“You sure you don’t want to knock on the door and Jew them down?” Heath said as Manny slid into the passenger seat.

  “I used the money we got when we took Nando’s wallet,” Manny said.

  A dog three doors down responded to their laughter but died back to a whimper by the time the Jimmy was out of sight around a turn.

  Those two boys were gone by the time Deputy Farleigh Davenport returned to check on them the following morning. The clerk at the motel told him they paid up in advance. Cash. Showed him photo ID. They left the key on the dresser and the room as clean as they’d found it. They were quiet guests and didn’t ask for housekeeping, just fresh towels every morning.

  “Didn’t that seem suspicious to you?” Davenport said.

  “They paid in advance. Cash,” the clerk repeated as if that answered all questions.

  Dumbass, Davenport thought as he exited the chilly registration office for the kiln-hot air outside. His uniform shirt was stuck to his skin as he climbed back into his prowler. He tooled over down the road to a Bob Evans and sat outside for a bit to run the names the motel dumbass gave him. He turned the laptop on the swivel base set in the console and tapped in Devlin Washington and Joseph Barr and the California plate number of their truck. He accessed AZLaw, the state police database and hit the search tab. It would take time so he went into the restaurant for some biscuits and gravy.

  Twenty minutes later the deputy was back in the car with a belly full of grease and carbs and a fresh stain on his tie. The first screen ran down Washington’s background. Born in Paragould, Arkansas. Was there really a place named that? Navy man honorably discharged in 2009. Not married. No family. No residence listed. Nothing criminal beyond an arrest when he was teenager for aggravated assault. No conviction. He scrolled to the next screen to look at the record of the one who looked like a pirate. Joe Barr was Navy too until 2008. Baltimore native. Again, unmarried with no family. No residence. No trouble with the law.

  It checked out but it was wrong; those two were wrong. But the records were solid. And the truck legally belonged to Barr, purchased two weeks ago in Ojai, California.

  Deputy Davenport had no way of knowing that the histories of the two men on his screen ended in 2008 and 2009 because they each died in those years. Washington and Barr were both MIA from the US Navy and chosen as subjects for the two very much alive SEALs because of their lack of familial ties. Both died heroes and continued to serve their country even from the grave. Their backgrounds were real, detailed and legal and would defy scrutiny from any intelligence agency on the planet. They were designed to allow captured SEALs to comply with the code of military service without revealing their true identities.

  But the deputy’s nose for lying was a peak performer. He knew when someone was bent because he was bent himself. A career of hiding a life of petty corruption from his brothers in uniform honed his skills equally at deceiving and detecting deception. He couldn’t prove his suspicions but he knew that black and white pair were not who or what they said they were and he’d file that nugget away in case it might pay off down the line.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  ESTRATEGIA

  The great room of the plaza house was now a war room. Gordo was the jefe, the generalissimo. He gave his bitch the keys to his Escalade and vamoosed her off to her mother’s. He told her to keep her ass away until he told her it was okay to come back. He threw Santa Muerte and three cartons of Marlboros in the back seat and wished her vaya con dios.

  Now five of the six men of his crew were gathered around his granite-topped coffee table. They were smoking reefer, downing brews, and facing the fucked-up situation they all found themselves in.

  “They saw us,” Gordo said. “They know what we look like.”

  “Where’d they see us?” Hector said.

  “On that video, ese,” Cuchillo cut in. “The one we made for Esteban at that house in South Mountain.”

  All five of them remembered that night. They were each paid ten large and Gordo got twenty. They were told to make it ugly and gave the plaza value for its cash. Each one took turns holding the digital camcorder and streaming the video down to Sinaloa over WiFi. Gordo and three others took the woman. Cuchillo and Beto took the kids. Those two were into sick shit like that. Demented shit. Gordo never looked at the video. He erased it from the machine’s hard drive once he was sure it had been downloaded on the other end. He didn’t want a record of that lying around. And he never wanted to see what happened in the kids’ room. The screams were enough.

