Standoff

Ten

I braced for whatever was coming next. The guy with the machine pistol pushed me in the chest with his free hand, backing me up against the wall. When I got there, the two Mickey D’s employees were already lined up, hands above their heads. The businessman was still seated, now surrounded by the new arrivals. The man with the mace seemed to have made up his mind, circling him.

The leader of this little mariachi band appeared to be a guy in his early twenties: shaved head, loose-fitting tank top and covered in tattoos — even on his bald head. I recognized several iterations of MS-13 inked on his skin, indicating that he was a member of Mara Salvatrucha 13, the organization that boasts it’s the world’s most violent gang. He was yelling at the businessman. I got the impression they knew each other. He took the man’s briefcase, opened it and quickly rifled through the contents before tipping them over his head. Pens, magazines and other stationery items rained down. The bald guy then jerked the businessman to his feet. He stood hunched on the spot until several of the gangbangers started pushing and pulling him toward the restaurant’s front door. They kept this up till they reached the guy’s Ford and then the thug with the mace went to work, using it on the vehicle’s doors, the spike leaving craters in the metalwork.

And just when I thought this was going to be the end of the show, the mace guy turned around and swung the weapon into the businessman’s chest. Blood erupted from him, a red gusher, horizontal like an opened fire hydrant. The businessman dropped to his knees, one hand trying to staunch the blood, the other held out in front of him to maybe stop another swing. The assailant walked behind him, limbered up with a practice swing and then launched the mace two-handed into the businessman’s temple. In baseball terms, it was a textbook hit, the batter following through on the swing so that his hands ended up around the region of his opposite shoulder, the bat pointed down his back at the ground. If it’d been a ball he’d have knocked the skin off it, but it was skull and brains whacked in this instance and most of them were now sliding down the stolen Land Cruiser’s duco ten feet away. A couple of pals patted the killer on the back, all of them grinning like he’d just upped his average.

The kid in my face with the machine pistol also grinned and, satisfied by a job well done, sauntered to the counter. The Gerente rushed to serve him — a Big Mac, and five cheeseburgers, essentially everything that was in the rack. The kid tossed some bills on the counter, leaving the change, and walked out with a spring in his step to join the guys who, bloodlust spent, were now all climbing slowly back into the Silverado like they were a little exhausted. I watched the burgers get handed around, the jefe with the all-over ink taking delivery of the Big Mac. He got into the Mercedes and both vehicles drove off together, leaving the dead businessman on the asphalt as shoppers and employees began to trickle into the lot.

The woman who worked at the restaurant was shouting at the ceiling, angry and distressed — in shock. I flicked through the phrasebook before opening my mouth and, though I could guess, asked the manager who those people were: “¿Quiénes eran esas personas?”

With a look on his face like he was chewing something rotten, he said, “Cartel de negocios. Quizás Sinaloa. Que el hombre, él era un contador — vino aquí a menudo.” I took that to mean: “Cartel business, maybe Sinaloa cartel. He was an accountant and came here often. I shit on all of them.”

Maybe it wasn’t an accurate translation but I gathered he wasn’t a fan of either the businessman or the visiting breakfast club and didn’t see much difference between them. He then got on the phone to the authorities, the Federales probably — the army, the law hereabouts. Time to bounce.

I abandoned the remains of the burrito, snatched the front page of the paper, stuffed it in my pocket, and went outside and watched shoppers giving Mickey D’s a wide berth, not even stopping to gawk. There was nothing to be done for the remains of the dead businessman on the asphalt except perhaps throw a blanket over him, if only I had one. I wondered what his crime was. Did he maybe forget to add all the zeroes? Was he skimming? Or was he just working for the opposition?

I took another look at the Land Cruiser. I had to leave it and not necessarily because its door panels looked like the meat department at a supermarket. It no longer had its wheels.

I paid the woman from Mickey D’s fifty dollars to give me a ride to the airport and another fifty to say to anyone interested enough to ask that she’d dropped the gringo off at the bus terminal. A hundred bucks was a lot of money in Juárez. I hoped it would buy me a little silence.

