Dark horse, p.19
Dark Horse, page 19
They linked arms and do-si-do’d, waddle-dancing preposterously in their Velcro suits.
“Josephine.”
At his tone they both stopped. Joey looked at him. Some of the color drained from her face. She clicked the remote, and the music and lights stopped abruptly. They stood absurdly in their absurd suits. The silence was painful.
Evan said, “Peter. Home.”
“But we also hafta show you the cool nozzles in the shower that hit all your parts—”
“Now.”
Peter stripped out of his suit, tumbling over and then kicking his way free. His tiny footsteps pounded past Evan, out the door, and up the hall.
Evan closed his eyes. Saw the blond girl in his arms, her body arced as if an electric current were passing through, her insides gone to jelly, leaking out her nose and mouth. The raw skin at the nape of his neck prickled. The inside of his mouth, raw from chemical residue. All those fallen bodies littering the park. His need to come back to a space of his own, designed to his specs, something that reflected the state he tried moment by moment to achieve in his mind.
When he spoke, his voice shook with anger. “This is my place.”
Joey flipped her hair out of her eyes with a quick jerk of her head. Sweat glistened in the strip of shaved hair over her right ear. She tugged her arms free of the suit so it hung down at the waist like a coveralls bib. She looked wounded and foolish and utterly ridiculous. “Maybe it’s not anymore,” she said bitterly, fighting her way free of the puffy legs.
“What does that mean?” His voice wasn’t raised, but there was a coldness in his tone that he’d never used with Joey.
“It means you asked me to get all this done for you. And I did. And over the weekend. Tile guys and appliances and painting and— You know what? Never mind.”
“I asked you to help restore my place. Not add a bunch of shit that I don’t want.”
“When you ask for help, you don’t get everything exactly how you want it, X. It’s impossible for anyone to get everything exactly how you want it.” She kicked the suit aside. “You know why? Because you’re impossible.”
“It’s a stretch to think that I might not be ecstatic with Velcro and a disco ball?”
“I thought it might cheer you up!” she said. “Know what you told me? ‘Handle it yourself, Joey. I trust you.’”
“I thought I could trust you.”
“What?” Her mouth fell open. That dimple appeared in her right cheek, and not from smiling. “What did you say to me?”
It took everything he had to hold his tongue.
“You can’t trust me because I did something to cheer you up?” She blew the hair off her forehead once more. “Just ’cuz the world is dark and miserable doesn’t mean you have to be, too. You choose it. You choose not to trust anyone. You choose to be an asshole to people who care about you. Sure, you’re nice to some girl you don’t even know—Anjelina or whatever princess’s name is. You run off to save her. Do anything for her. But me? I’m here fixing your place up and you won’t even let me go on a road trip by myself.”
The road trip now.
Two in. Four out.
Not working. Images cascading down on him.
His defiled penthouse, Velcro and a disco ball.
The blonde shuddering in his arms, bleeding out.
Anjelina in the hands of men who decapitated their rivals and suffocated journalists with duct tape.
Joey out in the world he’d protected her from all this time, out among men like the Leones who lie in wait for vulnerable girls like her.
Too much for him to manage and also save Anjelina. Too much weakness and emotion to hold in his heart to go after those he needed to go after. He tried to access what was right, but he couldn’t. He was trapped in two dimensions, inside the painting of this horror of a mission.
Joey was still going, mouth wavering, anger in her glare. “Just ’cuz you can’t figure out how to have freedom doesn’t mean you can take it away from me.”
“You want to leave, Joey?” His voice low like a growl and even more controlled; rather than revving up, he was simmering down, eradicating emotion. “Go, then.”
She looked suddenly unsure of herself, even frightened. Like she didn’t recognize him. “X…?”
“Get out,” he said.
Her eyes flared, those big glossy lashes parting, emerald irises shining beneath the strokes of her eyebrows. She was wide open—her face, her heart, everything stripped bare.
She collapsed, hitting the floor on her side, head resting on her biceps, fetal and sobbing.
