The Collected

CHAPTER 3

The Pemex Station was on the left. Just beyond it was a road that cut between the station and a row of cinderblock buildings that stretched along the highway for several hundred feet. If Nate could get the van behind those buildings without being seen, the cops might drive straight by and not realize their mistake for several minutes.

“Hold on tight,” he said.

Burke grabbed the back of his seat with one hand, and braced his other against the dash.

Now that the gas station was only a few seconds away, Nate had a much better idea of how it was laid out, and could see that instead of having to take a sharp turn onto the intersecting road between it and the other buildings, he could cut diagonally across the Pemex lot and whip behind the row of shops, all without having to touch his brakes.

He waited until the very last second, then yanked the wheel to the left. The van careened across the road, bouncing Nate and Burke in their seats as it hit the uneven asphalt surrounding the filling station. Keeping on as straight a line as possible, Nate aimed the van just to the right of the pumps, then off the curb on the other side.

“As soon as we stop, get out and run,” Nate said as he whipped the vehicle around the back of the first cinderblock building.

“Run? Where?”

“Anywhere. As far away as possible. I’ll contact you in a few days.”

Out of the corner of his eye, Nate could see Burke nod, but if the other man said anything, it was lost in the squeal of brakes as Nate brought the van to a halt.

“Go!” Nate yelled.

Burke fought with his seat belt for a second, then wrenched open his door and disappeared.

Nate jammed the transmission into Park, grabbed his clean kit, and moved quickly into the back. From the main section of the bag, he removed a can of lighter fluid and a box of matches. He doused both the wrapped body and the package of materials, and removed a match from the box.

Just as he was striking the head against the side of the container, he heard the siren. But it wasn’t coming from the highway on the other side of the buildings like he’d hoped. It was quickly approaching the back of the van. Though it sounded like only a single car, it was still one too many.

His ploy hadn’t worked.

Cursing under his breath, he threw the lit match onto the plastic covering the body. As the flames ignited, he raced up front, pulled the backpack over his shoulders, and exited through the same door Burke had used.

He kept the van between himself and the police car, and ran as fast as he could, but was sure it would only be a matter of seconds before they saw him. He spotted a break ahead between the buildings. Knowing it was his only chance, he ducked into the gap, and was relieved to see it went all the way to the front. He moved rapidly down the space, crouched down as he neared the end, and eased his head out for a look.

There was another police car, lights flashing, sitting across the entrance to the road that ran next to Pemex. Nate had to fight the urge to jerk his head back as he slowly rotated around and looked in the other direction. The third police car was stopped on the shoulder, about a hundred feet away, on his side of the highway.

He carefully drew his head back into the safety of the narrow alley.

Escaping via the front wasn’t going to work, but neither was returning the way he’d come. He was surrounded. Either he stayed where he was and waited for someone to find him, or…

He looked up.

The roof?

Did he really have a choice? The walls were too close together to effectively spider-walk to the top, but there was a pipe running up the side that looked like it might be secure enough to use as an impromptu ladder. He gave it a jerk, and decided it would hold.

Just as he started up, he heard footsteps. Close, no more than a dozen feet around the front corner, moving in his direction. No way he’d make the top before the person reached the passageway.

He had but one option. He scrambled upward as high as he dared, and wedged himself between the walls and moved as close to the front end of the gap as possible. There, he hung, ten feet up and two feet back from the corner.

The steps approached from the other side, and stopped. Several seconds passed, then the end of a gun and top of a police hat peeked around the corner below him.

That’s right, Nate thought. Come on in for a look, but just keep your eyes down.

The man’s gaze swung from one side to the other across the ground, and seemed to freeze on the spot at the base of the pipe.

Nate’s footprints.

The cop moved all the way into the opening, and kneeled down for a better look. A moment passed, then he raised his head, his gaze continuing to move up toward the roof.

A split second before he would have seen Nate, the cleaner dropped from the sky like a stone.

The cop tried to raise a hand in front of his face, but Nate plowed into him feet first before he could, slamming the man to the ground.

Something popped along one of the cop’s legs, a knee perhaps, or an ankle bent the wrong way. Whatever it was, the cop wasn’t feeling it at the moment. He was out cold, thanks to his head thudding hard against the ground.

“Lo siento,” Nate whispered, apologizing.

He grabbed the man’s gun, and checked the main street again. The two police cars were still there, but now that it was a little lighter, he could see both vehicles were empty. He scanned the buildings in case another cop might be working his way toward him, but there was no one.

