by Logan Fox
Which he would have done, had he not heard the thud of shoes heading toward him from the small garden’s archway.
Lars ducked behind a nearby tree, held his breath, and hoped to god he hadn’t picked up ten pounds overnight.
The shoes drew closer. Lars peeked out as much as he dared, and caught a sliver of a familiar face.
Javier’s wife. It had to be, despite her get up; he’d recognize those cold, calculating eyes anywhere. Even if they were smudged with makeup in a face still hinting at tear tracks.
She’d changed into a floppy sweat suit, trainers on her feet and a hoodie around her face as if she couldn’t feel the heat of the day.
Lars shifted a little. Shit, she’d probably come here to be by herself. Maybe cry a little more, if her red-rimmed eyes were anything to go by.
Were those finger marks around her neck? Had Javier really choked her so hard?
Lars was about to step out from behind the tree, announce himself, and try and leave without embarrassing the woman any further when he heard the sound of shoes. Heavier. Spaced out. A man.
Jesus…was Javier on his way here?
Squeezing his eyes closed, Lars gave his head a shake. The last thing he wanted was—
“Gabby,” came a familiar voice. “Are you sure we should—”
Gabriella spun to face the archway, lifting a finger to her lips. Her face creased with anger, and she swiped a hand at whoever was approaching before leading the way to that partly hidden gate.
A man stepped out of the archway, someone Lars had never seen before. Which defied reason, of course, because he could remember that voice. Medium build, gray eyes, thick hair. He wore a vest that exposed a flurry of tattoos on his arms and shoulders.
And a square of what looked like bandaged gauze when he turned his back on Lars to follow Gabriella through the door. The gate creaked a little as it swung shut behind the pair.
The guy in the cot. The one who’d said he’d been shot by a stranger. Could it be him?
Lars stared after them, and slowly cocked his head to the side.
“The fuck…?” he murmured.
22
Dirty money
Neo danced around the soccer ball, slamming his foot into it to try for a goal. It soared so far to the left of the make-shift goal posts that the goalie crossed his arms and threw him a pitying look.
“What the fuck, Neo?”
He turned, looking away from Sam’s incredulous expression. How the fuck could anyone expect him to keep his mind on the game? When he’d agreed to play a match this morning with the staff members who only started work later in the day, he’d hoped it would take his mind off last night. But the sport just seemed to focus his thoughts.
He’d never been so livid before. His father had always had a way of screwing up his plans…but this?
“I’m out,” Neo said, giving Sam a curt wave as he left the dusty field. He was itching from the dust and sweat coating his skin; a quick, ice-cold shower would hopefully wash away his irritation along with the grime. Movement caught his eye; a pair of horses returning to the stables. The saddled figures could only have been Eleodora and one of her bodyguards; the difference between her petite silhouette and the man’s bulk was obvious even at a distance. He grabbed a towel from a bench under one of the trees and wiped his face as he headed back to the villa.
Married? He wasn’t even twenty-five yet. What the hell was his father thinking?
No, he knew exactly what was on that man’s mind. The cartel. It was always the cartel. The cartel was why he’d been forbidden to go study in Europe. Instead, he’d had to stay in Mexico with his family.
After an attempted hit on him a few years back, Javier had refused to even listen to him about university, even when he’d agreed to have bodyguards around him during school hours. Instead, he had to remain at home. When he grew to like sports, he could never attend more than a regional match. And that under the watchful eyes of enough cartel sicarios to make the entire crowd uneasy. Soon enough, he wasn’t being placed in matches anymore, and his only resort was to play with those staff that didn’t mind scrabbling in the dirt between shifts with El Guapo’s son.
And now this?
He whipped the towel from his shoulders and tossed it into the garden as he entered the villa’s inner sanctum. It draped over a nearby shrub.
God, how he hated this place. It just kept growing, like a goddamn tumor. The few times Javier allowed him away from it—like the blissful month-long stint he’d spent in Europe before being hauled back—something new had been added on by the time he came back. A new wing, more stables, strange buildings in the back that Javier had made clear were none of his business.
Except, now it probably was his business. Being capo and all that shit.
“Hijo de puta,” he muttered. A passing maid threw him a startled glance and picked up her pace. He should have gone upstairs, but when he glanced up, he saw Javier’s office door was open.
Was he inside?
Neo stopped walking, running fingers through his damp hair. He stank of sweat, but he didn’t care. He cut through the garden, whipping a branch out of his way so hard that it snapped, and made for Javier’s door.
He pushed it open, and the muzzle of an assault rifle swung to face him. He sneered at Santino, and the man reluctantly dropped the weapon.
“We need to talk,” Neo said.
Javier looked up from his computer. He wore reading glasses, but instead of making him look weak, they just made him look like a professor who was more likely to hand out a caning than an A. Javier’s face broke into a smile, but Neo didn’t return it. He swung around, gesturing at Santino and Eddie. “Out.”
Santino shifted his weight, but didn’t move. Eddie just stared at him as if he’d been struck deaf.
“I said out!” Neo yelled.
“Give us a few minutes, gentlemen,” Javier said.
