Standoff: A Vin Cooper Novel (5 page)

“In these parts, somewhere around one hundred and thirty million dollars,” said Foote. “Lieutenant?”

Cruz nodded, backing her up.

“So where’s it gone?” I asked. “El Paso?”

Foote replied. “No, the market here’s too small.”

“Five hours after it’s landed and transferred,” Matheson added, “those vehicles are gonna be halfway to Dallas.”

“Why Dallas?”

“Biggest distribution point in north Texas for drugs coming up from this part of Mexico,” said Gomez. “Anything major heads to Dallas for dispersal – it’s a transport hub for the rest of the country.”

“We been to a conference hosted by the DEA ’bout it,” Matheson added. “You can hide in Dallas, but you can’t hide in El Paso.”

The way he said it, sucking something from between his teeth, made it sound like El Paso wasn’t an option for drug dealers, not when ol’ Commander Matheson was on the job.

“What time did the sun rise this morning?” Gomez inquired.

“Six twenty-one,” Cruz answered. “According to our survivor, the killers were gone by then. That was roughly six hours ago. So if you’re right, the shipment will be more than halfway to Dallas, but not too much more.”

Gomez was pulling out his cell. “If they’re on I-20, they’ll have come through Odessa. Maybe we can stop ’em this side of Abilene. But they also could’ve taken the long way round, I-10 through San Antonio,” he said, thinking it through on the go. “DPS can cover both routes.”

Foote acknowledged the help and also fired up her cell, as did Matheson who turned his back on us, I assumed to play a level or two of Angry Birds in private. Cruz consulted his notes. I twiddled my thumbs.

Gomez finished his call as a cab drove slowly up to the hospital entrance drop-off. Our transport had arrived. All twiddled out, I gestured to the Chief that the Ranger and I were leaving. Foote excused herself to whoever was on the other end of the line and pressed the cell against her chest. “Thanks for your help. You both staying in town?”

I told her that we were. She asked for our cards and told us she’d be in touch.

A few minutes later we were in the cab, heading for our motel, an old-style two-star cinder block sandwiched between the highway access road and the railroad tracks, complete with stained carpet and walls no thicker than the beige-colored wallpaper covering them. I needed to take a shower, or maybe a dip in the outdoor swimming pool.

“You gonna report in?” Gomez asked when we got out of the cab.

“Yeah, gimme forty minutes.”

“I’ll call Thrifty, break the good news to ’em and pick us up another jeep.”

I took that shower, the outdoor pool being a little bigger than a bathtub, but then I thought that maybe I’d made the wrong choice when the drain beneath my feet in the shower recess exhaled something that made me think of what was rising off the asphalt out at Horizon. I gave the cold tap a few extra turns but the water pressure couldn’t wash away thoughts of the slaughtered family left on the ramp, or any of the many other victims unfortunate enough to be early starters out there, murdered so that some rich college kid in LA, Frisco, New York or wherever could get his hands on a gram of blow and maybe get lucky at a party with some drug slut in the john. I wasn’t a fan of Class A drugs, and I didn’t care too much either for the people who thought taking them did no harm. The sight I caught of Gail Sorwick when a corner of the blanket lifted was going to stay with me for some time. What a way to go, to see your children and your husband gunned down in front of your eyes while the killer made you swallow his poison. She’d tried to balance the account with her incisors, but it was a final small act of defiance. The animal killed her and then mutilated her. If I ever got my hands on the fuck who did that, I made a silent promise to Gail Sorwick that I would make him pay.

I eventually got out, toweled off and dressed – dark-blue T-shirt, jeans and all-terrain boots. My cell rang, the tone telling me that I’d missed a call. The screen informed me that it was Arlen, so I rang him back.

“Vin, how was it?”

“Heavy.”

“I know. It’s all over the news. Turn on your TV.”

“It’s locked on the porn channel,” I said.

“So you’ll be staying in tonight?”

“I’ve never seen anything like this down here.”

