The men exchanged perplexed glances.
* * *
Daria and Patricio were still moving, face-to-face, and turning. Patricio looked a bit surprised. Daria smiled languidly.
She gripped his right hand fiercely and stepped farther to his right, twisting his arm as she moved. Before he was aware of it, she slid behind him, pulled up his arm, and twisted painfully. His shoulder popped out of its socket and lights flashed before his eyes.
Daria raised her left forearm and drove it into the base of his skull, slamming his forehead into the door.
His vision blurred and his knees buckled. Daria held him aloft against the door and raised his dislocated right arm higher.
Her thumb flicked the plastic blade from its sheath. She slid the serrated edge the length of Patricio’s right arm, from the heel of his hand as far up the inside of his arm as his suit coat allowed.
The skin split easily. Warm blood roiled from the long, surgically clean wound.
Daria held the gushing right wrist over Patricio’s left shoulder, and directly over the card reader.
A Leveque system can be short-circuited easily enough. Water worked fine, as would wine, but really, any liquid would suffice.
João Patricio moaned as his blood gushed into the magnetic card reader. Daria smelled smoke rising from the short-circuited locking mechanism.
Time to see what would happen next. The one-room office, between the stairwell and the outside wall, was too small for an ambush from within. That left her free to ignore any potential threats within the room.
Daria used her strength, weight, and training to pin the half-conscious importer between herself and the door.
* * *
Guerrón and Banguera waited a handful of seconds for the Portuguese businessman to unbolt the door from the inside. Doing this favor for the cartel was erasing a very large debt Patricio owed.
Nothing happened. The soldiers thought they heard a
thump
from inside the room.
Banguera, his absurdly muscle-bound upper body gleaming in sweat, reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a magnetic card. He swiped the card through the lock and awaited the
ca-clank.
Nothing.
The LED light on the card reader flickered red. There was a strange hiss from the locking mechanism.
The Sinaloan soldier swiped the card again.
Another hiss. This time, they didn’t even get the red LED. Nothing.
Guerrón brushed his checkered keffiyeh behind his back, set down his waterproof satchel, pulled out a Heckler & Koch MP 5 machine pistol. He slapped home a banana clip. He waved his friend out of the way, and thumbed off the safety.
He stepped in front of the cheap wooden door and kept the sound-suppressed MP-5 on single fire. He tossed seven .9-mm. slugs into the door.
The bullets cut a perfect half circle in the door, surrounding the steel bars in the locking mechanism.
The gunmen heard a grunt through the perforated door.
* * *
Wearing a Kevlar vest is good but Daria knew, from painful experience, that standing behind the person wearing one is better.
The door took the first impact. The front of the vest took much of the rest. Patricio’s body absorbed the hydrostatic shock. The back of his vest dampened the remainder of the impact.
Daria took very little.
She felt around his waist for a gun and found nothing. She found a puny, five-shot, chrome .22 with an ivory handle strapped to one ankle. It was, as her old gunnery sergeant would have said, a complete piece of drek. She imagined firing such a weapon at plastic ducks to win a stuffed animal.
But beggars and choosers
, she thought. She pulled the little gun and shot Patricio in the left knee.
Patricio cried out in agony. He dropped to his knees and Daria dropped with him, still pinning him against the door.
“How many?”
Patricio began chanting in Portuguese.
Daria cocked the little .22 and placed it against his left elbow. She whispered in his ear, as a lover might. “Senhor.… my fee … is going … up.”
“
Two! Two! Please, God, please.
”
“Two total?”
“Two in the hall! Two in the hall! There’s a van in the alley, a fat man! Waiting! Please, by all that’s holy!”
He had lost quite a bit of blood by now. But that didn’t mean he couldn’t be of use.
João Patricio’s head lolled to one side, revealing two of the seven splintered holes evenly spaced in a half circle in the wooden door. Daria stuck the barrel of the pip-squeak .22 into one of the larger holes and fired once.
* * *
Guerrón smiled at the perfect half circle of bullet holes in the wood. He considered himself an artist with a gun. He stepped back, ready to kick it in, when they heard a second shot from within the room.
