Kill for Me

by Tom Wood

  She just watched. There was nothing to be gained by getting him busted. Even if he talked, which was unlikely, he wouldn’t know anything. He would willingly sit silent through the interrogation and land himself jail time he could have avoided in order to make doubly sure the cartel knew he hadn’t given anything up. If they couldn’t get to you in prison—and they usually could—they would get your family. Everyone had a mother or sister or grandfather. Everyone had someone to lose.

  So, Alamaeda watched. The Smurf would have a nice roll of cash on him. Seven or eight thousand. Below the limit. Below the radar. He would get a hundred bucks for taking all the—albeit minimal—risks. There was probably a sob story to justify this, and Alamaeda had sympathy with those driven to such a life by circumstances outside of their control, but she had no sympathy for what they would become. No circumstances could justify murder. There was never an excuse. She had grown up poor, and she hadn’t done so much as steal a stick of gum. Did they still make gum in sticks?

  The Smurf worked for a guy who got orders from a guy who answered directly to one Miguel Diaz, who was the latest verified addition to Alamaeda’s rogues’ gallery. Diaz was young for a top player, but he was experienced. He had been a courier for the cartel since age twelve, and now had almost two decades of experience that had begun with ferrying handwritten orders on his bike, advancing rung by rung up the ladder to organizing and handling the transportation of huge sums of cash south—namely from Mexican cartels who bought product from Maria’s half of the Salvatierra cartel—back to his masters. An estimated 80 percent of drug profits never left the United States, and of the 20 percent that crossed international borders, most of it did so digitally through a number of sophisticated money-laundering schemes. The remaining few percent came back in hard currency, which posed a huge logistical problem for the cartel. Few people knew when and how these shipments would enter the country—such was the threat posed not only by the authorities and rival cartels, but also greedy who might forget where their loyalties lay.

  Cash was a cartel’s lifeblood, which made Alamaeda think of herself as a vampire. It was her job to bleed them dry.

  As both accountant and money launderer, Diaz knew where the money was buried. Sometimes literally. Most cartels had a pyramidal hierarchal structure, and the money-laundering part had its own such pyramid inside the greater structure. At the bottom were those who deposited cash into legitimate banks in small enough amounts not to attract attention. Higher up, and fewer in number, were those who found ingenious, and sometimes far from genius, ways to hide the physical cash. Sometimes it was sewn into mattresses or stuffed into the pipes of machinery; other times it was buried in sacks of coffee beans. And often it was simply packed into the load bed of a truck and driven along the roads with little more than a tarpaulin to hide it from those who might interrupt its passage.

  A midranking trafficker had been picked up on possession charges and had given up Diaz’s name to avoid prison time, confirming the information Gabriel Hernandez had supplied Alamaeda with as part of his negotiations for protection. Low-level cartel players were not prone to roll over—the fear of reprisals on them or their families was too great—but this particular trafficker had a diabetic son and couldn’t leave his wife and the kid to fend for themselves. The trafficker knew the name Diaz, and so Alamaeda could add another photograph to the spiderweb of red string that linked the cartel members together on the whiteboard she and Wickliffe had pieced together in their sectioned-off part of police headquarters.

  The local cops didn’t like their presence, and Alamaeda didn’t blame them. She got in the way of their bribes. She cost them money just by being nearby. They weren’t all corrupt, but she worked on that assumption. The first one she encountered had tried to make her pay an on-the-spot fine for a nonexistent traffic violation. The detectives working on the same floor were polite and decent and didn’t go out of their way to make her feel any more unwelcome than she already felt. She didn’t tell them that she didn’t have to be here, she didn’t have to help. She could be working a nice Stateside post instead. She chose to be here. She wanted to do something tangible, to stop the poison before it did the damage, not pick up the pieces after the damage had been done. She’d tried that as a kid and it hadn’t worked. She knew, at a Freudian level, she was still trying to save her mom.

