Texas Sicario (Arlo Baines Book 2)

  OTHER TITLES BY HARRY HUNSICKER

  Arlo Baines Thrillers

  The Devil’s Country

  The Jon Cantrell Thrillers

  The Contractors

  Shadow Boys

  The Grid

  Lee Henry Oswald Mysteries

  Still River

  The Next Time You Die

  Crosshairs

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2019 by Harry Hunsicker

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503905412

  ISBN-10: 1503905411

  Cover design by Ray Lundgren

  To Alison

  CONTENTS

  EL EMPRENDEDOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  - EL EMPRENDEDOR -

  (THE ENTREPRENEUR)

  Alejandro Sandoval liked money.

  Occasionally, the thought crossed his mind that this might be a sin.

  If he still attended mass, he might have asked his priest. But he had little time for church, or for much of anything for that matter, his second job being more labor intensive than he’d imagined. And more lucrative.

  Alejandro tried not to think about sin and priests and such.

  Instead, he concentrated on the good fortune that had come his way, the opportunity for a better life for his family and him.

  After all, wasn’t that what America was all about? The chance to better yourself?

  Right now, there was so much plastic-wrapped good fortune in the back room of his tire store that he couldn’t process the numbers in his head, the dollar figure that belonged to him from each shoebox-size package.

  His cut was only a tiny fraction, but the quantity this week alone was so vast that he wondered what he would do with the extra cash.

  Fortunately, this was the last of it for a day or so. A few dozen kilos stacked in a cramped area behind the office, the air thick with the chemical tang of new tires and a fragrant herbal aroma from the packages themselves.

  The man from the restaurant—another spoke in this particular wheel of opportunity—would arrive at any moment to take the shipment to a place where the distribution would begin, an area of the operation with which Alejandro didn’t concern himself.

  Alejandro’s life was full enough without worrying about others’ responsibilities. The businesses, a wife and two sons, the ever-increasing amounts of cash that needed to be handled.

  A life so different from that of his father, who’d spent decades as a cobbler in Guanajuato, hunched over the shoes of rich men.

  Alejandro wondered what Papa would make of his only son. Surely this newfound success would change the old man’s stubborn way of thinking. These people with their packages were just businessmen, just like Alejandro himself.

  His phone chimed. A text from the restaurant man, now in the alley behind the tire store.

  Alejandro replied that he was ready.

  Twenty minutes later, the transfer was complete, the restaurant man departing in his van.

  Tomorrow, one of the jefes would drop by Alejandro’s tire store with a grocery sack full of cash and information about the upcoming schedule.

  Until then, Alejandro was free to relax. He lit a cigarette, his only indulgence, and gathered up the trash that had accumulated in the storeroom over the past few days.

  Outside, the sky was cloudless, the heat fierce. August in Texas, so much hotter than the mountains back home.

  He walked across the alley, threw the trash into the dumpster.

  That’s when the man in black appeared, and Alejandro Sandoval came to understand that for every opportunity, a price must be paid.

  The man wore a clown mask, a silencer-equipped pistol in one hand.

  Alejandro started to speak, but the words wouldn’t form, his tongue thick and dry.

  The man raised his arm, and Alejandro felt a thump in his belly.

  He shuddered. An instant later, he lay on the dirty asphalt, gasping for breath.

  Pain spiked deep in his stomach. The taste of blood filled his mouth.

  The man pointed the pistol at his face.

  “Please, don’t.” Alejandro’s voice was a whisper, lungs not functioning quite right.

  The killer didn’t reply.

  “Por favor, amigo. My wife, my children, they need me.” Alejandro tried to move his legs, but they refused to work properly.

  The killer shook his head. “No soy tu amigo.”

  “Tengo dinero,” Alejandro said. “Much money. All for you. Just don’t shoot again.”

  Silence.

  Alejandro realized he was going to die in a few moments, passing on to the next life from this grimy spot in the alley behind his place of business. No sum of money could save him.

  Without warning, the killer fired again, a bullet smashing into Alejandro’s knee.

  The pain was blinding, but he had no strength to cry out.

  The killer’s mask shifted like he was smiling.

  He aimed at Alejandro’s forehead, and the world turned black.

  - CHAPTER ONE -

  Days like this, when the whiskey got the better of him, Javier liked to talk about death.

  “These are dangerous times,” he’d say. “Evil is at the gate, and we shall all die soon if we are not vigilant.”

  I liked to point out that we didn’t have a gate, aiming for a bit of levity, but I never got much of a response. Javier’s sense of humor was—oh, how should I put it?—askew, so he didn’t appreciate jokes all that much.

