And, boy, does it stand out.

Especially here in the Philly airport.

Should be interesting to see it in Center City…

Payne was standing with five others who were watching the passengers coming out of Concourse D and going their different directions. He saw The Hat make a slow sweep of the terminal as Byrth scanned the area, no doubt looking for him. Then Byrth made eye contact with him and walked purposefully toward him.

With the exception of The Hat and his pointy-toed western boots, James O. Byrth did not look unlike Matthew M. Payne.

Byrth, who appeared to be about thirty years old, stood right at six feet tall and weighed 170 pounds. He was lithely muscled. He had dark, intelligent eyes and kept his dark, thick hair trimmed conservatively short. He wore gray slacks that actually had cuffs and a sharp crease, a stiffly starched white button-down collared shirt, and a single-breasted navy blue blazer with gold buttons.

The Hat stepped up to Matt Payne.

“Marshal Earp, I presume,” Jim Byrth said with utter confidence. His distinct Texas drawl made it only more so.

“That’s interesting,” Payne replied dryly. “I was about to say the same to you. You forget your horse in the plane’s overhead bin?”

Byrth grinned. “No. I checked it. Should be waiting at the baggage claim.”

Wait, Payne thought. How the hell did he pick me out so quickly?

And confidently?

Liz Justice probably gave him a basic description.

But he knew without question that it was me.

“Okay, how’d you make me?” Payne said, holding out his right hand.

Byrth didn’t reply immediately, as if he was considering whether he would.

“Penatekas,” Byrth finally said, powerfully squeezing Payne’s hand as he looked him right in the eyes. He added: “Sergeant Jim Byrth, Texas Rangers, Company A.” He nodded once, and The Hat moved with great drama. “Pleasure to meet you.”

“Sergeant Matt Payne, Philadelphia Police Department, Homicide.”

“I know.”

“‘Penatekas’?” Payne repeated, stumbling over the pronunciation.

Byrth nodded again, and again The Hat accentuated the movement.

“One of the warrior bands of the fierce Comanches,” Byrth explained solemnly. “Back when Texas was the Mexican province of Tejas, early Rangers learned from them their various methods of how to tell everything about a person simply by knowing what to look for.”

Payne stared at him.

He’s pulling my chain.

Or is he?

That “Mexican province of Tejas” stuff I read about. And those Comanches were ruthless.

“Fascinating,” Payne said. “What sort of methods?”

“Well,” Byrth began, stone-faced, “they were nomads, and roaming the plains. When they hunted down a buffalo, they had a spiritual ceremony and prayed for its soul. They honored the great animal by letting no part of it go to waste. The flesh they cured for food. The skins became blankets and clothing and other protection. Even the cojones were used for special purposes. The cojones were dried and ground and consumed for the powers to observe. In particular, to observe people, and even more in particular, to observe enemies.”

“Co-what?”

“Co-hone-ees,” Byrth repeated, this time phonetically. “That’s actually the Spanish word. The Indians had their own, which varied from band to band.”

“And that’s how you knew it was me? With these co-hone-ees?”

Still stone-faced, Byrth stared Payne in the eyes. Payne felt that he was reading him. Then Byrth nodded once. The Hat mimicked the motion.

“Co-hone-ees is Spanish?” Payne said. “For what?”

“ ‘Testicles.’ ”

Byrth grinned.

“Actually, it translates closer to ‘balls.’ ”

Then Byrth wordlessly pulled out his cell phone and punched at its touch-screen.

“That, and then there’s this.”

He held it out to Payne, showing him a big bright glass screen that filled the whole face of the device.

There was a digitized photograph on the screen.

Payne grunted.

He immediately recognized it as one that four years before had run on the front page of The Philadelphia Bulletin. It showed a bloody-faced Officer Matthew M. Payne, pistol in hand, standing over a fatally wounded felon in an alleyway. And it had had the screaming headline: “Officer M.M. Payne, 23, The Wyatt Earp of the Main Line.”

“Your reputation precedes you, Marshal. And, I might add, lives online for all to see.”

Homicide Sergeant Matthew Payne’s eyes went between the phone and Byrth’s face. He shook his head.

Shit. He got me. And good.

Then he burst out laughing.

I think we’re going to get along just fine.

“Nice job, Jim.”

Byrth smiled.

Payne added: “But just remember that payback is hell.”

Now Byrth laughed aloud and said, “Liz Justice said you were a good sport. I’ll deal with the payback.”

[THREE] D/E Connector Philadelphia International Airport Wednesday, September 9, 3:10 P.M.

Juan Paulo Delgado sat at a rental Dell laptop computer inside the Road Warrior Connection kiosk.

He reached into his camo shorts and pulled out the flash drive. He stuck it in a USB slot on the side of the laptop, and simultaneously hit the CONTROL, ALT, and DELETE keys. When the screen went blank, he held the CONTROL and Z keys simultaneously. The computer restarted, loading the secure program from the flash drive that mirrored his laptop in the safe of his converted warehouse loft.

As the computer booted up, he wondered if there actually was something to what Jorge Aguilar had suggested in his text message.

Did Los Zetas have anything to do with the kid’s disappearance?

The Zetas, led by Heriberto “The Executioner” Lazcano, were mercenaries working as the enforcement arm of the narco-trafficking Gulf Cartel. They numbered some five hundred men, and were heavily armed and well-trained. The majority of them had been commandos in the Mexican Army’s Grupo Aerom?vil de Fuerzas Especiales, which, ironically, went after members of the drug cartels. They were ruthless and fearless. And what they could not or would not do-assassinations inside the United States, for example-they hired others, most notably gangbangers, to carry out for them.

The Gulf Cartel-if not the biggest of the Mexican drug-trafficking organizations (MDTOs), then one of the richest-was based due south of Brownsville, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico, thus the source of the cartel’s name. Since the 1970s, the Gulf Cartel had trafficked pot, coke, meth, and smack into the United States. And they taxed anyone who used their “plazas,” or smuggling routes. The Zetas acted as their lethal collection agency for slow- or no-payers.

Thus, Juan Paulo Delgado knew that the Zetas were not to be fucked with.

He also knew that, compared to the gangs to whom the cartel wholesaled drugs for resale in the United States, he was a very, very small player. He operated on the fringes of what to the cartels was a multibillion-dollar-per-year enterprise. As long as he kept paying the plaza taxes that the Gulf Cartel levied on him, and he didn’t step on their toes, and he didn’t try to become a bigger player, he would more or less be left alone with his crumbs.

Which meant that it had been a damned dumb move to pump forty-two rounds-two of 9-millimeter and forty of 5.7-millimeter-into his former business associate in that South Dallas crack house. Not because it was wrong to take out the bastard who owed him for the kilo of black tar smack. But because that property had also been an occasional stash house for the Zetas.

Not long afterward, he’d learned on the street that they were not exactly pleased that El Gato (a) had drawn unwanted attention to the stash/crack house and (b) had made the mess with what once had been their P90 Fabrique Nationale submachine gun.

Like toothpaste from a tube, there of course was no way to put fired bullets back in a gun. The damage was done. But Delgado had a hard time believing that any of that actually warranted the anger of the Zetas.