He took a breath, tasted the gritty dirt, coughed hard, then tried to breathe again, blinking hard against the burn in his eyes. He tried to turn around, but his legs were pinned by the dirt. He screamed Ansara’s name, but there were easily thousands of pounds of debris between him and his colleague. He screamed again, beat his fists into the fresh piles of sand, knowing that Ansara and the kid were suffocating and there wasn’t a goddamned thing he could do about it. He dug past the dirt and into his pocket, barely noticing the blood dripping down his arm. He took hold of his smartphone, but his hand trembled so badly that he dropped it. Fighting for breath and coughing yet again, he picked up the phone and dialed Towers. “They blew the fucking tunnel. Ansara’s buried. I’m stuck in here, too. Do you hear me? They blew the tunnel …”
“I hear you. A team’s coming.”
“Fuck. They spotted us.”
“They get off with the weapons?”
“I think so. Black Ford Explorer. Probably leaving the warehouse. Check with your spotters.”
“Got it. Now, Moore, you just sit tight. Help’s on the way. And I’m coming down there myself.”
It took him another five minutes to free one of his legs, and by the time he was able to lift that leg in an attempt to wriggle out of the hole, he heard a group moving into the bedroom and a voice he didn’t recognize shouting his name.
“Down here!” he cried.
A flashlight blinded him for a second until the man holding it doused the beam.
Moore glanced up into the eyes of a guy wearing the black helmet and black fatigues of an FBI task force. The guy shouldered his rifle. “Holy shit!”
Moore just looked at him. “Hurry up. My buddy’s down here with a kid. He’s buried. They can’t breathe.”
“Aw, Jesus …”
Within ten minutes Moore was free and climbing the ladder, groaning over the pain in his arm as he tried to cling to the rungs. Metal fragments from one of the trusses had torn through his shirt and lodged themselves in his biceps. The wound was nothing. He couldn’t take his mind off Ansara, and as he stood there in the bedroom, pacing, wanting to get back down there and dig through the sand with his bare hands, one of the task force members came back up the ladder and said, “We’ll need a goddamned Bobcat to get them out.”
Moore leaned back on the bedroom wall, cursing and grimacing again over the dirt in his mouth. He held his breath and took himself back into the tunnel, through all that dirt and into a tiny depression where Ansara lay, taking his final few breaths. Moore shuddered. Wanted to scream. Then he just stormed out of the house, slamming the door behind him.
Maybe he was just cursed. That was it. If you hung around him long enough, you’d wind up dead. How much more of this could he take? How many ghosts could populate his head?
He found Towers getting out of an unmarked car across the street. “Let’s get you out of here.”
Moore glanced back at the house. “Not till they get him out.”
“All right, just take it easy.”
Moore turned away and marched back toward the house. Other units were arriving, and the entire street would be cordoned off. Welcome to the circus, a police and first-responder big top lorded over by spotters from the FBI and the drug cartels, along with nosy neighbors, kids running around in diapers, and a host of stray cats and dogs.
Moore and Towers returned to the bedroom, where down in the tunnel several agents were clearing away debris with their hands and the butts of their rifles until an excavation crew could arrive.
“He was going to teach me how to ride a mountain bike, did you know that?” Moore asked Towers. “He told me I really sucked.”
Towers shook his head. “Don’t do it, buddy. Don’t torture yourself.”
“He’s dying in there right now.”
Towers hardened his tone. “Are you listening to me?”
The excavation team didn’t reach Ansara and Rueben until nearly one p.m. the following day, and while Moore had been coaxed away from the scene by Towers and had gone to a hotel to take a shower and get some fresh clothes, he’d returned and waited there until both his colleague and the young mule were taken out and set down on the bedroom floor. Ansara’s face and most of the left side of his body had been peppered with shrapnel, so there was a good chance he’d died in the explosion. Rueben, meanwhile, had probably been shielded by Ansara and had only his major stab wound.
One of the kid’s hands was balled tightly in a fist, while the other was limp, and that struck Moore as a little odd. He dropped to his knees and delicately pried open the kid’s hand to find a gold pendant covered in dirt.
Moore breathed another curse, because he knew exactly what he was looking at: an eighteen-karat-gold Hamsa, a Middle Eastern symbol also called the Hand of Fatima, named after the daughter of the prophet Mohammed. The pendant was shaped like the back of a human hand and included delicate filigree work that suggested lace. It was worn by Muslims to ward off the evil eye.
The tunnel had been dark. Moore and Ansara had never noticed Rueben’s other hand. He’d grabbed Moore and had been desperately trying to tell him something, perhaps give him something.
Moore closed his eyes and squeezed the pendant tightly between his fingertips.
Pablo Gutierrez had murdered an FBI agent in Calexico during a mission to help Pedro Romero scout out homes for the workers on the Juarez Cartel’s new tunnel project. The agent had confronted them, pretending to be a
The agent had been full of bravado and had pretended that he did not work for the U.S. government, even after Pablo removed both of his pinkies with a pair of hedge clippers he’d found in the garage. The blades were caked with rust and dull. After two more fingers were removed from the federal agent’s right hand, he began to babble like a little boy, confessing all he knew about the cartel’s operations in the area — or at least his story sounded good enough. Pablo didn’t care either way. His job, according to Corrales, was to kill, not interrogate, the man, but he thought he’d have a little fun first. Pablo thanked the agent, then lifted an ax to the man’s neck and made a few practice swings while Romero turned away and put a hand to his face.
The agent released a bloodcurdling cry as Pablo raised the ax and told him to be still.
It took five solid blows before the man’s head toppled to the floor. Pablo had never before seen that much blood, and there was a strange odor coming from the body, almost like raw seafood.
He ordered Romero to help him carry the chair and body out to the curb as though they were putting out the trash and recyclables. He pinned a sign on the headless corpse:
They mailed the head to the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C., the headquarters of the FBI, but it wouldn’t arrive for three to five days. However, less than an hour later, neighbors coming home from work spotted the grisly sight at the curb, and within minutes after Pablo left, units were on the scene.
That night, Pablo had laughed his ass off as he’d watched the story on CNN, with tickers flashing ridiculously obvious statements, such as “Trending: Mexican drug war crosses border into the United States.” Did they think it would never happen? What kind of fantasy land were the Americans living in?
That was the night that Pablo had become a wanted man in the United States because a teenage boy had photographed him near the house and had surrendered that picture to the American authorities (Pablo had killed that kid as well). Now he realized that those were the good old days, and that his involvement with Corrales and Los Caballeros and the cartel tore at him from both sides.
He’d agonized over where his loyalty should lie: to Corrales, his immediate boss, the man who’d taught him everything and had made him a trusted right hand, rescuing him from a life of mowing lawns as an eighteen-year- old illegal immigrant in Las Vegas …or Fernando Castillo, the man whose identity Pablo had only recently learned