“I know,” he said. “The networks have all got their birds in the sky. Tweets leaked the story after some of the relatives were informed. The Mexicans are being blamed. Some think it’s the violence from Juárez spilling across the border. It’s virtually a failed state over there. Could be a gang called the
Barrio Azteca
involved in some payback, or maybe the
Los Zetas
. There are a dozen theories floating around. No one’s sure, but everyone’s guessing. The FBI is gonna get involved.”

“So we can all relax then,” I quipped.

“And maybe the CIA.”

“Cancel all relaxation.”

“No one likes where this is headed; gonna bring all the vigilante crazies out of the woodwork looking for revenge. I just heard a couple of Mexican-Americans were shot at a Texaco up in Seattle. The word ‘payback time’ was spray-painted on the wall behind them. The last thing anyone wants is open season on US citizens who don’t have blue eyes. Do you know what happened? Other than what’s playing on CNN?”

I gave him a rundown up to the point where Macey made her late entrance, followed by the subsequent deductions in the hospital parking lot.

“Drugs will bring in the DEA,” Arlen said, more to himself. “And you’ve got a witness?”

“I’d call her a survivor. It’s the Lear pilot. She saw two black King Airs arrive, heard the shooting, and then saw the aircraft depart. Didn’t witness much else. She was out walking the desert, star-gazing.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah.” It was, though if Macey had been close enough to see anything else it would’ve been the last thing she saw.

“What about the other Lear pilot? What’s his name … ?”

I heard paper being shuffled: Arlen had briefing notes.

“Rick Gartner,” I said. “As far as I know the guy’s still in a coma. No one’s taking odds on him snapping out of it.”

“Well, if you hear anything come of those roadblocks …”

“I’ll let you know,” I promised.

“What about our deserters?” Arlen asked once the bigger picture had been dealt with.

“I’d say Angus Whelt is checking into a suite in Cancún by now. And, as you know, Sponson’s lining up with twenty-six others at the medical examiner’s table. We’ll have to pick him up from the country coroner’s office when they’re done.”

“I’ll make the arrangements.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked. I couldn’t chase Whelt south of the river. As for what was happening at Horizon Airport, being federal and limited to the affairs of the Air Force, OSI had no jurisdiction in what was a local, civilian investigation. Those facts put me right out of the picture.

“I’ll see you back here tomorrow.”

“Here” was Andrews AFB, in DC. I said goodbye and tossed the cell on the bed, exchanging it for the TV remote. I turned on the set bolted to a caged bracket on the wall and up came the picture of two women working on each other furiously with all the affection of a couple of carpenters hand sanding a cabinet. I changed channels and got a flicker of black before the picture returned to the two women rubbing each other raw. Forty minutes were about up anyway. I turned the thing off. Maybe Gomez and I could find someplace around here where we could get seriously tanked.

Gomez was drunk. That made two of us. The Ranger waved a shot of tequila around in front of his shiny face.

“An Arab, a Frenchman, an American and a Mexican are ridin’ down the Interstate,” he said. “The Arab picks up an AK-47, shoots some rounds and then throws the gun out the window. The American asks him why he did that and the Arab says, ‘We got so many of these where I come from, I don’t care what happens to it.’ Next, the Frenchman picks up a bottle of wine, drinks a little and then throws it out the window. The American asks him why he did that and the Frenchman says, ‘We got so much wine in my country, I don’t care what happens to it.’ Then it’s the American’s turn: he picks up the Mexican and throws him out the window.”

Gomez laughed and it
was
funny and it was
his
joke and there
was
plenty of Mexican in him; so what was I gonna say? You can’t tell jokes like that?

A couple of other Hispanics in the bar fixed him with expressions that gave away nothing.

“That’s a good one,” he continued a little too loud, raising his shot glass and toasting it.

Gomez was smart, he could laugh at himself and he knew how to drink to excess. His performance review was certainly shaping up nicely.

