Blood of the Assassin

CHAPTER 41





Dusk was fading into night as the daily rush hour clogged the streets, horns honking as drivers cut one another off to gain a few feet of fruitless advantage on the overpass near the green two-story building that housed a hardware store below and two residential units above. The neighborhood was seedy, even by Mexico City standards. The two plainclothes police detectives that had been recruited by Cruz’s task force had seen everything in their combined thirty-seven years of duty, and while this wasn’t a district most would be advised to be strolling in after dark, at least it didn’t boast multiple murders every night, like some of the surrounding areas.

Joel Ortiz and Ruben Lariel had been called in because they knew the streets better than any, and had protected their identities over the years, so they wouldn’t be spotted by someone who knew them while they investigated the lead that had come from the snitch who had told the task force about his friend’s recent transaction involving a gun and some papers for a foreigner. The transaction itself was almost routine; but most of the underworld business involved locals, or cartel-related new arrivals from Guatemala, El Salvador, and Colombia. His friend had gotten the impression that this one had been from Europe – something about the accent, he’d said, while drinking heavily the other night with the informant, who had later been involved in a regrettable incident in which he’d been mistaken for a robber by the police.

Ruben eased off the gas of his twenty-year-old Pontiac and parked illegally at the filthy curb a few dozen yards from the suspect’s building – the home of one Virgilio Pontescu, who was not unknown to the authorities for his involvement in gun-running, forgery, blackmail, assault, and slavery. But other than an arrest as a teenager, he’d managed to evade spending serious time in jail, and he paid off the right people to be allowed to operate his little cottage industry without making waves. He had recently been linked to Los Zetas; but again, rumors were as thick as the rain that pelted the city during monsoon season, and even if he was, whispered talk on the street was a far cry from proof – and there were far more doing far worse than Virgilio, who wasn’t given to overt violence, at least that anyone had been willing to swear to in court.

Joel regarded his partner with a blank stare, and then rolled down the window and lit a cigarette – an annoying habit that infuriated Ruben, but to which he’d grown accustomed during the last decade they’d operated as a team. It had been some time since they’d been out on the streets, having traded their field shoes for desks a few years earlier, but in their day they had been the best, and their track record as investigative detectives was as impressive and lengthy as their tactics were unorthodox.

“How do you want to do this?” Ruben asked, shutting off the roughly idling engine and waving away some stray smoke.

“We watch for a while, and hopefully he shows up. Then we take him before he can get inside.”

“What if he’s already in there?”

“Do you see any lights on?” Joel countered, eyeing the dark façade.

“No, but maybe he’s taking a siesta.”

“Or maybe he’s not there. We watch and wait.”

Ruben grumbled a little and then settled in, having developed powerful muscles for sitting in one place for long periods of time on countless stakeouts.

Three hours later, the lights went off in the store below, and the proprietor exited through the front door, locked it, and then pulled down a steel security barrier to keep thieves from breaking the glass display windows. A shambling junky holding a hushed conversation with imaginary demons moved past the front of the shop ten minutes later, but other than that, the sidewalk was quiet, a downtrodden stray dog nosing piles of trash their only companion on the cul-de-sac.

Eventually, Ruben looked at his watch. “It’s almost midnight. Why don’t we check to see if he answers his door?”

“Don’t think so. No lights.”

“That’s okay. Maybe he left it open and we can take a quick look around while we’re waiting...,” he suggested, and Joel grinned.

“You want to take it, or should I?”

“Go back to sleep. I’ll be right back,” Ruben said, and opened the glove compartment and removed a leather bag with the tools of his trade in it.

Watching Ruben jimmy the front door was a thing of beauty, even as a few brave pedestrians hurried by. To all appearances he was fumbling with his keys – the trick being that he was picking the lock with practiced dexterity that would have made a magician gape. After twenty seconds of fiddling, he was in.

Joel eyed the street in the cracked side mirror, wary of being snuck up on while engrossed in Ruben’s artful craft. Two minutes later his cell phone vibrated, and he groped in his shirt pocket for it and stabbed it to life. “What?” he growled.

“It’s not good. Virgilio wasn’t taking a nap. Judging by the smell, he’s been dead for two days, maybe more.”

“Shit. From what?”

“My guess is that the pen stabbed through his right eye is the cause of death. But I’m no coroner,” Ruben rasped.

“I better call the crew.”

“Yeah. This is a dead end.”

“Very funny. Don’t ever lose that childlike naïveté.”

Joel disconnected and dialed the task force and broke the news, and his contact told him that they would handle forensics – to just get out of there and leave it to them. Joel didn’t need to be told twice, and when Ruben returned, the engine was already running.

“What do you think? Is this all a coincidence, that this guy they’re looking for was maybe doing a deal with Virgilio, and next thing Virg turns up smoked?” he asked rhetorically.

“Sure. Probably unrelated. People die every day.”

“Might have been an accident.”

“Yeah. He was signing a check and stabbed himself in the eye.”

“Or committed suicide.”

“Seems reasonable to me. You see anything suspicious?”

“You mean besides the corpse with a Bic jammed through its frontal lobe?”

“Yeah. Besides that.”

“He had lovely curtains. Might have been, what do they call that now, metro-sexy?”

“Metro-sexual.”

“What you said.”

“I don’t think that’s suspicious.”

“Speak for yourself.”

Ruben pulled away and rolled down the street, his exhaust proclaiming his blissful lack of concern for mundanities like tune-ups or preventive maintenance, and then the old wreck turned the corner and was gone, leaving the mangy, miserable dog, still foraging hopefully, as the only witness to their departure.