Warrior Mine (5 page)

T
hree weeks
, two days, nine hours, thirty-four minutes, eleven seconds, and Vail could not take one more hour of lying low. The sterile white of his building’s stairwell threatened to rupture every vessel in his eyes. Heaves of stagnant air inside the echoing column of metal and concrete shaved another year off his life. Gunshot wound or not, he hadn’t been able to sleep past 0445 since he’d enlisted. And here he was, up before the sun. Not that he’d seen it lately.

He kicked his knees high on the fifth floor, refusing himself the break he’d taken yesterday on the last of three sets of the entire case. As workouts went, it wasn’t much. But it was progress. It had taken a week before he could walk the ten flights to his condo. Another week to do it without expecting his lower half to completely separate from his top half. And it beat the hell out of staring at the wall all day.

Sweat tickled his forehead and dripped from his chin on to his sopping shirt. The cold refused to leave no matter how hard he pushed or how many layers he added. The chill of death clung, reminding him of that night. As if the darkness of his persistently drawn curtains and agent detail at the front and rear entrances of his building—both Commander Slaughter’s doing—weren’t enough to do the trick. That combined with his wayward subconscious and it was all he thought about.

Right. She’s all you think about.

True as it was, he couldn’t yet admit it.

His mending muscles burned from the abuse. A cramp stitched his right side from overcompensating for his weak side. One more flight and he’d be home.

Home.

Vail laughed at the notion, but it cost core strength he lacked. Especially after fifty toes-to-bar, two miles on the treadmill, seventeen-hundred meters in the pool, and then the stairs. His left hand shot out to the cold metal railing. The sweat-slicked fingers didn’t do much to help. He met the concrete with his palms, shins, and knees. He sprawled to the side and then rolled to his back. Slowly the rise and fall of his dark grey T-shirt reached a functional rate. He braced one hand on the rail—after wiping it on his athletic shorts—and the other on the stair close to his rear. He’d learned quickly it hurt less to get vertical this way.

Upright, he used the rail and tugged himself up the remaining steps. Across the hall and down two from the stairwell. The gray front of his door looked like the others. The only difference nestled above the door’s knob. He punched in the code to his self-installed security system and shoved his way inside the cave.

Normally, unobscured windows lined the space, framing out the living room, office, and two bedrooms with the radiance of the sun. Normally, he ran through the city and hoofed the steps of the various monuments littering the National Mall. Normally, he didn’t notice the emptiness of the space he referred to as home. But now the only thing that felt comfortable to him were the pages scattered across the granite of his kitchen counters.

Vail peeled the shirt from his torso, opened the closet off the entryway, and hung the wet thing over the edge of the washing machine. After toeing off the black Mizuno’s, his socks, boxer briefs, and shorts, he added them to the clutter. He closed the door, and then he grabbed the small towel he’d set on the foyer table. Draping the cloth over his head, he lumbered to the sink for a glass of water. Or three.

The stacks of paper called to him and, like always, he went. Naked. Sleepy. Confused. Hungry. Horny. Sweaty. Pissed. Time and again he returned to the information he now knew better than his own name and aliases. His persistence—obsession, really—had paid off in the darkest hours of the night.

Twenty years ago the Arellano-Félix Organization had been Mexico’s most powerful and feared cartel, controlling Tijuana and its lucrative border crossing with merciless tyranny. Carlos’s full name, Carlos Félix-Ruez, revealed his connection to the organization. He was the only son of Ángela Arellano-Félix-Ruez, the world’s first female drug lord. Though his mother hadn’t been long for the earth it seemed she’d passed the lust for violent authority through her genes.

After her death her husband took control. Carlos Hersio-Ruez, the father, lacked none of the ruthlessness the business required. He did, however, lack the family name to bear the weight of leadership. The remaining Arellano-Félix brothers wrestled Ángela’s husband for control. The organization cracked, allowing the US government to capture some of its top tier leaders and the Sinaloa Cartel to gain footholds in the foundation of their rival. Little by little, the Sinaloa overwhelmed the AFO, took control of Tijuana, and set the remaining members of the once prestigiously infamous family scurrying to the corners of the country.

