Gone (Michael Bennett 6)

Manuel had not been pleased. Yesterday afternoon, the cartel boss had forwarded to Vida a very simple instruction by encrypted text message.

Slay the dragons, his text had said. Each and every one.

She weaved through the dense El Monte neighborhood until she found the location she was looking for, a deserted parking lot behind a shuttered supermarket on Cogswell Road.

The young man slouching in the passenger seat beside her loudly slurped at the last of his McDonald’s chocolate shake as they came to a stop.

“You’re going to do this now, right, Jorge? Not having any second thoughts on me, right?” she said in Spanish.

“Please,” Jorge said, looking at her, his brown eyes soft in his even softer face.

Youthful appearance aside, Jorge was an up-and-comer in the cartel’s newest ally, Mara Salvatrucha, the brutal Hispanic gang otherwise known as MS-13.

Jorge had dealt to the Dragons before, so his job had been to set up a dope deal. Five kilos of coke at the cut-rate price of $12K per. There weren’t any drugs, of course, and the only thing cut-rate was going to be the lives of the Vietnamese gangbangers, as soon as they showed up.

Vida looked out on the El Monte neighborhood as they waited. Low stucco houses, palm trees, chain-link fences. California shabby, minus the chic. Above it all, dark clouds rolled against the fast-fading gold of the sky.

More waiting, she thought, feeling like a bubble about to pop. It was driving her mad.

Vida sat bolt upright as Jorge’s phone finally rattled in the silence.

“Is it them?” she said hopefully.

“It’s them,” Jorge said with a nod. “They just got off the expressway.”

CHAPTER 21

AT JORGE’S CONFIRMATION, THE inside of the truck was immediately filled with the meticulous, oiled click and snap of guns being loaded and readied.

Music to my ears, Vida thought.

Vida put a hand to her brow. Even with the AC jacked, she was sweating, amped up beyond belief. She had to slow things down and concentrate. She counted backward from ten as she carefully dried her hands and face with a McDonald’s napkin.

Then she reached back and accepted her trusty MGP-84, which the cartel soldier behind her handed up.

“Let’s go over it one more time,” Vida said to Jorge, who was nervously playing with the door latch.

The young man sighed.

“I roll up, make nice, make sure the gang’s all there,” he said quickly. “Then I whistle over to you like I want you to bring the stuff, right?”

“Then duck, Jorge,” Vida said, showing him her Peruvian machine pistol as she draped a motherly arm over his shoulder.

The rough men behind them in the SUV chuckled as they polished gun sights and tightened weapon straps over their burly forearms.

“You don’t want to forget that last part, homey,” one of them said in a low voice as Jorge finally swung open the door.

Jorge was sitting up on the abandoned supermarket’s concrete loading dock as a car pulled into the lot. The new black Audi A4 with tinted everything pulled up directly in front of Jorge, and three Asians immediately got out, leaving the driver behind the wheel.

Vida scanned the men quickly with a pair of binoculars. The young, heavily tattooed Vietnamese thugs might have hidden handguns, she thought, but that was it. So far, so bad. For them, at least.

Vida peered closer at the tallest of them. She quickly looked at some pictures on her phone, comparing. Well, what do you know? A stroke of good luck. The tall forty-something Asian with the handsome, angular face looked an awful lot like Giang Truong, the head Triumph Dragon honcho who, after the port fiasco, had personally told Manuel to go fuck himself. Manuel said if they took out Truong, their crew would split a bonus of $50K!

All of her anxiety had been for nothing. Her and her superstitions. Everything was coming together just fine.

Jorge wasn’t through with the hand slapping when it started. From one of the cruddy houses across the street came a loud bang. Then, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, there was a group of large men wearing blue Windbreakers, running across the street toward them. At the same time, two marked and two unmarked cop cars rolled out from behind the supermarket like they were some kind of circus trick.

“Everyone on the ground!” a bullhorn cried as the first cop car raced toward them. “This is the Los Angeles Police Department! Turn off your engines and exit your vehicles! We have you completely surrounded!”