“What’s your take on those sluggers that crawled into the bushes?” Glenn said.
“Same as yours,” Ricci said. “Looks like Quiros has something rotten cooking for whoever met him here…. What’s his name again?”
“Salazar,” Glenn said. “Lucio Salazar. At least that’s who my people think it is. He and his brothers in Mexico are old-time, all-purpose smugglers and racketeers. Got into dealing dope, hit the mother lode. He’s Quiros’s chief local competition.”
“Maybe not for much longer,” Ricci said.
Glenn nodded and ran on in silence a moment.
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“At this pace, it’ll be a quick shot to that garden.”
“You positive we have a vehicle at every car exit?” Ricci said.
“Yeah.”
Ricci grunted, hustling along. “Be good to’make the action,” he said. “Main thing for us, though, is that Qui- ros doesn’t slip away. Because that E-mail we got is looking righter and righter. And I’ve got a feeling that if we lose him now, we’re done.”
As soon as they got halfway across the green, Salazar slowed to halt and stood gazing at the Moreton Bay fig. “All those twists and turns, one grows out of the other, you never know which way they’re gonna go,” he said and indicated the outspread branches and root system intricately silhouetted in the partial moonlight. “I figure it’s what life’s about.”
Quiros made a meaningless sound and waited, concealing his impatience.
Salazar kept staring at the tree. “We should talk about Felix,” he said.
Quiros looked at him. This was not how it was supposed to happen. He wanted to get to the damned garden walkway.
“Let’s hold off,” he said. “The pond is a better place. We can sit there and-”
Salazar raised a hand abortively and faced him. ‘Wow, Enrique,” he said. “I want to talk about him right now.”
Quiros studied his expression. It left no room for argument. So be it.
“You had a problem with my nephew, you should have come to me,” he said after a minute.
“For what? The problem, like you said… it was
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never him. He wouldn’t have done that job at the tunnel if you didn’t authorize it.”
Quiros shook his head. “He was on his own.”
“No.” Salazar’s voice was at once weary and bitter. “We came all the way here, might as well be straight.”
Quiros inhaled, exhaled. “That’s what’s been wrong from the start, Lucio. You answering your own questions. Making up your mind before you know the facts. I told you the truth, and you can believe it or not. It doesn’t make a difference to me. It isn’t even the real issue between us anymore. If you’d given me a chance, I’d have put Felix on the rack, made amends. But you chose otherwise. You took things into your own hands. What you did, how could you think it would resolve anything?”
“What I did-?”
“Killing my nephew. My sister’s only son. What were you thinking?”
Salazar glared with anger. “Even here, between us, you’re trying to pass off that bullshit-”
He never got to finish his sentence.
There were four simultaneous flashes from four different points above the green, four rifle cracks that merged into one loud, echoing sound that split the night like a thunderclap. Salazar jerked with surprise and confusion as Quiros’s head snapped sideways, blood misting up around it and spurting from a hole in his chest, and then his mouth dropped open and blood was pouring from it, too, streaming over his lips and chin. Quiros went down, folded almost neatly, and lay still there in front of him on the grass.
Salazar spun around and saw that Quiros’s guard was
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also on the ground, his own man standing over the sprawled body.
He looked up at the roof of the museum, at the great fig tree, at the tops of the Spanish Village cottages and saw no sign of the snipers, nothing at all except shadows and pale silver moonlight.
His eyes widened with confusion. He hadn’t given the order. What the hell had happened here? He hadn ‘t given the goddamned order.
Ricci and Glenn were within fifteen yards of the hedges when they heard the discharge of the sniper guns smack the air up ahead.
Both had slowed to a trot to keep from scaring Qui- ros’s men out of the bushes. Now they came to a frozen standstill and looked at each other.
“Those were rifle shots.” Ricci removed his radio’s earpiece so he could hear more clearly. “Plural, I’m pretty sure.”
