The Cornwalls Are Gone Read online

  So they’re hunkering down.

  Waiting.

  Not for me, I hope, but waiting for somebody else.

  All right.

  Let’s call it four guys in that house, one being the guy I need to grab.

  That leaves three armed guards, watching over things.

  And one has just left.

  The firepower in that house has just decreased by 33 percent.

  The guy that’s gone…maybe he’s out for a grocery run, or a beer run, or maybe he’s off to church. But I don’t know how much longer he’s going to be gone.

  Time to move.

  I slip the small binoculars into my coat pocket, take out my SIG Sauer 9mm, make sure there’s a round in the chamber, and off I go.

  I have no illusions.

  There are armed men in that house, and there will be shooting.

  But I have surprise on my side, and one other thing.

  Almost all armed men who do bad things can never see a woman as a possible threat. It’s just not in their DNA or in the way they think or how they’ve learned.

  And I’m about ninety seconds away from giving them one hell of a lesson otherwise.

  CHAPTER 52

  PEPE TORRES is struggling with a certain phrase of St. Paul’s in his letter to the Romans when Ramon Hernandez walks in, face red, wearing a tight black tank top and black shorts, peeling off white workout gloves. There’s a small weight set in one of the bedrooms, and he’s been dedicated to his daily workout routine. Ramon’s head is shaved and most of his body is covered with badly inked tattoos he got while in prisons like La Mesa or El Hongo. He picks up a dirty towel from a chair and wipes his hands and face.

  “How goes it, Christian?” he asks.

  Pepe says, “I’m working…working very hard. How is our guest?”

  “Snoozing. I don’t know anyone who can sleep so much. I envy him. His mind must be very innocent to be able to sleep with no worries.”

  Pepe scribbles one last note. “I need to go to the bathroom. Can you stay here for a few minutes?”

  “Sure, just don’t stink up the place, all right?” Ramon plops down on the couch next to Pepe and slaps his knee with his hand. “Where did Antonio go?”

  “He was hungry. He went to the new McDonald’s to get something to eat.”

  “Oh, the jefe won’t like that.”

  “Well, I won’t tell him.”

  “Neither will I,” Ramon says. “That Antonio, he needs to chill, am I right? Here we are, we don’t have the best food or bedding, but hey, we don’t have to worry about some chicos coming by, strafing us with iron bananas.”

  Pepe puts his notepad to the side, carefully closes the Bible, thinking, Yes, Ramon is right, even using the slang for AK-47s, iron bananas. His bladder is full and he needs to go, and as he stands up, Ramon says, “Hey, did Antonio say he’d bring anything back?”

  “No,” Pepe says, walking out of the living room.

  “Figures, that stingy bastard. Hey, you taking the Good Book to the crapper?”

  Pepe says, “Why not?”

  Ramon laughs, picks up the control for the television. “I don’t know, it just seems…bad, bringing the Bible into the crapper.”

  Pepe moves along. “Jesus is everywhere, even in the bathroom.”

  As he goes into the bathroom and closes the door, he thinks he hears a knock but pays it no mind.

  Ramon can handle anything out there.

  CHAPTER 53

  RAMON HERNANDEZ checks the telenovela DVD playing on the old color television and frowns. It’s a good one, La Reina del Sur, starring that knockout actress with legs that go on forever, Kate del Castillo, but he’s seen this series at least twice. That chica Kate plays an innocent woman who gets involved in cartels and smuggling, and Ramon loves that shit, and—

  Ah, no harm in watching it a third time.

  There’s a knock on the door.

  He pauses the DVD.

  Another knock.

  He reaches under a couch cushion, takes out a Beretta Model 12 9mm pistol, one of the many weapons hidden in the house. He walks off to the side, looks through the window.

  No traffic. No cars parked in front.

  He can barely make out a shape on the front stone steps.

  One person, then.

  Is it the norteamericano, the pickup guy for their guest?

