Devil's Mark

Smiley shook her head again. Sicarios were cartel enforcers and hit men. “No one ‘used to be’ a sicario, you just end up in jail or dead.”

Bolan mulled over other inconsistencies. The Valencia Cartel had merged with the west coast branch of the Federation Cartel. They were enemies of the Tijuana and the Gulf cartels and didn’t have any friends in the north. Valencia operated out of the state of Michoacán, which left their boy Balthazar about fifteen hundred miles away from home. “Definitely something hinky about him.”

“The boy is positively anomalous.” Wang nodded.

Bolan liked what he saw less and less by the second. “So what’s he doing hanging around in La Chinesca?”

Wang frowned mightily. “He’s waiting for me to pay him.”

Smiley leaned in between the seats. “Pay him for what?”

Wang squirmed in his seat slightly. “He wants his taste.”

Bolan looked at the man, and he didn’t like what he saw there either. “You telling me he’s leaning on you?”

Wang squirmed even more. He might be a Mexican citizen who had been educated in the United States, but he was also Chinese and he knew he was losing face. “Yeah.”

“Who’s he working for?”

Wang stopped short of hanging his head in shame. “I don’t know.”

Villaluz had been taking all this in with increasing unease. “Forgive me, J.W. We have known each other for a very long time. You know I respect you, but I must ask. Why haven’t you killed this man?”

Wang turned his face away to look out his window into the middle distance. “Because I’m afraid.”

“Who does he work for?” Bolan repeated.

“I don’t know. All I know is that he’s hombre marcado.”

“A marked man?” Bolan asked.

“Yeah.”

“You know even in Spanish that usually means a dead man.”

“I know!” Wang became increasingly agitated. “But that’s not what it means now.”

“What does it mean now?”

“It means he bears the mark,” Wang stated.

“The mark of what?” Bolan probed.

“I don’t know.”

Bolan looked at the Chinese gangster and realized Wang was genuinely afraid of Balthazar Gomez. “Tell me what you do know.”

“I know you don’t mess with marked men.”

“Or what?”

“The first three hombres marcados I heard about in Mexicali showed up at Tijuana cartel–controlled operations or fronts and demanded tribute. Of course they got killed and killed ugly.”

“And then?”

“And then? Within a day the men who killed them were dead. Their families were dead. Their immediate friends were dead. Their business associates were dead. Everyone’s head got taken, including the heads of the dead marked men in the morgue. The cartel capos who ran the killers got anonymous messages. Silencio, and pay. Two didn’t pay and they and their families and friends ended up just like their sicarios. The third one paid. The bosses of the two who didn’t got the same message. Silencio. Pay. There were a number of slaughters up the chain of command before they paid.”

“These marked men are always out of towners?”

“Always,” Wang affirmed. “As far as I’ve heard.”

“And they’re not taking over anyone’s territory or operations?”

“No, they just demand a taste.”

“And no one knows who’s running them?” Bolan asked. “No.”

“And now you’ve got an hombre marcado in La Chinesca demanding tribute from you.”

“Yeah.”

Bolan nodded and flung open his door. “Right.”

“Wait!” Wang cried, spewing a stream of very agitated Spanish, Cantonese and American profanity in Bolan’s wake.

“Here we go,” Smiley said.

Villaluz drew both revolvers. “This should be very interesting,” he opined happily.

Cars slammed to screeching standstills as Bolan strode across the street straight at Balthazar Gomez. “Hey! Balthazar!”

Nearby citizens of La Chinesca scattered in all directions. The former sicario sneered behind sunglasses as Bolan reached the curb. “White boy? You—”

“White man,” Bolan corrected him. Balthazar Gomez’s sunglasses snapped at the bridge and his nose flattened beneath Bolan’s fist. The soldier opened his hand, which made a sound like a frying pan slamming into a side of meat as he slapped teeth out of the marked man’s mouth. Gomez staggered backward. He clawed beneath his sweat jacket and came out with an FN Five-seveN pistol. Bolan snatched the weapon out of his opponent’s hand and beat him with it. More teeth flew as Bolan returned Gomez’s gun forehand and back across his jaw.

Bolan tucked the gun away and had to give Gomez credit for still being upright.

The Executioner gave him no mercy.

