Ambush (Michael Bennett #11)(9)

“?Vete a la mierda!” shouted a second man.

“Y el burro en el que cabalgaste,” cried a third.

A foul-mouthed cavalry. From the darkness on the alley’s north end emerged a crowd of staggering, wheeling men who came at me with remarkable speed, given their apparent drunkenness. As they drew near, I counted eight men. Some of them sported Mexican eagle tattoos on their biceps, and several wore T-shirts with MARINA spelled out in white block letters.

The infantería.

I turned back to Angelo. His single eye was still open, but now it served only as a mirror to the night, flat and lifeless as an icy pond.

“Angelo!”

I touched my fingers to his neck—the weak pulse had vanished. I tilted his forehead back and lifted his chin, then pinched his nose closed and clamped my mouth over his, breathing into his lungs. Then again. When his chest didn’t rise, I rose to my knees and began chest compressions. Thirty compressions, two breaths. Thirty compressions, two breaths.

Angelo remained motionless. Thirty compressions . . .

“Sydney!”

Jesús’s voice penetrated the haze, and I became aware that he was crouched next to me. His men eddied around us, human shields. I checked Angelo’s neck again for a pulse.

Nothing. I tilted his head back, breathed into his mouth. Tasted his blood.

Jesús placed his hand on my shoulder.

“We must go, Sydney.”

I shrugged him off. Placed the heel of my hand on Angelo’s breastbone.

“Now,” Jesús said. “Your enemies won’t wait much longer.”

An approaching siren sounded, too late to offer Angelo anything more than transportation to a steel table and the coroner’s scalpel. I rocked back on my heels and stared at his corpse, my eyes wide and painful in sockets as dry as old bones.

“He’s gone,” Jesús said. “Come. We must be gone as well.”

At last I looked at him. “Where’s your car?”

“The Americans blocked off both ends of the alley. We have had to improvise. And we cannot hold them off forever. Even the infantería know when to retreat. So come. I think you were right in saying this is dangerous.”

I looked at him dully. “Come where?”

He rose and pulled me with him. “Follow me.”





CHAPTER 2

Trust in God, but tether your camel well.

—Arabic saying.

We backed away from Angelo’s body, then Jesús’s phone lit up like a Christmas tree, and he stopped as suddenly as if he’d walked into a wall.

“Wait,” he said, scrolling through a torrent of texts. Then, “Shit.”

“We gotta keep moving, sí?” said one of his men, a guy with a jutting jaw and a body like a six-foot-five brick. “Get out of sight of the norteamericanos.”

“We lost plan A and now plan B.” Jesús shook his head. “We got nowhere to go at the moment.”

“I see doors,” said the Brick. “I see windows.”

“Won’t work. They got guys everywhere.” Jesús typed with furious speed, then jerked his chin toward me. “Make sure they can’t get a sight on her.”

Jesús’s men closed ranks around me, and the bar stink of beer and cigarettes filled my nostrils. The men put me in mind, appropriately enough, of alley cats—scruffy and lean, tough in their jeans and T-shirts, their faces in fighting mode and their eyes signaling all systems go. The reek of testosterone could make a girl’s eyes water.

But the men were no longer a merry band of revelers. They’d been silenced by Angelo’s broken body. Death does that.

I looked past the shaved heads and bushy beards toward the blocky shapes of the SUVs guarding each end of the alley. The drivers had cut the headlights, but the faint hum of idling engines rumbled against the bricks. When I squinted, I could make out shadowy figures sitting in the cabs. Waiting, I presumed, for Jesús’s men to get over their shock at the body and move on, leaving me alone with Angelo.

Years ago, in Iraq, Doug Ayers told me that after a hunter lays eyes on his target, his next move is to choke off all routes by which that target can flee. When the man in the hotel failed to do whatever it was he was supposed to do—kill or capture me—they’d set a trap by closing off the alley. They undoubtedly had another man inside the hotel by now, and God knew where else.

Guys everywhere, Jesús had said.

As soon as I was alone and out of the public eye, they’d spring their trap.

High overhead, the last shimmer of sun lit the tops of the buildings. Down here, the dark encroached in a relentless tide.

I swallowed my panic. “Jesús?”

He was hunched over the bright glow of his phone.

“Madre de Dios,” he murmured. A glance at me. “Who the fuck are these people?”

I took the question as rhetorical and said nothing.

He kept texting. “When you called, I thought you had un problemita. A little trouble. But this is a shit storm.”

Twenty feet away, a fire escape dangled. “I’ll go up and over.”

“No.”

“I’ll move fast. You’ll have my back.”

“They’ve got men on the rooftops, too.”