Ballistic

Calvo interjected, “We think it is possible he is getting his intelligence from Madrigal, but we don’t know that he is working with the Madrigal organization.”

“Your counterpart in los Vaqueros, remind me of his name.”

“Hector Serna Campos.”

“Right. Reach out to him. Tell them it is war.”

“Daniel, going to war with Madrigal right now would only cost us more money. We cannot—”

De la Rocha screamed as he stormed from the balcony into his bedroom. “Do not tell me what I cannot do! They are fighting a war with me right now, through this one man!”

“We do not know for sure!”

“I know!” de la Rocha screamed, spit flew from his mouth, and he screamed again, a guttural cry of anger and frustration, pent-up rage without an outlet. “I had this man! I had this man in front of me in chains! I could have pulled the trigger on my pistol and ended this madness a week ago! Why did I not do this? Why did I not kill that pendejo? I’ve lost so many men because I did not pull the trigger.”

Calvo said, “He’ll keep killing your men if you keep chasing him. He’s too good!”

De la Rocha regained control of himself. He took a few breaths, rubbed the back of his bare neck, and then waved a dismissive hand. “Doesn’t matter. Men are easy to lose. Pride? Pride is a very difficult thing to lose.”

He turned to Spider. “My decision is made. As of this moment, it is all-out war on los Vaqueros.”

“Entendido, senor.”

“Anywhere we find them, anywhere in the country . . .

Spider looked into his leader’s eyes. “They die.”

“Correcto.”

Calvo did not throw in the towel just yet. “Don Daniel. I beg you to listen. Spider wants war with Madrigal so that he can show you that his men can fight. They can’t kill the Gray Man because of his skill and cunning, but they can shoot a bunch of pinche Vaqueros in the streets.”

Javier “Spider” Cepeda scowled at Nestor, giving him a look countless men had seen shortly before Spider chopped off their heads. “Mi jefe, the old man just wants to avoid war with los Vaqueros because he is soft. We have been too easy in our dealings with Madrigal for too long, and look how the Sinaloan Cowboy repays us! We will fight them until they kill the Gray Man or turn him over to us. My men will turn their plaza red with their blood, and within a week the Cowboy will see that the American assassin is only a liability to his operation. Then we can back off, if you order us to do so.”

DLR was nodding before Spider finished. He turned to Calvo. “Nestor. I want you to communicate with your counterpart in los Vaqueros. Tell him that we know they are running the Gray Man, and we see this as an all-out declaration of war on our plaza. We will hold them responsible for the loss in property and in lives, and we will respond accordingly as long as the Gray Man is alive.”

Nestor was furious and frustrated, but he did not hesitate. He possessed an astute barometer that could measure the moods of his boss, and he knew this was no time to argue. “Si, Daniel. I will contact Hector Serna immediately and tell him we are at war, and I will then give him the conditions by which we will accept peace.”

The first attack took place a mere thirty-three minutes later. A pair of low-level sicarios in Mazatlan who’d been tasked to follow a local underboss in the Madrigal organization got the text message declaring open season on los Vaqueros. Immediately, they got up from their table at an outdoor cafe, tossed paper plates soaked with tamale juice into the trash, walked into the jewelry store across the street, and shot dead the man they had been tailing, along with his wife and two bodyguards.

Nine minutes after that a truck carrying four Vaqueros was pulled over by a Jalisco state police SUV on the highway from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara. The men were lined up and shot, execution style, against their vehicle, their bodies left on the hot mountain freeway like roadkill.

By evening twelve more Vaqueros had been murdered and seven wounded. Four members of Los Trajes Negros had been felled by return fire, and one passerby was wounded by shotgun pellets when a firefight broke out between rival factions of the federal police in Mexico City.

Thirty-two casualties in the first twelve hours of the war was only the beginning.

Two more days passed, and Court worked at a fever pitch through it all. His intelligence from Serna, as good as it was, paled in comparison to the product he was picking up during his raids. In Colima he took the smartphone from a sentry and found an address with the notation “Foco” by the listing. He knew this was the local slang for crystal, so he drove there and found a fenced storage facility full of shipping containers. There were several guards on duty, but Court managed to slip into the complex and place several ANFO bombs he’d built back at his mine shaft, each equipped with a simple radio transmitter detonator on them. Once clear of the blast radius, he dialed a number on one of his many mobile phones, and six containers of crystal went up in a mushroom cloud of black smoke.

On a hillside nearby he stopped to admire his work, but he saw a single man racing from the scene in a black BMW. Court ran the sport coupe off the road with his pickup, found a member of the Black Suits crawling from the wreckage, and took him hostage. Four hours later the man succumbed to his injuries but only after giving the American a treasure trove of information about de la Rocha’s crystal operation in Nayarit and Jalisco.

Court decided to focus on the meth for a few days. According to the dying Black Suit, it was DLR’s cash cow; the product was expensive to produce and, therefore, subject to easy disruption by killing or scaring off the skilled labor or destroying the infrastructure of the labs, and to Court this seemed preferable to burning pot plants or poppy fields. He’d still do that, if opportunity arose, but the foco seemed like the best bet to make a quick impact.

This led Court to Acoponeta, a small river town on the flatlands along on the road to Mazatlan. He had some addresses gleaned from the dying Black Suit that he wanted to hit before heading up into the mountains to go after a super laboratory.

Before an evening of wreaking havoc, Gentry went into a grocery to resupply with beans, soft drinks, instant coffee, and water, and he stepped into a cantina next door to use the men’s room in the back. After using the restroom and washing a small fraction of the grime from his hands, he turned halfway towards the door but stopped suddenly. There, on a wall and staring back at him, was a man’s face on a Wanted poster.

Like nothing he had felt in years, unease ripped through his body.

It was him. The fucking picture was of him.

WANTED FOR MURDER

American Assassin of the Madrigal Cartel

A local mobile number was written below.

Gentry realized now that, even if he survived this, even if he got out of Mexico, the U.S. government would label him an assassin for the Mexican mob, and he would never, ever, get back into the USA.

Was the girl worth all this?

Court shook his head, hated that the question had entered his brain.

Yes. Of course she was.

He ripped the paper sign from the wall and tossed it in the garbage.

The door on his left squeaked open.

Gentry spun as he drew his weapon, dropping low to his knees in front of the sink.

He centered the weapon on his target’s chest, his finger had already taken up the slack of the Glock’s trigger safety.

The man’s arms flew over his head. He cried out in panic, “?Madre de dios!”

Court looked past the front sight of his Glock 19, felt his finger tight on the unforgiving trigger, and he saw an overweight man in a cowboy hat, just a simple farmer, just a guy in a bar looking to relieve himself after a couple of