And I don’t fucking understand how men can be so weak as to betray the cartel. So stupid to think that they can get away with it. But they do.
They always fucking do.
And I am always there to deliver the message. My hand wears the same skull we carve into every body. I carve it anew on my hand after every kill, say my prayers, and remember who I am.
I get to the hotel late that night, but I know my suite will be ready. It is one of my perks for my status, which I acquired because I stay in absolute style when I travel for work, like any businessman.
I arrive and I enter the elevator on the first floor to take me to the 70th floor lobby.
This hotel is always incredibly busy. The lobby is absolutely full of people checking in, checking out, and heading to the lobby bar.
Me?
I get to the VIP lounge of the hotel reserved for high net worth guests and check in. The lounge has cocktails now but I want to see the city, so I leave my bags with the smiling woman at the desk. Izzie, a saucy, beautiful Filipino woman. She’s past her dating prime, but she makes me wonder what it would have a been like to have a mother like her. Older or not, she is gorgeous and when she smiles at me, I shoot a grin right back at her.
An orphan’s an orphan. I know Izzie must be a mother, in the way she knows I’m an orphan. I feel it in her eyes and how she talks to me.
When I look back, I think this is part of why my whole life was going to change. I don’t truly belong to anyone yet. I think my family baptized by blood is my family, but there’s something empty inside me that I can’t name just yet.
I head up to the glass elevator around the lobby corner and I get a seat next to a tall glass panel. I look out over LA atop Spire73, the rooftop bar showing all of the glory of the City of Angels. It’s practically its own country. The flickering lights of cars, of buildings, of the glittering beauties all over the streets and the gold in everyone’s eyes, well if you’re not fucking jaded, you’ll love it.
You know how people say LA is so fucking fake? Perhaps that’s fucking true, and yes I’m rolling my eyes when I say that. Because, look, everyone’s fake to a large extent. We all tell lies. But LA is beautiful and it knows it is beautiful. And what’s so wrong with that?
Not a goddamn thing.
I call my associate, Kristen, and let her know that I’m at the rooftop bar.
“So am I,” she says on the other end of the phone.
She hangs up and quickly approaches my table.
“The dossier?” I ask. There’s no way in that dress—this slinky blue shit that’s deep as the sea at night and glittery— has room for it, and the only thing in her hand is a martini glass holding a pink drink.
“Your phone,” Kristen says with a grin. She taps the face of her smartwatch and a private dossier file pings to my phone.
“Thanks,” I say, scanning through it. “Is everything I need in here?”
“Everything you need is there,” she says with a pleased lilt in her voice. “Now you don’t need to eat a dossier after you read it.”
I laugh. “I could always shove it up your ass,” I retort.
“Don’t tease a girl,” Kristen says, and walks away. She had a look of bemused disappointment.
She still thought I might fuck her after this meet.
Kristen is hard-up for some cock because none of the other players in this game have been badass enough for her.
She’s had a thing for Zario forever. He’s the boss, I get it. But when Kristen realized I was the only guy in Bonita Muerte that wasn’t clamoring to fuck her, well, it made her a little crazy.
Not nearly as crazy as she is for Zario, who barely pays her more than five seconds of attention after they inevitably fuck one night after a big victory.
But the truth is, my dick doesn’t see much action nowadays because pointless sex with random bitches does fuck all for me. I’m old-fashioned. I want something deeper.
And I know that I can’t have it.
Three
Grayson
The last picture really shows off his dick hanging through his throat, and that pleases Zario greatly.
I took of the rat from the dossier Kristen delivered. Sliced, carved, and drained of all his blood.
He’s dead.
The message is sent.
Fuck with the cartel and think you can win, and you’re goddamn wrong. You’ll lose everything and your family will find you.
I’m sitting across from the head of the Bonita Muerte cartel and he’s definitely approving of another job I’ve taken care of.