Gomez flung a palsied punch in Bolan’s direction. The soldier grabbed the arm and violently spun his sparring partner into a hip throw and projected him through the barbershop window. Glass shattered into flying shards. Chinese barbers shrieked and fled. Abandoned Mexican and Chinese customers in various states of midcoif cringed and jerked in their barber chairs. Bolan stepped over the sill through broken glass and into the carnage. Gomez was dazedly climbing up a shuddering patron’s legs. The big American grabbed him and flung him against the back wall. The wall-length mirror cracked. Balthazar sank into a sink, and the basin ripped halfway out of the wall. Bolan closed both fists and delivered a series of rights and lefts.

He stepped back, and Gomez fell forward, flopping out of the sink with his face beaten and his seat sodden. He mewled slightly as he was dragged out of the barbershop by his ponytail. Bolan whistled through his teeth, and Wang’s BMW bolted across the intersection and stopped in a shriek of rubber. Villaluz and Smiley emerged as Wang popped the trunk. The inspector grabbed the sicario’s legs and between them, he and Bolan heaved Balthazar into the trunk while Smiley covered the intersection with one of Wang’s Chinese pistols. Villaluz handcuffed their perp and zip-tied his ankles with riot cuffs. Bolan slammed the trunk shut and everyone jumped back into the car as people on the street gasped and pointed.

“Drive!” Bolan ordered.

Wang was seriously unhappy. “Where?” he snarled.

Villaluz began speaking in fast and furious Spanish. Wang shook his head fatilistically as he put the pedal down and the BMW lunged back into traffic.

Bolan drew a Chinese pistol and laid it in his lap. “Where’re we headed, Inspector?”

“A place I know and no one else in this car does, including the one in the trunk. Assuming you trust me, Señor Cooper, we will be safe.”

“You don’t get it!” Wang growled. “No one is safe from the marked men! They find you! No matter where you go! No matter where you hide! It doesn’t matter who your patron is or who is protecting you! You’re dead!”

Bolan’s voice was as cold as the grave. “Just drive. Go where the inspector tells you.”

Wang muttered, but he slammed through the gears and through traffic. In minutes they were out of La Chinesca, out of Mexicali and heading into the desert. Bolan watched as brown mountains clawed upward and the uglier and uglier roads kept creeping down toward sea level. “Laguna Salada?”

The inspector laughed. “You have been here before.”

Bolan had walked the vast emptiness of the Sahara and Gobi deserts. Laguna Salada couldn’t be described as a big empty. It had too many features of interest and too much character, but it was a big piece of brown solitude and Bolan watched it unfold before him. The Laguna Salada was a desert basin bounded by the Sierra Cucapah and the Sierra Juárez ranges. In wet years it was actually an inland fishing ground and bloomed like a rose. In dry years the saline watershed was salt desert and dunes where NASA had sent astronauts to train and Hollywood had filmed Westerns and WWII North African battle scenes. Depending on the weather, it was an off-road racing mecca, a land-speed record racecourse for land and water vehicles, an amateur astronomer haven, and Mexico’s UFO and extraterrestrial sighting ground zero.

Most of the time it was a fair chunk of sere-brown solitude.

Bolan had to admit there were worse places in Mexico to deliberately get lost. “You got a place out here?”

“I know of a place out here.” Villaluz kept giving directions, and they slowly began to move out of the flats into the brown humps and hills that led into the Sierra Juárez.

A lot of things were bothering Wang, and he picked the least of his problems to avoid thinking about the major ones. The BMW bucked and slammed across road that was little more than cart path. “You know what this is doing to my alignment, old man!”

Villaluz put his hands to his breast innocently. “I did suggest we take my Tundra, but you insisted on your sedan.”

Wang muttered something that sizzled in Cantonese.

Smiley looked about at the brutal landscape. “We should have packed a picnic basket.”

“God provides,” Villaluz assured piously.

It was Villaluz who provided, and what he provided was a goat ranch. The land was too hard for cows and sheep. It was too hard for BMW 7 series sedans, as well. They took a left turn into a box canyon that was nearly invisible from the road and came to a halt outside a cubist adobe. Steam tea-kettled out from under the hood.

Bolan got out and examined the inspector’s redoubt. It was pueblo-style and used the rock face of the soaring brown cliffs as the back wall. The few windows were little more than firing slits. Bolan made most of it for original Yuman Indian construction. The satellite dish, prefab shed to the side and corrugated tin lean-to/garage with camouflage netting for a door were more recent. The small cottonwood corral for shearing and slaughtering was open and currently empty, though a few incredibly shabby-looking, random goats stared at the newcomers in slow, square-pupiled incredulousness from various vantages around the pueblo.

