“Why did you sneak up on me?” I demanded.
He was as pissed as I was. “And you didn’t do the same? I can’t believe you’d do this, Delilah. Be all okay with staying behind and then slip down to Juarez anyway. It’s dangerous and juvenile and it jeopardizes the mission.”
“Maybe you should have confided ‘the mission’ to me. It’s dangerous and juvenile for you to come back here right where El Demonio wants you.”
The chuckles behind us continued. “You hotheaded kids.” Tallgrass used the same forced whisper we had. “The mission will be fine if you quit trying to out-protect the other. Come on. Time to crawl for your country. They need us on the ridge to see if there are any cartel movements around here.”
“You all right?” Ric mumbled in my ear. He was not only wearing camos, but the moonlight illumined a face painted in dark patterns like cracked dry earth.
“Don’t growl at me. I’d be a lot better if I hadn’t have been given the bum’s rush down a desert roller coaster.”
Grabbing the leather jacket that had fallen loose, I struggled into it without lifting too high from the ground, now that I knew this was a scouting party. Tallgrass’s black jeans, boots, and Western shirt faded into the sky. He crouched to dig in his backpack and threw something down at me.
“Camos. Too small for me, and I don’t need ’em any more than Quicksilver does. Fasten your duty belt over them.”
I didn’t argue, but struggled into the equivalent of desert warfare pajamas. By then, Quicksilver had already belly-crawled back to the ridge top. He and Tallgrass kept low enough to blend with the terrain.
I made a face no one could see at the thought of overlooking those millions of roiling spiders and snakes and scorpions as I dug in my knees and elbows and worked back up the slope like a recruit in boot camp.
Ric was still mad, because he got there first and didn’t look back. Fine with me. I planted myself on the other side of Tallgrass with Quicksilver.
Leonard Tallgrass had been friends with Rick when he was a whiz-kid FBI profiler with a knack for finding buried bodies. I wasn’t sure of the guy’s tribe, but he was as pure a Native American you saw these days off a reservation, and pure Kansas cowboy too. Quicksilver had cottoned to him immediately, which had miffed me some. Quick and I were an unofficial K-9 team. Still, Tallgrass was hard not to like, and harder not to trust, which did not come to me naturally.
At least he didn’t treat me as too fragile to go into the field. He passed me a pair of really powerful binoculars without comment while he and Ric lowered their bone-sensing night goggles from their foreheads to perch onto their faces.
Now I saw the reason for the vermin traffic jam. The binoculars showed a plain below pockmarked with mesquite trees and sagebrush and behind any smidgeon of cover sat duffel bags of probable weapons. A secret army was assembling and preparing to dig in.
On the horizon, heat lightning stabbed the dark night sky.
“What’s going on here?” I asked. Only the vermin had ears and they weren’t the enemy.
“Smackdown.” Ric’s voice was still low. “Secret combined US-Mexican government operation. That’s why I couldn’t tell you. This is an official consulting job for Tallgrass and me. The joint military forces have run a sting that will lure all the firepower of the Juarez and Sinaloa cartels into facing off ten miles north of here.”
“What’s the bait?” I asked.
“A juicy set of visiting state department hostages-to-be, worth millions in ransom,” Tallgrass said, “and it’s working. The bastards from both cartels are setting up major operations to grab the visiting honchos and families.”
“It’ll take them another day to muster all their men and weapons to go after the same target,” Ric said. “Then the combined government forces wait until they take each other out and scoop up the survivors.”
“Smart.” I heard the crack of thunder in the distance. “I was afraid Torbellino and his bull whip were involved.”
“They may be,” Ric said. “He’s certainly not falling for wasting his forces against the two warring cartels while they slaughter one another, as Washington hopes. That action is way north of here.”
“You told them,” Tallgrass muttered, “that wouldn’t work.”
I had one question. “If all the action is moving north, who’s going to take on Torbellino’s gang of zombies on speed?”
Ric lifted his bone-seeking night vision goggles and pulled them down to his neck. I could see he wasn’t wearing a concealing contact lens over his single silver iris.
He focused beyond the ridge, facing the dark and the distant lightning.
“Me.”
Chapter Thirty-one
“NOW YOU SEE,” Tallgrass said to me.
Did I ever.
Ric was sweeping his unprotected gaze over the legions of teeming beetles and spiders and lizards and snakes and scorpions like an invisible searchlight while I watched through the binos.
I gasped as their scales and carapaces and even fuzzy black tarantula legs changed in a dazzling wave to sheer silver. The wave reversed course, sinking down the slope on our side and cresting the opposite ridge of the gash, overflowing onto the flat desert plain beyond.
Ric followed them down like a shepherd, a dull mottled figure behind the sparkling living metal.
I watched Quicksilver slink around the edges of the mechanistic silver wave, forcing the components into tighter formation. If Quick could herd the robot vermin, Ric could perform more wonders to stop Torbellino.
Tallgrass stood slowly, but he’d kept his high-tech goggles on. “He’s just letting his new powers out to play. The vermin was massing to escape the action that’s agitating their territory. They sense it’s more than the gangs or the cartel hitmen using their range to bury the latest bodies.”
As I watched Ric herding the silver tide south, he explained. “The military honchos thought Ric and I’d serve best as guides, Ric because he knows this terrain from his childhood indenture to El Demonio, me because I have Native American tracking blood as well as FBI creds.”
“Kinda stereotyped expectations.”
“Kinda dumb. The border crime and military types never believed us when we said El Demonio was more than a power-mad cartel king who used superstition and gory rituals to control his men and the Mexican authorities and population.”
“They’re still in denial about the Millennium Revelation?”
“So are these cartel drug warriors. They’re so busy being bad they think they can conquer anyone or anything. What we have here is uptight military might versus gangster ignorance. The human cartel bosses fell for the trap.”
“The inhumanly cruel cartel bosses.”
“Ric and I never figured on El Demonio Torbellino doing anything but hanging in the wings and offing anyone who was left and taking over everything. That leaves us to stop him.”
“And this will happen when?”
“Tomorrow night. Now we have the lay of the land. Ric has been testing his new powers.”
“Gained through me.”
“Maybe so, Miss Delilah, but he needs to know he can use them solo. This is the one chance he has to put down Torbellino forever, on the turf where their dance of death began years ago.”
I looked at the silver-armored army Ric was scattering into the brush, the shining effect fading as the myriad tiny components separated. I had no doubt he could call up all these slithering toxic beasties any time he needed them.
“Ric somehow . . . contracted . . . my affinity for silver,” I told Tallgrass. “Maybe that’s why I feel so responsible for him.”
