Delta Ghost - 02 Read online

  DELTA GHOST

  Tim Stevens

  Copyright 2014, Tim Stevens

  ***~~~***

  License Notes

  This ebook is licenced for your personal enjoyment only. If you would like to share it with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. Thank you for respecting the work of this author.

  Cover by Jane Dixon-Smith at JD Smith Design

  Prologue

  Maverick County, South Texas

  In the forty-seven years Diego Salazar had been privileged to walk God’s earth, he’d killed approximately thirty men.

  It was an estimate, because although in the past few years Salazar could recall and tally with precision the lives he’d personally ended – the four cartel thugs at the exchange outside Albuquerque, the three suspected informants within his own organization, the Venezuelan son-of-a-bitch who he’d surprised one afternoon in the bed of his, Salazar’s, dear departed wife – there was another time, before, when the killings had been less clearly defined, less targeted. When the deaths had been more impersonal, occurring as they had in the heat of battle and under orders.

  But thirty sounded about right to his ears.

  Still, whatever the number, Salazar had never looked forward to a killing the way he looked forward now to putting a bullet through the head of Oscar Flowers.

  The late-morning July sun beat down, soaking the arid landscape in brittle heat. Even the hardy mesquite trees that were scattered across the plain seemed to droop under the merciless pounding, as if finally admitting defeat. Salazar wore nothing on his head. His shoulder-length hair, barely flecked with gray, was a source of pride for him, and he wasn’t covering it up for anything, not even the fireball in the sky.

  Oscar Flowers, on the other hand, hid his shaved scalp under a Stetson that would have just about passed muster on a beefy good ol’ boy from Houston, but looked completely ridiculous balanced on the neck of a whip-thin expatriate from San Salvador. Flowers wore black jeans and a black leather jacket over a black T-shirt, stupidly, as if inviting heatstroke to do its worst. He stood, fifty feet away, flanked on either side by two goons, crude humanoids who looked like a kid had thumbed them out of lumps of flesh-colored Play-Doh.

  Salazar stood alone. In his right hand was a pigskin suitcase. In his left, down by his side, he held a cell phone, his thumb poised over one of the keys.

  Flowers raised his head, slowly. His feet were placed apart, his arms slung by his sides. Beneath the brim of his Stetson he wore mirror sunglasses.

  Oh Mary, Mother of God, thought Salazar. He thinks he’s Clint Eastwood. Except he’s got the details wrong. The sunglasses. The clothes.

  Oscar Flowers. The idiot who’d anglicized his decent, honorable Salvadorean name, Flores, into something silly and girlish. Who’d watched too many Sergio Leone movies about cowboys, and too many modern TV shows about ordinary guys who became ice-cool drug barons. Who’d consciously adopted the persona of a ‘coconut’, dark on the outside but white on the inside.

  Flowers needed to die. Not just because he’d screwed Salazar over during the Eagle Pass deal, when the bundles of cash Flowers had handed over had been several hundred thousand dollars lighter than they should have been. It was chickenfeed, compared to the overall haul. But Salazar never forgot, or forgave, a double-cross. Not even if it involved a single greenback.

  No. Flowers deserved to die mainly because he was a traitor. If there was a single rule that bound the organizations involved in the narcotics trade across Mexico and Nicaragua and El Salvador and Honduras and further south to Colombia, it was this: you never went native.

  You could accept the Yanqui’s dollar. Indeed, you could milk it for all it was worth. You could befriend him, ally with him, kill your own people to satisfy him.

  But you never, ever, became him.

  Salazar took ten measured paces forward, reducing the distance between him and Flowers and his men to just twenty feet.

  He lifted the suitcase.

  “One million dollars,” he said.

  He chunked the suitcase down in the dirt at his feet.

  The four men flanking Flowers reacted as though Salazar had drawn a weapon. They dropped into crouches, two of them bringing out handguns, the other two moving closer to the man at the center, Flowers, as though he was a precious bloom they’d been sworn to nurture.

  Flowers held up a hand and the men backed off. He walked forward until he was ten feet from Salazar.

