The Shadow Cartel (The Dominic Grey Series Book 4)

by Layton Green

  There was no sign of Agent Turner.

  “Where is she?” Fred shouted. He prodded Hector into the group of men standing around the cauldron, then waved his gun at the group. “Keep them contained,” he said to the other two agents.

  Grey’s eyes caught a trickle of crimson seeping out of a closed doorway on the left side of the courtyard. The stream of blood advanced, pooling around the shoes of the nearest worshipper.

  Everyone saw it. Grey’s adrenaline spiked, and time seemed to both stop and accelerate.

  Fred pointed his gun at Hector, and the other two agents leveled their weapons at the group. Grey scanned the men and found the one he considered to be the biggest threat, a smaller man in the corner with the calm but alert stance of a predator. His face was concealed by a grey hoodie and his hand had been the first to slip inside his jacket, feeling for his weapon.

  “Open the door,” Fred said to Hector, his voice trembling.

  Not trembling from fear, Grey realized, but from barely controlled rage, as if Fred were a whistling teakettle ready to pop. His face had reddened and a vein on his neck pulsated like a signal from a lighthouse.

  “Solo un pollo,” Hector said, grinning. It’s just a chicken.

  The blood spread farther, to the base of the cauldron. Fred gritted his teeth. “Open it.”

  Hector’s grin expanded. “Sí, señor.”

  The priest stepped to the closet. As he opened the door, he whistled and then disappeared inside, closing the door behind him. A gunshot sounded. Anthony pitched forward, blood spurting from his chest. The men around the cauldron drew weapons and dispersed.

  Realizing the shot must have come from behind them, Grey dove behind a banana tree at the same time he shot the man in the grey hoodie. Out of the corner of his eye, just before he dove, he saw Fred shoot the dealer closest to him and then scurry away, and Agent Menendez firing his weapon into the crowd of men.

  Grey looked up and saw someone lying on the floor of the second-story balcony. He fired at the sniper, causing him to back-crawl through a door. The sight of the wraparound balcony caused Grey to swear. Too many exposed angles.

  When Grey looked back at the room, he saw five dead or unmoving bodies. Three cartel members, Agent Menendez, and Agent Miller. The stench of blood and gunpowder filled the air, mixing with the incense from the ritual. It was eerily quiet.

  Grey spotted Fred behind a palm tree to his right. Hector was still behind the door, which Grey assumed was a closet or a bedroom. The other two dealers must be hidden within the foliage on the other side of the courtyard.

  There was no sign of the assailant who had fired from the balcony, and that was a problem. Time was on his and Fred’s side, as he assumed a strike force was on the way, but they were outnumbered and had to live long enough to greet them.

  Grey caught Fred’s eye and motioned with a head jerk that he was going upstairs. Fred gave a thumbs-up and started firing across the courtyard. Grey took the cue and dashed for the stairway, just ahead of the return fire.

  Rising to a crouch, he sprinted for the stairs at the end of the corridor, gun gripped in two hands at chest level. He passed an open doorway just before the stairs, and almost got butchered by a wild-eyed Hector wielding a foot-long knife.

  The only thing that saved Grey was his jujitsu training to move into an attacker wielding a short-range weapon, rather than away. As soon as he saw the glint of iron coming at him from an overhead swipe, Grey ducked under the knife thrust and into the body of his attacker, negating the strike. Hector stumbled, and Grey grabbed him and whirled both their bodies violently to the ground, dropping his gun but using his own falling body weight as momentum for the twisting sacrifice throw.

  Hector was stunned by the maneuver, and Grey came up straddling him, using his knees to pin his opponent’s arms and trap the knife. Then he knocked the priest senseless with an elbow to the head.

  Grey heard sirens at the same time he saw a flash of movement at the top of the stairs. A gunman appeared and Grey had nowhere to go. He rolled with Hector’s body, using it as a shield, and felt a round of bullets thump into the priest’s flesh. One tore through Hector’s face and missed Grey by inches.

  Still hiding behind Hector’s body, Grey managed to grab his gun and return fire, catching the shooter in the leg. The man dropped his gun, which bounced halfway down the stairs.

