Iron River (6 page)

Holdstock sobbed without sound, head hung, big hands still folded on his lap. It felt good to let those tears out. He thought he should feel humiliation, too, but he didn’t.

He didn’t cry long. A moment later he had wiped his face on his hands, took another deep, wavering breath, and stood up.

“You want a couple of weeks off, take them,” said Soriana. “You’re entitled to them and you’ve earned them the hard way.”

“I think I’d like to work, sir. Back on the horse and all that.”

“The fact that Gustavo was the son of Benjamin Armenta gives us cause for concern,” said Mars. “There are the Zetas. We can reassign you.”

“I want to see this through.”

“You want to do a couple of weeks of office work here in San Diego?” asked Soriana. “We could use you. You can bring Jenny and the kids, stay in a motel with a pool, enjoy the summer.”

“No, sir. But thank you.”

Soriana and Mars stood and all three men shook hands.

“We’ll get your sidearm back to you in good time,” said Mars.

“I appreciate your support, you guys.”

“You acted properly, Jimmy. You did the right thing.”

“I really, really appreciate that.”

 

 

 

Holdstock bought small gifts for Jenny and the girls in a San Diego Target and made El Centro by two o’clock. He ate his sack lunch on the way home but he was starved, so he drove to the Denny’s and pulled around back and parked with the other locals in a patch of scarce afternoon shade. He stripped off his tie and when he got out of the car he buttoned the suit coat over his hip holster and walked around to the entrance and into a blast of conditioned air.

He got a newspaper out front and sat at the counter and ate a large lunch and a piece of pie for dessert.

He read the front page and sports and slowly he felt the terrible tension lessen in his body.
You did the right thing.
Funny what a few words could do. Words from men you respect.

He left a big tip for the waitress and pushed outside, thinking that was how he met Jenny. He could still picture the little café where they’d met, the bud vases on the tables, Jenny beautiful. He’d go in for lunch whenever he could afford it, wait for her station if he had to.

He was smiling when he got into the Ford and started up the engine and hit the air, and when he turned to back out he saw the bright orange flyer on his rear window. The print was facing him—something about losing weight. Could actually stand to lose a few pounds, he thought. He glanced at the cars on either side of him and saw the orange sheets flapping in the hot desert breeze.

Holdstock sighed and got out and went around to the back. The flyer was held in place by a rock. He reached for the rock and heard something behind him, and when he turned, the first man hit him on the head with something small and hard, and a huge second man drove him down to the asphalt with a choke hold and didn’t let go. The first man stripped away his pistol and hit him again over one temple. The last thing Holdstock knew for sure, they were stuffing him into the backseat of his own car.

 

 

 

 

B
radley Smith and Ron Pace braced themselves against Smith’s Cyclone GT convertible while two gunmen frisked them and two more stood by and watched. Smith looked over at Pace. The gunmaker had been blindfolded since the outskirts of Tijuana, and he was still blindfolded now. He was grinning.

“Wipe the smile off your piehole,” said Smith.

“I smile when things get intense.”

“I told you the people who run Favier and Winling are intense.”

“They don’t even trust you, and you work for them.”

“He who trusts ends up on the dinner table.”

“They frisk me for guns, but I
make
guns.”

“They know what you do. Speak when spoken to.” Smith looked at Pace, and the idiot was smiling again.

As the cartel pistolero felt his boots for weapons, Smith looked out at the pale green Pacific. It was afternoon, and the summer Baja wind had whipped up battalions of whitecaps and sent them marching toward shore. The last time Bradley was here on the beach at Baja was early spring, when he had brought his fiancée, Erin, to an old hotel down here to celebrate her first recording contract and their engagement. Quite a party—fifty friends and family down from L.A., Erin’s band, of course, some producers and soundmen and session guys, Bradley’s gang of outlaws, and all the roadies and dealers and hangers-on, catered by an upscale restaurant in TJ, booze courtesy of a friend with a San Diego tequila distributorship. Bradley and Erin, in a Max Azria runway dress, had snuck off with blankets and made love on the sand dunes. He missed her right now. Business was business, but Erin was his heart.

