Standoff

Thirty-four

Back from the road, unfenced bushland and open fields suddenly became permanent high cinderblock walls painted green, topped by coiled razor wire. An entrance gate came up. I slowed right down to get a good look at it. The gate was new and solid. Signs warned of surveillance and jail terms for trespassers. Someone was keen on privacy, but there was no APOSTLES LIVES HERE banner. Still not enough to get that go team off the beach volleyball court. Nothing less than a positive sighting would be required.

Before I Skyped Arlen, I played through the conversation in my mind. I’d tell him about Apostles’ whereabouts, to which he’d say: “So you think he’s moved a mile up the road?” There’d be skepticism.

I’d say: “That’s what his daughter believes.”

To which he’d respond: “He has a daughter?”

“Her mother was Miss Venezuela. Remember Miss Venezuela, Apostles’ first wife?”

“Oh right, I understand now.”

“Understand what?”

“Is that her I can see in the background there? Is she hot? Show me …”

“What’s getting a look at her got to do with anything?”

“Because, Vin, sometimes you think with your dick.”

I knew Arlen and, of course, he knew me. So the end result of this deliberation was that I didn’t call him. One look at Juliana and he’d think for sure my libido was running the show.

So I opened up Google Earth instead to see what it would reveal. As it turned out, not a lot. While the resolution over Puerto Triunfo was reasonable, things became blurry over the countryside. And an apparently innocent random flight in a helicopter over the property wasn’t on the cards either, as the only choppers in the skies in this part of the world were flown either by drug lords, or by the police or military looking for drug lords.

That explains why I stole a boat. Yes, okay, that was Juliana’s idea but, truthfully, I didn’t have a better one. And while stealing it was easy, keeping Juliana out of it was a little tougher. She agreed to remain behind on dry land only after I promised I was just gonna float downstream and recce the place. Juliana believed this because, unlike Arlen, she really didn’t know me at all.

She stood on the bank lit up silver as the gentle current took hold of the craft and pulled it into the center of the river. The air was alive with the sound of frogs and insects croaking and clicking at each other, and sudden louder rustlings suggestive of larger animals. That’s about when I remembered there were hippos in these waters and that they killed more folks in Africa than any other animal. But this was South America, I reassured myself, another continent entirely and maybe they were better behaved here. Something large in the water moved nearby.

“Nice hippo,” I whispered.

I pushed off a bank with a pole as the river rounded a bend. A night light burned brightly on the rear porch of a rambling old mansion set back on higher ground away from the flood plain. A couple of horses slept standing under the stars. The boat, more of a dinghy, kept moving with the current. Around half an hour later and past two more neighboring properties, both with cattle, I drifted into the weeds on the edge of the ranch Juliana believed now housed the most wanted men in the world. Two stories of it sprawled from left to right roughly parallel to the course of the river. Two other smaller buildings also occupied the land. All of them were running dark and there didn’t appear to be any livestock in the fields, except for a few horses. Even if no one was home, the place was probably wired up with infrared surveillance. Surveillance would include motion sensors.

It was about ten minutes before first light. Mist drifted over the land, ghostly in the moonlight. An animal with what sounded like very large lips blew air across them, and then gave a succession of deep warty grunts. And it was close. Dry land suddenly seemed a better risk than the river.

“Good hippo,” I whispered as I removed the Sig from the small of my back, holding it aloft with my cell as I slid out of the dinghy. I gave the boat a gentle push to send it on its way, and pulled myself through the water-clogged weeds that hid the bank from view. My boots soon found the ooze on the bottom and I slowly, soundlessly snaked up the shelf, out of the water and into a stand of overgrown bush. Off to the east, the sky was giving a hint of the coming day. I checked the cell — no signal bars.

The ranch house and other buildings were maybe a hundred yards back from the river, much of them obscured by the thickening mist. And then I spotted movement. It was a man walking across the back of the house, beside a deep veranda. He had a dog on a leash and some kind of rifle slung over his shoulder. My heart rate leaped up the scale. A man patrolling with a rifle was pretty suggestive that Juliana might be right about this ranch’s residents. And then there was the dog. That presented a problem. Well-trained K-9s were difficult customers. They had a nose for trouble and lots of snapping teeth to deal with it.

