Hunters

by Matt Rogers

  Again, he wasn’t a fool.

  Seven hundred thousand families in this beautiful country survived on less than a dollar a day. Torres was worth sixty million. That left room for violent men with no hope to risk everything for a small shot at stealing a fortune.

  But he had guards and alarms and cameras and the small country’s entire military on speed dial, so he released himself for a brief moment and gave in to the climax.

  It was incredible.

  He squeezed his eyes shut as it happened, relishing the smoothness of the woman straddling his groin.

  When he opened them again, she wasn’t enjoying herself anymore.

  Her face was cold and her eyes were hard, and she had a switchblade gripped in her right hand which she pressed to his jugular vein, pinning him to the pillow.

  Panting for breath, he squirmed, but he didn’t dare cry out for help.

  He tried to slow his racing heart but he couldn’t, so he tried to distract himself with conversation. ‘Who are you?’

  ‘My name is Antônia,’ she said in that rich deep voice that had seduced him in the first place.

  ‘I know,’ he panted. ‘You told me that. But you’re not a whore.’

  ‘That depends on your definition of “whore.”’

  ‘You don’t sleep with men for money.’

  ‘If the job requires it,’ she said. ‘But I’m a whore in the sense that I sell myself. It just so happens I sell myself to America.’

  His heart clenched in his chest, further straining his clogged veins. ‘Shit.’

  Antônia smiled. ‘Exactly. That’s what I was looking for. Now, Fabio, it’s come to my attention that you’ve been a very bad boy.’

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Says my employers. And that’s all that matters.’

  ‘Do they have proof of these baseless allega—’

  She pressed the blade harder into his throat.

  He cut himself off and whimpered.

  She shushed him, like a mother soothing her small child. ‘There, there, Fabio. I’m told you’re in bed with Cártel de Texis.’

  ‘Lies!’ Fabio gasped. ‘I swear. I promise you, I would never—’

  ‘Shut your mouth and look at me,’ she said, her steely eyes boring into his. She hadn’t budged from her position, still straddling him, still naked, but somehow horrifying. ‘I’m not some dumb bitch. I know these things. I’m not here to hear you confirm or deny them. I’m telling you how it is.’

  His heart triple-timed in his chest. Boom-boom-boom, boom-boom-boom.

  He wanted to reach up and wipe the rivulets of sweat running from his forehead into his brows, but he didn’t dare. He gulped. ‘Okay. Okay.’

  Her deep voice was almost soothing as she said, ‘You’ve done very well for yourself, papi. I applaud you for that. You were in coffee and sugar cane in the eighties, but agriculture profits dried up, so you pivoted into commercial infrastructure and finance. You have a bank, you own office towers, apartment complexes, shopping centres. And now you think because you’ve made good business decisions you can pull the wool over the eyes of entities far more powerful than you’ll ever be. But you can’t, Fabio. You just can’t. My employers pay you a handsome fee for your loyalty and your influence. They pay you so that when they need a helping hand, they get in your ear and you get in the ear of your political associates and El Salvador enacts sweeping policy changes that are advantageous to the United States. What they don’t pay you to do is double-cross them. That would be a very foolish business deal, don’t you agree?’

  Torres flapped his lips, at a loss for words. This stranger knew everything about him. It was indescribably violating. Now it made him sick that he’d engaged in such a passionate act with her. It turned his stomach that she was still gripping him with her hips, trapping him inside her, long after he’d gone soft.

  She said, ‘I asked you a question.’

  He couldn’t nod at risk of cutting his own throat, so he grunted in agreement.

  She said, ‘What do Cártel de Texis want with you?’

  ‘The same deal. My influence. Policies that benefit them, not America.’

  ‘Do they know about your previous arrangement?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So that wasn’t their threat? To expose your corruption?’

  He said, ‘They’re the cartel. They’re a little cruder than that.’

  She waited for him to elaborate.

  He didn’t care to save face anymore. He wanted this nightmare over, so he told her. ‘They told me they would disembowel my wife and children in front of me. They’d force me to watch before they killed me.’

  ‘You love your wife?’

  ‘I do,’ he said, despite the irony of his current predicament.

  ‘Then you’ll come back to our side and we’ll never need to have a conversation like this again.’

  ‘They’ll kill me.’

  ‘Do you think America got where we were by being nobler than everyone else on this godforsaken planet, Fabio?’ she said. ‘Whatever they threatened to do, we’ll do it. But worse.’

  He said, ‘What do I tell Texis?’

  ‘That’s for you to figure out. Use those businessman brains of yours.’

  Finally, mercifully, she climbed off him. She took the knife away from his throat, retracted the blade, and slipped it into a concealed pocket of her long summer dress, which she pulled back up over her body. He watched her without so much as a hint of retaliation.

  She smirked. ‘Good, Fabio. You’re a smart man.’

  ‘Why?’ he said, his pathetic frame still spreadeagled on the four-poster bed.

  ‘You know you’re going to let me waltz out of here without a word of this to your security. You know if I don’t check in with my superiors, there’ll be hell to pay. This little compound will be eviscerated by sunrise if I show up with so much as a scratch on me.’

