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  “Coupla questions.”

  “Sure.” Yeager tucked the phone under his ear and rooted a red shop towel out of his box. “Shoot.”

  Jurdan took him through the hijacking then asked, “Where’d you learn them moves?”

  “Courtesy of the United States Marine Corps.”

  “Semper Fi, buddy,” Jurdan said. “Anyway, you ought to know, our intel guys IDed the leader of the merry band of outlaws you tangled with. They had some new facial-recognition software that they got to play with. Made ’em very happy, you know. Geeks with their toys.”

  “Okay, I’ll bite. Who is it?”

  “Humberto Cruz.” Jurdan paused for a moment, as if waiting for Yeager to add something. When Yeager didn’t respond, he continued, “He operates a hijacking ring south of Monterrey, Mexico. He used to work for Los Zetas, the drug cartel enforcement bunch, before branching out into hijacking, human trafficking, and whatnot. He’s a bad hombre, Mr. Yeager. You’re lucky you met him and lived.”

  “Lucky Miz Buchanan showed up with a gun. You think she’s in any danger?”

  “Naw, prob’ly not,” Jurdan said. “It’s a business for these guys, right? All they want is the truck. It’s not like it was personal or anything.”

  “Any luck finding Mr. Cruz?”

  “We’re following up on some leads. Have you seen these fellers since the attempted hijacking?”

  Yeager was tempted to say he’d seen at least two of the gang last night, but that would lead to a lot of questions he didn’t want to answer—like how his friend from Texas had flown up with an illegal pilot, carrying guns in his gym bag, and capped off a round in the Comfort Inn parking lot. Next thing he knew, somebody would be questioning both of them about carrying weapons. Eventually, they might even get around to Cujo. Yeager shuddered just thinking about it. Cujo talking to the police would not be a pretty sight. “No.”

  “Well, that’s all the questions I have for now.” Jurdan sounded a little surprised that Yeager didn’t have more to add. “If you see them ol’ boys again, give me a call at this number.”

  “Sure,” Yeager said. “Appreciate you keeping me in the loop.”

  “You bet.”

  Jurdan signed off, and Yeager wiped the phone with the rag from his pocket. He gave Victor a rundown of the conversation.

  “Humberto Cruz, huh?” Victor chewed his lip and stared off across the parking lot. “I’ve heard that name, I think. Somewhere.”

  “Another cousin, maybe?”

  “Ver’ funny, gringo.”

  “Well, one thing’s for damn certain,” Yeager said. “Cruz is pissed about something. This is about more than a truckload of copper.”

  Victor nodded solemnly. “My people carry grudges a long time.”

  “Oh yeah? And who’re your people? Short, muscle-bound assholes?”

  “Handsome Mexicans, esé, what you think?”

  “Shit, Por Que. Your people been in Texas longer than mine. How’s that make you a Mexican?”

  “See, it’s like this.” Victor tossed the magazine onto the seat. “It was Mexico before it was Texas. You people stole it when you sneak attacked Santa Ana, dude. Is why I’m still carrying a grudge, you know?”

  “Ah. Clears it up.”

  “You through dickin’ around with that engine, homes? Give me a ride to the airport. I gotta check on Cujo, get to him before he gets too far into his stash. When he flies stoned, altitude becomes an arbitrary concept, you know?”

  Yeager nodded, but his mind was filled with questions. What did Cruz want? If what Jurdan said was accurate, why did the gang leader’s boys show up again last night and try and take him out? And some of the things Cruz had said during the hijacking had sounded more personal than just business. If Cruz was taking it personally, was Charlie really safe?

  CHAPTER 8

  Big River Wholesale

  St. Louis, Missouri

  Nauseated and dizzy, Dareas Thompson tried to sleep Wednesday night, but he couldn’t seem to get any rest. He finally gave up and threw the sheets back at four o’clock in the morning. He sat on the side of his bed and rubbed his aching shoulder. Must have pulled a muscle. Lifted something wrong, I guess. Maybe comin’ down with a cold, too.

  He yawned and scratched his fuzzy chest. It was pick-up day. Better stage the money pallets. Get that done before anyone clocks in.