The back door of the house opened and a figure came out, met by another figure that I hadn’t seen, obscured by deeper shadows. The two of them started running — no, they were jogging. They turned and turned again, on a course heading straight toward my hide. The sky was getting lighter by the moment, light enough for me to see that one of the joggers ran with a shoulder holster, light enough for me to recognize the person running beside him. Jesus — Lina. They kept coming toward my position. I didn’t have a lot of time to think through the options. I couldn’t spot the guard with the K-9. This was risky. My muscles were twitching, breathing short and shallow. The Sig was in my hand.

They changed course in front of me, heading away. I leaped from the hide, slid onto the ground, got my legs either side of the armed runner’s legs and twisted my body. The guy had no idea what happened. One moment he was running and maybe having a nice chat about global domination or whatever with Lina, and the next his face was accelerating toward the earth at a frightening rate. He had time to reach out with one hand to break his fall and I heard his wrist snap an instant before his face slammed into the turf. Lina had stopped. She was wide-eyed at the lightning assault. I was on the ground, Sig was pointed up at her, daring her to make a move. Or a sound. She was frozen.

“Morning,” I said.

“Y … you,” she replied, a whisper.

“How many guards are there?”

“Three.”

“Why only three?”

“Too many would … draw attention.” Lina was still getting over the shock of seeing how fast her world could be turned upside down.

Keeping the Sig on Lina, I untangled the rifle from the fallen guard. He was unconscious, but for how long? I tapped him behind the ear with the rifle stock, just hard enough to keep him seeing stars for an extended period.

“Drag him into the bush,” I told Lina, the Sig tracking her every movement.

She hesitated, looking around for rescue. None was coming.

“Do it,” I repeated.

“What are you going to do?” she asked once her guard was hidden away.

“Start running,” I said.

“What?”

“You heard me. You were running. Let’s just keep going, have a catch-up.” She started to run and I ran with her, the Sig pointed across my body at her ribs. “Where’s Apostles?”

“Not here,” she said.

“And Perez isn’t here either, I suppose.”

“No.”

“You’re lying.”

“Why would I tell you anything? You can find out for yourself.”

“How’s Daniela?”

“Do you care?”

“What do you think? You’re both part of an operation that killed hundreds of your fellow Americans — men, women and children — and nearly started a war. Your boyfriend is a drug lord who pedals addiction while he murders people, and his best pal is a psycho fiend who belongs in a rubber room or, better still, with a lethal injection plugged into a vein.”

“She can’t talk after what you did to her. She was so beautiful. I think she’s going to die.”

Lina altered course, jogged away from the river and headed toward a couple of tennis courts with a cabana, all surrounded by steel-mesh fencing. Beyond the courts were stables and, beyond them, the ranch house.

“What are you going to do?”

“Just keep running until I tell you to stop.” That sounded a lot more convincing than, “I’ll let you know when it occurs to me.”

We ran past the courts and the stables.

Moments later, approaching the ranch house, the guard with the dog walked around the side of one of the detached buildings, more or less into our path. The animal saw Lina and me, got the scent, and started barking and straining at the leash. It knew something was wrong — that something with an unfamiliar scent was in its presence. The guard was too busy restraining the animal to get a good look at me. He pulled on the dog’s leash, yelled a command and managed to settle it down a little. The dog was a beast, some kind of shepherd — Rottweiler cross. It had jaws straight out of some horror movie and it clearly wanted to get them around my throat. The guard apologized to Lina with a friendly wave as we ran past and gave the K-9 another good yank on its chain to remind it who was boss.

I didn’t know how long I was going to keep this up. I couldn’t run around with Lina all day long and every footfall she had to be thinking about how to get on top of me, in a manner of speaking. I was just one man and it was now daylight. We came around the front of the house. There was a large, fast helicopter parked on the lawn, outside a hangar. Beyond it, partly obscured by trees, were other buildings, including garages where several vehicles were parked. Three large radio dishes were perched on the roof of the garage. Apostles and Perez were wired into the world, running their empire.

Lina changed direction again. “So you just run around and around the house?” I asked her. “What happened at Laughlin changed the game. What the hell was Apostles thinking?”

No answer.

“This is it, you know,” I told her. “I found you and now Uncle Sam is gonna reach down here and squash you. You can’t leave — there’s nowhere you can go. You’re trapped. Like they say, the jig is up.”

Finding her voice, Lina suddenly laughed. “It’s just you, isn’t it! Jesus, you’ve followed a hunch and here you are. They wouldn’t send one man. No fucking way. There’d be the CIA, Colombian police. Shit …”

We came around the corner of the house. The guard with the K-9 was quite close.