  Grey threw off Hector’s limp corpse, ready to rush up the stairs and secure the man as a witness. Another gun sounded, and the man at the top of the stairs convulsed and then pitched forward.

  “What a pity,” Fred said from behind Grey. “No survivors.”

  Sometime after two a.m., after Grey finished downloading to a room full of DEA agents in the South Florida Home Division office in Weston, Fred caught him on the way out the door. “Want a lift?”

  “Sure.”

  “Grab some grub on the way?”

  Grey nodded.

  Weston was a muggy strip of suburb west of Fort Lauderdale, and Fred took him to a Waffle House near the Interstate. The place was packed, full of casino workers and a random assortment of nighttime denizens.

  “Grease never smelled so good,” Grey said.

  Fred found a booth in the rear and glanced eagerly at the menu. “This place almost makes Weston bearable. Miami’s too full of places where they hold your wee-wee when you pee.”

  They both ordered coffees and waffles with bacon. The food came quickly, and Grey dug in. When he was finished eating, Fred leaned forward and cupped his hands around his coffee mug. “Thanks for not ratting me out.”

  Grey knew he was talking about the unarmed man Fred had shot at the top of the stairs. Grey took a sip of coffee and eyed Fred calmly. “I got over that when I saw what they did to Agent Turner.” He pushed away a mental image of the undercover agent’s corpse, the hole in her chest cavity gaping like a shark’s mouth. He didn’t want to know where they had found her missing organ.

  “What I care about was losing a potential witness,” Grey said. “And how they made her. But hey, it’s your case.”

  “He shot my partner in the back. I did what I had to.”

  “I’m not your boss or your priest. It’s your conscience. I’m just saying he might have been a good guy to interview. How’s Anthony?”

  “Critical, but alive. Maybe paralyzed.”

  “I’m very sorry.”

  “Yeah.” Fred stuck a toothpick in the side of his mouth, eying Grey’s empty plate. “Most people wouldn’t have an appetite after a night like that.”

  “Probably not.”

  “How many times you been there?”

  “Too many,” Grey said.

  Fred gave a slow nod, flipped the toothpick over. “You know that guy in the gray hoodie you shot?”

  “Yeah.”

  “It wasn’t a guy. It was Angel Alianza.”

  “One of the assassin twins?” Grey pressed his lips together and returned to his coffee.

  “Her brother probably won’t be too happy about that,” Fred said.

  “Not much I can do about that now.”

  Fred’s chuckle died almost as soon as it started. “You’re one cool customer, aren’t you?”

  Grey set his coffee down. He didn’t react because he was a professional, but the violence of the evening still filled his veins like a drug, coursing through his system as sure and swift as any narcotic. It was an addiction he fought at every turn, a patch of darkness on his soul he loathed with all of his being.

  The thing was, just like a heroin addiction, violence was a path that, once trod upon, was impossible to leave behind. It could only be managed, fought against, compartmentalized.

  “I thought I was the guy who made people nervous,” Fred muttered. “Look, I appreciate all your help. And you’re right, I screwed us. I don’t know how they made Agent Turner, and we probably never will. And that other thing with Lana, the cult angle—tonight was our shot.” He twirled the toothpick and smiled his confident s
mile. “But that’s okay. You’re private sector, and my career’s already ruined.”

  The waitress cleared their plates, and Grey said, “You know the two guys I took out at Manny’s place? They still in custody?”

  “Nah, we had nothing on them except a few stolen bones from the cemetery. Those two are guppies. We threw them back in the sea.”

  “Let’s go chat with one of them.”

  “I already have,” Fred said.

  “You might not have asked the right questions.”

  Fred stopped fiddling with the toothpick. “What’re you thinking?”

  “Get me an interview and I’ll let you know.”

  Fred dropped Grey outside his hotel. On the way to his room, as the last of the adrenaline seeped away and left him feeling hollow and alone, Grey couldn’t stop thinking about the expression on Fred’s face during the shootout, the bloodthirsty glaze that had coated his eyes. He knew Fred was fighting a losing battle against his demons, and it pained Grey because he sensed Fred was a good man.