  He had suffered more than I had. He’d watched his family die, a wife and two daughters, cut down by gunfire on the streets of his hometown, Nuevo Laredo. Beca
use of that, I was pretty lenient when it came to his missing sense of humor and discussions about evil and death and whatnot.

  On this day, when the topic came up, we were in a bar called El Corazón Roto, the Broken Heart, sitting in a booth at the front.

  It was a few minutes before noon, and he had just started on his second glass of Jack Daniel’s, on the rocks. I was nursing a cup of coffee.

  “You feel it, too, yes?” He took a sip of his drink.

  “Feel what?”

  “The hairs on the back of my neck. Bad things are headed our way.”

  “Maybe you have a rash,” I said.

  Javier’s neck was always telling him some disaster was about to hit.

  “Why are you and I even friends?” He rolled his eyes. “This is what I get for discussing such things with a gringo.”

  “You got any other friends? Gringo or otherwise?”

  He waved a hand dismissively and stared into his glass.

  I knew he was thinking about the girls, María Elena and Gabriela, who would have been twelve and thirteen this year.

  Thirteen years old, the same age as my son if he’d lived.

  I pushed away those thoughts, drank some more coffee.

  El Corazón Roto catered to working-class Latinos, an increasingly large customer base in Dallas. The place was small and out of proportion, a long, narrow room with high ceilings, like a casket. The walls were decorated with neon signs advertising Carta Blanca and Modelo. A pool table was in the back by a jukebox loaded with conjunto music, Mexican rap, and Marty Robbins, the last one a favor for me, to be played only when there wasn’t a crowd.

  “You are armed today?” He rattled the ice in his glass.

  “Sí. I have my pistola.” A small-frame Glock he insisted I carry, tucked inside my waistband, like when I used to work undercover.

  Javier owned El Corazón Roto and the mercado in the much larger building attached to the bar. I was head of security, which had little to do with actually keeping things secure. Mostly, I took care of him when he’d had too much to drink, which wasn’t all that often, and commiserated about the travails of the small businessman, usually a daily occurrence. A patrol service made sure the businesses were safe.

  This early on a Thursday, we were the only ones in the place other than the bartender.

  In a few hours, the men would show up, dusty and sweaty from building this or landscaping that, and the room would fill with the sound of glasses clinking and people speaking Spanish.

  I finished my coffee as the front door opened, and a shaft of light cut through the gloom.

  A moment later, a man appeared, short and squat, his hair close-cropped.

  He blinked several times and sauntered to the bar. His skin was dark brown, the color of coffee beans, stretched over wide cheekbones, the face of a Mayan warrior.

  He took a seat at the far end of the bar, maybe thirty feet away, out of earshot.

  “You know him?” Javier asked.

  I shook my head.

  “Look at his clothes,” he said.

  I had already noticed the black jeans, matching western-style shirt, and the boots with the silver toe tips. Not the usual wardrobe of an El Corazón Roto customer.

  “Let it go,” I said.

  “You know the rule. No narcos.”

  Javier had a thing about people in the drug business, his family having been killed in the crossfire between two competing cartels.

  I sighed. We’d been over this before. The smuggling operations along the Rio Grande didn’t have a significant presence in North Texas. The police and the courts in this part of the world weren’t as corruptible as farther south, the journalists not as easily coerced.

  “Those clothes don’t mean he’s a narco,” I said.

  “Look at his wrist. What about that?”

  I turned toward the bar. The man wore what appeared to be a diamond-encrusted watch. I didn’t reply.

  “What do I pay you for?” Javier said. “Earn your keep.”

  “You haven’t actually paid me in a while.”

  He stared at me, face blank, brown eyes unblinking. He was in his early forties, a little younger than I, but looked ten years older.

  Our relationship wasn’t based on money. We were close because of the suffering we’d endured but rarely talked about, the daggerlike pain that never quite went away, grief from losing all that we had loved.

  I slid out of the booth.

  The man with the fancy boots watched me approach. He’d ordered a Bud Light and took a drink as I handed my cup to the bartender.

  “Cómo estás?” I said to the stranger.

  “Coffee?” He pointed to the mug as the bartender emptied the dregs.

  “I’m not much of a drinker.”

  He took another sip of beer. “Your friend handles that for the both of you, huh?”

  I pulled a cocktail napkin from the stack by the beer taps, wiped up a small spill while the bartender rinsed out my cup, studiously ignoring both of us.

  “Where are you from?” I asked.