“¡Ayúdame!” Lina shouted, pushing me away.

At the call for help, the dog, already wary, instantly broke from the handler and leaped at me. I shot it. No choice. The animal died quiet. The handler swung his rifle off his shoulder as the Sig came around and barked at him too. At this extreme close range, the soft-nosed round punched him backward off his feet. When he landed, there was a big hole in his heart. He wasn’t moving and neither was the dog.

In the dense morning air the gunshots had gone off like bigger explosions. They were ringing in my ears. And now surprise was lost and with it went any control of the situation that I might have had.

Lina had disappeared inside the house. I stripped the rifle off the dead guard, pulled the bolt and threw it. A man burst from one of the buildings away from the house, firing a carbine on full auto as he ran. The angle was bad for him, good for me. I had time to lead him two-handed as he ran. Squeezing the trigger, the Sig jumped and the man rolled into some longer grass before he could reach cover. I stood behind the side of the house, listening. Lina had said three guards. I believed her. When she’d told me she’d been in too much shock to think about lying. Three guards were now accounted for.

I thought about alternatives to storming the house. Most of them circled the notion of calling for backup. Only who was I gonna call? There was no 1st Cav gonna be riding on in this time. And then there was the question of how I was gonna make said call. I looked at my cell. Still no bars, damn it.

I checked the Sig’s magazine: five rounds and one in the chamber. Dropping the mag out of the FN FAL carbine taken from Lina’s running partner showed it to be full. The Sig was a better choice in confined quarters, like inside a house. The FN would be my reserve weapon. I slung it over my shoulder. The world had gone way too quiet to be healthy. I took a couple of deep breaths to get my heart rate under control, then stepped warily to the dark doorway through which Lina had disappeared.

I put my head around the corner, in and out. A billiards room, full-size table. The room was empty. I went in. The air smelled of fresh paint. No sound, no movement. Off the room, two hallways and a spiral staircase. I took the staircase. The stairs topped out in a kind of sitting room with a spare bedroom off one end and an office off the other. On the wall in the sitting room, that familiar signed photo of Pancho Villa. The office was vacant, no paperwork or computer gear. One hallway off the sitting room. Still no sound or movement. I took the hallway. On the wall, an old oil painting of a vast sea battle — sails, cannon fire, explosions. On the wall opposite, a very large mirror in a gold frame. Beneath the mirror, some kind of antique wooden chopping block with an ancient rifle displayed on top. Further down the hall, a suit of armor. A doorway. A bedroom. I went in. The bed had been slept in. An en-suite bathroom, empty. I backed out into the bedroom. Somewhere, a door opened. And before I had time to react, a loop of steel enveloped my arms and body and squeezed.

No, not steel — arms. They lifted me off the ground, the pressure intensifying. My ribs — they were going to crack. I struggled, slammed my head back, hoping to do some damage, but whoever had me in this bear hug was ready for it. I got a look at the human vice in the mirror. It wore a black mask, jagged silver teeth, round silver-painted eyes and angry silver brows. Jesus, El Bruto? Lina dashed across the hall, pistol up and aimed at me. I found the wall with my boots and pushed off an instant before she fired. The round skimmed the wall, taking off paint. I couldn’t breathe. El Bruto roared in my ear and squeezed ever harder. I thought my head was going to burst. I gripped the Sig, pointing at the floor, changed the angle slightly and fired. The roar turned into a scream as bits of El Bruto’s foot burst all over the floor. He released his grip as we both toppled over, the wrestler making animal sounds of intense pain.

Sprawled on the floor, I glanced up and saw Lina run down the hallway, disappear into a room and slam the door closed behind her. The fight had gone right out of El Bruto, the man shaking with shock and holding his mangled quivering foot in the air, his scream almost continuous.

I got up and left the wrestler where he was. He was noisy, but out of the game. Edging further down the hall, I wasn’t sure of the wisdom of following Lina. I put my hand on a doorknob and turned it. The air that came from the room was close and smelled of sickness. I opened the door. Daniela was propped up in bed, sleeping. Her closed eyes wore circles of green pallor, her throat encased in bandages. She opened her eyes and saw me. They went wide with fear. She opened her mouth, tried to call or scream, but only a dry croak escaped. I felt a pang of regret. She’d been a beautiful creature, emphasis on creature. Daniela was out of the game too. I closed the door and continued down the hall. Three other bedrooms. All were gorgeously decorated with tapestries, rugs and old weapons. The four-poster beds had all been slept in. Another suit of armor marked the end of the hall and the entrance to a dining room. A horse with a case of rigor stood stiff and dead in one corner of the room. It was Siete Leguas — Seven Leagues, Villa’s stuffed nag.

