“Get her into the van!”
Vaught was still watching television in his room. He heard the young man’s shout and lowered the volume to listen for more. Hearing nothing else, he ran the volume back up.
Valencia slid off the couch and went to stand in the open doorway. Seeing two men in the process of kidnapping her mother, she immediately began to scream.
Hearing the scream, Vaught ripped open the bedroom door and was already moving at full speed by the time he vaulted over Valencia and into the carport. The two men lifting Paolina from the concrete watched in stunned confusion as he came at them, having had no idea there was anyone else in the house. Vaught drove his knee into the closest man’s face, knocking him backward against the door with his nose smashed flat, blood jetting. Then he spun smoothly around with a high backward kick that caught the second man in the side of the head and sent him sprawling.
The counterfeit health worker was bleeding in the corner and didn’t want any part of the fight, so Vaught ignored him, turning back to the first guy as he struggled to rise. He put him back down with a punch to the trachea and snatched Paolina’s stiletto off the ground, using it to stab both men in the throat before finishing off the imposter from the health department with a brutal kick to the temple. Then he lifted Paolina up and swept her into the house past Valencia, who was still crying. He set the young woman on the sofa, pulled the tape away from her mouth, and began freeing her hands and feet as the chloroform wore off.
She came awake flailing, and he grabbed her wrists.
“You’re okay!” he said in Spanish. “Look at me! You’re okay!”
Paolina jumped unsteadily to her feet and tottered over to her daughter, sinking to her knees and taking the frightened little girl into her arms to settle her. “Mommy’s okay. Mommy’s okay …” She glanced at Vaught. “We have to leave — now.”
He glanced around. “Where the hell are we gonna go?”
“Daniel said if anything ever happened while he was out of the city to go to Juan Guerrero.”
“Who’s Juan Guerrero?”
Still dizzy, she got to her feet and lifted Valencia into her arms. “The police chief in Toluca.”
“Toluca’s thirty miles south of here. Where the hell is Crosswhite?”
“Guadalajara.”
“What the hell’s he doing up in Guadalajara? That’s a six-hour drive. Did he fly? When’s he coming back?”
She moved toward the bedroom. “Stop complaining, Chance. Call for a taxi.”
“Goddamnit,” he muttered. “Right when you think things can’t get any more fucked up.”
17
The gringo sniper’s Barrett XM500 .50 caliber sniper rifle rested on the floor, propped on its bipod near the end of a long hallway in an abandoned elementary school. At the opposite end of the hall was a one-square-foot opening cut into the base of the concrete wall overlooking the street one story below. Almost a quarter mile away, at the far end of the avenue, was a church where a young lady’s first communion ceremony was taking place. Taped to the wall, knee high off the floor, was an eight-by-ten color photo of Police Chief Juan Guerrero.
Rhett Hancock sat against the steel door of an empty classroom, studying the gentle features of the face in the photograph. He would have time for only one shot, and it would have to be on the correct target. The chief had a gentlemanly look about him: dark eyebrows and soft brown eyes set in an oval face. His hair was cut short without style, and to Hancock he looked more like a gardener or a waiter than a defiant cop.
The Barrett XM500 was not a common model like the M82A1 or the M107. This rifle was of a bullpup design, with the action located behind the trigger, allowing for shorter overall weapon length. It was a variant of the old M82A2, which had never generated much interest on the weapons market. Another difference was that the XM500’s barrel remained stationary when the weapon was fired, facilitating greater accuracy at long ranges.
Hancock’s partner, Jessup, sat around the corner at the far end of the hallway. After Hancock’s shot, he would quickly shove the concrete block they had cut from the wall back into place to prevent anyone from pinpointing their location. The rifle report would be muffled by the building and covered up further by the clanging church bell.
Hancock stared at the photo, visualizing the shot in his mind’s eye. There was no greater feeling, no greater thrill in the world to him, than shooting another human being at long range. He had become addicted to the experience almost immediately during the Iraq War, and though the cartels were paying him extremely well, he would have gladly done the work for food money. He was willing to shoot anyone. Man or woman — it didn’t matter.
He used his own modified ammunition, having paid a munitions expert in Nevada to design him a special soft-tipped round that would pancake to the size of a hubcap upon entering the human body. As it was, the standard .50 caliber sniper round did a devastating amount of damage — the hydrostatic shock of the impact being hundreds of times more powerful than the body could absorb — but Hancock sought maximum devastation with every shot now, like a junkie needing a larger and larger fix as his addiction progressed. He had used the special round to blow Alice Downly’s guts all over the street, and it still made him snicker to think about the way she had exploded. One second a raving lunatic — the next, total obliteration.
The phone vibrated in his pocket with an incoming text message: “listo,” meaning “ready.” This was the signal from their man inside the church letting him know that Guerrero would soon be coming out the front door, as they had hoped. There had been some initial concern when the informant reported that the police car had been pulled around behind the church, but apparently the chief was feeling lucky today.
Well, Hancock thought, putting on his protective earmuffs, I’m gonna give the dude a stiff dose of a bad time.
He felt his blood begin to thrum as he slid in behind the rifle to peer through the Leupold 4.5-14x50 Mark 4 scope. The church doors were open, and people were coming out slowly. The first person to really catch his eye was the young lady whose special day it was. She was dressed all in white and shone like a beautiful pearl in the bright sunlight. Next, there was the chief of police, standing perfectly in his crosshairs between two other policemen. The timing was sublime, the shot pristine, and there was no hesitation, no need to even think. Hancock squeezed the trigger, and the 600-grain projectile streaked down the hallway at 2,800 feet per second, blasting out through the hole near the floor and speeding its way down the street to strike Chief Juan Guerrero in the base of the throat, severing the spinal cord perfectly. Guerrero’s neck disintegrated. His head went twirling up into the air like a pop foul, slinging blood on the little girl’s dress in bright globs of crimson as his body dropped to the sidewalk. The head landed and bounced once before coming to rest near the feet of one of the other policemen.
No one in front of the church heard the faint report of the rifle over the clanging of the bronze bell above them, but many saw the chief’s head ripped from his body, and no one needed to be told what had done it. Bedlam ensued as everyone began to scream, scrambling back inside the church for safety. One of the policemen grabbed up the little girl and swept her inside along with the rushing throng.