  He pointed the tip of a snakeskin boot at the suitcase between them.

  “What, precisely, are you buying?”

  Salazar said: “No cross-traffic with me or my organization, ever again, for the rest of your life. No encroaching on my turf, ever. No attempt to send business my way, or to steal my own clientele. And, of course, no word to anybody, ever, about our association with one another.”

  Flowers tilted his head, expertly, so that the light flashed off his shades like a punctuation mark. “One million bucks.”

  “Yes.”

  “In shitty denominations, I’m assuming.”

  “One-hundred dollar bills,” Salazar said. “Ten thousand of them. They’re clean, but you’ll be able to launder them further. It’s a generous severance package, Oscar. More than generous. Take the money, forget about me, and I’ll forget about you, and we’ll all be happy.”

  Flowers peered at him for a long second, his eyes invisible behind the mirrors.

  He stooped, with his face still raised to Salazar, and picked up the suitcase.

  With his left thumb, Salazar hit the speed-dial key on his cell phone.

  The first shot cracked across the horizon, and Salazar was on the move, stepping to his left and slipping his right hand inside his light cotton jacket and drawing out the Colt M1911 pistol. But there was something wrong, something about the direction of the gunshot he’d heard, and in a moment he grasped what it was.

  The shot had come from in front of him, not behind him.

  At Salazar’s back, a ridge rose to a height of thirty feet at its peak. He’d positioned his four men among the outcroppings of rock that broke up the contour of the ridge. Each man was armed with a Zastava M91 sniper rifle, a Serbian military weapon. Salazar had gotten a batch of six of the rifles at a discounted price from a Belgrade expatriate he’d met in Mexico, a man who’d presented himself as a retired army officer but who Salazar assumed was a war criminal on the run.

  The speed-dial call Salazar had made was to one of the snipers, his cue to take out whichever of Flowers’s bodyguards he had in his sights. The other three riflemen would follow suit, shooting down the remaining goons. Leaving Flowers as the last man standing, until Salazar stuck the barrel of the Colt in his mouth and forced him to kneel and beg like a dog and likely piss his pants before Salazar pulled the trigger and sprayed his brains all over the hot sand.

  That was the plan. But as the flashes of light from the rocks in front of Salazar reached his consciousness, he understood Flowers had second-guessed him.

  Flowers normally went around everywhere with the same four bodyguards. But this time he’d brought additional insurance.

  A scream from behind and above Salazar told him that one of his men was down. He didn’t turn, didn’t pause, but fired the Colt twice, three times, into Oscar Flowers, two in the chest and, in case the little bastard was wearing a Kevlar jacket, one in the head. Before Flowers’ body hit the dirt Salazar was already diving for the suitcase.

  The handle was wrenched from his hand as a high-velocity round struck the case.

  Salazar didn’t stumble after it, didn’t nurse his stinging fingers. He ran, weaving and ducking, to the left, where a cluster of rocks invited protection. The air had erupted in the crash
of rifle- and handgun fire. One of Flowers’ heavies fell and twisted in Salazar’s path, his torso a bloody mess, and Salazar leaped over the body and sprinted for the rocks until he thought his heart and lungs were going to burst from his chest.

  He dove behind a boulder, rolled and pressed himself against it with the Colt extended. He surveyed the scene.

  Flowers had hidden an unknown number of men on the slope of the mesa behind him. It was impossible to tell, but from the explosions of light Salazar estimated there were three or four of them. They must have been in place already when Salazar and his entourage had arrived, a half-hour before the appointed time of the rendezvous. Salazar had though his early arrival would give him an advantage. Clearly, he hadn’t gotten there early enough.

  From the clatter of the gunfire issuing from Flowers’ side, Salazar guessed his men were armed with assault rifles, probably M16s, rather than sniper guns. What they lacked in range and precision they made up for in sheer, relentless firepower. The walls of rock surrounding Salazar flung the barrage of noise crashing back at him so that he was almost paralyzed by the overwhelming torrent of sound.