A donkey stood in the shade of the satellite dish and looked at the newcomers with little enthusiasm. Bolan noted the clumps of boulders and tombstone-sized shards of rock all around. Looking backward, the approach was flat save for the ugly dips and bumps that had had their way with the BMW’s suspension. The pueblo was defensible, at least by Old West or possibly the conquistador’s standards and the approach was a nice killing ground. Bolan couldn’t immediately see the bolt-hole, but he knew it had to be there.

“Nice,” Bolan acknowledged.

Villaluz sighed happily. “I am one-quarter Yuman Indian. My ancestors once lived here.”

Smiley took in the pueblo and clearly wondered about the state of the facilities. “Little slice of heaven,” she observed dryly.

Wang kicked his driver’s side tire in anger. No one was ever going to tow his beautiful black vehicle out of the Laguna Salada. “Fuck!” he opined.

Villaluz cupped his hands over his mouth. “Fausto!” His voice boomed off the box canyon walls. “Fausto!”

Long moments passed before Fausto shambled out of the pueblo. He looked like Charles Bronson might have had he lived to be a hundred. His denim jeans and cowboy boots looked about as old and faded as he did. His cotton shirt was bleached blinding white. A red headband held back his shoulder-length gray hair. His face was a sun-raddled baseball mitt with two eyes a nose and a mouth. Duct tape held his cowboy boots together. The old man carried a Mexican army surplus M-1 Garand loosely in both hands. The weapon was missing a great deal of finish, and the stock was chipped and dinged but the metal and the wood gleamed with oil.

Fausto took in the panorama of interlopers stonily and finally turned his gaze on Villaluz. “Israel.”

“Fausto!”

Fausto’s features glacially moved into the semblance of a smile. “Che, amigo.” He looked back at the unexpected guests. “Yanquis?”

“Sí.” The inspector nodded.

Fausto contemplated this weird and wonderful turn of events. “Trouble?”

“Sí.” The inspector nodded.

“Ah.” Fausto turned and headed back into the pueblo. Villaluz nodded for them to follow. Bolan popped the trunk, and he and Villaluz manhandled Gomez out of the trunk. The man blinked dazedly in the glare and nearly toppled over. Villaluz produced a switchblade and cut the riot cuffs on his ankles. Gomez shuffled under the inspector’s direction on feet stupid from lack of circulation. Bolan and Smiley grabbed gear bags heavy with ordnance. Wang spent a few mournful moments gazing at his stricken vehicle before his shoulders sagged and he grabbed some gear and followed suit.

Bolan had eaten well the past twenty-four hours, but his stomach rumbled as he entered the brown cube of the pueblo. A pot of pinto beans and bacon loaded with chilies bubbled over the hearth. They dropped their gear, and all took seats around a table made out of two sawhorses and planks. Villaluz shoved Gomez in a corner. Bolan put a Chinese pistol on the table and sat facing him. Fausto put out earthenware plates and began slopping beans and bacon and put out corn tortillas that had been steaming in a pan in the coals. Fausto gave Villaluz a questioning glance and the inspector nodded. The old man took up a clay pot and began splashing liquid into the mismatched coffee mugs around the table.

Bolan peered at the fresh pulque and smiled at Fausto. “Tlachiquero?” Fausto nodded. Tlachiqueros were men who harvested the juice of the maguey plant and made pulque. Tequila and mezcal were distilled liquors from the same plant. Pulque was simply fermented like beer, had roughly the same alcohol content and was as ancient as the Aztecs. Villaluz clapped Fausto on the shoulder. “Tlachiquero? Ranchero? Pistolero? Fausto does it all. He is a—” Villaluz savored the English euphemism “—jack of all trades.”

Fausto favored Bolan with a smile. “You like pulque, señor?”

“In the United States all you can get is the urine-in-a-can brands at the super mercado. But fresh made is always a pleasure.”

Fausto cackled like a rooster with a herniated testicle as Bolan poured back his pulque, keeping the grimace off his face. Pulque was definitely an acquired taste, and could charitably be described as milky-, musty- and sour-tasting all at the same time. But most of its manufacture across northern Mexico was an artisanal industry, and Fausto had definitely put the time and love into his trade.

Smiley and Wang shuddered down a sip each. Villaluz hit his mug with gusto. Fausto gave Gomez his attention for the first time. “Who is this man?”

