The Savage Dead by Joe McKinney

structure. Women were good for decoration, and for recreation, but not for business. Still, something about her had impressed him. She was feisty. She was smart. At twelve, she had succeeded in robbing him blind, getting in and out of his compound with the ease of a professional burglar. She would have gone on stealing from him, too, if he hadn’t been forced to come back here unexpectedly. Ramon knew talent when he saw it, and he saw it in her.
    Over the next six years he made her into a real professional. By her late teens, she could slip in and out of any compound, government or otherwise, like a ghost. And she was a natural with computers, with financial networks, with business management. She became indispensable to him, helping in every part of his operation.
    Even the killing.
    As his operations in America grew, he created the Monica Rivas alter ego. He built a fictitious biography for her, making her the only daughter of one of Mexico’s wealthiest coal barons. He got her into Harvard, paid her way. He paid her way through law school at the University of Virginia, too.
    In return, she’d become his faithful spy in Washington.
    Ramon Medina, she thought. There had been a time, years ago, when she actually believed she was in love with him.
    But she was older now. She knew better.
    She turned her car into a church parking lot that bordered the abandoned warehouse Ramon was using for this meeting and parked behind a large cluster of shrubs that had gone to riot. The church was small and poor looking, which probably meant it didn’t have video cameras, but there was no point in being careless.
    She went around to the side of the warehouse and saw three guys standing just inside an open doorway. She knew them at a glance. Knew their kind, anyway. They were like all the other common foot soldiers taken off the streets of Ciudad Juarez, tattooed, skinny, unkempt, with a perpetually feral look in their eyes, like dogs that were never fed enough. Men like these died by the dozens every day in Ciudad Juarez, their only claim to fame the horrors that were ravaged on their bodies.
    They saw her coming and separated from the shadows. One of the men—Jesus, she thought, he’s not even wearing a shirt—put out his cigarette and walked right up to her. He looked her over, head to toe, leering hungrily.
    “I’m here to see Ramon,” she said, not wanting to waste time with these losers.
    The man laughed. He glanced over his shoulder at the two men behind him. “Ramon se esta putas caras en estos dias,” he said.
    This brought a laugh from all three men.
    “I am no man’s whore,” Pilar said.
    The man looked back at her, a stupid grin still on his face. Perhaps, at that moment, he sensed the change in her posture, or perhaps he saw the look in her eye, but either way it didn’t help him.
    He was still grinning when she drove her fist into his throat, crushing the hyoid bone. The man staggered backwards and fell over. He was choking, holding his throat, rolling on the pavement like a fish out of water.
    The other two men were already pulling the pistols from the waistbands of their jeans, but they weren’t fast enough either. Pilar sidestepped the first man, and when his right hand came up with the gun, she caught his wrist, pushed it high to get the arm and the gun out of play, and then brought the blade of her foot down hard on the side of his knee. The bone crunched beneath the kick and the man cried out. He sagged into a crouch, his leg unable to support his weight. That gave her the height advantage she needed. Using her weight as leverage, she twisted the man’s gun hand around, turning in a circle so that he was off balance. He tried to hold on to the gun, and that was a mistake. She snapped the bones in his wrist and sent him tumbling away.
    All of this happened in the time it took the third man to pull his weapon, and by the time he did, he found himself staring down the muzzle of the pistol in Pilar’s