He stared at her in disbelief.
He had never done that to another human being. With words.
He couldn’t make sense of the noises coming from her.
“Joey,” he said in a strangled tone that was completely foreign to him.
She shoved herself up with her palms, got her legs under her. She was shaking her head, looking down, away. Hurt glowed from her, and something worse.
Shame.
She walked past him, giving him a wide berth, no eye contact. Not storming for the door so much as sweeping herself out before she went to pieces.
The front door slammed behind her.
A terrible silence asserted itself. No giggling, no belly laughter, no tearing of Velcro.
He didn’t understand what he felt, but he felt it everywhere. In his fingertips. His scalp. Tongue numb against his teeth.
Vera III looked up at him in her stupid fucking rainbow pebbles.
Then she was in his hand, hurled against the wall, the glass dish shattering, brightly colored pebbles raining down across the poured-concrete floor, skittering past his boots.
Belicia’s words returned to him like an echo: It’s not so black and white. It’s gray and messy. Family teaches you that.
Right now Evan had to turn away. Had to flatten himself out again, knife-thin, nothing but purpose and intent with a tapered point.
Because of the bodies scattered across that park. The remainder of the Kontact waiting at the Leones San Bernardino headquarters. The other batches creeping their way into America, spreading toxic tentacles through cities and towns, stash houses and bloodstreams.
He thumbed his RoamZone on, dialed Aragón.
“Yes?”
“I tracked down the first shipment of Kontact,” Evan said.
“And?”
“Turn on the news.”
He waited while Aragón grunted, no doubt rising from his armchair. There was a click, the sound of a commercial, channels flipping. Then a newscaster’s voice hitting a strained note of empathy.
“My God,” Aragón said. “My God.”
“I’ll handle the San Bernardino chapter.” Evan still maintained that flat, dead tone. “Every other channel you have a bead on from your or my associate’s intel, you leak to the DEA. Give them everything and see if they can backtrace to the original lab in Mexico. Blame the leak on the Gulf Cartel. Blame it on whoever you need to. But get it done now so they can stop those loads from hitting market, so they can snuff this out at the source. Understand?”
Aragón sounded shocked by whatever footage he was seeing. “I understand,” he said quietly, his voice touched with remorse. “Those people in the park … all those people.”
“It ends,” Evan said. “Right here. Right now. No more drugs. No more anything like it ever again. Burn whatever product you have. Destroy whatever you have in transit. You do it now. Or you’ll never hear from me again.”
The pause stretched out. Evan wasn’t sure he’d be able to hear the reply over the blood thundering in his veins.
”Okay.”
“Give me your word.”
Aragon said, “I just did.”
“I’m going in,” Evan said.
He cut the line.
28
Beginner’s Mind
Hands shoved in his pockets, head down, Evan came up on the headquarters with nothing on his person. No ARES 1911, no Strider knife, no backup mags in the streamlined inner pockets of his cargo pants.
All he had was himself. They’d search him at the front door. They’d pat him down ankle to crotch to ribs, make sure he had nothing on him before they’d let him pass through.
Jack’s timeless advice returned to him: You are the weapon.
The back end of dusk, stagnant water standing in the gutters, drawing mosquitoes. The spaced-out houses somewhere between mobile homes and prefabs, blue TV light flickering against windowpanes, folks cocked back in easy chairs, grandmothers fanning themselves with magazines at screen doors.
A portable chain-link fence guarded the onetime auto-repair shop at the end of the block. A sentry stood guard outside, beefy and neckless, arms so bulky he could barely clasp his hands in front. He took note of Evan’s approach from a hundred yards out, straightening up, shoulders back, ready to rumble.
There was no time for a strategic approach. The bigger Kontact rollout was planned for tomorrow. Evan knew from intercepted texts that the Leones San Bernardino crew was in an emergency meeting right now regrouping after the disaster in the park and that they were expecting a visit later in the night from a member of El Moreno’s inner circle. Given the fatalities, Evan didn’t know if the Leones would pull the load back or try to dump it into the marketplace to recoup what they could. The latter seemed unconscionable, but Evan had lived with the unconscionable for the bulk of his life and was unwilling to put off a confrontation in order to give human nature the benefit of the doubt.