  He ate a Jack-in-the-Box breakfast in the car on the way to Big River Wholesale. To keep the peace with his queasy stomach, he only had two breakfast sandwiches and hash browns instead of his usual morning meal. The headlights of his Escalade washed the front of the building when he pulled in at oh-dark-thirty. He opened the SUV’s door. Sweat beaded on his forehead the instant he left the comfort of the Cadillac’s air conditioning and was rolling down his face by the time he finished climbing the stairs to the main entrance.

  After switching on the warehouse lights, he fired up a forklift and unlocked the secure cage containing the money pallets, six skids, each with a square core of small bills carefully banded, weighed, and shrink-wrapped. Stacks of books surrounded the core, which were in turn surrounded by cardboard and shrink-wrapped again. Dareas assembled the pallets, scrawling seemingly random numbers on the side that indicated the dollar amount in each. He did the math in his head and came up with sixty million dollars for that shipment alone.

  Getting cash from the United States to Mexico was a problem for the cartel. In the years Dareas had worked for the Sinaloa in the U.S., he had run every money-laundering scam the big boys could think of. The idea of smuggling cash inside pallets of books was the latest in a number of techniques to get cash back in the hands of the drug sellers.

  Every ten, twenty, fifty, and one-hundred-dollar bill dropped into the hand of a street dealer was stacked into piles of cash in the dealers’ home bases. With hundreds of dealers in each city, selling thousands of dollars per day in crack cocaine, powdered cocaine, heroin, pot, X, meth, and a pharmacy’s worth of other street drugs, those piles of cash added up quickly.

  Each of those piles—suitcases full—was moved upstream to the dealer’s supplier, who aggregated their take into pallet-sized piles. The suppliers delivered those loads of cash to one or more collection points in the city. In St. Louis, for example, the main collection point was Big River Wholesale. And Dareas moved several pallet loads of cash back to Mexico inside loads of cheap, easy-to-get books.

  The cartel knew within a few thousand bucks how much each shipment contained, so Dareas kept his fingers clean. He had seen firsthand what happened when people got greedy and the cartel found out.

  Dareas’s predecessor had skimmed and skimmed, then his skimming had turned to scooping. By the time the cartel hitters were done, the man looked like something eaten by a lion and vomited back out. The bosses had shown Dareas the remains as a lesson in appetite control, and it had worked. He’d lost his breakfast and all the meals he’d eaten for the past week, right there on the warehouse floor.

  He lined up the six money pallets behind door number one. In a rare burst of industry, Dareas also pulled the six skids of books purchased by the pretty redhead. Too bad she’d gotten away. He had her phone number on the PO; maybe he should give her a call, set up a date for the next time she came back. Her pallets, he put at the second door. The two lines of staged pallets looked identical. Hidden in plain sight. Nobody would know the difference.

  Grateful to get inside the air-conditioned office, Dareas braced himself for a moment, overcome with a bout of dizziness. He tottered around his desk, vision going dark around the edges, and all but fell into his chair. The leather protested with a woof and a groan.

  Dmitri came in with two cups of coffee. “Here, boss. Half-and-half, six sugars.”

  “You ain’t good for much, Dmitri, but you’re damn regular about bringing good coffee.”

  “Is Russian blend. Make you strong, like me.”

  Dareas mustered a weak laugh then sipped from the cup. It really was nice coffe
e, with a spicy, cinnamon scent and a slightly bitter aftertaste. He wiped the sweat off his brow and massaged his arm, where the dull ache had flared to a sharp pain. Shit, this ain’t good. Better get myself to a doctor. This feels like some kick-ass flu.

  He drank some more coffee. Printing the shipping labels was his next task. He had to print the labels or the shipment wouldn’t go. A little flu virus will be the least of my worries if the shipment doesn’t go out.

  Dareas gathered both sets of labels and got to his feet. A knife of pain—no, a big fucking sword of pain—stabbed through his chest, driving him to his knees. He must have yelled or something because Dmitri ran back down the hall. For some reason, the little Russian was smiling. His mouth moved, but Dareas couldn’t hear any sound. Another railroad spike of pain hammered his chest, and dirty linoleum filled his vision. As he fell, the shipping labels spiraled out of his hands and fluttered across the floor in a blizzard of white.

  His last thought was Well, that’s a fuckin’ mess.

