The Girl with the Golden Gun

BOOK ONE

Smart Cowboy Saying:

You get used to hanging, if you hang long enough.

—L.D. Burke, Santa Fe

One

Fifteen years later

Big Bend National Park, Texas

Where was the damn plane?

“Where are you, you little shit? Why don’t you be a good boy for a change and just come to Daddy?”

DEA Division Director John Hart squinted as he lowered his binoculars and shoved on his sunglasses. His pale blue eyes burned from eye strain from searching the skies so long for one tiny airplane.

So far the seizure was going off as planned. Except for one skinny, dark kid in ragged jeans, who’d run like lightning, eluding his best agents and their bullets, his men had rounded up Octavo Morales’s ground crew. At this very moment the bastards were cuffed and cursing him as they sweated like pigs in a sweltering van parked out of sight in a sharply cut canyon beside the trickle of water that was the Rio Grande.

No way was Hart driving the traffickers to El Paso. Not when the pilot was rumored to be Morales’s half brother. It was hard to be patient and wait, but Hart wanted this plane, its cargo, the pilot and the woman. He wanted them badly.

Ah, the woman.

Mia Kemble.

He still couldn’t believe it.

Bringing Mia Kemble home to the Golden Spurs Ranch was going to be bigger than the seizure. Way bigger. Just thinking about who she was and what this could mean for him made his pulse speed up. His name would be all over the papers. He’d be a hero.

It was high time. Wasn’t he capable and ambitious? Hadn’t he worked hard for the agency for years? Hadn’t he played it straight? Hell, for the past two years he’d worked his butt off on Operation Tex-Mex-Zero, which was an international Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force investigation into the Morales-Garza (MGO) drug organization.

Since the U.S. Mexico border was the primary point of entry for drugs being smuggled into the United States, and he worked El Paso, he’d naturally been forced to play a big role. Operation Tex-Mex-Zero involved seventy separate criminal investigations conducted by dozens of federal, state and local law enforcement agencies, including Mexican and Colombian police officials.

Hart hated working on task forces. There were always too many egos and too much bureaucratic horseshit. When things went wrong, everybody got paranoid. Nobody cooperated. He’d been blamed for mistakes others had made. In the past year he’d gotten himself shot at twice by traffickers—once at point blank range. If he hadn’t been wearing his vest, he’d be dead. He was damn sure he’d been set up, too.

Hell, he was nearly as sick of lawmen as he was criminals. Where had his hard work gotten him? He’d been passed over for all the big promotions for guys who knew how to kiss ass or blow their own horns.

Then the Sombra had contacted him, and things had started to change. He didn’t know who this guy was or why he had it in for Morales, but if Hart could rescue Mia Kemble, get Morales’s half brother and make a major seizure to boot, all in one day, the name John Hart was going to be big on the Texas border. Maybe not as big as Morales, but big enough to suit John Hart. At least for a while. What he really wanted was to get Morales alone and chop him into little pieces.

The Chihuahua Desert was hot, rugged country even in early spring. Hart’s armpits were ringed with sweat. Watchful for snakes, he grabbed his backpack off the ground and then squatted in the scant shade of a nearby boulder and kept his eyes trained on the sky. A dozen of his men were hidden behind other rocks, but he preferred his own company.

He shook out a cigarette. Lighting it, he inhaled deeply. Then he pulled out a crumpled photograph from his shirt pocket and studied the redheaded beauty on the magnificent, black horse. Next his gaze turned to the tall, sinister-looking man with her, who held the bridle.

Morales.

Hart inhaled again. Even now, having studied the images dozens of times, the picture still had the power to shock him.

What the hell was Mia Kemble doing with that drug-smuggling, murdering son of a bitch, Morales? The bastard had to be balling the panties off her. And she had to have more tricks up those panties of hers than a talented border whore, or why else would he risk keeping her alive?

Her plane had crashed fifteen months ago in the Gulf of Mexico in the dead of winter. Everybody in Texas believed she was dead. Hell, her own father and husband had had her declared legally dead—no doubt to get their hands on her money. Her husband had even remarried, her twin sister, of all people.

All John Hart knew about the mystery was that it was lucky as hell for him that the bitch was still alive.

Where the hell was the plane?

Impatient, he lifted his binoculars again.

Two

Chihuahua Desert

Northern Mexico

Be careful what you wish for.

The desert wind was blowing hard outside. Despite the close, suffocating heat, Mia shivered convulsively as little pebbles pinged against the fuselage of the Cessna 206 like buckshot. Her nerves were on fire. She wasn’t sure how much longer she could stand being locked up in this tight, dark space.

What was wrong? Had she been set up? The plane, which sat on a dirt runway outside the tall walls of Tavio Morales’s immense outlaw compound, should have been airborne for el norte, translation—the United States—hours ago.

Mia felt faint and slightly woozy as well as nauseated from the marijuana fumes, which reminded her, of all things, of the woodsy, slightly sweet stink of skunk urine back home on the Golden Spurs Ranch. Mopping at the sweat on her brow with her sleeve, she plucked her soaked blouse off her breasts. Then a gust rocked the plane so hard the towering bales shifted in the cargo hold, several of them falling on her.

When they struck her cheek, knocking her down, she screamed. Then she clamped a hand over her mouth. Being locked up was horrible, but being crushed was even worse.

Her heart thudding, she wriggled free of the heavy bales and sat up, straining to listen for the running footsteps of Tavio’s thugs outside or a nervous spray of machine gun fire. When nobody stomped up with assault rifles or machetes, she fought to calm down, sucking in big gulps of air. All the deep breathing did was to make her grow even woozier from the marijuana.

In the total blackness, the thin walls of the sweltering Cessna felt like they were closing in on her. To calm herself, she tried to imagine that she was loping bareback on one of the Golden Spurs’ endless green pastures instead of lying here trapped in this airless prison fearing imminent suffocation.