When the gunman was finished with him, Smith turned and looked up at Herredia’s hilltop retreat. It was a white Castilian two-story buried in a lavish oasis of pools and fountains and blue palms and big terra-cotta pots overflowing with protea and plumeria and flowering tropical vines. A helicopter hovered high above, swaying in the currents like a kite.

“Where is it?” asked the gunman.

“In the trunk,” said Bradley, handing him the keys.

They walked single file up a winding stone path toward the house, then along the shady western flank of the home, then descended into a grotto of gurgling pools and flowers. The pistolero carried the lacquered box with the stainless steel Pace Arms insignia on the top. Bradley saw two uniformed Mexico Federal Judicial Police officers with combat shotguns standing motionless beside a man-made waterfall. He was impressed that Herredia was now employing
Federales
. He’d never seen that before. He knew that local and state police were defecting to the cartels for better pay and benefits, just as the federal soldiers were defecting to the Zetas. Calderón was pitting both police and soldiers against the cartels as never before—thus the spiraling body counts and savagery as the cartels warred for share in a tougher market. The men who had once upon a time pursued Herredia now drew much fatter salaries for protecting him. Herredia’s answer to the Gulf Cartel’s Zetas, thought Bradley. He glanced back at the stone-still soldiers. The times they are a-changin’. Spooky. Maybe Erin could write a song about it.

From this height Bradley saw a swatch of desert far below and an airplane hangar painted to match the desert and an ancient transport helicopter hunkered beneath a canopy of camouflage net. A soldier stood guard outside the hangar. A man squatted beside the big helo, welding away at its flank.

Then the path dropped steeply and a handrail appeared and when he rounded a wide turn, the wind pushed against him. He saw the cove of black rocks below and heard the ocean pounding onto the white crescent of beach. It took a few minutes to get there.

Bradley jumped down from the last step and felt the sand give beneath his boots. He saw North Baja Cartel leader Carlos Herredia waiting in the shadows where the black rocks met the sand. There was an old cable spool upended for a table in the shade. Two pistoleros sat on plastic buckets. Nearby stood old Felipe with his combat 10-gauge, drum-fed shotgun. Bradley had never seen him without it. It was like a limb. Felipe was white-haired and walnut-faced and wore a black eye patch.

At the far side of the cove, Bradley saw that pallets had been leaned up against the rocks, each one with a paper human silhouette target affixed. A hundred feet offshore bobbed a sleek sportfisher manned by two men who were now sitting on the fighting chairs and smoking. Down at the waterline was a small dock beside which five men squatted on their haunches. As Bradley and Pace and the four gunmen walked out onto the sand, the squatting men stood up and studied them.

Bradley introduced Herredia to Ron Pace as Señor Mendez, deputy chief of worldwide operations for Favier & Winling Security. Herredia offered his hand and considered him with a black stare. Pace swung his hand in a big arc like a rube and told Señor Mendez he’d heard a lot about him.

Bradley flinched inwardly as he shook Herredia’s hand and received a brief, formal hug.

Old Felipe gave Bradley a partially toothed smile and thoroughly ignored Ron Pace.

One of the pistoleros set the wooden gun box on the spool table, and Pace unlocked it and opened it.

He took out the Love 32 and presented it to Herredia. Herredia was a big man with big hands, but his index finger fit through the trigger guard with room to spare.

“It’s heavy.”

“Yes, sir,” said Pace. “I’ll show you why.”

Herredia’s eyebrows were bushy and when they rose upward in the middle he looked soulful, and when they lowered into a glower he looked capable of anything. Now they were level as he looked to the men at the shoreline.

Bradley watched them shift their weight uneasily, as if they wanted to walk away but also wanted to stay together, their attention divided between the men in the boat offshore and what was going on around the big cable spool. He could not hear the words but their voices were anxious and speculative.

“What is this?” asked Herredia. He stabbed a finger at the widened cooling comb atop the barrel of the automatic.

“Let me explain,” said Pace. “It’s called the Love 32.”

“A gun named Love?”

Bradley listened as Pace launched into the same presentation he’d given a few days ago at Pace Arms. He stated the gun specs, then explained the name of the Love 32. Herredia looked at Bradley blankly at the mention of Murrieta.

“The thirty-two-caliber bullet is weak,” said Herredia.