Glenn nodded. “I’ve heard synchronous fire before. You don’t forget the sound.”
Ricci reached under his sport jacket and pulled his Five-Seven out of its holster. Glenn drew his own piece, a Beretta 9mm.
“Where you think the shooting came from?” Ricci said.
Glenn started to answer, then abruptly tapped his radio earpiece to indicate he’d been squawked, and listened.
His features were stunned as he ten-foured into the unit’s neck mike.
“Let’s have it,” Ricci said.
Glenn looked at him.
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“Quiros is down,” he said. He pointed eastward beyond the walkway and hedges. “The green, back of the museum.”
“Fuck.” Ricci’s breath escaped him in a sick rash. “What about Salazar and his bodyguard?”
“They’re on the go.”
“Tell our people to stay on his tail, but I don’t want anybody trying to take him, not under any circumstances. Those shooters that tapped Quiros have the overhead positions and are going to cover his retreat.”
Glenn nodded and conveyed the message.
Ricci was forcing himself to think. “We have to get over to Quir-”
There was a loud stirring of vegetation to his right.
They might have started out of the bushes a second or two earlier, Ricci wasn’t positive. In his momentary crushing distraction, his effort to pull his wits together, he could have missed hearing them right off. But he’d heard them now.
He wheeled toward the sound of tossing branches, spotted Quiros’s men spotting Glenn and him, remembered a couple of them from the Golden Triangle office. One was the bulky door-opener, Jorge.
Just doing his job, Ricci thought.
And all within a heartbeat he saw the recognition in Jorge’s eyes, saw Jorge notice the Five-Seven in his hand…
And then Ricci saw Jorge start to point his own gun at him.
Glenn reacted to the disturbance in the shrubbery in near unison with Ricci, pivoting on his heel, whipping his Beretta toward the hitters as they appeared from cover.
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“Team One, move In!” he called into his throat mike. They were already moving.
By the time he saw the gun coming up in front of him, Ricci was on automatic pilot: his position, movement, and firing seamlessly integrated, the large figure outlined against the bushes objectified to his trained eye, a target with specific aiming points.
The Five-Seven in a firm, two-handed grip, his arms extended, feet apart, he dropped into the slight crouch of a police shooter’s stance and fired three rounds into the darkness, catching Jorge dead on with every one of them.
Clouted off his feet, Jorge collapsed backward, a yawning hole briefly visible in his chest before he crashed heavily down into a clump of shrubbery.
Ricci didn’t pause to think. You didn’t pause at these moments, didn’t think; at these moments you were the tip of an arrow.
Leading with his Five-Seven, he swiveled to the right, where another slugger had advanced from the bushes, his pistol a blur as he brought it up toward Glenn. Ricci took a quick breath, sighted, pulled the trigger on his exhalation. Glenn’s Beretta spurted flame at the same instant. The slugger did a grotesque shimmy on his feet, then pitched over sideways.
Ricci sought more movement, listened for more rattling in the hedges. There, over to the left, a third man raised his gun. A fourth beside him.
And then from farther back in the darkness, a female voice called out, “Don’t try it! Toss your weapons, hands up in the air. Now!”
Ricci focused on the spot from which the command
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had been shouted and saw a woman in a rigger’s outfit with a semiautomatic pistol in her right hand. The luminescent Sword ID on her breast identified her as one of his own.
A moment ticked by.
Two more figures had rushed out of the night to either side of the woman and formed up in a semicircle around the hedges. Men in dark civvies, firearms held out, glow- in-the-dark Sword insignias seeming to float over their chests.
Ricci kept his Five-Seven on the sluggers, saw Glenn doing the same with his Beretta from the corner of his eye.
Both men waited to see if the sluggers would pick smart or dead, their choice here, no lifelines, no polling the audience.
They dropped their pieces, raised their hands.
Smart.
Ricci sprang out of his crouch toward Glenn, leaving the frisk-and-cuff to their foot team.