John Gilstrap - Damage Control

In that instant, Dom realized what he had to do. A woman had been murdered and her body disposed of as garbage. Even if it wasn’t Gail, she deserved better than that. She deserved better than to be left alone on a cold gurney in the morgue.

“Father Dom, are you there?”

“I’m going to her,” he said. “Can you get me the address for the morgue?”

Silence. Then Venice said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea. This is an active homicide investigation. If you get involved, the questions are-”

“She was our friend, Venice. That’s really all that matters. Can you give me the address or do I have to look it up on the Internet?”

Consciousness came slowly to Trevor Munro. The phone call came in the deepest phase of his REM sleep.

This particular ringtone-“Ride of the Valkyries”-belonged exclusively to one person.

With the lights still off and his eyes still closed, he slid the phone open and brought it to his head.

“Yes,” he said.

“Jesus, Trev,” the big voice boomed. “Where the hell-”

“Call me back in three minutes,” Munro said. He clicked off.

These were delicate times. He wanted to be one hundred percent sure that he was awake and fully functional, if only as a hedge against saying something stupid. He kicked off the covers, padded to the bathroom to urinate, and then soaked a washcloth with cold water and scrubbed his face with it. Just to be sure that he was completely lucid, he recited the alphabet aloud-backwards.

He’d timed it all perfectly. He was back at his bedside table exactly two minutes and forty-five seconds after he’d hung up. Sjogren was not quite as punctual. It took him three and a half minutes to call back. The time on the clock read 2:37.

“Okay, speak to me,” he answered when the Valkyries started singing again.

“Jesus, Trev,” Sjogren said through the thick Boston brogue. “This is my third call to you. What the hell have you been doin’?”

“It’s called sleep,” Munro said. “Among life’s most important activities.”

“I guess you get to do that if you’re the one paying the bills. Me, I work around the clock.”

“For what you get paid, that’s the least I would expect,” Munro said. “The fact of your call must mean that you have a name for me.”

“I do,” Sjogren said. “And let me tell you, it took some doing to get it, too.”

Munro waited for it.

“It’s a babe,” Sjogren said. “A chick named Maria Elizondo.”

Munro jotted the name onto the pad he kept on his night stand. The name rang a distant bell, though he didn’t know why.

“And listen to me, Trev,” Sjogren went on. “I deeply don’t give a shit what happens to you, but I warn you to be prepared for a really bad reaction to this. Elizondo is this loon’s main squeeze. He thinks they’re in love.”

“I’ll be damned,” Munro said. He remembered now that he’d actually met this treasonous bitch. During one of his meetings with Hernandez, she’d been in the car.

“How certain are you of the identity?” Munro asked. He didn’t care all that much, but passing this news along was tantamount to issuing a death warrant. It seemed reasonable to want to be sure.

“I can’t speak to that personally,” Sjogren said. “But my guy in Justice says it’s a sure thing.”

“And what’s your level of confidence in him?”

Sjogren laughed. “What the hell do you want from me, Trev? You hire me for my sources, and I give you what I’ve got. You want two-hundred-percent certainty, you need to hire somebody else.”

Munro forgave the attitude because the underlying message was spot-on. “Maria Elizondo,” he said, repeating the name aloud to make sure he had it right.

“That’s it,” Sjogren said. “Now it’s my turn to go to sleep.”

Jonathan hated flying. Airplanes were orders of magnitude better than boats, but given all the years of parachute jumps, fast-roping, and landings-cum-crashes in bullet-riddled aircraft, he worried that he’d made God grow weary of pulling his ass out of trouble.

Now he was in a single-engine airplane that had been officially out of gas for the last ten minutes, flying fifty feet above the rooftops in the dark, hoping that they’d be able to trick the laws of physics one more time. Jonathan forced himself not to dwell on the depressing details, and instead scoured his map of Ciudad Juarez for a suitable place to land the Cessna.

Airfields were out because they would be guarded, which left them with the option of landing on a field somewhere, or maybe on a highway. Either of those scenarios would alert the authorities, but at least Jonathan and his team would have a head start and some tactical flexibility. Problem was, they’d already crossed into Ciudad Juarez, and the urban landscape provided precious few fields. Exactly zero, in fact, by Jonathan’s reckoning.

It had become clear quite some time ago that a soft landing was not in their future-perhaps it had never been-and to prepare, they’d secured all their weapons, and tied down as many potential projectiles as possible.

“How flexible is the fifteen hundred feet of landing space?” he asked Boxers. Jonathan tried to keep his voice low so as not to spin Tristan up. The kid had good ears though, and issued a dreadful groan.

“Depends on how much of the airplane you want to be left when we’re done,” Boxers said. “Nose-first, we don’t need any space at all.”

Tristan said, “Oh, shit,” and Boxers laughed.

“That’s not as helpful as you might think, Big Guy,” Jonathan said. It was a quirk of Boxers’ personality that his lighthearted banter ran inversely proportional to the seriousness of the moment.

“Okay, serious answer,” Boxers said. “If I can slow it to nearly stall speed and we don’t care about breaking some stuff underneath, then five, six hundred feet should do.” The engine coughed. “It’d be good to decide quickly, though.”

A solution materialized in Jonathan’s head. He triangulated between where they were and where they wanted to be. “Does this beast have five miles left in her?” he asked.

“She’s got what she’s got,” Boxers said. “Give me a strategy.”

Jonathan glanced at the compass on the control panel and verified that they were traveling north. “Okay, the north-south streets are pretty narrow, but the east-west streets are wide. This Elizondo chick lives about five miles northeast of our current position. She lives on Calle de Oro, one of the wider streets.”

Boxers grinned beneath his night vision array. “You telling me you want to park in the driveway?”

“At the curb, actually.”

The engine coughed again.

“Sure,” Boxers said. “Why the hell not? We’ve done crazier shit than that.” He banked the plane slightly to the right. “I’m gonna have trouble reading street signs from up here, though.”

Below them, the city was mostly bathed in darkness, save for the rows of streetlights.

“You can line up with any of these. We’re still fifteen, sixteen blocks south, but better to get lined up than be forced to crash into buildings.”

“I thought we were going to be able to land the airplane,” Tristan said from the back.

“I already told you,” Boxers quipped. “Landings are mandatory. They’re just not all created equal.”

“Make sure your seat belt is tight,” Jonathan said. “And when I tell you, press yourself as far back into the seat as possible. Let the ratchet in your shoulder strap go as tight as possible.”

“Should I take the vest off?”

“Negative,” Jonathan said. “If we hit really hard, that vest will distribute the impact from the belt. Might save your collarbone.” He had no idea if that was really true, but it sounded right. “And lock your jaw tight. It’ll keep you from biting through your tongue.”