Iron River by T. Jefferson Parker Read Free Book Online Page A

them and two more stood by and watched. Smith looked over at Pace. The gunmaker had been blindfolded since the outskirts of Tijuana, and he was still blindfolded now. He was grinning.
    “Wipe the smile off your piehole,” said Smith.
    “I smile when things get intense.”
    “I told you the people who run Favier and Winling are intense.”
    “They don’t even trust you, and you work for them.”
    “He who trusts ends up on the dinner table.”
    “They frisk me for guns, but I make guns.”
    “They know what you do. Speak when spoken to.” Smith looked at Pace, and the idiot was smiling again.
    As the cartel pistolero felt his boots for weapons, Smith looked out at the pale green Pacific. It was afternoon, and the summer Baja wind had whipped up battalions of whitecaps and sent them marching toward shore. The last time Bradley was here on the beach at Baja was early spring, when he had brought his fiancée, Erin, to an old hotel down here to celebrate her first recording contract and their engagement. Quite a party—fifty friends and family down from L.A., Erin’s band, of course, some producers and soundmen and session guys, Bradley’s gang of outlaws, and all the roadies and dealers and hangers-on, catered by an upscale restaurant in TJ, booze courtesy of a friend with a San Diego tequila distributorship. Bradley and Erin, in a Max Azria runway dress, had snuck off with blankets and made love on the sand dunes. He missed her right now. Business was business, but Erin was his heart.
    When the gunman was finished with him, Smith turned and looked up at Herredia’s hilltop retreat. It was a white Castilian two-story buried in a lavish oasis of pools and fountains and blue palms and big terra-cotta pots overflowing with protea and plumeria and flowering tropical vines. A helicopter hovered high above, swaying in the currents like a kite.
    “Where is it?” asked the gunman.
    “In the trunk,” said Bradley, handing him the keys.
    They walked single file up a winding stone path toward the house, then along the shady western flank of the home, then descended into a grotto of gurgling pools and flowers. The pistolero carried the lacquered box with the stainless steel Pace Arms insignia on the top. Bradley saw two uniformed Mexico Federal Judicial Police officers with combat shotguns standing motionless beside a man-made waterfall. He was impressed that Herredia was now employing Federales . He’d never seen that before. He knew that local and state police were defecting to the cartels for better pay and benefits, just as the federal soldiers were defecting to the Zetas. Calderón was pitting both police and soldiers against the cartels as never before—thus the spiraling body counts and savagery as the cartels warred for share in a tougher market. The men who had once upon a time pursued Herredia now drew much fatter salaries for protecting him. Herredia’s answer to the Gulf Cartel’s Zetas, thought Bradley. He glanced back at the stone-still soldiers. The times they are a-changin’. Spooky. Maybe Erin could write a song about it.
    From this height Bradley saw a swatch of desert far below and an airplane hangar painted to match the desert and an ancient transport helicopter hunkered beneath a canopy of camouflage net. A soldier stood guard outside the hangar. A man squatted beside the big helo, welding away at its flank.
    Then the path dropped steeply and a handrail appeared and when he rounded a wide turn, the wind pushed against him. He saw the cove of black rocks below and heard the ocean pounding onto the white crescent of beach. It took a few minutes to get there.
    Bradley jumped down from the last step and felt the sand give beneath his boots. He saw North Baja Cartel leader Carlos Herredia waiting in the shadows where the black rocks met the sand. There was an old cable spool upended for a table in the shade. Two pistoleros sat on plastic buckets. Nearby stood old Felipe with his combat 10-gauge, drum-fed