LITMIR.BIZ

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plastic grips. It was the Chinese QSZ-92 service pistol, and the only thing unique about it was the proprietary cartridge if fired.

      Wang regarded the pistol. “Oh, I’ll admit it’s not as sexy as the Five-seveN. It’s no race gun, but the 5.8 mm cartridge it fires has the pedigree. Needle-pointed steel-core bullet? Check. Magnum velocity? Check. And—”

      Smiley stared at the pistol as if it were a snake. “And half the price of a Five-seveN.”

      “Try less than a tenth,” Bolan said. “And you don’t have to smuggle it across the U.S. border. You just pay off any customs official from Ensenada to Acapulco and he can bring them in by the container vessel.” Bolan smiled at Wang without an ounce of warmth. “How many are you bringing in this year, Wang? Hundreds? Thousands? You going to bring in Chinese Type 05 submachine guns in the same caliber, as well?”

      Wang frowned. “Therein lies the problem.”

      “What would that be?”

      “I don’t want to.”

      Bolan was mildly surprised. “Oh?”

      “Oh, I’m telling you, my cousin in Hong Kong has them ready to go. He thinks we should market them locally as asesinos chinos.”

      “Chinese assassins?”

      “Yeah, my cousin earned his degree in marketing. He’s good. He wants to sell them from Tijuana to Matamoros, one end of the border to the other, from sea to shining sea.” Wang laid the weapon back in the crate. “Every punk on the street will want one.”

      “And be able to afford one,” Smiley added bitterly. “You’ll make a killing.”

      “You bet we would, but kill who?”

      Wang turned to the inspector. “Forgive me, my friend, but the Chinese philosophy has always been to pay off the police and then get out of the way and let the Mexican criminals kill each other.”

      Villaluz’s eyes narrowed but he reserved comment.

      “Now it’s different. Now it’s war. The cartels aren’t just killing one another. They are killing policemen, soldiers, mayors, judges and journalists. They are taking over whole towns. Parts of whole states. The days of paying off police and politicians in Mexico is almost over. Now it’s simpler, and cheaper, to kill them. I was born in Mexico. I’m a Mexican citizen. My family is here. My business is here, and I reckon I just don’t want to live in a narco-state.”

      Bolan had to admit that for a tong gunrunner who pit-fought animals and ate them J. W. Wang was a somewhat surprising man of conscience. He still kept his voice hard. “So what are you going to do about it?”

      “I don’t know.” Wang looked Bolan straight in the eye. “What would you like me to do about it?”

      “Go to war,” Bolan said. He looked around at the crates of armament. “What else have you got?”

      CHAPTER FOUR

      Bolan sat shotgun in Wang’s black BMW 7 series sedan. An exploratory tap of his knuckles on the body panels upon entry told Bolan the car was armored. Wang pointed to the corner across the street. “You see that guy?”

      Bolan looked through the tinted window. A man as big as Bolan stood outside a barbershop on the La Chinesca street corner as if he owned it. He wore mirrored blue aviator sunglasses and a blue-and-white team Cruz Azul soccer team warm-up jacket. His black hair was pulled straight back into a short ponytail. He had zipped open the front of his jacket in the heat, and gang tattoos crawled up out of his wifebeater from his chest to his neck. By the way he was standing and occasionally adjusting his jacket, Bolan could tell he was armed. He reeked Mexican gangster, but there was something about the vibe he was throwing off that the Executioner didn’t like. Great minds thought alike, and Smiley shook her head in the backseat. “There’s something hinky about that guy, and more than just the fact that he’s a scumbag.”

      “Who is he?” Bolan asked.

      Wang made an unhappy noise. “It took some time to find out, but his name’s Balthazar Gomez. He used to be a sicario for the Valencia Cartel.”

      Smiley shook her head again. Sicarios were cartel enforcers and hit men. “No one ‘used to be’ a sicario, you just end up in jail or dead.”

      Bolan mulled over other inconsistencies. The Valencia Cartel had merged with the west coast branch of the Federation Cartel. They were enemies of the Tijuana and the Gulf cartels and didn’t have any friends in the north. Valencia operated out of the state of Michoacán, which left their boy Balthazar about fifteen hundred miles away from home. “Definitely something hinky about him.”

      “The boy is positively anomalous.” Wang nodded.

      Bolan liked what he saw less and less by the second. “So what’s he doing hanging around in La Chinesca?”

      Wang frowned mightily. “He’s waiting for me to pay him.”

      Smiley leaned in between the seats. “Pay him for what?”

      Wang squirmed in his seat slightly. “He wants his taste.”

      Bolan looked at the man, and he didn’t like what he saw there either. “You telling me he’s leaning on you?”

      Wang squirmed even more. He might be a Mexican citizen who had been educated in the United States, but he was also Chinese and he knew he was losing face. “Yeah.”

      “Who’s he working for?”

      Wang stopped short of hanging his head in shame. “I don’t know.”

      Villaluz had been taking all this in with increasing unease. “Forgive me, J.W. We have known each other for a very long time. You know I respect you, but I must ask. Why haven’t you killed this man?”

      Wang turned his face away to look out his window into the middle distance. “Because I’m afraid.”

      “Who does he work for?” Bolan repeated.

      “I don’t know. All I know is that he’s hombre marcado.”

      “A marked man?” Bolan asked.

      “Yeah.”

      “You know even in Spanish that usually means a dead man.”

      “I know!” Wang became increasingly agitated. “But that’s not what it means now.”

      “What does it mean now?”

      “It means he bears the mark,” Wang stated.

      “The mark of what?” Bolan probed.

      “I don’t know.”

      Bolan looked at the Chinese gangster and realized Wang was genuinely afraid of Balthazar Gomez. “Tell me what you do know.”

      “I know you don’t mess with marked men.”

      “Or what?”

      “The first three hombres marcados I heard about in Mexicali showed up at Tijuana cartel–controlled operations or fronts and demanded tribute. Of course they got killed and killed ugly.”

      “And then?”

      “And then? Within a day the men who killed them were dead. Their families were dead. Their immediate friends were dead. Their business associates were dead. Everyone’s head got taken, including the heads of the dead marked men in the morgue. The cartel capos who ran the killers got anonymous messages. Silencio, and pay. Two didn’t pay and they and their families and friends ended up just like their sicarios. The third one paid. The bosses of the two who didn’t got the same message. Silencio. Pay. There were a number of slaughters up the chain of command before they paid.”

      “These marked men are always out of towners?”

      “Always,” Wang affirmed. “As far as I’ve heard.”

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