police.”
Kurtzman saw his solution within seconds. “I’ll have Barb work it up and get you documents, IDs and cover files via courier.”
Lyons nodded and rose. “I’m in a car.”
Ojinaga, Chihuahua
LYONS STOOD TO one side leaning against the family room wall and watched Blancanales work his magic. His partner wore his sixth-best tropical-weight suit and looked exactly like a senior insurance investigator. He exuded paternal concern for the distraught family as he interviewed them. Blancanales didn’t have to fake it. Neither did Lyons. In his own days as a police officer he’d been given the terrible task of informing families many times. Lyons grimaced internally. They meant business when they said there was nothing worse than seeing your children leave the world first.
The Villa family had been destroyed.
For a father of six, Rafa Villa had only just turned forty. His red-rimmed eyes looked a thousand years old. Señor Villa’s shoulders sagged as though they held the weight of the world. His wife, Juanita, cried so hard as her younger sister Sofi held her that her tears might make Jonah build a second ark.
Their daughter, Maribel, had just turned eighteen this month. She had graduated at the top of her class at the private Catholic school her parents had scrimped and saved to send her to. The pretty young girl with glasses and black hair that reached her waist had won a foreign student scholarship to the University of Northern Texas. Her declared major was Library and Information Sciences. Her dream was to be a head librarian somewhere in the United States. Two weeks ago she had gone to Texas for college orientation with her aunt Sofi as her chaperone. Maribel had come back with a somewhat geeky but very earnest blond boy and fellow freshman Todd Potter from Slippery Rock, Pennsylvania, who’d texted her surprisingly not bad love poetry.
One week ago to the day Maribel had strapped on a suicide vest of TNT cylinders. The cylinders were wrapped with plastic sheeting containing nuts, bolts and ball bearings. The homemade shrapnel had been coated with rat poison to facilitate uncontrollable hemorrhaging in the victims. Security camera footage showed Maribel Villa stepping into a crowded cantina in Ciudad Juárez, during the lunch rush, yanking off her raincoat and pulling the rip cord fuse. Maribel had killed six people, seven including herself. Two of them had been children. She’d severely injured eighteen others.
It was utterly senseless. During her short life, Maribel had never left Ojinaga until her short trip for initial orientation and dorm assignment at UNT. There was no evidence of her having any political leanings whatsoever. Maribel’s three great passions in life appeared to be classical Spanish literature, the Ojinaga municipal library where she worked after school, and her dog, Kaliman.
The fawn-colored boxer lay forlornly, uncomprehending but inundated with his family’s sadness. Lyons dropped to his heels and scratched the boxer behind his ears. Lyons’s inner detective was not buying Maribel being radicalized over a single weekend while under the watchful eye of her aunt, much less at freshman orientation at the University of Northern Texas. The whole thing stank to high heaven. He sighed quietly at Kaliman. “Who’s a good boy?”
Kaliman’s docked tail twitched forlornly a few times as he licked Lyons’s wrist. Lyons nodded. “You and me both, brother.”
Blancanales looked over at Lyons. “Señor Irons, do you have any questions?”
Lyons and Blancanales had come to the Villas’ small farm posing as insurance investigators. One Latin and one Anglo fit the bill. A three-man team would have seemed too much. Schwarz was up in the hills with a rifle maintaining surveillance on the Villa farm and the two approaches to it.
An undertaker would have given his left testicle for the empathy and professionalism the Able Team leader exuded. “I know the state and local police have already done so, but with permission, I would like to see your daughter’s room. Of course you both are welcome to observe.”
Señor and Señora Villa looked at Lyons petting the family dog. Juanita Villa gave Lyons a tremulous smile. “Of course.”
Rafa Villa hung his head for a long moment. Lyons almost thought he had gone to sleep. Señor Villa raised his head and locked eyes with Lyons. “There is something I have not shown the federales.” Fresh tears spilled down the small farmer’s cheeks. “Something terrible.”
Juanita’s head snapped around. “¿Qué, mi amor, qué?”
Rafa Villa rose without a word and walked down the narrow adobe hall to his daughter’s room. Lyons and Blancanales shot each other a look and girded themselves for the worst.
Señor Villa reemerged with an assault rifle. Lyons wasn’t a gun-bunny but he recognized the weapon as one of the relatively new Mexican military FX-05 Xiuhchoatls or “Fire Snake” rifles. The weapon was black and stubby like most modern military weapons. It was Mexico’s first indigenous assault weapon, and only issued to certain units. If you were found with one and not active in the Mexican military it was pretty much a summary death sentence. It was a very strange thing for a teenage Mexican girl to have under her bed. This example was distinguished by a having a nonmilitary-issue, twin-drum, 100-round Beta C-Mag.
Alarm bells rang up and down the Lyons’s spine.
Señor Villa was not carrying the weapon like a holy relic, or like a dangerous serpent involved in his daughter’s death. He carried it crooked in his arm, as if he was going duck hunting. Lyons shot to his feet. In the same motion his Python appeared with slight-of-hand suddenness. “Freeze!”
Villa didn’t freeze. He raised the rifle to his shoulder.
Kaliman lunged and sank his teeth into Lyons’s wrist. Lyons’s shot went low and wide left, and the pistol fell from his hand as Kaliman’s canines found his ulnar nerve.
Blancanales tackled Aunt Sofi off the couch.
Rafa Villa shot his wife in the face.
Blancanales struggled to draw but he was entangled in screaming Sofi. Villa swung his rifle onto Blancanales’s puppy-pile and strode over. Lyons heaved seventy pounds of snarling lockjawed dog into his arms and vaulted the couch. Blancanales managed to lash out with one foot to slam a stacked leather heel into Villa’s shin.
The assault rifle ripped a 20-round burst into the adobe floor a foot from Blancanales’s head. Lyons’s shoulder block hit Villa with every pound of his body and his canine burden behind it. The Villa patriarch went flying with his rifle stitching holes in the roof as he fell backward. Lyons and Kaliman fell on top of him. The boxer gave a muffled yelp but maintained his death grip. Villa struggled beneath them both. Lyons rose up on his elbows and slammed his forehead directly between Villa’s eyes. The Able Team warrior saw purple pinpricks around the edge of darkened vision with the blow.
Rafa Villa went limp.
Kaliman rolled an eye up at Lyons accusingly. He wasn’t letting go. “Damn it...” He’d drained his stun gun into Roble and hadn’t packed a spare power module. Lyons dug his left hand around Kaliman’s trachea, found the dog’s thudding pulse and squeezed off the canine’s carotids. “Bad dog, no biscuit...”
Kaliman’s jaws slowly relaxed in the strangle.
Blancanales rose with his pistol in hand. His face was bleeding in several spots from fragments of flying floor chips. He helped Sofi up. “Are you okay?”
“Yes.”