Directly across the street was a small dirt field, and on the other side of it were several cinderblock homes. There were no fences around the properties, just more dirt and the occasional patch of grass or brush.

So, go for the roof or take the chance?

Hell, the roof was a chance, too. Perhaps even a bigger one, because he could easily get trapped there.

He glanced at the road again. Nothing.

Option two, then.

He slipped out of the gap, and scooted along the front of the building to his left, alert for any movement. Reaching the end without incident, he snuck a look around the corner, down another road that led back toward the rear of the buildings. There were two cops, fifty feet away. Each had a gun drawn, but their attention was focused in the other direction, as if they expected Nate to come barreling around the back.

Nate glanced toward the highway, intending to pick the best path across the field on the other side, but his gaze strayed to the nearby police car. It was vibrating, its engine idling.

Like coincidences, there was no such thing as luck. “Opportunity, yes,” Quinn had once said. “It’s up to you whether you take it or not. But no luck.”

Consider it taken, Nate thought as he moved silently over to the car and around to the driver’s side. He carefully lifted the handle, and eased the door open.

No yells. No one heading in his direction.

So far, so good.

Staying low, he slipped inside, and positioned his foot above the accelerator while grabbing the transmission lever with his right hand.

On three. One. Two.

The moment three passed through his head, he sat up, dropped the shift into Drive, and jammed the gas pedal to the floor. As the car jumped forward, he whipped the wheel around and pulled a quick U-turn so he would be heading toward the safety of the city.

The door was still partially open as he finished the turn, so he had no problems hearing the shouts of alarm. He reached out and pulled the door closed just as the crack of a gun echoed behind him, but wherever the bullet went, it didn’t hit the car.

He checked his mirror in time to see the men run out onto the highway. They were small and getting smaller fast, but that didn’t stop them from firing several more rounds in his direction. Again, none of the bullets hit their mark.

Then the road curved to the right, and the men dropped out of sight.

Nate knew it would only be moments before the other police cars took up chase. He needed to get off the highway and into an area where it would be next to impossible for them to find him.

The good news was that the city was starting to rear up around him. At the first major intersection he reached, he turned right, drove down four blocks, and made a quick left in front of oncoming traffic.

Two more turns, and he was confident there was no way the others would know where he was. A few minutes later, he pulled into an alleyway behind a clothing store and parked the car tight to the wall.

His gloved hands made doing a wipe down of the interior unnecessary, but he still did a check for any hair he might have left behind. Once he was sure the car was clean, he tossed the keys onto the dash so they’d be visible to anyone interested in taking a joy ride, and walked down the alley to the far street.

For the first time since things had gone sideways, he allowed a thought that had been pecking away at the back of his mind to come forward.

The police had been waiting at the turnoff for his dump site.

How had they found it? And how had they known what time to be there?

It seemed unlikely that someone had discovered the hole in the ground and reported it. But even if that were the case, the hole wasn’t long and narrow like a grave. It was a five-foot-deep square. Odd, perhaps, and they might be curiosity about who had dug it, but jumping to the conclusion that it was criminal in nature was a giant leap.

There really was only one possibility. The cops had been tipped off.

But by whom? The only ones who knew about the pending death of the target were Pullman, the ops team, and Nate and Burke. Well, the client, too, of course, whoever that was. But he or she was unlikely to know any of the operation details. In fact, the only ones who knew about the dump site were Nate and Burke.

That son of a bitch sold me out.

As anger began to build in his chest, Nate fought it back down. He did not have time to worry about the whos and whys right now. What he had to worry about were the hows, as in how he’d get out of town. Given the gigantic fiasco the operation had become, there was no question Monterrey should already have been in his rear window.

Once he was safely away, the next thing he’d need to do was get in touch with Pullman so the broker could handle any damage control that needed to happen. Hopefully the fire in the van had taken care of the body. It wouldn’t be the most satisfactory conclusion to the assignment, but the target was dead, and Nate had followed procedure, doing all he could to make identification of the body difficult.

Then, and only then, could he start thinking about Burke.

The closest entrance to the US from his current location was along the Texas border. There were several small crossings, but the busy one at Reynosa would be easiest. Busy was good. He could lose himself if he had to. And if anything looked screwy there, he could head east to Matamoros and cross over into Brownsville. Worst case, he could continue over to the Gulf Coast and hire a fishing vessel and work his way north.