“Next one: Why doesn’t Mexico have an Olympic Team?” he asked, believing he was on a roll. “Because anyone in Mexico who can jump or swim is in the United States. Heh heh heh …” He waved at a Mexican-looking character seated down the far end of the bar who gave him no reaction whatsoever. “Your turn, Cooper,” he said.

“Okay …” I said, checking the immediate area. Gomez was the center of attention and, given that no one else in the place was smiling, I figured the natives probably weren’t all that happy about the roast.

“I’m waiting …”

I had to think and there was a lot of tequila getting in the way of that. Something popped into my head. “Okay – two nuns. They’re riding down the back streets of Rome. One says to the other, ‘I haven’t come this way before.’ The other nun says, ‘It’s the cobblestones …’”

Gomez stared into the middle distance, processing the joke and failing to get it. But then a grin spread across his face, his eyes disappearing behind slits. “Ya got me – I was waiting for the racial epithet,” he said.

“I’m slurring religion today. Open season on nuns.”

“Jesus, Cooper. Gimme one fuckin’ good Mexican joke, for Chrissakes.”

I looked at him.

“
Give
it to me. I can take it,” he insisted.

I sighed. How far was I supposed to push this? “Okay … Why are there no Mexicans on
Star Trek
?”

“I dunno. Why?”

“Because Mexicans don’t work in the future, either.”

He frowned at me, which made me think that maybe I had, in fact, nudged it over the edge. I didn’t know Gomez that well. “Hey,” I told him. “You asked for it.”

At which point he broke into a grin. “Gotcha,” he said. “Hell, this shit don’ worry me. There are
millions
of illegals in America.
I’m
American and I don’ like that as much as any other American.”

“This doesn’t get under your skin?”

“Could be worse.”

“You could be a gay Mexican-Irishman,” I said.

He sniggered. “Look, the jokes are funny because there’s a grain of truth in ’em. And they hurt for the exact same reason. There’s a poor country next to a rich one; what do people reckon is gonna happen? And when you add drugs to the picture …” He tossed back one shot and then another and followed it with a suck on a lemon, which made him pull a face like he just sucked on a lemon. “Ughh – I hate this shit. Gives me the shakes. Can we switch to bourbon now?”

I raised my eyebrows at the barman, pointed at a quart of Jack among the bottles lined up on the shelf in front of the mirror beside him and waved two fingers at the bar in front of us.

The drinks sorted out, I asked Gomez, “How long you been here? Your family …”

“My father immigrated in 1941, after Pearl. He joined up the day they gave him citizenship and he fought on the beaches of Normandy. His youngest brother, my uncle, fought in Nam. I’m just following the leader ’cause I’m not smart enough to pull the rug out from under Warren Buffett. What about you, Cooper? What’s your story?”

I shook my head. “Nope, got no Mexican in my family tree.”

“Shit, Cooper …”

Gomez’s cell rang, distracting him. He picked it up off the bar, looked at the number. He didn’t recognize it but shrugged and answered anyway.

“Gomez,” he said, followed by, “Uh-huh, uh-huh, yeah. Okay, thanks.” He ended the call and put the phone down. “The Sheriff’s Office.” He reached for the shot of bourbon in front of him and threw it back. “The road blocks on 10 and 20. They got nothing.”

The TV monitors scattered around the bar were tuned to the local news, which had spent the best part of the day rehashing what the Sheriff’s Office chose to divulge about the events out at Horizon. From what I could see through my tequila goggles, it wasn’t much – just the bare facts: there’d been a massacre; 27 people shot and killed; no suspects taken into custody. And that was the burr in the shoe right there. Where was the guy who’d run amok with a semi-auto before turning it on himself, the way these things usually went? There were suspicions that persons from across the border had perpetrated the crime, which wasn’t being denied in the TV news report. Just as I was thinking this, Matheson’s red face and curly blond locks bounced in front of the cameras. He began deflecting the only two questions anyone cared about: who did this, and why.

I gestured at the bartender and he hit us again.

