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Category:
Action/Thriller
Dante goes undercover again. Sequel to Blue Heat
Dante is on loan from the DEA to the NYPD to root out corrupt cops. He falls in love with a woman detective assigned as one of his contacts during the investigation.
Excerpt
Ricardo Mendez stood on a deserted street corner of Nogales, Mexico, under the careful observation of his back-up team of agents. The accumulated debris and overturned trashcans that had spilled their rotted contents onto the narrow sidewalks reeked of discarded and putrefied household waste. A fetid stench of the long-neglected garbage wafted to his nostrils. The sultry heat worsened the odor and threatened to nauseate him if he remained there much longer. His contact, due to arrive at midday in the broiling sun, now ran several minutes late, a characteristic of his indolent nature.
U.S. Drug Enforcement Agents Osgood and Bagley, Ricardo’s designated field operatives who had driven him to the meeting place, stationed themselves a bare twenty-five yards away in a 1970 Oldsmobile 442 with a dilapidated exterior, their presence disguised by windows tinted with a bluish-gray finish. Underneath the rusted and chipped chassis, a newly fitted super V-8 engine idled with a virile throb. The doors concealed steel reinforced panels and the opaque windows protected the occupants with bullet-resistant non-shatter glass designed especially for vehicles such as these.
Before the bearded informant left the car that had driven him to the meet, Agent Osgood handed him a small bundle of marked currency and said, “When the exchange takes place he’ll probably want to count the dough. We’ll jump right out and collar him before he walks away.”
“I’ll try to stall him a moment longer,” ‘Ricardo answered, slipping on his distinctive sun glasses with polarized lenses, “just in case he starts to leave too quickly.”
While he waited, Ricardo, the cover name assigned to him in his role as an undercover informant for the Regional Federal Drug Enforcement Unit, absently fingered the cash in his pocket. The money intended for the purchase of the drugs that he had arranged to buy from a street dealer, Enrique Barra, known in the local narcotics trade as El Chulo. This purveyor of often-poisonous heroin adulterated with boric acid, “stepped on” in drug parlance, had earned the mocking sobriquet from his associates in crime. They used it as a cynical twist on a Spanish word for pretty. It had become a snide tribute to his lumpy and scarred face, made more unsightly by an unshaven growth of scruffy facial hair.
When they had first met to arrange the sale of three ounces of the product El Chulo had to offer, Ricardo had looked into his dead, mirthless eyes with their lusterless irises flecked with dull browns and yellows, devoid of any defined color. Ricardo recognized the indicia of evil that emanated from the Mexican’s appearance and demeanor. With a certainty that this petty criminal had cartel-ordered murders to his credit, Ricardo knew to exercize the utmost caution when dealing with him.
His back-up team planned to take the pusher into custody immediately upon the completion of the drug buy to avoid the potential of their target’s escape into the winding dirt streets of the barrio. Their hope to question El Chulo and use him to identify those higher up in the chain of Mexican drug traffic stood little chance of success, but if they only removed a suspected multiple killer from the criminal ring that plagued the Texas-New Mexico border towns, it would count as a successful operation. The local field office of the United States Drug Enforcement Administration saw an opportunity to make inroads into the cross-border traffic from Mexico by targeting a low-life like El Chulo and using his arrest as an opening wedge in their efforts.
Maintaining his vigilance, Ricardo saw El Chulo come into view a block away accompanied by another man whom he had not seen before. “Chulo” Barra had brought his own backup. Ricardo knew instantly that the burly, hard-faced man with the small-time dealer represented a serious menace. With a subtle hand signal, he alerted Osgood and Bagley then turned to face the approaching Mexicans. Bagley slipped quietly from the passenger’s side of the Oldsmobile and crouched behind the front fender, remaining screened from view with his 9mm Glock drawn and ready. A signal from his partner would spring him into action. Osgood drew his own automatic and held it on his lap, lowered the driver’s side window part way and slid down in the seat to minimize his observable profile but which position permitted him to keep Ricardo under surveillance. Ricardo stepped back into the shadows of the nearby building line to divert the Mexicans’ attention from the car across the street with the agents poised to move in once the planned exchange took place.
The presence of the second man with Chulo now complicated the operation. Ricardo, with experience based on years as an undercover operative, had a strong suspicion that this encounter would not end in arrests. The impending confrontation heightened his sensory awareness that prepared him for quick response should it become necessary. Not permitted by the Agency to carry a weapon, he had to rely on his own reflexes and the skill and fast reaction of the men assigned to protect him. The two Mexicans approached their potential customer while scanning the area nearby with narrowed eyes alert with suspicion. With its outward appearance as a derelict vehicle, the Oldsmobile did not attract their attention.
As they approached Ricardo, El Chulo, speaking in Spanish said: “Say hello to my friend Chi-chi,” referring to the heavier of the two men.
Chi-chi, his right hand in his trouser pocket, addressed Ricardo: “Hey ‘Barbudo’, you got the money?” he snarled, using the nickname, the ‘bearded one’. The drug gang had tagged Ricardo with their own label since they began dealing with him.
“Lemme see the product first,” Ricardo said, in Spanish, keeping his voice modulated.
“We came for the money, sucker,” Barra said, baring his crooked yellow teeth in a sinister sneer.