Guerrón took another step back. And another.
He looked down. Blood began seeping from his iliac artery, halfway between his left hip and his testicles.
* * *
Daria squinted through one of the other holes in the door. She saw a man’s legs stumble backward, saw a bloodstain blossom on his jeans.
One down.
Still on her knees behind the convulsing, bleeding-out importer, Daria took a moment to scan the office. One generic desk, three generic chairs on rollers with cheap but durable cloth seats and backrests. A window that looked out on gnarled, dyspeptic trunks, which is what passed for trees in L.A.
She rummaged through the dying man’s trouser pockets, leaning him up against the smashed door like the legion of cadavers at Fort Zinderneuf. She found a lighter—old, burnished, and brass—and a fat calfskin wallet. She opened it and found what she wanted: a thick wad of dollars and euros.
Perfect. Money can’t buy happiness. But it can buy time.
* * *
Banguera drew his own matching machine pistol, leather strap over his sloped shoulder. His eyes bulged as his partner stumbled back and fell on his ass against the far wall of the corridor. The ruptured artery in his groin was dampening his jeans with a fast-growing red stain. Guerrón began to twitch as his body went into shock. His H & K fell to the carpet by his side.
* * *
Daria left Patricio on his knees propped up against the door. She kicked off her stilettos and hitched up her already-short skirt to a decidedly unladylike level. She leaped up onto the cheap desk and used the lighter to ignite João Patricio’s stash of money. She held the burning end under the mandatory smoke detector that she had found in every room of every public building she had entered since defecting.
I do so love American paranoia,
she thought.
An earsplitting alarm sounded and the tiny, tin windmill beneath the ceiling-mounted spigot began to rotate, splashing water everywhere.
Daria dropped to the far side of the desk. Soaked to her skin, hair matted with water from the sprinkler, she stripped off her jacket—it was last season’s anyway.
It was her own damn fault. She shouldn’t have come to the meeting without a gun. Oh, well. Kill and learn.
She remembered a drill instructor from her Shin Bet days.
Whatever can’t be used defensively, use offensively.
The IKEA desk wouldn’t repel bullets but the cheaply made furniture was light enough to maneuver, and it rested on coasters so the office could be easily reconfigured for each new renter. She shoved the chairs out of the way and spun the desk anticlockwise so the short end faced the door.
She started shoving. Her bare feet struggled to find purchase in the soaked carpet, but the light, cheap desk on its concave coasters picked up speed.
João Patricio—kneeling against the door, barely conscious, right arm hanging limp and spooling out blood—half-turned to see the narrow edge of the desk only a meter from his face and moving fast. He screamed.
* * *
The alarm blared in the hall. Banguera felt the wheels fall off their well-crafted plan. He knelt to hoist up his friend as the busted door exploded off its hinges. He scrambled away as the door toppled like a felled tree, trapping Guerrón’s legs and drawing a howl of pain from the Ecuadorian. The Portuguese importer tumbled out into the hall, skull staved in, blood arcing in every direction. The fire alarm continued to shrill.
Madre de Dios,
Banguera thought, landing on his stomach,
lo que el Diablo?
He shook his head to clear his thoughts. He felt his machine pistol dig into his side, the strap still around his shoulder.
He rolled over to free the gun but his eyes caught on a pair of bare feet standing on the felled door, which pressed down on Guerrón’s badly bleeding leg. Banguera’s eyes traveled upward from long, tapered legs, a short skirt, a soaked and translucent blouse, to a heart-shaped face.
Only then did he realize the figure was holding Guerrón’s sound-suppressed machine pistol.
* * *
There were only a handful of offices in the incubator building and the fire alarm was sufficient to drive the few employees out into the parking lot on an otherwise dull Monday afternoon. No one noticed the bedraggled, barefoot woman, soaked to the skin, carrying stilettos and a limp, wet jacket, who padded out through the fire door and climbed into a nondescript car. She put the car in reverse, maneuvered it around the building, and into the back alley lined with Dumpsters.