He glances over every last photograph with great care, inspecting angles, smiling, commenting, laughing. It delights Zario to see anyone who betrays him get carved up and put on display as a warning. You skim money? Your family is going to starve to death because no one in town will feed them and no doctor will see them. They find your body and then the horror doesn’t stop from there.
Zario sees the promise of that in these photographs. Sure enough, this traitor’s family found him. His family will die for what he’s done. He didn’t do it in the name of taking care of his family. He got greedy. Now they suffer.
Each picture shares the horror that is to come, every angle displaying graphically just what awaits anyone else who betrays Bonita Muerte cartel.
The pictures weren’t even taken by me—these are the cop shots. My boss takes great delight in the horrors I do for him, staging bodies, being photographed by police, and I acquire those. He even likes to call the vice cops his photographers and janitors. They clean up whatever he wants them to, after all.
Zario Dantes isn’t into dicks unless they’re the kind in this picture, hanging out of a weasel’s throat because that’s what we do to those who fucking cross us.
Zario points, and I kill.
Vicious little Kristen is probably filing this away for his files as we speak. He likes to review them. No shit, at the end of the year when he’s basically giving out his annual report, we watch a slideshow of all of these pictures with his favorite shots in there.
Narcotrafficking cocaine cartels.
At the end of the day, we’re just like you. You have an office. I have mine. You deal with the broken copy machine. I deal with bitches. We even have a Christmas party. I’m a big hit when I’m not cutting a dude’s dick off and stuffing it down his throat.
If your cozy office job is anything like ours, it comes with cocaine and strippers too.
Something tells me that even if you have some of our cocaine, your office Christmas party is a little different.
Who knows, though. I could be wrong.
My thoughts wander to crazy shit like this because it isn’t like every job means I need to hand deliver the proof and shit. Sure, sometimes he just likes to see and give me a fatherlike hug and pat on the back. But Zario didn’t just call me in to praise his preferred upgrade to the Columbian Necktie. No, he’s got another job for me.
“There’s a miracle drug out there, and gringo fucking business bitches gonna shit in their Gucci to get a piece of it, and we gotta get to it first,” Zario tells me, sliding a folder over to me. “Coke squared has no comedown,” he waves his hands for flair.
No comedown cocaine? Now that shit is crazy.
“The chemist who designed it did it in our territory,” Zario says. “But before anyone could talk to him, he fucking fled. Blew up his own lab. Took the formula. Probably got scared that we’d come over and steal it from him.”
“Were we?” I ask, with a grin.
“Of course,” Zario says. “But now he’s gone and no one knows where he’s at. But his formula has to be somewhere and with someone. There’s some leads. I need you to chase it down.”
“This shit is money,” I state the obvious to Zario.
“It will make every white boy’s bleeding nose dance with fucking delight, and this year’s numbers will buy me so much I’m going to need to start buying a new fucking country, I’ll have so much damn money.
And I already have so much,” he laughs.
Whatever. I’ve got enough money as it is. I want the blood.
“So coke squared is what every motherfucker on the street is calling it,” Zario repeats himself. “And Cabeza Dios cartel has one smart bitch on it, and you should focus on doing all the terrible things you want to her body before you kill her.”
He pulls out a tablet and shows me pictures, video. Gives me all the dirty details on Eliza Lang, the only real competitor we need to worry about.
“Other bitches, they’re sniffing around, but you’ll knock them out with a backhand. She’s the one that you’ll need to focus on.” Zario zooms in on a picture of her so we can see a closeup on her tits.
“Not just for those?” I laugh. They’re fucking delectable. I do want to squeeze and suck on those perfect tits. I’m intrigued, too, that she’s a threat.