  But it was all part of the service. They’d all done bad shit. Sometimes the ones on the receiving end deserved it. They shorted a shipment or held back money or talked to police. And sometimes they hurt people to scare others into compliance or send a message. And sometimes, rare times, they punished people just to show they could.

  They asked for fifty more when they found out the two cops they killed outside the house were US marshals. That made it federal. It made it Homeland Security shit. It got so tight for a couple of weeks that Gordo thought of moving down to his mother-in-law’s in Nogales. His contacts with the law told him the DEA, FBI and ATF were sniffing all over asking questions and pushing the local cops and deputies around. There were a few guys who flew in who weren’t showing badges or saying what agency they came from. It was all over in a few days and they went away to leave the local FBI office and city cops to get results. Gordo could handle that. He had enough cousins in the department who would stay on top of it and give him a heads up if Five-O was getting close. Cops talked to other cops all the time even when they were told to keep their mouths shut. Things loosened up so Gordo didn’t have to pack up for that shithole his wife’s mama lived in.

  And in the end they got no bonus because Esteban turned up dead.

  But the heat was off. At least it was until these two gabachos showed up knowing shit they had no right knowing.

  “I thought they weren’t going to drop that on the web,” Calaca said. “You told us the plaza wouldn’t put that up on the site. Shit, you can see us putting it to that bitch, vato.”

  “That’s what Esteban told me,” Gordo protested. “He said it was a special deal. It wouldn’t be public. Somehow these two guys have it.”

  The Mexican cartels had their own websites and other places that could only be described as fan sites for the drug gangs. Here you could find music videos, articles, comment boards and comic strips about the most famous sicarios. There were also videos of actual murders, rapes and torture; very real reality TV at its most raw. The Mexican government used to take them down and bust the service providers but the material would only crop up somewhere else within minutes.

  “It’s not on any of the cartel sites,” Gordo said. “I checked them all. Whoever these guys are, they have inside information.”

  “Two gabachos in a shitty Ford pickup,” Cuchillo said. “Black dude and white dude. They know three of us and they’ve seen all of us. By now maybe they know all our names. And they know we’re in Phoenix and they know about some of our hang-outs.”

  “This about those feds?” Feo said. He was the one who took down the two marshals while they sat in their unmarked outside the house in South Mountain.

  “These guys aren’t cops,” Gordo said. “They’re on a whole different trip. Cops this side of the border don’t bury dudes and threaten to cut their heads off. We can’t buy anyone off this time. We don’t even know who to pay.”

  “Maybe they’re Russians,” Feo offered. “Russians are into that shit.”

  “One of them is a nigger,” Gordo scoffed. “You know any nigger Russians? Besides, where you get this Russian shit? You never met a Russian your whole fucking life, Feo.”

  “So, two guys,” Calaca said. “They show up and we kill them.”

  “We got to know they’re coming first,” Cuchillo said. “Got to know they’re coming.” He’d been up forty-eight hours straight on crystal. He liked the meth and went on week-long jags and did shit he couldn’t ever remember doing.

  “Where’s Beto?” Feo said.

  “Nogales,” Gordo said. “He’s looking for paying work for us. There’s going to be traffic again once they stop killing each other down in Sinaloa.”

  “These gabachos,” Cuchillo said. “What about these pinche gabachos? We going to forget about them?”

  “I got calls in all over,” Gordo said in an even tone. Cuchillo really needed some downtime. His pupils looked like pinholes in a pair of hard boiled eggs. “My cousins with the policia and the county. I offered a Benjamin to anybody telling us where they seen a mayate and white guy in a shit-ass pickup. I got the radar up, all right, ese?”

  It was something. But not enough to give any of the plaza real peace of mind. At least, not until the two strangers were dead.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  THE SCOPE

  They stopped looking for sandal tracks and simply followed the smell of frying onions and garlic. The timber camp was close enough that they could taste the tang of goat butter on the backs of their tongues.

