The Border Lords Read Free

Dyman smelled of soap and his dark skull was cleanly shaved. “Look at this. The baby killers are stirring.”
    “Maybe they’ve got something coming up.”
    “Still nothing from Sean?”
    Hood shook his head and watched Angel flip his tortilla. “I left him another message. That’s three in six days.”
    In the silence that followed, Hood thought of their comrade Jimmy Holdstock, kidnapped last year on U.S. soil and taken to Mexico. Hood knew that Dyman was thinking of Jimmy, too. Jimmy hadn’t even been working UC like Sean. Jimmy wasn’t setting up bugged safe houses for the North Baja Cartel like Sean. Jimmy was just a former divinity student, part of the Blowdown team checking ATF Firearm Transaction forms, keeping an eye on the licensed dealers, trying to stem the flow of the iron river—the guns heading south.
    “What I don’t get,” said Hood, “is who tells these boys they can do this.”
    “Do what, Charlie.”
    “Kill people for money.”
    “The cartel recruiters tell them that.”
    “But what about the consequences?”
    “You’ve seen the consequences, man—a new truck for a bonus, and free prostitutes, like last week. Remember when Ray got that ten grand for a job well done?”
    “What I mean is, who tells them it’s okay?”
    “Who do they have to tell them different? Their parents either don’t care or don’t know what to do. These boys don’t go to school. Probably haven’t been inside a church their whole life. So who are they gonna listen to except each other, and the actors in the movies they watch, and the cartel dudes with all the cash?”
    Hood thought about that. “Still seems like something’s missing. Some kinda horse sense or something.”
    “You had advantages you didn’t know you had. I had them, too. Bakersfield is like Beverly Hills compared to these border towns.”
    Hood, a Bakersfield boy, nodded. Morris of the South Bronx sipped his coffee.
     
     
    By six thirty A.M. agents Janet Bly and Robert Velasquez had arrived. This was the transitional hour, when the graveyard watcher went off duty and the three-agent day team took over for another shift of interviewing firearms dealers, recruiting informants, shadowing suspected buyers and sellers, posing as straw men and illicit buyers, answering the phones and watching the young killers on live feed—all in a day’s work for Blowdown.
    “Well, look who’s up bright and early today,” said Bly. “Is that Angel with his carnitas ?”
    Hood nodded, looking at Angel’s machine pistol again.
    “Sean call in?” asked Janet.
    Hood shook his head, saw the hardness in her face.
    “Then maybe he called Mars or Soriana.”
    “He’d call us first if he was in trouble,” said Hood, confident that his good friend Sean Ozburn would call Blowdown well before he’d call the ATF field station in San Diego. Ozburn was a soldier, loyal and focused.
    But six days and no calls. So the ghost of Jimmy Holdstock—retired now with long-term disability from injuries suffered in the line of duty; in his case, torture—hovered there in the war room once again.
    Then, as if that ghost had cast its long, dark shadow over the room, one of the monitors went white, then black, and the audio died.
    Hood’s attention had been drawn to it just a split second before it went blank.
    “The hell,” said Bly.
    “Don’t worry,” said Velasquez, their techie. “It’ll come back. I’m not sure what’s . . .”
    Thirty seconds later the other monitors suddenly all turned bright white, then black. And the audio feeds died with them.
    Blowdown was on its feet now. Velasquez looked down at the main control panel, head cocked. The others stared at the dead screens. They had lost camera transmissions before but never all of them at once.
    “This is what my son does when the satellite goes out during SpongeBob,” said Morris. “He just stares at the TV like he can make it come back on.”
    “It’ll come back,” said Velasquez.
    Hood