“You should have told me the bitch had a goddamn fed for a boyfriend from day one,” Walker hissed.
Navarro remained calm. “Well, you did know she was ex-DEA. And if you and your babosos hadn’t been so pathetically incompetent, the boyfriend wouldn’t have been around, would he?”
Something about the way the Mexican spoke tripped a small circuit deep inside Walker’s brain. He wasn’t sure what it was, but it made him uneasy. Still, the man was standing there, mouthing off in front of Walker’s own crew and doing it in his own fucking clubhouse. Not too many people had done that and lived long enough to brag about it.
“Listen to me, you wetback sonofabitch. I don’t know what you’ve got yourself into or what the hell this is all about, but I know we’re done here. So how about you get that chickenshit shrink of yours out of my basement, give me the rest of my money, and get the fuck out of my face while I’m still feeling charitable.”
Walker stared down the Mexican as a loaded silence choked the room. From the corner of his eye, he could see that his men were ready to deal with any threatening move. There were six of them facing three Mexicans in the room and one outside, odds that Walker was more than comfortable with. He knew the Mexican’s heavies had to be packing, but his own guys weren’t exactly there to play bingo and their guns were also ready to rip.
The Mexican seemed to read the situation the same way and after a few seconds of deliberation, his body language eased off. Then he spread his arms wide in a brotherly, conciliatory gesture, and shrugged.
“I understand you’re angry right now. I would feel the same way. But we’ve done good business together in the past, and it seems a shame to me for us to throw that away and kill the chance of doing more good business in the future because of this. So how about we shake hands and conclude this unhappy experience and move on without poisoning our relationship with any further disrespect? Deal, amigo?”
Walker eyed the man curiously. The Mexican just stared at him with a cordial, even expression.
The man had indeed paid them good money in the past for relatively easy work, and the pragmatist within Walker agreed that there was no need to kill off any future prospects between them. And given all the heat that the club would probably be facing after the shoot-out, Walker preferred not to have four more bodies and a whole lot of forensic evidence to bury, to say nothing of a potential Mexican shitstorm from the wetback’s compadres south of the border.
Walker nodded. “Deal.”
The Mexican spread his arms wider and gave him a look that was part reproachful and part relieved, then stepped toward Walker and brought his arms together, his hands inviting a handshake.
Walker shrugged and took a step in himself, and extended his hand.
Walker’s gaze locked onto the man’s eyes, and the same circuit in the biker’s brain tripped again as the Mexican’s hands wrapped themselves tightly around his right hand. And in that instant, the Mexican’s eyes hardened, giving Walker a peek into an abyss of darkness he knew he’d encountered before as he felt something sharp cut into the inside of his wrist.
His skin lit up with a burning sensation, and Walker flinched and tried to yank his arm back, but the Mexican’s grip stayed solidly locked on his wrist and held it there for a moment longer while his icy stare dug deeper into him—then Walker tugged back and pulled himself free.
He studied his wrist with confused, angry eyes, saw the small spouts of blood appear from where he’d felt the cuts—then he looked up to the Mexican’s hands.
“What the fu—”
Walker didn’t have time to finish the word. From either side of the Mexican, the two sicarios—professional gunmen—were whipping out their silenced handguns and unleashing a torrent of rounds with deadly accuracy.
Three seconds later, Walker’s men were all dead or dying where they stood.
Walker’s jaw dropped an inch as he stared in disbelief at his fallen brothers and watched in dumbstruck shock as the two enforcers went around calmly pumping confirmation slugs into their heads, then he tore his gaze off the slaughter and swiveled it back onto the Mexican—and then two things hit him.
The first was who the Mexican really was.
The second was a complete and sudden loss of feeling in his arms and legs.
He just fell to the ground, collapsing on himself like someone had turned all his bones to Jell-O.
Walker couldn’t move anything. He couldn’t even twist a shoulder or lift a finger to straighten himself out. Nothing worked. The realization sent a rush of terror through him as he just lay there, on his side, his cheek and nose squashed up against the wood flooring, his eyes locked at a disturbing sideways angle and giving him no more than a close-up view of the dust and the scrapes that littered it.
The Mexican’s boots edged closer until they were right up against Walker’s face, and from the corner of one eye, he could see the man towering over him and looking down at him like he was no more than a cockroach.
Then he saw the Mexican’s boot rise up.
21
I got back to the street outside the bonded warehouse to find a black-and-white pulled up where I’d left Flamehead. One of the Harbor Patrol uniforms was talking to Terry while the other was busy on his radio. Within seconds, another cruiser swerved in and discharged two more officers. I gave them all a quick description of Soulpatch, and one of them radioed it in and asked for an immediate BOLO to be sent out. The uniforms then jumped back into their cars and tore off to look for him just as an ambulance screamed in.
Flamehead wasn’t doing well. He was still lying in the middle of the road, sprawled on his belly. I couldn’t see much blood under him, but although he was conscious, he was just staring vacantly at the asphalt and barely responsive. I stood back with Terry and watched as the paramedics went to work on him, hard and fast.
I was livid with myself. I’d started off with two potential living, breathing leads into finding out who had targeted Michelle and why, and I was down to one half-dead extra from a Mad Max movie who didn’t look like he was going to be doing any talking anytime soon.
I put my BlackBerry back together and watched as one of the paramedics checked his blood pressure while the other used some trauma shears to cut through Flamehead’s Windbreaker and T-shirt to reveal an oval entry wound in his right upper back.
“BP’s one hundred over palp,” one of them announced.
“I’ve got one GSW through the lung. Let’s roll him over.”
They moved together expertly like they’d done this a thousand times before and used the shears again to cut through the front of his shirt. There was a two-and-a-half-inch sucking-air chest wound just below his right nipple.
The lead paramedic, a striking brunette with steel-blue eyes, a lush mane of wavy hair that she wore tied back, and the name Abisaab embroidered across her chest, examined him with agile, calm hands, then told her colleague, “He’s hypoxic, his oh-two sat is eighty-nine percent and it looks like the bullet punctured his lung. I think he has a pneumo. Get the mask.”
They quickly strapped a high-flow, non-rebreather oxygen mask over his mouth and nose, then ran a couple of IV lines into his forearm as my phone’s software finally finished its interminable reboot. I felt my spirits sagging as I dialed Villaverde to bring him up to speed.
I heard the other paramedic, a short, muscular Latino by the name of Luengo, say, “Systolic’s down to eighty,” sounding more alarmed than before, then Abisaab said, “I’ve got frothy blood coming out of the wound, we need to seal it now,” and within seconds they were at full throttle, taping a seal tightly across the wound while keeping one side open. When they were done, Luengo broke away and prepped the gurney.