Devil's Mark

“Or what?”

“The first three hombres marcados I heard about in Mexicali showed up at Tijuana cartel–controlled operations or fronts and demanded tribute. Of course they got killed and killed ugly.”

“And then?”

“And then? Within a day the men who killed them were dead. Their families were dead. Their immediate friends were dead. Their business associates were dead. Everyone’s head got taken, including the heads of the dead marked men in the morgue. The cartel capos who ran the killers got anonymous messages. Silencio, and pay. Two didn’t pay and they and their families and friends ended up just like their sicarios. The third one paid. The bosses of the two who didn’t got the same message. Silencio. Pay. There were a number of slaughters up the chain of command before they paid.”

“These marked men are always out of towners?”

“Always,” Wang affirmed. “As far as I’ve heard.”

“And they’re not taking over anyone’s territory or operations?”

“No, they just demand a taste.”

“And no one knows who’s running them?” Bolan asked. “No.”

“And now you’ve got an hombre marcado in La Chinesca demanding tribute from you.”

“Yeah.”

Bolan nodded and flung open his door. “Right.”

“Wait!” Wang cried, spewing a stream of very agitated Spanish, Cantonese and American profanity in Bolan’s wake.

“Here we go,” Smiley said.

Villaluz drew both revolvers. “This should be very interesting,” he opined happily.

Cars slammed to screeching standstills as Bolan strode across the street straight at Balthazar Gomez. “Hey! Balthazar!”

Nearby citizens of La Chinesca scattered in all directions. The former sicario sneered behind sunglasses as Bolan reached the curb. “White boy? You—”

“White man,” Bolan corrected him. Balthazar Gomez’s sunglasses snapped at the bridge and his nose flattened beneath Bolan’s fist. The soldier opened his hand, which made a sound like a frying pan slamming into a side of meat as he slapped teeth out of the marked man’s mouth. Gomez staggered backward. He clawed beneath his sweat jacket and came out with an FN Five-seveN pistol. Bolan snatched the weapon out of his opponent’s hand and beat him with it. More teeth flew as Bolan returned Gomez’s gun forehand and back across his jaw.

Bolan tucked the gun away and had to give Gomez credit for still being upright.

The Executioner gave him no mercy.

Gomez flung a palsied punch in Bolan’s direction. The soldier grabbed the arm and violently spun his sparring partner into a hip throw and projected him through the barbershop window. Glass shattered into flying shards. Chinese barbers shrieked and fled. Abandoned Mexican and Chinese customers in various states of midcoif cringed and jerked in their barber chairs. Bolan stepped over the sill through broken glass and into the carnage. Gomez was dazedly climbing up a shuddering patron’s legs. The big American grabbed him and flung him against the back wall. The wall-length mirror cracked. Balthazar sank into a sink, and the basin ripped halfway out of the wall. Bolan closed both fists and delivered a series of rights and lefts.

He stepped back, and Gomez fell forward, flopping out of the sink with his face beaten and his seat sodden. He mewled slightly as he was dragged out of the barbershop by his ponytail. Bolan whistled through his teeth, and Wang’s BMW bolted across the intersection and stopped in a shriek of rubber. Villaluz and Smiley emerged as Wang popped the trunk. The inspector grabbed the sicario’s legs and between them, he and Bolan heaved Balthazar into the trunk while Smiley covered the intersection with one of Wang’s Chinese pistols. Villaluz handcuffed their perp and zip-tied his ankles with riot cuffs. Bolan slammed the trunk shut and everyone jumped back into the car as people on the street gasped and pointed.

“Drive!” Bolan ordered.

Wang was seriously unhappy. “Where?” he snarled.

Villaluz began speaking in fast and furious Spanish. Wang shook his head fatilistically as he put the pedal down and the BMW lunged back into traffic.

Bolan drew a Chinese pistol and laid it in his lap. “Where’re we headed, Inspector?”

“A place I know and no one else in this car does, including the one in the trunk. Assuming you trust me, Señor Cooper, we will be safe.”

“You don’t get it!” Wang growled. “No one is safe from the marked men! They find you! No matter where you go! No matter where you hide! It doesn’t matter who your patron is or who is protecting you! You’re dead!”

Bolan’s voice was as cold as the grave. “Just drive. Go where the inspector tells you.”

