Standoff

Four

It was also a woman. Gomez and I were first to reach her. She was filthy, dehydrated, exposed skin burned red by the desert sun. She was barely alive. From the angle of one of her legs I could see that it was badly broken. Gomez began cutting away the pant leg with a small buck knife. A stick of bone appeared. It was covered in coagulated blood. Shredded muscle, dirt and ants erupted from a weeping red crater midway between her knee and ankle. I had no idea where she’d crawled on her hands and knees from, but it had to be a reasonable distance given her state. She was clearly in a lot of pain, drifting in and out of consciousness.

“The buzzards … the buzzards,” she said, head rolling from side to side like she was having a nightmare, her tongue thick in her mouth. “Black buzzards …”

“Did she just say black buzzards?” Gomez asked.

“Yeah.” I had a small bottle of water in my pocket. Taking off my shirt, I poured water on it and wiped the dirt off her face before drizzling some more water on her tongue and cracked lips.

Lieutenant Cruz arrived, panting, and pulled Gomez and me away from her. “Give us some room.”

The room we gave up allowed a couple of crime scene investigators to swoop down on her. They undid her shirt, examined her quickly for other damage while she looked at them wild-eyed. Behind us, an ambulance came bumping across the desert, taking the shortest route, red lights flashing.

“Black buzzards!” she cried out. “No!”

The ambulance pulled up, the medics jumped out and raced to her side. The CSI backed off and let them through.

“Looks like her lucky day,” I said.

Gomez nodded. “Had a few of those yourself I see.”

He was frowning at my bare skin, my back puckered where bullets had entered, the scar tissue ragged where they’d exited. A swirl of burned skin here, a knife cut there, mementos from various cases gone by. I put my shirt back on, feeling self-conscious.

“So what happened to you?” he asked.

“Life.”

“What about your partners?”

The question made me think of Anna Masters and mostly, unless reminded, I was successful at locking any thoughts of her away in a private vault. And I wanted the door to remain firmly bolted shut. She’d been my former partner in all the roles that counted, killed not so long ago. And no matter what the forensics report said, it was my stupidity that had pulled the trigger and blown a hole in her chest. So much for not thinking about her … History showed that most of the people around me seemed to come off second best, which was why I preferred to work solo, though that wasn’t always possible. Like now. “Do you really want to know?” I asked him.

Gomez thought about it. “You just answered the question.”

The medics lifted the woman onto the gurney and then hoisted it into the back of the ambulance. One of them climbed in with her. The doors closed and the remaining guy ran around to the front and jumped in behind the wheel.

“Who is she?” Gomez wondered as the ambulance moved off.

“The missing piece, maybe,” I said.

Cruz came over with a wallet — the woman’s. He pulled a credit card-like ID from the wallet. “Well, well — FAA license. Your second pilot.”

Gomez looked sideways at me.

I shrugged.

“Wanna go double or nothing?” he asked.

“Hit me.”

“What are those buzzards?”

“Birds,” I said. “Black ones …”

He shook his head.

“I know, you wonder how I do it …”

There was a slight change for the better in the mood, but it wasn’t my banter that had done the trick. We’d found a survivor. Life had triumphed. I almost felt light-hearted.

“Hey, Lieutenant. Where you taking her?” I asked.

He was speaking on his cell with his back to me. Holding the phone against his chest he replied over his shoulder, “Thomason Hospital. And we’re gonna give her an armed guard.”

“We’re coming along. Got some questions for her,” Gomez told him.

“You’ll have to stand in line.”

“We’re cutting in,” I said.

The lieutenant nodded, world-weary-style. “Jesus, you Feds are all alike.”

“She’s exhausted, in shock and she’s on a morphine drip,” said Doctor Monroe, a thin black woman with heavily lidded eyes and the look of terminal tiredness about her. “I don’t know how much sense you’ll get out of her. Keep it as brief as possible.”

Gomez, Cruz, Matheson, Foote and I all ignored that.

The doctor checked left and right and came in a little closer, something on her mind. Dropping her voice, she said, “Is it true what they’re saying on TV?”

“What are they saying?” Chief Foote asked her.

“There’s been a massacre. They’re saying it might be Mexicans — from across the border. Is that true?”

“We’re not in the rumor business, Doctor,” said Foote, deftly palming off the question.

I moved to the patient’s bed. I’d already learned, with as much digging as the intervening hour would permit, that the Learjet pilot’s name was Roberta E. Macey of Venice Beach. She was forty-four, married to a civil engineer and had three kids, two of whom had left home. She was the senior pilot at California Executive Jet and a US Marine KC-130 aerial tanker driver before that. I also knew that, having survived at least five hours under the sun with no water or shelter and the temperature for most of it hovering around 110 degrees Fahrenheit, all while enduring a compound fracture of her tibia and fibula, she was no cream puff.