  He lay there, helpless, deflated.

  He said, ‘I’m dead either way.’

  She said, ‘Maybe. But if you do what we say, you have a small chance. The other way round, not so much. Take your pick. Cártel de Texis or the United States.’

  She breezed out of the giant bedroom, leaving him in a cold and sweaty heap.

  33

  Light trickled into the small safe house early the next morning.

  King was already awake, lying motionless in bed as he stared up at the ceiling to allow Violetta much-needed rest. Last night she’d packed his nose with gauze, placed a splint over it, and administered him a light dose of painkillers. Slater had needed the same treatment, minus the painkillers. It wasn’t so much that he thought he’d get addicted to OxyContin, but that the mind-numbing pleasure of the drug would remind him of what he was missing with his abstinence from alcohol.

  So if you can’t sleep with painkillers, King thought, how do you think Slater’s faring without them?

  He doubted they’d managed more than a few hours collectively.

  Violetta blinked awake as the room became progressively brighter. She rolled over, checked the time, then rolled to King. ‘How did you sleep?’

  He turned his head to look at her. It hurt. He could tell the swelling was bad from the apprehension on her face when she saw him. ‘Not great.’

  She said, ‘Do you honestly think El Salvador is the right move?’

  ‘Alonzo knows more than we do right now. He seemed to think it was best. And we’re not in a position to make demands.’

  ‘We aren’t?’

  ‘What cards do you think we hold?’

  She tried to muster the courage to show defiance, but she couldn’t. She was still half-asleep, bleary-eyed, and as soon as she remembered what had happened yesterday she tightened up.

  She said, ‘No matter how hurt you and Slater are, you two are still—’

  ‘Violetta,’ King said, reaching out and placing a hand on her shoulder.

  She quietened and looked into his eyes.

  He said, ‘Wha
t if you were kicked in the stomach instead of Alexis?’

  Silence.

  King said, ‘That’s all it takes. One moment of anti-chance. A single instant of bad luck. The next squadron that comes after us … one of them decides to go for you instead of me … all they need to do is rough you up unnecessarily. And then we have nothing to look forward to.’

  He could see the horror in her eyes, but he needed her to understand.

  ‘El Salvador,’ he said. ‘Until this is all a distant memory.’

  She softly bit her lower lip. ‘By the time this is a distant memory—’

  ‘We’ll have a baby,’ King said, and smiled. The pain throbbed, dull and incessant in his head, as his cheeks crinkled against his swollen nose. But he didn’t stop smiling.

  He couldn’t.

  ‘So yesterday might have been it for a long time?’ she said.

  He used his good right arm to gesture to his left, keeping it pinned to his side, resting on the mattress. He still didn’t know the extent of the damage but it had pained him all night, even with the Oxy dulling everything. He was leaning toward a bad sprain rather than torn muscles in his forearm, but the limb would still be functionally useless for over a week. Then his gesture swept up to his nose, which had swelled so significantly as to make his eyes puffy and his cheeks purple. The splint masked most of the visible damage, but the picture wasn’t pretty.

  He said, ‘If it was, then it was quite the way to go out.’

  They heard movement in the hallway. Violetta tensed up involuntarily, but King recognised the familiar gait. He swung himself out of bed — he’d slept fully clothed — and padded out of the tiny bedroom.

  Slater was in the process of passing by. The man stopped and turned and regarded King. Slater’s nose was swollen, too, but there was no splint or gauze padding it. It wasn’t as bad of a break, even though he’d been hit harder. You can never predict how the human anatomy will react to blunt force trauma. Sometimes you take a colossal strike full in the face and it doesn’t even faze you. Sometimes you get tapped in a soft spot and you’re sent into a world of hell.

  King said, ‘You look better than me, but that’s not saying much.’

  ‘We’re getting old.’

  ‘Are we?’ King said. ‘Or is the competition improving?’

  Slater said nothing.

  King said, ‘Gangbangers, corrupt officials, ex-military. That’s who we’ve been going up against, our last few operations. Last night … that was another level. Those two were the best this country has to offer. And they’re lying dead in our house.’

  ‘It’s not our house anymore. They made sure of that.’

  ‘And it cost them their lives.’

  Slater said, ‘You sound awfully confident for a man on the run.’

  A pause. ‘You overheard last night?’

  ‘I heard enough.’

  ‘You don’t sound happy.’

  ‘We’re running? That’s what we’re doing? That’s what we’ve been reduced to?’

  ‘You want to have this argument here? In the hallway?’

  Slater rolled his eyes. ‘You want to sit down in front of a fireplace in opposite armchairs with a whiskey tumbler in each hand? Would that seem sexier?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant.’

  Slater stuck his head through the doorway and saw Violetta in bed, her knees tucked up to her chest, her chin resting on one knee. She turned her head to meet his gaze.

  Slater said, ‘You’re on board with this?’

  She hesitated. ‘It’s different for King and I now.’

  He shook his head. ‘Not this different.’

  He ducked out, storming to the kitchen.

  Violetta’s face was flushed with frustration when King turned to her and tapped the side of his head twice. She soaked in the meaning behind the gesture, then nodded her understanding. Her annoyance fell away.

