by A. J. Adams
“What do we do about it?” Chumillo asked. “What if Songbird is here?”
“There’s no need for panic,” Kyle said quietly. “As we’ve had no more leaks, it’s possible Songbird was after the English rim job. We may have been hit just because we were in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
That cheered everyone up, and the mood lightened.
“But just to be certain,” Kyle continued. “We have a general security audit.”
“You mean like check everyone?” Rafa asked.
“Yes. Everyone gets the once-over, no exceptions.”
“I like it,” Chumillo said slowly. “It will give us peace of mind.”
“Where do we start?” Rafa asked.
“We start with us,” Kyle told him. “We work outwards, eliminating people as we go.”
“How do we check us out?” Chumillo asked.
“Group grope,” Rafa grinned.
“I ran a check on us all last week,” Kyle said quietly.
There was a dead silence, and then everyone was swearing at him. Kyle took it, and when they ran down, he just shrugged. “In case you were wondering, we’re all clean.”
Quique was looking unhappy, but he said nothing. I knew what was bothering him: Tina, his wife, was running round on him. Kyle had uncovered it, and I had seen the file, but we’d pretend we didn’t know. It was too humiliating, and it might blow over, so it was better for everyone to be in official ignorance.
“Now that Kyle has proven us all lily-white, we all take half a dozen people, and we check them out. When those pass, they get one or two people each to check out. Make sure everyone down from us is checked out twice,” I told them.
“Send up a red flag is there’s any doubt at all.” Kyle’s Marine roots were showing. “But do it quietly.”
“We meet again in three days,” I told them. “This takes priority over everything else.”
“We’ve got three big shipments this week,” Chumillo reminded me.
“I’ll make sure that’s all good. You focus on Songbird.”
Afterwards, Kyle hung back. “Arturo, this stinks.”
“Yeah.”
“I had a look at our operations abroad,” Kyle said. “Leaving England out of it, we had a couple of heists in the US, a lost plane in Colombia, and three of our people picked up in Canada. For the rest it’s small robberies and general losses worth practically nothing.”
“I got the same. In our local operations, we’ve had two dozen shootings, all part of everyday business, nothing suspicious. We’ve lost two factories through fire – faulty wiring, not arson – and we’ve had some cop shakedown troubles in Mexico City, but apart from that, business is pretty smooth.”
Something was bothering me. “You know, Kyle, it really makes no sense. If Songbird got to Escamilla’s safe, why not rat out the whole operation? Why go for customs people and goddamn DJs for chrissakes when there was twenty kis coming in every damn fortnight? Songbird could have rolled up Escamilla and everyone else, lock stock and barrel!”
Kyle thought for a while. “What about this?” he mused. “New operations are always tricky, and it’s the easiest time to create a power vacuum and to step in. Songbird knows Escamilla is looking to break away, so he gets his hands on some intel and passes it to the Met, knowing that when the shit hits the fan, we blame Escamilla, Escamilla blames us, and while we’re killing each other, Songbird and his organisation step in and take over.”
Kyle used to hunt terrorists so he’s used to thinking sneaky. Sometimes he sees conspiracy where there is none, but as we’re running a billion dollar business, there’s always someone ready to play mind games, just to see if they can take a chunk out of us.
“Not the Poles, because they had Escamilla in their pocket,” I was thinking out loud. “Maybe someone like the Rovers; their territory runs next to ours. Or it may have been a test run for something even bigger. The Gulf are always looking to take us out, but we’re too tight on our home turf to try anything. Maybe they used the UK to test our systems because it was new and therefore vulnerable.”
“And they got to see how long it took us to figure it out, and what we’d do to fix it,” Kyle nodded. “It’s classic strategy: if you know your enemy and know yourself, you’ll have nothing to fear in a hundred battles. Know yourself but not your enemy, and you’ll have equal chance of loss and victory. Know the enemy but not yourself, and you’ll lose every time.”
“The Art of War?”
“Yup.”
It was interesting to speculate, but we had no way of knowing if we’d hit it on the button, or if we were just paranoid. One thing was for certain, though. “Whoever Songbird works for, he must have been trusted enough to walk in and out freely. Escamilla didn’t leave those lists tacked to the fridge door.”
“It’s not one of us,” Kyle said positively. “Not inner circle.”
He’d been annoyed that I’d told him to check out Quique, Rafa and Chumillo. Kyle’s loyal to the bone, so it hurt him that I suspected them.
“Our cousins? Come on!” he’d snapped. “Fuck me, Arturo but where does it end? Do you suspect me, maybe?”
“It’s not personal. Better safe than sorry.”
He’d seen the sense of it, and he’d done a great job, but it still rankled. I love him to death, trust him with my life, but my brother does have his blind spots. Once you make exceptions, it never stops. Better to treat everyone the same.
“Listen Kyle, we can’t afford to let this drag on. You know how it is: if the men think we’ve got a rat, they’ll panic and do something stupid.”
“I know.”
“I want you to set up canary traps.”
One of the great advantages we have over everyone else is that we’re loaded with Special Forces talent, and Kyle in particular is the equivalent of a platoon of James Bonds. At my words he nodded; he’d been thinking along the same lines.
A canary trap is one of those sneaky spy tricks that’s easy to set up. There’s a lot of wasted time and effort, but when it pays off, it pays off big. What you do is share a secret with someone, like where you’re going to pick up a tonne of product. Then you wait and see what happens. If you’ve trusted the wrong person, the feds are waiting for you. If not, you move on.
Of course everyone knows about this kind of deal, so the clever types work around it. Like I said earlier when that fucker Davis tried to finger Solitaire, sometimes they let even the juiciest bait slide so that their undercover gets to sit nice and tight.
“I’ve already started,” Kyle said. “Let me tell you how I want to work this.”
Man, I love working with the best! Kyle had it all set up, but despite that, we sat tight for a week, ran our checks, put out bait and came up with nothing.
“We did have three bites for one of our canary traps,” Kyle reported ruefully. “Our mark blabbed in a bar, and as a result three people we’ve never heard of turned up to hijack a lorry of bootleg whiskey.”
“Jesus! It’s a wonder we don’t get busted by the Federales every day of the week!”
Kyle shrugged. “At least gossip goes both ways. Six of our own associates warned me about the leak, too.”
At this point I was seriously hoping it meant that Songbird had been a hit and run. I told Kyle to finish the security checks, but frankly it was looking like we were clean. Someone in my home could do serious damage, but we were now down to checking our club owners, subcontractors and other people with too little access to hurt us.
So I prayed that Songbird had moved on to new pastures and turned my attention to Solitaire. From the outside she looked as if she had it together. The household was working great, with the girls going around grinning all the time and the foundation beginning to select candidates for sponsorship. Solitaire got on well with the men, even taking on our security measures without a problem, which relieved Quique, