Standoff

Sixteen

I watched a United 747 take off and struggle for altitude while I waited for Panda to answer the phone. The air was thin here. Just walking around made me feel light-headed, like being a little drunk. Not near as much fun, but free. The call went through. “Si?” said a tentative voice down the line.

“Panda?”

“Yes.”

“It’s Cooper.”

My name took a moment to register while he attached a face to it.

“Cooper,” he repeated aloud.

Matheson was quiet for the moment. Duct tape over the mouth and a Sig to the head will guarantee that. “Something I need picked up.”

“Where from?” Panda asked.

“El Dorado International, Bogotá.”

“What’s the package?”

“Kirk Matheson.”

After a lengthy silence, he said, “It can be arranged.”

I gave him the details of the Range Rover as well as the car park and bay numbers where it would be found and told him the keys were on the front right-hand tire. Then I followed up with a brief rundown on the past week.

“Anything else?” Panda asked like I hadn’t done nearly enough and really should pull my finger out. Maybe he was right. I’d had my chance with Perez and blown it. And I remained outside of the Saint’s operation.

“A sweeping generalization,” I said. “These people — and I use the term ‘people’ loosely — have opted out of the human race.”

Panda wasn’t interested. “When are you meeting Apostles?”

“Tonight.”

“It’s management that sets the tone for a corporation. Don’t let the charm fool you.”

He wasn’t telling me anything I didn’t know. With Perez as the managing director of the business, Apostles, the CEO, had to be a complete whack job. At least when he wasn’t building orphanages.

I heard a groan from the trunk. “When are you gonna make the pickup? The package is about to get restless.”

“On their way. Fifteen minutes out.”

Fifteen minutes was fast. CIA usually needs more time to tear itself away from the mirror. Maybe it was subcontracting in Bogotá. “One last thing. Tell Chalmers I could’ve sent Matheson home in a bag.”

More silence.

“He’ll know what I’m talking about,” I said. The call ended without goodbyes and I cleared the phone’s history. Checking on Matheson, I could see he was in a fair amount of discomfort, which suited me fine. With a little more time up my sleeve I would have questioned him about events back in El Paso, but time was something in short supply. I doubled the duct tape, checked his hands and feet one final time, locked the vehicle with the remote and placed it on the front right-hand tire.

I bought clothes from a shop in the Marriott lobby, all of it Gant except for the Timberland boat shoes, taking my cues from the help back at the Saint’s hacienda, the Yacht-Owning Hamptons Wannabe look. I didn’t do a lot of undercover work but I do know it pays to blend in. The disguise was working. No one gave me a second glance.

The concierge told me that Dry 73 was tucked away beside the Marriott’s restaurant. He also told me the name stemmed from the fact that it served 73 different flavors of martini — banana, strawberry, lime and so forth. I was pretty sure I wasn’t going to find one I liked unless it was Glen Keith-flavored.

The entrance to the bar was roped off along with a stand that announced FUNCIÓN PRIVADA, the words Private function in brackets beneath. “You are a guest at the función, sir?” asked a young male waiter in gray suit and Marriott tie hovering beside the sign.

“Yep,” I replied. He hesitated, wrestling with this matter-of-fact answer, trying to decide which was more dangerous: pull the rope aside and let me pass or turn me away. After a few seconds of inner turmoil he unclipped the rope and said, “Welcome, Señor.”

The bar itself was small, a feature wall lined with black salt bricks dug out of the rock, which also accounted for the name of the adjoining restaurant — La Mina, or the Mine. Yellow boxes of light suspended from the low ceiling contrasted with the bar’s seating, individual chairs of a blue so electric they almost hummed. But I was less interested in the interior decorating than I was in the people occupying a group of those chairs: a couple of exquisitely manicured Chinese bookends dressed in red satin cheongsams and the man sitting between them, the Saint of Medellín Juan de Apostles. I took a few steps toward them but was immediately intercepted by a broad Mexican tough wearing an expensive navy suit and an earpiece. His shaved brown head was so glossy I could see those yellow lightboxes perfectly reproduced on his dome in miniature. This was a shine you usually only drive off a showroom floor.

‘I’m invited,’ I informed him, in case he thought I was some random sneaking in for a cheesecake martini, and showed him the note from Perez. He skimmed it and then his hands were inside my jacket, searching around my beltline, where they quickly found the Sig. Removing it, he expelled the mag, ejected the round in the chamber and handed the lot back to me. In case I had any ideas, he opened his own jacket to reveal a machine pistol concealed nice and snug under his armpit. There was nothing else to interest him and the pat-down finished, but he gestured to a dark corner of the bar where another man stared back, unblinking, just to let me know that the odds were heavily weighted in their favor if I was thinking about doing some bad.

I left the Mexican security goon behind and walked toward the bar. One of the Chinese women turned her head. She had light-gray eyes with heavy linework to make them appear almond. Her full, heart-shaped lips were painted bright red. If she was Chinese, I was Pekinese. Her black hair, which shone with blue highlights, was worn up and sculpted into loose coils held in place by a pair of gold chopsticks. The red cheongsam, embroidered with small gold and blue dragons, was buttoned at the base of her smooth neck and short sleeves revealed long slim olive-skinned arms. She shifted slightly in her seat, which was an arm of the chair occupied by Apostles, revealing more of a crossed leg framed by a split that ended mid-thigh. It would make my day if she had another leg just like it. On the end of her smooth olive calves were red lacquered stilettos, the heels four-inch spikes.

Those gray eyes dropped down my body and then back again, weighing up the unknown male about to invade their space. I read in those eyes that while intrigued and not altogether displeased by what they saw, she was still unconvinced. At least that’s how I read it. She sipped something brown from a martini glass, managed a coy smile, and telepathically communicated my presence to the other piece of bread in the Apostle sandwich — the woman who, like the meat in the middle, had her back to me. This woman turned her head slightly and revealed the gray eyes and red lips of a twin who was, at least at first glance, in every way identical to the other. I was seeing double, a first while stone-cold sober. The only way to tell the two of them apart was that the gold dragons on this sister’s cheongsam were embroidered with green thread rather than blue.

Apostles had a thing for twins. I knew that — it was in his bio. Envy isn’t something I do all that much, but I was seeing it.

Apostles leaned a little forward to catch what the distraction was, and that gave me a look at his face. His hair was thick and straight and salt and pepper, layers of it swept from a high brow that suggested brains back there somewhere. The eyes were dark and framed by heavy black eyebrows yet to gray. His nose was long and generous and there was a bulb at the end of it with a vague cleft that reminded me of a head of garlic. A week of ragged salt and pepper stubble occupied his neck and cheeks, framing a thick old-style moustache. Yes, the Latino Don Johnson force was strong with this one. He wore a gray flannel suit with light-blue business shirt open three buttons at the throat — one button too many in my opinion — revealing a tuft of salt and pepper chest hair.

With one eye on the goon for reassurance, he asked “¿Quién coño eres tú?” Who the fuck are you?

I handed over the note from Perez. “A cop killer.”

“Did I hear about you?” he said, scanning the note, switching to English with a hint of Oxford about it. “Were you at the hacienda this afternoon?”

“Yes.”

“And you want a job.”

“If you’ve got one.”

“Get lost before my boy kills you.”

“He can try,” I said. Apostles took another look at me and so did the slices of bread in the cheongsams either side of him. The one with the blue and gold dragons glanced over at the bar and raised a finger, and a waiter sprinted over.

“I’m having a chocolate martini,” she said with a vaguely Texan accent. “Would anyone care to join me? Mister …?” She turned those gray eyes on me fully. They were like lenses with lights behind them and I experienced a moment of vertigo like the floor had dropped away beneath my feet.