  Could be, and then he and Pepe and Antonio can get the hell out of here and get back to work. It’s been nice to relax and do some workouts and weight lifting, but that crappy frozen food and lumpy bed are starting to get to him.

  The knock comes again.

  “Hold on!” he calls out in English.

  He moves slowly to the door and peers out through the peephole.

  Small guy standing there, shoulders hunched up, wearing a black baseball cap, hands hanging down, empty. He’s got on blue jeans with some sort of silvery stripes on them.

  That’s it.

  Ramon thinks briefly of waiting until Pepe shows up, after he wipes his bum, and thinks, No, just one small guy out there. Besides, if it is their contact, won’t Antonio be pissed that he missed the handoff! Let him try to explain to the jefe why he wasn’t here.

  He slides the pistol into the side of his tight black shorts, opens the door.

  CHAPTER 54

  AFTER I knock at the house again, turned sideways so whoever’s inside can’t get a good look at me, I’m racing through a lot of options and choices in my mind. Maybe I should have waited some more. Maybe I should have just tossed a cement block through the rear sliding-glass door. Maybe going in through the front door isn’t the best idea.

  Too late.

  I’m committed.

  The door opens up, and unlike my comrades in the service, who more often than not can practice and re-practice and practice yet again a raid on a compound or a heavily defended house, I’m going in cold, as they say, making up shit as I go along.

  I turn to see who’s there, and holy God, it’s one bulky and scary-looking guy. Hispanic, shaved head, tattoos up and down his thick biceps and legs, even on his hairless and muscular chest, and he’s wearing black shorts and a tank top, and now, I’ve got to hit him, now.

  “Yes?” he says in accented English. “What do you want?”

  My hand quickly goes to my coat pocket and his eyes widen and he steps back, reaching to his side where I see the handle of a pistol, but I’m faster and I come out with the same canister of pepper spray I took from the trooper in Tennessee, and I push forward, aim it right at his face, and thumb the trigger.

  A slight hiss.

  Nothing happens.

  Nothing comes out.

  It’s empty!

  The guy pauses and then bursts out laughing at me, and I know what’s going through his mind: Silly girl can’t do anything right.

  So I punch him hard in the throat, still holding the metal canister in my hand.

  He coughs, stumbles back, and I punch him again in the throat, and he lifts both hands to his neck, starts gurgling, his eyes slightly bulging, and I know that my allotted seconds to get this done are sliding away, so I give a good whirl on my left foot, kick out with my right, and catch him behind the near knee.

  He tumbles to the floor, damn near making the room shake.

  I put the useless canister back into my jacket pocket, pull off one of the strips of silver duct tape I earlier placed on both pant legs, and with a knee to the small of his back, I work quickly to get his wrists bound behind him. I grab the pistol from his waistband, toss it to one corner of the room, and then I tape his bare lower legs, and I’m thinking, Fast, have to go faster, and then I look up and a skinny guy is coming into the room, holding a black leather book with a gold cross on the cover.

  We stare at each other for a second.

  He ducks back into the kitchen and I get up and move fast, and he’s turning around in the kitchen, spinning, and the book is now a pistol, and he’s bringing it up, shooting at me.

&
nbsp; I react within seconds, pulling out my SIG Sauer, remembering the long hours on the range—“Better to get off an imperfect shot than wait to make a perfect shot and get your head blown off”—and my first round misses, the second one catches him in the upper right thigh, and the next one strikes him dead center in the chest.

  He falls against the near cabinets, making one door pop open, and dishes and glassware fall out, and his moans and the sound of the shattering glass nearly drown out the bellowing from behind me.

  I whirl and the big guy has torn away the strips of duct tape and is grabbing another pistol from under the couch, and he brings up his weapon and I shoot again, and I catch him right in his mouth. He falls right back in a spray of blood and knocks over the television set, increasing its volume, and some sort of Mexican music starts echoing through the house, overpowering the ringing in my ears.