  “You have a nice place here. Business good?”

  He was observant, noticing Javier’s whiskey, and forthright, asking about business. The hairs on the back of my neck were starting to take notice, and the ex-cop in me wondered what game he was playing.

  The bartender frowned, leaned close to a monitor next to the cash register.

  “We work hard at keeping it nice,” I said. “Me and the owner.”

  “I’m from South Texas.” He adjusted his watch. The diamonds sparkled in the neon light. “So, what’s a white guy doing in a place like this?”

  “Everybody has to be somewhere.”

  “Señor Baines.” The bartender called my name, pointed to the screen. “You should see this.”

  The monitor, visible to anyone standing at the bar, was connected to a series of video feeds. The one in the middle displayed the parking lot directly in front of the entrance to El Corazón Roto.

  The lot was huge, much bigger than what was needed for a relatively small bar. Most of the spaces would be filled over the weekend, shoppers at the mercado.

  At the moment, only a handful of cars was present. In the distance, at the far edge of the property, I could see blue and red lights flashing.

  The man with the expensive watch glanced at the monitor. “La policía.”

  “You know anything about that?” I asked.

  “Not me, amigo. I’m just passing through.” He pushed away his half-finished beer and headed toward the door.

  - CHAPTER TWO -

  I’d been a cop most of my adult life, up until eighteen months ago, first as a trooper with the Department of Public Safety, then as a Texas Ranger.

  Dead bodies were nothing new to me, but that didn’t make seeing one any easier, especially when it was somebody I knew.

  We weren’t exactly close, but Alejandro Sandoval had always seemed like a decent enough guy, a low-end entrepreneur, hustling to get a slice of the American Dream. Certainly not someone who deserved to be gunned down in an alley.

  But bad things happened to good people all the time, as any police officer could tell you, and his death was just one of many I’d seen that made no sense.

  Alejandro’s body lay sprawled in the middle of a rectangle formed by yellow crime scene tape. The tape bracketed an area behind his tire shop and the dumpsters at the rear of Javier’s parking lot.

  From my vantage point by one of the dumpsters, it appeared that he had been shot at least three times: in the head, abdomen, and knee.

  A coroner’s assistant stood in the shade of a hackberry tree, fiddling with his phone, his van parked nearby. Inside the crime scene tape were several forensic investigators armed with clipboards and digital cameras, a half dozen uniformed officers, and a homicide investigator I knew named Sam Ross.

  Javier stood by my side, staring at the body, swaying on his feet a little. Ross nodded hello but continued working.

  It was
twenty minutes past noon, the temperature pushing ninety-five. The air smelled like garbage—grease and rotting food, sour milk.

  “Go inside,” I said. “They’ll be here awhile.”

  Javier shook his head. “You should find that puta with the fancy watch.”

  I’d already used my phone for a quick scan of the video from the camera system.

  Alejandro’s body had been found to the north of El Corazón Roto, maybe two hundred yards from the entrance. The man we’d seen in the bar had come from the east and departed in that same direction. None of the other cameras showed where he’d gone—not too surprising, since there were gaps in the coverage.

  Also, the camera facing north barely captured the police cars, showing only the flashing lights. The lens wasn’t powerful enough to pick up individuals at that range, as the homeless people who sometimes hung around the dumpsters seemed to intuitively know.

  I’d explained all that to Javier, plus the fact that it didn’t make very much sense for the killer to stop for a beer at the place next door while waiting for the police to arrive.

  He didn’t care. To him, the guy with the silver-toed boots didn’t belong in this neighborhood. Therefore, he was a suspect.

  Javier called out to the coroner. “Why don’t you cover him up?”

  The coroner’s assistant glanced up from his phone but didn’t reply. A moment later, he returned to his screen.

  “Hey.” Javier raised his voice. “I’m talking to you.”

  The coroner looked up again, an exasperated expression on his face.

  “His family,” Javier said. “They shouldn’t see him like that.”

  The coroner rolled his shoulders and got in the van, turning on the engine.

  “They can’t cover him yet,” I said. “Might contaminate the scene.”

  I’d once worked a case in a little town outside of Corsicana; a waitress in a honky-tonk had been stabbed to death in the men’s restroom, her body dumped in the metal trough that served as a urinal. Forensics had taken nearly ten hours processing the scene, bagging and tagging DNA samples, old cigarette butts, the odd used condom.

  Ross stepped around a tech taking pictures and approached us.

  “Arlo Baines,” he said. “Last I heard, you’d left town.”

  I shrugged. “Now I’m back.”