Monroe loitered.

The Chief glared at her. “If you don’t mind, doctor,” she said, “Police business.”

The doctor returned a look as if she’d just been told she had unseemly body odor. “Five minutes, no more,” the women said, her nose a little in the air. “I’ll be just outside.”

With a glass against the door.

Macey was propped up in bed, the veins in her wrists attached by lines to various bags held aloft from a stand. A monitor with a sensor clipped to her index finger beeped away quietly to one side. She appeared to be asleep, though she was frowning. Her face had been cleaned up but it was badly sunburned and there was a deep gash across a cheek now covered by a gauze bandage. Anti-bacterial wash gave her an all-over orange pallor. Her broken leg was in a temporary cast and raised above the bed, held there in a sling suspended from an overhead pole.

“Ms Macey?” said the Chief Deputy, leaning over the bed. “Roberta?”

The patient groaned, swallowed drily and opened her eyes. She appeared a little disoriented, unsure of the surroundings and the people in her face.

“Ms Macey, we’re the police. We’d like to ask you a few questions.”

“What happened?” she asked dreamily.

“We were hoping you’d be able to tell us,” said Foote.

“You might let her in on what we know,” I suggested. “Give her some context. Might help.” And might not. Being told what had happened could just as easily push her over the edge, if she was close to it.

“There was some kind of a raid on the airport this morning,” said Cruz. “A lot of people have been killed.”

Macey closed her eyes slowly and then reopened them. “I heard it. The gunfire. Like Iraq.” She closed her eyes again briefly. “Who?”

“We don’t know,” said Foote. “Do you remember anything?”

Gomez chipped in. “When we found you, you said something about black buzzards.”

“I said that? Don’t remember. They were King Airs; painted black. Two of them. Looked like buzzards. Maybe that’s what I meant. They came in low from the south — real low — avoiding radar.” Macey again swallowed with some difficulty, her lips cracked, swollen, burned. Foote took the glass of water with a straw in it off the breakfast tray pushed back against the wall. She held the straw to Macey’s lips and the patient took a few sips, after which her head fell exhausted back onto the pillows. “I heard the shooting,” she repeated, tears growing in the corners of her eyes.

Foote rested a hand on her shoulder. “Did you see anyone?”

“No. Heard the gunfire and started running.”

“Away from it?” Matheson asked.

“Toward it.”

I was pretty sure I knew which direction Matheson would’ve headed.

“What were you doing way out there?” Cruz asked.

“Had some time before the charter arrived. Went for a walk … wanted to look at the stars.” Macey scowled, a sudden thought occurring to her. “Gartner, Rick Gartner. Is he …?”

“He’s alive,” said Foote.

He was, yes, at least technically. But I agreed with the Chief’s half-truth. Knowing your partner’s dead — or close to it — doesn’t help all that much when you’re alive and kicking, relatively speaking, and aren’t sure if you have the right to be.

“We were going to Disneyland, taking a young family.”

Macey must have read something in Chief Foote’s face. “Did they kill the family?”

“The Sorwicks?” said Foote.

Macey nodded.

“Yes, they did.”

The pilot’s forehead became a brace of deep, parallel lines. Her eyes closed and the lines disappeared and she appeared to drift off to sleep. But then she said, as if from a rapidly increasing distance, “How many people did they kill?”

“‘They’ — you keep saying ‘they’,” Cruz said. “Who’s they?” The lieutenant was hoping to coax something more from the only potential witness we had, but the Learjet pilot was snuggled up to the poppy.

“Ms Macey?” Foote prompted. She gave the pilot’s shoulder a gentle shake, but got nothing in return.

Doc Monroe arrived. She opened the door to the room and held it open, leaning against it, her body language saying, “Okay, everyone out.”

Foote, Matheson and Cruz held an impromptu meeting in the hospital parking lot, Gomez and I spectating.

“We’re going to have to go public,” said Foote.

“I agree,” Matheson agreed, happy to let the Chief Deputy take the lead now, and any career bullets later.

“I think we should wait until we have some idea about who did this and why,” said Cruz.

“You heard the doctor, Carlos,” Foote reminded him. “There are rumors. If we don’t fill the vacuum someone else will. It’s already a media circus.” She put a hand to her forehead and smoothed the hair back from her temples. “Look, more than anything, we need to make some progress. If you’ve got any ideas, Matt, let’s hear ’em. We need to claw something back here, and fast.”

Matt Matheson? Even the guy’s name lacked imagination. I felt sorry for the Chief. She was doing her best, but it was like watching someone attempting to start a car with a dead battery on a cold morning.

Matheson stroked his chin, said nothing, no current in the wires.