“You don’t want to do business any more, Chulo? You know the deal, no product, no money,” ‘Ricardo replied.
“We don’t do business with gringos, or whoever you are”, Chi-chi said, taking a menacing step forward.
Ricardo inched further back against the stucco wall behind him, running out of room to maneuver. “You think I’m a gringo pigeon? Now you’re trying to rip me off?”
Chi-chi pulled his hand from his pocket brandishing an eight-inch, lead-weighted sap. Without warning, the taller thug swung the blackjack aiming for Ricardo’s head. Trapped against the wall, Ricardo could only duck away from the blow. The leather-encased weight caught him on the left cheekbone, knocking his expensive sunglasses to the pavement several feet away. Blood spurted from the wound and Ricardo slid to the ground raising his arm to ward off the expected second attack. Chulo reached into his back pocket and began to draw a gun. Before Chi-chi could lift his arm to swing again, two shots in rapid succession struck both Mexicans, each one an accurate bullet to the head.
Osgood and Bagley sprinted across the street and helped their operative to his feet. Bagley pulled a clean, folded handkerchief from his pocket and pressed against Ricardo’s injury. “Hold this in place,” he said, “until we get you some stitches in a hospital across the border.”
Ricardo stood unsteadily, placed his own hand over the cloth and bent to retrieve his glasses. “These cost me a lot of money,” he said, examining them for damage.
“C’mon,” Osgood said, “let’s get outta here. Leave these two mutts where they are. The Nogales police aren’t going to care. With a blood-stained blackjack on the ground, they’ll guess what happened.” He peeled back the handkerchief and peeked at the wound, “That’s gonna be a serious black eye, my friend.”
After a quick search of both bodies, they confiscated the loaded snub-nosed .38 caliber revolver found in Chulo’s hand. The agents helped their man into the back seat of the Olds and roared north along the highway toward the border crossing and New Mexico. “We left a mess back there,” Ricardo said. “We gonna get blowback from the Mexican authorities?”
“Listen, my friend,” Osgood said over his shoulder while speeding along the deserted highway north, “The next smack with that blackjack could have finished you. Did you see the size of that thing? Luckily, the first one was only a glancing blow. You rather we lost time running across the street to make an arrest or wait until that other ugly mutt shot you?”
“No. you’re right, I’m just twitchy about leaving bodies in our wake,” Ricardo murmured, now bent over with pain.
“As we said before, nobody’s gonna miss those two,” Bagley answered.
His injury treated in the emergency room with stitches, an ice pack and pain-killers, and after an x-ray to check for fractures, Ricardo received a few days off from the Supervising Agent of the field office to recover. He borrowed an old impound evidence car from the office motor pool, and drove aimlessly out into the desert. The emptiness and austerity of the harsh landscape had a strangely calming effect on his soul. After driving for several miles, which he did not stop to calculate, he parked on the shoulder of the road and began walking. The solitary time he spent among the jagged rocks with only silent saguaro cactus to vary the endless vista of the stark desert shimmering with heat, became a cleansing, penitential rite. Off on the horizon, as he trudged through the hard-packed sand, mesas striated with the colors of eroded sediment appeared closer, then receded from view again like a fanciful mirage. An indistinct figure materialized from the waves of incandescence reflected from the parched ground. A vague sense of recognition formed in his imagination when the blurred shape of a woman emerged as if from the desert itself. Mina, the woman whom he had loved and trusted unwisely and who had died when she attempted to kill him, strode toward him. Ricardo paused to shield his eyes from the unremitting glare. The apparition drew nearer and he almost called out to her. A crushing sadness overcame him when he realized that the broiling heat had begun to affect his rational thinking.
Old regrets and anguish welled up, but the penetrating glare from the sky reaching into the recesses of his spirit seemed to burn them away. Small desert lizards skittered across his path to remind him that life survived even in this hostile environment. Heedless of the distance he covered, when the unremitting heat threatened to overwhelm him, he began to think of returning to the car. The exercize in self-purgation had become dangerous in the searing furnace through which he walked. Retracing his steps, he hoped he had not begun to wander in circles.
Finally, the highway came into sight and with a last effort before he succumbed to exhaustion, he spied the car. Peeling off his shirt, soaked with perspiration, he used it to open the door without scorching himself and draped the wet garment over the steering wheel. The leatherette upholstery seared his skin through his trousers and he gasped audibly. He finally started the vehicle and got the air conditioning running. Tired but cleansed, he turned the car back toward his motel, anticipating a cool shower and a Glenlivet over ice.
Back in the motel, with the air conditioning turned up high, Ricardo wearing only undershorts lay propped up against pillows in his bed. His drink in hand, he snapped on the television as background noise while he tried to think through his dilemma. The running debate he carried on with himself about the wisdom of trying to earn his way back into the drug agency in which he had formerly held a respected position occupied his thoughts. This latest debacle in Mexico and the swelling and stitches he bore as a souvenir engendered serious self-doubt about whether to continue in his role as an informant setting up narcotics buys for the agents who ran him. His father, a retired Carabinieri investigator now managing a private detective firm in Italy had long ago proffered advice that now began to reverberate in Ricardo’s memory. “When things seem at their worst wait a few revolutions of the earth. Something always happens to change your situation. If you act too hastily in a depressed mood, you will usually regret it. Don’t make important decisions in a negative frame of mind.”
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