“No,” Zario laughs, patting me hard on the back. Proud of my fucking lecherous tendencies. Like adoptive father and son. “She’ll want supplies in our territory. The only thing we got going is that the alkaline base is found in our territory—that’s why the chemist set up his lab here in the first place. If we don’t do anything then she’ll find the formula and she’ll need to do some digging to decode it. So you kill her and you take over, figure out when’s best, handle this shit.” Zario smiles up at me, rubbing his nose. “And tell me how those tits feel, too, when you’re done.”
I nod, looking through the folder at what they know about miracle no comedown coke.
It’s interesting. I see the potential.
But chasing this tail? I’m not committing to anything. I know with Zario’s Latin lover good looks he probably gets enough tail without being the capo of a major drug cartel. But the fucker probably likes killing the women he fucks.
Something tells me right away that this job won’t be so simple, and it isn’t just because I’ve heard about Eliza Lang and I know how smart she is.
How good she is.
I look at her and fuck, I see why Zario’s so intent on telling me to fuck her. This woman is gorgeous. The video of her in San Diego airport, just a few seconds of her walking and checking her phone, and my cock is fucking twitching in my trousers. Her mouth looks so fuckable that I think mine is actually watering. She’s beautiful, and she’s strong, but something about Eliza...I don’t fucking know, it is almost like I see something I recognize in her that’s also in me. I know, what the fuck am I talking about?
I’m intrigued by her.
But something shakes within me, just a slight tremor. Something I’ve never experienced before.
A hesitance to kill someone.
I don’t want to kill her—even if I fuck her, then kill her, as Zario suggests.
He’s a sick motherfucker and I always figured I was, too, but no, there was a moment of hesitation in my mind.
Of course I’m still going to do it. It won’t be hard. She’s tough, but she’s not sicario.
She’s not a hitman. I am.
She not a killer. I am.
She deals in shipping manifests and microwaves and shit. So of course I am safe to assume that she’s no match for me.
Still, I don’t know what the fuck to think about this change in my thoughts.
Well, I’ve never known any family. Never had anyone I loved.
I’m a faithful fucking dog to Zario, though he does his best to treat me like a son because his other fuckwad actual sons could never be trusted with any part of the business.
Still, this is that moment where I know something is different.
The orphan boy who lives like a spartan, nothing of value to him, sees something he wants.
I don’t fail.
I know then that I will have her.
The other details seem way less important.
Like how I’m supposed to kill her?
Yeah, I’m pretty goddamn distracted.
I mentally shake my head, telling myself that this is how I get killed.
I don’t believe in distractions.
Or someone like me is going to be showing cop photos from vice to Zario of my mutilated fucking body.
Four
Eliza
“This better be good, Lorenzo,” I groan, sitting up on the bed with my phone pressed against my ear. I glance at the digital clock on the nightstand, and sigh heavily as 3:47 am blinks repeatedly on the screen.
“I wish.” From the tone of his voice, I can tell that he has just woken up as well. Good, at least I’m not the only one in pain right now. “I got a call from my contact in the Envigado.”
Shit. What do these fuckers want? Envigado is cartel that inherited the majority of Pablo Escobar’s operations when the policía snuffed him out over twenty years ago. Calling them a cartel is a misnomer though. Mostly, they keep to themselves and even act as mediators whenever there’s a major dispute in the international drug trade. Still, to get a call from them...that’s not a good omen.
“What the hell do they want?”
“The Mexicans are making a move,” Lorenzo breathes out, and I can feel the nervousness coating the words of my capo. The Mexicans, huh? Juan will probably shit his pants when I tell him. Or when he finds out.
“What kind of move?” I ask
“They know about what we’re looking for. Coke squared. And they’re looking for the formula as well,” he tells me. “The guys in Envigado got word that Zario’s men have been asking questions about the lab, trying to connect the dots. And they’re been rough about it, leaving a pile of bodies on their wake. Like Mexicans do.”
“Fuck,” I hiss through gritted teeth. I knew that the Mexicans would eventually show up to this dance, I just never thought they’d start making their moves this early in the game. “Who are we dealing with? Sinaloa? Juarez?”
