CHAPTER 1
Jay Butkowski
Alejandro awoke and blinked the double vision from his eyes. A forehead-sized crater in his windshield spider-webbed out to the corners. He touched his fingers to his forehead as if making the sign of the cross and lowered them to inspect. He touched his fingers to his tongue, just to confirm that the red stuff was in fact blood – his own, not that he could tell by taste.
He tugged on his seatbelt, but it had jammed when his car suddenly went from 80 mph down to 0 when he crashed into – something? – in the middle of the desert. Whatever he hit, it was big, but he never saw it coming… and it didn’t look like there was any sign of it now, peering through the cracked remains of his windshield.
Lifting his arm across his body to pull the seatbelt free was agony. Where the belt had decelerated his body and kept him from launching through the windshield – even if it hadn’t completely stopped his forward momentum – was a strip of deep, fresh bruises. He felt around on his torso. Ribs were tender, but intact. It hurt to breathe, but it hurt to exist right now, so breathing wasn’t any different than anything else he could be doing. At least he didn’t puncture a lung with a broken rib.
He popped the center console between the two front seats of his truck and rooted around for anything with a blade that might be able to cut him free. He cursed himself for not being more like his cousin, Carlos, who was full of machismo and always had a spare blade in his back pocket, even if he rarely used it. Carlos would have been out of the car and hitchhiked to the nearest service station by now.
The darkening plume of smoke rising from Alejandro’s mangled hood brought his attention back into focus. If he didn’t make his great escape soon, the truck was likely to catch fire and burn him alive.
A glass bottle of off-brand cola was reduced to shards of sticky, sharp glass in the cupholders next to his right leg. He grabbed one of the biggest pieces and started sawing away at the fibrous material of the seatbelt.
The glass shiv snapped in his hands, and an errant piece slashed his palm.
“Fuck!” he exclaimed, surprised the expletive came out in English and not his native Spanish. Carlos would have chided him for spending too much time with the gringos, but business was business.
The cut on his hand wasn’t particularly deep, but it stung like hell as his palms got sweatier, and his anxiety over escaping a soon-to-be-raging truck fire grew deeper. He yanked on the belt with one hand, while feverishly jiggling the busted buckle with the other.
“Help! ¡Auxilio!”
The smashed driver’s side door flung open with a loud creak and the sound of crunching fiberglass. A seatbelt cutter slid over the strap by his shoulder and roughly pulled down, aggravating Alejandro’s bruises and eliciting a yelp from the trapped passenger. Another quick snap of the belt near his hip, and he was pulled free and tossed carelessly from the vehicle to land in a heap on the side of the road.
“Just what the fuck do you think you’re doing out here?” came the drawl from behind a pair of mirrored aviator shades and a drawn military issue handgun.
Alejandro tried to prop himself up to respond, and realized his left arm wasn’t moving the way it should. Rather than put weight on it and further injure himself, he rolled to his side like a beached seal to respond.
“Comprend-ay On-Glaze?!” came the slow, tortured Spanish from Alejandro’s savior-turned-sadist.
“I … speak English. I was in a car accident.”
“I can see that,” said the man in the sunglasses, jerking a thumb back to the now-flaming pickup. “What I want to know is, why are you here? This is a government road… as in U.S. Government, not your native Mexico, amigo…”
Fucking racist, thought Alejandro. I’m from Uruguay.
“… as in U.S. Government road that leads straight through a U.S. Government military base, which you also happen to be on. You’re in a world of shit, guy.”
You don’t know the half of it… amigo, thought Alejandro, as he watched thirty grand in cash and 7 bricks of Argentinian coke go up in smoke with his truck.
“Man, I get it. You’re scared speechless by the might of the U.S. military. Maybe you’ll talk more from the brig.”
The man in the sunglasses, whom Alejandro now recognized was wearing military fatigues and a ballcap with the letters M and P emblazoned on it, yanked his arm roughly behind his back. The pain was excruciating, and whether it was his shoulder or fear over what the cartel had planned for him once they found out about this fuckup, Alejandro puked on the blacktop.
“My fucking boots!” exclaimed the MP, before issuing a sharp kick to Alejandro’s bruised body.
From a nearby mesa, a hidden figure watched the whole encounter through a pair of expensive binoculars. He lowered the field glasses and let them dangle from the strap around his neck as Alejandro was handcuffed and shoved into the back of a jeep. The unseen man pulled a phone out of his back pocket.
“This is Santino. We have a problem.”
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