The sound of a vase or a plate smashing distracted me. It came from downstairs. It felt like a lure. I backtracked, past El Bruto who was now whimpering, his bloody foot making a hell of a mess on the wall and floor, and took the stairs down from the sitting room. The billiards room was still clear. My palms were sweating on the Sig’s handgrips. Along with Lina, who was armed and dangerous, Apostles and Perez were embedded somewhere in this house, waiting for me. More specifically, waiting to kill me. And by now, they would know that I’d come alone. Or maybe not.

I fired the rifle into the air and the three horses went through the ground floor hallway like, well, a herd of horses. They made plenty of noise knocking paintings off the walls, smashing vases, sliding on rugs and breaking chairs, neighing and whinnying in the strange environment. When they got to the front door and found it closed, the animals went seriously berserk, bucking and turning, and kicking out with their hooves, skidding on the wood floor. I came in behind them and ran to the side, into a library. I figured Apostles was into horses more than humans. He’d be worried about them. I heard him calling out to them, trying to soothe them and horse-whisper them back out the way they came in. One of the animals got the message, reared up and twisted around, galloped down the hall and out the rear entrance, the other horses following. I snuck into a room, came through an adjoining door and, in a mirror, saw Apostles’ back, a machine pistol dangling from his hand. All the noise and distraction hid my movement. Apostles sensed me behind him too late. He spun around but now the Sig was barely inches away, aimed at the bridge of his nose.

“I’ll take that,” I told him as he hesitated, relieving him of the machine pistol, pulling the weapon out of his hand.

“I don’t think so,” said Perez in Spanish.

What? I froze. Jesus — the man was behind me! He’d done to me what I’d done to Apostles. The short vicious little fuck stepped around where I could see him. He had a H&K pistol, blue-black with pearl grips, pointed at my chest. The stupid gun matched that stupid knife of his. Maybe it was a boxed set.

I held my nerve. “Don’t think about moving.” To Perez I said, “This trigger only needs two point two pounds’ pressure to release the hammer. I’m squeezing it now — gotta be close to two pounds’ pressure on the trigger. Shoot me and the shock will make my finger twitch.” I took a glance at Perez. His head was no longer shaved smooth, a band of scraggly salt and pepper fuzz running around the back of his head from ear to ear. The tear tattoos were mostly gone, expensively lasered off I guessed, the skin still mildly scarred from the burning. The color of his eyes had also changed. Dung-beetle black was now cow-brown. He was changing his appearance, getting ready to disappear or perhaps start afresh. “Had a makeover?” I asked him. “Going for that paedophile accountant look, I see. Suits you.”

“I am going to enjoy killing you, Cooper,” Perez growled.

“Don’t count your chickens.” I sounded tough, if a sentence with chickens in it could sound tough, but I was compensating — the momentum had shifted out of my control.

Perez switched to English. “What is it you gringos call this? A Mexican standoff?”

And then Juliana walked in through the back door, hands behind her head. Coming in behind her was Lina, armed with that crossbow, the bolt aimed between Juliana’s shoulder blades.

“Ah, Juliana. How nice to see you, as always,” said Apostles. “And look, you’re returning my ballista. Can you believe those putas stole it?”

Juliana’s eyes met mine, and there was an apology in them. She must have simply stolen another boat and drifted along down the river behind me. But however she’d managed to get herself here was academic. Juliana was now their prisoner and this changed things, the balance now firmly in Apostles’ favor. Once upon a time, I might have taken a gamble in a situation like this, had a crack, shot first and worried about the consequences later, but I’d learned my lesson. This was how Anna Masters had lost her life. Experience had taught me this standoff shit never ends well.

Perez relieved me of the machine pistol as Apostles turned and took the Sig from my hand. “I liked you, you know that? We could have done some good business, you and me. Pity.”

Plan A was busted. My mind raced through plans B, C, D, all the way to Z, and came up empty. I couldn’t see a way out. Apostles had my pistol, Perez was behind me with a pistol and Lina had an iron bolt that could kill out to three hundred yards aimed point blank at Juliana’s back. Tears of frustration ran down Juliana’s face.

