Ghost Sniper

59

A frustrated Clemson Fields arrived at Villalobos’s motel and knocked sharply at the door to room 11. Villalobos was not answering his phone, and there were pressing problems in Mexico City. He needed a man he could depend on to neutralize Ortega before the guy realized his wife and kids had probably been chopped into little pieces and showed up at the US Embassy in hysterics, blabbing everything he knew about the Alice Downly affair.

“Come on, Villalobos, open up.” He stood, looking around. Villalobos’s car was parked right in front of the room.

Putting his ear to the door, he could hear music inside. “Hey!” He thumped the door with the heel of his fist. “Late night or what? Open up. We’ve got trouble down in DF.”

There was a small restaurant across the street, so he crossed to the road to check if Villalobos might be eating breakfast. The man was not there, so Fields went back to the room. He thought briefly to involve the motel manager, but an old instinct left over from the Cold War told him he’d better not. He went to his car and took a lock-pick set from his briefcase.

“I haven’t picked a lock in ten years,” he muttered, glancing around before fitting the needles into the lock. Luckily, the lock was old, so he was able to get the door open in under three minutes.

Fields slipped into the dark motel room and switched on the light. What he saw made him catch his breath. Propped on a pillow, Villalobos was tied naked to the bed with strips of torn sheet, his arms and legs outstretched, a blue condom over his shriveled penis, and his chest covered in blood that had spurted from his severed jugular vein. His empty wallet lay on the table near the door, and a blanket was thrown over the television which was on, playing Mexican music.

For the first time in his thirty-year career, Fields felt the impulse to run, but he ordered himself to remain calm. He’d been in a similar situation in East Berlin in 1980. “This is no worse than that,” he told himself. “And I’m not being hunted by the KGB.”

He peeked through the curtains to be sure no one was watching the motel and stepped into the bathroom. A bloody white hand towel lay on the floor. He found five or six strands of long, dark hair on the shower stall floor, but this was an almost useless clue. Eight out of ten women in Mexico had long dark hair.

“Murdering whore,” he mumbled, moving back into the room.

Realizing he had no way to safely dispose of the body, he unplugged the television and stood with hands on his hips, looking at the corpse. Villalobos’s dark eyes stared down at his shriveled genitalia. “Thank God this is Tijuana,” Fields said to himself. “In any other city, this would draw a lot of attention.”

He searched Villalobos’s bags and discovered that the murderer had stolen his silenced H&K pistol. At least he didn’t have to worry about the police finding the weapon in the room.

Five minutes later, Fields was sitting at a red light, wondering what to do about Ortega. “Damn it.” Now he had no choice but to call the clowns from Baja.