Beautiful Sacrifice

CHAPTER TWO

YOU THERE, MAN? I NEED YOU.”

Frowning, ignoring the fatigue that kept dragging at the edges of his vision, Hunter Johnston listened to the message. He had known Jase for a lifetime, yet he’d never heard quite that sound from his friend. He prayed it didn’t have anything to do with Jase’s wife or kids. Especially his children. Kids were so innocent, so fragile.

The thought made Hunter open the apartment window with a vicious snap. It was the eighteenth of December, and Houston had to be seventy-five degrees already in the simmering morning. Summer simply hadn’t given up.

Better than the Yucatan, he told himself. No one shooting at me.

Hot air bathed him, bringing with it the smell of the city—gas, diesel, asphalt, concrete, dust, a whiff of stuffed Dumpster, and dueling Mexican and Chinese take-out joints. Hunter preferred the mixture of odors to his stale apartment and food that had been forgotten in his rush to get to Mexico in time to keep a young woman from being bought and sold like tamales on a dirty street corner.

A world away from Dr. Lina Taylor’s safe, well-lighted classroom.

Dream on, fool, Hunter told himself. I had to run out on our last sort-of coffee date. I’ll be lucky if she speaks to me.

Business and apartment lights glimmered against the hazy sky. Across the city avenue, Jase’s apartment already had the windows open and the blinds lifted to catch every breeze. A woman’s silhouette paced past one window, holding an arm-waving toddler. Ali, Jason’s high-school sweetheart and his wife, mother of his children.

Hunter both envied and feared what Jason had. The pain of losing what had once been part of his soul would always haunt him.

In the faint breeze, the gauzy privacy curtains by Hunter’s face did a shy and languid dance, like the last girl watching the last boy from across the gymnasium, that tantalizing moment of will I or won’t I?

He’d met Suzanne’s mother on a day like this. Seven years after that day, both mother and daughter were dead.

Get past it. The world sure has.

It had ended almost eight years ago, and it still cut like broken glass.

The breeze danced over Hunter like laughter, like memories, burning. He slammed the window down. The curtains hung, lifeless. No more dance, no more shyness.

No more.

He picked up his cell phone and punched in a text message to Jase. Border Patrol types stuck together, even when it was officially called Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even though Hunter had quit years ago. He hadn’t liked having his hands tied by orders from on high while the bad guys ran free. ICE’s ropes were covered in velvet benefits, but they still cut his wrists after a while.

Are your wrists bleeding, Jase?

Somebody knocked on the apartment door. Hard. Jase’s voice came in, low and urgent.

“Hunter, you in there? I saw lights.”

Three long strides took Hunter to the door. When he opened it, Jase stood there, a thick manila envelope under his left arm. He was dressed in jeans and a T-shirt, his feet in worn leather sandals, his thick, short hair standing on end. His broad face looked tired. From the amount of dark stubble on his jaw, it had been at least a week since his last shave.

“Hey, bro,” Hunter said, grabbing him. “I was just texting you. I’ve been in the Yucatan for two weeks.”

Grinning, Jase stepped into the one-armed hug and mutual back whacking. “Figured that. Haven’t seen the blinds open until a few minutes ago.”

“Ali and the kids okay?”

“Colds, spit-ups, Christmas gotta-haves—the usual.”

Hunter let out a silent sigh of relief. The kids were okay. Anything else that was wrong could be dealt with. He motioned Jase in and shut the door behind him.

“You home for a while?” Jase asked.

“Until the phone rings. The family business is exploding like popcorn. All the narco violence has people on both sides of the border checking under the beds.”

“I don’t blame them.” Jase threw his manila envelope on the kitchen counter. “The crap going down now has to be seen to be believed.”

“That why you need me?”

Jase’s smile faded and his face looked years older than thirty-four. “They’re going to fire me on the twenty-second. Merry Christmas, mope.”

Hunter went still. “What the hell?”

“Some stuff went missing from ICE’s warehouse. You know what that place is like—lockers crammed to the ceiling with guns and goodies, drugs and money.”

“Brubaker thinks you’re selling drugs out of evidence lockers?” Hunter asked, not hiding his shock.

“No.” Jase sighed, poured himself some coffee, and took it to the small café table. He slumped into one of the two mismatched chairs. “I’ve never flipped an investigation or taken a drop of all that black money pouring through our hands and he knows it. But if I don’t find this missing stuff before the twenty-first, I’ll be cleaning bathrooms at Mamacita’s. With my tongue.”

“Three days?” Hunter demanded, unbelieving.

Jase nodded. He was counting down the minutes. Hell, the seconds.

