The Devil's Elixir

48

Hank Corliss parked his car in the single garage of his house, climbed up three small steps, and went through the narrow doorway that led to his quiet, empty home.

Like he did every night.

He set down his attaché case on the couch and plodded across to the kitchen, where he got a clean tumbler out of a cabinet. He filled it using the fridge’s ice maker, then retrieved a bottle of Scotch from another cabinet and filled the glass slowly, his weary eyes staring through the ice cubes as they cracked and popped and settled in. He carried the glass into the living room, set himself on the couch, and flicked on the TV. He didn’t change the channel. He didn’t adjust the volume. He just looked dead ahead as the random images unfurled on the screen and raised the glass for that first sip, rolling it around his mouth, feeling the burn tickle his throat, letting the golden potion work its magic.

Like he did every night.

Only tonight, things were a little different.

Tonight, there was a glint of hope breaking through the desolate numbness in his mind.

Hope that the beast who’d wrecked his life might finally be made to pay for the horrors he’d caused.

It wasn’t likely. It wasn’t probable. But it was possible. And right now, that was worth something. It was a hell of a lot more than he’d had in years.

His thoughts coasted back to that time, five years earlier, when he was running the DEA field office in Mexico City, fighting an unwinnable war against a well-armed, ruthless enemy that was everywhere and had the power to corrupt anyone. There was a reason why the posting had been nicknamed “the greatest laxative in the foreign service.” Beyond being insanely dangerous, it was also a thankless task. Few Mexicans wanted him or his agents in their country, even though the cartel’s turf wars were claiming thousands of victims every year. The locals blamed his countrymen for what was happening to their homeland, lambasting the insatiable appetite for drugs north of their border that had created the market in the first place while condemning the unlimited supply of easily bought weapons that were flooding south across the Rio Grande and spilling Mexican blood with increasing savagery.

“Poor Mexico . . . so far from God, so close to the United States,” the dictator Porfirio Díaz had quipped in the nineteenth century.

For most of Díaz’s countrymen today, the quip still held.

Despite all that, despite the difficulties he knew he’d face on the ground, Corliss had thrown himself into his assignment with the steely resolve and unflinching commitment he was known for. The posting was a badge of honor for him, the ultimate challenge for someone whose entire career had been devoted to the War on Drugs. It was a chance to take the fight to the enemy’s backyard, to disrupt the poisonous scourge at its source, before it reached American soil.

To show those gutless cabróns how it was done.

Right off the bat, he and his men had notched up some decent successes. Against a rising tide of severed heads dumped in coolers, mass graves, and spiraling corruption that reached the very highest levels of government, Corliss’s agents had led successful raids on several labs, torched many tons of narcotics, and put their hands on millions of dollars of illegal earnings.

Then the call had come in.

The call that changed everything.

Corliss tried not to think about that night, but he couldn’t help it. Even if he wanted to, even if he could somehow overpower his mind and force it to forget, his body wouldn’t let him.

The pain and the scars left behind by twenty-three bullet holes would see to that.

He hadn’t expected the attack. No one had. Not at his house. Not in the gated compound, not at the home of the head of the DEA in Mexico. But that’s where it had taken place. And the barrage of painful images that battered his mind whenever he relived it was so intense and so surreal that he didn’t know what was real from what was imagined, not anymore.

The men had burst in on them in the middle of the night, rousing him and his wife, Laura, from their sleep. Four men in balaclavas, four soulless demons that rose out of the pits of hell, dragged them out of their bed, and threw them into the living room to face their worst fear: the sight of their nine-year-old daughter, Wendy, sheer terror crippling her face, in the clutches of one of the men, the one who was their leader. The one who didn’t bother with a mask.

Raoul Navarro.

The man who’d hardly ever been photographed, the one of whom the agency had no more than a couple of grainy, out-of-date photographs. And yet, here he was, in Corliss’s own living room, not even bothering to hide his own face.

Which didn’t bode well at all.

The Mexican had one hand clasped around Wendy’s neck, anchoring her in place. In the other, resting against the other side of her neck, he held a thin, small knife. Its compactness wasn’t any source of comfort. Not when its smooth, sleek blade glinted with such ferocity.

“You took something from me,” Navarro announced. “I want it back.”

At first, Corliss’s frazzled mind didn’t register any of it. He didn’t understand what the man wanted. He pleaded with him to let his daughter go, saying he’d give him whatever it was he wanted and asking him to explain what he was talking about.

“McKinnon,” Navarro added, coldly.

In a blinding flash that seared right through him, Corliss understood.

“The journal,” he muttered. “I have it. It’s right here.” He pointed to a corner cabinet in the living room, his eyes begging for permission to retrieve it.

Navarro gave him the smallest of nods, and Corliss scurried across the room, his breath coming short and fast, his fingers twitching as he rummaged through a drawer before pulling out the old, tattered leather-covered book.

