part of the back of the house. He’d gotten pretty artistic with that charge. It had been hidden in an AC vent with the tripwire woven through the top of a shower curtain.
It took another three minutes or so before the surviving two men reappeared in the doorway and began giving their report. Again, Spanish fluency wasn’t necessary to understand what they were saying. They’d found neither the man nor the coke they’d come for.
There were five men left outside and their discussion quickly went from heated to a full-blown shoving match. For a moment, Rapp thought they were going to start shooting at each other, but he didn’t get that lucky. Tattooed Guy managed to get control and dialed a phone while the others huddled in tight around him. They looked like they were working out the next play in MS-13’s annual football scrimmage. Did these people receive no training at all?
Rapp picked up the suppressed M4 and fired at the tightly grouped men on full automatic. Not surprisingly, they were all down before half his magazine was expended.
He stepped out of the hole, ducking under various low-hanging tree branches as he approached the men on the ground. All were dead or headed in that direction so he glanced up at the circling drone and raised one of his hands, palm up. The sentiment would be clear in any language.
Is that all you’ve got?
One of the men on the bottom of the pile started moving and Rapp shot him in the side of the head. He wasn’t going to get anywhere with these soldiers. That had already been proved during his interrogation of the men the DEA had picked up. He needed to talk to the man in charge.
Rapp walked over to the nearest SUV and turned off the music. At this point, there wasn’t much he could do other than load the product and drive off in one of Esparza’s pimped-out vehicles. If that didn’t piss the man off enough to reach out, nothing would.
He was about to climb in when the ring of a cell phone became audible. Rapp had to search through the pile of men, but finally found the phone in Tattooed Guy’s lifeless hand. The blood on the screen confused its touch sensitivity but Rapp finally managed to pick up.
“What?”
The screaming on the other end started with what he assumed was a stream of Spanish epithets.
“Speak English, dipshit.”
“I’m going to carve you up and feed you to my dogs, you . . .”
The sentence devolved into Spanish again.
“Who is this?” Rapp said, crafting his tone to sound vaguely irritated. “Lorenzo Varela? Why don’t you shut the fuck up and let the big boys work.”
The name belonged to the leader of an upstart cartel run by a college-educated kid from Mexico City. Just the kind of guy someone like Carlos Esparza would despise.
“Varela? You stupid piece of shit! This is Carlos Esparza!”
Rapp didn’t respond immediately, instead glancing nervously up at the drone. “Bullshit.”
“You want me to prove it? How about I send a hundred men with pliers and blowtorches up to you? I’m going to—”
And more with the Spanish.
Rapp waited for the cartel boss to run out of oxygen before he spoke again. “Look, man. The DEA said this was Varela’s shipment. They didn’t say anything about you.”
More Spanish. Rapp was starting to regret not paying more attention in high school.
“I don’t want a war with you, Carlos. I just needed some money to disappear with. Your product’s in a hole to the northeast of the house. Why don’t you send some guys over to get it.”
“And are you still going to be there when they show up, pendejo?”
“I could be, but I don’t think you can afford to lose any more men.”
“Fuck you!”
Rapp didn’t respond immediately, making a point to look thoughtfully up at the drone he hoped Esparza was watching from in real time.
“Maybe we can make this work for both of us,” he said finally.
“What?”
“I need money and to get as far from U.S. law enforcement as I can. And you clearly need men who can tell one end of a gun from the other.”
Esparza laughed hard enough that Rapp thought he might choke. “You just stole my drugs and killed eighteen of my men. Now you’re asking me for a job?”
“Why not? I said I’d give the coke back.” He thumbed at the bodies behind. “And you’re suddenly light on personnel.”