Page 52 of Billion-Dollar Ransom

WORD SPREAD THROUGH the ranks of the Tijuana police like a brushfire on a parched hillside: The FBI and PFM were looking for some rich American movie producer and an actress who’d been abducted from a private resort down on the peninsula but were possibly being held on the border.

Tijuana made a lot of sense. You could literally walk to the United States from here, and the city was about as lawless as you could get.

As this news traveled, many of the officers snapped into action.

Not official action—the smart ones were working out their own angles.

Stealing from kidnappers (who were most likely American) felt like a much safer bet than ripping off the cartel.

Some of these cops’ colleagues had attempted that recently, raiding a cartel warehouse full of fentanyl near the border only to end up decapitated and stacked like cordwood as a gentle message from the syndicate: Steal from anyone you like, just not the cartel. The smart ones understood.

Two of the smart ones were now walking down a quiet, dusty street just off the North Zone, taking in the neighborhood as the sun began to dip behind the hills. Nobody reacted, but everyone on the block noticed.

The two police officers took their time getting to their destination, a semidetached two-story house right in the middle of the block.

The two guards standing on the second-floor balcony flicked away their cigarettes. One muttered something about seeing trouble.

“Yeah, you do,” the taller of the two cops called up from the street. “Why don’t you tell Little Rami to come on out here and talk to us.”

Little Rami. No one had called Five that since he was a baby. Five’s men outside hoped he was too busy with the guests to hear such disrespect. The very grown-up Ramiro would lose his damn mind.

“Not home,” said one of the guards, slowly removing the Glock from his leg holster, an action that was obscured by the balcony wall. The other guard prepared his weapon, which was also out of sight.

“Well,” said the shorter of the cops, “we’ll just go inside and wait for him.”

“Door’s locked,” replied a guard.

“Come on down and open it.”

“Nah, not gonna do that. Why don’t you come back later?”

“We want to go in now.”

“Too bad.”

“Tell Little Rami we’d like to be compensated for the inconvenience.”

“Like we told you, Ramiro’s not here.”

The conversation was Mexican Kabuki. Both sides knew how this would most likely end, but first, they needed to see how committed the other side was.

Nothing was preventing the smart cops from breaking into Ramiro’s house except bullets.

Nothing was preventing the guards from blowing the heads off these stupid pigs except the noise and the cleanup hassle.

After a moment of heavy silence, it became clear that neither side was willing to back down, so it was now a matter of who would draw first.

The smart cops didn’t have to discuss their plan—they’d done this many times. The short one would provide cover fire while his partner went through the front door. If that meant taking the guards out, who cared? Idiots should have just opened the damn door.

But the smart cops didn’t realize that Little Rami had fortified his home a while back, and hidden behind the balcony wall was a tactical gun-in-a-box.

If you looked at the balcony floor (not that any outsiders could), you’d see only a tread-plated toolbox, standard equipment on the back of a pickup truck.

But inside that box was a foot switch that controlled a Russian PK assault rifle with a four-hundred-round ammo can.

When activated with said foot switch, the gun would protrude from a long horizontal rainspout at the bottom of the balcony wall and spray bullets at whoever was unlucky enough to be knocking at your front door.

Before the short smart cop could even raise his service weapon, one of the guards stomped on the foot switch.