The book he’d had translated by an analyst at the agency.

The one whose contents he hadn’t shared with anyone else there.

He held it up to his captor like a trophy.

“Here,” he said, edging closer to him, one hesitant step after another, a supplicant approaching his executioner. “Now, please. Let her go.”

Navarro nodded to one of his men, who stepped in and took hold of the journal, tucking it into his backpack.

“Please,” Corliss pleaded.

Navarro smiled—an awful smile, a smile that chilled the bone more than any frown.

“Do you take me for a baboso?”

Corliss was lost.

“That’s not what I came for,” Navarro added, fixing him with a murderous stare while tightening his grip on Wendy and pressing the blade against her skin.

Corliss could see Wendy’s artery straining against the edge of the blade. “No, please. I don’t know what—” Then, in a stomach-wrenching flash, he got it. What Navarro had come for. And the realization hit him like he’d been stabbed with live wires.

“I don’t have it,” he told the Mexican. “We don’t have it. We couldn’t access it.”

“Bullshit.” He pressed the blade in even tighter.

“I’m telling you, we never got it. The laptop, it had a password, we couldn’t crack it. The hard drive got wiped. I’m telling you we don’t have it.”

“I’m not going to ask you again.”

Corliss’s mind was scrambling for answers, but he couldn’t think of any. “Please. You’ve got to believe me. I’d give it to you if I had it. I’d give you anything you want. Just don’t—don’t hurt her. Please.”

And then he saw it. A narrowing in Navarro’s eyes, a hardening of his jaw muscles. A seething exhale. And the fingers, tightening their grip on Wendy’s neck—and on the blade.

“Okay, well, if that’s how you want to play it,” Navarro said—

And Corliss bolted.

“No!”

He lunged forward, arms outstretched to grab his daughter and pull her to safety, with Navarro’s men leaping at him while the startled Mexican lurched backward—

And in the flash of chaos, in that instant of madness, Corliss saw the blade nick Wendy’s neck, saw the blood shoot out, saw her eyes shoot open with fear, saw her mouth go wide and heard her scream tear into his ears—

And she slid to the ground, holding her neck, blood spurting relentlessly through her fingers, her terrified gaze locked on her father—

He was on her in a flash, cradling her, pressing down against the cut on her neck, caressing her hair, telling her she was going to be all right—

His wife, sobbing and out of breath, now alongside him, desperately trying to do something to stem the life gushing out of her and bring some measure of comfort to their daughter—

“Help us,” Corliss shouted, tears streaming from his eyes. “Help us, damn you.”

Navarro and his men just stood there and watched as, in a few brutal seconds, Wendy lost consciousness. Then her breathing stopped and she just lay there, in Corliss’s arms.

Dead.

He looked up at Navarro, drowning in fury, sorrow, and confusion.

“Why?” he mumbled between breathless sobs. “Why? I told you . . . I told you we didn’t have it.”

And in that instant, he thought Navarro finally believed him. But it was too late.

It didn’t matter anymore.

“I told you I didn’t have it,” he wept. “Why did you have to do this?”

“Perhaps you’ll understand,” Navarro replied, coolly. “In another lifetime.”

Three words that Corliss would never forget.

He roared as he leapt to his feet and launched himself at Navarro.

He never made it, never even laid a finger on the Mexican.

The bullets had stopped him.

Twenty-three of him.

He didn’t remember much else about that night.

He’d spent days in a coma. Weeks in intensive care. Months in a hospital. Years in rehabilitation. Three months into his ordeal, he’d been told that his wife had taken her own life. Which hadn’t surprised him. He’d seen how Wendy’s death had affected her, how she couldn’t live with the memory of that night. And now she was gone, too.

They were both gone.

But Navarro was still out there. Roaming the land, carefree, no doubt causing more horrors, inflicting more pain and suffering wherever he went.

A monster on the loose.

At first, Corliss couldn’t understand why he’d survived. He couldn’t understand why he hadn’t died from the hailstorm that had ripped through his body. After leaving the hospital, he’d considered ending his own life and joining his girls in the hereafter. He’d thought about it a lot. He’d come close to doing it a few times. Then, one day, he understood.

He understood that he’d been spared for a reason.

He realized he was still alive to do what had to be done.

To put the monster down.

To make sure his evil was extinguished.

To make sure he paid.

And right now, it seemed like there was a chance that the monster was finally out in the open. Not just out in the open, but here. In America. In California.

Within range.

Corliss’s arm slid down to rest on the couch, the empty tumbler slipping out of his fingers and rolling into the cushions. And as he drifted off to sleep, he held onto one thought: that if the monster were ever caught, that he’d be the one to slit his throat and watch him die, one slow breath at a time.

Hasta la vista, motherfucker.