King of Swords

“All right, little man, you want to kill me? You want to kill someone? Let’s see you do it, you goat prick.” The kicker flipped open a long wooden-handled folding knife, freeing the little boy’s hands with a single slice of the razor-honed blade.

The little boy rose to his bare feet, glaring defiantly. The kicker spat dismissively and cuffed the boy, knocking him back a few paces; but the little boy remained on his feet, although obviously dazed by the blow.

The man strode to him and flipped off his pistol’s safety, jamming it into the little boy’s tiny fingers while maintaining an iron grip on it. He forced the child’s hand towards the back of his father’s head, holding the knife at the boy’s throat. He reeked of onions, alcohol and sweat, and the little boy gagged at the powerful stench of his bear-like captor.

“Go ahead, cabron. Be a man. Blow his fucking head off. Either that, or I’ll cut your throat and fuck him in the ass for good measure. After I’m through fucking you, too,” the kicker hissed in his ear.

The roar of an engine arriving in the field startled the group, and the kicker reflexively squeezed the boy’s hand, depressing the hair trigger of the automatic. A spray of blood spackled the little boy as the father fell forward, his struggle on the planet finally at an end.

A stately older man approached the scene from his Ford Bronco, taking in the carnage with a practiced glare. Like the others, he wore a cowboy hat, but his bearing was one of authority that immediately commanded the men’s full attention.

“What the fuck are you doing? What’s going on here?” he demanded, as the kicker scrambled to his feet, fear spreading over his face, as well as his partner’s.

“Uh, nothing. Just cleaning up the job, Jefe. Having a little fun,” the kicker mumbled sheepishly.

The man slapped him, his look radiating contempt as he shook his head. He regarded the boy, who watched the scene impassively, his face smeared with his father’s blood, a fleck of brain stuck to his cheek near where two rivulets of tears had trickled a channel in the gore.

“Your fun is over. Finish this.” The leader studied the child carefully for a few more seconds. “The boy will come with me. Hurry up with this mess. I haven’t got all night.” He kneeled in front of the small face, and flicked the errant cerebral speck off his stern countenance. “This is a lesson for you. Your father took a chance and didn’t think through the consequences, so now everyone has to pay. I don’t want to hurt them anymore than they want to hurt me, but the law of the land is that if you cross me, you die. So we all pay the price. I’ve spared you because you’re brave, and I can use brave men around me. So remember tonight, and remember that I saved you from this,” he beckoned at the burning hovel and the bodies.

The boy glared at the man, unable to process much after the horror of the execution. The roof of the main house collapsed in a shower of amber sparks; both man and boy turned to look at it. A crow took flight from the field, its startled, raucous cry piercing the silence as it beat its wings over the slaughter. The man grabbed the boy’s chin and returned the child’s focus to his mustached face.

“I will be your new father, and the only god you will worship. I am the law, and I am the judge and the jury. Don’t forget it. Remember that I saved you, and could have killed you with a snap of my fingers.” The man stood, nodding at the kicker, who was obviously relieved to have gotten off with nothing more than a little humiliation and a slap. He took the boy’s trembling hand and turned, the child padding by his side as they walked to his vehicle.

Neither turned when two gunshots fractured the night.

Present Day, Los Cabos, Mexico

At six-thirty a.m., the old school bus creaked to a halt at the side of the dirt road in the barrio, just off the street that led to the small municipal airport. Its front door opened to the waiting group of workers, who shuffled groggily towards their ride. They were dressed in ragged jeans and T- shirts, and most of the men wore hooded sweatshirts in spite of the daily ninety-degree heat. There wasn’t much talking as they climbed aboard, and most conversations died once the small portable radio at the front of the bus was turned on, blaring ranchero music from its tinny speaker.

Thirty minutes later, the bus arrived at its destination, a gargantuan construction project on the slope of a hill just off the main highway, near a toll road leading to the international airport. A golf course stretched off into the distance; the perimeter of which was dotted with homes. A school sat below the project, dwarfed by its scope. Across the highway, a shopping plaza loomed over the surrounding buildings, housing a grocery store and a host of shops, with aboveground as well as underground parking areas.

When the bus pulled up the service road to the drop-off point, the site was already a swarm of activity, with workers milling about everywhere. Twenty other buses similar to the new arrival waited in line to exit, having discharged their loads of workers. Still more were queued to gain entry. A long line of personnel transport wound its way from the construction zone to a dirt field a quarter mile away that had been set up as a longer-term parking facility for the rickety conveyances.

The supervisors appeared at seven-fifteen and passed out hard hats — an unusual requirement for workers in Baja, but mandatory on this particular project. The different trades grouped together according to specialty — to the right were the masons, to the left the carpenters, in the middle the painters, in the back the electricians. A sense of controlled pandemonium pervaded the air and the pressure to perform was high. They were a little over four weeks out from show time, and scrambling to catch up to the schedule. Crews were being run round-the-clock, the prior eighteen hour days of nine hour shifts having proved insufficient to meet deadlines. A host of new arrivals waited on the perimeter for their assignments, bewildered somewhat at the underlying chaos that rumbled in the heavy atmosphere.

The project had been plagued with labor problems, and disputes were now being settled with summary firings of the sub-contractors. The company chartered with making the project happen was in a state of raw panic; there was no higher a profile build in all of Mexico. Many companies had underbid to get the work and had failed at every turn to perform. The lack of certainty in the employees created an unhappy labor pool. This in turn resulted in yet more mistakes or overruns, resulting in more firings, which generated a negative chain reaction.

The work orders were handed out to the peritos, the supervisors for a particular trade or section of the project, who in turn issued a list of the day’s concepts to their workers. At the end of the day, the peritos checked the work and verified that the tasks had been completed, then reported the status of their jobs to the main supervisor, who had a team of engineers working to stage the various projects to be completed on the following day.

Turnover had been high in the skilled trades, especially the plumbers and the engineers, who were essential to the project’s completion. Most of the companies that had begun the project were no longer there, their attempts to wrangle more money out of the project once they’d won the bid having failed.

The new electrical supervisor for zone seven nodded as the harried engineer in charge of the myriad electrical details for the project curtly handed him his day’s assignments along with a rolled up plan for his area, before moving to the next man in line. There were thirteen electric sub-contractors who acted as supervisors to the actual electricians; six of them had only been hired within the last three weeks.

The zone seven supervisor signaled his men, and together they moved up the concrete ramp to the upper tier of the main entry, where they would be working on the lighting conduit for the massive reception area, which would double as the stage for any opening festivities. The men moved to their assigned work spots, and the supervisor called two of his more senior workers and handed them a set of detailed drawings with minor modifications on it. Specifically, eight of the conduit runs were going to be rewired to accommodate a central switching system for the new runs the detail plans now showed. The men nodded to one another — this would be easy to install at this stage, and wouldn’t be much more work, so it would be possible to complete it within the timeframe allocated by the schedule.

El Rey slapped two of the electricians on the back, and they moved to begin the modifications. He watched as they added the desired wiring and strung the modified sections with the existing ones. Ensuring that none of the engineers were around, he studied the new plan he’d had drawn by his consultant in La Paz. It would enable him to mount a set of high explosive nodes to simultaneously detonate with a single flip of a switch, blanketing the reception area in a lethal shower of shrapnel that would slaughter everyone in the vicinity. It would be a killing field when they went off — no one would be able to survive it.

Normally, he favored more surgical methods for fulfilling a contract, but with all the security that would be in