  Wickliffe was less of an idealist, Alamaeda knew. Wickliffe wanted the action. She liked the danger. She had spent nearly two decades as a prosecutor before deciding it would be more satisfying to hunt the bad guys down instead of putting them away. Most agents went their whole careers without drawing their piece with the intention of using it, let alone firing it. Down here in cartel country, Alamaeda had lost count of the number of times she had drawn, and every time she had been expecting to use it. She hadn’t shot anyone, but she knew it was only a matter of time. Across the border in Honduras was where things got really crazy, but Guatemala was pretty close. Wickliffe lived for the adrenaline and she got her money’s worth in Guat chasing the Devil Sisters.

  The Salvatierras had always played the long game. Whereas Mexican cartels used violence to exert power, the Salvatierras developed mutually beneficial relationships. They kept everyone happy and everyone rich, whether they were suppliers, traffickers, or locals. Loyalty obtained through fear only went so far and was easily usurped by the fear of greater violence, because the brutality of the cartels was ever evolving. While loyalty obtained through generosity was no less susceptible to being usurped, in Guat there was no one wealthier. An alliance was a safer bond than those applied from master to servant. Such alliances were numerous and intricate, stretching back and forth geographically and politically across the country. The more individuals and factions involved, the more everyone had to lose if the Salvatierra cartel fell. It was in everyone’s interest to protect it. With such a history of largesse, Heloise and Maria were not as rich as they might have been, but they were stable, and their only fear was for the other.

  The drug trade was a cash business, and however efficient the process of washing the cash, there was a backlog years long. A billion dollars in hundreds would take up shipping containers’ worth of space. It had to be stored, safe and hidden, but it had to be accessible too. A cartel had to be liquid in all senses. Sicarios were paid in cash. Bribes were paid in cash. Both had to be paid on time, every time, or the whole machine would begin to break down. That was Alamaeda’s primary goal: interrupt the cash flow and watch with a smile as the whole sand castle began to wash away in the unstoppable tide of discontent.

  A fine strategy, but the problems were many. She found a million here, a million there. In small bills, a million in cash looked like a huge score, but such losses were insignificant to a multibillion-dollar business. She had to pose for photos with smiling cops, pretending to be delighted, pretending it mattered. Her biggest bust was north of three million and the photograph of it made the front pages. It was a big deal. National news. Her phone didn’t stop ringing. It was the early days of her time in the Guat and she was as pleased as anyone about her success. She even felt proud. Then the next day, she received a beige envelope containing a memory stick. On the memory stick was a video file. The video showed masked cartel guys pouring gasoline on a huge pile of cash and setting fire to it. Three million up in smoke just to make a point. She didn’t show the video to anyone else. After that, Alamaeda wasn’t so enamored with posing for photos. She went out and bought herself a comfortable chair. She was here for the long haul.

  Later, she realized they wouldn’t have sent the video if she hadn’t made an impact on them. They had sent it as a show of strength. If they had really been that strong, they wouldn’t have felt the need to prove it. Three million might not make a dent, but one day it would be twenty, and then a hundred. That’s why they sent the video. They were afraid she was going to get there.

  Swung enough times, even the smallest ax could fell the largest tree.
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  • Chapter 44 •

  For a moment, Victor just looked at the sea. His gaze tracked the incoming swells all the way to the beach. The water was black now, even if the stars had yet to appear. The crests of the waves were still white, however, and the sound of them lapping on the sand was still divine. He longed to lie on a beach in another place in another time, just listening to that sound, nothing to do but that all day long; not looking out for beachgoers in clothes, not thinking about sniping lines, not considering how far it was to cover, not keeping a weapon within reach at all times. What did lazy even feel like?

  He spent too long in the distraction, he knew. Introspection was a bad idea at the best of times, and worse while corpses cooled nearby. He consoled himself with the thought that if a beautiful beach in the twilight couldn’t conjure up some semblance of humanity from him, nothing could.