  Round Rock, Texas

  Harlan stopped the Challenger at the gatehouse for the Sandy Creek private community in Round Rock, a suburb of Austin. A rent-a-cop came out, and Harlan handed off his identification.

  After consulting a clipboard, the guard returned his license. “Go right on through, Mr. King. You need directions?”

  “Nah, I been here before.” Harlan gunned the car through the retreating gate.

  Skeeter flicked his cigarette butt out the open window and yawned. “Wonder what this place looks like at Christmas.”

  The streets lamps glowed orange, and every house had bright porch lights and wall-mounted security floods under the eaves. Landscape lighting added accents while ensuring shadows were kept to a minimum. Fit-looking people in summer clothes from Neiman Marcus or L.L.Bean strolled the twisty residential sidewalks. Joggers in spandex and flashy red warning lights weaved between the walkers, their running shoes as clean and spiffy as if they had sprung out of the box that morning.

  He pulled the rumbling Challenger into the driveway of a two-story house as big as an aircraft hangar. A lighted, arched entry dominated the front; tall windows on either side revealed a grand staircase in the foyer. White stone construction, rough-hewn wood balconies, and a red-slate roof gave a vague impression of Spanish, Texan, and modern architectural styles splashed together with more ambition than taste.

  John Stone answered the door. Pudgy, with a round face and bulldog eyes, he wore his black hair long, pulled into a ponytail. Bone-white ostrich cowboy boots added another inch to his five and a half feet. A personal injury attorney, John did TV commercials, calling himself the Rock of Texas. He came on harder than a Southern revival preacher, claiming he’d get clients big settlements if they were injured at work or in a car crash. “Insurance company messing with you? Crush ‘em against the Rock!” Harlan laughed out loud whenever he saw it.

  They must do wonders with makeup on his TV commercials. He doesn’t look like the Rock of Texas now.

  Stone held the door with one hand and motioned with a Corona in the other. A piece of lime floated in the beer. “C’mon in, boys. Been expectin’ ya.”

  The attorney led them to a sunken living room decorated in what Harlan thought of as Nouveau Southwest. Indian-style print blankets and branding irons adorned the walls, alongside cattle skulls and a Henry repeating rifle over the fireplace. Circled in the middle were a couple of cattle-hide sofas and leather chairs. Bonanza in the suburbs of Austin.

  “Where’s Hoss and Little Joe?” Harlan asked, as he always did.

  Stone laughed. “Ass-fuckin’ Miss Kitty! Y’all want a drink?”

  “Yeah, sure. Rum and coke.”

  “Bourbon, straight up,” Skeeter said.

  They settled around a coffee table cut from the heart of a sequoia, sanded and polished to a glow. Harlan yawned and stretched. They’d spent the better part of three days in the car, from Dallas to Texarkana to St. Louis and back to Austin. His eyes were gritty and tired.

  “Your money’s there.” Stone handed Harlan a buff envelope. “How’d it go in St. Louis?”

  “Like a charm.” Harlan tossed the packet to Skeeter, who opened it and riffled through the bills.

  Stone leaned forward and put his elbows on his knees, giving Harlan his most sincere, convince-the-jury look. “Dmitri do it?”

  “Yep. The warehouse manager, Thompson, is sick as a dog from that stuff Doc Buchanan gave us. Should be ready to drop any second.”

  Stone grinned. “Okay, then. I talked to Buchanan, and he came through on the wife, too. Call Dmitri and tell him to switch the load to Book Finders in Austin. His ex bought a nice-sized load yesterday. Double the dose if Thompson’s not dead yet.”

  “This is all pretty complicated, Stoney. Why not just knock off the truck when it leaves the warehouse? Stick a gun in the driver’s belly and have him drive it where we want it.”

  “Two reasons, Mr. King.” Stone tipped the last of his beer into his mouth, sucking the dregs around the lime wedged in the neck of the bottle. “The cartel may be running security on the rig. We wouldn’t see ’em ’til they dropped in and butt-fucked us. And two”—Stone touched a finger to his nose and winked—“when they do figure out where the truck went, I want the trail to lead right to the good doctor. Once you boys take care of him so’s he disappears forever, the Sinaloa bastards will be chasing a ghost. Hah! Get it? Chasin’ his ghost, right?”

