"General Zaragoza defeated Napoleon's forces at Puebla on May the fifth, eighteen-sixty-two," Jesse said, "and brought democracy back to Mexico. That is what the Mexican people celebrate on this day, Cinco de Mayo."
They stood before the general's statue in the San Agustin Plaza in downtown Laredo. Palm trees surrounded the plaza, as if they were the general's sentries. Street vendors sold Mexican food and margaritas, beer and bottled water. Mariachis strolled the plaza singing Mexican ballads, and Mexican flags flew from every light pole and storefront. Girls clad in old-style costumes performed traditional dances. The plaza looked and sounded and smelled like old Mexico. Lindsay and Jesse had gone into town for lunch at the Cinco de Mayo festival. The local newspaper and television station had cameras capturing the crowd. Lindsay wore her scarf, hat, and sunglasses to avoid being recognized. But everyone recognized Jesse Rincon. Young girls flirted with him and asked for photos with him, and old men came to him and shook his hand. He had been interviewed on camera twice when a young man stuck a hand out to him.
"Doctor. Angel Salinas from Austin. With Texas Journal. Mayor Gutierrez said I should come to Laredo and interview you."
Lindsay quickly averted her face. She knew Angel, and he knew her. She walked to the far side of the plaza where the girls were dancing. Where her picture would not be taken and she would not be recognized.
" Mrs. Bonner? "
She turned to the familiar voice-to Congressman Ernesto Delgado. He held a long churro like a kid holding a popsicle. His face evidenced his astonishment.
"Is that really you?"
"Yes. It's me."
"What… what are you doing here? Dressed like that?"
"I'm Jesse's nurse."
" No."
"Yes. For a month now."
"I heard he had an Anglo nurse, but they said she was Irish."
"I am."
She demonstrated her accent.
"I would not have known it was you."
"No one can know. You mustn't tell a soul. Please."
"Your secret is safe with me. But why?"
"I need to be useful."
He gave her a knowing nod. "Ah, yes. At my age, I understand that need. But how will this work, when the governor is the president?"
"My daddy the president!"
Bode hugged his daughter and inhaled her fresh scent; she had showered (if not shaved) that day.
"You're like, a celebrity now."
"Hell, if I'd known shooting a few Mexicans was all it took, I'd've done it a long time ago. Jim Bob, how many followers I got on Twitter?"
Jim Bob fiddled with his phone.
"Eight million."
"Wow," Darcy said, "that's more than Selena Gomez!"
"I thought she died?"
"That was the singer. This is the actress."
"Oh."
Becca hugged him again.
"I'm so proud of you, Daddy."
She seemed as excited as on her sixteenth birthday when Bode had surprised her with a new Ford pickup truck. Darcy hugged him, then they sat at their regular table on the raised seating section at the front window at Kerbey's on the Drag. UT students walked past on the sidewalk just on the other side of the plate glass and waved at the governor of Texas-with all five fingers. Jim Bob sat at the adjacent table and played with his phone. Ranger Hank stood at attention behind them.
"How are the kids?" Becca said.
Becca and Darcy had come over to the Mansion and played with the Mexican children several times in the last month.
"Good. It's been fun to have kids around the Mansion again, like when you were growing up."
"How many are still with you?"
"Six. We found the others' relatives, but we've still got five of the boys and Josefina. The cartel killed her folks."
"What are you going to do with her?"
"I don't know."
"Why don't we keep her?"
"She's not a stray puppy, Becca. And without your mom here…"
Their waitress, a cute gal with tattooed arms and a nose ring, arrived to take their order. Bode went for the cinnamon peach pancakes. The girls went for salads.
"She still down on the border?"
Bode nodded. "I figured on waiting her out, that she'd get bored and come back. She hasn't."
"You know how she is when she's on a mission."
The waitress returned with their drinks. Becca emptied two sweeteners into her tea and stirred.
"She'll have to come back, Daddy, if you're elected president. Only problem is, if you guys are living in the White House, we won't be able to have lunch together."
"Sure we will. I'll just fly down every week."
"No, I mean, the Secret Service won't let you eat here, with this big window right on the street. Someone might shoot you."
"Well, no need to worry about that now."
Becca laughed. "Yeah, who would want to shoot the governor of Texas?"
She dropped her teaspoon.
Ranger Hank heard the spoon hit the floor and watched the governor and his daughter duck under the table at the same time to retrieve it, but his attention was diverted by a cute coed with long legs in a short skirt off to his left; he glanced her way just in time to catch a shot of her neon pink underwear as she sat down. Damn, that's a sweet female. He turned back just as a black SUV skidded to a stop on Guadalupe Street directly in front of their window and two men jumped out and pointed high-powered automatic weapons at them. His right hand went for his gun, but he was too late. The first bullet hit him in his right eye, shattering his sunglasses and the back of his skull after boring a hole through his brain. He was dead before the next six bullets hit his body and his body hit the floor.
" Daddy! "
The plate glass window above them exploded. Bode lunged for Becca and covered her under the table as glass and bullets sprayed the restaurant. Diners in the lower section screamed and cried out and dove under their tables and booths. Waiters dropped serving trays and scrambled out of the line of fire; dishes and glasses crashed to the floor. It sounded like a war movie. But Bode knew it was real. Because Hank lay next to them, blood streaming from bullet holes in his face and chest. He was gone. But the gunfire was not. Bullets bit into the walls and sliced through light fixtures and cut wood support posts into splinters. Jim Bob was unhurt and under his table, punching 911 on his phone. But the police wouldn't arrive in time.
"Stay down!"