Wang muttered, but he slammed through the gears and through traffic. In minutes they were out of La Chinesca, out of Mexicali and heading into the desert. Bolan watched as brown mountains clawed upward and the uglier and uglier roads kept creeping down toward sea level. “Laguna Salada?”

The inspector laughed. “You have been here before.”

Bolan had walked the vast emptiness of the Sahara and Gobi deserts. Laguna Salada couldn’t be described as a big empty. It had too many features of interest and too much character, but it was a big piece of brown solitude and Bolan watched it unfold before him. The Laguna Salada was a desert basin bounded by the Sierra Cucapah and the Sierra Juárez ranges. In wet years it was actually an inland fishing ground and bloomed like a rose. In dry years the saline watershed was salt desert and dunes where NASA had sent astronauts to train and Hollywood had filmed Westerns and WWII North African battle scenes. Depending on the weather, it was an off-road racing mecca, a land-speed record racecourse for land and water vehicles, an amateur astronomer haven, and Mexico’s UFO and extraterrestrial sighting ground zero.

Most of the time it was a fair chunk of sere-brown solitude.

Bolan had to admit there were worse places in Mexico to deliberately get lost. “You got a place out here?”

“I know of a place out here.” Villaluz kept giving directions, and they slowly began to move out of the flats into the brown humps and hills that led into the Sierra Juárez.

A lot of things were bothering Wang, and he picked the least of his problems to avoid thinking about the major ones. The BMW bucked and slammed across road that was little more than cart path. “You know what this is doing to my alignment, old man!”

Villaluz put his hands to his breast innocently. “I did suggest we take my Tundra, but you insisted on your sedan.”

Wang muttered something that sizzled in Cantonese.

Smiley looked about at the brutal landscape. “We should have packed a picnic basket.”

“God provides,” Villaluz assured piously.

It was Villaluz who provided, and what he provided was a goat ranch. The land was too hard for cows and sheep. It was too hard for BMW 7 series sedans, as well. They took a left turn into a box canyon that was nearly invisible from the road and came to a halt outside a cubist adobe. Steam tea-kettled out from under the hood.

Bolan got out and examined the inspector’s redoubt. It was pueblo-style and used the rock face of the soaring brown cliffs as the back wall. The few windows were little more than firing slits. Bolan made most of it for original Yuman Indian construction. The satellite dish, prefab shed to the side and corrugated tin lean-to/garage with camouflage netting for a door were more recent. The small cottonwood corral for shearing and slaughtering was open and currently empty, though a few incredibly shabby-looking, random goats stared at the newcomers in slow, square-pupiled incredulousness from various vantages around the pueblo.

A donkey stood in the shade of the satellite dish and looked at the newcomers with little enthusiasm. Bolan noted the clumps of boulders and tombstone-sized shards of rock all around. Looking backward, the approach was flat save for the ugly dips and bumps that had had their way with the BMW’s suspension. The pueblo was defensible, at least by Old West or possibly the conquistador’s standards and the approach was a nice killing ground. Bolan couldn’t immediately see the bolt-hole, but he knew it had to be there.

“Nice,” Bolan acknowledged.

Villaluz sighed happily. “I am one-quarter Yuman Indian. My ancestors once lived here.”

Smiley took in the pueblo and clearly wondered about the state of the facilities. “Little slice of heaven,” she observed dryly.

Wang kicked his driver’s side tire in anger. No one was ever going to tow his beautiful black vehicle out of the Laguna Salada. “Fuck!” he opined.

Villaluz cupped his hands over his mouth. “Fausto!” His voice boomed off the box canyon walls. “Fausto!”

Long moments passed before Fausto shambled out of the pueblo. He looked like Charles Bronson might have had he lived to be a hundred. His denim jeans and cowboy boots looked about as old and faded as he did. His cotton shirt was bleached blinding white. A red headband held back his shoulder-length gray hair. His face was a sun-raddled baseball mitt with two eyes a nose and a mouth. Duct tape held his cowboy boots together. The old man carried a Mexican army surplus M-1 Garand loosely in both hands. The weapon was missing a great deal of finish, and the stock was chipped and dinged but the metal and the wood gleamed with oil.

Fausto took in the panorama of interlopers stonily and finally turned his gaze on Villaluz. “Israel.”