“So what do we know?” Foote asked, looking at everyone in turn, including Gomez and me. “An unknown number of assailants flew in to Horizon Airport before dawn this morning, and killed everyone they could find. Only two people are known to have survived. Automatic and semi-automatic weapons were used …”

“We’ve collected DNA evidence and we’re talking to the FAA about identifying the aircraft,” said Cruz.

“That’s something — a start,” said Foote. “What else? Anyone got any theories? Right about now, I’ll listen to anything.”

Crickets.

I had a question. “Why two aircraft?”

The corners of Foote’s mouth sank like they were supported by quicksand.

“The attack wasn’t random,” Gomez said. “Lieutenant, you said you thought it was carefully planned and executed. I agree.”

Cruz nodded, grateful for the support.

“And for some reason the plan called for two aircraft.”

Gomez looked at me. “How many passengers can you put in a King Air?”

I’d worked with several variants in the past. “Depends on the configuration,” I replied. “Ten or more?”

“Lieutenant, you got an estimate of how many killers you believe were running around the airport?”

I sensed that Gomez had maybe sniffed something out.

Cruz held his forehead in his fingertips and massaged it. “Nothing definitive, no, but given the area, the number of deaths, the spread of the casings and the variations in striations on them — best guess so far is up to maybe fifteen.”

“Around fifteen people arriving in relative comfort, split between two aircraft … Why not twenty or more killers, fill the planes up with them and do the job in half the time with twice the numbers?”

“Maybe all the assailants were squeezed into one plane,” I said, headed to the same place Gomez was going. “Because there was something else in the other aircraft.”

Gomez scratched his chin. “This is about drugs. The hit squad in one aircraft came along to ensure there were no witnesses to the cargo brought in on the other.”

No one had anything to say. The air was tense, all of us testing the theory internally, looking for holes. That is with the possible exception of Matheson, who was maybe thinking about what music he was gonna put on for the evening’s floor class.

“Would’ve been a big load,” said Foote, climbing on board.

“Does El Paso still get a lot of drugs coming across the border?” Gomez asked.

“Yes, but nothing like Laredo.”

“Didn’t you make a big bust here not so long ago? A thirty-million-dollar haul?”

Foote, Matheson and Cruz all nodded.

“Maybe this time, whoever made this shipment — maybe they wanted the delivery assured,” I said.

“Jesus,” said Foote.

Gomez turned to me. “What’s the cargo payload of a King Air?”

I was paid to know these things. I took a guess at it. “Over a ton.”

“They land, the hit squad deplanes, disburses, kills all possible witnesses to the offload and flies away.”

“What do they offload into?” Foote asked.

“A truck, or perhaps several vehicles,” Cruz suggested. “Y’know, split up the load. One or two get caught but the others sneak through. Your standard decoy run.”

“That makes sense,” said Foote.

“We got evidence that any of this is anything other than guesswork?” asked Matheson.

“Educated guesswork,” Cruz corrected him.

I wondered whether Matheson might need the word educated spelled out. “What’s a thousand kees of cocaine worth on the street?” I asked. “A hundred million?”

“In these parts, somewhere around one hundred and thirty million dollars,” said Foote. “Lieutenant?”

Cruz nodded, backing her up.

“So where’s it gone?” I asked. “El Paso?”

Foote replied. “No, the market here’s too small.”

“Five hours after it’s landed and transferred,” Matheson added, “those vehicles are gonna be halfway to Dallas.”

“Why Dallas?”

“Biggest distribution point in north Texas for drugs coming up from this part of Mexico,” said Gomez. “Anything major heads to Dallas for dispersal — it’s a transport hub for the rest of the country.”

“We been to a conference hosted by the DEA ’bout it,” Matheson added. “You can hide in Dallas, but you can’t hide in El Paso.”

The way he said it, sucking something from between his teeth, made it sound like El Paso wasn’t an option for drug dealers, not when ol’ Commander Matheson was on the job.

“What time did the sun rise this morning?” Gomez inquired.

“Six twenty-one,” Cruz answered. “According to our survivor, the killers were gone by then. That was roughly six hours ago. So if you’re right, the shipment will be more than halfway to Dallas, but not too much more.”

Gomez was pulling out his cell. “If they’re on I-20, they’ll have come through Odessa. Maybe we can stop ’em this side of Abilene. But they also could’ve taken the long way round, I-10 through San Antonio,” he said, thinking it through on the go. “DPS can cover both routes.”

Foote acknowledged the help and also fired up her cell, as did Matheson who turned his back on us, I assumed to play a level or two of Angry Birds in private. Cruz consulted his notes. I twiddled my thumbs.

Gomez finished his call as a cab drove slowly up to the hospital entrance drop-off. Our transport had arrived. All twiddled out, I gestured to the Chief that the Ranger and I were leaving. Foote excused herself to whoever was on the other end of the line and pressed the cell against her chest. “Thanks for your help. You both staying in town?”

I told her that we were. She asked for our cards and told us she’d be in touch.

