Wild Card

TWO

It was after midnight when the Lincoln Navigator reached the outskirts of Devoción, a tiny dust spot on the road some forty miles south of the U.S. border and roughly midway between Mexicali and the smuggler’s hive of Tecate. Unmarked by direction posts, excluded from most maps of the Peninsula for its slumbery irrelevance to tourists, Devoción was known to locals as the birthplace and original home territory of the brothers Lucio and Raul Salazar, two of the three Magi of Tijuana—Los Rayos Magos de Tijuana, in Spanish — so called for the blessings and protection they had once bestowed upon their underlings and lesser allies in a widespread theft, money laundering, and narcotics trafficking empire they built from scratch.

Devoción translates directly into English as “devotion,” a word defined as a profound, earnest attachment or religious dedication.

The Spanish give it another meaning as well: to be at another’s full and absolute disposal.

For the three decades that the Salazars controlled their native stronghold, it was the latter definition that its sparse peasant community might have best understood. Yet while fear was a constant for them, and obedience to the cartel law, they were grateful for the many tangible dividends of their loyalty. It had meant a meager but steady income, food on the table, and good clothes gifted to the children at Christmas. It had meant paved sidewalks for the town’s main street, a new church, and even a movie house that screened first-run American films. Disloyalty would bring swift retribution, but the magnanimity of those who governed was never without strings, and the clear-cut threat of knife and gun could be easier to abide than the hypocrisy of corrupt Federales and their stacked courtrooms.

This state of affairs had undergone an explosive upheaval when Lucio Salazar and his rival Enrique Quiros were killed on a night of vengeance and rumored double-cross up over the border in San Diego. No one in Devoción seemed to quite know what ignited the bloody violence. But the warfare between their formerly cooperative families had left the Salazars on the losing end of the struggle, and allowed Enrique’s successors to extend Quiros dominance into their vacated borderland territories, including the village at the real and symbolic heart of Salazar power.

Afterward, Devoción had quickly settled down to life as usual. Its five hundred or so inhabitants now pledged allegiance to the Quiros family, who, like their predecessors, continued to put bread and butter on their tables in return. Streets were dusty, faces were resigned and suspicious, and the kids bouncing through the alleys at all hours wore clean white Nike sneakers come the holidays. At the south edge of town, the chop shop garage that was a pet operation of the Salazars — whose lawless careers had started out with their driving hot American cars down across sierra country to the ports of San Felipe and La Fonda, where they were crated and shipped overseas — remained as active as when Lucio had taken in multimillion-dollar profits from the cannibalized auto parts racket, perhaps more so since the garage had become a roof for other lucrative areas of criminal distribution.

A competent mechanic was rarely undervalued, and every man who had worked there for Lucio had retained his job.

The Navigator, boosted up north, had been headed to the chop shop for disassembly when things went crazy.

In its driver’s seat, his eyes throbbing in his skull, so wide open with fear and apprehension they felt ready to pop from their sockets, Raul Luiza suddenly recognized the tall, broad shape of Devoción’s Catholic church up ahead on his left. His hands moist around the steering wheel, he saw the church, saw the enormous cross atop its spire outlined darkly against the yellow moon, and realized with fresh dread that time was running out. La Iglesia de Jesus Christos, it was named. The Church of Jesus Christ. But it was the name of Quiros that the villagers had been calling on to answer their prayers for the past couple of years, the same as he’d done in his own way.

Tonight, though, Raul had started the long list of regrets he’d compiled in his mind wishing to Jesus, the Virgin Mother, and all the blessed saints that he’d never heard of it. From there he’d moved on to wishing he’d listened to his old lady for once, hung at Anna’s crib like she’d practically begged of him. Had he done that, stayed there with her, they could have stepped out to score some rock, put the kid to bed early, everything would have been different. But he’d ignored her, and instead hustled over to the car dealership, where it all turned bad for him, turned to absolute shit in a hurry—

Raul tightened his sweaty, trembling grip on the wheel. He could remember his cousins in Devoción wanting to parade through town with joy when the Quiros family moved in, remember them chirping like perequitos about how those dudes walked a young man’s walk, talked a young man’s talk, dudes were players who brought some San Diego street with them, a big city style that would open doors most people hadn’t even dreamed of knocking on when those old-school fat cats the Salazars were on top.

Even in his gaining despair, Raul thought that was kind of funny. In fact, he might have laughed aloud if he hadn’t suspected that was something the man in the backseat would want explained… and he’d already asked too many questions, following every answer Raul him gave with another.

Now Raul passed the rear of the church as the road swung off to his right along the foot of the low mesa west of town. He took a final glance at the cross staring down from high above him, then turned his attention back to the road even before the church vanished from sight behind the curve of the mesa’s slope.

Raul drove on, his tremors growing steadily worse… and it wasn’t all because of nerves. Goddamn, he thought. Goddamn. If his stem had been in his pocket, he’d have tried to talk the head case in back into letting him stop on the way down from Chula Vista, take a few pulls. Just a couple on his way down and he would’ve been okay. Or okay enough to keep his hands steady on the wheel. But the guy had stamped his kit into the sidewalk, dumped his vials and everything else down a sewer after frisking him clean—

“How long until we’re at the shop?”

Raul jerked at the sound of the voice behind him.

“I tol’ you,” he said without glancing over his shoulder. “Wasn’t five minutes ago I tol’ you…”

“Tell me again.”

Raul took a breath. He’d driven the entire distance from Chula trying to convince himself he’d make it through this jam, find a way to get out of it alive and whole if he could only manage to keep his cool.