Neo bristled as the two men left the study, Santino pulling the door closed behind him. When he turned to face his father, the man was taking off his glasses with the perfunctory air of someone who knew he was about to deal with a difficult child.
“You think you can just do what you want and get away with it?” Neo asked, striding forward and slamming his palms onto the table top.
Javier sat back and laced his hands over his flat stomach, watching Neo without any change in his blank expression.
“I’m not getting married. I’m not becoming capo. I came back because you said there was urgent family shit. I thought someone had died.” Neo swept a hand over Javier’s desk. “Not this. This is bullshit.”
“Calm down.” His father sat forward, let out a sigh, and adjusted his clothing as if he was worried it had gotten wrinkled. “Why don’t you sit, so we can—?”
“I’m not doing anything you want.” Neo put his fists on the table, leaning forward on his knuckles. “I’m going back to Europe. I’m going to study. And I’m never coming back to this fucking place.” His heart pounded a mile an hour, but at least his voice was steady. And, in that moment, it reminded him of his father’s voice, which made him seethe inside.
“Language, son.” Javier studied him for a moment, and then shrugged. “Okay. You can go to Europe.”
Neo blinked at him, licked his lips, and slowly straightened. “Good.” He gave a small nod. “Glad we had this talk.” He turned to leave. His fingers brushed the door handle when Javier spoke again.
“Son…?”
Neo paused, but didn’t turn around. He could hear Javier clicking the mouse. The tap of a few keys. “What?” he snapped. One thing he hadn’t missed in Europe was his father’s flair for drama.
“One question before you go, if you don’t mind indulging your old man.”
He stayed as he was—one hand on the door handle, eyes staring at the wood without seeing.
“I’m curious…How will you pay for this trip to Europe?”
Neo pressed his eyes closed and took a long, slow bre
ath. When he turned to Javier, the man had his attention fixed solely on the computer, spectacles perched on his nose as he worked.
Javier made a show of pressing the mouse, and then the enter key on the keyboard before swiveling his chair to Neo. “Now that you have no money?”
23
White fucker
A haze of cigarette smoke clung to the air in his motel room. Kane sat beside the room’s round table, an overflowing ashtray and an empty can of energy drink beside him. A half-jack of vodka, also empty, lay on its side.
He used his computer’s track pad to select a new audio file, lit a cigarette, and listened as it began playing through his earphones.
Before he’d left that rundown street where he’d fucked Brenna, Kane had planted an audio receiver near that bottom window where he’d seen movement.
First, he’d had to disable the cameras, of course.
If he’d had any doubt that this house would provide a new rung in the step ladder leading to Zachary, the fact that the property had four hidden cameras as security had dispelled it entirely.
He was so sure, in fact, he hadn’t hesitated to try the windows and doors. All had burglar proofing, but one was open a crack. And it happened to be in the room where he’d spotted movement. There was a desk with a computer and some papers laying about. An ashtray, coffee cup, and an empty plate. Obviously, this was where whoever occupied this room during the day spent most of his time. That was why the window was open a crack.
Luck had fuck all to do with it.
He’d wedged it open a little more, and stuck the small audio receiver to the bottom of the sill before draping the curtain over it. Anyone taller than a child would easily miss that small device, hidden in the sill’s shadow as it was.
So far, there’d been nothing.
The little device had a twenty-four-hour battery life, since all it did was transmit audio to his cellphone once he’d phoned in. It had no storage, no lights, no speakers.
He recorded its audio to his cellphone, and then synced the data to his own private cloud storage. This he accessed via his laptop, and analyzed with a program that spat out the waveforms of each audio file so he didn’t have to listen to the entire day’s recordings to find something useful. Instead, he studied each file’s waveform patterns, zooming in and playing those that had a spike of sound.
Most were the faded zooms of passing cars. Bird calls. The occasional plane flying overhead.
Twice, he found voices. They’d been kids, probably walking home from school.
Kane lit himself another cigarette, and scratched an itch on the side of his neck. A red flake stuck under his nail. He narrowed his eyes, and felt on his neck again.
He picked away the splash of dried blood as he pulled on his cigarette. Lifting the can of energy drink, he wriggled it to make sure it was empty. He was about to hit pause on the laptop so he could shoot out and refill his drinks when the audio file he’d been loading opened up.
There were a string of spikes about halfway through the recording.
He sat forward in a rush, swiped hair from his eyes, and hurriedly zoomed in on the first spike.
Hoofuckingrah.
He upped the volume on his earphones and took a long pull at his smoke as he leaned forward on his elbows and studied the screen.
There were the faint yet unmistakable sounds of someone opening a door. You had to love cheap houses; their walls were paper thin. Footsteps growing closer and then fading.
Silence.
He fast-forwarded through the track and started listening at the next spike. A man’s heavy sigh. The scrape of ceramic on wood; a cup of coffee. A faint slurp. The click of a Zippo case opening.
A chair creaking.
“Where’s this fucker…?” came a murmur of Spanish.
Kane was fluent in the language. He knew more of Mexican cartel slang than anyone else in the DEA’s New Mexico office. Pity that was something his shitface of a boss didn’t seem to care about.