And so he would enter the headquarters with open eyes and beginner’s mind, see everything as if for the first time. No assumptions. No thought patterns. No neurological pathways.
That was the aim.
To see nothing that wasn’t there and to see everything that was.
To pay attention.
Fifty yards out.
Now forty.
The ground firm beneath the tread of his boots. Air keen in his throat.
Thirty yards out.
Twenty.
Taking note of the red eye of the security camera on the roof, Evan made sure to square himself to the lens to allow the active camo of his shirt to have full cloaking effect.
The sentry had an MP7 in hand now. His head cocked back, beady eyes looking down his nose at Evan, ready to kill or fight or frisk him.
Ten yards.
Holding his arms wide, palms bared, Evan released the jumble of thoughts tumbling through his mind and sharpened his focus until every last detail was crystalline.
The sentry’s hands were huge, encompassing Evan’s calves, thighs, biceps as he patted him down. Evan recognized him from the files as Alce. The guy straightened back up, seeming to rise and rise, and then he breathed out through flared nostrils into Evan’s face.
“Fuck you want?”
“I’m here to talk to Rondo.”
“Ain’t no Rondo here.”
“I have a message straight from El Moreno,” Evan said. “You’re gonna want to let me in now.”
A sea change in attitude. “Oh, shit. Okay. That’s why you’re not packing.” Alce set his massive palm on the metal door and hinged it open. “I wasn’t expecting you to be so…”
“White?” Evan said, drawing up next to him and side-eyeing the MP7, noting the selector switch’s position—three clicks down for full auto.
Alce nodded somberly. “I apologize for the disrespect.”
Up a long hall. Through another rusting metal door. Across the defunct floor of the garage with its car lifts and oil stains and a few disused cargo vans. And into a surprisingly pristine lobby-office.
The members were spread out on vinyl couches or perched on mesh chairs rolled out and away from the front desk, which hosted a few dated security monitors streaming live feeds from the property.
Eighteen men, tattooed and rawboned. Gold incisors and dangling cross pendants. Forties of malt liquor and crack cigarettes. The cubicle walls of two-thirds of the room had been torn apart and stacked like firewood to make room for dozens and dozens of clear industrial plastic tubs stuffed with Kontact packets.
Rondo had a soft, boyish face with sad, seal-like eyes and whiskers at the edges of his upper lip. Scruff tufted from his chin, glistening in the low light. He sat on a throne built of shrink-wrapped bricks of five-hundred-euro notes, his black British Knight high-tops propped up on an ottoman fashioned of like currency.
Nicknamed the “bin Laden,” the banknote was favored the world over by high-rolling reprobates because it packed the most punch for its weight. A million bucks in hundred-dollar bills weighed nearly twenty-two pounds, whereas the same amount in bin Ladens came in at a fifth the weight and size.
Everything about the Leones operation was designed for maximum efficiency.
Evan entered at the tail end of a conversation.
“—having some growing pains, that’s all,” Rondo was saying. “Complications. It’s a trial-and-error process, and the chemists down south are aware of the imperfections in the product.” His eyes snapped over to Evan, and he leaned forward, clasping his hands.
“This is El Moreno’s guy,” Alce said.
“I didn’t catch a name,” Rondo said.
“No,” Evan said. “You didn’t.”
“Take a seat.”
Evan took a spot in the circle of loosely arrayed couches and chairs and weighed their eighteen beating hearts against the forty-seven no longer beating hearts in the park. For a moment he saw through their cocky bearings, saw their full humanity, saw them as sons and fathers and grandsons. A sacred pause he sometimes took before the kill.