“Two, three miles up, we gon’ see it,” he said. “Be onna left side th’ road.”

“Describe it to me.”

“Jus’ a garage, you know.”

“Describe it.”

Raul shrugged tensely.

“Place made ’a big cement blocks. Sorta square, got no windows. There a parkin’ lot goes aroun’ it…”

“A paved parking lot.”

“Uh-huh. Like I say before—”

“I want to hear more about the garage,” the guy behind him cut in. “How many entrances does it have for vehicles?”

“Two in front, two onna side.”

“The south side?”

“Yeah.”

“Means they’d be facing us when we pull up, that right?”

“Yeah, right.”

There was a beat of silence. The Navigator’s high-beams slid over the road.

“Tell me what else is nearby,” the guy in the backseat said.

“Lotta nothin’.”

“Describe ‘nothing’ to me.”

Raul took another breath. This was some kind of scary hombre he’d picked up, not that he’d done it by choice. Wore a black jacket and pants with all kinds of outside pouches and shit, besides having one of them SWAT cop masks, or hoods, or whatever it was called, pulled down around his neck. Except Raul was pretty convinced he wasn’t a cop.

“Ain’ no houses, no stores, nothin’,” he said. Then hesitated, thinking. “ ’Cept, you know, the junkyard.”

“What kind?”

“Huh?”

“What kind of junk gets dumped there?”

Raul grunted his understanding.

“All kinda parts for cars,” he said.

“You’re sure.”

“Right—”

“You have some reason for not mentioning this yard to me before?”

Raul shook his head. The motherfucker never got tired of grilling him, asking the same questions over and over in different ways…

“Wasn’t keepin’ no secrets, that what you mean,” he said. “Thought you was askin’ about buildings.”

The guy didn’t answer. Raul glanced at him in the rearview mirror, saw a look on his face that he’d already noticed more than once. He’d gone perfectly still, his head kind of tilted to the side, his upper lip curled back a little, his eyes far off and at the same time right there and honed in… the way a cat looked when it was waiting for some rodent to crawl out of a hole so it could pounce and tear it apart. It was like he was reading signs in the air Raul couldn’t see, or listening to sounds he couldn’t hear, scary as hell.

Raul wondered what he was thinking and planning, asked himself if he could have ever seen that face before tonight and somehow forgotten it. It was long, thin, pale. Black hair combed straight back from the forehead, eyes dark as the night outside. Still as could be when that weird, focused-on-his-own-thing look came over him. Not a face anybody could read. Or forget.

The guy was a stranger, Raul concluded. A total stranger.

He lowered his eyes from the mirror, afraid his passenger would notice the close scrutiny.

“Let’s get back to Armand Quiros,” the guy said barely a moment later. “What makes you so sure he’s going to be at the garage tonight?”

Raul chewed his bottom lip. He’d figured they’d come around to Armand again, wasn’t stupid enough to think the guy was finished asking about him. That hadn’t stopped Raul from hoping, but you had to expect it, know what was going down here.

“He hands on,” he said with reluctance. “Like bein’ the one does the payout.”

“The payout in drugs.”

Raul felt his insides tighten up. “Look, man, I been straight with you alla way. How come we got to run through this again—?”

“You boost a set of wheels, deliver it to Armand’s chop shop heaven, he pays with crack,” the guy said. “Yes or no?”

Raul continued to hesitate. He was thinking bleakly about the deal he’d had going with Jose, thinking what an unbelievable piece of luck it had looked to be when they met through Raul’s sister, who had been seeing Jose for a while before she hooked them up a couple weeks back. Since then they’d pulled some inside jobs that had been worth a bundle… especially with their terms being wheels in exchange for crack, like the man in the backseat had put it. With flat cash you couldn’t turn it over to double or even triple your profits.

Now Raul took a breath, held it, blew it out his mouth.

“Yeah,” he said finally. Even his voice was quivering now. “That how it works.”

There was another period of silence, this one longer than the last. Blackness swarming the SUV’s windows, no other vehicles in sight, Raul drove on toward what he felt would be certain death, trying to figure how things could have gone downhill for him so fast. That first time at his sister’s place, Jose explained he was a salesman at a dealership in some rich gringo suburb, place with a huge fucking showroom and lot, and that he had access to whatever Raul needed to jack a carriage nice and easy — keys to the building, codes for the gate alarm protecting its outdoor lot, electronic car door openers and starters, even dealer temps and registration documents for him to wave around if he got hauled over by cops. Just as sweet, he could tip Raul to the delivery of a new consignment, give him a chance to roll out a few of the vehicles before they were entered into the computerized inventory.

Raul had really gotten his ass stoked when Jose told him about the expensive Navigators that had arrived, two of them, both cherry and loaded right off the double-decker truck. This was just the other day when they arrived with a big shipment, and he’d known he could drive one from the lot, and that nobody would notice it was gone for at least a month, six weeks. It would probably be another month afterward until the dealer and factory sorted out whether it had been delivered to the lot, or hauled to the wrong one by mistake, or disappeared somewhere else along the way from the production line… no way the setup could’ve have been sweeter. Taking carriages from the dealership was a slam compared to looking for them on the street, where you had to get lucky and find a target that had been left with its door unlocked, or make sure you knew how to bust its antitheft system if it had one, maybe even a GPS tracker — and that was while having to look over your shoulder for its owner, the five-oh, or just some busybody asshole solid citizen who couldn’t keep his eyes in his head where they belonged. Raul had almost never worried about being pinched since he’d got down with Jose, and wouldn’t in his worst nightmares have thought he’d find himself in the spot he was in right now. The thing was here… the thing was that the chop shop would show in his headlights soon, and then what was he supposed to do?

