Tim Green - Above The Law

As they drove, Casey checked her rearview mirror, nodding at it after a while. "Company."

Jose glanced over his shoulder and said, "The black Suburban, I know. Also, up there."

He twisted his head and pointed up through the windshield. Casey leaned forward and bent her head back, just catching a glimpse of the small black helicopter.

"Can't blame them for making sure," Casey said.

Jose studied the side mirror outside his window and nodded his head. It took only twenty minutes to reach the hill overlooking the motel. They stopped the car and the Suburban shot on past, continuing without them. Jose rested his elbows on the roof of the Mercedes, dialing in his binoculars, scanning the motel and the surrounding area, taking long slow breaths. Behind the motel the sun had begun to sink toward a low line of dung-colored mountains wreathed in smog.

"Look good?" Casey asked, shading her eyes but not seeing anything.

"Perfect," he said with a nod, handing the binoculars over to Casey and studying the empty sky. "Helicopter's gone, too."

Casey looked through the binoculars. The star-shaped red neon sign for the Motel de Libertad blinked on and off along with the word VACANCY, letting people know that it was open for business despite its condition. In front of the long, low concrete building sat an old filling station with a grocery store add-on. In the adjacent lot, five sagging cows stood, flicking their ears at the clouds of bluebottle flies, in a wired-off mud lot riddled with hoofprints. Beside the pen stood a shack where chickens ran beneath a line of hanging laundry.

The unfinished motel building itself looked to have run out of money three-quarters of the way through. Concrete pilings in the ground projected clusters of rusty rebar. Beyond the foundation, the giant hole of an unfinished swimming pool gaped open with mud the color of coffee. Candy wrappers, plastic soda bottles, and broken concrete blocks littered the barren and rocky landscape. Out back, on the high ground, a rickety water tower stood with its back to the setting sun.

"Where?" Casey asked, her eyes still pressed to the binoculars.

"On the end by the pool," Jose said, "in the doorway of that last room."

Casey zeroed in on the figure of Isodora cradling her baby. Directly behind her in the shadows stood the shape of a man. She handed back the binoculars and watched the small shape of the black Suburban that had followed them pull into the dusty parking lot. Two men got out and went into the room where Isodora waited.

Casey took a deep breath and said, "Okay. Here we go."

Jose cleared his throat and asked, "You think it was worth it?"

Casey handed back the binoculars and said, "You don't?"

"I'm not saying that at all."

"You're the one who said the FBI couldn't shut that factory down, or the State Department," she said.

"I know. It's a different country down here."

"'An act of Congress,' your words," she said. "How many people have that kind of power?"

She looked hard at him, and he glanced down.

"I'm sorry," she said in a soft voice. "Yes, it was worth it. That place is shut down. You're cleared. And now we're going to get Isodora and the baby. That's what Elijandro would have wanted, too, more than anything. Any lawyer worth a shit knows that sometimes the best deals aren't always fair. You work with what you got."

Casey climbed in behind the wheel. Jose got in next to her and she started the engine and drove off.

"I saw your face when Diane Sawyer said that nice stuff about him," Jose said. "And the way that motherfucker bowed his head in prayer. That's a special type of evil.''

"I know," she said, following the road as it wound down toward the motel. "I think it was the smugness, the look of knowing he was above the law."

"Money and power can buy that," Jose said. "Or are you new to the program?"

Casey didn't answer.

After a few minutes Jose said, "Sometimes there's other kinds of justice."

"I don't want to talk about karma," she said as they rounded the corner of the service station and pulled into the lot of the unfinished motel. "Karma is bullshit. If karma was real, my ex-husband would live under a bridge and suffer from an incurable venereal disease."

Jose said, "My mother had a saying: Fate may be slow but it's always sweet. It sounds much better in Spanish. Most things do.''

They pulled into the cool shadow of the motel and came to a stop. Except for the black Suburban that had followed them from the border, the rest of the parking lot was empty. Casey nodded and studied the black rectangle of the open door on the end unit.

There was no sign of life.

CASEY WAITED FOR JOSe TO GET OUT FIRST, THEN SHE FOLLOWED.

Casey wrinkled her nose, smelling the cows, and noticing that the numbers on the row of unpainted metal doors had been added as an afterthought in black Magic Marker. Quiet filled the air except for the wretched drone of the window-mounted air conditioner on the end unit. The air conditioner dripped down the wall beneath the window and left a damp moldy spot on the fresh concrete stoop.

Casey touched the back of Jose's elbow as they approached the open door. With no more than fifteen feet to go, Jose suddenly stopped and put up his hand.

Without warning, six men wearing black bulletproof vests piled out of the room, the last of them dragging Isodora along by the collar of her white cotton dress. She cringed and clasped her crying child to her chest with both arms. The men quickly circled Jose and Casey with handguns by their sides. Dressed in black with close-cropped hair, not one wore an expression on his face behind his sunglasses.

One of them, a man with a red crew cut and the apparent leader, stepped forward and nodded at the men behind Jose and Casey. Two of them grabbed Jose by the arms, kicked his legs out from under him, frisked him, and removed both the Glock from under his arm and the smaller snub-nosed.38 from the back of his pants.

The men tossed the guns to the leader, who caught them smoothly and quickly emptied the Glock of its bullets before tossing it aside. He dangled the nickel-plated.38 by the trigger guard and said, "I used the other one just like this to put a bullet in that old lady's head. They said she was your aunt."

Jose growled and launched himself at the man, only to be yanked back to his knees by his two captors, one of them twisting his arm and snapping the bone at the elbow. Jose screamed and Casey watched him shudder as he struggled to breathe and control the pain.

Then one of the men stepped behind her, wrapping an arm around her throat, kicking the backs of her knees, and propelling her to the dirt as well. The man with Isodora did the same, bringing her to her knees so that the three of them looked like a small prayer group with Isodora still clutching the crying child.

The leader stepped forward. As he pointed the.38 at Jose's temple, he turned his face toward Casey and said, "Before we end this and bury your bodies in the desert, the senator wanted me to tell you that he knew from the start you'd get down on your knees for him, one way or another."

Jose tried to twist free, but couldn't.

"Too bad he'll never get the message," Casey said. "You shoot him and you won't make it out of here alive."

The leader's lips curled into a sneering smile. "I'm ready, baby, give it your best shot."

"I know you are, shithead," Casey said.

The leader clicked back the hammer on the gleaming.38. He laughed at her.

"You're dead," Jose said. "Look at your chest."

"Boss," the man holding Isodora said, pointing at the base of the leader's neck and then at the red dot in the center of his own nose. "Wait."

The leader dipped his chin just a touch. The two small red laser dots on his neck zigzagged, crossing each other.