Long Range (Joe Pickett Book 20)(9)
“Pretty impressive, isn’t it?” Sandburg asked, chinning around the inside of the huge RV. “It’s a thirty-nine-foot Entegra Reatta. Satellite TV and Wi-Fi, king bed, fireplace, washer/dryer—everything a man could want. It’s like my own private land yacht that sleeps eight people.”
Nate nodded. He’d been in high-tech mobile special operations vehicles but never one built solely for luxury.
“Do you want to know how much it cost?” Sandburg asked.
“Not really,” Nate said.
“Two hundred ninety-one thousand dollars,” Sandburg said. “And that was with a twenty percent discount.”
“That’s a lot,” Nate said.
“Thank you,” Sandburg said.
“For what?”
“For paying for all of this.”
Nate got it. “You mean the taxpayers,” he said.
“Yes. I can’t say it was worth it to me completely, since I can hardly get around anymore,” Sandburg said. He patted the table and said, “But this was a nice consolation from the settlement I negotiated with the Bureau. My pension takes care of the rest. It’s a real chick magnet, as long as you like chicks with blue hair who are sixty-plus. That’s what you find at these RV parks I frequent these days.”
“Then you’re welcome,” Nate said. “Not many folks have pensions these days. So what brings you all the way out here?”
Sandburg gave Nate his best cop glare. “You mean besides revisiting the scene of the crime?”
Nate nodded. Although he felt a pang of sympathy for Sandburg’s condition, the man’s act was wearing thin. He waited him out.
“Abriella Guzman,” Sandburg finally said. “The martyr you created.”
Nate didn’t react outwardly, but he felt the grip of cold tighten in his chest. Abriella Guzman had been a beautiful and charismatic young woman, and the leader of a team of four assassins known as the Wolf Pack. She’d been as cold and ruthless as anyone Nate had ever encountered. The Wolf Pack had been sent north by the Sinaloa cartel and they’d been responsible for the massacre on the courthouse steps, as well as the murder of several others in the area. Nate and Joe had pursued a wounded Abriella into the mountains, where she’d died. He’d willed it to happen and he had no regrets, although he knew Joe still struggled with the circumstances of her demise.
“What do you mean when you say ‘martyr’?” Nate asked.
“I did some research on you before I officially left the Bureau,” Sandburg said. “You’ve had quite the checkered past. You should be buried away in a federal penitentiary instead of running around the countryside in Wyoming, cavorting with the antelopes.”
“Pronghorn antelope,” Nate corrected. Then: “Those files are supposed to be sealed. I guess a deal with the FBI only goes so far.”
Sandburg wagged his eyebrows at that, as if to emphasize his intimate access to “sealed” documents. “I still have lots of friends there,” he said.
“Good for you. I have a signed agreement from the Department of Justice agreeing to drop all those charges in exchange for infiltrating a ring of bad guys a few years back. The agreement was witnessed by the governor of Wyoming. I’ve left all that behind me. I’ve gone straight, I’ve got a legitimate business, I’m married, and I have a beautiful little girl inside the house right behind me. If your purpose here is to try to intimidate me, you’re wasting your time.”
With that, Nate slid sidewise on the leather of the seat and pressed down on the tabletop with his hands to stand up.
“You might want to hear me out,” Sandburg said.
“Then get to the point.”
“Let me show you something,” Sandburg said. He said it with a tone of barely disguised glee.
The man opened a thin laptop, made a few keyboard strokes, and spun the computer around so Nate could see the monitor.
On the screen was a mixture of photographs and graphics from what looked like a crude e-commerce website. In the photos, several of which were blurry, individuals could be seen in staged poses. In one, a dark-skinned Hispanic man held aloft the severed head of a victim by the hair. In another, a group of heavily armed men stood in front of an open grave in a shadowed jungle setting. The lifeless limbs of a pile of victims could be seen jutting from the grave.
Obviously, the photos had been captured off the internet, and they were of Mexican cartel violence, Nate guessed. It was impossible to determine how recent they were.
What stood out when he bent down and looked at the photos, and what they had in common with the rest of the e-commerce offerings, was the image on the simple white T-shirts the killers wore: a stylized graphic of Abriella Guzman. In it, Abriella held a defiant pose with her chin thrust toward the camera. She wore a tight black top, tactical pants with semiautomatic pistol grips sticking out of the side cargo pockets, and high lace-up boots. A stubby Heckler & Koch submachine gun was gripped in her hand and pointed toward the ground. She had a pout on her lips and her big, provocative, dark eyes were trained directly at the photographer.
Abriella was wearing the same clothing Nate recalled her in when he and Joe had chased her down. The photo, he guessed, must have been taken earlier that same day.
The graphic of Abriella reminded Nate of the iconic Che Guevara–in–a–beret image on clothing worn by clueless hipsters and political activists who thought it edgy and cool. Like Che, Abriella had been a stone-cold murderer.