Raul drove through the night, not the slightest clue in his mind, seeing only the worst in store. He had driven maybe another quarter mile toward their destination before the questions started coming at him again.

“Tell me how many of Quiros’s men I can expect,” the guy in back said.

Raul clutched the wheel with whitening knuckles. This was a subject they hadn’t touched on yet, and it had rated high among his wishes that they would not get to it. It wasn’t enough that the hijo de puta had set a trap for him at that streetlight, forced him into taking this suicide ride. He had to keep digging him a deeper hole.

“Can’t be sure,” he said

“Tell me how many,” the guy repeated. “And where they’ll be.”

“Listen, man, please, I don’ know—”

Raul suddenly felt a cold, circular pressure between his neck and the base of his skull. He stiffened with fear, not needing to look around to know his passenger had jammed the silenced barrel of his.45 semiauto into him.

“Give it up,” the guy said.

“I don’ wanna die,” Raul said.

“Don’t be stupid. You already brought me this far along. You think it’ll square things with them if you don’t tell me?”

“I don’ wanna die.”

“Then prove you’ve got an ounce of brains that isn’t fried, Raul,” the guy said. And then paused a moment. “That’s your real name, right?”

“Yeah.”

“You wouldn’t have lied to me about it.”

“No, man, I swear.”

The guy nudged his head forward with the gun barrel.

“Understand this,” he said. “I start to think you did lie, I can’t trust your word on anything else. And that would make you useless to me.”

Raul felt his stomach lurch.

“It my name,” he said. “Swear to God it my name.”

A second or two lapsed. Raul felt the weapon easing back from his head.

“All right, Raul, I’m about to pass along some free wisdom,” the guy said. “Armand won’t care if I hijacked my way into this cart, or you wore white valet gloves letting me through its door. One makes you a foul-up and a loser, the other a sellout. Either way he’ll have you capped without even thinking about any second chances.”

“An’ how ’bout you?” Raul said, fighting down panic. “We get to the garage, you gonna give me one?”

“I have a cross-country Greyhound ticket and expense money in my pocket that says so,” the guy said. “Ride this out with me, you can hop on a bus, visit some relatives far away from here. Or sell the ticket and buy a whole lot of stuff to fill your crack pipe. No skin off mine whatever you decide.”

Raul felt the slow heavy stroke of his heart in the short silence that followed.

“Ain’t got no shot at makin’ it,” he said. “Gonna get myself hurt, don’t care what you say.”

There was another silence that lasted perhaps half a minute. Then the guy in the backseat leaned forward, coming so close Raul could practically feel his lips brush against his ear.

“It’s long odds,” he said. “But I’m all that stands between you and crapping out.”

The Navigator rolled over the snaking, undivided blacktop. In its cargo section, Lathrop glanced out the front windshield, and then through the limotinted windows to either side of him. The chop shop was just ahead to the left. A little closer up on the right he saw the junkyard, its orderly rows of scrap metal hills stretching off into the darkness.

He let his Mark 23 pistol sink below Raul’s headrest.

“You look jumpy,” he said. “Relax.”

“Been tryin’, man.”

“Try harder,” Lathrop said. “If Armand’s guards smell you’re scared, we’ll never get past them.”

Raul inhaled. “What gonna happen after we in the garage? Happen, you know, to me?”

Lathrop shrugged.

“Just worry about bringing us in,” he said. “And about making sure I can believe what comes out of your mouth.”

Raul shook his head, his nervous, rasping breaths very loud over the smooth hum of the engine.

“Why you got to be doubtin’ me like that?” he said with a kind of fearful indignance. “I swore to God, man. Can swear on my mother’s life, you wan’ me to—”

“Save it,” Lathrop said. “ ‘Long as I’m the man with the gun, I figure your word’s probably good.”

He was of course telling an outright lie of his own.

Lathrop watched the Nav’s headlight beams creep toward the edge of the parking lot, thinking it didn’t matter how many times Raul swore up and down to him, or on whom or what he did his swearing. All Lathrop really trusted was what he’d known firsthand about Armand Quiros’s operations before tonight. This included the answers to most of the questions he’d asked Raul on the way here, answers he had compared against Raul’s responses to get an idea of whether or not he was being purposely deceptive, almost as if he’d been setting the baseline for a polygraph test… though it couldn’t be forgotten for a minute that the kid was a pathetic, strung-out crackhead. When the squeeze got too tight, he would say anything he thought might help buy him some wiggle room.

Still, Lathrop had learned enough about the garage from his reconnaissance. Learned its location, its size, its outward appearance, and its immediate surroundings. He had also tracked Armand’s normal patterns of movement in and around Devoción. Found out how many guards usually traveled with him from San Diego, and the number of lookouts — mostly young men from town — he kept hanging around the garage and its lot. As Raul had said, though, the place was windowless. Since Lathrop hadn’t yet learned the trick of seeing through solid walls from Clark Kent, he’d obtained no advance knowledge of its interior layout, or where Armand would sit down to take care of his private business.

Assuming the kid hadn’t tried to sucker him, he knew now.

Lathrop peered out through the windshield, saw several parked cars in the lot, and noted the shadowy figures of Quiros’s lookouts in the cast of the SUV’s lights. There were five, maybe six of them hanging around near the building’s corrugated steel roll-up doors.

