Death Blow

1

Howard (“Howie”) Anderson faded silently into the shadows against the wall of a closed shop that sold cheap pottery. He pulled down the stained slouch hat that had part of the brim torn off and hunched over so anyone seeing him couldn’t tell how tall he was. He wore two sweaters, both moth chewn and filthy but warm. His double layer of too-large pants had been patched several times. He walked quietly on dirty, rundown sneakers. In his left hand, he carried a half-filled wine bottle partly hidden in a paper sack. He had bought the clothes three weeks ago at a thrift store on the other side of Tijuana. It had taken him twenty minutes to finish his disguise by layering dirt and grease paint on his face and hands.

The clothes were untraceable. He carried no wallet or identification, only two thousand pesos for an emergency. Hidden under the sweaters, a .22-caliber automatic pistol rested in a belt holster. He tensed as a Tijuana Police car made a sweep along the cross street half a block down. The TJ cops were getting better at their job. He didn’t want them to see him.

Howie checked both ways on the litter-strewn side street. No cars, no people. He worked his way painfully into the street, dragging his right foot, which turned outward so far he couldn’t step on it solidly. A car flashed by in the narrow street, missing him by three feet and bringing a screech of Spanish vulgarisms from strident young voices. Howie didn’t even look up. He was bilingual in Spanish. What they said was crude and challenging, but he wasn’t concerned about the newly rich TJ teens. He had bigger prey.

The building he had been watching for the past four hours now showed lights on the second story. There had been none there for the past three hours of darkness. Howie jammed himself between a garbage can and a large wooden packing box in front of a tattoo parlor. It would be impossible to see him in the heavy shadows from ten feet away. From there had a good view of all six windows on the second floor of 4343 Blanco Street. Reymundo “Cuchi” Hernandez must be home. “The Knife” wouldn’t have much use for a blade, not after tonight.

For the past three Sundays, Howie had tracked Cuchi, carefully recording every detail of his lifestyle. The afternoons he spent at the bullfights, then a big dinner and lots of drinks with his current mujer at an expensive restaurant. After that a long night with her in his bedroom. There had been few signs of the protection that Cuchi’s position had earned for him. His bodyguards must leave him after making sure he was inside his apartment. The eight-room bachelor pad hovered over a fancy ice cream parlor. Tonight looked to be the same for Cuchi. He usually came and went from a rear entry.

Howie went over his plan again. It never hurt to question every detail on an operation, especially since there was no one to double-check with and no backup. The shed on the rear of the store was an easy climb to the first-floor roof. From there he would work the second-floor window in the rear of Cuchi’s apartment and be inside before the drug supplier knew it. Cuchi was pushing too hard for more territory, taking over three or four smaller suppliers without permission. The powers who supplied the third level of the huge operation with the product, didn’t like it. A spokesman four layers removed from the man at the top, El Padre, had talked to Howie one night a month ago in the El Gallo Colorado. The bistro/cantina was owned by one of Howie’s long-time friends. Most weekends Howie was at the café, down from San Diego, eating too well, drinking just enough, and sampling the always available bevy of eager muchachas. Sometimes the best things in life all depended on who you knew.

Howie didn’t move for two hours where he hid beside the packing box. His muscles began to scream at him, but he’d stayed in one position for three times that long on many missions. He relaxed and waited for the lights to go out in the apartment. Three hours later the lights snapped off one at a time.

Shortly after 0200, a sudden light from a downstairs entranceway slashed into the dark street. A woman came out quickly. The door closed. The light snapped off.

Howie grinned. Everything was perfect. He’d never seen the woman of the night sent home this early before. Everything was in place. Tonight was the night.

He was ready. His special Ruger Standard .22 long rifle pistol felt good in his hand. It was his favorite handgun. It was a classic 1982 upgraded model of the 1949 weapon that launched Ruger’s empire. It had a hold-open latch, a new magazine catch, new safety catch, and a modified trigger system. The basic weapon had a 120mm barrel, weighed 1020 grams, and had six grooves of rifling in the barrel.

He had been extremely careful handling the pistol to avoid fingerprints. He had worn surgical gloves for loading the nine rounds in the main magazine and nine in the spare. There would be no fingerprints on the shell casings. He kept the thin plastic gloves on when he cleaned and oiled the Ruger last night after the team came off a night exercise. He did that work at home in his Coronado apartment. It had cost him six hundred dollars to get a custom-made silencer put on the weapon three months ago. That extended the barrel by four inches but it had been invaluable twice already.

Howie smiled in the darkness, cracking the layered-on dirt and grease. He lifted up, stretched as he had seen street people do, and worked across the narrow passageway dragging his right foot as before until he made it into the shadows. Then he hurried down the darkness to the alley and up it to the third store, the ice cream parlor. It even had a marked rear entrance.

Howie slid the Ruger into the belt holster and stood on a barrel next to the shed’s rear wall. He climbed up the back of the one-story building, finding foot- and handholds as the skilled hard rock mountain climber he was.

After he swung up on the roof, he froze and listened. There was no cry, no window banging open, and no voice in the night. No ominous shape of a guard hiding in the shadows. He moved on soft-soled sneakers to the windows of the second story where he found the same one unlocked that had been left wide open last Sunday night. Cuchi was getting sloppy. Too sloppy to live.

With infinite care and quietness, Howie edged the double-hung window up, letting the sash weight settle into its chamber gently and without a sound. He paused and listened again, inside and outside the open window.

Nothing.