Jesus fucking Christ, just not the Bonita Muerte assholes. I don’t want to spend the next few months dealing with those psychopath murdering fucks.
“Bonita Muerte,” Lorenzo whispers, almost as if he was too afraid to say the name of the cartel out loud. “Which turns our situation into a bonita mierda, Eliza.”
Well, at least he’s still trying to crack jokes, as lame as they might be.
“Fuck, we’ll have to move faster now.”
“Yes,” is all Lorenzo says. A moment later, he hangs up. He never says goodbye.
I sigh and look at my phone. It’s time to let Juan know.
“You heard?” is the first thing he asks when he picks up.
“The Mexicans?” I ask.
“Bonita Muerte,” he says with a sigh.
“We need to move fast,” I posit.
“Yeah, Eliza, we do,” he sighs, a note of desperation on his voice. “Jesus, Eliza...this is fucked up. I know that cartels don’t fuck around when it comes to their business...but these guys...oh, fuck, Eliza...have you seen what they do?”
“They don’t call them Bonita Muerte cartel for nothing, Juan. Now try and get some sleep. Tomorrow morning we’ll get together and think of something like we always do. There’s no way I’ll let these assholes beat us to it.”
I hang up the moment I finish speaking. I know that if I allowed him to, he’d just keep on whining. And, girl, if there’s something I can’t stand...is a whiner. If you’re such a pussy, maybe we shouldn’t be working for a cartel—hey, just saying. Although, yeah...once you get in this line of work, there’s no way out.
Unless you want to end up on the wrong side of the earth, that is.
For a moment, I consider laying down again, but then I just swing my legs off the bed and stretch my back. It’s early as hell, but at least I can get a headstart on the day. God knows I need it, now that other major players are making a move.
Wearing nothing but the skin I was born with, I tiptoe my way to my suite’s bathroom and get the water running on the tub. Then, grabbing the bath bombs the concierge gave me yesterday, I drop them on the water. I stand there, watching as a brightly colored foam starts taking over the
warm water, and then I jump in.
I lay there, just savoring the warmth, when I spot a bottle of champagne on the small table next to the tub. A girl can drink champagne at any hours of the day. Even 4 am.
Reaching for the bottle, I push the cork out with a loud pop! and then I pour a glass for me. I swear, this is the life. Drinking champagne at four in the morning, while laying back on the massive bathtub of my even more massive suite.
I revel in the peace that I be so relaxed when these Bonita Muerte assholes are trying to beat me to coke squared. Sure, they’re probably aching to put a bullet in my head. I take it one day at a time. And I wouldn’t have gotten this far if I spent my days wondering about what might happen. Besides, I’m a big girl, I have the backing of one of the most powerful cartels in the world, and I can handle myself.
Sure, I don’t hang around the frontline. I’m not out there chopping fingers and setting people on fire. And that’s for the best, really, since that kind of works would probably ruin my nails. But the thing is, I know how to use gun. I know how to use a knife. And I know how to use my fists, and how to kick a man so hard in the balls his voice will become high-pitched for the rest of his natural life.
So I’m not worried. I’m ready, and I’m taking a moment of unplugged me time.
I sit up on the tub as I hear my phone buzz in the bedroom.
Okay, maybe not so unplugged.
Sighing, I get up and saunter over to my suite, not even bothering with a towel.
You’ve been tailed, I read on my phone the moment I pick it up. They have eyes on you. I don’t recognize the number, but that’s normal. A lot of the communication we do inside the cartel is done through encrypted channels, or the old method of burner phones. Hey, snapping a phone in half is great fun.
Pressing my thumb on the screen, I open the attachment embedded on the message. There are a few photos of Mexican looking dudes in a car, one of them holding a camera, and there’s a timestamp on the bottom right corner.
Don't Trust Him: An Enemies to Lovers Romantic Suspense (King Vs. Queen Book 1) Page 2