LITMIR.BIZ

       CHAPTER FIVE

      Ciudad

      Carl Lyons showered off the stink of sweat, gunpowder and CS. All their suspects save Ibanez were in the hospital or in custody. Other than re-invading Mexico, there was very little to do but wait.

      Able Team was ensconced in a brand-new, mildly palatial house in a new Laredo suburb. Theirs was the only finished house on the block. The rest of the subdivision had yet to recover from the housing crisis. The Farm had picked it out and it suited Lyons just fine. If the enemy found them here something genuinely spooky was going on. Able had run into spooky before, but in the Ironman’s experience 99 percent of spooky involved ignoring the scary trappings, figuring the angle and then attacking. Lyons followed his nose and took a seat at the kitchen bar. Blancanales handed him a plate of steak rancheros and eggs with enough hot sauce to scar the colon of a normal man.

      Lyons took a bite and grunted his appreciation.

      His mood took away some of his enjoyment of the food. Lyons had been fighting his war for some time, sometimes in some very strange places under even stranger circumstances. There was that one percentile of spooky that refused to be explained. The Ironman had seen things explainable and otherwise that would haunt him to his grave. He took a meditative sip of his coffee.

      He didn’t care for what he’d seen in the past forty-eight hours.

      The laptop on the counter chimed. Lyons tapped an icon and Kurtzman popped up. Lyons shoveled down steak. They’d been idle for eight hours. “That was fast.”

      “We got a lot of data to crunch still, but we have plenty you want to hear now.”

      “What do we have on the khaki lackeys from the ranch house?”

      “They’re Zetas.”

      Lyons was confronted with a “two plus two equals five” situation. “Zetas?”

      “Confirmed. All of them have records in Mexico. Some have sheets here. We have fingerprints and matching tattoos.”

      “The drivers?”

      “They’ve clammed up, but veteran Zeta wheelmen, all three.”

      Lyons confronted the five-hundred-pound gorilla in the room. “Guillotine, Bowling Ball and their guys who hit us in the streets are all New Laredo.”

      “That is correct.”

      “Last time I heard, Zetas and New Laredo don’t get along.”

      “They don’t. As a matter of fact they’re at war at the moment. The Mexican state police and military have made some high-level busts against the cartels this past year in Tamaulipas, Nuevo León and Coahuila. The Zetas, New Laredos and the Gulf Coast boys are all fighting to fill the void.”

      “Doesn’t it strike you a bit odd that New Laredo tries to hit us. We hit New Laredo back, but it’s the Zetas that cross the border to come looking for us?”

      “Tad bit,” Kurtzman admitted.

      “What’s the story on Ibanez?”

      “That’s Captain Ibanez to you.”

      “What?”

      “Oh, you’re going to love this.”

      Lyons hated it when the Stony Man cybernetics genius said that. “What?”

      “Captain DeLoran Desus de Ibanez. Webb County Sheriff’s Office. ‘DiDi’ to his friends and ‘the Double D’ on the street. Decorated veteran of twenty years on the force. Some people think he’ll make sheriff some day.”

      If Lyons got headaches he’d have one. “So what’s he doing leading an army of Zetas in cop clothing?”

      “Good question.”

      “We got any FBI connection with Ibanez?”

      “Webb County Sheriff’s Department works with FBI, DEA and ATF and every other acronym on a daily basis. Ibanez has worked over a dozen multi-jurisdictional task forces. It’s a tangle of red tape but we’re taking it from the latest and working backward.”

      Lyons went back to the beginning of spooky. “How’s Miss Valenzuela?”

      “Well...” Kurtzman’s craggy brow furrowed. “Cal tranquilized her to get her out of the house and to the hospital.”

      “Yeah, and Ibanez, too. So?”

      “She never woke up. She seems to be in a coma.”

      “Whatever Cal hit her with would have been mild. He knows what he’s doing.”

      “Yeah, he used ketamine, just enough to make her comatose.”

      “Could she have had a bad reaction to it? Or a mix? He’d given her Valium earlier. She’d been freaking out pretty hard. Could she have been on something else, as well?”

      “Blood test showed no known narcotics in her bloodstream. Just the ketamine and Valium. Both low dose. She should be sleeping like a baby, not totally unresponsive to outside stimuli.”

      Lyons jumped forward in the timeline. “How’s the Oak?”

      “El Roble died about an hour ago.”

      Lyons felt a little bad about that. He’d never fried someone from the inside out before. “I didn’t think he’d make it.”

      “There were anomalies.”

      Lyons quirked an eyebrow. “Drugs in his system?”

      “He tested positive for steroids, as you might imagine. It appears he was an occasional user of marijuana.”

      “So what was anomalous?”

      “His pupils were blown.”

      Lyons considered that. “Trauma will do that to you.”

      “But from what I read in your preliminary after-action, neither you nor anyone else hit him in the

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