At the airport I bought a suitcase and some random clothes to throw into it. I also bought a ticket for the first available flight to Panama City, Panama. I’d just missed the direct flight, but I could make the Copa Airlines flight with a stopover in Mexico City. I took it and put my Sig through checked luggage, the reason for buying the suitcase and the crummy clothes. From a tourist concession I also bought a trucker’s hat with I ♥ MEXICO on it, passed immigration and security without any problems and headed for the gates. Once inside, I hung around in the departure lounge for an Aeromexico flight headed to Houston as there was a TV monitor in the lounge tuned to CNN. My clean-shaven happy face was soon on screen again although, fortunately, the face currently below the I ♥ MEXICO hat was far from clean-shaven and happy. The volume was low but audible: “… the US Air Force officer then took two police officers and a bystander hostage and forced them to drive him to the border, where he released them,” the reporter said. “El Paso Police are working on the assumption that he has gone into hiding in Juárez and are working with authorities there to apprehend him.”

I hoped not and pulled the peak lower over my eyes.

“And in the latest development, El Paso law enforcement is also looking for this man, Sheriff’s Deputy Kirk Matheson, wounded in a shootout with the fugitive Air Force officer earlier last night.” A current official photo of Matheson appeared, clean-cut and ready for duty in front of the Star of Texas flag. “Matheson is believed to have fatally shot a fellow deputy, Renaldo Ortiz, a 21-year-old rookie, and wounded US Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Arlen Wayne during a daring escape from El Paso hospital where he had been placed under guard …”

Hey, wait a minute — Arlen shot and Matheson split? I wanted to find out more about it but a couple of Federales showed up in the lounge, sniffing around, which forced me to retreat. Arlen was wounded, which meant he was alive. Saying that he was “wounded”, however, covered everything from a scratch to quadriplegia and the report said nothing about what kind of condition he was in. I fought off the desire to call his cell as he’d be in the hospital himself now and the call would go to message bank. And what was I gonna say? I’ll be over later with a box of chocolates and a dirty magazine?

The other big news — Matheson was on the run. Or more accurately, given his wounds, a slow painful lurch.

A female voice over the loudspeakers announced in Spanish that this was the last call for passengers on the Air Panama flight to Mexico City. She was talking to me. I went to the gate and found the lounge empty, the passengers apparently already on the plane. The middle-aged female flight attendant said, “Lucky last, Mr Cooper,” cracked a smile and let me pass.

The flight to Mexico City was uneventful on account of I slept from wheels up to wheels down; two hours of dreamless recovery time. At Benito Juárez International, the airport at Mexico City, I had an hour to kill and murdered it in the departure lounge sawing a few more zees off the log.

This time I was one of the first aboard the Boeing 737 and dropped into my allocated aisle seat over the wing. Feeling refreshed and wide awake, I flicked through the airline magazine while my fellow passengers filed in and found their places. There was an article on Montego Bay, Jamaica. I’ve never been to Jamaica. It looked like my kind of place. The featured resort had my favorite kind of bar — it was in the pool, the barkeep serving bikini models. There was an unoccupied seat between a blond and a redhead and I mentally put my name on it. There were more pictures, mostly of beaches and golf courses so I went back to the bar. The girls were still there, waiting for me but, second time around, it just wasn’t the same. My brain wandered again to the situation in El Paso with Arlen. He must have gone to the hospital to check on Matheson; maybe to ask the bent deputy some questions. How had Matheson managed to get hold of a gun? Maybe he created a disturbance, tipped over some equipment, the guard poking his head in the room to see what was up. From there, a little faked distress and the guard could’ve come close enough for Matheson to grab his sidearm. I could visualize the scenario like I’d witnessed it.

I glanced up at the passengers coming down the aisle. And that’s when I saw Kirk Matheson. I couldn’t believe it. Did the guy have a doppelganger? It just seemed so odd to see him ambling sideways down the aisle, dragging his carry-on behind him. I gave myself a mental shake. Had I conjured the guy up out of my own mind? I was thinking about him and, poof, suddenly the fucker was right in front of me. Could the same trick possibly work with Victoria’s Secret models?

Our eyes met. Mine slid off his face and out the window. Did he recognize me? I took another glimpse. He wasn’t staring back so I figured not. Instead he was attempting to wrangle his carry-on into the overhead locker, his seat a row in front of mine and on the other side of the aisle. He was doing this one-handed — right-handed — on account of I’d fired a bullet into his left shoulder before breakfast this morning. I hadn’t been sure about the location of the wound, but now that he was close I could harden up on some of those details. Everything about Matheson — from the exhausted way he moved to his washed-out pallor — told me he was in a world of pain, the analgesics administered in the hospital long since worn off.

A flight attendant came up to help him stow his bag as he was obviously in a bad way; no color in his face, the sweat beaded across his forehead and cheeks. The rim of his blue shirt collar was dark with absorbed perspiration. The guy could barely keep his eyes open, his eyelids hanging heavy and his jaw slack.

