The Traffickers (Badge of Honor 9)

Delgado had let Gomez out at the corner. Gomez, who stood six-one, wore a black hoodie, its top up. He carried the can of spray paint along the side of his leg, attached to the end of a four-foot-long extension arm they’d bought at Home Depot for ten bucks. He trotted down the sidewalk of the strip center, keeping his face concealed from the cameras. When he got to the gun store, he simply extended the aerosol can to the camera lenses and squeezed the extension arm’s grip. The lenses were quickly covered in a coating of black paint.

Moments later, El Gato was backing up the Suburban to the front door. Then El Cheque, the chain coiled over his shoulder, jumped out the right rear passenger door.

He dropped the chain at the foot of the gun store’s front door, grabbed one end with his leather-gloved hands, and began threading it through the wrought-iron bars. Then he wrapped the chain around the heavy metal support bar bolted across the center.

Gomez, also wearing leather gloves, took the chain’s other end and doubled it around the trailer ball of the receiver hitch that was affixed to the Suburban’s rear frame. Then, with an open palm, he pounded twice on the big SUV’s rear window… and ran.

El Cheque got out of the way just as the accelerating truck took up all the slack in the chain-and popped the bars and the door off the face of the storefront. It made an enormous noise. There was mangled metal and broken glass everywhere and, inside, an alarm blared angrily.

El Cheque ran inside the store and spray-painted the cameras there, while Gomez went to the Suburban, unwrapped the chain from the hitch, and pulled the door frame and twisted wrought iron to the side. El Gato then backed up the Suburban to the doorway, and Gomez threw open the SUV’s rear hatch, removed a pair of bolt cutters, and went into the store to cut the steel cable the store owner had strung through the trigger guards of all the shotguns and rifles on the racks. El Cheque was already coming out with an armful of the TEC-9s.

They’d had the back of the Suburban, its rear seats all folded flat, covered with guns and ammo in five minutes.

And two minutes after that, they were on the interstate and getting far away from the scene and its blaring alarm.

Juan Paulo Delgado was not surprised that Angel Hernandez had agreed to the barter. The TEC-9, a more or less cheap knockoff of a fine Swiss submachine pistol, was a coveted weapon. Early semiautomatic TEC-9s had an open bolt design and could be converted to fully automatic. They even had a fifty-round box magazine, which made for one lethal weapon.

The newer models that El Gato and Crew had stolen were of a slightly different design and could not be converted, and their mags held only twenty bullets. But they still resembled the older fully auto TEC-9s that Hollywood had glorified by having all the badass movie drug-runners shooting them. And that was enough to give the gun “street cred”-credibility in the ghetto. So much so that homeys even shot one another just to get their hands on any variant of the TEC-9. They even mimicked that moronic pose they saw in the shoot-’em-up flicks: holding the guns sideways while they fired.

There was also a strong irony about bartering the guns for stitching up Jes?s Jim?nez, and it was not lost on Juan Paulo Delgado.

Not only was Angel Hernandez going to flip the pistols for a helluva lot more money than if he’d just been paid in cash for his services-but he was also likely going to get more business from whomever those TEC-9s shot up.

A horn honked.

Delgado looked up from the phone and saw Jorge Ernesto Aguilar at the wheel of Aguilar’s ten-year-old dark brown Ford Expedition.

He could not help but notice that the SUV had brand-new twenty-two-inch chrome wheels and low-profile high-performance tires.

Delgado shook his head as he slipped the phone into his pocket.

They must’ve cost more than the damn truck is worth.

What a waste of money.

But… he’s not the only homeboy with them.

The Expedition pulled to a stop at his feet. Delgado opened the back passenger door and threw his duffle on the bench seat. Then he went to the front passenger door and got in.

“Hola,” El Cheque said.

“What took so long?”

El Cheque made a face, which caused his cheek scar, the check that gave him his name, to distort. Then he looked out the driver’s-door window, scanning his mirror for a gap in the traffic. He saw one and accelerated the Expedition into the flow.

Delgado knew that it bothered the twenty-five-year-old Aguilar that his boss-Delgado-was only twenty-one. That Delgado was also physically much bigger did not help with Aguilar’s inferiority complex. Nor did it help when Delgado went out of his way to remind Aguilar exactly who was his El Jefe, in subtle and, occasionally, not-so-subtle ways.

Delgado said, “And what’s with those new wheels on here? It’s not good to draw attention.”

El Cheque remained silent. Delgado could see that Aguilar’s eyes were moving quickly, as if he were considering saying what was on the tip of his tongue. Then El Cheque just shrugged.

They drove in silence as Aguilar steered the Expedition off the airport property and made a right turn onto Mockingbird Lane.

Two blocks later, at Maple Avenue, he hit his left-turn signal.

“Where’re we going?” Delgado challenged.

“Umberto’s. He’s got the Suburban. When I went to get it out of the garage, it would not start. So he put a temporary battery in it, then brought it here to put a good one in it for the trip.”