Alce had sauntered over to stand at Rondo’s side, leaving Evan on the couch between Arturo, who tapped a pencil nervously against a ledger, and Beltrán, cleaning dirt from beneath his nails with a stubby button-lock knife. Lengua Larga leaned against a pallet stack of Kontact tubs, tapping a crowbar in his palm. A few pieces were visible, a blinged-out .38 resting on Pancho’s thigh on the far side of a footrest and of course the big gun in Alce’s hands, ready to spit 950 rounds per second.
Rondo flared his hands. “Well?”
“Quite a mess at the park,” Evan said.
Rondo bobbed his boyish face. “Yes. Yes.”
Evan was unsure what he was reading from Rondo’s expression. Remorse? He caught himself. The First Commandment: Assume nothing.
“Too bad about that,” Rondo said.
“Yeah,” Lengua Larga said. “It’s a mess, a real mess, amirite? All them dead junkies and shit, can barely believe—”
Rondo silenced him with a glance. Returned his attention to Evan. “The product, the product we trusted you to deliver, is tainted. We are unwilling to kill any more of our consumers.”
Maybe there would be a way out for these sons and fathers. It struck Evan that he knew how to walk into a room filled with men and walk out with them all dead and him alive. He was less sure how to extract himself from the situation with them still breathing.
“I know you bring a suggestion for what we should do with the remaining product.” Rondo swept a hand to indicate the thousands of packets brimming from tubs, each one a lethal dose. “And we respect greatly the wisdom of El Moreno. We are honored to be newly pledged Leones.”
Evan waited and breathed and paid attention.
“But.” Rondo held up a finger. “I understand it will be some time for your labs to figure out the proper ratio of chemicals for the next batch, so—”
“Seriously,” Lengua Larga cut in. “Gotta get that figured out. Spraying the right synthetics and shit, amirite?”
Rondo patiently continued, “In the meantime we laid out six point five million of our own money for this. We are overextended. In order to recover our cost…”
Evan felt nothing but his breath, his heartbeat, and the faintest ticktock of the second hand on his watch fob.
“… we would like to dump the bad product in other cities. Wholesale if we have to. We can recover what we can while preserving our market here. And start fresh once you’ve squared away your end of the operation.”
Evan felt it then. High clarity, sensory precision, utter stillness. The whole world slowing down. Ticktock.
The curl of smoke from Rondo’s cigarette. The sharpened tip of the ledger pencil three and a half feet to Evan’s side. Arturo’s pupils. The tilt of Beltrán’s head. How Beltrán’s shoulders were persistently elevated, his neck foreshortened, showing diminished confidence. He’d be slow to move. Lengua Larga displayed a beta body-language cluster as well, lowered eyes, forehead creased. He carried tension in his left shoulder, and his left eye had the faintest flutter—a potential flinch point Evan filed away for later.
Ticktock.
With his jewel-encrusted handgun, Pancho was overconfident, facial muscles relaxed. The sight line of the horizontal barrel aimed vaguely to the side; with a shove it could be controlled, a thumb dug through the trigger guard from above. Alce’s fluttering nostrils betrayed his nerves, as did his right trapezius raised in a partial shrug, which showed not firmness of purpose but unease.
Ticktock.
“I’m not with El Moreno,” Evan said. “I’m not with anyone.”
Rondo’s features contracted. “Then who the fuck are you?”
“The Nowhere Man.”
Rondo gave a short stutter of a laugh, but on the tail end he made a gestural slip, lips stretching horizontally in an effort to conceal fear. He raised a finger to point at Evan, his right forearm slightly bigger in circumference than his left, showing his favored side. “Whether that’s true or not, friend, you just made the last mistake of your life.”
Another fear microexpression undermined his words, brows lifted and pressed together in a straight line, eyes showing upper white but not lower, the bottom lid drawn up.
The discussion was over though it was still continuing. Evan had already moved the entirety of his focus to the chessboard. Noting every minuscule movement, each flash of the eyes, angles and sight lines. His body was completely relaxed. He was attuned to every last element in the room, waiting for the precise moment when they would all align.
This entire time they were still talking.
