Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(5)

As a potential risk, Angelo pinged my radar in the slim-to-none category. Plus, he had no reason to put a tail on me. He knew exactly where I was because he’d arranged the hotel.

The third person who knew I was here was Detective Mike Cohen of the Denver PD. While I trusted Fuller and even Angelo with my life, I trusted Cohen with far more.

So maybe the guy was a random thief or kidnapper who had spotted me at the airport and pigeonholed me as an easy mark. Or he was a Mexican Peeping Tom who parked himself on the roof every night in the hope of getting lucky, voyeuristically speaking. Which would make our presence together in this corner of the universe mere coincidence.

I didn’t believe in coincidence.

There was a third option, one that made me feel like a bug under a magnifying lens on a sunny day.

Three years earlier, something terrible had happened in Iraq. Something outside even the so-called normal atrocities of war. I hadn’t figured out the details. But whatever went down, it had resulted in the murder of Malik’s mother—an interpreter for the Marines—and the deaths of several Americans. Now an unknown someone was working a cleanup operation to erase the past. I dubbed this person the Alpha. The Alpha was a man without a name or a face—a bogeyman I could not find or label. I didn’t know who he was, what he looked like, or where his loyalties lay.

I knew only two things. That he would kill to keep the world from learning the truth. And that he believed I had something he wanted. I didn’t. But this confusion, near as I could tell, was the only reason I still had a pulse.

So maybe the man on the roof meant that someone on the Alpha’s team—or the Alpha himself—had figured out that a war was on, and I’d fired the first volley by coming to Mexico to look for Malik. The Alpha had been after the boy for a long time—Malik was part of what needed to be buried.

Now it was a race to the finish line.

I tugged on the cord to the window blinds, but the broken slats refused to unfurl. I stepped backward into the arms of a dusk fading into night and resisted the desire to turn on the lamp. Shadows stretched and lengthened across my room like athletes warming up for a game. Across the alley, Rooftop Thomas’s cigarette flared, and I cursed the desk clerk who’d told me in broken English that there were no rooms available on the first floor. The first floor meant an easier escape, if it came to that.

Just because you were paranoid didn’t mean they weren’t out to get you.

I considered my options as a single woman alone in a foreign country without a pistol or my K9 partner. I could change hotels, but if Rooftop Thomas worked for the Alpha, he would follow me anywhere I could afford. I could call the police, but according to everything I’d heard, they’d probably join my admirer on the roof. Or I could go on the rooftop myself and confront him.

Tempting. But I suspected he had a gun in his backpack. And I doubted he was alone.

The best option seemed to be to stay up all night, then have Angelo get me somewhere safe tomorrow.

Semper Gumby. Marine-speak for always flexible.

The good news was that if they intended to hurt me, they wouldn’t have set up a tail. They’d have snatched me at the airport by using a fake cab, or grabbed me during my earlier detour to the crime-infested barrio of Tepito. If it was the Alpha, I figured he was just drawing a line in the sand, letting me know he was onto me.

Across the alleyway, Rooftop Thomas flicked on the penlight and turned a page in Márquez’s epic.

I was beginning to regret my decision to stay in what was probably the cheapest hotel in the city—cheapest where a white girl would be safe, anyway. I was here courtesy of Angelo’s generosity—the hotel was owned by the sister of a friend of his second cousin, or some such relation.

You’ll be safest around my family, he’d told me.

Plus, another friend of mine lived in the area. Jesús López, a Mexican Marine I could call on if things got dicey.

But my room on the second floor of the Hotel Fiesta was about as cheery and welcoming as a roach motel. Which might explain the roaches. A hard, narrow bed. An equally hard concrete floor. The porcelain sink in the bathroom was cracked, and the toilet leaked at the base. A broken ceiling fan left the room in a stifling heat that raised a sheen of sweat on my skin. The slit of a window looked across an alleyway to a two-story building that hosted not just Rooftop Thomas but also a tattoo parlor that looked like it hadn’t seen a paying client since the time of Pancho Villa.

The Hotel Fiesta was some party.

But the toilet flushed if you jiggled the handle, a tired stream of cold water came from the faucet, the cockroaches mostly left me alone, and the immense spider tucked behind the single chair was doing a good job of taking care of any insects smaller than a pigeon.

Count your blessings.

I reached in my duffel for the stun gun I’d bought an hour ago during a detour between the airport and the hotel and placed it on the bed. Bringing a weapon into Mexico was illegal, so I’d gone straight from Terminal 1 to the Tepito market, escorted by a man who looked like he could arm-wrestle Satan and then spit in his eye for good measure. Jesús López was infantería, a former Mexican Marine I’d first vetted then chatted with over Skype before I left the States. I’d told him I was in need of a few days of sun and fun, but the prospect of being unarmed made my reptilian brain itch.

No hay problema, he’d said. In Tepito, you can buy anything. Just as long as you leave your dignity at the door.