The Devil's bounty

Seventy-three

An hour passed and the temperature dropped. Behind the marshalling yard, armed police had massed at the edge of the colonia, ready for one more sweep. Officers in riot gear were positioned at fifty-yard intervals, one facing in, the next looking out. Their vehicles were parked so close to the yard that Lock could hear the ticking of engines cooling.

Maybe the woman whose home they had invaded had made a report. Maybe the boys with the soccer ball had decided they could make more than five bucks. Or maybe the cartel had triangulated the position of the calls made from the cell phone. The reason didn’t matter. The cops knew he was close by. But they didn’t know where exactly. They must have assumed he was still in the colonia. They would figure out he wasn’t. The only question remaining was how long it would take them.

With the police so close, Lock spent the time trying to estimate their chance of surviving the dash from where they were to the border fence. At most he believed that a hundred yards out from their current position, they would likely be spotted. Fifty yards further they would probably begin to take fire. Keeping Mendez close to him would present the cops with double the regular body mass and double the target area.

It was possible that he and Mendez would get lucky. Shooting a man at range, or two men, was more difficult than it looked, especially given that the people shooting were cops rather than military. The ability to shoot to kill, more so than killing someone up close, was as much about switching off certain parts of the subconscious as it was about technical skill. Up close with a knife or your bare hands, millennia’s worth of survival instincts kicked in, overwhelming your mind. Killing another human being from a distance took training, repetition and a readjustment of your mindset to get to the point where you could accurately and coolly shoot someone in the back.

So, some things were in their favour, but Lock figured it was a seventy-thirty split against. A thirty per cent chance that they would make it in one piece, and a seventy per cent chance that they would be shot, and those were odds he didn’t like very much.

There was one other major barrier. A bad one. Bad because it didn’t conform to logic. It was a political consideration. Even if a battalion of US Marines was standing on the other side of the border, they wouldn’t be allowed to cross over to help him. They would have to stand and watch while he was killed. All kinds of US government agencies and operatives worked in Mexico with the tacit approval of the Mexican government. That wasn’t the case here.

Here, the local authorities with the supposed approval of the Federal authorities, were engaged in the hunt for a convicted rapist, and the man they were probably by now claiming was his accomplice. In all likelihood, that was how it was being spun, and if it wasn’t, it would be a variation on that theme. Whatever had changed behind the scenes, and the shots from the helicopter told Lock that something definitely had, they wanted Mendez dead — himself too, probably. It was classic spin-control for the cartels. If a situation gets out of hand, let the bodies pile up, shut things down and limit the number of those who can relate to the rest of the world what has gone down.

The land ahead was flat. No points of cover: it was exposed to the east, west and south. Not the kind of terrain you’d want to make a break over if your life depended upon it. Yet they would have to. But not now. They would need an edge and there was no better edge than the one he had in mind. The only snag was that his edge lay another sixty minutes in the future.