious to the figure which, even as Salazar watched, disappeared with the suitcase around the side of a rock outcropping.

Salazar let out a renewed roar, rage and frustration igniting something primal and terrible within him.

I
t wasn’t the most disgusting apartment block Joe Venn had ever visited. But it came close. Top five, certainly. Probably top three.

The corridor was so dimly lit that Venn paused for a moment to adjust, his eyes still accustomed to the dazzle of the noonday July sunshine outside. Fewer than half of the bulbs that hung from the ceiling on filthy cobwebbed twists of flex were intact. The lino floor was sticky in patches under Venn’s feet, and he was glad both that the gloom prevented him from seeing exactly what he was treading in, and that he was wearing cheap sneakers. The air was musty and cloying, with an overlay of sweet smoke.

The stink of urine, both stale and freshly voided, was everywhere.

“Look at this,” said O’Dell, at his shoulder. “This is what I have to put up with, every day. I don’t like to sit on judgment, Mister Venn, but these people are just...
animals
.”