The Border Lords Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Acknowledgements

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY T. JEFFERSON PARKER

  Laguna Heat

  Little Saigon

  Pacific Beat

  Summer of Fear

  The Triggerman’s Dance

  Where Serpents Lie

  The Blue Hour

  Red Light

  Silent Joe

  Black Water

  Cold Pursuit

  California Girl

  The Fallen

  Storm Runners

  L.A. Outlaws

  The Renegades

  Iron River

  DUTTON

  Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.); Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England; Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd); Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd); Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi-110 017, India; Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd); Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

  First printing, January 2011

  Copyright © 2011 by T. Jefferson Parker

  All rights reserved

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  has been applied for

  eISBN : 978-1-101-47546-1

  PUBLISHER’S NOTE

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

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  For Rita

  Bride, Partner, Sister in Arms

  Prologue

  “Charlie, Gravas here. Reporting live from the Wild West.”

  “Good to hear from you, friend.”

  “My machine gun peddlers got a whiff of something. Me waiting there with my cash and meth like a dude with flowers and chocolates. They stood me up. How’s my Seliah?”

  “She sounded great like she always sounds.”

  “She doesn’t tell you how hard this is for her.”

  “Neither do you.”

  “I feel strong, and clear in the eye. I want someone bigger than those machine gun punks anyway. I want someone with heft. I’m making some contacts out here. I’ll get within spitting distance of Carlos Herredia if it kills me. Maybe I shouldn’t put it that way.”

  “You’re where you need to be. And when it’s done you’re out and rolling home.”

  “If Seliah needs something, she’s going to call you.”

  “As always.”

  “I keep coming back to her, don’t I?”

  “You’re supposed to come back to her.”

  “Gotta go now. Bad actors, incoming.”

  “Vaya con Dios.”

  “Yeah. I always go with God when I waddle around in hell.”

  1

  Just before sunset the first bat fluttered from the cave and came toward him, wobbling and breeze-blown, like a black snowflake ahead of a storm. It rose and navigated between the trunks of the banana trees, then climbed into the magenta sky. Another flew, and then another.

  The priest stood facing them, his feet together and his back straight and his hands folded before him. The reeking cave mouth yawned and the bats spilled out. He watched them come at him, then veer abruptly.

  From the first few, he heard faint chirps but soon there were too many and all he could hear was their muffled flight. Then the air was heavy with them, a great dark blanket of membranous wings and small faces and tiny feet. One of them brushed his cheek and another glanced off his hair and another screeched at him in fear. Some of them dropped guano that tapped against his windbreaker but the priest stood motionless and let the flood of hair and skin rush past. My music, he thought. He considered the centuries and still the flood rushed.

  When it was over he stepped inside. The smell was stronger. He lit a candle with a plastic lighter. Before he spoke he cleared his throat as he would before the homily.

  “Yoo-hoo, little creatures of the night. Father Joe, here to see you.”

  His candle revealed the holdouts still hanging from the walls by their feet, wrapped like football fans, not in blankets but in their wings. Some of them squinted into the insult of the light; some shifted irritably like insomniacs, all snouts and elbows.

  “Not quite feeling up to it tonight? The halt and the lame and the old and the sick. Feeling just a little off, are we?”

  The priest strolled deeper into the darkness and the stench. A bat ran across his path, upright, wings raised overhead like a tiny man with an umbrella, looking back and up at him.

  The priest stopped and held up the candle. A bat peered down from the wall and the man saw the glitter in its purblind eyes, the quivering, inquisitive expression on its face. The man cocked his head. The bat bared its teeth and screeched. The mouth was large for the face and the incisors were large for the mouth, and needle-like. The leafed nostrils were flared and its ears were enormous. The little animal began breathing faster, and it extended its wings and resettled them back around its body.

  “Cold, my little friend?” The man saw the froth of saliva gathered at the chin, and when the bat sneezed the foam flew off.

  The priest extended his fr
ee hand toward the animal. Again the bat bared its teeth and screeched but the priest didn’t move, and a moment later the animal crawled down the wall a few feet closer to him. It was a cumbersome movement, with the thumb hooks grappling for purchase on the rock, and the minute toes spread for traction, and the sheer wings clumsy and useless. “Come closer, little fliedermaus. I’m not going to climb up there to get you!” The bat clambered closer and the priest stood on his toes and offered his finger and the bat climbed on.

