Free Horns of the Devil - Jeff Trask [02] by Marc Rainer Page A

like them more in the spring and fall. They smell a little worse this time of year.”
    She laughed again. He loved her laugh. He had decided some time ago that if he didn’t like a woman’s laugh, there was no future in the relationship.
    “Which ones are your favorites?” he asked.
    “Probably the pandas—the ones from China. They’re like big stuffed toys, and they always seem to be playing, just rolling around, even when they’re eating. How about you?”
    “The big cats, I guess.”
    “So you’re a predator?”
    Crawford paused and thought for a second. Should he give a macho yes or…
    “I like to study them, like I study the predators we hunt. The criminal predators.”
    “I see.”
    She was nodding.
    I think I made the right call there, he thought.
    “Should we go see them then?” she asked.
    “Who?”
    “Your big cats, silly.” She was laughing again.
    “Oh, sorry,” he said. “Sure.”
    They walked at a relaxed pace to the zoo’s great cat exhibit. A solitary Sumatran tiger paced back and forth at the front of his cage. They stared at the huge animal for a moment, and then walked to the next exhibit, which held a couple of African lions.
    “Which one would you bet on?”
    He thought for a moment. “The lions.”
    She was laughing harder now.
    “What?” he asked, laughing himself.
    “I asked which one , and you said, ‘The lions.’ The tiger is bigger.”
    “That’s why I’d bet on the lions. There are two of them.”
    She laughed again, and she turned and held his hand for a moment.
    “This was fun,” she said. “Let me know if I can help with anything else.”
    “Of course.”
    He watched while she walked toward the entrance, not moving until she was out of sight.

.
    Chapter Seven
    August 16, 2:00 a.m.
    A s the two vans pulled into the rear of the Qwik Shine Car Wash in northeast Washington, DC, a small army of Hispanic males emerged from the building and began removing crates from the truck beds. As each worker entered the building, he was directed up the pull-down stairs by another man. After climbing the stairs with his load, the Mara soldier was met by Esteban Ortega, who looked at each crate and then told the worker where to place it.
    Ortega was pleased with himself. The car wash was the perfect front. It was a defensible structure, solidly built, and the long, cavernous attic—covering the building’s office, wash track, and waiting area—was big enough for the grow operation. Best of all, the legitimate commercial purpose of the building was the perfect cover, both for the massive amounts of electricity and water that would be consumed, and for the laundering of some of the profits that would be generated by the hydroponic marijuana.
    He had plenty of seeds for the “white widows”: high-yield, hybrid marijuana plants with an extraordinarily high THC content, the product of years of experimentation and grafting by some of Amsterdam’s most dedicated disciples of horticulture.
    The Mara commanders in La Esperanza, El Salvador’s largest prison , had suggested the switch to the marijuana from cocaine. The seeds were easily concealed and transported across the border from Mexico, the “white” was now selling in the United States for between $4,000 and $7,000 a pound, and it didn’t carry the heavy penalties that coke or crack did if the workers were arrested. Five kilos of cocaine powder, or just an ounce of crack, meant a ten-year mandatory sentence in an American federal prison, followed by deportation back to El Salvador and even more time in La Esperanza. To get a ten-year mandatory sentence for marijuana trafficking, the feds had to put 1,000 kilos on a defendant—a whole metric ton of weed—or find him with a thousand plants. Accordingly, Ortega’s grow would only contain eight hundred plants at any one time.
    Ortega wasn’t concerned about deportation himself. Like several members of his Mara chapter, he had been born in Los Angeles and was an American