Begić’s larger and faster boat continued to pull ahead as they sped upriver toward Tigre. Both vessels slalomed in and out of the steady parade of tour boats and pleasure craft.
A hand on each gunnel, Chavez leaned well over the bow, willing more speed out of the motor.
Begić’s boat slowed, then turned up one of the finger canals cut between the concrete piers. Cutting left, it disappeared in front of a line of squat mahogany tour boats rafted together at the docks. Midas and Chavez rounded the flotilla in time to watch the Serbian leap over the side of his skiff and sprint up the steps. His driver sped away without looking back.
Midas nosed toward the pier. “Come take the tiller!” he shouted. “I’ll go after him!”
Chavez ignored him, hopping over the rail when they were still two feet out. Midas was no spring chicken, but Chavez had more than a few years on him. Fortunately, Begić was older than either. Catching him shouldn’t be a problem. Hopefully. Still, Chavez dispensed with any witty comeback, saving his breath for the chase.
Arms pumping, Chavez hit the top step at a full sprint. The crowd of fruit market shoppers, already alerted to a wild man rushing up from the river with a pistol, began to murmur and shout when they saw Chavez in hot pursuit.
Begić spun, realizing someone was following him. He shot from the hip, missing Chavez but scattering startled market-goers. Chavez ducked behind a T-shirt shop, then did a quick peek around the corner, squatting low so his brainpan wouldn’t present such a predictable target if Begić happened to be lying in wait. No worries there. The guy was hauling ass, pistol in hand, but not looking back.
Chavez followed at a sprint, chuffing like his cousin’s ’66 Shovelhead Harley.
“He’s cutting right,” Chavez said between breaths. “First side street . . . Left again . . . parallel to the piers . . .” He scanned for a street sign. “Sarmiento . . . South toward the main road out front.”
The Serbian continued to shove his way through crowds. Small shops gave way to traditional brick buildings, furniture stores, art galleries, restaurants—and far fewer people. Begić sped up, now with a straight, unimpeded path as he ran toward a waiting white sedan idling in the street at the next corner. He touched his ear, adjusting an earpiece, speaking to someone as he ran.
Sirens wailed from every direction, growing louder. Policía. They were close.
The driver of the white sedan had clearly had enough. Spooked by the oncoming police, he sped off, leaving Begić high and dry, still half a block away.
The Serbian stutter-stepped, threw up his arms in protest. Chavez couldn’t hear what he said, but imagined a string of colorful curses. Begić didn’t slow down for long.
Fifty feet behind him, Chavez brought everyone up to speed over the radio. “He’s turned northeast again . . . cutting between some buildings to the same street where he jumped out.” Chavez matched his pace, not wanting to risk getting a bullet to the face if he got too close. “He’s on his phone with someone.”
John Clark chimed in. “Returning to his boat, maybe?”
“Could be,” Chavez said.
“That’s affirmative,” Midas said. “I have eyes on his boat driver. No Uzi in sight, but he’s sitting in the skiff in front of the northernmost tour boat in the canal, almost to the main river. The tour boats are rafted three out from the dock. Four or five have just come in from delta tours. The whole place is a mess, crawling with vessels and people.”
“Copy that.” Chavez slowed to a trot so as not to prompt Begić to take any more wild shots and risk hitting the crowd. “He’s winded,” Chavez said, panting himself. “I’m fifty feet behind him.”
“Jack,” Midas called out. “What’s your pos?”
“About a hundred meters downriver,” Ryan said. “Coming up on the easternmost Tigre docks now. We have Rossi on board. According to her, Begić raped and murdered her sister about a month ago. She came to settle the score—”
“Haul ass this way,” Midas said, “and we’ll help her do that. Move toward the front where the driver is waiting. It’s okay if he sees you.”
“Roger that,” Ryan said, trusting the former Delta operator to know what he was doing.
“Begić’s boat can’t get any closer to the pier than he already is at the moment,” Midas said. “Too many other boats in his way . . . Press him, Ding. Keep him moving. I have an idea.”
