The Devil's Elixir

her.

She pulled out her weapon as several rounds sliced through the air and whistled past her. A couple of kids who were climbing back into their family car started screaming as a nearby windshield shattered, and the lot turned to mayhem with people yelling and taking cover. Jules was leveling her gun at the lead killer, looking for a clear shot, when, to the right, a black-and-white drove into the lot. The hostiles saw it, too, and as one of them slowed to fire at it, Jules stopped, crouched and let off five shots in quick succession, missing him but forcing him to take cover behind the corner of the building on the west side of the service road.

The other kept going, staying low, ducking for cover behind successive cars, heading straight for the lot’s exit—and the Ford Explorer.

Jules’s body ignited with alarm.

She bolted forward again as the black-and-white screeched to a halt. Two SDPD cops jumped out and went to take up positions behind their car, but the driver was hit and dropped to the ground before he could make it. Without coming to full halt, Jules took aim at the hostile who had taken down the cop, but there were civilians all around the lot and she couldn’t fire. She had to keep going. The hostile heading for Tess was still rushing down the side of the lot, closing fast on the parked SUV.

Jules looked right and left. There was no way she was going to get to Tess first. Not without running straight into to the hostile’s path.

The hostile was now beelining for the car—he seemed to know Tess and Alex were in it, possibly because Tess wasn’t in a parking spot but waiting by the exit. As their trajectories converged on the Explorer, Jules saw him train his gun on it—but she couldn’t shoot at him, not with all the people and parked cars between them.

Instead, she veered right and leapt up onto the hood of a parked car, climbing quickly onto its roof, where she could get a clearer shot at the man. She lined him up, gripping her gun with both hands, about to pull the trigger when shots cut the air past her from the right, from the shooter farther back. A round grazed her shoulder, throwing her off balance, and she fell off the roof and hit the asphalt hard, her gun skittering out of her fingers.

The shooter she’d tried to take out was now barely twenty yards away from her and charging in for the kill.

Jules was on her hands and knees, looking for her gun, eyes darting from under the cars and back to catch glimpses of the killer closing in, seeing a wicked grin creep over his face as he anticipated the kill—then she heard a wild screech from behind her and turned to see the Explorer lurching backward, wheels spinning, coming right at her.

She rolled out of its way as it drew level with her, its tires squealing as it slewed to a stop.

She didn’t need an embossed invitation.

She pulled the back door open and leapt inside.

“Go!” she yelled.

Tess threw the car into gear and floored the gas, and as they blew out of the exit, Jules caught a glimpse of the receding gunman who was already pulling back and disappearing into the crowd.

As Tess swung onto Park Boulevard and pulled away from the park, Jules knew the area would soon be crawling with cops. They’d deal with the shooters. Still, she wasn’t sure she’d made the right call. She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself as she wondered about it.

Either way, Alex and Tess were safe.

That had to count for something.

45

I could breathe again.

Tess and Alex were now out of harm’s way, tucked away in a bureau safe house that Jules had driven them to, straight from Balboa Park and bypassing the hotel. Villaverde had sent a couple of agents to the hotel to pack up their stuff and take it over; one of them would stay with them to beef up security. I promised Tess I’d be there as soon as I could. Until then, I was in Villaverde’s office with him and Munro, chewing over what Pennebaker’s little news flash meant.

“It’s got to be someone who was close to Navarro,” Munro speculated. “Someone who knew what he was working on and is now trying to get his hands on it, one of his lieutenants who climbed up the ranks after he was killed.”

That’s how it works down there. Every time some kingpin is arrested or killed, you get a bunch of his underlings going to war with each other over who’s going to take his place, all while trying to fend off takeover attempts from other cartels. The violence spirals and is often far worse than it was before the takedown. It’s like we can’t win either way.

We weren’t going to get anything out of his shooters. The one Jules had knifed was DOA before he reached the hospital. The other two had melted away into the crowd and disappeared.

Villaverde asked, “What is this drug anyway? What was so special about it?”

“We don’t know,” Munro told him. “All we know is that it’s a very powerful hallucinogen that McKinnon found through some godforsaken tribe in the middle of nowhere.”

I remembered the recording I’d heard of McKinnon’s distress call. It had come in unexpectedly, via a cell phone that had been smuggled in to him.

His message was brief, chaotic, and intense.

He gave his name and said he’d been kidnapped several months earlier by armed bandits while bioprospecting in the rainforests down in the south, near Chiapas. The banditos had thought to ransom him to whatever big pharmaceutical company he was working for—a common occupational hazard for researchers working in the hinterlands in that part of the world. When it turned out McKinnon wasn’t working for anyone but himself, they debated killing him before coming up with another way to monetize their catch. They offered him to Navarro, figuring El Brujo would be interested in the kidnapped chemist’s talents.

They had no idea.

In a desperate attempt to stay alive by proving his usefulness, McKinnon made the mistake of telling Navarro about something he’d discovered, something he’d been searching for for years, something the shaman of a small, isolated tribe living deep in the rainforest had shared with him: a radical hallucinogen that was, according to him, unlike anything else out there. Navarro tried it, loved it, and became obsessed with it.

“McKinnon was very cagey about giving us any specifics,” Munro told Villaverde. “It was like pulling teeth. He said it was an alkaloid that would be irresistibly popular, and described it as ‘ayahuasca on steroids.’ But Navarro had a problem. With most of these tribal hallucinogens, like ayahuasca—taking them is like drinking mud. Literally. Thick horrible sludge that tastes like shit and makes you puke your guts out for days. No one would want to try that. Navarro needed McKinnon to turn his discovery into an easy-to-pop pill that didn’t have the horrible side effects—and once it was a pill, Navarro could easily add chemicals into the mix to make it highly addictive. He threatened McKinnon with a slow, drawn-out death—we know how convincing he can be on that front. So McKinnon got to work. And he did it. He told us he figured out how to synthesize it into pill form, but he hadn’t told Navarro—not yet. He wasn’t sure how long he could hold out. We looked into McKinnon and he checked out. He had the profile and all the know-how he needed to come up with something like that. So we had to do something. We couldn’t afford to let that drug hit the streets. That’s why we had to get him out.”

Or kill him, I thought.

“But you don’t know what its effects are?” Villaverde pressed.

“McKinnon wouldn’t say. I guess he thought it was too damn dangerous to say more. That’s why he called in his SOS. And that’s why he didn’t leave any record of it behind. At least, nothing we’ve found.”

Villaverde nodded, soaking it in. “So now we’ve got another player after it, whoever hired the bikers.” He turned to me. “Why you? What do they think you can give them?”

I said, “I have no idea. But they must know I was there”—I turned to Munro—“we were there, and maybe they think I found McKinnon’s notes and still have them.” I looked at Munro, curious about