Beautiful Sacrifice

alarm clock.
    He’d slept well into the next day. No wonder he felt like roadkill.
    “Hunter?” Jase asked. “You sound like something the cat dragged in and rammed down the garbage disposal.”
    “What’s up?” Hunter asked. The last thing he wanted to talk about was why he sounded the way he sounded.
    “I got a tip from someone who owes me. A bust is going down that sounds like it might be interesting. I’m out front.”
    “My car or yours?”
    “Mine. Some of the agents are used to seeing it.”
    Hunter swigged the dregs of yesterday morning’s coffee straight out of the carafe, jammed his feet into his jungleboots, and went out to meet Jase. It was hot, stinking hot. The thunder that echoed in the distance hadn’t brought any rain.
    Hunter got into Jase’s white minivan, slammed the door, and fastened his belt.
    “I’m not going to say anything,” Jase said. “Don’t want to prejudice you.”
    Hunter grunted. Silence was just fine with him
    Jase drove through Houston to Willerton Lane. Going through this part of Houston was like peeling back time, skinning away years and watching things get meaner and meaner until the low stucco buildings went feral. Sunbaked and blasted, mangy lawns reverted to swatches of prairie yellow, dead for lack of water. Weeds grew waist-high and finally starved out, leaving behind a prickly thicket that you could lose bodies in.
    ICE and Houston PD had cordoned off the area. Patrol cars were sitting with rollers blinking urgent colors, moving aside only for official vehicles. Neighborhood people watched from porches, nursing the second or third cerveza of the day while the children played with faded plastic toys in a heat that was more summer than winter. The sky reflected the neighborhood. Sullen.
    Jase flashed his badge and got waved through with a nod and a glare of sun from the cop’s mirrored aviator sunglasses. Nobody seemed to care that Hunter was in the passenger seat, probably because he looked rough enough to be an undercover agent. Jase pulled over to the decaying curb behind a newly minted Houston blue-and-white. Under other circumstances, the high-gloss finish would have been irresistible to neighborhood taggers.
    Jase didn’t move to get out.
    “Now what?” Hunter asked. He needed something to keep his mind off his nightmare or his second taboo line of thought—Lina’s scent, her warmth, her lush lips made for the sweetest kind of sin.
    She must think I’ve disappeared again.
    “We don’t get to move in until after the door is cracked,” Jase said.
    The house on Willerton had been left to abscess for a long time. It was rotten to its foundation. But that wasn’t what kept neighbors at a distance.
    “The bad guys live here,” Hunter said. “No graffiti.”
    Every other house on the block had been tagged, broken into, and then patched up. But this old house would be standing long after the neighborhood was abandoned and stripped. Nobody would be messing with the sun-faded stucco, because real predators lived here. The only things new about the house were the security doors and bars on the windows. They were black steel, powder coated, and looked like they could turn a bullet shot from the street.
    “Nice bars,” Jase said.
    “Stupid,” Hunter said. “Limits your field of fire from the inside.”
    “Dude, sometimes I worry about you.”
    Nearby a tactical van was parked close enough to do some good, but not close enough to get in the way. Two snipers lay on the van’s roof, covering the front of the house and yard. Hunter knew there would be another van just like it on the opposite side of the house, with ICE troops ready to come over the back fence if anyone tried to rabbit.
    An electronically amplified voice boomed from the van in front of the house, advising the occupants of the house thatthey were officially required to quit the premises with hands on head.
    The house stayed quiet.
    “That’s the third warning,” someone shouted. “Take it down.”
    A group of men cut the chain on the fence’s gate and moved in fast, marching up the cracked walkway in black fatigues and vests that clearly spelled out ICE in what seemed to be mile-high yellow silkscreen. All of them carried handguns at a precise forty-five-degree angle from the ground.
    The agents swept up the short stoop. They didn’t bother knocking. One of them stepped to the side and yelled, “Clear!”
    “Det cord?” Hunter asked. Explosive cord made short work of