Dead Six

of it. He never heard me rise from behind the filing cabinets.

I wrapped my arm around his throat, other hand clamping over his mouth, locking him right down. “Make a noise and I’ll snap your neck,” I whispered. He nodded slowly. “Good. Don’t reach for the gun in your desk. I’ve already taken it. Go for the knife in your pocket and I kill you. Comprende?” He nodded again. I removed my hand slowly but kept up the pressure so he could barely breathe.

“What do you want?” he whispered, terrified.

I slowly reached down and lifted his lunch bag from the table, bringing it up to our faces, and smelled it. Ham, eggs, bacon, guacamole, jalapenos, on fresh baked bread, oh yeah . . . I hadn’t eaten since the flight. I was starving. “I want your lunch. Dude, Lomitos Argentinos? This stuff is going to kill you. I see Juanita’s still trying to fatten you up. It’s working.” I patted his gut.

He hesitated. It had been years. “Lorenzo?”

I let go of his throat. “What’s up, Guillermo?”

He spun around, eyes widening in shock. “Pendejo! You scared the piss out of me!”

I put my finger in front of my lips, signaling the need for quiet. “I snuck in. I didn’t want anybody else in your outfit to know I was here. What’s up, man?” I grinned.

He crushed me in a hug. “You always were a scary bastard,” he said as we clapped each other on the back. Guillermo let go and studied me. “But what’re you doing here? I thought you guys were in Thailand? Where’s Death Train? Where’s Carl? The asshole still owes me money.”

Guillermo Reyes and I went way back. I shook my head. “Big Eddie killed them.”

“Oh, shit. Sorry, man,” he said. “That sucks. They were good men, honorable men. I hadn’t heard . . .” Realization dawned. “Hey, man, I don’t do nothing with Big Eddie anymore. He’s too crazy. The money’s not worth it. That man gives me nightmares.”

“I know,” I said quickly. “I don’t want you to get involved.”

It was obvious that was a relief. “Well, thanks for sneaking in. Last thing I want is being seen with somebody Big Eddie’s looking for. I like not getting my house burned down with me in it, know what I mean?”

“I need a favor.”

Guillermo scowled. He knew exactly what kind of favor somebody like me probably needed. “I’m a legitimate businessman now.”

“Legitimate my ass. That’s why this dinky airstrip has fifty flights a day taking off? Sightseeing?”

He smiled; once a crook, always a crook. “Smuggling is a legitimate business. All right, I still owe you a favor.”

Once upon a time—well, about eight years ago— Guillermo had pissed off a certain group of drug dealers. They’d decided that for his disrespect the lovely young Reyes family needed to die. But before that could happen, Carl, Train, and I had made all those bad men go quietly away forever. We’d staged our own little Dia De Los Muertos, only with real dead people, and kept their money. Good times.

“A favor? You owe me like five.” He had three kids, so he knew exactly what I was talking about. “But I’m not picky. I just need intel. It’s been a really long time, and I need to cross the border tonight.” It would have been nice to fly directly into the states, but since I had no idea what the mystery item in my possession was, I had not wanted to try to bluff my way through US Customs. Those guys were actually really good at their jobs. The officials at the Mexico City airport were a lot easier to work with once you passed over the mordida. Reaper was still in Cairo recuperating. Once I had a clue where I was going, he would just fly directly there to meet me. Travel was much simpler when you weren’t smuggling glowing beetle vials.

“Whoa. Lorenzo is going back to the States? Are you loco? You need a place to hide, I can help you. I’ve got a little place back in the mountains. Beautiful. You stay there as long as you want.”

“No. I’ve got to do this. I just need to know where it’s safe to cross.” The last time I’d been here, Mexico still had a semi-functioning government. I didn’t know what the border was like anymore. For all I knew, the Americans had actually secured it since then. “I only need to get into Arizona.”

Guillermo plopped into his seat and opened his lunch. He pulled a giant knife from his pocket, flicked it open, and sliced his messy sandwich in two. He passed me the smaller side. “So, you were thinking that with a full-on revolution south of the border, your countrymen would actually be paying attention?” He laughed. “Man, you worry too much. Paying attention would cost money and be racist. Some movie stars said so. The military is for rent in this State. You got some extra money and I’ll send you across with an army tank if you want.”

So, just as lax as usual. Figures. “No tanks.”

“Seriously, man. It’s so open that it’s getting bad for business. I’m a professional, I run a clean outfit, but now I’ve got to compete with every coked-out asshole who’s just itching to shoot up innocent bystanders. And those UN pinche faggots—gotta bribe them more often than I did the old Federales. And you won’t believe this. I’ve got rag-heads sneaking across the border to blow shit up. Hell, about once a week now I get some dude named Achmed, pretending to be Mexican, crossing the border with bombs or poison gas or some scary shit. You know me, I kill those putas on sight.”

“That’s mighty nice of you, Guillermo.”

He snorted. “They start blowing up schools in Happytown, USA, and it turns out they crossed here, and then the US overreacts once the shit’s already blown up, and it’ll kill business for us regular guys. It’ll go from one Border Patrol per hundred square miles to a thousand Navy SEALs. I know how you Americans do it. You love to lock the barn after all the horses are gone. It’s getting bad lately. The world’s getting crazier, I tell you.”

It was kind of sad when smugglers were our first line of border security. The food was amazing. Juanita was still a great cook. “Got a map?”

Santa Vasquez stank.

The smell was a combination of chemicals, garbage, open sewer, and crowded humanity. I had been all over the Third World, and this town had to be in the middle of the list of olfactory offenders. It was worse than Afghanistan, where the stink of dried human waste was embedded into the dust, but it was far better than the shallow-grave smell of Bosnia back when everything fell apart there.

The town was on the other side of the sagebrush-covered hillside, but the prevailing winds still carried the funk toward the Arizona border. It was night and dark enough that I could barely make out the rest of the group stumbling northward. During the day illegals tended to walk in bunches, but at night they unconsciously strung out into a single-file line. I could hear the sloshing of the milk jugs of water that everyone else was carrying. The ground was rough, uneven, and strewn with trash.

I was dressed like the other border jumpers. Rough jeans, a button-down work shirt, and a ratty ball cap. I was unshaven and had not bathed since my flight had landed in Mexico City yesterday morning. I was traveling light, just a small pack and some water. The drug mules were the ones with the burlap forty-five-pound backpacks, and their tracks tended to leave deeper heel prints. Those were the ones that the Border Patrol paid extra attention to, and those boys knew how to track. Once I split off from the herd, I didn’t want my footprints to stand out.

It was late June and hot, but my body was acclimatized to the Middle East. This was pleasant by comparison. We were 5,000 feet farther above sea level than I was used to, so I was a bit out of breath. The border was a hundred yards away, and Guillermo said that the terrain was rough enough and covered in ocotillo that it was a rare occurrence to have Border Patrol vehicles in the area. Since I wanted to be discreet, Guillermo had pointed me to this section. The path was through a rough, hilly area. If any of my fellow travelers got picked up by the USBP, they would be detained, given a Capri Sun drink and a picante-flavored cup of noodles, fingerprinted, and bussed back across the border. For me, I was armed, smuggling something priceless, and had no idea what kind of flags my fingerprints might raise in America, so better safe than sorry.

Jill had not called me back yet, and it was beginning to worry me. I had left a message with the Fat Man to tell Eddie that I would arrange a drop-off within the week. The last thing I wanted was for him to get jumpy. When Eddie gets jumpy, people get burned.

There was movement in the sagebrush ahead. Instinctively, I took a knee and crouched low. The other