Scott Greene glanced at the hotel phone on the nightstand. The telephone rang again. But not that telephone. The sound was coming from the balcony. Scott stepped through the shattered door and dug a cell phone from the dead man's pocket just as it rang a third time. The caller ID showed BLOCKED. Scott jabbed the ANSWER button and pressed the phone to his ear. He didn't say anything. For several sec-onds he heard only the open line. Then a man's voice said, "Is it done?"
Scott knew the voice. One of the two men who had tak-en Felix Ortiz from the DEA office. The man who had called himself Jones and claimed that he and his pet pit bull were with the State Department. "Yeah, it's done, asshole. And your man's dead. Just like you're going to be. Real soon."
Several seconds ticked by. Then the man said, "You are a resourceful son of a bitch, Agent Greene. I'll grant you that."
"Resourceful enough to find you and put a bullet in your head."
"I wouldn't count on that."
"Really?" Scott said. "Why's that?"
But the line went dead.
Benny was staring at Scott. "Who was that?"
"The guy trying to kill us."
"What did he say?"
"That he's going to keep trying." Scott heard the distant wail of police sirens. He looked at the dead man at his feet, at the two pistols the man had been carrying, at Glenn Peter-son's body. What had been the plan here? The gunman had obviously been expecting him, so why keep Peterson alive? Why gag him and tape him to a chair instead of just killing him and waiting for Scott to show up?
Outside the sirens were closing in.
"We should go," Benny said.
Scott looked back and forth between the two bodies. He was missing something. Something important. The scene was trying to talk to him. He just couldn't hear it over the sound of the sirens.
He wondered why the sirens even bothered him? Nor-mally, they were a welcomed sound, the herald of help on the way. Of the cavalry charging to the rescue. This time it was different. He hadn't done anything wrong. He'd killed the man in self-defense after the man had murdered Glenn Peterson. In fact, every shot he'd fired had been justified, last night in Nuevo Laredo, today in the tunnel, and just now in this hotel room-all of them in defense of his own life or of Benny's life. The logical part of his brain was telling him that he wasn't in any more trouble now than he had been in yesterday afternoon when the SAC suspended him and took his badge and his gun. But the deeper part of his brain, the part that ran on emotions and instincts, was screaming at him to run.
As if reading his mind, Benny said, "We have to go."
The sirens were close now. Almost on top of them. Then from below, Scott heard the sound of rubber squealing on pavement. He edged up to the railing and peered over. A marked Laredo police car, blue emergency lights flashing but no siren, charged up the hotel's U-shaped driveway and slid to a stop at the main entrance. The cruiser's front doors opened and two uniformed officers jumped out just as a sec-ond police car turned into the driveway.
Scott dropped the dead man's cell phone on the con-crete balcony and crushed it under his foot. Then he and Benny ran out of the room and sprinted down the hall. Several hotel guests were standing outside their open doors looking for the source of the gunshots, but none of them interfered as Scott and Benny ran past them. They just gawked.
Benny slowed at the elevator lobby. "No," Scott said. "We need to take the stairs."
They kept running and crashed through the steel fire door at the end of the hall. Flying down the stairs two, sometimes three, steps at a time, they were on the mid-flight landing between the fourth and fifth floors when Scott realized what he had missed. He stopped on the fourth floor. Benny stopped beside him. They were both breathing hard. "Why are we stopping?" Benny asked.
"He had two guns," Scott said. "Two Glocks."
"I know," Benny said. "I saw them."
"No, what I mean is, why did have two guns? Nobody uses two pistols at the same time. That's just in the movies."
"He did."
Scott opened his mouth to reply, but then his mind flashed back to yesterday afternoon, to his office and his meeting with Special Agent in Charge Robert Stockwell. "I need your badge and gun," the SAC had demanded after telling Scott that he was suspended. Scott remembered toss-ing his badge and credentials on the desk. The heavy DEA badge landing with a thud. "And your gun," Stockwell said. Scott had told him that his duty weapon, a .40-caliber Glock, was in his desk drawer. And Stockwell had pulled it out and laid it on the desk. That was the last time Scott had seen it.
Upstairs, the man who had killed Glenn Peterson had two identical Glocks. The killer had fired both, and Scott knew by their sound, that distinctive heavy bark, that both of them were .40 calibers. And he was willing to bet...
"That was my gun," Scott said. "And the other one had to be Glenn's. He thought I was coming alone. That's why he didn't kill Glenn right away. His plan was to shoot us both, each with the other's gun, then pull the gag and the tape off Glenn and walk away. Let the cops find us and create their own scenario, something involving us killing each other."
"But why would anyone believe that?"
"The media," Scott said. "The media would sell it for them. Whoever's behind this would leak a story about us be-ing crooked, or gay, or one of us screwing the other one's wife. Or maybe I just went psycho after being suspended."
Benny looked back up the stairs. "We can go back and get it."
Even in the concrete stairwell they could hear the sirens.
"No," Scott said. "We have to keep moving."
"Where are we going?"
"I don't know."
But they kept running, down the stairs to the ground floor. They stopped at the bottom to catch their breath. Then Scott peeked out the fire door and scanned the lobby. It was crowded with employees and guests. Four uniformed cops were waiting for an elevator. Blue police lights flashed out-side the front doors.
"The police are in the lobby," Scott said. "But they're not looking this way. We have to find a back door."
She nodded.
Scott eased the stairwell door open halfway and slipped through it. Benny was right behind him. Neither of them looked in the direction of the front doors or the elevators. They walked like they belonged there and knew where they were going. Except they didn't. But they kept moving. Past the restrooms to a door marked EMPLOYEES ONLY.
They stepped through the door and found themselves at one end of a long service corridor. At the far end stood a pair of stainless steel swinging doors that looked like they might lead to a kitchen. In front of the doors the corridor turned right, and Scott hoped it would lead them to a back way out of the hotel.
Scott and Benny were halfway down the corridor when a man and woman turned the corner next to the double doors and walked toward them. Both were Mexican. The woman was dressed in a hotel maid's uniform. The man wore jeans, a denim work shirt, and an old straw hat. The service corridor was narrow. They would have to pass shoulder to shoulder. The man took the woman's hand and guided her behind him. They were a couple, Scott thought. He was probably picking her up from work. Both of them avoided eye contact with Scott as they approached.
Just before they passed each other, Benny, who was two steps behind Scott stepped into the middle of the corridor and blocked the Mexican couple's path. She said something to the man in Spanish. Scott only understood two words, señor and ropa, "mister" and "clothes."
The man looked at Benny like she was crazy.
Scott grabbed Benny's arm. "We have to get out of here."
Benny ignored him. She pulled a wad of hundred-dollar bills from her pocket and counted out five. Pushing the bills toward the man, she addressed him again in Spanish.
He answered in Spanish and waved her away.
"Whatever it is you're saying to him," Scott said, "you're pissing him off." He pulled her arm. "Let's go."
She jerked away from him. "We need their clothes."
"Their clothes?" Scott said. "Why would we-"
"Because the police are looking for an Anglo DEA agent and a Mexican policewoman," Benny said. "No one is looking for a Mexican laborer and a hotel maid."
The man tried to push past Benny. But now that Scott understood what was going on, he stepped into the man's way. "Señor," he said. But his Spanish failed him. It didn't matter. The man was beyond the point of listening. He put a big meaty hand on his wife's shoulder and turned her around. Then they headed back the way they had come.
Scott ran after them and grabbed the man's shirt. He spun around with a cocked fist, but before he could throw it, Scott shoved his pistol under the man's chin. The man froze. Scott nodded at the hundred-dollar bills in Benny's hand. "Plata o plomo?"