LITMIR.BIZ

      El Psicópata was subconsciously aware of humming, but he made no effort to curtail it. He was safe at home, immune to interruptions from the world outside, free to behave as he saw fit, indulging in the only pastime he truly enjoyed.

      He leaned toward happy tunes, which might strike some people as paradoxical, but the internalized music had seen him through some rugged times, beginning with the earliest of childhood memories. He’d been too young to understand or to mourn losing his parents in the auto accident that—he had later learned from yellowed newspapers and bootlegged autopsy reports—had turned them into twisted skeletons of blackened ash.

      From his first home, which he could not recall, he had moved on to a state-run orphanage in Zacatecas—picture sodomy endured from older boys and staffers, whippings when he first complained before discovering that silence was expected of him—then to foster homes that ran from bad to worse.

      A dictionary had enlightened him that “foster” was a verb, meaning to stimulate, encourage and promote. Each so-called home, for him, had stimulated fear, encouraged pain, promoted nightmares, till he woke one morning and decided something had to change if he was going to survive.

      He’d torched the fourth place after moving silently from room to room wielding a butcher’s knife. The police had been too blind, stupid or apathetic to see past the fire that had left his foster “parents” and their spoiled brats in the same shape as his birth parents. As a result, they’d sent him to another home. While that childless couple was sincere enough, eager to please, the damage suffered by El Psicópata prior to meeting them was irreversible. He’d aged out of the system twelve months later and was on his own, determined to avenge himself upon the world that never wanted him.

      From Zacatecas City he had traveled the twelve hundred miles due north to Ciudad Juárez. He’d started out hitchhiking along MX 45 and taught himself to drive by watching Good Samaritans who stopped for him. A few miles south of Torreón he’d killed a honeymooning couple, left them to the desert as a sacrifice and driven on in their car. When he was halfway to Delicias, a fellow hitchhiker attracted him and learned that there were no free rides. Two cars and three more sacrifices later, he’d rolled into Ciudad Juárez, running on gasoline fumes, and abandoned his last ride—a little something in the trunk—near an industrial park.

      Already, the Chihuahuan capital had earned a lawless reputation, luring gringo tourists with its reputation as a town where “anything could happen” and frequently did. Low-paying jobs were plentiful in Ciudad Juárez, permitting him to put a roof over his head, but when it came to “honest work,” El Psicópata had little patience. It was easier to jack-roll drunks and gringo tourists straying off the city’s beaten paths. Some managed to survive his avid ministrations, others died, and no one of importance seemed to care.

      Within another year he had accumulated enough cash to purchase an old house one mile from a Petróleos Mexicanos oil refinery in far southwestern Ciudad Juárez. It had six rooms on the ground floor and, down below, a basement that he’d transformed into a workshop and playroom.

      He had not earned his nickname yet. That came later, after Juárez courted infamy for murders by the warring drug cartels and the rising death toll from feminicidio striking down prostitutes. Journalists from the United States described it as a “playground” for serial killers.

      Not a single killer obviously. Who could work that long and hard, achieve so much, within a few short years? But as El Psicópata came into his own, adopted a creative signature, collected certain souvenirs that pointed to a single hand at work, his legend grew. He hadn’t bothered keeping score, could only estimate how many souls he’d reaped so far, before his life had taken a dramatic turn.

      El Psicópata had been hunting, chose a teenage prostitute who presumed to call herself Chantelle Amor, but hadn’t noticed when her pimp observed him and—against all odds and common sense—reported him to a detective from the FIA. The lawman came for him alone, another strange anomaly, and literally caught him red-handed.

      Another deviation, then. Instead of arresting him, baring the secrets of his subterranean rec room and packing him off for sixty years at La Palma prison, Lieutenant Chalino Prieto, El Psicópata’s personal savior, had had a better idea.

      A sadist without boundaries, it seemed, could earn protection by performing certain favors for the FIA and for cartels that had their own armies but sometimes wished to shirk responsibility for certain acts of mayhem. They’d be offloaded to independent operators with a history of dodging the police. Some cast-off prostitutes, police informants, possibly a lover or a relative of some soldier in disfavor with his boss who’d benefit from sampling the sorrow of loss but hadn’t earned extermination yet.

      In short, a homicidal psychopath was useful in Juárez, and by no means the only one at large.

      The present sacrifice was not El Psicópata’s normal prey. He favored females younger than himself, although his sacrifices had included men, as well, a few minors, a handful of old indigens. This one was different: a former man of substance by the look of him, though he’d come down to nothing in the end. Captain Prieto, promoted since striking his bargain with El Psicópata, left nothing with this one to identify him, and it mattered not.

      His orders were simple: make it seem as usual, disposal offering no pointers to the truth, assuming the remains were found.

      Which left him worlds of what gringos described as “wiggle room.”

      He could afford to take his time and relish the experience.

      Hacienda de las Torres

      Bolan scanned his target from a block out, through his Leupold BX-1 binoculars. The neighborhood—at least this part of it—was seedy and presumably a menace after dark. It was an hour off from sunset, too long since Brognola had been lifted from El Paso. Bolan planned on teaching local predators to walk in fear, just like their decent neighbors and the tourists who occasionally strayed into this part of Ciudad Juárez.

      Assuming

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