“Turn on the rearview video,” he said.

The kid was shaking his head again.

“That ain’t gonna work while I got us in Drive,” he said. “They make it for when people goin’ backward, you know. When they can’t see what’s behind ’em inna mirror—”

“Go ahead,” Lathrop said. “Turn it on.”

Raul obliged without further comment, reaching over to push the dashboard LCD’s control button. Its cover panel slid up above the screen.

Lathrop thought for a second, still looking out the windows.

“Okay, Raul, listen close,” he said. “Here’s what you’re going to do next…”

Raul stopped at the parking lot entrance, his window about halfway down like the man behind him wanted it. Then he waited in silence as a couple of the lookouts outside the garage strode toward the Navigator. He recognized the first to approach as a dude named Pedro.

“Hola, Papi, what’chu bring tonight?” the lookout said, mixing Spanish and English. He was a little older than Raul — around twenty-three or twenty-four. Lived right in town, hung out with Raul and his cousin at the cantina every so often.

“Ain’ no Matchbox toy, man.” Raul forced a grin.

Pedro grinned back at him, came around to the driver’s side, clasped his hand through the window. Tall, skinny, he wore a two-tone gray basketball warmup suit and a bright purple-and-yellow paisley skullcap with a long, flowing neck shade that made him look like some kind of flashy Arab camel herder. There was a small diamond stud in each ear, another in his right nostril. On a band around his arm was a gum-stick MP3 player.

He pressed a button on the audio player, plucked out a stereo earbud, and let it dangle over his shoulder, leaving the other earbud in place.

“Es un machin mas bárbaro,” he said, admiring the vehicle’s shiny new flank. “This high line merch.”

“Sí, Pedro.”

“She somethin’ else, bro.”

“Sí, eso es.”

Raul rested his left elbow over the upper edge of the window and leaned against the door, struggling to look calm, look relaxed like the crazy man in back had put it, while intentionally blocking Pedro’s view of the Nav’s interior with his upper body.

“Armand still around?” he said.

Pedro nodded over his shoulder at the garage, his eyes still admiring the vehicle. “Bet she tricked out nice—”

“Armand gonna wan’ to see her.”

The lookout was in no apparent hurry in spite of Raul’s growing insistence. He leaned against the car, propping himself against the driver’s door with both hands.

“Like to be havin’ a look inside on my own,” he said. “A ver, how ’bout you let me see…”

Raul drew erect. His head ached and his pulse was racing in his ears. He had the vehicle in Reverse, his foot on the brake pedal to keep it from slipping backward and, more important, to keep its rear lights on. According to Crazy Man, they would give off enough brightness for the cargo hatch’s built-in video camera to serve some kind of purpose.

But he couldn’t just sit here with Pedro getting ready to climb in front with him. If he could have just taken a hit off his pipe before he got here, one hit, he’d have been able to handle things without feeling like the walls of his skull were closing in around his brain, mashing his brain to a pulp.

“Que pasa?” he said. “Been drivin’ all night, know what I’m sayin? Wanna take care’a my shit.”

A moment passed. Another. Raul’s head kept throbbing to the accelerated beat of his heart.

Finally Pedro frowned with disappointment, boosted himself off the Nav, and held up his palms in acquiescence.

“Yo, chill, I hear you,” he said, looking quickly around at the garage.

Raul saw one of the dark figures outside the vehicle bays reach for a wall-mounted control box next to the automatic door. As the door started to rise, he almost crumpled in his seat with relief.

“You wan’, I give you a ride into town when you done,” Pedro said, studying Raul curiously. Then his expression sharpened, and he added in a low, confidential whisper, “El basuco alvidar mis hambres.”

The crack will fill our hunger.

Raul looked at him, momentarly speechless. He’d been struggling to hide the unbearable fear and need at his core, but realized now that the need showing through might have been the best thing he could have wished for. That it was all that had disguised the other.

“Bien,” he said at last, and nodded. “I got you covered.”

Pedro gave him another soul handshake, his grip lingering a few seconds. “Hey, awright,” he said with a grin.

Raul flashed a pretend grin in return. Then he pulled his hand back through the window, shut it, and reached for the shifter.

On his belly in the Nav’s cargo section, his balaclava pulled up so that only his eyes were visible through its narrow opening, Lathrop looked between its two front seats at the video display. He’d thought he might have seen someone’s outline at its left-hand border… a dim, fuzzy human silhouette flitting into the image, such as it was. But that had been several seconds ago. Now he saw only the faint red glow of the vehicle’s taillights tinting the blacktop.

His gaze steady on the screen, Lathrop heard Raul and the lookout conclude their exchange. I got you covered. Hey, awright. It had been dicey having the kid lower his window more than a little — Lathrop knew he’d have been discovered in an instant had Pedro stuck his head in. But if Raul had kept the window any higher up, it would have invited suspicion, given the appearance he had something to conceal.

Lathrop had weighed his choices, and what he saw now seemed to confirm he’d made the right one. The lookout had stepped away from the vehicle, stuffing his hands into the pockets of his warm-ups.

Raul had managed to get by him.

Now he raised his window, shifted into Drive, and rolled across the lot toward the garage.

That instantly killed the video, but Lathrop hadn’t expected it to be of any real use until they got inside. The rearview camera was a crummy excuse for a spy eye, meant to help an Average Joe driver avoid backing over toddlers, pissing dogs, and low stationary obstacles in his mirror’s blind spots… not pick out roving Quiros stooges in a dark nowhere like this. A crummy, inadequate option with a range that extended fifteen feet at best. Still, Lathrop had gotten a sense of what he could expect from the thing.