“He doesn’t have a name,” said Apostles. “He is nameless until I say it can be otherwise.”

“Two,” said Green Dragons to the waiter as she drew figure eights on Apostles’ thigh. “Cariño?” Darling?

“Si, okay,” he replied, not taking his eyes off me.

“Four,” Blue Dragons informed the waiter and he ran off to see to them. She looked at me again but I was prepared for it second time around. “So you were saying you kill police?”

“I try not to make a habit of it,” I said, wondering whether I should sit or keep standing. I was having a drink now, evidently. A chocolate martini. I shuddered.

“An associate of mine has gone missing,” said Apostles. “You were at the hacienda at around the same time. Did you happen to see anything?”

“Like what?” I asked.

“He was driving a Range Rover — black. He drove off and hasn’t come back.”

“Maybe he ran away.”

“Do you want a job or do you want my people to take you outside?”

I made out like I was searching my memory. “Yeah, now that you mention it … A black Range Rover almost ran me off the road. Doing a hundred miles an hour, going somewhere in a hurry. He was a friend of yours?” I shook my head. “He was around the bend and gone. No way I was going to catch him, but I wanted to, you know, tell him to slow down.”

“He was a cop,” said Blue Dragons. “If you’d have caught him, would you have killed him?” She smiled. It was a smile I could get used to being around.

Apostles cut Blue Dragons off. “So I’ll ask again. Who the fuck are you?”

“Ex-Special Agent Vin Cooper, OSI.” I handed him the El Diario front page.

“OSI — what’s that?” He held the page away from him to read it.

“United States Air Force Office of Special Investigations.”

“What do I do with you? I don’t have an air force.”

“What do you call the planes that fly your cargo into the United States?”

He regarded me, head tilted on a slight angle, intrigued. “What about them?”

“How many do you lose? And what does that cost you?” I let those questions hang in the air for a pregnant moment, giving him time to add all those zeroes. “I can get ’em into the US — guaranteed.”

He twisted in his seat to get a better look at me. “How?”

“Before I was an Air Force cop, I was a special tactics officer. They’d drop me behind enemy lines to set up beacons for the bombers. But first we had to penetrate air defenses, which was also my job. I’d say that the United States is your enemy. Pay me right and I’ll get you inside, behind the enemy’s lines.”

He was interested.

“Go on.”

“Your market’s not US — Mexican border towns, it’s San Antonio, Austin, Dallas, Houston … What if I can get your aircraft safely on the doorsteps of those cities? And get them out again. No DEA, no seizures, no loss of income.”

Apostles’ eyes glittered. “What’s it gonna cost me?”

“I’m not greedy,” I said.

“Greedy gets you dead.”

“How much revenue have you lost in the US over the last twelve months? Thirty million? Fifty? Now think about losing nothing. I figure five percent of every shipment I successfully take into the States is reasonable.”

He gazed at me, balancing my offer in some kind of mental scale. “One percent,” he said finally.

Bingo, we were negotiating. “Four percent.”

“Don’t waste my time. You want two and a half percent,” he said. “If we were to agree on that, you’ll also train several others to do your job.”

“And once they’re trained up, you’ll make them do it for nothing and have me killed.”

“Not if you find ways to make yourself indispensable.”

“Is anyone?”

His features slid into a position that could be called a smile. I took that as a no.

“And what if those shipments are delivered unsuccessfully?” asked Green Dragons, her back to me but her head angled in my general direction.

“As I’ll be riding in there with them, you could say I’ll have skin in the game. Get it wrong and it’ll be a long stretch in a federal penitentiary for me.”

Apostles didn’t say anything, not immediately. “I’ll think about it,” he said eventually. “I’m going to ask around. Get you checked out.”