The one thing he couldn’t do in a timely manner was walk the one hundred and forty miles from Monterrey to the border. But most of the traditional transportation options-planes, buses, rental cars-were out, too. Cops would be watching those. Even if they didn’t know exactly what Nate looked like, if they’d been tipped off about the operation, they probably knew he was a gringo, too, and would question any Caucasian male traveling alone.

A taxi? Same problem. A quick warning broadcast over their radio, and suddenly the driver would start to wonder about his passenger. Nate could just steal a vehicle, but most of the cars he was passing looked liked they’d be unlikely to make it halfway to the border before giving out.

At the end of the block, a delivery truck turned onto the street, grinded its gears for a moment, and drove right by Nate.

He smiled. That was the solution he was looking for.

There would be hundreds of trucks running between Monterrey and Reynosa, carrying goods bound for the US. If he could get to where the highway started-find the Mexican equivalent of a truck stop, perhaps-he should be able to bum a ride, or, even better, stow away and then hop out when the rig reached the border town.

He consulted a map of the city on this phone, walked four blocks over to a main road, and took a chance on flagging down a taxi for a short ride.

“La Condesa,” he told the driver. It was on the outskirts of the city, along the highway to Texas. “Metele velocidad.”

Nate wasted no time picking out his target. It was a tractor-trailer rig with license plates for both Mexico and Texas, parked in a big lot beside a Pemex station on the side of the road headed toward the border. The trailer was locked up, but there was an area behind the cab surrounded by metal partitions just wide enough for Nate to sit between if he drew his legs up to his chest. It certainly wasn’t the safest place to ride, but there were several things he could brace himself against, and as long as he didn’t fall asleep or the driver didn’t get into an accident, he’d be fine.

He went inside the store attached to the station and picked up some water, all the while keeping an eye out the window in case the driver returned. When he was done, he hung around the side of the building until the trucker finally showed up. As the man was doing a walk around his rig, Nate made his way over to the semi parked in the adjacent spot. He waited there, out of sight, until the driver started to climb into his cab.

As Nate heard the door open, he scooted out of his hiding spot, rushed into the space between the truck and the trailer, and took his self-assigned seat. The engine rumbled and the truck pulled out.

Nate was on his way toward Reynosa.

The ride was hot and windy. Nate kept his head tucked down most of the time. With nothing else to occupy his mind, he allowed himself to go over the possibilities of why the job had gone wrong. No matter which scenario he considered, his thoughts always circled back to Burke. There was just no other solution.

His motivation?

Money?

It was the root of all evil, right? And the easiest answer. But even that brought a set of unknowns. Who had paid Burke for the information? And what was that person’s motivation?

Was it a friend of the dead man? No, that wouldn’t make sense. The person would have wanted to stop the operation from happening at all.

The police? Wouldn’t they have been more interested in catching the ops team in the act of killing the target?

Neither choice satisfied Nate. But if not them, then who?

Nate wondered what Quinn would have thought, but immediately knew the answer. Quinn would have never taken the job in the first place.

Pullman hadn’t been on Quinn’s Preferred Clients list, and Quinn had reached a point in his career where if a job were offered by someone he didn’t know, he would have just passed. Nate was not in the position to be as picky. So when the gig coincided with a hole in his schedule, he’d done some due diligence, and found out that Pullman was a mid-level fixer with a decent enough reputation. Nate had seen no reason to turn the job down. It was all experience, he’d told himself. The more he had, the better he would be.

If it was a unique experience he’d been going for-mission accomplished.

He checked his watch. They’d been on the road for almost an hour and a half. Another thirty minutes at most, and they’d be in Reynosa.

His backpack was sitting between his heels and his thighs. He unzipped the top, pulled out the nearly empty bottle of water, and downed the remaining liquid.

As he put the bottle back in his bag, the truck whined loudly, the driver downshifting and reducing speed. A hill, maybe, Nate thought. It certainly wouldn’t be Reynosa yet. They hadn’t been driving that fast.

The truck downshifted again, but the road remained level.

Nate took a cautious peek around the thin metal partition. On the passenger side were the dotted line that indicated the edge of the highway, and the scrub-covered, semi-desert plain. There were no hills or mountains anywhere he could see. He looked to his right. The car in the fast lane next to them was slowing, too, and behind it, he could see the front bumper of the trailing car.

Traffic. Great.

The truck’s speed continued to decrease until Nate could have walked faster. Then, with a final hiss of its air brakes, the rig stopped completely.