Speaking from first-hand experience I knew that pretty much all movement for him would be excruciating. An innocent bump from a passerby would be enough to send him to the edge of unconsciousness. Taking a deep breath would be enough to make him want to faint. I gave myself a mental pat on the back. And now the asshole was right here, helpless as a baby, a fellow fugitive headed south. I got up from my seat, went over and sat heavily down beside him, my shoulder banging into his. Oops! I heard the suck of air between gritted teeth and felt the flinch shudder through his body. I gave him a great big smile. “Hey, sorry about that,” I said. “Not a lot of room in here, is there? They keep building ’em smaller and smaller. Or maybe it’s me getting bigger and bigger. Ha ha. A few too many Buds, right? Say, you’re American, ain’t you? Me too. Where you from? I’m from all over …”

Matheson turned away from this physical and verbal onslaught, showing me his back.

“Sir, do you have the right seat?”

I turned and saw the flight attendant from the air bridge back in Juárez, furrows through her dry, powdered forehead. A Mexican woman with a stern face that looked like it had seen everything and would prefer not to see any of it again accompanied her. Both of them were staring down at me. Damn it, I was just getting into the swing of things here with Matheson. I pulled my boarding pass and made like I was checking it. “Oh, gee … Musta got confused. Sorry ’bout that.” I bounced out of the chair, giving Matheson another good jostling on the way up, and crossed the aisle back to my rightful place.

It was no big deal. I had the next three hours to play with the guy, time enough to figure out what I was going to do with him and maybe exact a little payback for Arlen and the several members of El Paso law enforcement who were now checked into the morgue on account of him. But it wasn’t going to be all fun and games. The fact that he was free and headed in the same direction I was presented a problem: he was the only survivor, aside from myself, of the shootout in the truck yard. He knew the truth about what had happened and could blow my good-cop-gone-bad cover to any interested party.

I kept my eye on Matheson but, as far as I could make out, he hit the hay instantly and didn’t wake till the plane was on descent to Panama City International. The jerk hadn’t even given me the pleasure of accidentally on purpose bumping into that wounded shoulder of his on his way back from the head.

He pressed the button for service. A flight attendant came up to him, went away and came back a moment later with a plastic cup of water and waited for him to drink it.

Matheson had escaped from lawful custody in the hospital, I figured, because he believed he was safer south of the border. (I wondered if he’d still believe that if he’d caught what I’d seen in the Mickey D’s parking lot.)

He threw back some pills and washed them down with the water. He handed the cup back to the attendant, slumped in his seat and closed his eyes. Not long after that, we’d landed and were taxiing to the gate. I decided to stay on this fucker’s tail and see where it led. Panda and the Cool Room could wait.

Most of my fellow sardines were in the aisles shuffling forward with their carry-on when two uniformed men with the word INMIGRACIÓN on their shoulder tags fought their way in against the tide, looking for someone. They stopped at Matheson’s seat and asked to see his passport, which he handed over. They checked it quickly, retrieved his bag from the overhead locker, helped him to his feet and led him away, the passengers parting in front of them like maybe Moses had a hand in it.

Hopping across the aisle, I tailgated the threesome as it hurried to the front door and only just managed to get there in time to see Matheson whisked away in a wheelchair. I kept following. If the overhead signs were any indication, the uniformed escort was speeding him to Inmigración. Walking fast, I managed to keep them in sight, at least right up to the time when they opened a door marked DO NOT ENTER and disappeared behind it.

I gave the door a push. Locked from the other side, damn it. A female Inmigración officer materialized and waved me on. Not having any alternative, I joined one of the lengthy queues leading to a bored passport clerk, filled out the paperwork and waited my turn. Matheson was gone, his escape aided by the authorities. There was no reason to be surprised about that. The folks he worked for had multi-story houses full of cash and almost everyone has their price.

The Cool Room was back at the top of the list. I collected my Sig from baggage and took a cab to a place called Casco Veijo, the Old Town, where this former CIA agent Panda had put down some semi-retirement roots.

Speeding along the waterfront, I had a mind that there were at least two Panama Cities. One was a vaguely futuristic steel and glass version that could have been a set in a cheesy sci-fi flick. The other was a partially renovated old Spanish settlement across the bay. Neither seemed occupied by the people living in Panama City who, from what I could gather, appeared to collect in the spaces between the two, like plaque.