“What went missing?” Hunter asked. “Guns?”

“Maya stuff. Or Aztec. Or what’s that early one?”

“Moche? Olmec? Mixtec?”

“Whatever. I don’t know diddly or squat about that stuff. That’s why I need you.” Suddenly Jase put his face in his hands. “Ali told me she’s pregnant. I was grinning at the moon. Then this. I don’t know what to tell her. It’s not like the missing stuff is gold or coke or anything, but Brubaker’s dick is in a knot and it all has to do with politics. How do you explain politics to a pregnant mother with children to feed and a husband who’s about to get sacked?”

And I’m your Hail Mary option, Hunter thought unhappily. Damn, Jase, no wonder you’re halfway to panic.

Hunter took the remaining chair at the tiny kitchen table. Their knees knocked. The men automatically shifted to make room. They had been raised around small tables in small kitchens.

“Walk me through it,” Hunter said. “How did ICE come across the artifacts?”

“About two, three weeks ago,” Jase said, rubbing his eyes like a man who hadn’t had enough sleep. “Around the first of December. I’m out there supervising a training session at the Matamoros crossing. Everything is dry like burned toast. Everyone out there is swearing and edgy. Beagles start howling just because they’re so miserable.”

“Beagles? What, you’re gonna lick the bad guys to death?”

“Those beagles are unstoppable. Noses that won’t quit. Stubborn and cute as puppies. They’re a lot more tourist-friendly for airports and cruise-ship terminals than your average German shepherd.” Jase glanced up from his coffee. “Politics, you know. Nobody’s afraid of beagles. Ali swears she’s gonna steal one and take it home to the kids.”

Hunter almost smiled. “Okay. You’re out on a beagle training session. Then what?”

“It’s a joint training session. ICE and DEA, getting along just like stepbrothers. But when the president tells you to play nice, then you damn well don’t get caught playing dirty.”

“What happened?”

“We get a stake-bed truck with plates out of Quintana Roo. The dogs freak. Howling and pawing the air and stretching leashes all over the place. All we see are commercial bags of concrete and some boxes of tools.”

“Coke?” Hunter asked.

“Yeah, the dogs hit on coke stashed with the concrete bags. But not a lot of it. A few kilos, nothing like a full shipment.”

Hunter’s mouth quirked at one corner. “And the dumb driver swears he didn’t know coke from concrete mix, right?”

“How’d you guess?” Jase asked dryly. “The coke was packed amateur, and it looked like at least one of the packages had gotten messed up before it was wrapped. Dogs locked onto the smell of the coke even though it had been doctored with kerosene or jet fuel.”

“Bad night for the driver,” Hunter said.

“I suppose, but he seemed almost relieved to get caught. Was real eager to talk. Acted like we would protect him from the witch doctors. He gave us the address he was supposed to be taking this load to.”

“He talked before he had a lawyer?”

Jase shrugged. “He didn’t care about lawyers. All he wanted was to get away from the shipment quick as he could. We processed him the snitch route, even ran a transfer to Cameron County custody on an empty charge just so he wouldn’t be kept with us or labeled as a DEA collar. He got shanked anyway within a few days.”

Hunter whistled softly. “Someone is connected like muscle to bone.”

“Welcome to the border, where money is black, coke is white, and you never know who’s got a rocket in his pocket.” Jase’s voice was weary rather than bitter. The border was what it was—a war zone.

“Who did the hit?”

“Some gangbanger from the Latin Kings out of Harlingen.”

“Did he give a reason for the killing?”

“Said the dude looked at him funny. He’s already in for life on killing four people, including two kids asleep in their beds, but he’s not giving up whoever told him to do the driver from Quintana Roo.”

“Not even to get some time shaved off a life sentence?”

Jase looked like he wanted to spit. “Cameron County’s D.A. is ambitious. He wants to run for governor and makes no secret of it. You don’t score a lot of points by making deals with kiddy whackers.”

“You can get a lot of points for nailing whoever ordered the whack.”

“Bird in the hand, man. Can’t guarantee what’s in the bush.” Jase drank some cooling coffee. “The ADA went ahead and tried to make a deal. The gangbanger acted like he was alone in the room.”

“Which tells me that whoever gave the order for the hit on the Q Roo driver pulls some serious weight. Is it a Latin King?”

Jase shook his head. “Ain’t none of the LKs ever had a lick of interest in the artifact trade. The amount of coke we found might get someone killed, but…” He shrugged, the liquid movement of a man whose ancestors came from both sides of the border.

“So would a handful of dirt,” Hunter said.

