“Guys, I need an update,” I told them.
Abisaab replied without taking her eyes off Flamehead. “His lung’s down and he’s very hypoxic and tachycardic. He can hardly breathe. We need to get him back to the ER to put in a chest tube.”
I asked, “What are we looking at here?”
She got my drift and turned to face me, and her eyebrows rose up with a doubtful look, but she didn’t say anything—standard procedure given that the victim was still conscious and quite possibly hearing everything going on around him.
I stepped back to give them some room and gave Villaverde her read. I heard him blow out a frustrated sigh, then he said, “There’s not much more you can do out there. Why don’t you head on back up to Broadway and look at some faces?”
Villaverde was right. It was pretty obvious that even if Flamehead made it, I wouldn’t be able to go near him for days. Which infuriated me to no end. For some reason that I still couldn’t figure out, these goons were tailing me, and I didn’t fancy sitting around looking over my shoulder while waiting for this bastard to get his vocal cords back. I needed to find out who these guys were.
I watched as Abisaab and Luengo lifted him onto the collapsible gurney, then strapped him in.
“I need to check his pockets,” I told them as I moved in.
Abisaab stayed on task. “We’ve got to go.”
“I’ll be quick,” I insisted, my fingers already rifling through his pockets.
“Sir—”
“Just give me a second!”
He had nothing on him—no wallet, no ID. Not that I expected to find anything, but sometimes you get lucky. He did have a cell phone, though, a cheap prepaid, which I pocketed.
I stepped back to let them take him away, and as they did, I noticed something on Luengo’s arm. The bottom of what seemed like an elaborate tattoo, just peeking out from under the edge of his sleeve.
An idea slapped me.
“Hang on, hang on.” I rushed right back up to them and pushed through to get to Flamehead.
“We have to move him now,” Abisaab objected.
“I know, just—” I moved the cut fabric of his T-shirt aside, one side, then the other. I couldn’t see anything. I turned to Abisaab and said, “Give me your scissors.”
“What?”
“Your scissors. Give them to me.”
“We have to move him, agent,” she insisted, her eyes drilling into me.
“So stop wasting his time and give me the goddamn scissors.”
Abisaab looked at me and must have read the utter seriousness on my face as she shook her head and rummaged in her medical kit before handing them to me grudgingly, like I’d just snapped the neck of her pet cat.
I went to work on the rest of Flamehead’s jacket, using the scissors to cut lengthways up the sleeve that was closest to me.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” she asked.
I kept going. “You’re wasting his time, not mine, you hear me? His time.”
I pulled the sleeve apart carefully, exposing his forearm, then the rest of his arm all the way up to his shoulder. His skin was bare.
I scurried around to Flamehead’s other side and did the same to his left arm, working carefully around the IV lines that were plugged into it. There was nothing on the forearm, but as I peeled back the rest, I saw the tattoo on his shoulder.
I peeled the fabric away to get a clear view of it. It depicted an eagle holding two crossed M16s in its claws, positioned like crossbones under a skull. Curiously, the eagle was wearing sunglasses and a bandana, and its wings were drawn like they were made of flames.
I stared at the shades and the bandana.
Maybe. Just maybe this would be something.
I pulled out my phone and took two quick snaps of the tattoo, checked to see that they were clear, then glanced up at Abisaab.
“He’s all yours,” I said, giving her a contrite look. “I’m sorry, it’s important.” It didn’t seem to soften the brunt of her uncompromising glare much, but she managed to grace me with a small nod.
I was already dialing Villaverde as they wheeled him away.
“I got a tat off the guy’s shoulder,” I told him. “The guy could be a vet, but it could also be a club patch.”
“Send it over,” he said. “I’ll shoot it across to ATF.”
I was stoked. If this was a club patch, the guys at ATF were bound to have some record of them, and we’d soon know who they were.
I emailed it to him and sprinted back to my car, feeling a small tug of hope.
22
Walker watched aghast as the man’s right boot kicked down on his shoulder and flipped him onto his back.
The Mexican was still looking down on him with cold bemusement. Walker felt an onslaught of blood in his temples and as he stared into the man’s eyes, a sudden realization speared through him.
This was no “ex-lieutenant” of Navarro’s, no “Nacho” or whatever the hell he’d called himself.
It was Navarro himself.
The sonofabitch wasn’t dead.
The ramifications of that realization sent his already turbulent thoughts into a tailspin as he just lay there helplessly while Navarro held up his hand and adjusted a big silver ring that, oddly, bridged across two of his fingers, the right middle and the fourth next to it.
“Works like magic, doesn’t it? The tribe it comes from, that’s what they believe—that it’s magic. Which in a way, it is. A potent little neurotoxin cocktail that denervates the motor neurons at the level of the upper spinal cord and causes quadriplegia,” he said with genuine exuberance, like he was marveling at its effects for the first time—something Walker knew firsthand was definitely not the case.
He’d seen its effects before, in Mexico. On someone they’d suspected of being a snitch.
The memory drenched him with fear.
“You’d need a pretty capable anesthetist and some decent equipment to achieve that in an operating room,” Navarro added, “and yet, here it is, just a simple toxin from a jungle spider . . .”
Navarro got down on his haunches for a closer look at him, and his eyes suddenly lost their wonder and turned more predatory. “The great thing about it is, it doesn’t cripple all your muscles. You may have noticed that some of your nerves—the ones from your neck and above—they still work, don’t they? Which means you can talk. So tell me, amigo,” he said softly, almost in a whisper now. “What is this ‘grotto’ you mentioned, and who is this ‘Scrape’ you were talking to?”
Walker steeled himself and spat into the Mexican’s face.
“Fuck you.”
The Mexican’s face brightened, almost as if Walker’s reply was the one he’d been hoping for. He stared at the biker like he was proud of him again while swinging his arm out behind him without turning back.
Walker strained to see what he was doing. He saw one of Navarro’s enforcers hand him something but couldn’t see what it was. Then Navarro smiled at him and brought it out, like a magician pulling out a rabbit, holding it up in front of Walker—a pair of garden shears, the one-handed kind with a spring between the blades.
He snapped the blades together as a demonstration, then turned his attention farther down Walker’s body.
“Let’s see . . . what shall we start with?”
Walker tensed up and tried to lean his head up to see what Navarro was doing, but he couldn’t see much beyond the back of the Mexican, whose arms were busy with something. Then he heard a sickening crunch and a snap, and Navarro turned back to face him. He looked gleeful as he brought something up for Walker to see.