It was pushing ninety degrees by the time I reached the Cool Room, a hideaway occupying the ground floor of a three-hundred-year-old building, tropical plants sprouting from cracks in its ancient external walls. The bar itself was a cavernous dark room with exposed wood beams and raw stucco walls. Beneath the bar’s swirling ceiling fans, away from the sun, the temperature dived fifteen degrees or so. Louisiana swamp blues and ice-cold beer were being served, the latter pulled from buckets of crushed ice for tourists sitting at tables or perched at the bar.

A local girl worked the bar — full lips, big brown eyes, dark skin, short-cropped black wiry hair, athletic. She wore loose gym shorts and a thin mauve undershirt that advertised her nipples as she jiggled along to ‘Polk Salad Annie’. She could take a seat at my pool bar any time she liked.

“¿Qué te gustaría?” she asked me with a little head and shoulders movement, timed to the music.

“Un cerveza, por favor,” I said, motioning at the bottles of Atlas keeping a pair of English tourists beside me company.

She bobbed behind the counter and came up with the beer, ice sliding down its frosted sides, and popped the top of it reverse-handed with a bottle opener hanging from a hook. She placed the beer on the bar on an Atlas coaster. I gave her five bucks. “Speak English?”

“Maybe,” she replied, implying it depended on what came next, and handed over my change.

“Keep it. Panda here?”

“Who?”

“I have an appointment,” I replied.

“How is your name?”

I knew what she meant. “Cooper.”

Walking away, she was on her cell a heartbeat later, I assumed, calling Panda. There were plenty of exits in case I needed to leave in a hurry. I counted seven and was working out the best lines to them when a tall guy wearing a Panama hat, smoking a cigar and carrying a beer gut supported by his belt, darkened one of them. He looked older than his mug shot. There was a telltale nod in my direction from the barmaid. The big man came over and sat in the space the English tourists had by now vacated.

“Got some ID?” he said.

I showed him my passport. He flicked through the pages, ending on the one with my photo. He told me to take off the hat. I took it off.

“Welcome to Panama, Mr Cooper,” he said, satisfied, handing back the passport. “Been expecting you, but maybe not so soon.” He held out his hand and we shook. It was a large warm hand as soft as bread dough.

“Nice place you got here,” I remarked.

“Retirement’s been good.” He glanced down at his gut. “A little too good.”

My eyes went for a tour of the bar and couldn’t help but linger on the barmaid as she placed a glass of something clear with ice and mint leaves in front of Panda.

In case I had any ideas, he said, “That’s Claudia. She’s French, from our Paris station. Used to kill for a living until she started to enjoy it. The garrotte was her weapon of choice. This is the pasture they put her out to. Chin-chin.” He air-toasted me and took a slurp of his drink. “Not quite the same when it’s water, though,” he said with a shrug. “The ol’ blood pressure’s stratospheric these days. Ironic now that I’m in this low-pressure existence, out of the life. You? Guessing — I’d say your BP’s around one-ten over sixty and your resting heart rate is somewhere in the fifties.” He nodded to himself. “Gun battles, car chases … That shit keeps you fit. Pilates is for turd burglars.” Another toast. He drank, sucked on the cigar and filled the immediate area with smoke that smelled like the guts of something washed up on the beach.

“What’s the latest from El Paso?” I asked. “You know anything about Lieutenant Colonel Wayne?”

“Friend of yours?”

I nodded

“Wayne … One of the guys shot at the El Paso hospital overnight.”

“Yeah.”

“From what I heard, a bullet creased his head. He was lucky. The shooter must have thought your pal was a goner and left it at that. He put two rounds in the rookie on guard duty. It was the second bullet killed him.”

Okay, I could relax a little about Arlen. “I just shared the flight down here with the shooter.”

“Matheson was on the plane?”

“In the seat across the aisle.” I flicked a chunk of ice off the counter.

“You wanna back it up to the truck park and tell me what happened?”

I filled him in on the gun battle at dawn between Deputy Matheson and me, and Panda drew the only possible conclusion — that Matheson was on the payroll of the cartel that shipped the drugs north and perpetrated the massacre. “But what I don’t get,” I said, “is why he’s not hiding away somewhere — like in a deserted Norwegian fjord. He failed. Why confront his employer? You just know what his reward’s gonna be.”

Panda considered this, puffing on the burning dead thing between his lips. “Security might not have been his role. He might’ve been on the books just to observe and report. Fleeing south like he has — he’s essentially defected. And, as a law enforcement officer, he’s got the credentials being actively targeted by the cartels for recruitment. There are plenty of buyers. What he knows is invaluable to gangsters with upcoming operations over the border. And the first thing the Sheriff’s Office should be doing is changing their operations and protocols to make sure whatever Matheson has is rendered obsolete.”