As the Navigator began to move, he slipped his free hand under his partially unbuttoned tac jacket and withdrew a shoulder-slung MP7 compact assault gun he’d carried tucked away against his side at the ready, keeping the other hand around the.45’s checkered rubber grip. He had prepared carefully for tonight’s work and knew they were pieces he could count on.

Lathrop would have liked to know if anybody was out in the dark circling the wagon, though. For the first time in longer than he could remember, he wouldn’t have minded having a second pair of eyes to cover the very dangerous blind spots in his own sight. But he had gotten along with less than he wanted before, and there had been three million dollars’ worth of incentive for him to do it again tonight.

Just ahead now, the garage’s vehicle bay was opening wide for the Nav. Lathrop pressed his chest almost flat against the carpet. He hadn’t seen or heard Pedro indicate he wanted the door retracted, yet the lookout had somehow given the okay to somebody before his prolonged handshake with Raul.

Lathrop wondered if his quick glance around could have been it, decided that explanation didn’t wash. The garage was about a hundred feet away, and it was too dark a night for that look to have been seen clearly by anyone out front. So what was the signal? He pictured the MP3 player on the lookout’s arm, asked himself if maybe it wasn’t what it seemed. A hands-free radio unit could be easily modified to look like an audio player and equipped with an ear/bone microphone that would pick up the wearer’s words from vibrations in his skull. If that were the case, Pedro would have barely needed to move his lips to give his order.

It occurred to Lathrop that Enrique Quiros, who’d packaged the family business in his tech savvy and Stanford degrees, would have appreciated exactly that kind of touch. And though his cousin and former underboss Armand had a reputation as a throwback player with more muscle than brains, it might indicate that at least some of Enrique’s modern standards of criminality were being carried on two years after he’d been erased from the world.

Lathrop put that thought aside as the Navigator reached the garage, cool white fluorescent light rinsing over it from the open bay entrance. Raul stopped just outside it, his foot on the brake.

About thirty seconds passed. Lathrop scooched forward, raised his chin slightly to look out the windshield, saw two men stepping over to the Nav from inside the garage. Lean, dark, curly haired, they looked enough alike to be brothers. One of them wore a black-and-silver rugby pullover shirt, a handgun bulging a little under the shirt, his neck zipper lowered to showcase the tats on his chest. The other had on a flamingo pink button-down with short sleeves, its untucked tails hanging loosely over the belt holster clipped to his jeans. He also had a lot of ink on his arms. Neither man wore a vest or had taken very much trouble to conceal his weapon. Placing strut over smarts.

They came closer, Rugby Shirt stepping over to the driver’s door, Flamingo Pink hooking toward its right side.

Lathrop recalled the scouting he’d done, placed this matched set among Armand’s traveling entourage of bodyguards. He had never seen Armand go anywhere without five or six armed men around him and didn’t suppose it was any different tonight. There would be more of them around… the only question was where. He couldn’t see out the vehicle’s side windows without bringing his head up, but a glance at the rear video display told him its image had been improved by the garage’s fluorescents — although the low line of sight still restricted what he could observe.

Getting his elbows underneath him, propping himself up a bit, he adjusted his pistol in his right hand, then checked again that the MP7 was within fast and easy reach under his other arm.

He knew he’d have to move at any moment.

There was nothing left for him to do now but stay ready for when it arrived.

Raul brought his window partly down again, leaving it raised a little higher than before.

“Here it is.” He looked out at Rugby Shirt. “Got what I promised.”

Lathrop heard the strained edge in Raul’s voice, noticed his fingers were back around the steering wheel, fidgeting with the wheel.

The guard stood there and didn’t say anything. His eyes slid over the Navigator, inspecting it in the outspill of light from the wide bay entrance. Then they came level with the kid’s face.

Lathrop drew a breath. The mingled garage smells of car exhaust, valve oil, and gasoline vapor reached him along with the night air… that and a metallic clanging beyond the door. There would be other bays besides the one that had been opened to admit the Nav. Some probably with mechanics in them, working to dismantle the latest stolen vehicles delivered by Armand’s crack-addicted worker ants.

Raul continued to sit there facing the guard, waiting to be let inside.

“Wha’s goin’ on?” he said, angling his chin toward the bay entrance. “Thought Armand know I got here.”

Rugby Shirt’s eyes held firmly on Raul.

“No este tu irrespetuoso,” he said.

Do not be disrespectful.

The kid dragged the back of his hand across his mouth. When he clenched it around the steering wheel again, Lathrop noticed it was glistening with streaks of wiped-off perspiration.

“Didn’t mean anythin’,” he said. “Jus’ want to be bringin’ in this coche, do what I gotta do.”

Rugby Shirt stood by the vehicle, quiet and intent, his lips pressed together. Beside the passenger door, his partner was equally impassive.

Lathrop saw Raul shift in his seat with apprehension, got the sense he was starting to unravel under their combined scrutiny.

The waiting silence continued about ten seconds longer, Lathrop down on his stomach in the Nav, his finger curled around the trigger of his.45. He wasn’t inclined to act before the time was right, but it would force his hand if either of the guards decided to lean in closer to the windows.

Then Rugby Shirt nodded his head toward the garage, rapping the vehicle’s broad flank with his palm.

“Muy bien, es de el jefe agrado,” he said.

Very well, it will be to the boss’s liking.

