Suicide Mission by William W. Johnstone Page A

although the border town might have changed some since he had visited it last. Once Bill had driven somewhere, it tended to stick in his mind.
    He stopped at a nondescript motel on the edge of town, one of a nationwide chain. He didn’t know how long he would be here, but if he needed a room he would have one.
    He topped off the pickup’s gas tank, too. Here in Texas there could be some long, empty stretches without any gas stations, so it was wise not to let the needle on the gauge drop too far below a half.
    And if he wound up with somebody chasing him, he sure as hell didn’t want to have to stop for gas.
    The new burner phone was in his shirt pocket. All he could do was wait for the “package” to call him and let him know where to meet her. While he was waiting, he turned on the TV in the motel room and changed the station to one of the cable news channels, the only one that could be counted on to broadcast something that bore a distant relationship to reality.
    As usual, the people in Washington who possessed the least bit of common sense were still in the minority, while those who didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground—the ones who kept getting elected and reelected by a lot of people who also didn’t know their ass from a hole in the ground—kept yammering on about how everything would be just fine if all those filthy rich people would just pay more taxes, “rich” being continually defined downward because even if the government took everything from everybody there wouldn’t be enough to make a dent in the flood of runaway spending, and how all the country’s problems were still the fault of that guy who’d been in the White House three or four administrations earlier.
    After watching for ten minutes, Bill heaved a sigh and changed the channel. He found an old Western movie and left it there with the sound turned low for background noise while he checked his guns.
    Before he’d left Sonora he had opened the homemade stainless-steel toolbox and storage chest in the back of the pickup and taken out the locked case that held his handguns. He had picked the Browning Hi-Power to carry in a holster clipped under his shirt at the small of his back and slid a .25 caliber revolver down his boot. The popgun wasn’t much good unless you could stick the barrel in somebody’s ear before you pulled the trigger, but for that kind of close work it could come in handy. He tucked a .32 behind his belt in the front. His shirt would cover it, too.
    Once he was gunned up he felt a little better. Would’ve been nice to be able to carry a shotgun, too, he thought, but folks tended to look a little funny at somebody who did that. They got nervous in a hurry, too, and Bill didn’t like having nervous people around him.
    The phone buzzing in his pocket interrupted a stream of inspired gibberish from Gabby Hayes on the TV. Bill muted the sound with the remote and opened the phone, held it to his ear and said, “Yeah?”
    â€œEl Nuevo Sol.”
    The voice on the other end belonged to a woman, all right, a fairly young woman by the sound of it, although you couldn’t always tell by that. Bill said, “Go on.”
    â€œThat’s all I know,” she said in only faintly accented English. “Except I need help. People are after me.”
    â€œWhat people would that be?” Bill asked in a casual drawl.
    â€œThe . . . the cartel. The drug cartel.”
    â€œWhat’s your name?”
    The woman didn’t answer for a moment. Then she said, “You don’t need to know that.”
    â€œNo offense, miss, but if you need my help, then I need to know what I say I need to know.”
    Again a momentary silence, then, “Catalina.”
    Maybe she was making it up, maybe she wasn’t. Bill didn’t really care. He just wanted to establish that he was running the show here. If he was going to help her, she needed to