"You're their Lieutenant, of course they'll listen. Now tell them to stand down."
"They'll kill me just to get to you. Nobody fails Mr. Fuentes." The macho bravado she'd seen in him before at the police department lobby was all but gone. Strangely, it wasn't fear replacing it now. It was peace. Munoz surrendered to the acceptance of his death with an almost enviable serenity. The road he'd taken in life to bring himself to this point had finally reached its ultimate and expected trade-off, as deals made with the devil typically do. Maybe when Munoz signed his soul away, he had also resigned himself to this outcome long ago.
The two officers Munoz had sent inside now stood on the front porch with the door opened behind them, their guns pointed out into the light, blinded by their devices, and momentarily frozen by the invisible adversary who hid behind their lieutenant holding him hostage. "Nobody inside boss," one of them said.
"Take the shot," Munoz yelled in Spanish.
The two men, suddenly aware of the shift in power, widened their stance and took aim but did not fire. Not yet at least.
"Kill her," he hissed. The words never getting past his lips as Hatch constricted.
The men on the porch had yet to move. Instead, they peered out into the light and shifted their weapons in several different directions. They didn't know where she was.
Hatch made herself as small as possible behind Munoz who was of similar height and size. She prepared for the eventuality that once the rounds started firing, she would move Munoz forward and try to flank around to one of the vehicles. It wasn't a perfect plan. Lots of variables. Lots of places for Murphy's Law to insert itself.
Coiled. Ready. Hatch breathed in the muggy air tainted with the cologne of her hostage.
The first bang came, followed immediately by another. And neither came from a gun.
Both armed men were now face-down on Ernesto's yellow porch. Standing behind them, or more appropriately above them, Hatch saw Miguel Ayala and Ernesto Cruz holding up heavy cast iron pans like baseball players, celebrating an over-the-fence home run. The two men broke into a bit of a jig.
Munoz cursed at the sight of his two men being handcuffed together by the two older gentlemen.
Munoz, realizing his fate was back in Hatch's hands, made a last-ditch effort to break free by bucking hard.
Hatch felt his movement in his muscles before he made it. She began her counter before he attempted his attack. With the forward threat neutralized, Hatch stowed her gun and used her left arm to lock in the back of Munoz' neck. The interruption of the blood and oxygen to the brain caused the corrupt lieutenant to drop to the ground.
When consciousness returned, Munoz was cuffed to the open door of the police cruiser he'd arrived in.
"You might as well kill me." He spat blood into the dirt.
Hatch felt the cold steel of the Glock against her back and seriously considered taking the dirty cop up on his offer.
"They'll never stop. You know that," he continued through ragged breaths. "After I'm gone more will come."
"How did you find us?" She had other ways of extracting the information, but time was of the essence.
"I told you, Mr. Fuentes tracks his packages." He smiled. It was the same smile he'd given her when he first saw her walk in through the doors of the Nogales Police Department. The glaring difference this go round, his bright white teeth were now painted with his blood.
"The girls, like the one in that house and everything else the Fuentes family claims as their own, are monitored. It didn't matter that you ditched the van at that mission parking lot, though it would have been a lot easier had you not. It would have saved us a lot of time. We were tracking the van, not the package. Once we realized what'd you done, we activated a different tracker."
"Where is it?"
Munoz shrugged. "I don't know. Some doctor puts them in."
"Then a doctor will take them out," Ernesto said walking up on the man with his frying pan weapon still at the ready. The seventy-seven-year-old looked ready for another round.
"What are you going to do with me now?"
"Don't worry. If what you said is true, and Mr. Fuentes tracks his packages, then I'm sure someone will be along to find you soon enough." Hatch walked away, back towards Ernesto's house.
"You're already a dead woman! Do you hear me? A DEAD WOMAN!" Munoz called out.
The black hole swallowed Munoz as Hatch walked into the light. She thought about the words. There was more truth to that statement than he’d ever know.
Twenty-Five
They filled up Ayala's yellow Nissan, just as it started to sputter its final protest. Hatch gave an uneasy smile, still unnerved from the gun battle they'd narrowly avoided at the hand of the pan-wielding hero in the driver's seat. A man who, by his own admission, was accustomed to covering the violence of the world but unaccustomed to experiencing it firsthand.
"See, I told you we'd make it." His voice still quivering as the adrenaline dump he'd received during his moment of triumph had begun to recede within his system. Homeostasis would be reached again, but only after he'd crashed. The trick in combat was to keep the crash from happening before the battle was fully won. And they were still far from done. After filling up, they set off toward the Solarus Juice plant.
Ernesto and his wife Josephina had loaded their small Jeep with supplies, as much as they could comfortably fit and still leave enough room for Letty. The trio headed off in the opposite direction of Hatch and Ayala. It hadn't taken Ernesto long to find a doctor in his inner circle willing and able to find and remove whatever tracking device was implanted in Letty. And hopefully keep the cartel's henchmen at bay.