T Parker: The border Lords

"Well, look who's up bright and early today," said Bly. "Is that Angel with his carnitas?"

Hood nodded, looking at Angel's machine pistol again.

"Sean call in?" asked Janet.

Hood shook his head, saw the hardness in her face.

"Then maybe he called Mars or Soriana."

"He'd call us first if he was in trouble," said Hood, confident that his good friend Sean Ozburn would call Blowdown well before he'd call the ATF field station in San Diego. Ozburn was a soldier, loyal and focused.

But six days and no calls. So the ghost of Jimmy Holdstock-retired now with long-term disability from injuries suffered in the line of duty; in his case, torture-hovered there in the war room once again.

Then, as if that ghost had cast its long, dark shadow over the room, one of the monitors went white, then black, and the audio died.

Hood's attention had been drawn to it just a split second before it went blank.

"The hell," said Bly.

"Don't worry," said Velasquez, their techie. "It'll come back. I'm not sure what's…"

Thirty seconds later the other monitors suddenly all turned bright white, then black. And the audio feeds died with them.

Blowdown was on its feet now. Velasquez looked down at the main control panel, head cocked. The others stared at the dead screens. They had lost camera transmissions before but never all of them at once.

"This is what my son does when the satellite goes out during SpongeBob," said Morris. "He just stares at the TV like he can make it come back on."

"It'll come back," said Velasquez.

Hood dialed Buenavista police chief Gabe Reyes and asked for an unmarked unit to drive by the Agate Street safe house, and Reyes said the shift was changing right now but consider it done. Ten long minutes, thought Hood, ringing off.

"Cops are changing shifts," he said. "Ten minutes."

"We can't lose all six feeds," said Velasquez. "Even in a power outage, even if someone cuts the line. Those cameras have two hours of battery backup. You have to shut them down from here, or in the control panel on the side of the safe house. But I built that control panel, and I disguised it as a breaker box, and it's got a lock, and the only people who have keys are us. So what the-"

"I saw something on screen six," said Hood. "Just before it went out."

"I was watching Angel make his breakfast," said Bly.

"I was seeing if Johnnie's gravity hammer can kill brutes," said Morris.

"I saw something, too," said Velasquez. "Then it was gone."

"The Den is only three miles away," said Hood.

"Wait," said Bly, the senior agent.

Velasquez pushed various control buttons but nothing happened. "It's gotta be at our end. I'm going outside to check the cable."

"I'm with you," said Hood.

They emerged through the back door into the young light of morning, Hood first, his hand on the sidearm holstered on his hip. They walked quickly, looking up at the black coaxial cable fastened along the fascia board above the eaves. It entered the field station through a hole low on the eastern wall, and Hood could see the cable and the hole and the nest of gray steel wool crammed in to keep the rats and snakes out. Velasquez knelt down and tugged at the cable, then shrugged and stood.

They checked the circuit breaker panel and the relay boxes and the splitters and the transformers for the coax and the telephone landlines, and all of these Velasquez said were fine.

"The problem is at the Den," he said. "Unless some fine citizen plowed a car through a phone company switch box between here and there."

"What did you see on monitor six?"

"I don't know, Charlie. It happened too fast."

"It'll be on the tape."

"Monitor six is the side yard," said Velasquez.

"Where the control box is," said Hood.

They exchanged looks and went back inside.

The screens were still dead. Hood could tell by the forced calm of her voice that Bly was talking to Soriana out in San Diego. Bly was impulsive and Soriana was deliberate, and this tried her patience sorely.

She rang off and lowered her cell phone. "Soriana says give it five."

"I'd go right now," said Hood.

"I would, too," said Bly. She was a stout woman whose sweet round face the years with ATF had started to harden. "He's afraid the narcos will make us if we drive by looking like tourists. But we'll give it five, all right? Because he's the boss. Yes. Five seconds, that is. You guys ready?"

Dyman Morris, once a point guard for NYU, made it to the door first, swinging an armored vest off the coatrack like a kid going out to play in the cold.

A few minutes later Hood was guiding his Durango down Agate Street, looking at the little crowd of people standing outside the Den in the dawn's early light.

The neighbors greeted them with tales of gunshots and screams and a guy smoking off in a black Range Rover, so the Blowdown team went in through the wide-open front door.

Hood followed his autoloader into the kitchen where Angel lay nearly decapitated by a shotgun. The blasts had also torn the stove hood open and flung a storm of flesh and blood against the wall. The machine pistol was gone and the tortilla lay, shriveled, black and smoking, on the griddle.

In the living room Ray and Johnnie had taken multiple rounds and they lay in ribbons on the floor. Johnnie had gotten his gun up, or at least a gun lay next to him. It was one of the silenced.32 machine pistols that no one at ATF had ever seen until late last year. The Halo game had gone into sleep mode, its Gregorian chant soundtrack swelling across the room.

Hood and Morris moved through the house as a team. Hood had that nobody-alive-here feeling but his stomach and nerves were stretched tight. Like Anbar, door-to-door, he thought. Like a drug tunnel he'd once found himself trapped in by unhappy gunmen. They covered the empty house quickly, then backtracked to the living room where Hood shut off the video game and the chanting stopped.

He peeked through the blinds and looked outside at Bly and Velasquez. The two agents were helping the Buenavista cops seal the scene against the public. The agents looked cooperative enough right now, but Hood knew that in just a few minutes they would seal the scene against the Buenavista cops and bad feelings would arise. That's how it went down when the feds were in town.

Hood found another of the strange machine pistols in Ray's bedroom. He stood in front of a bedroom window and let the strong morning sunlight illuminate the weapon. The stainless steel planes threw off the light like the facets of a gemstone. He unscrewed the noise suppressor and retracted the telescoping handles and set aside the curving fifty-round magazine. Now the gun looked very much like the ones that he had seen being packed for shipment at the Pace Arms factory in Costa Mesa. He read the engraving on the frame: LOVE 32. That was it. No serial numbers, no manufacturer grip marks, nothing else.

"Who names a gun 'Love 32'?" Hood asked.

"Beats me, Charlie. But it's a sweet carry. Easy to conceal and basic, like a Mac, but it's got elegance. Reminds me of one of my kid's Transformer toys."

"Angel's was on the kitchen counter but it's not there now."

"I'll bet we can solve that one."

Blowdown had suspected for some time that the sicarios in the Den were using these silenced weapons on their jobs-several witnesses had reported that the guns were all but silent. Hood held the Love 32 in his hand and turned it once again into the morning light. This was what Ozburn had gone undercover for. Risked his life for. A gun. Hood shook his head.

A moment later all four met in the side yard. The side-yard camera, hidden within a functioning motion-detector light, had been yanked from the wall and thrown to the ground. The wires dangled from the wall base. Velasquez swung open the door to the faux circuit breaker box. It was partially hidden by a riot of wisteria vine that had crept from its trellis to the eave of the house. The key was still in the control panel lid and Velasquez turned to his team with a woeful look.