Fear No Evil

Chapter 76

Raphael Durango and five of his remaining men were holed up in a motor home parked deep in Bureau of Land Management property some forty miles east-northeast of Laramie. They’d been there since before dawn, sleeping, eating, and talking their way through the battle, as warriors do.

Durango’s instincts told him to move on at dark, to head east and then south toward Denver, New Mexico, and the border. But before that, he had to face his half sister.

He gave his men a bottle of tequila and ordered them outside before starting the motor home and booting up the satellite internet base station. When he had a solid feed on his laptop, he routed it through a VPN to give himself partial anonymity and then routed it through a second VPN to assure an untraceable connection.

Durango made the sign of the cross, opened Skype, and called Emmanuella.

Her face soon appeared. Her eyes flashed when she saw him.

“I was worried,” she said in Spanish. “I’ve heard many, many dead. Is this true? Did you wipe them out?”

Durango knew not to sugarcoat anything, not with his half sister. “No.”

“Did you get M?”

“Maybe,” he said. “We shot at least twenty people there. Men, women, kids. You said to kill everyone.”

Emmanuella swallowed hard. “It was the only way. What about this Butler?”

He shook his head. “He and three others, two men, one woman. They were professionals, ex-military, they had to be. They retreated into the mouth of a canyon, took positions where we couldn’t hit them. They had the advantage.”

“Advantage?” she cried angrily. “I sent you with an army and every weapon we could buy!”

“And they killed more than forty of our men before I pulled back.”

Emmanuella blinked. “Forty?”

“And wounded six more, who probably won’t make it,” he said.

The cartel leader went stone-faced for several moments. “What happened to Butler and the other three?”

“Escaped deeper into that canyon behind the ranch,” Durango said.

“I wanted them dead. I still do.”

He finally lost his cool. “I know what you want, sister, but how in God’s name am I supposed to do that? How am I supposed to find them with the FBI crawling all over the area?”

“I thought you were some great manhunter, Raphael. Great Indian tracker. Special Forces animal. You tell me how to—”

Emmanuella stopped her rant abruptly, frowning. Her eyes ran left and froze there, as if she were puzzling out some odd thought or hearing a distant voice become clearer. Then she said, “Wait a second.” Emmanuella began typing on her laptop. She hit Return and sat back. “He’s there! I knew he’d be there.”

“Who?”

“Cross,” she said, almost smiling as she returned her attention to her brother. “He’s still wearing that belt with the GPS transmitter. It says he’s in Laramie. Wait, there’s a history function.”

She typed, hit Return, and covered her mouth as she moved her head closer to the screen. “He was all over that ranch and that canyon today.”

“Makes sense.”

“That’s true. But it doesn’t change things. If I’m right and Cross is a secret ally of Maestro, he will meet up with Butler and his men very soon. You only have to follow Cross until it happens.”

“You don’t think we should come back to Mexico and let things cool down around here?”

Her smile vanished. “No, Raphael, I want you to finish this. Follow Cross wherever he goes. Sooner or later, you’ll find Butler. And if I’m right, you’ll also find M.”