The Savage Dead by Joe McKinney

made no sense at all. “Have you been to Penn Quarter lately? Shopping isn’t easy.”
    He said nothing for a moment, as though seriously considering her question, and then shrugged. “Okay, sit down.”
    What a frustrating man, she thought.
    She’d met Juan five years earlier, when she was completing her seventeen-week Special Agent Training course at the academy. A crack shot since her early teens, she was mesmerized by his skill on the weapons range, and when she learned he was former Delta Force, she went into fan girl mode. After her graduation, in a sort of schoolgirl crush that embarrassed her now, but that he, thank God, had never brought up, she e-mailed him several times, asking to be considered for his team.
    His response at the time had crushed her. He told her that he didn’t take on rookies, even talented ones like her, and that she needed some experience under her belt before she could expect to be taken as a serious contender. Looking back, she realized how practical he had been. Juan was always practical. Now that she knew him as well as she did, she found he could sometimes be a pain in the ass he was so practical.
    Crushed, but not deterred, she’d kept tabs on him, and when his team was tasked with protecting a federal judge who was testifying before a Senate select committee, she managed to get herself assigned to the same detail. A man, a Montana survivalist by the name of Wayne Hodges, had come out of the crowd of protestors and tried to slosh a Mason jar full of pig’s blood on the judge. Hodges was a big man, much bigger than Tess, but she’d managed to take him to the ground quickly, even made it look easy. She even kept the pig’s blood from spilling. Juan was impressed. An offer to join his team followed. And a year later, she was his second in command.
    She glanced over the paperwork in front of him. Working for Juan, she’d become something of an expert herself on the cartels, though of course her knowledge was only parroting his far deeper knowledge. He’d actually lived this stuff while down in Mexico. He’d fought these people on their home ground, in their own streets and alleys and living rooms. Juan Perez was their boogeyman.
    But what she saw surprised her. The shooter from the Washington Hilton Hotel had been a low-level soldier with the Juarez Cartel, and his knowledge of the cartel’s hierarchy hadn’t gone above his boss’s boss. They learned nothing of substance from him. This stuff, though, these pictures, she recognized several high-ranking members of the Porra Cartel. Cooperation among the cartels was unheard of, even when it was for their mutual survival, so seeing information on the Porra Cartel meant there was a third column in this game.
    She pointed to one of the pictures, which showed a handsome man she knew as Ramon Medina playing tennis on a court lined by bougainvillea.
    â€œWhy are we looking at this stuff ?” she said. “I thought we were focusing on the Juarez and Gulf cartels.”
    He shook his head. He looked troubled. “I am. For the shooting at the hotel. This, though,” he said, pointing to the pictures, “I think this is something different.”
    He handed her a police report, a Charge and Disposition Report written by a detective with the San Antonio Police Department’s Narcotics Unit, though the detective’s name and badge number had been censored. That meant the detective was probably on loan to one of the major drug task forces in the South Texas area, most likely HIDTA, the High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area Task Force, made up of officers and detectives from twenty-eight different local, county, state, and federal agencies and charged with multi-jurisdictional authority to cover nearly all of South Texas. They’d worked with some of the HIDTA guys when they were figuring out how to handle the threat on Senator Sutton’s life in San Antonio. There was