Lathrop listened, understanding the guard’s Spanish, thinking the look in his eyes didn’t at all match his words. He’d caught on that something was up with Raul. Anybody who wasn’t blind or deaf would have caught on. And while it was possible he would attribute the kid’s twitchiness to his being strung out on rock, Lathrop was not about to stake his life on it.

Still, Rugby Shirt had decided to let the Nav through the entrance. Whatever his reasons. It moved slowly forward, both guards walking along to either side of it, escorting it into the bay.

Lathrop braced himself. The Nav’s heavily tinted glass had screened him from sight out in the darkness, but it would be another story under the garage’s bright overhead fixtures.

Now Raul pulled the Nav through the door and shifted into Reverse, leaving the engine on as he’d done out in the lot. Beside his door, Rugby Shirt nodded his head toward the rear of the garage. When Lathrop had questioned the kid back on the mesa road, he’d said that was where Armand’s private office was located, its door facing the bay entrance and work area, a large two-way mirror on the wall beside the door looking out over everything.

Lathrop glanced at the rear video screen and saw two sets of legs move into the right side of the picture, coming around from what he assumed was the next bay over. Then a third pair appeared behind the Nav on the left. All of them were in drab green mechanic’s pants, Lathrop’s view of them cut off above the knees by the camera. If these men were armed, he had no way to tell.

A few seconds went by. Then another pair of chopped-off-at-the-knees legs entered the left border of the picture and came up to join the group behind the vehicle. These were in ordinary brown chino trousers rather than grease monkey work pants.

Lathrop was guessing they belonged to a third bodyguard. He also guessed at least twice as many more were elsewhere in and around the building — the chop shop had its regulars in addition to Armand’s personal crew. And he couldn’t allow himself to forget the lookouts. They were local punks, sure. Amateurs. But amateurs that he had to believe would be carrying hardware.

He waited a second or two more.

Behind the wheel, Raul had kept the Nav in Reverse, his foot on its brake. He seemed to be hanging onto the last frayed threads of his self-control well enough to stick to the plan. Lathrop had wanted him to keep the pedal down, stay put as long as possible, figuring that some of the guards would be drawn around the vehicle. The closer they got, the better it would be. When the time came, Lathrop would prompt the kid to release the brake and start the Nav rolling backward, throwing whoever was around it off balance, and giving Lathrop a bare moment of surprise he could work to his favor.

Now Rugby Shirt turned all the way around to face the office door, stepping toward it, waving for the kid to get out of the vehicle. Lathrop was convinced he looked more suspicious than impatient.

“Mira, viene aquí!” he said, instructing Raul to follow him over to the office.

Raul hesitated.

Lathrop tapped the kid’s backseat, his cue to release the brake.

Raul sat there, unresponsive, his foot leaden on the pedal. He took several breaths through his mouth. It was the same sort of harsh, nervous breathing Lathrop had noticed when they’d approached the chop shop, only with a shallow rapidity that made it sound like he was gasping for air.

Out in the garage Rugby Shirt paused, turned around, waved the kid out of the Nav again.

Lathrop saw the pair of chinos inch closer in the rearview video screen.

Then Raul grabbed the shifter and threw the Nav into Park, reaching for his door handle with his other hand, jerking himself toward the door, starting to push it open, getting set to bolt out into the garage.

The kid’s rope had finally snapped; he’d lost it. Lathrop wasn’t waiting to find out what he had in mind.

With a quick, fluid movement, he pushed up onto his knees, swung his.45 up above Raul’s shoulder in a two-handed grip, and fired three rounds through the windshield.

Rugby Shirt could not have been prepared for what hit him. He would have had only an instant to see Lathrop spring into a double-handed shooter’s crouch in the Navigator’s cargo section, and was unlikely to have heard the muffled pops of the sound-suppressed gunshots before his developing suspicions came together.

The bullets penetrated the windshield with a loud, sleety explosion of broken glass, meeting his flesh and muscle across the rib cage. He wobbled around on loose legs and smashed backward against a pegboard wall to his left, clawing for a handhold, groping blindly at its cluttered array of power tools in a vain attempt to stay on his feet. Several of them crashed off their hooks as he slid down to the floor of the garage, leaving the board and whatever tools remained hanging from it speckled with red.

Lathrop saw this at the outermost corner of his vision while switching his attention toward the right side of the windshield, moving his SMG around in the same direction. Flamingo Pink had drawn his own weapon from its holster, a big, long-barreled semiautomatic handgun.

The gun a dark rising blur in his fist, he took hurried aim at the Navigator and triggered off a couple of shots.

His speed and accuracy were better than Lathrop expected. The first slug punched into the Nav’s hood just below its folded wipers. The next struck the right side of the windshield a millisecond afterward, partially dissolving it, spewing glass into the vehicle this time.

In the front seat Raul released a panicky scream and ducked under the steering wheel to avoid a storm of jagged, blown-out shards. He dove facedown across the seat and put his hands over his head as the broken glass showered over him, leaving his door ajar, abandoning his decision to cut and run, looking for cover inside the vehicle now.

Lathrop couldn’t afford to let the kid’s wild thrashing around become a distraction. He focused narrowly on Flamingo Pink, inhaled, and held the breath to steady his aim like a trained sniper. Then he squeezed the trigger of his.45 to take the guard out with a single clean shot to his heart.

An instant later the guard collapsed in a scattery mist of blood, the front of his shirt billowing out where he’d been hit, his pistol slipping from his fingers.

