John Birmingham - Without warning

Jules was almost whispering now, softly and gently, like an old lover. ‘Not many ex-mil types here though – are there, Capitбn? Just you, really. You’re the only true pro here, which means you know what’ll happen if my guys back there open up on you. I’ll get shot, almost certainly, just because I’m standing so close to you. My friend Fifi, with that enormous Russian machine-gun, she’ll probably make it to cover because she’ll put out enough fire to make sure nobody draws a bead on her. And Shah and Thapa, well, look at them – they’re cold motherfuckers. They’ll do the job. But your guys… well… I think we both know what’ll happen when thousands of rounds of ammunition start heading towards them, don’t we? So let’s not even go there. Let’s see if we can work something out between us, you and me, so that everyone’s a winner. Perhaps you could start by telling me your name.’

‘Miguel Pieraro,’ he said quietly. ‘I am not police, no. I was vaquero – a cowboy… a boss of cowboys.’ His shoulders straightened with real pride. ‘But that was before. I worked in the north, by the border. I worked for an American cattleman, with large herds below the Rio Grande. I ran his business there. He supplied McDonald’s.’ Pieraro invoked the name of the Golden Arches with reverence and awe.

Jules eased back a little, giving him some room. He was a proud man and very obviously cut from finer cloth than his comrades. His grasp of English was excellent. The chorus of sexual taunts and whistles from the makeshift barricade had died away completely now. All of Pieraro’s men watched him closely, straining to hear what had passed between el jefe and the white slut.

‘I will take you in myself,’ he declared. ‘We will discuss your proposal. You have a proposal, yes?’

‘I do,’ she confirmed.

He nodded and called out to another man who was sitting on the bonnet of an old ‘79 Camaro, reclining back against the dirty windscreen. The car was a dinosaur, with faded red racing stripes to match a thick coating of rust and dust. ‘Roberto, you are in charge here! I will take our new friends through to the Fairmont. Call me on the radio if you need to. The phones are useless.’

Jules noted that like Miguel, Roberto was notable for being clean-shaven and sober. Where his boss was a tightly wrapped bundle of steel cord and knotted muscle, however, Roberto slid from the bonnet of the car in one fluid movement. He reminded her of a snake, uncoiling in the sun. In Miguel’s position, she wouldn’t have trusted him to sit the right way around on a toilet seat. Oh well, not her problem.

A few hand gestures from the two men saw their followers hurrying to turn over engines and reverse the cars out of their herringbone arrangement. Pieraro indicated that Jules should follow him, so she signalled to Fifi to hurry back to the Jeep. ‘It’s cool,’ she said over the radio. ‘We’re going in with this chap.’

With the tension evaporating, she allowed herself a few moments to check out the locale as she followed the former cowboy through the gauntlet of leering street toughs. They’d set up their barricade across an avenue that most of them would never have seen before. Twee little fashion shops, jewellery stores and cafйs lined both sides of a street that recently had been a well-manicured boulevard. She noted Givenchy, Prada and Armani boutiques, all looted and burnt out. Rubbish choked the gutters and footpaths, and a couple of spent brass shell casings twinkled in the mid-morning sun.

Pieraro stopped at his car, forcing Jules to suppress a snigger. It was a micro, some sort of courtesy vehicle from the Fairmont resort, according to the livery; not much more than two doors and four dinky little wheels. Pieraro caught her sceptical expression.

‘It is new,’ he said. ‘And environ… environo-mentally sustainable.’

‘Does it run on tanning butter or something?’ she smirked. She would have taken him for a muscle-car tragic. But then she’d taken him for a crooked cop too, hadn’t she?

‘It is just for running about… with work,’ he emphasised.

She made sure the safety was engaged on the shotgun and then climbed in. A misfire would probably peel off the entire roof. ‘My name is Julianne, by the way – Jules, if you like,’ she told him as they fastened their seatbelts. ‘Do you mind if I ask you something?’

‘Will you mind if I don’t answer, should the question be none of your business?’ he said. ‘I am an honest person… Not like you, si?’ he added pointedly.

‘Really? Your little shakedown racket here – you’re earning an honest peso with this, are you?’

He started the car but didn’t drive off. ‘I have a family. Three children. I am providing for them. Those men back there, my men now, they have their own to look out for too. Unlike these people…’ he waved a hand to take in all of the Diamante district, ‘my men have nothing to fall back with. La Desapariciуn , it will hurt the poorest the most.’

Pieraro pressed on the accelerator and they pulled away. ‘Your question, senorita?’ he asked eventually.

Jules shrugged. ‘I was just wondering how you ended up on that roadblock, but I guess you answered it. Three children. You were, what, holidaying? Visiting relatives?’

Pieraro snorted at the first suggestion. ‘My wages, they would not have allowed me to clean the streets of el Diamante. I could not holiday here. We were visiting my wife’s cousins further south for a wedding when everyone disappeared. I came as far north as I dared to find work to support them. We have lost everything but our lives.’

Jules glanced in the side mirror to check that the others were still with her. The Jeep was only a few metres behind. She couldn’t get a read on Pieraro at all. He looked like a hard case yet she could detect none of the primitive fear in his eyes that was such a part of the make-up of almost all street thugs – the knowledge that there was always someone harder and meaner than you just around the corner. She could sense anxiety leaking out of him, at the edges, where he couldn’t keep his emotions completely nailed down, but it didn’t seem personalised. If he was telling the truth about his family, that might well explain it. She would have to play him very carefully. In many ways, it would have been a lot easier if he were a simple gang boss.

‘I suppose I should ask how you ended up running that operation. Not a lot of call for herringbone roadblocks, snipers and intersecting fields of fire in the cattle business, is there? Not even when working for Mickey D.’

‘Mickey D? I do not understand… Oh, McDonald’s. I see.’ An arid smile cracked open the dark, sunburnt rock of the cowboy’s face. ‘The catering manager of the resort, an American, once worked for McDonald’s in Houston,’ he explained. ‘I met him on business many years ago. We drank a lot of tequila and he embarrassed himself, eating the worm like a college boy. Well, he was a college boy, I suppose. But I looked after him. I knew he had taken the job here, so this week I came looking for work. Any work.’

‘I see,’ said Jules, nodding. ‘But security work? That’s not your business.’

‘Men are my business. Running cattle and running men. You have never bossed twenty vaquero, no? I have bossed many more. Hard men, not to be crossed. Much harder than those idiotas.’ Pieraro threw a contemptuous look back over his shoulder.

‘Yeah, I get that. But that Roberto guy, he really is ex-military or something, right? He handles the tactical side, yes – where to place your good shooters and how to set up the roadblock?’

The cowboy remained quiet for a moment before finally muttering: ‘He is Colombian. AUC – Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia.’