  Using the outcroppings, he sidled further to the left at a crouch, his Colt aimed two-handed in the direction of the mesa. There – there was the outline of a man’s head, one-quarter visible at the side of a boulder. Salazar took aim, fired. The shot whined off the rock, chipping shards from it, but the head jerked away in time.

  Shit.

  He’d heard one of his men go down with a scream. That left three of them, plus Salazar. His snipers had taken out, he saw, all four of Flowers’ bodyguards. Which meant they were up against at least three, possibly four, men with automatic weapons.

  Salazar wasn’t a gambling man, but if he had been, he’d reckon the odds at fifty-fifty.

  A hail of gunfire smashed and splintered the rock he was pressed against and he cringed and huddled against the smooth expanse, fury and terror sending his heart rate soaring. His best hope, he realized, was to stay put, to wait for one of the enemy to emerge and advance upon him, trying to get a better angle of fire, which would allow one of Salazar’s snipers to shoot him down.

  But he guessed Flowers’s men were too smart for that, and a fresh bout of gunfire exploded from the slope of the mesa as they resumed blasting away at the places where they’d pinpointed Salazar’s snipers. With the side of his face pressed against the rock he was hiding behind, Salazar watched the stretch of ground he’d vacated when the firing had started. Where Oscar Flowers lay in the dirt, the suitcase with the million dollars ten feet from him.

  Salazar had considered bringing a decoy suitcase, filled not with banknotes but with scrap paper. But there’d been the possibility that Flowers would send one of his men into the open to check the contents of the case before he himself emerged, and Salazar didn’t want to screw up the plan before it even got going.

  Now, though, he stared at the dusty, torn pigskin and wished like hell he could just abandon it.

  He realized that Flowers’ men had shifted on the slope of the mesa so that the rock he was behind was directly between them and his own snipers. It meant that the stretch of dirt where the suitcase lay wasn’t in the line of fire. But there was no way he could risk breaking into the open and making a run for it. Flowers’ men would swing their guns across and shred him before he got halfway to the suitcase.

  Salazar blinked, his eyes blurring with dust and smoke.

  He thought for a moment he was hallucinating.

  A figure had appeared in his line of sight, sprinting in a zigzag pattern from somewhere along the slope of the mesa. It reached the suitcase and stooped and snatched it up, stumbling a little as if unprepared for how heavy it was.

  The figure continued its run, slower now, towards the rocks in the distance.

  Salazar gave a yell and pointed the Colt at the figure’s back. He fired, but his stinging eyes and a fresh barrage of automatic fire from the enemy threw his aim off. He heard a yell of pain from one of Flowers’s men, followed by another scream from one of his own snipers. They were engaged with each other, and seemed oblivious to the figure which, even as Salazar watched, disappeared with the suitcase around the side of a rock outcropping.

  Salazar let out a renewed roar, rage and frustration igniting something primal and terrible within him.

  Chapter 1

  It wasn’t the most disgusting apartment block Joe Venn had ever visited. But it came close. Top five, certainly. Probably top three.

  The corridor was so dimly lit that Venn paused for a moment to adjust, his eyes still accustomed to the dazzle of the noonday July sunshine outside. Fewer than half of the bulbs that hung from the ceiling on filthy cobwebbed twists of flex were intact. The lino floor was sticky in patches under Venn’s feet, and he was glad both that the gloom prevented him from seeing exactly what he was treading in, and that he was wearing cheap sneakers. The air was musty and cloying, with an overlay of sweet smoke.

  The stink of urine, both stale and freshly voided, was everywhere.

  “Look at this,” said O’Dell, at his shoulder. “This is what I have to put up with, every day. I don’t like to sit on judgment, Mister Venn, but these people are just... animals.”

  O’Dell stood five-seven or -eight, a full six inches shorter than Venn. They were probably around the same weight, Venn guessed, but in O’Dell’s case the mass was concentrated in the tire of fat around his waist, in his butt, in the blubber of his jowls and his neck. O’Dell was an amiable guy, with a stout man’s engaging though wistful smile, as though whenever he encountered somebody who wasn’t fat like him he immediately felt inferior, and regretful.