  But Fred had seen too much or fought too long, or something else had happened, something that had taken him to the brink. He was perilously close to succumbing to the siren call of violence and slipping into those dark waters forever.

  Grey didn’t have many possessions, but one of them was a tiny soapstone carving of two intertwined lovers that Nya had given him. He took it off the bedside table and carried it to the balcony, feeling the need to gaze upon the beauty of the night sky before bed, a final cleansing of the events of the day. As he leaned on the railing, carving in hand and thinking of Nya, he heard a faint thwap and sensed rather than saw the stone ball hurtling towards him out of the darkness. He flung his body downward onto the cement.

  The balcony door shattered behind him. Shards of glass punctured his skin. A scream pierced the night.

  As he peered through the metal railing, a streetlight illuminated what looked like an athletic young Amerindian woman, dressed in a loincloth and a leather bra, disappearing into the darkness of Lummus Park. Her skin had a distinct blue tinge.

  Grey belly-crawled inside his room, took the stairs four at a time, and sprinted into the park. Head on a swivel, he canvassed the park once, twice, three times. He ran up and down the beach, circled the hotel, checked the streets off the beach.

  Nothing.

  No one.

  The woman who had screamed, a stripper returning to her condo, had seen nothing. The scream was a reaction to the glass shattering.

  Not a single suspect or witness or clue, just wisps of warm sea breeze that caressed him like the memory of lovers past.

  Or perhaps, he thought, it wasn’t the memory of lovers at all, but the ghosts of those whose lives he had taken, surrounding him like the ocean of dead souls in Kalunga, mocking him as he searched in vain for his spectral assailant.

  Grey kept lookout until dawn, and stayed in bed until ten. When he woke he called Fred and updated him on the attack.

  “A slingshot and a blue Indian, huh?” Fred said. “I guess this just got a bit more personal.”

  “Guess so.”

  “It could be a warning, telling you to back off.”

  “A warning? If I hadn’t dropped, I’d be lying on a slab with a stone ball embedded in my skull.”

  “Still want to meet with the goon from Manny’s place? I don’t blame you if you don’t.”

  “What do you think?” Grey said.

  Fred grunted. “Pick you up in half an hour?”

  “You’ve got it set up already?”

  “You could say that. Listen, I dug into Hector a bit more, like you asked. He opened the botánica soon after he returned from Mexico. Before that, he worked at a gas station that pumped more drugs than gas.”

  “What about cult activity?” Grey asked.

  “He’s been a licensed santero for years, even before Mexico. Why? What’re you thinking?”

  “I think Hector Fortuna upped his game in Mexico.”

  Fred drove Grey down South Dixie Highway to Cutler Bay, a jumble of seedy strip malls south of Miami. The house where Fred parked was the largest on the block, a stucco with garish yellow awnings and Roman statues on the lawn.

  The property belonged to Elias Monte, one of the men Grey had taken out when the Alianza twins had disrupted the ceremony on Manny Lopez’s back patio. Elias answered the door with a bandage wrapped around his head, and Grey remembered him: a snub-nosed bulldog of a man with close-set eyes and thick arms.

  Elias’s eyes found Fred’s badge, then widened when he saw Grey. “You’re the hijo de puta who pistol-whipped me,” he said, taking a step forward.

  Fred held a palm out and put his other hand on his gun. “It’s time for our appointment,” he said.

  “What appointment?”

  “The one we have right now.” Fred waved his gun towards the car. “Let’s go.”

  Elias hesitated, nervous. “I’m not going anywhere with you.”

  “I don’t know who’s inside that house, so we’re going to my car. Or downtown, if you prefer. We have plenty to hold you on. Not least of which is the cocaine we found on you at Manny’s house.”

  The nostrils of Elias’s snub nose flared, and he balled his fists. He muttered to himself but let Fred lead him to the back seat of his car. Grey slid in opposite.

  “I already told you everything I know. I’m not talking to any more cops without my lawyer.”

  “I’m not a cop,” Grey said softly. Elias whipped his head around to stare him down, but ended up moving his eyes to the side.