“Yeah. The driver didn’t have a drug background. Pretty much a Q Roo dirt farmer, not someone the Kings would be dealing with directly.”

“What about the artifacts? Do you think they were the real cargo?”

“DEA must have. They sneered at the five kilos of coke. That’s a lot of personal use, but not really a blip on DEA’s radar. But they were real eager to hand the artifacts over to Mexico for a big gold star in their good-neighbor file. So was our very own AIC Brubaker.”

Hunter shook his head and spit out a single word. “Politics.”

“Oh yeah. There was the usual pushing and shouldering. Then we cut a deal. DEA got the drugs and ICE got the artifacts. Since they weren’t evidence of anything prosecutable—the driver was dead—Brubaker fast-tracked the artifacts for the repatriation photo op.” Jase breathed out from the soles of his feet, deflating. “Man, I wish I’d given them to the feds. They’re politically radioactive.”

Hunter sorted through what he’d been told. “So the coke was the driver’s payday for taking everything over the border?”

“That and the lives of his family. You know how it works.”

Hunter grimaced. He knew. He just didn’t like it.

“The artifacts,” Jase continued, “weren’t carelessly wrapped like the coke. They were all tight and in sacks of concrete mix just like the kerosene-laced dope was. At first we thought the packages were opium tar or something else thrown in for the trip up. The shapes were really odd.”

“What about the address the driver gave you before he was shanked?”

“We checked it out.” Jase swallowed hard, remembering what he really wanted to forget. “I saw things in that place I’m not ever going to un-see.”

For a few moments Jase stared at his coffee cup, trying not to remember the unspeakable. He did anyway. “It wasn’t a single psycho rocking out. No bodies. Just blood everywhere, places you can’t believe blood would get. Blood from more than one person, more than ten. Fresh. Old. Blood and candle wax and rotting flowers.” He shook his head, hard, trying to throw off memories. “That place was…evil.”

“What’s the theory? Gang bloodbath? Death cult? Killing ground for rent?”

“ICE will take bets on any of those. We’re assuming the bad guys got word that the shipment had been popped, figured that the house was next on the list, so they ran like the cockroaches they are.”

“And resumed business in another place,” Hunter said grimly.

“Don’t they always? Hell, for all I know, they have lots of places like that house. The drug business lives on blood as much as money.”

For the space of several long breaths, Hunter tried to plug Jase’s new information into the framework of his own lifetime knowledge of the Texas borderlands. It didn’t fit. “Anything connect to cold cases?”

Jase drank some coffee, rinsed it around, and swallowed. “I don’t know. We handed the death house off to the sheriff’s department with the understanding that ICE wanted info on anything covered in our mission statement. All they told us was that something was taken off the wall, and there were signs that a table had been moved.”

“Or an altar?”

“I don’t like to think about that, but yeah, I wondered.”

“Okay. You busted artifacts and small-time coke. Followed an address to a bloody dead end. Cataloged the artifacts into the ICE warehouse.”

“With that Maya apocalypse 2012 all over the media, Brubaker was practically lap-dancing about the chance to add the artifacts to the pool of stuff that’s being repatriated to Mexico on the twenty-first. It’s a big-ass deal. Vice president, governor, senators, everybody under the Homeland Security umbrella will be there, shaking hands across the border and giving Mexico back pieces of its history as we walk shoulder to shoulder into the future, blah blah blah.”

“But the artifacts go poof from ICE storage,” Hunter said. “Then what?”

“I don’t have to tell you the theft has ‘inside job’ written all over it.”

“I remember the warehouse. Cameras, locks, finger pads, guards, everything but the ever-popular alien butt probes.”

Jase smiled faintly. “Brubaker was thirty-two flavors of pissed off. He looked around for an ass to pin the tail on. Must have been my lucky day, huh? He put me on paid leave, told me I had until the twenty-first to find those artifacts, then said if I even breathed the word ‘ICE’ in my investigation, much less showed my badge, I was roadkill. No word of the theft was to get out.”

Hunter stared at him. “That’s a joke, right?”

Jase looked back with hard, dark eyes.

“When did this happen?” Hunter asked.

“About two weeks ago. I tried to call you, but…”

“Cell phones don’t work where and when you want them to,” Hunter finished. “I was up to my pits in jungle and limestone scrub.”

“I hear those beaches on Riviera Maya are primo.”

“Didn’t get that far. You have pictures, file numbers, descriptions?”

“Of the artifacts?”

“What else?”

Jase reached for the manila folder on the counter. “You never saw these.”

“Saw what?”

Hunter opened the envelope and started looking at photos he never should have seen.