  I’m shaking now, and I go forward and grab the big guy’s pistol from the floor, stick it in my waistband, and then retrieve the weapon from the skinny guy in the kitchen, put it in the opposite waistband of my jeans, and I’m panting, trying to get some sort of semblance of calm, because if there’s another gunman in here, he’d have to be as deaf as the biggest bat in the world not to hear all the loud noise coming from this horrid gunfight.

  But nobody else is coming at me.

  I go up a short hallway, hammer open a door to a bedroom, check under the bed, and then the closet. Lots of piles of smelly clothes and porn magazines. I go to the other bedroom and it’s a twin of its mate, this time with weight equipment. Again, under the bed, and in the small closet.

  Nobody else is here.

  CHAPTER 55

  THEN I curse myself again for being so thick—thank God I’m not a platoon leader, because I’d probably end up decimating my troops on our first mission—and I go back down the short hallway, kick open the door to the bathroom, and there’s a man, huddled in the bathtub, holding up hands that are shaking like tall grass in the wind.

  I recall what the man on the phone said when he called me about the kidnapping of Tom and Denise.

  You’ll know him when you see him. He’ll be the one without a weapon.

  By God, he’s right.

  The man in the bathtub seems to be in his late sixties, early seventies. He’s wearing a two-piece dark-blue suit with a white shirt. His thin white hair is carefully combed, and he has a nicely trimmed white beard.

  His hands are empty, and they are quivering.

  I say, “Come on, let’s go, let’s move it.”

  He doesn’t move.

  I step forward, roughly grab his wrist. “Amigo, buddy, whoever the hell you are, let’s get going!”

  With some difficulty, he clambers out of the tub, and I shove him forward, and we go through the bloody kitchen—now smelly as the dead skinny guy becomes even more dead—and I get the sliding door open, and we’re off on a rear patio. I grab his wrist again, and start running.

  We run for a few minutes until I get to the grove of trees and scrub brush where I parked my Jeep. I open the passenger door, shove him in, and as I do that, I drop the two pistols I had gotten from the house after wiping them down.

  To hell with the extra firepower. Too much to carry around.

  I go around and start up the Wrangler; my hands, neck, and lower back are soaked with sweat that is quickly turning cold. A few minutes ago I just killed two men. Two men and their dreams and their lives and their hopes and their history, I’ve just snuffed out.

  I guess I should feel guilty, but the first guy I shot, he shot first, and the second guy I shot, well, based on his tatts and his attitude, he was no Boy Scout, either.

  No guilt, then. At least not now.

  I pull out and get on a side road that runs parallel to Linden, then drive up to North School Road, and make a left. I see flashing blue lights in my rearview mirror.

  That was quick.

  Must be some very attentive neighbors back there.

  I keep my speed low, keep on driving, and look up in the mirror again.

  I see one cruiser, and it looks like another is coming down North School Road, and I think, All right, one cruiser will probably go down Linden.

  And what will the second cruiser do?

  Join the first one?

  Or come after the only other moving vehicle on North School Road?

  Me.

  One more glance. A couple of curious folks emerge from their small houses, putting their hands up to their foreheads, blocking the sun, looking at the action.

  The first cruiser turns, and then the second.

  The road behind me is empty.

  So is the one in front of me.

  I take a deep breath, let it out, glance at my passenger. He is gently rearranging his coat and his shirt, and then he looks around and grabs the seat belt, pulls it over, and clicks it shut.

  “Hey,” I say. “You okay? You didn’t get hurt, did you?”

  He gives me a look, almost…

  Sad?

  Tired?

  A look of pity?

  Then he turns and looks out the windshield.

  I make a right, take out my iPhone, check my cell phone signal.

  Pretty weak.

  I need to make the most important phone call of my life to that man out there who has my family, and I’m not going to take a chance on losing the call over a bad signal.

  I put the phone in my lap, keep on driving.