“He was trying to lean on our friend Wang,” Bolan said.

Fausto took an ancient buck knife out of his pocket and flipped it open with a snap of his wrist. The blade had been sharpened so many times it was starting to resemble a scalpel. He looked to the inspector. “You want I should cut him?”

Gomez flinched but barely.

The inspector held out his mug for more pulque and measured Gomez. “Not just yet.”

The ride through Laguna Salada hadn’t done the beaten man any favors. “Perhaps he’d like a little something to cut the dust,” Bolan suggested.

“A waste,” Fausto proclaimed.

“He won’t talk with a dry throat,” Bolan replied.

Gomez drummed his heels on the floor and thrashed as Fausto pried open his mouth with fingers like cold chisels. Fausto poured a mug’s worth of pulque down the sicario’s throat. Gomez gagged and sputtered, and the old man treated him to another.

Bolan finished his meal, then rose. “I’m going to make a call. Keep our buddy Balthazar hydrated.” The Executioner scooped up a Chinese assault rifle from one of the bags and stepped outside. He owned one of the latest satellite phones in existence, but in the box canyon he just wasn’t getting full bars. Bolan pulled on a faded Boston Red Sox cap and took a hike out of the canyon. He squatted in the shade of a stand of mesquite trees and got a signal.

Aaron Kurtzman’s craggy face appeared on his touch screen. “Striker! Where are you?”

“Laguna Salada,” Bolan answered.

Kurtzman frowned for just a moment as he searched the massive database that was his mind. “What are you doing there?”

Bolan scanned his phone’s camera back toward the pueblo. “Hanging at the goat ranch with Fausto, drinking pulque. You?”

“Mostly worrying about you. You got a sitrep for me?”

Bolan gave Kurtzman the condensed version, and the computer expert began rapidly tapping keys on his end as he began pulling up CIA, FBI, DEA and NSA files. His craggy brow rearranged itself in question. “Running scared doesn’t fit this Wang fellow’s file.”

“Well, Wang isn’t typical tong, but he walks with heavy machismo around Mexicali. You’re right, it isn’t normal, and the cartel guys aren’t acting normal, either. You capture cartel guys, and they usually start making threats or get all sullen.”

“Well, I’m looking at your boy Balthazar’s file and it pretty much jibes with what Wang told you. Cuah Nigris was pretty much a sociopath who found his niche. Balthazar Gomez is about as professional as cartel guys get short of being ex-military. He was a genuine A1 sicario down in Michoacán for the Valencia Cartel. Seven kills directly associated with him but no convictions. Half a dozen more suspected.”

“Give me a timeline.”

“Last word on him is that he was picked up by the police in a general sweep six months ago in the state capital, Morelia. They couldn’t pin anything on him and let him go. Then he drops off the planet. His next known appearance is you grabbing him in La Chinesca this morning.”

“So who’s he working for?”

“That is the million-dollar question. Cartel guys betray one another all the time, but it’s almost always because of power grab or a rivalry within the cartel. For a sicario to leave one cartel and go work for another is almost unheard-of. For one, it would be an immediate death sentence from the people you betrayed, and even if another cartel used you, you’d never be trusted.”

“And yet our boy Balthazar is a thousand miles from home demanding a taste out of the Mexicali tongs, working for we don’t know who.”

“It is a conundrum,” Kurtzman admitted. “And you say Wang says that most of these marked men are out-of-towners?”

“Out-of-staters,” Bolan confirmed. “And as far as he knows, all of them bear Balthazar’s MO.”

“Hmm.” Kurtzman mulled that over. “A genuine intercartel foreign legion.”

Bolan smiled. “That’s pretty perceptive, Bear.”

“We try,” he agreed.

“I might be tempted to call it an intercartel group of untouchables.”

Kurtzman grinned in appreciation. “Even better, considering this new ‘marked-man’ status going around.”

“So who’s running them?”

“That is the question,” Kurtzman replied.

“You got anything new on the street and hospital fights in Tijuana?”

“Well, half of the victims have already been cremated and all of them were missing their heads. There’s not much to go on except the most basic of forensic evidence.”

Bolan rose to his feet. “All right, do what you can. I’ll get back to you.”

Kurtzman grew concerned. “What’s up?”

Bolan watched the rooster tails of dust rising in the distance from multiple vehicles. “Company.”

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