Nate didn’t like it one bit. By his estimation, they still had at least twenty miles left to go before they reached the border. He highly doubted traffic would be backed up this far south. An accident, then?

The truck’s engine roared as the semi moved ahead a few feet before halting again.

Nate knew he needed to take a look and get a sense of what was going on. It would be a gamble, but he figured if he stayed low and leaned around the passenger side, there would be little chance someone would notice.

He snaked his head and shoulders around the lower end of the metal partition. He checked the side mirror first to make sure the driver couldn’t see him, then looked down the road.

There were at least thirty vehicles ahead of them, inching forward at a mind-numbing crawl. Farther down the road, he could see a few flashing lights, but couldn’t tell if they were from police cars or fire trucks or perhaps even an ambulance.

Though part of his mind was thinking that it might very well be an accident, his intuition was saying, Get out of here.

Again, the truck moved, this time traveling about a dozen feet. At the front of the jam, another truck also pulled forward, but it was able to keep going, having cleared whatever the problem was. Once it was out of the way, Nate could see three of the emergency vehicles.

There wasn’t an ambulance among them. Not a fire truck, either.

Police cars only.

“A roadblock,” he whispered to himself.

Even if the cops there weren’t looking for him, given his unconventional seating arrangements, he would not go unnoticed.

He examined the side of the road. About thirty feet ahead, the highway crossed over a bridge that spanned shallow wash. The scrub grew tall along each bank, while scattered patches of bushes had sprung up down the middle.

It was a better opportunity than he could have hoped for.

He waited patiently as the truck continued to move foot by foot toward the bridge. When the cab finally reached it, Nate grabbed his bag, stepped onto the road, and dropped down into the gulch. Ducking under the bridge, he held his position as the truck and the next few cars behind it passed by.

No one honked or shouted at him.

He was just starting to think he’d made it without being seen, when he heard a whomp-whomp-whomp approaching. Using the bridge to conceal his presence, he looked toward the sky and spotted a helicopter descending toward the road.

It was dark in color and large, and though there were no discernible markings, it looked distinctively official, not private. He crawled farther under the bridge, hoping they were just doing a flyover and he hadn’t been spotted, but the rotors continued to increase in volume until their constant beating echoed through every inch of the semi-enclosed space.

Suddenly a voice crackled over a loudspeaker. “El hombre que esta abajo del puente, quedese en donde esta. No intente correr, o le disparamos.” The voice then switched to English. “Under the bridge. Do not run. You will be shot.”

Even if Nate hadn’t understood either language, the message was clear: He was screwed.

More orders were shouted over the speaker, telling the cars parked on the road to move out of the way so the helicopter could land.

Nate moved to the far side of the bridge. Beyond were twenty feet of open space, then a thick growth of shoulder-high scrub shooting up out of the soft sand.

The helicopter sounded like it was nearing the ground.

Now or never.

He sucked in a breath, then raced over to the brush and kept going. He wanted to look back, had to look back, but forced his eyes to stay forward.

Go, go, go!

He weaved back and forth through the scrub, trying to build up as much of a gap as possible between himself and the cops who would soon be chasing him, and searched for a place to hide.

Instinctively, he’d been counting off the seconds since he left the cover of the bridge. Thirty-seven turned out to be the magic number. That’s when he heard shouts from back near the bridge, and knew they had discovered he wasn’t there anymore. Add a few more seconds for them to get organized, and he figured he had, at best, a forty-second lead. Not great, but not as bad as it could have been.

He came to a fork in the wash. To the left, the dry bed rose gently as it narrowed in width. Most likely, it went on for only another fifty feet or so before petering out. The fork to the right, though, continued as it had been.

Knowing the latter would be the direction they expected him to go, he chose the shallower route. Ten feet shy of where the wash disappeared, he found what he’d been looking for. A portion of the sidewall had been cut away by a recent storm, creating an overhang just large enough for him to fit into. If he could pull some dirt on top of him, or cause the overhang to collapse, they might never find him.

As he dropped to his knees and started to roll into the space, a loud roar raced overhead.

“Do not move! You are being covered, and you will be shot dead.” The voice from the helicopter didn’t even bother with Spanish this time.

To emphasize the point, a bullet slammed into the dirt three feet from Nate’s head.

His mind raced, trying to come up with something else he could do. He’d made it this far; there had to be some other way out. But the pounding feet nearing his position forced him to realize all his options had been exhausted.

The job was over.