  I say to the man next to me, “I’m sorry I’m doing this to you. Very, very sorry.”

  He doesn’t say a word.

  No matter, I think.

  One way or another, he’s valuable to me, the key to get Tom and Denise freed, and if he wants to stay quiet, fine. In fact, more than fine. It’s perfect. I don’t need to hear him begging or pleading to be let go as I take him to the man who wants him.

  I look at my iPhone.

  The signal is getting stronger.

  Good.

  I pull over and dial that number from memory.

  In less than three seconds, it’s answered, and I recognize the voice. “Yes?”

  “Got him,” I say.

  There’s an all-knowing chuckle from the phone.

  “I know.”

  CHAPTER 56

  ANTONIO GARCIA belches in satisfaction and looks at the nice porn movie he’s watching on his Galaxy with the bigger screen he got last year, with his belly full of two Big Macs and a large order of french fries. He’s parked in the lot of the new McDonald’s, and he wishes he had come here earlier. The frozen foods back at their place…ugh.

  He sips on a big cup of orange Fanta and wonders if he should go back in for something else to top off his meal, perhaps one of those grilled chicken sandwiches.

  Chicken.

  No, he really should get back to the house, before Pepe decides it would be the Christian thing to tell their jefe that he has violated orders and has left the place. The earlier Pepe would have never squealed like that, but the new Pepe…who knows. Once a man starts believing in the gods, anything can happen.

  He sucks in the Fanta and finishes it, tosses the empty cardboard cup in the rear. Coming through the border crossing a week ago was so easy, even when the Border Patrol took them aside for a detailed search. Of course, the look of them made the norteamericanos suspicious—he, Pepe, and Ramon, looking the way they did, escorting a man who was so well-dressed and polite he looked like a retired television star.

  The truck was pulled apart, two bitch dogs sniffed around and poked, and nothing was found. Nothing. Not a seed, not a trace of powder, not a single 9mm round.

  So they were sent on their way, and when they arrived in this little crap hole in Texas, they found that weapons, DVDs, and food had been stocked up in that little house.

  He peeks down at the screen of his Galaxy phone and sighs. A sweet movie. It is about a busty housewife wearing a skimpy bikini who invites three bulky men into her home to clean the pool. Oh, yeah, a lot of cleaning was goi
ng on, but none of it involved chemicals or skimmers. The four of them had started poolside nice and gentle, and now they were in the wide living room of the house, and the housewife was being tossed around like a doll with flexible limbs.

  Antonio watches for a few more minutes—the movie is great but he’s seen some real stuff, the video quality not so great but what was being filmed could never be sold in public—but you take what you can get.

  When the movie is done, he slides his Galaxy off, feels his stomach grumble.

  Oh, one more sandwich. Why not.

  He pulls around and goes through the drive-through, and a sweet little blond Anglo girl with a big bust under her ugly uniform passes over his order. She’s cute but her face has broken out with acne, but so what. That’s what pillows or paper bags are made for.

  He smiles at her, says, “Gracias,” in his most polite and sweet voice, and drives off with his second McDonald’s meal of the day. God, the scent of that food…he starts eating before he even leaves the parking lot, and when he gets on North School Road, he wipes his fingers with a bunch of paper napkins, steering with his knees.

  Up ahead a police cruiser is coming straight at him, lights on, siren wailing.

  What?

  He checks his speed, sees he’s right at the speed limit, as he always drives—how many of his friends have come here to the States and ended up in jail because of speeding or having a broken taillight?—and he just keeps on going.

  The cruiser slides into a turn, heading right down—

  Linden Street!

  He swears softly, thoroughly, and with great enthusiasm, and he slows down just a bit more.

  All right.

  Slow enough not to get attention, but fast enough to look like an innocent resident, wondering what all the excitement is.

  Madre de dios!

  There are two police cruisers pulled up in front of their house, and an ambulance and fire truck are parked nearby. Cops are there, weapons drawn, huddled behind the police cruisers.