Blood Game: A Jock Boucher Thriller by David Lyons

to follow the advice he’d been given that night and opened the casket when it arrived, to his everlasting regret. His son’s head had been severed from his body. The face was bruised beyond recognition. He sought out others who had worked with his son, who had abandoned the project in Mexico and returned to theStates. He found Gus Schmidt, the man who had been with Charles when he was killed, and extracted from him details of the killing.
    “We weren’t forty miles across the border from McAllen,” Schmidt said. “There was a narco blockade.”
    “A what?”
    “That’s what they call them when one of the organized criminal gangs hijacks a couple cars or trucks, then sets them on fire to block the road. They do it when the police are chasing them; sometimes they do it just to show they can, like a territorial thing. It’s a way of demonstrating to the police, to their rivals, even to the local civilian population, who’s in charge. Anyway, we were stuck in this stalled line of traffic, trying to turn around and get the hell out of there, when we were dragged from our car. They marched us out to this field. They’d also forced some of the poor folks from the pueblo to come out; men, women, and children lined up on the side of a football field like they were there for a game. They were all so scared they could hardly stand. This guy with a machete picked a couple boys for his gang. Mothers started crying. Charles started yelling at him in Spanish and the guy walked up to Charles and cut off his head with one swing of his machete. He is the head honcho in that part of the country. They call him El Jimador.”
    “I speak some Spanish,” Dumont said, “but what’s a jimador ?”
    “It’s a traditional farmer who harvests the blue agaveplant used to make tequila. Machetes are the tools of their trade. Please, sir, you don’t need to hear any more of this.”
    “No,” Dumont had insisted. “Tell me everything.”
    The man sighed. “He cut off your son’s head, then played soccer with it, in front of all those women and children. Why? To terrify them.”
    “With so many eyewitnesses to my son’s murder, why didn’t the police do anything?”
    “They wouldn’t even take my statement. The police are powerless against the big guns.”
    “I can’t let the man who murdered my son—”
    “If the Mexican authorities are helpless against these criminals, there’s not a thing we can do. If El Jimador ever crosses the border, let me know, and I’ll cap him myself. But as long as he stays on his side of the Rio Grande, we can’t touch him.”
    Dumont thanked him and hung up, nauseated by waves of anger and futility. It was in this moment that the seed of an idea was sown.
    •  •  •
    He’d managed to keep details of his son’s death from the media and his wife. After the tragedy, she began to berate him for the slump in their financial standing and the degradation of their life in general, a roundabout way ofblaming him for their loss. Her bouts with depression and the other effects of her bipolar disorder upset him. He dealt with her impulsiveness as best he could, even if it meant destruction of art pieces he had bought to keep her happy in the first place. Elise’s fixation with finances seemed to be bordering on mania, and he did not want to see her slide into a more serious phase of the illness. Her mental instability had provided an unusual incentive of late, he had to admit, inducing him to work harder and in ways he had never thought of and in ways he could not speak of, least of all to her.
    “Elise,” he said. “I wish that you would not worry about our finances. I’m in just about every viable business that exists in this state, and I’m doing better than most. I kept everything going after Katrina, the oil spill, and the offshore drilling moratorium. You lack for nothing, and I make sure you live like a queen. What else do you expect from me?” He loosened his hands. The marks from