T Parker - The border Lords

He listened to the thumping of his heart and felt the downward pull of sleep and when he awakened and peeled off the almost-dry bandana, three men stood across from him on the other side of the small pool. A green sun hovered behind them. They wore jeans and hoodies and he couldn't see their faces. Daisy growled and Ozburn growled, too. He found the Love 32 with one hand and swung it up and at them. The tallest one, in the middle, raised a hand, as if calming Ozburn.

"Can I help you?" Ozburn asked. His voice sounded to him like a croak.

The middle man nodded to the west. Then he turned and walked away in that direction, one fellow on either side.

Ozburn clambered around the pool after them, his feet dead and clumsy. He dropped the machine pistol and it landed hard on the rocks but he picked it up and slung the strap over his shoulder. Daisy easily caught them, touching her sensitive black nose to their legs, tail down and not wagging. They stopped and let Ozburn approach. He came to within a few yards and studied them. The sun was still at their backs and their faces were lost in the folds of the hoods and he couldn't tell who they were-Mexicans, Americans-they might have been Inuits or Swedes for all he could see.

"If you repent, Seliah will live," said the tallest one.

Ozburn felt his anger spike. He was long past trying to suppress it. He felt the trigger against his finger. "Repent for what?"

"The faith you have abandoned. The lives you have taken."

"How can you find faith where there is none?"

"In your heart."

"It's empty. And what can my repentance do for the lives I have taken?"

"It can save your wife."

"You know nothing of Seliah."

"She is in the hospital in California. Don't doubt us. Don't make yourself smaller to us. You spit on the face of God. His mercies are small and easily withdrawn. Ours are even smaller."

"Who are you?"

"Representatives."

"What guarantee do I have that Seliah will survive?"

"There is no power higher than the word."

"Pull down the hoods. All three of you."

"If you repent, Seliah will live."

"Let me see your faces!" None of the three moved so Ozburn pulled the trigger and swept the Love 32 across them but only one shot fired. He heard the round spit and felt the recoil and saw the quick dimple form on the sweatshirt of the man on the left. A stomach shot. The man didn't so much as flinch. Rather he tilted his head down as if for a look at it, then turned his face back up at Ozburn. Ozburn felt for the extended fifty-shot magazine but it was gone. He looked back to where he had dropped the gun and saw the magazine, faintly green and luminescent, shining upon the rocks.

When he turned back the men were gone and Daisy was crisscrossing the ground where they had stood, nose lowered for scent, tail wagging hopefully. Ozburn labored up the nearest rise and from here he looked out on the vast, barren desert, unpeopled and motionless. He folded to his knees and sat slumped amidst the rocks and asked God to return his faith but he felt no return of it, just the ocean of dark urges moving inside him. And he repented to God his several murders but even as he did this there was a voice inside him, speaking more quietly than the voice with which he called to God, and it said, The brutes deserved it, the brutes deserved it, they deserved to be exterminated.

Backtracking to the Imuris airstrip, Ozburn parked short of a hillock and left Daisy in the car and climbed to the top. In the wavering green distance he could see the airstrip and the building and the black SUV parked nearby and the huge one-eared enforcer sitting in the shade just has he had done. Teodoro, Ozburn remembered. Teodoro "El Gigante" Caborca. Another sicario stood beside him, eyeing the landscape, a weapon slung over one shoulder. The door that Ozburn had kicked in swung in and out with the breeze. Ozburn slid down the hillside to his car and made sure the two Love 32s had full magazines; then he locked the car and hiked around to the south side of the cinder-block building, which was tucked against the rocky hills.

It took almost an hour. The feeling in his legs came and went. The numbness was climbing him now, almost to his hips. He was sweating hard. Daisy panted and stayed a few yards behind, never venturing ahead. She seemed to know the difference between playing and working, and Ozburn was impressed by her intuitions.

When Ozburn finally settled behind a boulder for a concealed look he could see that the enforcer's SUV was still parked where it had been. He could hear music spilling out from the building, then laughter. When he had caught his breath Ozburn picked his way down the hill on a game trail and soon he was pressed up against the back of the building, Daisy at his feet, a machine pistol ready in each hand.

He quietly picked his way along the perimeter. The music was a narcocorrido and the voices were of three men. He heard a beer can spit open. When he came to a window he motioned Daisy to stay, then ducked beneath it and sidled past. Rising to a crouch he hustled around the corner, then snuck beneath another window and stopped just short of the open front doorway. Laughter and an accordion. Laughter and profanities. Another can popping open. Daisy had broken her stay and now came crawling around the corner on her stomach, ears down in penance and an apologetic look on her face. Repentance, thought Ozburn. You want repentance-watch this.

Ozburn motioned her again to stay; then, guns up, he burst through the door for the second time that day.

All three men stared at him in disbelief. Two had beers in their hands instead of weapons. El Gigante sat hugely on one of the battered old couches and Ozburn knew that he could shoot both of the beer-drinking bad guys before their leader could get off the couch, and he saw that Teodoro knew it, too.

He ordered the two men to their knees and they took their positions with doomed expressions on their faces. One bowed his head and prayed. Ozburn ordered Teodoro to join them and he tracked the big man's slow movements with one of the Love 32s. Teodoro finally righted himself and lumbered toward Ozburn. When the big man came abreast of his comrades he did not kneel but instead lunged forward at Ozburn. Ozburn stepped aside deftly and let the gun in his right hand swing free on the shoulder sling. He hit Teodoro's jaw with an uppercut so hard the big man stopped and straightened, then dropped to the floor. When Teodoro managed to get to his knees Ozburn leveled a machine pistol at his forehead.

Daisy sat in the doorway wagging her tail.

— Do you repent, Ozburn asked in Spanish.

— I repent.

— I repent.

— I'll find you in hell and kill you, said Teodoro.

Ozburn looked down at the big man's quivering face, the dark, searching eyes, the jagged edge where the ear had been.

— Who has the vehicle keys?

Teodoro nodded toward the TV and Ozburn saw the fob and keys sitting beside the rabbit-ear antenna. He retrieved the keys and stuffed them into a vest pocket without taking his eyes off the men.

— Touch your faces to the floor, all of you.

ATF training was to never get on the ground on orders from an armed opponent: You will almost certainly be executed. Stay on your feet. Stay on your feet. Ozburn knew that trained or not, the cartel men understood this. The two smaller men lowered their heads to the concrete. One began to sob. He offered five thousand U.S. dollars for his life. Then ten thousand. Then ten million. Teodoro stared down at the floor muttering words that Ozburn couldn't understand. He caught the word Malverde, patron saint of the narcos, and that was all.

— I've bet the life of my wife on this moment. Her name is Seliah.

With that, Ozburn let go of the left gun and brought the last three crucifixes from his vest pocket. He moved from man to man, left to right, working the leather necklaces over their heads with his left hand and the barrel of the machine pistol he held in his right. Teodoro's head was too big so Ozburn dropped the crucifix to the floor in front of him where it landed with a clear tap.