Ever since she’d gotten locked in the attic as a child at the Golden Spurs and that big, yellow-eyed rat had bitten her, causing her to have those awful rabies shots, she’d been afraid of two things—rats and being locked up. Then, after this year, her list of scary things had grown much longer.

Now here she was, a stowaway in a coffinlike cargo hold that was as hot as a furnace and getting hotter, and all because she was so desperate to get back to her little girl and her mother and her father and the Golden Spurs.

She wanted her life back.

Would she die here instead? Probably. Her throat tightened. Who would raise her little girl, Vanilla, then? Watch her grow up? Who was raising her now?

Her mother? Lizzy? Had Lizzy watched Vanilla’s first step? Heard her say her first word? Lizzy. Always Lizzy.

Vanilla would be a feisty toddler now. Was she chubby or slim? Docile or as ornery as a terrible two could be? What Mia wouldn’t give to know.

Everybody she loved believed she’d been dead for more than a year, which gave her an eerie, unsettling sensation. It was as if the real her had ceased to exist. If something went wrong in the next few hours, Tavio would probably torture and kill her, and her friends and family would never know she’d been alive all these months, thinking of them, longing for them. Shanghai would never know how much she still loved him in spite of everything, either. Not that he would care.

“Oh, Shanghai…” As she sat in the dark, feeling lost and alone, she willed him to think of her, to remember her, at least sometimes.

The nightmarish seconds ticked by like hours. What was Tavio waiting for? Would Marco, his half brother, who was to be the pilot tonight, ever climb in and rev the engine? Would they ever take off? And what if they did? Would DEA agents really be there to save her as Julio had promised? Could she trust Julio?

It got so hot her skin prickled and burned as if she had a heat rash. She had to get out of here, to feel fresh air on her face and soon, or go mad.

No. Ever since Julio had risked his life to hide her, assuring her the plane was flying into a trap, she’d known this was her best shot at freedom. Clenching her nails into her palm, she fought to hold on to her sanity and courage.

Somebody up there had a twisted sense of humor. Mia wasn’t naming names because she didn’t want to tempt fate.

“I don’t want to sound whiney…Yes, I know I have abandonment issues because Daddy didn’t want me and neither did Shanghai, not even when I told him I was pregnant with our baby after that night in Vegas. Yes, I know I prayed for the next man I met to be struck by a thunderbolt and love me so much, he’d never want to let me go.

“But Tavio Morales and his sick obsession? A drug lord?”

Mia knew it wasn’t a good sign about her sanity that she talked to herself so much. But could a woman, who’d gone through even half of what she had with Tavio and his criminal army for more than a year, remain entirely sane? She knew she was only holding on by a thread.

Fifteen months ago she’d been married to Cole Knight, having married him because he was Shanghai’s brother and for a host of other wrong-minded reasons, which was ironic because everyone in Spur County had thought Cole had married her to get her stock in the ranch.

When things had settled down, she’d had a new baby daughter, Vanilla, to raise and had been working with the horse program at the ranch. If her life hadn’t been totally what she’d wished for, at least it had seemed all planned out and stable.

On a whim, because Daddy had said he was flying, too, she’d chosen to fly with Cole the day he’d crashed their plane into the Gulf of Mexico. Cole was probably dead, and there had been times, hellish times, that she wished she were dead, too, like when she’d heard screams coming from that forbidden zone at the compound. Listening to those pitiful cries, she’d suspected that Tavio’s men were torturing their prisoners before they murdered them. From her bedroom window, she’d seen blindfolded, handcuffed people brought to those buildings against the north wall of the hacienda, and she’d never seen any of them leave.

The irony was she would have drowned if Tavio Morales, who’d just stolen a yacht, no doubt, after murdering its owners, hadn’t been so high on his crack-laced cigarettes he’d seen diving into those stormy, icy forty-foot seas and plucking her to safety as an adventure.

She knew he’d removed her wet clothes that first night, that he’d wrapped her in blankets and warmed her with his own body. Not that she liked to think about that. Since that night, he’d never held her or stroked her or even kissed her because he was waiting for her to want him, too.

She loathed his attentiveness and deadly patience. Obsessed with her, he’d nursed her back to health and brought her to his rancho in the Chihuahua Desert. He’d treated her as kindly as a man of his sort keeping a woman prisoner knew how, she supposed.

When he’d found out she liked horses, he’d let her groom and ride his fine, Polish-Arabian stallion, Shabol. Except for those horrible, forbidden zones, she’d been free to roam and ride Shabol as long as she stayed within the confines of the high walls surrounding his adobe mansion.

When she’d wanted something to read, he’d brought her newspapers. Sometimes he ranted about the stories written about himself and his operation by a certain Terence Collins, who was a liberal reporter for the Border Observer in El Paso.

Even though there was no free press in Mexico, these articles were translated and reprinted in all the Mexican papers owned by Federico Valdez, whom Tavio seemed to hate with a special vengeance. The coverage incensed Tavio mostly because his business ran more smoothly if he kept his affairs quiet. But also she sensed some deep personal vendetta between him and Valdez.

Tavio had threatened the reporter, and Collins had printed every threat, which added to his fame.

Tavio would turn red as soon as he saw his name in a headline or a sidebar. “I will kill him!” he would say as he wadded up the paper. “I will kill them both.”

“No,” Mia would plead.

“Soon! You will see, Angelita.”

Publicity made the officials Tavio bribed look like fools who couldn’t do their jobs. If Tavio got too much press, he explained, the federal police comandantes would be forced to demand expensive drug busts to make themselves look good. The United States would put pressure on the politicians in Mexico City, who might demand his imprisonment or death. After all, individual drug lords were replaceable.