Horns of the Devil - Jeff Trask [02] Read Online Free PDF

common acronym for federal task force officers. “Any problem with that?”
    “Nope,” Sivella answered. “I’ll assign Dix here and get him a new partner.”
    “What?!” Carter objected. “Dammit, Cap, we’ve talked about this, and—”
    “And I’ve changed my mind, Dixon. I don’t want anybody—even you—riding alone on this thing. Too risky. Discussion closed.”
    Carter shook his head and stormed out of the room. Most of the others headed back to their desks.
    “Dix still has Juan Ramirez hanging over his head, doesn’t he?” Doroz asked.
    “Yeah, but it wasn’t his fault, and he’s going to have to get over it,” Sivella said. “I shouldn’t have let him fly solo this long.”
    “Who’ve you got in mind?” Trask asked. “Anyone we know?”
    “You’ll recognize him. Lots of experience, and a good young cop. Just passed the detective’s exam.”

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    Chapter Four
    August 11, 2:37 a.m.
    E steban Ortega pulled his car up to the back door of the deli and pulled the gasoline can out of the trunk. The convenience store where his soldiers had been killed the night before was not that far away, and the shootings had him worried. Not afraid, just worried. If the cowards from the 18th Street Mara were trying to move into his territory, the deli was not the kind of place from which one could properly manage a war. It was too close to the street and virtually indefensible against drive-by assaults like the one that had killed his troops. There was also too much glass in the front. Glass exposed those inside to the view from the street, and ordinary plate glass didn’t stop bullets.
    The deli had served its purpose—to provide a legitimate cover for the laundering of the funds generated by the sales of cocaine—but his people needed a new home. He had found one with concrete walls, a spacious attic, and set well back from the street. He just needed to get the final drop of financial funds out of the deli in order to crank up the new business. He unlocked the padlock on the back door and poured the gasoline around the base of the walls in the storage room, then dropped the container where he was sure the investigators would find it. Returning to the car trunk, he pulled a tire iron out. After relocking the padlock, he smashed the frame around the lock and ripped the hasp out of the door, leaving it dangling. He struck a match and threw it into the pool of gasoline.

    At 3:12 a.m., the man with the eye patch low-crawled along the wall of the vacant house. When he reached the rusted air-conditioning unit on the concrete platform at the side, he balanced the rifle barrel on top of the unit.
    He was close enough to the backyard of the house in the 3100 block of Georgia Avenue NW that he didn’t really need the scope, but he preferred to use it anyway. It lessened the slim odds of a miss, but more than that, it allowed him to see the faces of his targets.
    There were three of them sitting around a patio table on the elevated deck in the back of the house. There was a lantern in the center of the table, providing enough illumination for the man with the eye patch to read the Cerveza Caguama labels on the beer bottles. The one in the middle seemed to be very proud of the tattoo across the top of his back, since he kept pulling his shirt up to display it to the others.
    The man with the eye patch focused the scope on the face of the center target. Looking through the scope gave him a small sense of contentment. The view was the same as before his loss; his left eye was closed, not needed, as it had always been while he shot. The difference would come when he took his right eye off the scope. His left eye was no longer there for him to open. They had taken it from him, along with so much more.
    He took in every detail of his target’s face. The round shape, the flat nose, a bruise here or there, the bloodshot eyes and drunken smile. His first shot arrived at the center of the forehead. The dead man tumbled