Wild Card

behind it and squatted down low in the angle between its hinges and the driver’s-side panel, pressing against the vehicle so that he was almost wedged against its wheel well.

The move would give him cover from Chinos. That was the plus. The bad part was that it meant he’d had to turn his back to the one-way mirror fronting Armand’s office, leaving him vulnerable from behind.

It also meant Raul had been left suddenly and completely exposed to Chinos, but he had ceased to be Lathrop’s concern.

The kid jerked upright in his seat as the door was torn from his hand and flung outward, his lips frozen in a breathless grimace of terror, his throat clamping shut around his screams. Then he turned his head to see the guard hasten around the cargo hatch to his side of the vehicle, advancing behind his tiny assault weapon. His eyes bright staring circles, aware his prospects of survival had radically dwindled all in a second, Raul forced his vocal cords to respond to his commands and started shouting out the door in Spanish again, adding vehement denials to his repetitive declarations of regret, insisting that not only was he sorry but things weren’t his fault here. Lo siento, no es mi culpa.

Chinos gave him just an instant’s notice, scarcely pausing to meet his gaze with his own through the open door. His eyes did not offer the barest hint of whether he considered him a threat, an opportune target of revenge, or both at once. They communicated nothing, nothing whatsoever as they brushed against Raul’s and his compact submachine gun unleashed a burst of fire that ripped into Raul at almost point-blank range, snuffing the life out of him even before his body spilled limp-limbed and shuddering against the steering column.

Crouched on his haunches behind the door, aware of that mirror at his back, Lathrop did not miss his chance to exploit the moment Chinos had wasted taking out Raul. Shoving his pistol into its holster, he grabbed the foregrip of his MP7, braced its extended rifle stock against his shoulder, and pushed its bore around the edge of the door.

Chinos was quick to catch sight of it. He whirled toward the door seemingly on reflex and rattled off an arcing volley, smashing the driver’s side window from its frame… a reaction that might have done even more damage if Lathrop hadn’t gotten the jump on him by a slender hair, drawing an accurate bead, catching him in his midsection with a tight salvo. The guard pivoted drunkenly on his feet, his gun hand convulsing to trigger an ineffectual spray of ammunition at the walls and ceiling, his other hand clutching his stomach, blood dribbling between his fingers from multiple bullet wounds.

Lathrop was up from his crouch before he dropped, his MP7 poised.

He looked from side to side. Two of the three mechs that had approached the Nav’s tail section were gone, but it was hard to tell where. The bays over to his right were occupied by cars, vans, pickups, and SUVs in various stages of being stripped. Some of the vehicles were on hoists, the heavy-duty kind that were built into the floor. There was an open service pit in the bay closest to Lathrop, a large Cadillac sedan pulled almost up to it. A small crew of grease monkeys stood among the different vehicles, staring at him, looking scared stiff. A couple of them might have been the same men whose legs had entered the rearview video image. Or not. Next to the open bay entrance behind the Nav, another mech had sunk down into a corner and was cowering there with his hands on his head in submission. Lathrop figured him for one of the first three. His friends could have cleared out through the door — or not.

Lathrop reached a hand into his jacket, flashed the special agent badge around his neck, motioned toward the entrance with his subgun.

“DEA!” he said. “Vaya, go!”

His face streaked with perspiration, the mech nodded and slowly rose off the floor.

Lathrop snapped the gun toward his head to hustle him along. “Ahora!”

The mech nodded more vigorously, sprang the rest of the way up to his feet, turned, and fled the garage.

Lathrop saw him bowl into a cluster of lookouts still lingering in the lot outside the entrance, then push past them to disappear in the night. They all seemed like versions of Pedro with their head wraps or Under Armour skullcaps, their basketball warm-ups, their hoodies and low-waisted baggy pants. And the conspicuously identical gumstick MP3s on their arms.

They looked at him. He looked at them. The thing about the loose-fitting ghetto wear was that it could be a bluff or conceal a small arsenal.