Chavez listened as he ran, grateful for a break from using his wind to keep everyone updated.
Begić slowed a step as he reached the raft of tour boats, his head snapping back and forth, considering his options. The three vessels in the back of the line were in the process of disgorging dozens and dozens of passengers, packing the pier and blocking the Serbian’s way forward.
“Moving in,” Ryan said.
Begić threw up his arms, waving wildly as he spoke to someone through the mic dangling from his ear. Unable to move forward, he dispensed with the stairs and leaped over the railing to the roof of the nearest boat, landing on the fiberglass roof. Some sixty feet long and eighteen feet wide, the boats made for a slick but unimpeded escape route. Begić crossed the vessel nearest the pier laterally, leaping to the next boat in the raft, and then the next until he reached the outer vessel, at which point he ran forward again.
Chavez followed him over the rail, grateful for his Lowa boots with grippy soles. He jumped from the inside boat to the middle, running parallel to his target. Both men had been pushing all out for over five minutes. Chavez was in better-than-average shape, running well over twenty miles each week, though appreciably slower than he’d once been. Not too many years ago he would have run this asshole into the ground, ripped the dude’s arm off and beat him do death with it. But these full-on sprints had him fading. Fortunately, Begić was in worse shape, sucking the proverbial pond water, wheezing, staggering, fueled by little but adrenaline and hate.
Chavez gained on him now with every step.
Tour operators and boat crews began to shout from the pier and decks below, chastising these two crazy men for marring the tops of their beautiful vessels with heavy boots. Crowds of market-goers gathered at the rail. They shouted insults, well practiced in the Argentine art of escrache—public shaming—until Begić turned and fired two more shots. The bullets smacked the wood behind Chavez, missing him, but close enough to make him dance instinctively to the side.
Screams rose from the crowd at the pop of gunfire. Most stampeded away en masse, but a few hunkered down and tried to film with their phones.
Begić built up speed as he reached the bow of the rearmost tour boat. His boots pounding away on top of the roof, he gathered himself up to leap across the gap. He made it, landing at the aft deck of the next in line, but only just. A knee slammed against the unforgiving fiberglass in the process before he was able to haul himself up the ladder to continue his forward run.
Less than twenty feet behind him, but one boat closer to the dock, Chavez ducked his head and pumped his arms, willing himself to go faster. This would all be over soon—one way or another.
Begić jumped down to the next and final boat in line, floundering again, scrambling to his feet and up the last ladder, limping badly now. Chavez was able to gain another couple yards.
Almost neck and neck, running on parallel boats, Begić must have heard Chavez moving up on him. He raised the pistol as if to shoot, but Ryan, or someone off the bow, blew an air horn, grabbing the Serb’s attention.
Confused at seeing Guillermina Rossi so soon after their last encounter, and surely taking her for a threat, he stutter-stepped again, trying to work out which way he should go.
Ryan hit the air horn again.
Chavez angled to the right at the sound of the blast, launching himself across the gap to the adjacent boat and plowing directly into the exhausted Begić. Chavez bent his knees and dug in like he was hitting a tackle sled in football practice. Unable to control himself laterally, the Serb toppled over the side, dropping fifteen feet into Midas’s skiff. Chavez pulled up short, letting himself down in a more controlled fashion to keep from breaking anything.
Begić writhed on the plywood deck, not quite so lucky.
Cowering behind open hands, he moaned something in Spanish that Chavez couldn’t quite make out over the sound of his own breathing.
Midas pointed the little skiff into the river, blocked from view of the pier by the larger vessels. He turned south as a fiberglass launch full of Prefectura officers arrived from the San Fernando station upstream. A coast guard patrolling the country’s waterways, the Prefectura Naval Argentina was even larger than the Navy, so there was little doubt the entire market would be swarming with them in no time.
For now, the arriving officials were armed with stale information, still scanning the roofs of the large tour boats for the reported troublemakers.
Chavez pulled an oily canvas tarpaulin over the stunned and groaning Darko Begić. Midas motored downstream a kilometer, turning gently off the main river onto an industrial waterway at the edge of Tigre proper called the Canal San Fernando.