The waiter arrived with four chocolate martinis on a tray and offered them to the twins. Blue Dragons took two, stood up and walked mine over to me. She was tall, maybe five-eleven. It was difficult to tell — those heels were high. But I was happy to see she did have another leg to complement the other one finding its way through that slit with every step. Her perfume swept over me, an erotic caress. “You ever had one of these before?” she asked, handing me the drink, her perfect nails painted with black lacquer. She talked and moved with a venomous sexuality.

“No.”

“Try it.”

I took a sip. Hmm … cleaning fluid with chocolate aftertaste.

“What do you think?”

“Yummy,” I told her.

“I don’t believe you. What do you usually drink?”

“Single malt.”

“A man who likes scotch,” she said as if it was an invitation, turning to walk back to her perch. I couldn’t help but notice her long back or the swell of her ass and the way it moved against the silk. I put the drink on the table.

“Come to the hacienda tomorrow,” Apostles said as he placed his hand on Blue Dragons’ leg and chased it up the split. “Before you leave, where are you staying?”

“I don’t know,” I replied, glancing at his hand, envious of it. “I’m new in town.”

I toyed with the thought that Blue Dragons was disappointed to see me go, but only for a moment because crazy hit-and-run girl with the green Renault was striding into the bar, looking for trouble. I could see that the Mexican tough in the suit behind her had his weapon drawn but seemed confused about how to stop her. She looked different to the girl I remembered. Gone was the student jeans-and-an-old-T-shirt look. In its place was a fitted black satin dress that came to mid-thigh and silver strappy heels. Her eyes wore dark, dangerous makeup and her lips shone with a pink gloss. As I watched, she pulled that pistol of hers from a silver clutch bag.

“You son of a bitch,” she said, low and determined, and kept coming. Her eyes were on Apostles. She was beside me, the pistol coming up as she extended her arm and took aim.

This wasn’t the time or the place. I chopped down with a knife-hand strike on her inside elbow joint, which altered the angle of the gun toward those overhead yellow lightboxes. The sharp pain caused her to cry out. Smacking the base of the weapon dislodged it from her grip and it looped forward around her forefinger. I caught the weapon when it was pointing back toward her and pulled it from her grasp. That’s when the Mexican tough hit her, then wrapped his arms around her and lifted her up off the ground as she swore and spat and kicked her legs.

“You!” She glared at me. The Mexican held her tighter, his buddy in the corner moving in to see if he needed assistance. ‘Put me down,’ she panted, struggling to breathe in the grip of a bear hug.

Apostles was on his feet, as were the two dragons. Both women had their arms folded and Blue Dragons was smiling for reasons I couldn’t fathom.

“Juliana,” said Apostles, taking a step toward her. “I believed things had been sorted out between us.”

Juliana. Okay, at least now I had a name.

“I hate you,” Juliana replied, still struggling. Her face was reddening from mild oxygen starvation.

“You already know my daughter, I see,” Apostles remarked to me as he calmly watched the fight drain out of her.

“Your daughter?”

“From my first wife,” he said, drawing loony-bin circles in the air beside his temple. He motioned to the Mexican goon who then set her down and released her. Juliana leaned back on an electric-blue chair and I picked her silver clutch bag up off the floor and put it into her hand. “How do you know her?” Apostles asked.

“We met in the foyer earlier. I tried to pick her up.” I shrugged, suggesting the attempt had been unsuccessful.

“Yes, beautiful and crazy — just like her mother.”

“You killed her heart,” Juliana snapped.

“I thought you were finished with all this nonsense,” Apostles countered and pulled me aside. “Do me a favor. Take her out, talk some sense into her, though I’m not expecting miracles.” A roll of cash was palmed into my hand. “Buy her something nice. I owe you. Come and see me tomorrow. The hacienda …”

Time to leave. I took Juliana by the elbow and tried to get her moving. She shook her arm from my grasp and walked unsteadily toward the exit. I glanced back at Apostles and his “angels” — angels for the Saint. Blue Dragons still had that bemused smile on her face and now I knew what it meant. Juliana’s show was nothing they hadn’t all seen before.