* * *
Doctor Hector Avila was no doctor. They just called him that because he enjoyed using surgical tools during interrogations.
He preferred to let dumb foot soldiers like Guerrón and Banguera subdue the subject before he got involved. That’s why he sat in the van, in the alley, smoking a hefty joint with the passenger-side window open, smoke billowing out. He wanted to be relaxed before beginning his bit. Breaking a person is not an amateur’s business. It took a calm, steady hand.
Hector Avila was lost in his thoughts about how to begin: fear first, then pain? Pain, then fear? Different
patients
required different
remedies,
the doctor knew.
An unremarkable beige compact backed into the alley and had come to rest a foot from the front bumper of the van. Avila squinted through blue smoke, as the driver’s door opened and someone climbed out.
Wonderful, he thought. A civilian. Just what he needed.
It was a girl, young, barefoot. Avila tried to wave away the smoke haze to get a better look at her. She circled around and padded up to his passenger-side window, a sodden jacket draped over her left forearm.
Avila leaned out to tell the
puta
to get the hell gone. She probably was a junkie seeking a handout. Or maybe one of his few, remaining spliffs. Before he could growl at the girl, she let the sodden jacket flutter to the concrete, revealing a Heckler & Koch with a silencer. She pointed it at his face.
“Good afternoon, sir.” Her Spanish was flawless with the flair of a Catalan accent. “Do you represent the Juarez cartel?”
Dr. Avila froze, eyes bulging.
“Sir?” The woman seemed ever so calm.
“I…” The fat man felt his asthma kick in.
“I thought so.” The girl looked both ways down the alley, then back at him. “Could you step out of the van, please?”
“W-wait…” He heard his voice crack. “I just follow orders. I do as—shit!”
The joint singed his finger and thumb. He dropped it. It hit the knit shirt stretched over his obese belly. His hands flapped, slapping it to the van floor.
The girl tapped his cheek with the sound-suppressing barrel to regain his attention.
Avila whimpered.
In his storied career as a torturer, Avila had heard many men whimper. He knew the sound and considered it a sure sign that a man was breaking. Now he heard himself and blushed.
“Tsk. You mustn’t feel embarrassed.” The girl sounded genuinely sensitive. And absolutely insane. “That’s how I reacted the first time I was shot. I was eleven years old. The second time … well, I suppose I was still eleven.” She shrugged. “It’s a difficult age.”
She opened the passenger door. She waited a beat.
Avila hefted his bulk out of the van.
She slid open the rear door of the van. In the back she spotted rope, handcuffs, a small culinary blowtorch, a car battery with two cables that ended in alligator clips, and his doctor’s bag.
“Get in, please. Facedown.”
The girl spoke as one does to a distraught child: soothingly. “I would like you to send a message to the Juarez cartel for me. Will you do that, sir?”
“Yes!” Avila’s heart skipped. This might not end with a bullet to his brain. “Yes. Of course. Yes. Anything.”
“Thank you, sir.”
She slid the door closed.
* * *
Once it was closed, Daria looked to her left and right again. No witnesses. She opened the gas cap of the van. She took Guerrón’s long, al-Qaida–style keffiyeh and stuffed the cotton scarf into the gas tank as far as it would fit. She waited a few seconds for it to absorb petrol, then used Patricio’s lighter on the tail end.
She moved back to the passenger window. “Thank you, sir.”
Lying on his belly, Doctor Avila gulped. “Miss? What … what is the message?”
Daria said, “You’ll see.”
She walked to her car, opened the trunk, and pulled out her gym bag. She climbed into the compact and pulled away.
* * *
About twenty minutes later, in an elegant Rodeo Drive wine bar, a waiter brought Daria Gibron a goblet of Montepulciano and professionally ignored her spandex attire and just-showered hair.
She sipped. “That’s lovely.”
“Nice.” To Ray Calabrese, all red wines tasted more or less alike. He played with his glass a moment, avoiding eye contact. “Look, I’m sorry to dump this on you but … I’m no longer your handler.”