Apostles checked that there was indeed a round in the Sig’s chamber. Satisfied, he cocked the weapon, brought it up and pushed the muzzle against my forehead.

“Move,” Apostles suggested to Perez, who was in his line of fire if my brains didn’t stop the bullet.

I taunted him. “What’s the matter, afraid you’ll miss?”

Apostles smiled a pleasant smile, pushed the weapon hard into my forehead. And then he pulled the trigger.

Click!

The hammer hit home but nothing happened. Apostles looked at Perez and took the gun away from my head, confused for an instant. An instant was all I needed. I reached out, snatched Apostles’ hand, jammed it under his chin and pulled his own finger against the trigger. This time, with no backward pressure on the slide, the Sig roared as it coughed up a round. The barrel jerked up and back and Apostles’ skin and blood and gray matter flew in all directions as the soft-nose bullet did its job.

Lina looked on in horror at her lover’s brains hitting the ceiling. Juliana dove for the floor as Lina’s finger tightened automatically on the crossbow’s trigger. The weapon’s string made a sound like a musical note as it discharged. A moment later, from down on the floor, Juliana fired her own pistol up at Lina, the bullet smashing the girl’s hip and spinning her around. Lina screamed and toppled to the floor.

Something was missing: Perez. He’d gone. “Where is he?” I yelled.

“He’s wounded — the crossbow,” Juliana yelled back, the gunfire and Lina’s screams ringing in our ears, and pointed out the door.

I sprinted for the back door and saw him. He was running toward the river with an awkward gait, clutching his bloody side, the kidney area. A long smear of deep crimson on the grass said the wound was bad. I ran and caught up with him trying to drag a heavy wooden canoe off the weeds and into deeper water. I hadn’t seen this boat earlier. I guessed it was the one Juliana had arrived in. Weak from blood loss, not to mention the pain, the task was beyond Perez and he was puffing, exhausted, staggering like a drunk in the shallows.

“What do you want?” he panted in that dry voice of his. “Money, a share of the business?”

“You could take that fancy pistol of yours out of your pants — using your left hand — and throw it into the water,” I told him.

He did as I asked and tossed it into the weeds between us.

“Good. Now your knife.”

He removed it from inside his jacket pocket and it went into the drink, roughly where he’d thrown the pistol.

“Any other weapons?” I asked him, covering his movements with the Sig.

“No,” he said and then coughed. “Tell me, what do you want? I can make anything happen for you.”

That was some claim. It took my mind back through a jumble of nightmarish images. “I want you to pay for the people you killed at Horizon Airport. There was a woman. Her name was Gail Sorwick. You remember her? You killed her husband and children after you forced yourself on her. And then you cut her. Remember?”

Perez stumbled to keep his footing and coughed some more. “Por favor …” he pleaded.

“There was a girl by the name of Bambi, and the hundreds of men, women and children you killed or wounded at Laughlin. Can you bring them all back, asshole?”

I placed the Sig’s front sight on Perez and followed him with it as he stumbled around in the weeds, in the grip of a minor coughing fit, hacking up blood. I’d made a promise to Gail and to Bambi. To hell with Chalmers and his guilt trip. That shit had almost gotten me killed anyway. Monsters like Perez should never have been born. I could do this. It would be so easy. It’s what I’d been paid to do. I kneaded the Sig’s handgrip. No witnesses. Just pull the trigger on this piece of shit. Do it.

A sudden depression appeared in the water close to Perez, followed by a bow wave like a submarine surfacing. Shit — a large animal surged out of the water, stopped still in the weeds and waggled a bizarrely cute set of ears on top of its head. It scared the crap outta me. Jesus, a hippo, one of the descendants of Escobar’s zoo. It wasn’t a full-sized one — an adolescent or even a baby. It might even have been the animal I’d seen at Apostles’ ranch on my first visit there. What was its name? Sophie?

If its arrival startled me, it gave Perez the shock of his life. He lost his footing and lurched a few steps toward it, off balance. That’s when a second hippo the size of an M1 main battle tank charged out of the water. If the smaller one was Sophie, then the big one had to be Sophie’s mother, Magdalena. Maggie trotted to Perez with her mouth open wide and snatched him up, impaling him on those huge chisel teeth and shaking him from side to side several times before throwing him up onto the bank, broken and bleeding.

Mother then nuzzled daughter affectionately and herded her back into the water.

I blinked. A wheezing Perez groaned at my feet.