Of the gunnies Lathrop had been able to see from the Navigator’s rear section, that left the man in chinos as an immediate concern.

Raul was another. The kid was out of control. Bleeding from lacerations on his hands, bits and pieces of the shattered windshield pouring from his hair and clothes, he had frantically reached out to shut the door that he’d intended to open moments ago, still hollering at the top of his lungs, repeating a single Spanish phrase as if it were stuck on his tongue: Lo siento, lo siento! He was sorry, sorry, sorry.

Lathrop had no idea whether he was screaming at him, Armand’s men, or whoever opted to listen amid the surrounding bedlam. Maybe he was apologizing to all of them, and hoping God might have some forgiveness and mercy for him, too. But it didn’t really matter. The kid was useless to anybody within earshot.

In fact he’d become a liability from Lathrop’s perspective.

His gun extended in one hand, Lathrop grabbed for the door handle to his left and hurled himself out of the Navigator, landing on the balls of his feet, hunkering there on the driver’s side. He was aware Chinos would be somewhere close, maybe still behind him—

He looked back over his shoulder just in time to see the guard jogging around from the right side of the cargo hatch, his weapon held level with his hip in one hand. Lathrop could tell at a glance it was an Uzi mini or some close knockoff.

He thrust himself toward the front end of the Nav, snatched at the outer handle of Raul’s unlatched door, and gave it a hard tug to overcome the kid’s desperate opposition from inside. Pulling the door wide open, he scuffled behind it and squatted down low in the angle between its hinges and the driver’s-side panel, pressing against the vehicle so that he was almost wedged against its wheel well.

The move would give him cover from Chinos. That was the plus. The bad part was that it meant he’d had to turn his back to the one-way mirror fronting Armand’s office, leaving him vulnerable from behind.

It also meant Raul had been left suddenly and completely exposed to Chinos, but he had ceased to be Lathrop’s concern.

The kid jerked upright in his seat as the door was torn from his hand and flung outward, his lips frozen in a breathless grimace of terror, his throat clamping shut around his screams. Then he turned his head to see the guard hasten around the cargo hatch to his side of the vehicle, advancing behind his tiny assault weapon. His eyes bright staring circles, aware his prospects of survival had radically dwindled all in a second, Raul forced his vocal cords to respond to his commands and started shouting out the door in Spanish again, adding vehement denials to his repetitive declarations of regret, insisting that not only was he sorry but things weren’t his fault here. Lo siento, no es mi culpa.

Chinos gave him just an instant’s notice, scarcely pausing to meet his gaze with his own through the open door. His eyes did not offer the barest hint of whether he considered him a threat, an opportune target of revenge, or both at once. They communicated nothing, nothing whatsoever as they brushed against Raul’s and his compact submachine gun unleashed a burst of fire that ripped into Raul at almost point-blank range, snuffing the life out of him even before his body spilled limp-limbed and shuddering against the steering column.

Crouched on his haunches behind the door, aware of that mirror at his back, Lathrop did not miss his chance to exploit the moment Chinos had wasted taking out Raul. Shoving his pistol into its holster, he grabbed the foregrip of his MP7, braced its extended rifle stock against his shoulder, and pushed its bore around the edge of the door.

Chinos was quick to catch sight of it. He whirled toward the door seemingly on reflex and rattled off an arcing volley, smashing the driver’s side window from its frame… a reaction that might have done even more damage if Lathrop hadn’t gotten the jump on him by a slender hair, drawing an accurate bead, catching him in his midsection with a tight salvo. The guard pivoted drunkenly on his feet, his gun hand convulsing to trigger an ineffectual spray of ammunition at the walls and ceiling, his other hand clutching his stomach, blood dribbling between his fingers from multiple bullet wounds.

Lathrop was up from his crouch before he dropped, his MP7 poised.

He looked from side to side. Two of the three mechs that had approached the Nav’s tail section were gone, but it was hard to tell where. The bays over to his right were occupied by cars, vans, pickups, and SUVs in various stages of being stripped. Some of the vehicles were on hoists, the heavy-duty kind that were built into the floor. There was an open service pit in the bay closest to Lathrop, a large Cadillac sedan pulled almost up to it. A small crew of grease monkeys stood among the different vehicles, staring at him, looking scared stiff. A couple of them might have been the same men whose legs had entered the rearview video image. Or not. Next to the open bay entrance behind the Nav, another mech had sunk down into a corner and was cowering there with his hands on his head in submission. Lathrop figured him for one of the first three. His friends could have cleared out through the door — or not.

Lathrop reached a hand into his jacket, flashed the special agent badge around his neck, motioned toward the entrance with his subgun.

“DEA!” he said. “Vaya, go!”

His face streaked with perspiration, the mech nodded and slowly rose off the floor.

Lathrop snapped the gun toward his head to hustle him along. “Ahora!”

The mech nodded more vigorously, sprang the rest of the way up to his feet, turned, and fled the garage.

Lathrop saw him bowl into a cluster of lookouts still lingering in the lot outside the entrance, then push past them to disappear in the night. They all seemed like versions of Pedro with their head wraps or Under Armour skullcaps, their basketball warm-ups, their hoodies and low-waisted baggy pants. And the conspicuously identical gumstick MP3s on their arms.

They looked at him. He looked at them. The thing about the loose-fitting ghetto wear was that it could be a bluff or conceal a small arsenal.

Lathrop fired a burst out the door, his aim intentionally high, displaying his shield so they could see it, hopeful they would get the message that he was giving them a pass. He had not forgotten about the one-way mirror behind him — and whoever might be behind it. Any time he spent worrying about this bunch was too long.