  Venn picked his way through the gloom, his rubber sole crunching on something that he thought might be a glass syringe, maybe empty, maybe not. He peered at the numbers on the doors of the apartments to the right. Thirteen. Fifteen.

  “Seventeen,” said O’Dell.

  Venn reached into his leather jacket and drew his gun from its holster. It was a Beretta M9A1, his favored firearm, and one he’d held on to since his days in the US Marine Corps. A lot of military personnel had expressed reservations about the pistol, mainly in regard to its stopping power. But Venn had never had a problem with it. Besides, he wasn’t in an international combat situation in a hostile terrain like the Afghan or Iraqi desert. He wasn’t up against a crack team of Taliban, or Al’Qaeda, or even the rag-tag forces he’d faced in Bosnia and Kosovo, all those years ago.

  He was going in against a bunch of junkies.

  Venn put his ear to the door of number 17, held up his free hand to O’Dell for quiet.

  Vague noises from within. Creaks and shuffles that might have been people walking about. A TV pumped out the inane chatter of commercials.

  He reached for the door handle.

  *

  Venn had seen the advertisement in the Village Voice two weeks earlier. Property owner seeks competent and assertive security expert to enforce terms of contracts and collect monies owing. He’d called the cellphone number O’Dell had included, and had been mildly surprised when the voice at the other end had been not a secretary but O’Dell himself.

  “It’s hard, Mr Venn,” said O’Dell at their first meeting, the day after Venn made the call. They were in O’Dell’s office on Second Avenue, a featureless box of a room that might have been built from a kit and stank of sweat and hopeful despair.

  O’Dell was sweating in his too-tight shiny beige suit, his hands clasped business-like on the desk before him. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m as liberal as they come. I voted for our current mayor. I became a landlord because I wanted to make a difference to people’s lives. To provide the poor, the underprivileged, the destitute, with homes that were affordable and comfortable and safe. And most of my tenants are decent folks. Single moms who’ve escaped abusive relationships along with their kids. Ex-cons on parole who’re determined to go straight and make something of their lives. Disabled veterans with PTSD. But... but... I al
so get the junkies.”

  O’Dell sighed, looked toward the window for a view of the Manhattan skyline that wasn’t there. “Smackheads. Meth addicts. They tug on your heartstrings, persuade you they’re clean and sober. Offer evidence. References. So you give them an apartment. The next thing, they’re smoking, shooting up, inviting hordes of their friends and associates to use the apartment you’ve granted them as a drug den.”

  O’Dell looked up from his hands, gazed at Venn.

  “I need somebody who can clear them out, Mr Venn. Sorry if I sound harsh. If there was another way of resolving the situation, I’d take it. I don’t want to make anybody homeless if I can help it. But these people... they’re taking advantage. And they’re scaring away other tenants. I haven’t rented out another apartment in that block for three months. Word has gotten around.”

  Venn said, “Why not go to the police?”

  O’Dell gave another sigh, held his palms heavenward. “I did. The cops assumed immediately that I was just another typical slumlord. A hard-hearted son-of-a-bitch who was making up lies about his impoverished tenants to get rid of them when they’re a few days late with their rent. They wouldn’t even send round a patrolman to take a look.” He leaned across the desk, bitterness in his face. “I wasn’t a supporter of Mayor Giuliani, back in the day. But, so help me God, I could use a little zero tolerance right now, Mr Venn.”

  “Okay,” said Venn. “I’ll fix your problem for you.”

  O’Dell blinked, his eyes startled in his pudgy face. “Just like that?”

  “I’ll need to find out a little more about what I’m dealing with,” said Venn. “How many people approximately there are in the apartment at any given time. Have they ever given you cause to suspect they’re dealing, or manufacturing, rather than just using. That might mean they’re packing weapons. But, sure, I’ll find a solution.”

  O’Dell sat back in his chair, relief and gratitude fighting for control of his expression. “Mr Venn, you don’t know how -”