A sigh, as if the person in Zachary’s house had finally found what he was looking for.
“Hola, Duncan?” Silence. “Yeah, you busy, man?” Why had he switched to English?
Kane already had his notebook on the table. He flipped it to a fresh page and wrote,
Duncan. English.
“Yeah, uh…look, I don’t know if this something, man, but there was these strange people across the way. Yeah…a couple, man. Haven’t seen ‘em before. Fancy cars and shit. Know they don’t live there. Some Asian people up in there. These fuckers were white.”
Silence.
Kane’s skin prickled hearing himself being referred to as a white fucker. Would pretty republican Brenna have been offended?
He let out a soft huff of air tainted with cigarette smoke.
Not anymore.
“Nah. All’s I know it’s a Mini and a Jeep. Jeep parked too close to another car, and I was going the wrong direction to get the Mini’s plates.”
The Hispanic man took a slurp of his coffee.
“I know he’s a busy fucker, but you tell him. Something doesn’t sit right with all of this.”
More coffee slurped. The chair creaking. Kane could imagine a slightly overweight Hispanic man with tattoos on his knuckles leaning back in that chair as it protested. Someone who’d let muscle turn to fat. Or who’d been sentenced to a desk job instead of slinging dope.
“Mierde! You think I’d be telling you if I didn’t think it was something? After that shit that went down at the Elegance, man, my eyes are wide the fuck open.”
‘The Elegance’ was neatly penned under ‘Hispanic male, age 35-40, smoker’. He drew a line that connected the note to the opposite page where he’d written, ‘Duncan’.
Those were new names to him—both the Elegance and Duncan. His intel had led him to believe that Ailin and Rodriquez were Zachary’s second in command. Lugartenientes, as the cartels called them. Better than the hitman, and the closest to the capo. There was always a considerable rift between the lieutenants and the rest of the cartel.
“Didn’t matter,” Hispanic male muttered. “El Lobo still made it out to be our fucking fault.”
Presumably, he was referring to the ‘shit that went down’. He hadn’t heard of anything going down at any place called the Elegance, but maybe he could charm one of those darling admin clerks down at the DEA’s office to look it up for him. They’d all know he’d been suspended, of course, but hopefully some of them wouldn’t hold that against him.
“Man, I know!” Hispanic male whined. “All I’m saying is, I ain’t getting all shifty out here. I mean, what if it’s ECV busy staking us out?”
A line went from ‘Hispanic Male’ to a new note—E. C. V.
It wasn’t the first time those initials had sprung up, and not surprisingly. ECV was the second largest cartel peddling drugs in the southern states. Plata o Plomo was next.
If he could take down PoP and then ECV?
Praise the fucking Lord.
Kane sat back in his chair, as he slowly ground out his cigarette between the twenty other butts in the ashtray.
If he pulled that off, the Captain would have no choice but to give him back his fucking job.
24
Not a thing
Since he had no idea what lay behind that dark gate, Lars stood for several long seconds contemplating his next move. He could follow Gabriella and the mystery man, or turn back and try to find his way out of here. But this stank of some secret liaison, and his own curiosity got the better of him.
Like he knew it would.
He eased open the gate, wrinkling his nose when that stench rolled over him. Why the hell would someone as stately as Gabriella want to meet in this place?
Beyond the gate lay a dark, narrow passage walled in brick. The ceiling arched like he was entering some kind of sewer system. From the smell, he wouldn’t be surprised if he was. The gate creaked behind him, but he hoped the pair had moved past earshot already.
&n
bsp; It was cool in the passage, and the light ahead seemed dim compared with the sunlight that had been spilling into that small, circular garden he’d just left.
He heard voices and paused, but they were moving away so he started after them a second later.
More sunlight, but still not as bright as it should have been, beckoned him. Lars crouched, squinting as his eyes adjusted to the light. He could see the silhouettes of the pair he’d been following. They’d come to a stop under a small, stunted tree. There was a bench there. Both sat, Gabriella eclipsed by the man sitting opposite her.
They began murmuring to each other, too low for Lars to make out a single fucking word.
Lars scanned the courtyard. It was paved, neatly kept, but still smelled horrible. Ivy climbed the walls here, and a fountain splashed somewhere nearby. It was bigger than the garden leading here, but the walls were curved too. A few feet away from the curving walls ran a concrete fence. More ivy crawled over this, trained to almost block out the pale structure beneath.
If he could make it to that low wall, he might be able to creep close enough to that bench on the other side of this courtyard to hear what these two were muttering about.
Lars peered out from the passageway. He started forward a step, and froze. From this angle, he could see Gabriella’s face.
She didn’t look happy.
The man reached out an arm, but didn’t touch her. Her lips moved as she said something, and then shook her head.
Jesus, couldn’t they have the decency to speak up?
Gabriella turned her head away from the man, staring at something hidden from Lars’s view. Then she put her hands over her eyes, as if holding back tears.
It was probably the only chance he’d get. He shuffled over the cobblestones and ducked behind the low wall. He held his breath, waiting for one of them to cry out that they’d seen him. But they thought they were alone here in this stinking place.