  An approach from the creek was out of the question, at least for re-con purposes. For a real perspective they’d need the high ground. Pig led the way up a slope that rose from the flood plain and the other two followed. Walking point was habit for Pig. Even though he traded his SAW for a Mike-4, stepping out in front was where he was comfortable; where he felt he served the team best. The smell from the unseen campfire followed them up the thirty-degree and then forty-five degree incline.

  The ghost of a trail sketched around a curving hillside that formed a half a bowl above the timber camp. There was sign of log cutting here. Deadfalls of stacked branches, some still covered with curling brown leaves, covered a slope dotted with the sawed-off stumps of mahogany, teak and cypress trees. There was a rusting running line slung overhead that must have been used to haul the trimmed boles down to the camp. Two thick, steel lines mounted on a stout tree above the trail and probably run through some kind of pull motor in the camp. The sagging cables above pointed like a compass to the camp’s location, still out of sight through the underbrush below.

  Priest caught up to where Pig had taken a knee by a tumble of rotting abaca logs. Pig brushed some ants from his arm and pointed downhill past the logs. Priest answered by pointing at his own eyes, touching his chest and making a swooping gesture downhill. Priest handed off his M4 and slipped out of his armor vest. He drew his monster revolver and belly crawled past Pig and around the deadfall for a look at the target area.

  Voices from below. Laughter and shouts. Tagalog. Priest froze and listened, head low, revolver held pointed at the brush before him. He knew enough of the local dialect to get along but this was a rapid exchange. Something about a snake and a feast. They were excited about something but it wasn’t anything about strangers in the neighborhood. Sounded like skinny Christmas party down there.

  He moved forward using elbows and knees, swimming over the loose, mossy soil with thorny bushes pulling at his BDUs and scratching bloody lines on any exposed skin as he slithered. With his revolver barrel he carefully parted a branch to prevent a six-inch thorn from catching his eye. A gang of beetles the size of field mice skittered before him. He came to a clearing made by the timber crews. It was carpeted thick with ferns that sprang up in the patch of sun the cutting allowed in. In this place, life rushed in to fill any gap provided.

  The slope dropped away dramatically before him. He sensed rather than saw that this was as far as he would go on this crawl without exposing himself. He turned slowly onto his back and rested his shoulders in the soft dirt with his feet uphill and his back to the camp. From a pouch in his belt he removed a coiled surveillance lens. He bent the green flexible coil into a “Z” shape to reduce its length and aimed the wind-angle lens downhill. The flex lens attached to his tablet and he adjusted his view so that the image leapt into focus.

  The monitor screen was filled with blobs of green and he straightened the coil to raise his point of view and could see rusting metal rooftops in a ragged ring around a broad open area with machines strapped down and tarps over them. There was what looked like an ancient stationary crane of cast iron. The lines strung down the hill ended at a block and tackle suspended from the crane arm. It was encrusted with a century of rust and overgrown with vines.

  He swung the lens to find the source of the smoke and found a large campfire ringed with stones. The body of some four-legged animal was suspended on a spit over the flames. Roasting next to it were the loops of the biggest snake Priest had ever seen in his life.

  Around the fire were a bunch of men in shorts and sandals. They were playing grab ass like kids waiting for cake and ice cream at a birthday party. This was some kind of jungle hoedown and could have been just an innocent gathering in the woods if not for the AK-47s leaning everywhere. Priest saw a pair of RPGs laying on the warped surface of a picnic table. No one was carrying but the weapons were close enough at hand.

  A head count revealed thirty skinnies ready for dinner. That was everyone he could see. There could be more in the screen-walled huts or some at the creek or even on patrol. That was ten-to-one odds just with the bad guys he could see. His assessment was that this was no problem for three SEALs. Most of these assholes would run away once a firefight started. Whether or not they’d stay away was something Priest could not assess at this distance.

  Worse news than the size of the camp’s asshole contingent was a dented and hard-used Land Rover parked before an open shed. It stood on inflated wheels with the hood up. The windshield was bug-encrusted but free of dust. The Rover was operable recently and possibly drivable now. This was the only transport he could see and it was priority that it be taken down first in any action.