  “So we’re double-crossing Buchanan?”

  “Anything wrong with that?”

  Harlan shrugged. “Ain’t no skin off my pecker.”

  Big River Wholesale

  St. Louis, Missouri

  When Yeager pulled in, an ambulance was blocking the loading dock of the warehouse. He parked his rig on the other side of the lot and took the key but left the engine idling. Yeager hopped out, locked the cab, and went to the warehouse office.

  High, thin clouds traced the skyline, and the heat of the morning sun turned the muggy air into a steam bath. A ship’s horn sent up a mournful wail. The Mississippi sliced the edge of St. Louis a couple of blocks to the east.

  Big River looked like any of a thousand mid-sized warehouse-based businesses where Yeager had either dropped or picked up loads. Painted white at some point in the Napoleonic era, the single-story brick building squatted between an auto repair shop and a place called A1 Imports. A set of narrow steps led to a glassed-in office to the right of two open, dock-height freight doors.

  Paramedics and firefighters bustled around the near dock, struggling with a huge, sheet-covered form on a gurney. Three guys at the base of the door grunted and swore as three on the dock cussed back, lowering the overloaded gurney.

  This don’t look good. Yeager climbed the steps and pushed through the office door, making an electric chime ding somewhere in the back. He didn’t have to wait long before a thin guy in gray coveralls entered from the warehouse. He had mouse-brown hair, flattened and sticking up on one side, and a long nose protruding from a narrow face.

  The guy said, “Good-bye,” into a cellphone then put it away in his coverall pocket before addressing Yeager. “I am to be helping you?” He spoke in a Slavic accent with all the cheer of having a prostate exam. The man picked up a paper cup from the desk and gently placed it in the wastebasket.

  “Are you the boss?” Yeager asked.

  The guy seemed to be working over the question in his mind. “Yes… yes, I am the boss. Dmitri Kazulin is the boss here now. The old boss, he is dead.”

  “Sorry to hear that.”

  “I am not.”

  “Oh.” Yeager nodded. “Okay, then. I’m here to pick up some skids for Austin. Books.”

  “What kind books?”

  “I don’t know. Books. For Charlie Buchanan, Austin, Texas.”

  “Ah, yes, I know this one. Book Finders.” Dmitri held up his index finger then sifted through a loose pile of papers on the desk. “Manifest here somewhere. Back up, door one. You wait for le
ave the ambulance.”

  “Door one,” Yeager repeated. “Wait for the ambulance to leave.”

  “Is what I say.” Dmitri smiled for the first time, showing top and bottom gray teeth. “Dmitri take care of everything.”

  Book Finders

  Austin, Texas

  Charlie spent Thursday morning in her office on the bookstore’s ground floor, matching invoices to shipments from her two biggest book suppliers, Ingram and Baker & Taylor. Her single-cup coffee maker gurgled and dribbled her third cup of the day, filling the room with the aroma of cinnamon.

  Lined with walnut bookshelves and decorated with earth-tone furniture, her office resembled a comfy den more than a place of business. Books were stacked on every available surface. The only anomalies were the sleek twenty-three-inch monitor, keyboard, and mouse on the polished oak of her desktop. She looked up at a tap on her office door.

  Nita Lutz stood in the doorway. “Hey, welcome back.”

  “Hey, yourself. What’s been going on?”

  Nita’s voluptuous figure, broad shoulders, and wide hips exuded the sultry sensuality of a young Kirstie Alley. Charlie figured that in another ten years her friend’s infatuation with fried food, coupled with her tendency toward heaviness, would have her shopping in the Plus sizes.

  Nita briefly brought her up to speed on store business then asked, “So how was your trip? You find anything good?”

  “We have six skids of remainders due to arrive tomorrow.”

  “Awesome!” Nita selected a dark roast K-cup and started it brewing. “Online stock’s been getting pretty thin.”

  “Oh, and you’re never going to believe what happened…” Charlie filled Nita in on the confrontation at the rest stop.

  “So this truck driver, was he cute?” Nita asked.

  “Cute?” Charlie bit her lip. “No, I don’t think cute’s the word I would use. More like… uh, think Russell Crowe in Gladiator, and you have a better picture.”