  The sea breeze made him aware of the perspiration on his face. The guerrilla beneath his heel was still at last. From first shot to final kill, the whole thing had been over in less than two minutes, but there was no better workout than a fight to the death. Not exactly the definition of high-intensity interval training, but better.

  He used the coarse fabric of his trousers to brush the wet sand from his palm. Blood stained his fingers pink.

  He was miles from anywhere. Victor had last seen any sign of civilization an hour’s drive along the coast. It was why they had agreed on the location—for him to make a trade without prying eyes, and for Jairo and his Marxist pals to rob and kill him without witnesses. Different goals that happened to align.

  He had some jerky left, he realized. The packet had remained in a pocket throughout the gunfight. He took that as a sign he was meant to finish it. He wasn’t hungry—combat was never good for the appetite—but he chewed a few more strips. He didn’t like to waste food.

  It was a cool night, almost cloudless, and the heat of the day seemed a long time gone. But dragging, lifting, and carrying corpses was hard work. Even for Victor, a dead body was not easy to manipulate with so many joints and slack muscles. The weight was unevenly distributed. The person was uncompliant from beyond the grave in some last act of vengeance. Victor had plenty of experience to offset a corpse’s innate reluctance to comply, but it still took a physical toll. None of those that had been the aspiring Army of the Poor had been big, thankfully. Well-fed enemies were even less compliant.

  The feral dogs had returned now the gunfire had stopped. Victor couldn’t see them, but he heard them. They stayed just out of sight, in the darkness, watching him. On occasion, while he worked, he glimpsed saucers of moonlight staring out from the night around him, each time a little larger than the last as the dogs grew closer, braver. They could smell the blood on the sand.

  The breeze from across the Caribbean Sea rustled the long dune grasses and toyed with Victor’s hair when he lifted off his cap to swipe away sweat. He collected the bodies and tossed them into the load bed of Jairo’s truck, one by one. Their weapons followed, and then the AX50. He was disappointed to have to destroy it, but when the remains of the guerrillas were found—and they would be, sooner or later—maybe the investigators would discover they had been in the business of bogus arms sales, and that they had arranged to sell a rifle to a foreigner. Victor didn’t want anyone asking about the rifle or buyer, or paying attention when a cartel boss was assassinated using such a gun. He would have to wait for the shipment from South Africa, and hope no similar scam was being organized.

  He siphoned off diesel from the fuel tank, spread some over the bodies, and soaked a rag torn from the fatigues worn by one of the corpses. He shoved it inside the fuel inlet. Diesel didn’t catch light with ease, but a burning piece of cloth should do the trick. He didn’t have time to do much more. However isolated this place, the sound of gunshots traveled far, and however common such sounds might be in Guatemala, they could bring him trouble if he was not expedient in his departure.

  A dog lapped at the pool of blood on the sand where the guerrilla commander had died. It ran off as Victor neared, whiskers glistening.

  He went for Jairo last, surprised to find the seller still alive despite the wound to his face. Unlike the guerrilla who had survived two to the chest, Jairo was in no state to try anything. A bullet in the face did that. The wound reminded Victor of one he had seen before in London. Jairo looked worse than that man had, though. He was pale and his breathing was shallow. The wound was neat and the bullet had missed his brain and spine, but caused significant damage elsewhere. Jairo was swallowing a lot and coughing, so Victor expected a major blood vessel had been nicked somewhere inside of his skull. The blood was draining down Jairo’s throat.

  When he failed to swallow fast enough, it entered his lungs, and he had to cough it back up. His teeth were stained and his lips were coated. The stubble around them was dark with it.

  “Who made the deal?” Victor asked.

  Jairo heard and seemed to understand, but he didn’t answer. His breathing was raspy and strained.

  Victor continued. “A German woman arranged it from my end, but who was at yours? You didn’t have contact with her directly, so who acted as the go-between?”