Carmen’s entire family was remnant of cartel history. Carmen, with her sad eyes and surprising knack for stealth, torture, and precise aim. She’d placed the bullet just where it needed to go to show Carlos that Vail was a goner, while simultaneously doing the least amount of damage and giving him a fighting chance. Though the rage and regret etched into her face said she didn’t want to kill him, had it not been for the note she’d left Khani, she would have sealed his coffin.

How she fit into the puzzle he couldn’t yet tell. Carlos Félix-Ruez aimed for the top office, his father be damned. He apparently hadn’t been satisfied with his rich but powerless life of exile in the small fishing town of Puerto San Carlos in the southern Comondú Municipality. Five years ago the bastard began buying up real estate in Tijuana, Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango. An alias protected his identity, until Vail had coaxed it out of him. La Muerte. The name spoke of foreboding. Vail thought about the man, the malice in his stare, and knew if left to his deeds Carlos would ratchet the level of death in Mexico’s streets. Ruez had bought enough land, black market weapons, and people to mount a war.

His agents and contacts had heard the name La Muerte whispered over dark beers in even darker corners of rowdy cantinas. And though he’d suspected The Death to be one arm of a cartel falling away to become its own entity, as so often they did, it was good to know exactly who they were dealing with.

Three and a half weeks ago Vail unbound the file and separated the last five years of documentation into piles. Four in all lay in their respective heaps. Real estate. Known associates. Weapons. Income. A cabin in the wilderness of Kentucky.

The cabin stack had started as a single sheet. A buyer’s agreement between two men—Hank Higgins—an old guy being placed in an assisted living facility closer to his children in Lexington—and Charlie Ranger—a false front. The Base Branch system had flagged the transition because its routing number matched the routing number to another of Ruez’s aliases. Nothing about the cabin had fit into the equation. Not until Carmen dropped through his ceiling and started making demands.

If you needed to hide someone and had a sister willing to rip Mexico from its bedrock and toss it across the ocean to find that person, what better place to hide the person than somewhere she’d never think to look?

Carlos had been stopped in Tennessee on a simple traffic violation. The officer had hauled him in after running the license of one Charlie Ranger, which showed a federal warrant for his arrest. Those two pieces had been enough for Vail to move, but accustomed to checking and rechecking facts for his teams, he dug deeper.

Yesterday’s search yielded several other properties the good Charlie Ranger purchased in the States. Houses in San Diego, Tucson, and El Paso tipped the scale from likely to definite in Vail’s mind. Carlos Ruez had been planning something big. And from the way he ran his mouth before Carmen had left—before ripping a hole in his belly and screwing with his mind—he’d guess the crazy son of a bitch still hoped to carry it out. It made sense. He’d given them vital information, which allowed the Base Branch to take out several key Sinaloa facilities. And he bet the information dump had been another strategic move on Carlos’s part.

Vail placed the glass in the dishwasher and then pulled the topographical map of Kentucky and the cabin plans from the stack. Stiff after being still for only a couple of minutes, he shuffled around the high bar—the only thing that separated the kitchen from the living room, and dining room for that matter—past the fancy sofa and chairs with their accent pillows as the decorator had called them, and stopped at the eight-top dining table he’d never used. Well, he used it. Just not for its intended purpose. Most often he walked around it to the bank of three floor-to-ceiling windows it sat near and propped on the top while he drank his coffee and watched the sun bring the city into focus. This morning it held his gear.

Guns, knives, an oversized backpack, first aid supplies, boots, a wool blanket, and various camping tools lay scattered across the smooth wood top. Though he didn’t dare put more on the table, save for the two sheets of paper. The narrow metal legs likely couldn’t hold much more. Would the thing hold Carmen with his weight on top and the power of his body thrusting inside her?

He tossed the pages onto the table, ignoring his burgeoning erection. But really, what guy could look away from his Johnson when it saluted? Not him. He shook his head at the damn fool, who obviously had no sense of self-preservation. The gnarled red skin at his middle caught his eye. Slowly the sex-starved appendage followed logic and, despite the cold, hung low and long between his legs.