Lathrop fired a burst out the door, his aim intentionally high, displaying his shield so they could see it, hopeful they would get the message that he was giving them a pass. He had not forgotten about the one-way mirror behind him — and whoever might be behind it. Any time he spent worrying about this bunch was too long.

They took his warning and scattered from the lights of the garage, losing themselves on the mechanic’s heels.

Lathrop thought about the mirror at his unprotected back and started to turn.

That was when he heard the rev of an engine inside the garage to his right. He glanced toward the sound, saw that the mechs who’d been staring from over by the vehicles were heading for the entrance… all except one, and he’d gotten into the Caddy sedan. Almost simultaneously the office door crashed open and a tight knot of three or four men in street clothes broke from it. They held submachine guns of the same sort Chinos had carried and were assembled around another man who could barely be seen through their flanking bodies.

Several of them were rattling fire at Lathrop as they moved toward the auto bays in hurried unison.

He took cover behind the Nav, glanced over at the sedan he’d assumed was their escape vehicle, and realized that assumption was wrong. The gunmen had reached the space between the Caddy and service pit and veered toward the pit instead of the idling sedan. A couple of them paused at its edge, still firing at him. The rest separated from the others, backed toward the pit, and then followed the man they were escorting down into it.

No sooner had the last of them dropped over its side than the Caddy throbbed into gear, screeched a half dozen feet forward, and just as abruptly came to a halt right over the pit.

Lathrop knew that first man into it had been Armand Quiros. He’d caught a glimpse of him when the group left the office and gotten a slightly longer look as he descended the rail or ladder on the side of the pit. But it was really simpler than that. Armand’s office plus Armand’s bodyguards equaled Armand.

What Lathrop wondered about for a brief instant was Armand racing into that hole. Why would he box himself in while a charged-up getaway car was waiting for him? If that was really what he’d done. A man like Armand would be prepared for somebody to make a move on him sooner or later. Whether it was the competition or a takedown by the law, he would anticipate more than a solitary attacker… Lathrop had in fact banked on his turn-tail worker ants sharing that same belief. Armand would expect his enemies to be waiting along the mesa road toward Devocion and probably to the south of town as well. In his mind a frontal escape from the garage would leave him open to being followed or caught in a net of barriers, and that meant he would want a less obvious exit through the pit. Want to be sure there was another car ready on the other side of it.

Lathrop ejected his subgun’s half-empty magazine, got a fresh forty-round clip from a pouch on his trousers, and jammed it into the weapon with the heel of his palm. Then he reached under his jacket and produced one of three cylindrical flashbangs he’d brought with him in a nylon web belt rig. About a minute had gone by since Armand emerged from his office, too long, giving him more than enough time to rabbit. But the guy who’d driven the Caddy into position had drawn a nine-mil from inside his jumpsuit and was taking shots at him out his lowered window — no mechanic, that ace, it didn’t matter how he was dressed — and there was gunfire coming from underneath the Caddy, a shooter in the pit. Lathrop saw him poking his head out of it like an infantryman in a foxhole, his weapon in one hand, no way he could grip it with both of them. The pit had to be eight or nine feet deep and he’d need to cling to the rail with his other hand to fire over its top.

Staying low behind the Nav, Lathrop shuffled left around its rear fender and then forward along its flank, past the still-open driver’s door where the body of Raul was thrown back against the steering column. His MP7 on its sling at his side, he leaned around the front of the vehicle and pulled the arming pin from the steel grenade canister with his fist clenched around its flyoff lever. Then he tossed the canister across the garage floor with an easy underhand lob and saw the released lever twirl away as it rolled under the Caddy and into the pit.

The grenade detonated before he could count out two full seconds, the walls of the pit muffling its blast of light and sound in the garage above. Lathrop sprang to his feet and darted toward the Caddy, his gun spitting as thin white smoke came up from the pit to ribbon out between its wheels. He could see the guy in the mech suit through the driver’s side window, sprawled back in the front seat with the nine slipped from his fingers, looking