  The priest relaxed and lowered both arms and studied the animal in the light. Its eyes were bright in spite of their weakness. The man blew a puff of breath onto the animal, rippling its thin fur and revealing the almost-human shape of the rib cage. The bat cringed and screeched and bared its teeth again, and in this the priest saw humankind’s embodiment of evil distilled into a single horrific face.

  “Thank you,” said the priest.

  He dropped the candle to the cave floor where the guano devoured the flame and left him in darkness supreme. He gently cupped the bat between thumb and forefinger, then put it in his windbreaker pocket, zipping it halfway for security and oxygen. Then he carefully picked his way back out of the cave.

  2

  Charlie Hood sat in the ATF field station in Buenavista and watched the live-feed monitors. Hood was thirty-two, tall and loose, with an earnest face and calm eyes. He had been watching the screens for eight hours, doing his job for the ATF Blowdown task force. It was not pure excitement. He was on loan from the L.A. Sheriff’s Department but by now he had spent fifteen months in this often infernal, often violent, often beautiful desert. He liked this place and he feared it. He palmed another handful of popcorn from its paper container without taking his eyes from the screen.

  Buenavista was a California border town with a population of thirty thousand and an elevation of twelve feet. The monitors displayed live feeds from a “safe house” in one of Buenavista’s nicer neighborhoods, three miles away. The Blowdown team called the house the Den. ATF had bought it on the cheap as a foreclosure, then wired it for sound and video. Hood’s friend Sean Ozburn, an ATF agent operating deep undercover as a meth and gun dealer, had arranged to have it rented as a home for four young gunmen of the North Baja Cartel.

  The assassins ranged in age from seventeen to twenty-two, and ATF figured them good for thirty murders between them. Some in Mexico. Some stateside. Almost all business related, the business being recreational drugs. Sales of those drugs brought Mexico some fifty billion dollars a year—by far the single largest contributor to its economy.

  Hood watched one of the pistoleros, Angel, standing in his kitchen while a pot of carnitas warmed on the stovetop. Hood knew it was carnitas because two nights ago he’d watched Angel prepare the pork for boiling. Now the pot was on the stove again and a tortilla was warming on one of the electric burners and there was a skillet of eggs going.

  It was unusual for any of the young killers to be up this early but Angel was here in the kitchen and Johnnie and Ray were in the living room. Angel was the only one who ever cooked anything. He was a skinny little guy with a wisp of a mustache and an overbite. He stood still a moment and watched his own monitor, a little kitchen-size DVD player on which he watched nothing but American gangster movies. This morning it was Scarface again, in Spanish, Angel at times mumbling along with Pacino, mimicking his expressions. A machine pistol with a noise suppressor and an extended magazine lay on the counter by the DVD player.

  These guns had first come to Blowdown’s attention in Mexican crime scene photographs late last year. Nobody at Blowdown had ever actually seen one except possibly Hood, two summers ago, though he wasn’t totally sure at the time what he was seeing. He knew for certain that brand-new semiautomatic handguns were being packed for shipment at a Southern California gun factory. This he had confirmed with his own eyes. Then these illegally made guns had slipped away from Blowdown, right under their collective noses—one thousand gleaming new handguns, gone. Hood suspected they were headed south to Mexico.

  Now he wondered again if one of those apparently humble handguns could somehow be converted into a curve-clipped, silenced beauty like the one lying on Angel’s kitchen counter. Hood would bet on it. If he was right, he knew for certain who had built the one thousand silenced machine pistols—a talented young gunmaker named Ron Pace. And if that was true, Hood also had very strong ideas about who had delivered them into the hands of Carlos Herredia’s North Baja Cartel gunmen—a fellow LASD deputy named Bradley Jones. Hood was hot to get his hands on one of those guns. All of ATF was hot to get one. And Hood wanted to send Pace and Jones to the slammer where they belonged.

  He ate and watched and opened another soda. Graveyard was hard on sleep and diet. He wondered if the assassins were up early because they had a job to do. Usually they slept until noon. His mind wandered back to Sean Ozburn again, and Hood wondered why Ozburn had gone silent. Almost fifteen months undercover, and once a day Sean would call one of the Blowdown team—usually Hood—even when he had nothing substantial to report. He called it touching his life raft. Fifteen months UC was a long run in anyone’s book. Too long, according to many with experience. The calls had been Sean’s established pattern and it had worked for him, and now he had broken it. Six days and no call.