  He stepped away as Jairo vomited up a stomach’s worth of blood and acid over himself. The smell was awful.

  “I won’t pretend that I can save you any more than I’d pretend that I would,” Victor said, “but if you tell me what I want to know, I’ll put you out of your misery. You won’t have to drown in your own blood.”

  Jairo’s lips moved, but no sound was coming out. He managed to smile. Some last act of bravery or defiance.

  “Your choice.”

  Victor scattered the rest of the jerky on the beach for the feral dogs, then lifted Jairo off the ground and carried him to the back of the pickup.

  • Chapter 45 •

  It was a disgusting thing. There was no other word for it. Lavandier hated everything about the casino, from the repulsive facade to the trashy interior. A monstrosity by any definition, but Heloise’s baby. The drug trade was eternal, Lavandier knew, because existence was too cruel and joyless for people to get through it without the aid of intoxication, but traffickers had poor career prospects. Even the richest and most powerful cartel bosses ended up in prison or in the ground. No one retired. No one ever lived the good life. At best, they hid themselves away in luxury prisons of their own design, going insane in a hell of their own making.

  Heloise knew this too, and she feared decriminalization. She believed it was inevitable. It was already happening with marijuana. How long before cocaine received the same treatment? The Central American cartels existed on the fragility of the needs of the South American producers. For all Heloise’s wealth, for all her cruelty and her influence, she was a courier. If—when—the time came, she was never going to be able to compete with FedEx.

  So, legitimate business was the future she wanted. But, of course, a legitimate business that was ripe for exploitation by criminality.

  Hence the monstrosity. She had poured a huge amount of her own wealth into building the casino in—funnily enough—a monumental gamble that might very well not pay off. Guatemala City was no Las Vegas or Macau, but that’s what Heloise dreamed it could become. The start of that dream coming to fruition was the casino itself, with almost one hundred thousand square feet of gaming space, along with a thousand-bedroom hotel. Two years of planning and another two of construction and it was built, it was ready to open, but Heloise was not allowed to open it.

  She or, rather, the shell company, had been given planning permission, and the figurehead Heloise had chosen to run the casino had won a gaming license . . . but then lost his life to Maria’s sicarios. Her sister, naturally, wasn’t going to let Heloise’s ambitions go unchallenged.

  Then the problems started. Government officials got scared. Questions were asked. Bribes began losing their effectiveness. Heloise’s replac
ement was refused a license. There was too much attention, too much negative press for the mayoral office to allow the casino to open when everyone knew who was behind it.

  It’ll take time, their man on the inside had said, but you need to keep a low profile.

  It was easy to acquiesce to this request—Heloise had the autonomy to make sure the entire cartel reined in the operations and put a halt to violence—but weakness in the face of an aggressor only caused more aggression. Maria was emboldened by Heloise’s passivity, which had led to the attack a few weeks ago that convinced her to hire the Wraith and the Russian.

  The casino had been sitting empty and unused for months. At current estimates, it might be several years before a license was granted. They were hemorrhaging money, exacerbated by the deliberate slowdown in trafficking. Lavandier worried. Sometimes he couldn’t sleep. He didn’t enjoy the feeling of weakness. Like everyone else who had risen to the upper echelons of a cartel, he did so out of a craving for wealth and power. Now he wondered if that wealth would last, and any power seemed but temporary.

  Such a situation could not endure.

  Five short years ago there had been nothing but dead, empty space. Passengers in airliners circling overhead would have seen featureless scrubland beyond the airport’s borders. Then, the construction—hundreds of men and thousands of tons of materials, monstrous cranes, and endless noise. The noise had been the worst part. Heloise visited the construction site on a regular basis, so Lavandier did so too. He hated it. Builders looked at him with more disdain than sicarios. They sneered at his ear protectors and pristine white coat—worn to protect his finery from dust and oil—and made jokes they thought he couldn’t hear.