Bode reached over and yanked Hank's weapon out of his holster. It was a nine-millimeter semiautomatic pistol with a fifteen-round clip. He grabbed Hank's spare clip then clicked the safety off and chambered a round and waited for a pause in the shooting, when the men had run through their clips and had to reload. The gunfire lasted less than fifteen seconds, but it seemed like an hour. Then it stopped.
They were reloading.
Bode knelt up and saw two men standing in the middle of the street holding assault weapons. They were no more than twenty feet outside the restaurant. They had ejected spent clips and were inserting new ones. He stood and aimed the pistol center mass and fired. He hit both men in the chest three times each, dropping them.
"Don't move, Becca!"
He climbed through the blown-out window and walked to the men; broken glass crunched under his boots. One moved; Bode shot him again. Twice. Bode approached a black SUV angled across Guadalupe Street; a dark figure moved in the driver's seat. He aimed and fired through the windshield. Five times. He ejected the spent clip and snapped in the spare just as a man fell out of the vehicle with an AK-47; Bode shot him six times before he could fire his weapon. He heard sirens in the distance. He checked that the SUV was empty then walked back through air thick with gunpowder. He looked through the open window at Becca.
"Are you hurt?"
She shook her head, but she wasn't looking at Bode. She was staring at Darcy, who lay motionless on the floor with her eyes open and a bullet hole in her forehead.
Angel Salinas was a charter member of Mayor Gutierrez's Mexican Mafia. He had driven the two hundred thirty-five miles from Austin to Laredo just to interview Jesse Rincon.
"Doctor," Salinas said, "you could beat the governor-"
His cell phone rang. He checked the number.
"It's my office." He punched the button and answered. "Angel… What?… When?… Shit!.. I'm leaving now."
He disconnected but stared at his phone a moment. Then he looked up at Jesse.
"They killed the governor. His daughter, too."
He ran off. Jesse turned in a circle searching for the governor's wife.
"They missed. We're both okay."
Lindsay Bonner breathed a sigh of relief.
"Thank God."
She had called Bode's cell phone. Her husband and her daughter had survived an assassination attempt. But Bode did not speak. There was more.
"What is it?"
He exhaled into the phone.
"They killed Hank and Darcy."
She felt her legs start to give way.
"Oh, God. No."
"I'm sending the jet to Laredo. You're coming home, Lindsay."
" Sicarios," DEA Agent Rey Gonzales said to the governor of Texas. "Hit men."
Austin police, Texas Rangers, state troopers, and FBI and DEA agents now swarmed Guadalupe Street outside the restaurant called Kerbey's. The street was blocked off from traffic, and police barricades and cruisers cordoned off the crime scene from the reporters and cameras. People shouted, emergency lights flashed, and blood stained the governor's clothes.
"Hit men?"
Rey nodded. "Each cartel has a sicario unit. In-house assassins. Ex-military and law enforcement, hired out to the cartels."
"And they're here in America?"
"FBI's got an entire task force devoted just to Mexican sicarios working in the U.S. They just killed a stockbroker up in New York named Ronald Richey."
"He was into drugs?"
"Investment banking. Enrique de la Garza-we tagged him 'El Diablo'-he's the head of Los Muertos, he invested a billion with Richey, blamed him for losing half in subprime mortgages."
"So he killed the guy?"
"Bullet through his brain." Rey gestured at the dead Mexicans sprawled across Guadalupe Street. "Standard payment for a U.S. assassination is fifty grand cash plus two kilos of cocaine, worth three hundred grand on the street. We found two hundred grand cash and ten kilos of coke in their vehicle. El Diablo, he put a premium on your head. He wants you dead, Governor."
"Because we found his marijuana?"
"Because you killed his son."
" His son? "
"One of those Mexicans you killed on the ranch, he was El Diablo's first-born son. Jesus de la Garza, nineteen years old."
Rumors had been percolating on the border that El Diablo had sent a team of sicarios into Texas. Rey knew the target had to be the governor. So he had taken it upon himself to come to Austin and warn the governor. He had arrived in town that morning, too late to save the Ranger and the girl. The governor and his daughter were just lucky.
"Who does this guy think he is, the godfather?"
"Governor, El Diablo makes the godfather look like a middle-school bully. The broker, that was business. This is personal."
The governor turned to the bodies of the Texas Ranger and the college girl and his daughter sobbing in Mr. Burnet's arms. Then he turned back to Rey.
"You goddamn right it's personal."
The governor of Texas stood in front of a cluster of microphones set up in the parking lot. He faced a dozen television cameras but pointed at the crime scene.
"This is what happens when a sovereign nation can't control its own borders. When it won't control its own borders because of politics. People die."
"Governor," a reporter said, "The FBI says these men were professional killers. They staked you out, knew your daily routine. They knew where to find you. Aren't you afraid El Diablo will make another attempt on your life?"
Bode Bonner stared into the cameras.
"I'm not afraid of the devil himself."
"Oh, you should be, Governor. You should be very afraid."
Enrique de la Garza once loved the game of beisbol more than life itself. He loved the smell of the grass and his leather glove and the feel of the wood bat in his hands. He had the glove and the arm but not the bat to play in the American majors. So his playing days had ended but not his love for the game. On the shelf in his office, he maintained a costly collection of baseballs autographed by the legends of the game. He often imagined autographing baseballs for fans before games in Boston; he went to many Red Sox games while at Harvard and often dreamed of playing shortstop at Fenway Park. He now picked up the Ted Williams ball and threw it as hard as he could at the image on the television of the Anglo he now hated more than any man before. He turned to Hector Garcia but pointed a finger at the shattered screen.
"I want that man dead. I want his head on my desk."
He took a deep breath to get his blood pressure under control. He calmed and assessed the damage.
"Ask Julio to go online and order another television."