Begić’s moans grew louder, higher in pitch. “I have money,” he said, wincing as he spoke from what were surely fractured ribs.
Chavez put a boot to the man’s shoulder, not a kick, but a stern reminder that he should keep quiet. It didn’t help.
The Serbian squirmed until he was able to peek out from under the canvas. “Camarilla? Who hired you? One of the girls? Not Guijita, surely . . . I hear you guys are unbribable—but everyone has a price. Correct?”
Chavez ignored him.
“How does double sound, my friend?” Begić whined like a mosquito now. “I swear it. Don’t take it for yourself if your honor is at stake. Surely even the fabled Camarilla needs operating capital?”
Normally, Chavez would have been happy to let a prisoner spill his guts with all the intelligence information he wanted to vomit up, but frankly he was having a hard time getting past the fact that this guy was a piece-of-shit child rapist. No, Begić needed to go have his day in court in the Hague or wherever they sent him—Bosnia, with a bunch of female prison guards, if there was any justice in the world.
Chavez used the toe of his boot to turn Begić’s face toward the deck, grinding it against the filthy plywood so there would be no misunderstanding. He wasn’t interested in talking.
Midas took the little skiff past the Prefectura station on the left where a half-dozen uniformed officers prepared small runabouts to join the search for the man who had shot up the fruit market. Normal boat traffic on the river had not stopped during the recent melee and the enforcement officers had no idea the men responsible had run toward them instead of away.
Ryan followed in his boat with Dom, Adara, and Guillermina Rossi.
Still winded, Chavez breathed an uneven sigh of relief when he saw his father-in-law with arms folded standing in front of the van alongside the scrubby dirt bank of the canal. The scattered buildings were run-down and far apart, with several overgrown vacant lots in between what few there were. Bits of trash and nests of tangled fishing line blew over the moist dirt on a breeze that gusted up off the main river.
Clark peered north, past his arriving teammates. “His boat driver?” he asked. “The one with the Uzi?”
Adara Sherman shook her head as she hopped over the side to help Chavez wrangle the wobbly Serb from the boat. “Señor Uzi was going upriver at warp speed last time we saw him.”
Begić hunched forward, hands bound with zip-ties, and stifled a cough. Yep, Chavez thought, broken ribs.
The Serb switched to English. “What now?” he sneered. “Why bring me on land just to kill me? It is common knowledge that Camarilla takes no prisoners.”
John Clark looked from the Serb to Chavez, thought for a moment, and then waved away some notion. “We need to move. Now.”
Chavez prodded Begić forward, up the bank toward the waiting van.
The Serb stopped in his tracks. “You are not them?” Begić gasped. He looked heavenward, muttering a whispered prayer. Tears filled his eyes—and then he began to laugh.
Guillermina Rossi stepped out of Ryan’s boat a scant ten feet downriver. She stumbled over a gnarled little bush, but caught herself and smoothed her wet clothing with unsteady hands. Begić chuckled at her mishap, his smallish nose crinkling in bitter disdain. “I know you, Guijita.” He leered at her translucent blouse, still soaked from her plunge in the river. “So these people are merely your thugs. All this? For what, my darling? Revenge?”
Rossi bowed her head, water dripping from wet hair. Broken twigs and bits of leaf clung to a flushed face.
Chavez glanced over his shoulder toward the mouth of the canal, checking for followers—Prefectura officers or otherwise. A rush of adrenaline shot down his arms when he turned back and caught the momentary flash in Rossi’s eyes.
He’d seen that look before.
Rossi’s hand came up quickly, holding a small semiautomatic pistol. Her first round would have hit Begić square in the head, but Chavez bumped her elbow, deflecting her point of aim enough that the bullet ripped through the man’s jaw, destroying several teeth before exiting below his right ear. Rossi fired again, the second round striking the Serb in the wing of his pelvis, dropping him like a sack of sand.
Chavez wrested the pistol away, cleared it, and threw it into the river.