“You can say that one thirty-two-caliber bullet is weak,” said Pace.

“I did just say it.”

“Watch, Señor Mendez.”

Pace set the pistol on the spool and tapped out the frame pins with his pocketknife punch. He opened the frame and made the small adjustments with the needle-nose pliers. He reassembled it, then ejected the regular clip and replaced it with the big fifty-round magazine.

Bradley noticed the sharp twinkle in Herredia’s eyes as it dawned on him what he was seeing.

Herredia was nodding as Pace released the telescoping graphite butt from the back side of the frame. Bradley saw that Pace was ignoring his audience now, having drawn them so completely into his drama. Pace pulled out the butt and it clicked into place with authority and he held the gun as anyone would hold a pistol, but the graphite brace fit firmly into the crook of his elbow. Pace raised and lowered the weapon to make sure the brace was the right length. The fifty-shot magazine protruded from the handle with an artful, lethal curve.

“Fifty thirty-two-caliber bullets are never weak,” said Pace. “Señor Felipe, do you know about muzzle-rise in a full automatic weapon?”

“He knows everything about all weapons,” said Herredia.

“I doubt that, but keep your hand on the top of the barrel, old man, or you’ll blow yourself into eternity. Which I suspect will feel a lot shorter than most of us like to believe it will.”

Bradley winced inwardly again, but Felipe was smiling. Pace handed the weapon to him. He grasped the pistol grip and worked the retractable brace into his elbow, and he lifted and lowered the gun as Pace had done.

Then he led them across the sand and stood fifty feet or so away from the pallets. The old man spread his feet and swung the gun up and braced his left hand on the barrel comb.

Bradley listened to the five-second volley and saw the chips of wood and paper flying and the middle of one of the targets grow a hole outward. Through the hole he could see the sunlight hitting the black rock behind. The smoke rose quickly into the breeze. The men down by the dock watched unmoving. Bradley saw that they wore ankle irons linked to a chain fastened around a dock stanchion. The boatmen waved their baseball caps, and their laughter rode the breeze to shore.

Herredia looked at Bradley, nodding.

“There’s one more feature I think you will like, sir,” Bradley said.

Pace took the Love 32 and screwed the sound suppressor into the end of the barrel. He popped out the big magazine and clicked home a full one.

“Now you can mow down your enemies without waking the baby,” said Pace.

Bradley saw the quick menace in Herredia’s face, but Felipe cackled.

Pace presented the newly loaded and silenced weapon to Felipe, and Felipe presented it to El Tigre
.

Herredia looked out toward the dock and waved. Bradley’s heart fluttered and he took a deep breath and felt intensely present and bad. The men in the boat weighed anchor and the engine started with a gentle cough and a puff of smoke. Some of the five men near the dock turned to watch the boat.

Then the muffled groan of a helicopter became a full roar as an old Vietnam-era CH-47 transport chopper slowly lifted over the rise from the desert behind them. Its markings and numbers were Red Cross. It passed by above them, and Bradley could see the scars on its belly left by Herredia’s welder. Then it was far out over the sea, banking to the south.

“A gift to me from my Colombians,” said Herredia. “They stole it but wanted faster ones. It can carry more money and weapons than any vehicle.”

Herredia smiled at Bradley, then he cradled the Love 32 against his elbow and motioned for Ron Pace to follow him. Pace gave Bradley a proud grin, then he followed Herredia until they were sixty feet from the dock. The boat had swung north, and Bradley saw both boatmen watching intently.

He watched as Herredia asked something of Pace but the words were lost in wind and distance. Herredia appeared to press his case, offering the gun. Pace stepped back, shaking his head, and he raised his hands as if trying to keep something away. Herredia nodded at the five men and continued speaking and Pace continued shaking his head. Herredia spat out a final statement, then swung the machine gun on the men. Bradley saw the vibration of Herredia’s big forearm as he pressed down on the gun, and he heard the metallic clatter of the gun as the prisoners struck out with their fists or tried to shield themselves with their hands, and the air shimmered with their blood and Bradley heard screams while the bullets cut through them, some bullets stitching the placid cove water behind them, and he heard more screams as they twisted and buckled and fell gracelessly, then he heard no screams at all and it was over.