“It gets better. Matheson’s uncle is the commander back at El Paso.”

“Really? At the Sheriff’s Office? Well that’s embarrassing,” Panda observed with a grin. After considering that bit of news for a few seconds, he added, “It’s also going to increase the nephew’s worth.”

“It’s a problem for me if Kirk Matheson’s boss is this Angel of Medellín. One of the first items on the list will be how the shipment was discovered by a certain OSI agent.”

“Well maybe his failure to pop you when he had the chance is your best defense. The fact that he missed the opportunity is not something he’s gonna brag about.”

I was thinking the same thing just as it came out of Panda’s mouth.

“Maybe you should’a just taken care of him on the plane,” he concluded.

I didn’t ask Panda how, exactly, but I suppose he was thinking I could’ve just asked the flight attendants to hold the guy while I shanked him with a plastic bread knife and had them open the hatch while the pilot and I threw the body out. The CIA always has the answer … I changed the subject. “So, Juan Apostles.”

“The Saint of Medellín. You wanna know where he is.” Panda signaled Claudia to freshen the drinks. “The short answer is I don’t know.”

Singing along to Ray Charles’ “Georgia”, Claudia changed out the empty bottle of Atlas while I tried to picture her with someone’s blue bulging throat between her hands and couldn’t quite get there.

“He doesn’t stay in one place too long and his schedule is random. Last week he was in Bogotá. This week …” Panda shrugged. “But I know where you can find some of his cronies.”

“Like the Tears of Chihuahua?”

“Unlikely. But you never know your luck.”

“Go on.”

“Have one of his people take you to him.”

“Get myself taken hostage?”

“You’re a fast learner, Cooper.”

I wasn’t sure I liked the idea, but it was a plan and that was more than I had. “So where do I start?”

“A town called Yaviza down the Pan-American Highway, on the edge of the meanest place on Earth.”

“I’ve been to some pretty mean places,” I told him, not that I wanted to get in a pissing contest with him about it.

“Yeah, right,” he said, brushing my mean places aside. “The Darién Gap, where you’re going, beats them all. If the drug traffickers, kidnappers, guerrillas and/or corrupt soldiers hiding out there don’t kill you, the snakes, wasps, septic cuts and/or gastroenteritis will. It’s the 21st century and they’ve sent rovers to Mars but they still haven’t built a road through the Darién Gap connecting North and South America. Too dangerous.”

“They’ve sent a rover to Mars?” I said. “Which model?”

Panda looked at me like he wondered if he’d truly heard what I just said. I could have told him that they also haven’t developed an effective test for prostate cancer that didn’t involve a rubber glove and lubricant, so I considered I’d gone easy on him.

“Head down the Pan-American Highway until you get to a town called Yaviza,” he repeated. “The bus won’t take you any further. Across the Rio Chucunaque there you’ll find a bar frequented by killers, drug runners, communists, nationalist militia, smugglers, insurgents and birdwatchers.”

“Birdwatchers?”

He shrugged. “The area is full of rare birds. Amphibians, too. If humans would just vacate the place, it could be a veritable Garden of Eden.”

“A killer’s a killer. How will I recognize the Saint’s brand?”

“Ask, I guess. You carrying? For your sake I hope it’s something heavy and semi automatic.”

“Sig 228.”

“Standard ball too, I suppose.”

I nodded.

“Hmm … Where you’re going, the nice neat holes government-issue ammo makes won’t do you any favors.”

I stayed overnight in the Casco Veijo, at a hotel Panda recommended. Sometime before midnight, I was woken by a knock on my door. It turned out to be Claudia.

“I come with a present, from Panda,” she said.

How thoughtful. I hoped she’d left her garrotte behind and opened the door wider, an invitation to come on in.

“Non, merci,” she said, handing over Panda’s actual present — a box of hollow points for the Sig, the kind of ammo governments who’d signed treaties don’t issue to their militaries, the kind that leaves behind corpses with gaping wounds and minced skin and bone.

“Tell Panda thanks,” I said. And then, just in case, “Sure you don’t want to come in?”

Claudia was gone before I finished the question. I guessed that meant no.

The following morning, prior to boarding a bus for the border, I bought a bottle of eighty percent DEET mosquito repellent, the whining, biting critters being the worst thing about the jungle. I also bought a rucksack — easier to travel with than a suitcase and it made me look more like the tourists I saw at the bus station heading pretty much everywhere except southeast toward Colombia. The Darién Gap, around two hundred miles down the road, had a bad rap. Seemed the only folks going in that direction either lived there or hid there.