Howie stepped through the open window into what he knew was a storage room. He drew the pistol and screwed on the four-inch silencer. The room was filled with boxes, cartons, and cones for the store below. He edged through and around them noiselessly, and turned the door knob. It was unlocked as he had hoped. He eased the panel inward an inch and peered through the slot. A small night light glowed at the far end of the hall giving a strange half light to the area.

Howie slid through the door, then stopped, a prickle of alarm darting down his spine. Twenty feet down the hall, a man sat in a chair that leaned back against the wall. Howie could hear the guard’s slow even breathing. He growled in his sleep and moved just enough so the chair slammed down with the front legs hitting the floor. It woke up the guard. He swore softly in Spanish, turned the chair so it faced Howie. The man shook his head and blinked.

“What the fuck? Who’n hell are you?”

Howie had the Ruger up, he refined his head shot just a moment and squeezed the trigger. Just like on the close combat range. The guard clawed for his weapon in a shoulder rig. Before he could get it out of leather, the .22 caliber messenger sent an urgent message to his brain. The lead slug shattered as it tore through the skull and splattered into a dozen vital brain centers killing the guard in a half second. He slumped in his chair.

The whisper sound of the shot couldn’t be heard ten feet away. Howie scowled. Something always had to go wrong. He’d never seen a guard inside. But then he’d never had a good look inside before. He moved up quickly, checked the man, dead. Howie took the revolver from the man’s holster and stepped soundlessly to the door just beyond. It had to be the bedroom. That’s where the last light of the night always showed.

He listened at the door, his hand tightening on the pistol. Someone snored inside. Howie snorted softly and shook his head. Why did he have to make it so easy? Howie turned the knob. Locked. He saw the old-style door lock that had a key hole. He selected from a pocketful of keys an old time skeleton key and gently inserted it. A small metal clink sounded.

The snoring stopped for a moment, then charged on as if to make up for lost sound.

Howie turned the key in the lock and heard a soft click. He rotated the knob and the door eased inward. Now Howie wished he had his night-vision goggles. Some light came in the window. A double bed sat against the far wall. One figure on it sprawled over most of the bed. He wore only pajama bottoms, and used no covers.

Howie walked to the edge of the bed and lifted the Ruger. He eased the end of the silencer against the side of the man’s head.

“Amigo, it is time to come awake one last time,” Howie said in colloquial Spanish. The cucillo mumbled and tried to roll over. The force of the silencer against his head brought him awake. His eyes snapped open, and he saw his situation even in the faint light.

“Hey, hey. What’s this? You playing games? I am Cuchi. What the hell you doing?”

“You were Cuchi, amigo. El Padre doesn’t like the way you’re moving in on other men’s territories, especially his. El Padre wanted me to tell you before you die. Good-bye, asshole.”

Cuchi’s eyes went wide for a millisecond, then his muscles tensed, but before he could move the Ruger spat twice. The muzzle blast even through the silencer left two deeply burned powder circles on the side of Cuchi’s head. He died before his muscles could react. Two rounds to the head. It would look like a Mafia hit.

The two fssssssst, sounds could not be heard outside the room. Howie nodded, turned and retraced his path down the hall, past the dead guard, and through the storeroom. He stepped out the window to the roof, then gently closed the double-hung window. He didn’t think about the dead men. He didn’t know either of them. They were criminals who sold dope that killed hundreds of men, women, and kids every day. They deserved no sympathy. Howie shrugged. Hell, it was just a job, an assignment, a mission.

He crouched by the window, and looked quickly at every potential trouble spot. No noises, not even a dog. No late-night drunk getting home. He crept to the edge of the shed and crawled down the same way he had gone up. There was no evidence that anyone had climbed up this side of the wall.

Howie walked down the alley at his foot-dragging rate. If anyone saw him they would look right through him. Street bums were of no consequence, especially in Tijuana. It took him twenty minutes to go down the two blocks to where he had left his car. Actually it wasn’t his. He had “borrowed” it in Coronado, and changed the rear license plate to one he had taken off a wrecked car in a junk yard a month before. It always paid to be prepared. He’d drive the ’92 Chevy back to Chula Vista, just over the border on the U.S. side where he had left his Ford Mustang the night before.

Leave nothing to chance. Plan, plan, plan, and then work your plan. He had the system down. It worked. He stopped two miles from the kill house and cleaned up his face and hands with baby wipes, changed into a sport shirt and perched a Padres baseball cap on his head covering up his military crew cut. He had no trouble crossing the border.

An hour later he came out of the shower in his Coronado apartment. It was nothing fancy. He could afford much better, but it wouldn’t fit in with his public middle-class lifestyle.

He checked a small book that looked as if it held times and distances of his daily workouts and runs. The book showed a date last week and 112.6. He would call the bank tomorrow night and have the computer voice read off his balance. Then he would write down the new time for a run. It should be 122.6. Yes, ten thousand dollars in two e-deposits would be added to his bank account tomorrow morning. This was in a bank he didn’t use regularly and where he didn’t put down his real name. The name and numbers were hidden in the book of running times dating back five years.

Howie had stashed the Ruger and its silencer in a secret compartment he had built into the floorboards of his 1998 Mustang. The hiding place was barely three inches deep and eight inches wide. The top was designed to look like an access panel under the floor mats.

Now he toweled off, checked the news on the all-night TV station and looked at his hand-held computer calendar.

Today was Monday, nearly 0330. The platoon would have muster this morning at 0700. He wouldn’t be late. Had never missed a roll call since the day he signed on with SEAL Team Seven four years ago.