  He watched the skinnies jostling around the fire for their share of the feast to see if any more joined the party. Two more stepped from the shadow of a shed and shouldered their way in to grab handfuls of steaming meat and slap them into the fold of big leaves to cool a bit. There were laughs and taunts as some of the skinnies burned their fingers and danced about shaking the pain away with streams of curses. The celebration was cranking up.

  Shouts from a new source and in a new tone made Priest turn the lens coil to a man in a guayabera shirt and linen pants. The newcomer was pissed and gestured sharply to the others who grew silent. Priest touched a hand to the screen to zoom in on the new actor as close as possible. The man in theguayabera approached the loose ring of skinnies around the fire and pushed and shoved. He was taller than the others and, while still slim, had more weight on him. His hair was burred down close and he wore a long goatee. This was no Filipino. This guy was home office Al Qaeda, no question about it.

  Priest watched on the seven-inch monitor as the guy read the skinnies the riot act. They stood with lowered faces and shifting feet. The beard picked up an AK from where it was slung on the back of a camp chair. He fired off a ten round bust in the air and that made the skinnies jump like one man and caused a cloud of white-feathered birds to explode into the sky from the treetops all around. He tossed the smoking rifle to the ground, gestured wildly at the Land Rover and stormed away back into a machine shed and out of sight.

  Three of the skinnies cut themselves from the group and walked with slumped shoulders toward the vehicle. They moved like sullen children, pissed at being scolded. For a hot second Priest thought they’d crank up the Rover and drive off. Instead they gathered around under the hood to work on something at the front of the engine. One slid under the car on his back with a crescent wrench.

  The rest grabbed up weapons and wandered from the cook fire in knots of twos and threes. They moved to positions around the perimeter. One climbed the rusting rungs of a ladder to the top of the timber crane. Only one skinny remained to tend the further preparation of the feast.

  Priest drew in the coil and stowed both it and the tablet and returned to where Pig waited, muscles strained to move after hearing that burst of automatic fire.

  “They’re expecting us,” he told Pig and Chili in whispered tones.

  Sadeed dumped the entire bucket of water over his head then set the upended bucket on the floor of the shed and sat down upon it to put his head in his hands.

  Children. They were children. They were not of a serious mind. Their only usefulness was their willingness to kill. And at that they were heartless and efficient. An explosive device planted along a roadside failed to kill all the passengers on a bus. The men of his cell stepped into the overturned vehicle to finish the Catholic missionaries and their students with machetes. They were an instrument of God but it was up to Sadeed to wield this weapon and the burden was a heavy one.

  Instead of making the Land Rover operable, they were cackling around the cookfire. Earlier in the day, Dodong found a python in the woods. The snake was made heavy by a small deer lodged halfway along its digestive system. He lopped the head off the slow-moving snake and he and three others dragged it back to camp where they slit its belly and dumped out the crushed form of a fawn half marinated in the snake’s digestive juices. Much was made of this and the whole camp fell back into some primitive sense of awe as the animals were flayed and a fire was built.

  Fixing the vehicle was forgotten. Watching their perimeter for movement was neglected. All eyes were on the roasting carcasses and every mouth expressed wonder at this aboriginal omen. It was if his entire force of followers had marched back centuries in time to the days when the people of this island lived little better than animals.

  Their hoots and calls awoke him from what passed for sleep in this sweltering nightmare of a country. He stormed from the shed livid and didn’t even feel the cloud of biting insects that stuck themselves to every sweat-sticky inch of exposed skin. He yelled at them, hectored them with the words of the Prophet and few of the choice profanities he learned since arriving here. He accused them of eating shit and having sexual relations with their mothers. They gazed at him the same bovine expressions that always greeted his harangues. That was when his vision went red and he seized on the rifle to fire over their heads which finally got their attention. He sent them to their watch stations and returned to the relative cool of the shed.