Up on the screen a man wearing nothing but a white loincloth sat in a full-lotus position and lectured in obviously dubbed Spanish. He looked like Yul Brynner, if the actor was a six-foot-six Special Forces operator moonlighting as a yoga instructor. Beneath his dais three beautiful blond women demonstrated poses at various levels of difficulty as he lectured. Bolan bided his time and silently picked the lock on the sliding-glass door.
He had run up against some wrestlers gone bad before, and anyone who had the capacity to fake that kind of physical carnage day in and day out without using wires or computer-generated special effects could also inflict it for real outside the ring. Bolan grimaced at the tiny click the latch made as he lifted it with his pick. Dominico was oblivious. His attention was equally divided between his DVD guru and his own straining knee joints. Bolan watched as the women on the giant TV unfolded themselves effortlessly from their sitting positions and flicked out their legs into full-forward splits. Dominico’s groan was audible through the sliding glass as he made a very impressive attempt at following suit.
Bolan slid back the door and it closed behind him as he strode into the room.
Dominico’s head snapped around and he rose an inch out of his splits. “Hey!”
Bolan slammed his hands down on Dominico’s shoulders. The former crime lord groaned as the soldier leaned his two hundred plus pounds into his attack and pushed Dominico a little deeper into the splits than he’d ever gone before. He could almost hear the groin muscles and tendons pulling like piano strings being tuned to the breaking point. Dominico’s shoulders suddenly heaved as he tried to push himself up. He was a powerful man, and it was a mighty attempt but Bolan had all the leverage. Dominico was pinned in place like a bug. The only direction for him to go was down. Bolan spoke quietly from his position of moral advantage. “Try that again and you’re going to sing soprano, Santo.”
Dominico couldn’t rise and he sure as hell didn’t want to go any lower. He snarled, suspended in yogic purgatory. “Don’t call me Santo!”
Bolan raised an intrigued eyebrow. For a man about to be snapped like a wishbone Dominico was remarkably defiant. Bolan leaned a little harder. “You’d prefer King Solomon?”
“No!” Dominico’s triceps stood out like horseshoes as he bore the weight of both of them. “It’s just Memo now!” he gritted.
“Memo” was the diminutive of Guillermo, like Billy for William. Bolan decided to give it to him. He didn’t have a partner to play good cop-bad cop with so he was going to have to play both roles; that and Guillermo Dominico was giving off just about the weirdest vibe of any crime lord Bolan had ever encountered. It was going to require more study than just a quick beat down for intel. “Okay, Memo, let’s talk.”
“Hey, man…” Dominico groaned in counterpoint. “Do I know you?”
“I want to know about the operation in Culiacán.”
“What are you? FBI? DEA?”
Bolan shoved down a little harder. “Talk to me or make a wish.”
Every muscle in Dominico’s body tensed with strain. “I haven’t been to Culiacán in years!”
“There’s a farm up in the hills. Near the Tamazula River. It has a hacienda and a warehouse and an airstrip. There was a time when you flew out of it. From what I know you used to own it.”
“I got nothing going on in Sinaloa! I’m retired!”
“Drug dealers don’t retire, Memo.” Bolan leaned hard. “They just change their M.O.”
“Jesus!” Dominico shuddered with effort. “I’m retired! Ask anybody!”
“That’s not what I hear, Memo.”
“Heard from who!” Dominico probed.
“Your old buddy, Oswaldo Salcido, for one,” Bolan replied.
“Pinto!” A geyser of Spanish profanities erupted from Dominico’s mouth. “That prick? You took his word? I set him up in business! I gave him a piece of my territory when I retired as a gift! Now he fingers me? Pinche chingaso mother…” Dominico dropped back into profanity.
Bolan shut it off by giving the crime lord an extra millimeter of unwanted flexibility. “You are going to talk to me.”
“Listen…” Dominico’s elbows bent as his muscles began to give out and his crotch moved inexorably toward the floor. He hissed through clenched teeth. “You gotta let me up, man…before I never have children!”
Bolan relented a couple of inches. “Come up slow.”
Dominico didn’t rise. He suddenly dropped beneath Bolan’s grip and spun on his back like a break-dancer. His legs scythed upward and his ankles locked behind Bolan’s head. The soldier’s feet left the ground as he found himself in a scissors hold. The glass walls shook as Bolan hit the floor flat on his back and the air blasted out of his lungs. He clawed for the Beretta 93R strapped to his thigh, but Dominico grabbed his wrist in both hands. “Gonna snap you like a toothpick, motherfucker!” Dominico began pulling back to straighten Bolan’s arm and break his elbow.
Bolan found himself wrestling with a professional luchador, and he had no illusions about who was going to win a match between them. Dominico’s legs felt like two pieces of oak as they vised down on Bolan’s carotids for the strangle.
The soldier’s temples pounded as he felt the blood shut off to his brain. His only advantage was that wrestling, whether real or fake, was played by rules and most people in an emergency did what they had practiced, and a lot of wrestling holds had weaknesses for those willing to cheat. Bolan managed to turn his head two inches. Dominico howled and released the scissors hold and Bolan’s arm as the big American sank his teeth into his calf. Bolan shook his head against the head rush as he lurched to his feet. Dominico popped up and came in snarling and limping. “You dirty son of a bitch! I’m gonna—”
Bolan faked a right-hand lead but Dominico lowered his head and came in, willing to take a punch so he could get his hands on Bolan again and resume trying to snap him like kindling. Bolan fired his right hand for real—except that rather than going for a fist to the jaw he corkscrewed his thumb into the hollow of Dominico’s throat. His adversary’s eyes flew wide, and his tongue popped out as his trachea compressed. Bolan slammed his fist into the ex-drug dealer’s solar plexus, and the guy’s diaphragm spasmed against his already deflated lungs. Dominico’s face drained of blood, and he sat down on his yoga mat gasping like a landed fish. Bolan stepped in and threw an uppercut as if he were bowling to pick up a spare. His knuckles looped into the point of Dominico’s chin like a wrecking ball and ironed him out flat on the floor.
Bolan drew his Beretta 93-R machine pistol. The laser sight blazed into life as he squeezed, and it painted a ruby red dot between Dominico’s eyebrows. Dominico gazed up into the muzzle of the machine pistol dazedly and sucked for air. Bolan took a couple of long breaths himself and shook his head to clear it. “Memo? I’m done playing with you.”
“You aren’t DEA,” Dominico gasped. “And FBI doesn’t work like this. You aren’t cartel, either. Who the fuck are you?”
Bolan gazed down on Dominico. He had taken down more bad guys than most people had eaten hot meals. A lot of those bad guys had been drug traffickers. At this point most drug dealers would be screaming for mercy or screaming for their lawyer. For a former professional wrestler who’d just gotten his ass kicked and a drug dealer staring down the muzzle of a machine pistol, Dominico was remarkably calm and collected.
Bolan raised an eyebrow at the Yul Brynner look-alike lecturing in dubbed Spanish on the screen.