The Border Lords Read Free Page A

dialed Buenavista police chief Gabe Reyes and asked for an unmarked unit to drive by the Agate Street safe house, and Reyes said the shift was changing right now but consider it done. Ten long minutes , thought Hood, ringing off.
    “Cops are changing shifts,” he said. “Ten minutes.”
    “We can’t lose all six feeds,” said Velasquez. “Even in a power outage, even if someone cuts the line. Those cameras have two hours of battery backup. You have to shut them down from here, or in the control panel on the side of the safe house. But I built that control panel, and I disguised it as a breaker box, and it’s got a lock, and the only people who have keys are us. So what the—”
    “I saw something on screen six,” said Hood. “Just before it went out.”
    “I was watching Angel make his breakfast,” said Bly.
    “I was seeing if Johnnie’s gravity hammer can kill brutes,” said Morris.
    “I saw something, too,” said Velasquez. “Then it was gone.”
    “The Den is only three miles away,” said Hood.
    “Wait,” said Bly, the senior agent.
    Velasquez pushed various control buttons but nothing happened. “It’s gotta be at our end. I’m going outside to check the cable.”
    “I’m with you,” said Hood.
    They emerged through the back door into the young light of morning, Hood first, his hand on the sidearm holstered on his hip. They walked quickly, looking up at the black coaxial cable fastened along the fascia board above the eaves. It entered the field station through a hole low on the eastern wall, and Hood could see the cable and the hole and the nest of gray steel wool crammed in to keep the rats and snakes out. Velasquez knelt down and tugged at the cable, then shrugged and stood.
    They checked the circuit breaker panel and the relay boxes and the splitters and the transformers for the coax and the telephone landlines, and all of these Velasquez said were fine.
    “The problem is at the Den,” he said. “Unless some fine citizen plowed a car through a phone company switch box between here and there.”
    “What did you see on monitor six?”
    “I don’t know, Charlie. It happened too fast.”
    “It’ll be on the tape.”
    “Monitor six is the side yard,” said Velasquez.
    “Where the control box is,” said Hood.
    They exchanged looks and went back inside.
    The screens were still dead. Hood could tell by the forced calm of her voice that Bly was talking to Soriana out in San Diego. Bly was impulsive and Soriana was deliberate, and this tried her patience sorely.
    She rang off and lowered her cell phone. “Soriana says give it five.”
    “I’d go right now,” said Hood.
    “I would, too,” said Bly. She was a stout woman whose sweet round face the years with ATF had started to harden. “He’s afraid the narcos will make us if we drive by looking like tourists. But we’ll give it five, all right? Because he’s the boss. Yes. Five seconds , that is . You guys ready?”
    Dyman Morris, once a point guard for NYU, made it to the door first, swinging an armored vest off the coatrack like a kid going out to play in the cold.
    A few minutes later Hood was guiding his Durango down Agate Street, looking at the little crowd of people standing outside the Den in the dawn’s early light.

3
    The neighbors greeted them with tales of gunshots and screams and a guy smoking off in a black Range Rover, so the Blowdown team went in through the wide-open front door.
    Hood followed his autoloader into the kitchen where Angel lay nearly decapitated by a shotgun. The blasts had also torn the stove hood open and flung a storm of flesh and blood against the wall. The machine pistol was gone and the tortilla lay, shriveled, black and smoking, on the griddle.
    In the living room Ray and Johnnie had taken multiple rounds and they lay in ribbons on the floor. Johnnie had gotten his gun up, or at least a gun lay next to him. It was one of the silenced .32 machine pistols that no one at ATF had ever seen