  Post-concussion symptoms were plentiful, and they included irritability, anxiety, depression, mood swings, and even memory issues. King had been there before. Violetta hadn’t. But she could imagine if King hadn’t reacted in the slightest, then he knew what Slater was going through.

  They gave Slater a wide berth for ten minutes, allowing him to cool his head, then joined him in the kitchen. Alexis was there, brewing instant coffee. The smell was awful, but it was all they had access to. King realised he didn’t miss the luxury, didn’t miss the multi-million dollar estate, but what he did miss was a proper coffee machine.

  The kitchen was morosely quiet as they drank down warm mugs.

  Then Slater took a deep breath and said, ‘I was out of line before. El Salvador it is.’

  King and Violetta nodded.

  Alexis was still hunched over, moving with care, and she didn’t utter a word of protest. Pain had made her more human. She was vulnerable now, and she’d go wherever they deemed necessary. With her ribs burning and her mid-section inflamed, the experience gap between her and the others had become apparent.

  She said, ‘So what now?’

  ‘Alonzo emailed us what we need late last night.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘Proof of Central American citizenship, international driving permits, and numbers for anonymised credit cards.’

  The technical description washed over Alexis, making her glassy-eyed. ‘To the airport, then?’

  King shook his head. ‘One thing first.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘Passports.’

  34

  Antônia had a safe house of her own in Santa Ana.

  She’d breezed out of Torres’ estate without any of his security giving her a second look.

  Well, that was a lie.

  They’d all looked at her more than twice, but never out of suspicion or hostility, mostly fixated on the summer dress bouncing off her rear. Then she’d floated down the humid lanes until the surface beneath her shoes became an uneven mass of potholes, signifying a transition into the poorer suburbs. She moved through the barrio until she made it to the edge of a sprawling industrial zone, then ducked into a walk-up style apartment building that had fallen into disrepair long ago.

  Her apartment was a shoebox, so small she could nearly reach out and touch both walls if she stood in the middle of the small living area, but it was all she needed. She fished her work phone out from under the sofa cushion, intending to check in with her superiors and report the successful operation.

  Then the phone rang in her hand.

  She read the contact name and raised an eyebrow, then answered with a purr. ‘Hello.’

  ‘Been a while,’ Alonzo said.

  ‘That it has.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘You know where,’ she said. ‘Aren’t you in front of that special computer of yours?’

  ‘I am. I thought it would make you more comfortable to tell me yourself.’

  Sweat pooled in the small of Antônia’s back. Ninety-five percent humidity and an absence of air-conditioning. ‘Comfort isn’t something I take into consideration.’

  ‘Are you working?’

  ‘You know that, too.’

  Alonzo paused, then sighed. ‘I might as well get to the point…’

  ‘You know how I like it,’ she said with a smile. ’No foreplay. Straight to it.’

  ‘Do you remember what you told me?’ he said. ‘Six months ago, at The Beekman.’

  Antônia remembered that night fondly. The vintage-style room, the big bed, the rush of passion and sensation, the delicacy of his touch, something she didn’t think existed any more.

  She said, ‘I told you that you were a good man.’

  ‘Which you said was rare in our world. That’s why you were drawn to me, instead of the testosterone-fuelled alpha males you could have had with the snap of your fingers. Fellow operatives and the like.’

  Her smile turned playful. ‘Were you recording me? I recall those being my exact words.’

  ‘My memory,’ Alonzo said, lik
e it was a curse rather than a blessing.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Photographic. Of course.’

  He said, ‘Did you mean it?’

  The weight of his tone indicated he was serious.

  After a pause, she said, ‘I did.’

  ‘I’ve never asked anything of you.’

  ‘Because you’re not my handler.’

  ‘That I’m not,’ he admitted. ‘But now I need you. And the only reason you might agree is because you believe it’s the right thing to do. So I need you to trust that I’m a good man, because all you’ll have to go on is my word.’

  ‘What is it?’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I’m still in contact with Jason King and Will Slater.’

  Silence.

  She said, ‘Really?’

  ‘If you wanted to, you could have me executed with a single call. I probably wouldn’t live to see the sunset.’

  More silence.

  She said, ‘I’m still listening.’

  ‘Hide them for me.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You understand what I’m doing here, right?’

  ‘I can cover for you. You’re in my division, after all. You can go radio silent for a couple of weeks, blame it on post-traumatic stress. Accentuate the grittier details of your interaction with Fabio Torres. I’ll make sure it’s believed.’

  ‘King and Slater are domestic terrorists.’

  ‘Who told you that?’

  She paused, thought about it, and recognised the potential bias. ‘They’re not dangerous?’

  ‘Of course they’re dangerous. But they’re better men than I am.’

  What seemed like an eternity of silence elapsed. She said, ‘You’re full of shit.’

  ‘Am I?’

  ‘You despise operatives. What was it you called them? “Testosterone-fuelled alpha males”?’

  ‘Exactly,’ Alonzo said. ‘So ask yourself why I’ve been aiding King and Slater this whole time.’

  She said, ‘Have they threatened you?’