“You still agree with the drug delivery theory?” Gomez asked, throwing back the shot.

“Senseless otherwise.”

“Still think it was …” He waved his shot glass around. “You know …”

I didn’t know. I looked at him. He was swaying.

“Think I have to go,” he said, belching wetly, sliding off his stool like something made of rubber and wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.

I followed, finding my feet with some difficulty and only after I realized they were at the end of my legs where they usually were.

“Floor’s moving,” Gomez said, leaning to one side while we both fished around in our pockets for cash to leave on the bar. “I need one more for the road.” He slapped a wad of ones and fives on the counter.

“Shhure,” I slurred, adding to the pile and signaling the bartender.

“No, no. Not a drink, a joke. C’mon, hit me. A Mexican joke. I’m religious. No more poking fun at nuns.” He grinned at his own drunkenness and then stumbled toward the door buried in darkness below a couple of faintly illuminated exit signs.

“Two Mexicans in a car,” I said, the bourbon coming back up and scalding my throat. “Who’s driving?” I pushed open the door, noise from the highway hitting us and causing me to stumble a little.

“Dunno. Who?”

“A cop,” I said.

Gomez cackled. “Heh heh heh … That’s one of mine.” His eyes slid off my face, the grin fading. “Going back to the motel to throw up in private. You?”

The thought of lying down on the sidewalk and closing my eyes was overwhelmingly appealing; but then just as I was considering what to use as a pillow, a cab pulled up beside us.

*

I woke, head pulsing like it was expanding and contracting, bladder brimming with cold acid, tongue thick and dry. I stumbled out of bed, made it to the toilet and leaned against the wall with an outstretched hand, a warmth spreading through my groin as I stood there, head back, letting go into the bowl. “God,” I said aloud to no one in particular and for no reason other than acknowledgment of the simple heavenly relief of taking a piss.

Next stop, the sink. I washed my hands and face and drank four glasses of water, stripped off my shorts and took a shower. It was only then that I looked at my watch: 4 AM. I stood under the steaming jet, waited for the pounding in my head to become bearable as the nightmare images from Horizon Airport once again began to play across my mind. From there, I moved to the hospital and then out into the hospital parking lot. Largely because of Gomez and me, the resources of Texas law enforcement had been uselessly diverted to stretches of highway over four hundred miles away. Had we missed something? Or had we just read the signs wrong? Or was this about something other than drugs? El Paso sat on the Mexican border and yet somewhere I’d seen a sign proclaiming that it was “the safest city in America”. How had it managed to pull that off with Juárez, the second-most violent city in the world, sitting literally a stone’s throw across the dry ditch grandly known as the Rio Grande? For sure El Paso would have its share of stash houses full of drugs, cash and weapons, its cartel-paid stooges, Mexican-Americans acting as hit men, go-betweens, drug smugglers and fixers operating on both sides of the fence. Maybe what had happened out at Horizon was just a new phase in El Paso law enforcement’s corner of the war on drugs.

I belched tequila with a bourbon chaser. Fifteen minutes had passed under the shower and I was no closer to any kind of revelation. I was, however, more or less sober. I turned off the hot tap and wound on the cold.

A short while later, I threw on my standard non-uniform uniform – a navy polo shirt, khaki chinos, low-cut walking boots, followed by an ankle safe holding a pair of Smith & Wesson cuffs. The Sig came aboard next, but not before a run through the usual checks ensuring a full 13-round mag with one in the pipe, ready to fire. The Sig Sauer 228 was the standard OSI issue. It was a heavy weapon – far heavier than a Glock, say – but it felt good in the hand. I slid the weapon into the Raven concealment holster clipped to my belt in the region of the small of my back, made sure the shirt wasn’t hooked up on it, and checked the weapon’s positioning. I used a left-hand holster, but located the pistol so that I could reach around, like I might be getting my wallet from my back pocket, and draw it right-handed.