Vail ran his hand over the puckered skin, appreciating that it hadn’t harbored an infection. Unlike two of the five scars scattering his torso. If this shot had been one foot in the grave, those had been body in, lid shut, but for some ridiculous reason the dirt hadn’t piled on top. So, like an idiot set on provoking his own demise, he headed to his bedroom to finish packing, shower, and drive to Kentucky.

I
t shamed
Vail that his own world-class, elite operatives were so easily given the slip. Then again, he went to great lengths to keep the sleek Audi he’d driven out the back gate and right past the agent a secret. They also worked at a disadvantage since they were on alert for people trying to break into the building, not him trying to escape. Add to the fact that no one knew he lived here in the first place and they all thought he was dead, they worked at an extreme disadvantage.

Glasses and a hat helped conceal his face, but everyone knew his obnoxious truck by sight and sound. The thing gave him away a mile or more down the road with its rumbling engine. Its burnt red paint made it pretty hard to miss too. If training didn’t keep his hand eye coordination on point, parking that thing on a busy street without using the cars around him as speed bumps did. It fit in the city about as well as a straw of buckwheat between the First Lady’s lips. He loved the damn thing and would drive it until the day he died. Judging by the way things were going, that could be any day now.

The low-slung S5 whispered through the fallen leaves at the roadside and hugged the curves as asphalt hooked through the foothills nearly five hundred miles from his safety detail. He didn’t understand why Khani put them on him in the first place. Neither of them expected Carmen to come finish the job, not that Khani knew it was Carmen Félix-Ruez who’d shot him. She still dug for her own answers and prodded him for information nearly every day, not that she expected to gain anything from him. Yet, if the roles were reversed he’d take the same precautions and hunt for answers just as doggedly.

East of Morehead, Vail turned south into Daniel Boone National Forest. The road dipped between a valley of matchstick trees. Their thick, supple vegetation had long since changed from green to eye-popping yellows and reds, and covered the ground in a brittle brown blanket. At the top of a low ridge the sparse winter foliage allowed him to see the clear lake to his right. The cabin sat only a mile from the expansive reservoir near the end of one of its near stagnant tentacles.

Vail hooked left at the next two-lane highway and passed the gravel road that eventually forked and turned to a narrow dirt path leading to Carlos’s newest piece of real estate. With no obvious nooks or side trails to hide his shiny black car where it wouldn’t be spotted a mile away, he continued on toward a convenience store he’d spotted on the satellite feed he studied late last night.

He’d been ready to leave the city before dawn, but had waited until the commuters trickled out of his building so he wouldn’t draw unwanted attention. It put him arriving a little later than he’d like with the sun already yawning at the horizon. The late February weather threatened snow, filling the air with hazy gray clouds and dimming the daylight that much more.

Rounding one more bend, a clearing opened in the trees. Light stone gravel that complemented the muted sky filled the lot, save for a slab of neat concrete beneath the building’s awning. Where once gasoline pumps sat, a chunk of raised cement anchored two metal support posts, more rust than white paint coating the surface. A wall of surprisingly clear glass revealed what looked to be an office. Less convenience and more service station, the place hosted two bays with large glass-front doors buttoned low.

By the time Vail reached the storefront, parked, and straightened from the car, a young man—boy, really—stood, his face nearly smashed against the window, gawking. His side hurt less each day and didn’t cause him pain after sitting for so many hours in a row, but tightness held him stiff as a two-by-four. With the kid’s eyes on him he didn’t try to work out the rigidity. He just tried not to look like a toy soldier when he walked.

“Can I help you?” the boy—John, by the name embroidered on his coveralls—asked. His light blue eyes never left the sports car. Puffs of steam floated from his gaping mouth and his greasy hand shoved at the spiky blond hair above his forehead.

“You have an open bay. I’d like to rent it for a couple of nights. A thousand bucks up front and another thousand if it’s here when I get back.”

That swiveled the kid’s head. His gaze rose to Vail’s. “Two grand? Is something wrong with it? Cause we can fix it. We may seem backwoods, and we are, but I’ve got a computer for diagnostics. I guarantee I could have her purring in no time a’tal’.” His hand left his hair and burrowed into his pocket. A shiver wracked his lanky frame.