LITMIR.BIZ

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tackled Aunt Sofi off the couch.

      Rafa Villa shot his wife in the face.

      Blancanales struggled to draw but he was entangled in screaming Sofi. Villa swung his rifle onto Blancanales’s puppy-pile and strode over. Lyons heaved seventy pounds of snarling lockjawed dog into his arms and vaulted the couch. Blancanales managed to lash out with one foot to slam a stacked leather heel into Villa’s shin.

      The assault rifle ripped a 20-round burst into the adobe floor a foot from Blancanales’s head. Lyons’s shoulder block hit Villa with every pound of his body and his canine burden behind it. The Villa patriarch went flying with his rifle stitching holes in the roof as he fell backward. Lyons and Kaliman fell on top of him. The boxer gave a muffled yelp but maintained his death grip. Villa struggled beneath them both. Lyons rose up on his elbows and slammed his forehead directly between Villa’s eyes. The Able Team warrior saw purple pinpricks around the edge of darkened vision with the blow.

      Rafa Villa went limp.

      Kaliman rolled an eye up at Lyons accusingly. He wasn’t letting go. “Damn it...” He’d drained his stun gun into Roble and hadn’t packed a spare power module. Lyons dug his left hand around Kaliman’s trachea, found the dog’s thudding pulse and squeezed off the canine’s carotids. “Bad dog, no biscuit...”

      Kaliman’s jaws slowly relaxed in the strangle.

      Blancanales rose with his pistol in hand. His face was bleeding in several spots from fragments of flying floor chips. He helped Sofi up. “Are you okay?”

      “Yes.” Sofi glanced dazedly at her sister. “Is she dead?”

      Juanita Villa’s head was road kill. Blancanales nodded. “Yes.”

      Sofi lifted her chin toward Rafa. “Is he dead?”

      “No.” Blancanales shook his head. “He’s—”

      Sofi Valenzuela drew a Walther PPK from under her blouse and shot Rafa Villa. She calmly spun and shot Blancanales repeatedly in the chest until he fell. As she calmly raised the smoking pistol for the head shot on Blancanales, Lyons rose and shot-putted Kaliman. Kaliman met Tia Sofi like an eighty-pound sack of comatose canine potatoes. Sofi Valenzuela toppled back, ass over teakettle, over the couch wearing Kaliman like a dog feather boa.

      Lyons followed his mutt-missile’s trajectory and vaulted the couch. He leg-scissored Sofi’s gun arm and snaked his arms around her neck in a sleeper hold. Lyons cinched down and performed his second strangle of the day. Kaliman raised his head from the floor and managed a hoarse growl. “Pol!” Lyons urged. “Dog! Dog! Dog!”

      Blancanales rose shakily. He had taken six rounds in the chest, but the PPK’s caliber was small and his concealed soft body armor had held. Kaliman began lurching to his feet. Blancanales seized the boxer by his collar and docked tail. The hallway had a hardwood floor and he bum-rushed Kaliman down it, sending him sliding like a curling stone. Blancanales slammed the hallway door shut. Sofi sagged unconscious in Lyons’s embrace.

      The front door smashed off its hinges. Schwarz swept the scene with the double muzzles of his M4 carbine and the grenade launcher slaved to the forearm. He scanned the room and saw family interview turned into an abattoir. “Clear?”

      The hall door rattled on its hinges as Kaliman hit it, scrabbling and snarling. Lyons laid Sofi’s unconscious form out on the floor. This just wasn’t Able Team’s finest hour. “Mostly.”

      “What happened?”

      Carl Lyons took out a handkerchief and wrapped his bloody wrist. He was starting to develop a major headache from the head butt he had delivered. The only luck he’d seen today was that none of the major arteries were torn open. “Something messed up just happened.”

      Schwarz looked at Blancanales, who mopped blood from his face and threw back his shoulders to stretch his aching chest. Lyons never showed it but from long experience Blancanales knew Lyons was as rattled as he was. “Carl isn’t kidding. This interview went from Twilight Zone to X-Files. Get the restraints and the heaviest sedatives we got for Señora Sofi. We need to get across the border with her ASAP.”

      Lyons retrieved his fallen Python and began rapidly taking crime scene photos with his cell. The second piece of luck was that the Villa family farm was out in the boondocks. Third was that the rest of the family was out. A cold breeze blew through the Able Team leader. After what the Villa family had already suffered, coming home to this would be hell on earth. “I’m going to sweep the rest of the house for evidence. Get the señora in the car and concealed. I want to be out of here in ten and on US soil in thirty. Call Barb and tell her we have kidnapped a Mexican national and need our border crossing to be shit-through-a-goose smooth.”

      Blancanales gazed down at the unconscious murderess and tried to fathom what had just happened. “And tell Barb we want Cal on this one. We need to interrogate this woman when she wakes up, but we’re going to need some subtlety.”

      Lyons saw his role being reversed again. “You’re thinking I go hard, Cal goes soft?”

      Blancanales nodded. “Yeah, and me observing, ideally unseen, if we can get a proper interview room.”

      Schwarz pulled out his laptop. “On it.”

       CHAPTER FOUR

      Laredo, Texas

      The FBI safe house was just about perfect. The Bureau kept it for running undercover stings. It was out in the sticks, and its main joy was that the little half bath off the living room had been faux walled off with a hidden door. It looked out on to the living room through what appeared to be an ornate two-way mirror. Lyons smiled. They had been serious about the war on drugs back in the eighties.

      Schwarz sat ensconced in the hidden taping room with sound and video rolling. Blancanales stood beside him taking notes. Calvin James was the new factor in the equation. Blancanales was a psych-ops expert and Lyons an investigator, but James was the Farm’s number-one interrogator. He wore a white dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up, his tie loosened against the Texas heat. A pair of reading glasses he didn’t need perched on his nose. He wasn’t wearing a badge but even a cop would have taken him for a sympathetic law-enforcement officer trying to get to the bottom of a mystery. Lyons stood in the background like an angry stone Buddha.

      Sofina Valenzuela looked at James in confusion and Lyons in naked fear. Able had kept her under heavy sedation until they’d reached the FBI sting house. Calvin James had flown in on a Farm-chartered private jet. While he had been in transit Able Team had left Señora Valenzuela alone and let her come out of the sedation naturally. For the past hour she had been in what Lyons could only describe as a fugue state. She looked like a woman who had slowly and painfully pulled herself up out of a deep, dark well and now found herself blinking into the noonday sun like a mole.

      Lyons’s skin crawled. Everything about this op, since the first briefing at the Farm about the attacks along the border, had stunk; the problem was it was a smell he couldn’t put a name to, save one. Despite shooting her brother-in-law in the face and trying to kill Blancanales, Sofi Valenzuela smelled like a victim. As had her brother-in-law.

      Lyons steeled himself to be the bad guy in a destroyed life.

      “Where am I?” Valenzuela asked.

      Calvin James opened a bottled water. “Are you thirsty?”

      The woman focused on the water and spoke in a heartbreaking little-girl voice. “Please.”

      Handcuffs at the wrists and ankles bound her to a heavy Edwardian chair. Lyons had a new stun gun in a small-of-the-back holster in case she pulled a Mexican Oak and snapped her restraints.

      Calvin James cracked the cap on the water and held it to her mouth. She gulped half the bottle and leaned back gasping. “Why have you kidnapped me? We don’t have any money. It’s all in

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