Ballistic(137)
“Entendido, señor.”
“Anywhere we find them, anywhere in the country . . .
Spider looked into his leader’s eyes. “They die.”
“Correcto.”
Calvo did not throw in the towel just yet. “Don Daniel. I beg you to listen. Spider wants war with Madrigal so that he can show you that his men can fight. They can’t kill the Gray Man because of his skill and cunning, but they can shoot a bunch of pinche Vaqueros in the streets.”
Javier “Spider” Cepeda scowled at Nestor, giving him a look countless men had seen shortly before Spider chopped off their heads. “Mi jefe, the old man just wants to avoid war with los Vaqueros because he is soft. We have been too easy in our dealings with Madrigal for too long, and look how the Sinaloan Cowboy repays us! We will fight them until they kill the Gray Man or turn him over to us. My men will turn their plaza red with their blood, and within a week the Cowboy will see that the American assassin is only a liability to his operation. Then we can back off, if you order us to do so.”
DLR was nodding before Spider finished. He turned to Calvo. “Nestor. I want you to communicate with your counterpart in los Vaqueros. Tell him that we know they are running the Gray Man, and we see this as an all-out declaration of war on our plaza. We will hold them responsible for the loss in property and in lives, and we will respond accordingly as long as the Gray Man is alive.”
Nestor was furious and frustrated, but he did not hesitate. He possessed an astute barometer that could measure the moods of his boss, and he knew this was no time to argue. “Sí, Daniel. I will contact Hector Serna immediately and tell him we are at war, and I will then give him the conditions by which we will accept peace.”
The first attack took place a mere thirty-three minutes later. A pair of low-level sicarios in Mazatlan who’d been tasked to follow a local underboss in the Madrigal organization got the text message declaring open season on los Vaqueros. Immediately, they got up from their table at an outdoor café, tossed paper plates soaked with tamale juice into the trash, walked into the jewelry store across the street, and shot dead the man they had been tailing, along with his wife and two bodyguards.
Nine minutes after that a truck carrying four Vaqueros was pulled over by a Jalisco state police SUV on the highway from Puerto Vallarta to Guadalajara. The men were lined up and shot, execution style, against their vehicle, their bodies left on the hot mountain freeway like roadkill.
By evening twelve more Vaqueros had been murdered and seven wounded. Four members of Los Trajes Negros had been felled by return fire, and one passerby was wounded by shotgun pellets when a firefight broke out between rival factions of the federal police in Mexico City.
Thirty-two casualties in the first twelve hours of the war was only the beginning.
Two more days passed, and Court worked at a fever pitch through it all. His intelligence from Serna, as good as it was, paled in comparison to the product he was picking up during his raids. In Colima he took the smartphone from a sentry and found an address with the notation “Foco” by the listing. He knew this was the local slang for crystal, so he drove there and found a fenced storage facility full of shipping containers. There were several guards on duty, but Court managed to slip into the complex and place several ANFO bombs he’d built back at his mine shaft, each equipped with a simple radio transmitter detonator on them. Once clear of the blast radius, he dialed a number on one of his many mobile phones, and six containers of crystal went up in a mushroom cloud of black smoke.
On a hillside nearby he stopped to admire his work, but he saw a single man racing from the scene in a black BMW. Court ran the sport coupe off the road with his pickup, found a member of the Black Suits crawling from the wreckage, and took him hostage. Four hours later the man succumbed to his injuries but only after giving the American a treasure trove of information about de la Rocha’s crystal operation in Nayarit and Jalisco.
Court decided to focus on the meth for a few days. According to the dying Black Suit, it was DLR’s cash cow; the product was expensive to produce and, therefore, subject to easy disruption by killing or scaring off the skilled labor or destroying the infrastructure of the labs, and to Court this seemed preferable to burning pot plants or poppy fields. He’d still do that, if opportunity arose, but the foco seemed like the best bet to make a quick impact.
This led Court to Acoponeta, a small river town on the flatlands along on the road to Mazatlan. He had some addresses gleaned from the dying Black Suit that he wanted to hit before heading up into the mountains to go after a super laboratory.