I took a cab ride in darkness out to Horizon. The driver sat on the other side of a Plexiglas shield, which kept the questions to a minimum, like why I was going to the site of the massacre. He dropped me at the airport’s access road where a black and white was parked. I got out and walked. A flashlight came on and a female deputy approached. She was compact and round-shouldered with a large head and no neck to speak of and reminded me of a clothed basketball, but the image may have been prompted by the name on her chest – Wilson. She was young, maybe twenty. A light was on inside the vehicle and another young deputy was occupying the passenger seat, head tilted back like he was inspecting the lining. I heard snoring. This was the graveyard shift, so probably these were the SO’s youngest, rawest deputies, paying their dues.

“I’m sorry, sir, but this facility is closed,” Deputy Wilson said.

I handed over my credentials. “Much going on?”

“What’s your business here, Agent Cooper?” she replied, examining the ID under the flashlight and ignoring the pleasantries like she was the one who was hung-over.

“I’m already on your clipboard, Deputy.”

She went to the cruiser, retrieved it from the roof and rolled on back, flipping through a couple of pages as she walked. “Here you are … OSI, working with the Rangers. Why so early, Mr Cooper?”

“I left something lying around here yesterday.”

“Oh, what did you leave? Someone might’ve handed it in …”

“My common sense. You find one with a few holes in it, it’s mine.”

The deputy turned the Maglite in my general direction. I gave her a smile. “I can’t put that down, sir …”

“I’m just walking the crime scene, Deputy. Having a second look. We lost a man here.”

“We?”

“The Air Force.”

“Well, I suppose that’s all right. But stay out of the taped-off areas. Forensics hasn’t finished yet. It’ll start getting busy again here around first light. That’s in …” she checked her watch, “… 45 minutes from now.” She handed back my badge wallet. “Any theories about what went down here, sir, other than it was drug related?”

I shook my head and told her I had nothing. I hadn’t changed my mind about the special delivery, but I was equally sure that something important had been missed, or maybe misinterpreted. I doubted forensics had overlooked anything, but I have found through the years that going over old ground can sometimes help, or at least didn’t hurt. I told the deputy to have a nice day and she told me she’d keep an eye out for that thing of mine with holes in it.

It was a few minutes after five and there was no hint of the coming dawn as I headed for the ramp. The area itself was dark but I could still make out the pale shapes of the shade tents hovering like ghosts over the places where the victims had had their photos taken. A low chain separated the access road from the tarmac. I stepped over it and kept walking toward the runway. The cool desert air was still and quiet. I tried to imagine the airport as Bobbie Macey might have seen it before all hell broke loose here almost exactly 24 hours earlier. This small, cozy family facility didn’t have a tower or even a permanently lit runway. Macey and her co-pilot had split up prior to the flight for some reason, Macey going for a stroll out to the end of the runway, while Rick Gartner – the man in the coma – had stayed close to the Learjet.

I walked west, toward the airport’s few buildings. Sometime before first light, the two King Airs had arrived from the south at low altitude, flying nap-of-the-earth to avoid radar detection. Once on the ground they’d taxied to the ramp where their passengers had dispersed to kill everything that moved. It made sense to me that the shooting had started once the invaders were spread throughout the facility. Having reconnoitered what they were up against, they’d probably then just worked their way back to their aircraft on the ramp, taking care of business as they moved.

I crossed one of the few roads in the facility. Nothing to my left but black empty desert, lit with the occasional insufficient light. To my right was a row of Quonset huts. One of them had a shade tent set up out front, indicating a DOA. From this angle I could see some kind of vehicle in the hut, something classic that reminded me of my own car, a Pontiac Parisienne. This was a long way from the runway. Whoever hit this place was very thorough about it. I kept walking, kept mulling everything over. There was a chance that the bad guys had flown in prior to the assault and cased the joint. If so, there was a chance the aircraft registrations would be recorded either digitally or in a log or ledger. Equally likely, they could’ve driven here and had a look-see. In that instance there’d be no record – nothing.