Beautiful Sacrifice

wouldn’t be kept with us or labeled as a DEA collar. He got shanked anyway within a few days.”
    Hunter whistled softly. “Someone is connected like muscle to bone.”
    “Welcome to the border, where money is black, coke is white, and you never know who’s got a rocket in his pocket.” Jase’s voice was weary rather than bitter. The border was what it was—a war zone.
    “Who did the hit?”
    “Some gangbanger from the Latin Kings out of Harlingen.”
    “Did he give a reason for the killing?”
    “Said the dude looked at him funny. He’s already in for life on killing four people, including two kids asleep in their beds,but he’s not giving up whoever told him to do the driver from Quintana Roo.”
    “Not even to get some time shaved off a life sentence?”
    Jase looked like he wanted to spit. “Cameron County’s D.A. is ambitious. He wants to run for governor and makes no secret of it. You don’t score a lot of points by making deals with kiddy whackers.”
    “You can get a lot of points for nailing whoever ordered the whack.”
    “Bird in the hand, man. Can’t guarantee what’s in the bush.” Jase drank some cooling coffee. “The ADA went ahead and tried to make a deal. The gangbanger acted like he was alone in the room.”
    “Which tells me that whoever gave the order for the hit on the Q Roo driver pulls some serious weight. Is it a Latin King?”
    Jase shook his head. “Ain’t none of the LKs ever had a lick of interest in the artifact trade. The amount of coke we found might get someone killed, but…” He shrugged, the liquid movement of a man whose ancestors came from both sides of the border.
    “So would a handful of dirt,” Hunter said.
    “Yeah. The driver didn’t have a drug background. Pretty much a Q Roo dirt farmer, not someone the Kings would be dealing with directly.”
    “What about the artifacts? Do you think they were the real cargo?”
    “DEA must have. They sneered at the five kilos of coke. That’s a lot of personal use, but not really a blip on DEA’s radar. But they were real eager to hand the artifacts over to Mexico for a big gold star in their good-neighbor file. So was our very own AIC Brubaker.”
    Hunter shook his head and spit out a single word. “Politics.”
    “Oh yeah. There was the usual pushing and shouldering. Then we cut a deal. DEA got the drugs and ICE got the artifacts. Since they weren’t evidence of anything prosecutable—the driver was dead—Brubaker fast-tracked the artifacts for the repatriation photo op.” Jase breathed out from the soles of his feet, deflating. “Man, I wish I’d given them to the feds. They’re politically radioactive.”
    Hunter sorted through what he’d been told. “So the coke was the driver’s payday for taking everything over the border?”
    “That and the lives of his family. You know how it works.”
    Hunter grimaced. He knew. He just didn’t like it.
    “The artifacts,” Jase continued, “weren’t carelessly wrapped like the coke. They were all tight and in sacks of concrete mix just like the kerosene-laced dope was. At first we thought the packages were opium tar or something else thrown in for the trip up. The shapes were really odd.”
    “What about the address the driver gave you before he was shanked?”
    “We checked it out.” Jase swallowed hard, remembering what he really wanted to forget. “I saw things in that place I’m not ever going to un-see.”
    For a few moments Jase stared at his coffee cup, trying not to remember the unspeakable. He did anyway. “It wasn’t a single psycho rocking out. No bodies. Just blood everywhere, places you can’t believe blood would get. Blood from more than one person, more than ten. Fresh. Old. Blood and candle wax and rotting flowers.” He shook his head, hard, trying to throw off memories. “That place was…evil.”
    “What’s the theory? Gang bloodbath? Death cult? Killing ground for rent?”
    “ICE will take bets on any of those. We’re assuming thebad guys got word that the shipment had been popped, figured that the house was next on the list, so they ran like the cockroaches they are.”
    “And resumed business in another place,” Hunter said grimly.
    “Don’t they always? Hell, for all I know, they have lots of places like that house. The drug business lives on blood as much as money.”
    For the space of several long breaths, Hunter tried to plug Jase’s new information into the framework of his own lifetime knowledge of