  So maybe Sean had been made, Hood thought. He wasn’t sold on the whole idea of the bugged safe house, because of that possibility. One whiff of suspicion or one person who recognized Ozburn, and boom—he was dead, or worse. The Den was supposed to be an ATF jewel but they all knew its potential cost to their man undercover.

  And the bugged safe house wasn’t only a risk; it was frustrating, too. Hood understood that they didn’t have enough evidence to arrest any of the four assassins. Most of their murders were committed across the border where ATF was essentially helpless. And the murders they were suspected of committing in the States were quiet and neat: no willing witnesses, no weapons left behind, no written warnings or mutilations or beheadings, just plenty of shots to the head and heart and that was that. Always .32 Automatic Colt Pistol rounds. Nobody heard. Nobody saw. Nobody knew anything. All this manpower and technology, and not an arrest made, thought Hood.

  But the truth, and he knew it, was that ATF didn’t want to roll up the Den and go to court just yet, because although the four young sicarios were only small-time killers, they were gold mines of information. Since this “safe house” had been activated four weeks ago, their conversations and phone calls had provided ATF hundreds of hours of talk and video, giving the Blowdown team a street-level view of the North Baja Cartel’s blood-soaked battle for Southern California.

  Behind Hood, three large, rolling whiteboards were backed against the far wall. Two of them were jammed with writing and one was beginning to fill—names, crimes, suspects, straw buyers, timelines, organizational charts, routes, possible tunnel locations, turf, family relations, feuds, debts—many grouped in circles and linked by solid lines or broken lines or some by strings of small question marks. Certainties were written in black. Suspicions were rendered in red, speculations in blue. It looked like graffiti. And all of it was gathered by ATF eavesdropping on the four baby-faced hit men. Blowdown wasn’t after the likes of these boys. They were after the lieutenants and up, to the top of the food chain—the men who bought the guns and called the shots.

  So, Hood thought, the whiteboards are full of intel but the killers are free to roam about the cabin.

  He looked at monitor two and watched Johnnie and Ray playing Halo on the living room fifty-four-inch TV. Hood lifted an audio headset to his ear and winced: As usual the boys had the volume up loud. The hidden mikes were so good they could pick up both ends of a phone call, and this video combat game blaring through the home theater system sounded like Armageddon itself.

  Johnnie and Ray were the two Americans, poor kids recruited from the rough Buenavista streets, kids with voracious desires and stunted notions of self-control. Hood knew their plan for happiness: Get a gun
, get a job using it, get some decent clothes, get a better gun, get a car, get a big-screen television, get a truck, get a girl. Then, if you were still alive get a house, somewhere to put your girl and your stuff. They always bought the house last. It was the same for all the young pistoleros along the border. The cartels didn’t care if they were American or Mexican. Global economy, thought Hood. Johnnie was the seventeen-year-old and he had earned a new Dodge Ram 1500 two weeks ago as a bonus for a hit in Tijuana. Chunks flying out the back of his head, as he’d bragged to Ray one evening, over and over. Johnnie had washed the gleaming black truck fourteen consecutive nights, up late, inside the garage of the Agate Street safe house so the neighbors wouldn’t see him. He talked to the truck as he polished its coat.

  Only Oscar was unaccounted for now. He claimed to have a girl-friend in Buenavista but no matter how much the other assassins teased him, Oscar had so far refused to bring her to his lair.

  Hood heard two sharp knocks on the front door of the office, then the buzz from the ID reader. He glanced up at the security camera, then looked at the first light of the October morning just now touching the drawn blinds.

  Dyman Morris came into the room with a tall cup of coffee and his war bag, and he set both on the desk, then sat two chairs down from Hood. He looked up at the screens. There were six of them. Dyman smelled of soap and his dark skull was cleanly shaved. “Look at this. The baby killers are stirring.”

  “Maybe they’ve got something coming up.”

  “Still nothing from Sean?”

  Hood shook his head and watched Angel flip his tortilla. “I left him another message. That’s three in six days.”

  In the silence that followed, Hood thought of their comrade Jimmy Holdstock, kidnapped last year on U.S. soil and taken to Mexico. Hood knew that Dyman was thinking of Jimmy, too. Jimmy hadn’t even been working UC like Sean. Jimmy wasn’t setting up bugged safe houses for the North Baja Cartel like Sean. Jimmy was just a former divinity student, part of the Blowdown team checking ATF Firearm Transaction forms, keeping an eye on the licensed dealers, trying to stem the flow of the iron river—the guns heading south.