A few minutes later we were in the cab, heading for our motel, an old-style two-star cinder block sandwiched between the highway access road and the railroad tracks, complete with stained carpet and walls no thicker than the beige-colored wallpaper covering them. I needed to take a shower, or maybe a dip in the outdoor swimming pool.

“You gonna report in?” Gomez asked when we got out of the cab.

“Yeah, gimme forty minutes.”

“I’ll call Thrifty, break the good news to ’em and pick us up another jeep.”

I took that shower, the outdoor pool being a little bigger than a bathtub, but then I thought that maybe I’d made the wrong choice when the drain beneath my feet in the shower recess exhaled something that made me think of what was rising off the asphalt out at Horizon. I gave the cold tap a few extra turns but the water pressure couldn’t wash away thoughts of the slaughtered family left on the ramp, or any of the many other victims unfortunate enough to be early starters out there, murdered so that some rich college kid in LA, Frisco, New York or wherever could get his hands on a gram of blow and maybe get lucky at a party with some drug slut in the john. I wasn’t a fan of Class A drugs, and I didn’t care too much either for the people who thought taking them did no harm. The sight I caught of Gail Sorwick when a corner of the blanket lifted was going to stay with me for some time. What a way to go, to see your children and your husband gunned down in front of your eyes while the killer made you swallow his poison. She’d tried to balance the account with her incisors, but it was a final small act of defiance. The animal killed her and then mutilated her. If I ever got my hands on the fuck who did that, I made a silent promise to Gail Sorwick that I would make him pay.

I eventually got out, toweled off and dressed — dark-blue T-shirt, jeans and all-terrain boots. My cell rang, the tone telling me that I’d missed a call. The screen informed me that it was Arlen, so I rang him back.

“Vin, how was it?”

“Heavy.”

“I know. It’s all over the news. Turn on your TV.”

“It’s locked on the porn channel,” I said.

“So you’ll be staying in tonight?”

“I’ve never seen anything like this down here.”

“I know,” he said. “The networks have all got their birds in the sky. Tweets leaked the story after some of the relatives were informed. The Mexicans are being blamed. Some think it’s the violence from Juárez spilling across the border. It’s virtually a failed state over there. Could be a gang called the Barrio Azteca involved in some payback, or maybe the Los Zetas. There are a dozen theories floating around. No one’s sure, but everyone’s guessing. The FBI is gonna get involved.”

“So we can all relax then,” I quipped.

“And maybe the CIA.”

“Cancel all relaxation.”

“No one likes where this is headed; gonna bring all the vigilante crazies out of the woodwork looking for revenge. I just heard a couple of Mexican-Americans were shot at a Texaco up in Seattle. The word ‘payback time’ was spray-painted on the wall behind them. The last thing anyone wants is open season on US citizens who don’t have blue eyes. Do you know what happened? Other than what’s playing on CNN?”

I gave him a rundown up to the point where Macey made her late entrance, followed by the subsequent deductions in the hospital parking lot.

“Drugs will bring in the DEA,” Arlen said, more to himself. “And you’ve got a witness?”

“I’d call her a survivor. It’s the Lear pilot. She saw two black King Airs arrive, heard the shooting, and then saw the aircraft depart. Didn’t witness much else. She was out walking the desert, star-gazing.”

“Too bad.”

“Yeah.” It was, though if Macey had been close enough to see anything else it would’ve been the last thing she saw.

“What about the other Lear pilot? What’s his name …?”

I heard paper being shuffled: Arlen had briefing notes.

“Rick Gartner,” I said. “As far as I know the guy’s still in a coma. No one’s taking odds on him snapping out of it.”

“Well, if you hear anything come of those roadblocks …”

“I’ll let you know,” I promised.

“What about our deserters?” Arlen asked once the bigger picture had been dealt with.

“I’d say Angus Whelt is checking into a suite in Cancún by now. And, as you know, Sponson’s lining up with twenty-six others at the medical examiner’s table. We’ll have to pick him up from the country coroner’s office when they’re done.”

“I’ll make the arrangements.”

“What do you want me to do?” I asked. I couldn’t chase Whelt south of the river. As for what was happening at Horizon Airport, being federal and limited to the affairs of the Air Force, OSI had no jurisdiction in what was a local, civilian investigation. Those facts put me right out of the picture.

“I’ll see you back here tomorrow.”

“Here” was Andrews AFB, in DC. I said goodbye and tossed the cell on the bed, exchanging it for the TV remote. I turned on the set bolted to a caged bracket on the wall and up came the picture of two women working on each other furiously with all the affection of a couple of carpenters hand sanding a cabinet. I changed channels and got a flicker of black before the picture returned to the two women rubbing each other raw. Forty minutes were about up anyway. I turned the thing off. Maybe Gomez and I could find someplace around here where we could get seriously tanked.