  “Hector was Manny’s palero, wasn’t he?” Grey asked.

  He got the reaction he expected: Elias’s face tightened, a shadow of both fear and surprise sweeping across his visage.

  “Was Hector different when he came back from Mexico?” Grey asked.

  “I no know what you mean,” Elias muttered.

  “I think you do. He met his own palero there, didn’t he? Someone known to the cartel. Who was it?”

  Elias didn’t answer. His forearm was lying on the seat rest, and Grey slid his own forearm over it. Before Elias could pull away, Grey slipped his thumb against the inside of Elias’s wrist and pressed.

  Elias gasped. “Coño!”

  He tried to pull away, but Grey had entwined their forearms, and when Elias twitched Grey pressed harder on the median nerve, the soft area between the radius and the ulna on the inside of the wrist. Acute pressure on the median nerve, Grey knew, caused a feeling of intense and nauseating pain.

  As Elias moaned, Grey asked, “Who’s Hector’s palero?”

  Fred’s eyes were wide, but he said nothing. Grey increased the pressure, until Elias screamed and looked like he was going to be sick. Grey released enough to let him speak.

  “Okay, okay, loco, it’s not like it’s a secret. But I’m telling you it’s the last name on earth you want to know.”

  Grey found Elias’s eyes again, keeping pressure on the nerve. Elias squirmed and said, “Tata Menga, okay? That’s his name, I swear.”

  Grey watched him, found a face too brutish and simple for effective lying. What he did see was fear, swimming in Elias’s engorged brown pupils.

  “Where is he?” Grey asked.

  “Mexico.”

  “That’s a big country.”

  “Hey man, you said just his name.”

  Grey squeezed.

  “El Yucatan!”

  “Where in the Yucatan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Grey pressed his thumb even deeper, feeling the tendons underneath. Elias tried to ball his fist, but Grey knew that made the pain worse, and Elias bellowed and flung his head against the seat back. “I swear I don’t know. No one does. He lives somewhere in the jungle. In Palo Land.” He emitted a high-pitched giggle that sprang from the pain. “Palos are sticks, you know. Sticks are trees, trees are forests. Palo Land is where the spirits roam.”

  Grey watched him a moment longer, then released his grip and nodd
ed at Fred. Fred opened the door and let Elias stumble out of the car. Elias spit on the ground as he walked backwards towards his house, rubbing his wrist, finally mustering the courage to meet Grey’s eyes. “Go find Tata Menga, you stupid cabrón. Go find him and die.”

  Want to tell me what that was all about?” Fred asked as they drove north, away from Elias’s house.

  “Sure,” Grey said. “As soon as you tell me what the hell’s going on.”

  Fred chuckled, then took a toothpick out and twirled it between his fingers. “You really think there’s some connection to that priest in Mexico?”

  Grey didn’t answer, watched the traffic inch forward.

  Fred took a deep breath. “Fair enough, I don’t blame you. I need to okay it with Lana.”

  “I’ve got a better idea. How about I hear it from her in person? If she’s interested in what I have to say, let’s all talk.”

  Fred glanced at Grey as he drove, then reached for his cell. When Lana answered, Fred gave a rundown of the events of the last twenty-four hours, including the shootout at Hector’s house, the attack on Grey, and a teaser of the conversation with Elias Monte.

  Fred listened for a few seconds, grunted his assent to something, then shut his cell and looked at Grey. “How about right now?”

  Lana wanted to meet at a coffee shop in Coral Gables, which Grey found odd. Why the public venue?

  As they drove through the Gables, Grey’s eyes rose at the display of wealth, while the natural beauty reminded him of the northern suburbs of Harare, where Nya lived. The whole neighborhood a seething jungle, jacarandas and flamboyants and mangoes and lichen-covered oaks, entire streets shaded by canopies of banyans with their vine-like tendrils swaying down like horses’ tails.

  They drove down a street full of upscale boutiques with red barrel-tile roofs that soaked up the sun. The café was at the end of the block. Fred led Grey through a door in the rear, to a brick courtyard surrounded by a wall draped with bougainvillea. The place smelled of lavender and coffee beans.