They took his warning and scattered from the lights of the garage, losing themselves on the mechanic’s heels.

Lathrop thought about the mirror at his unprotected back and started to turn.

That was when he heard the rev of an engine inside the garage to his right. He glanced toward the sound, saw that the mechs who’d been staring from over by the vehicles were heading for the entrance… all except one, and he’d gotten into the Caddy sedan. Almost simultaneously the office door crashed open and a tight knot of three or four men in street clothes broke from it. They held submachine guns of the same sort Chinos had carried and were assembled around another man who could barely be seen through their flanking bodies.

Several of them were rattling fire at Lathrop as they moved toward the auto bays in hurried unison.

He took cover behind the Nav, glanced over at the sedan he’d assumed was their escape vehicle, and realized that assumption was wrong. The gunmen had reached the space between the Caddy and service pit and veered toward the pit instead of the idling sedan. A couple of them paused at its edge, still firing at him. The rest separated from the others, backed toward the pit, and then followed the man they were escorting down into it.

No sooner had the last of them dropped over its side than the Caddy throbbed into gear, screeched a half dozen feet forward, and just as abruptly came to a halt right over the pit.

Lathrop knew that first man into it had been Armand Quiros. He’d caught a glimpse of him when the group left the office and gotten a slightly longer look as he descended the rail or ladder on the side of the pit. But it was really simpler than that. Armand’s office plus Armand’s bodyguards equaled Armand.

What Lathrop wondered about for a brief instant was Armand racing into that hole. Why would he box himself in while a charged-up getaway car was waiting for him? If that was really what he’d done. A man like Armand would be prepared for somebody to make a move on him sooner or later. Whether it was the competition or a takedown by the law, he would anticipate more than a solitary attacker… Lathrop had in fact banked on his turn-tail worker ants sharing that same belief. Armand would expect his enemies to be waiting along the mesa road toward Devoción and probably to the south of town as well. In his mind a frontal escape from the garage would leave him open to being followed or caught in a net of barriers, and that meant he would want a less obvious exit through the pit. Want to be sure there was another car ready on the other side of it.

Lathrop ejected his subgun’s half-empty magazine, got a fresh forty-round clip from a pouch on his trousers, and jammed it into the weapon with the heel of his palm. Then he reached under his jacket and produced one of three cylindrical flashbangs he’d brought with him in a nylon web belt rig. About a minute had gone by since Armand emerged from his office, too long, giving him more than enough time to rabbit. But the guy who’d driven the Caddy into position had drawn a nine-mil from inside his jumpsuit and was taking shots at him out his lowered window — no mechanic, that ace, it didn’t matter how he was dressed — and there was gunfire coming from underneath the Caddy, a shooter in the pit. Lathrop saw him poking his head out of it like an infantryman in a foxhole, his weapon in one hand, no way he could grip it with both of them. The pit had to be eight or nine feet deep and he’d need to cling to the rail with his other hand to fire over its top.

Staying low behind the Nav, Lathrop shuffled left around its rear fender and then forward along its flank, past the still-open driver’s door where the body of Raul was thrown back against the steering column. His MP7 on its sling at his side, he leaned around the front of the vehicle and pulled the arming pin from the steel grenade canister with his fist clenched around its flyoff lever. Then he tossed the canister across the garage floor with an easy underhand lob and saw the released lever twirl away as it rolled under the Caddy and into the pit.

The grenade detonated before he could count out two full seconds, the walls of the pit muffling its blast of light and sound in the garage above. Lathrop sprang to his feet and darted toward the Caddy, his gun spitting as thin white smoke came up from the pit to ribbon out between its wheels. He could see the guy in the mech suit through the driver’s side window, sprawled back in the front seat with the nine slipped from his fingers, looking disoriented from the concussion.

Lathrop pressed the snout of his MP7 between his dazed eyes, shot him, and pushed his corpse toward the passenger door. Then he leaned in and put the Caddy into reverse to get it rolling backward. As it moved off the service pit, he tossed a second flashbang down inside.

He gave the smoke a moment to clear, rushed to the edge of the pit, thumbed on the slimline tac light mounted to his weapon. Almost directly below him at its bottom the shooter had fallen in a heap and was struggling up onto his hands and knees. Lathrop ripped into him with a volley and sprayed more fire through what was left of the smoke to take out the other men sprawled around him. Grabbing the rail’s handhold, he swung a leg over the side of the pit and dropped into it.

There was plenty of light from glowing tube fixtures on the walls of the little space, rendering the flashlight inessential. Lathrop looked around, took a quick count of the bloodied men on the floor. He’d killed most of them. A couple of them stirred, trying to gather themselves. One was slouched back against the wall spitting up blood and mucous.

Lathrop finished off the survivors and cut his eyes over to a door on his left. It was plain steel with a push bar and had been shoved wide open. On the other side was a lighted, cement-walled underground passage that ran out of the pit. There was a man kneeling in the doorway, blinking and groaning, his stooped form blocking the narrow passage. Armand Quiros was moving unsteadily forward just beyond him.

Lathrop plunged toward the entrance, triggering his weapon at the back of the kneeling man’s head as he ran through. Armand staggered on a few feet before he caught up, grabbed him by the back of his shirt, and drove him face-first against the wall.

“Que desa?” Armand said. “What you fucking want from me?”

Lathrop shoved his gun barrel between Armand’s ear and the hinge of his jaw, pressing his face into the wall.

“One good woman,” he said.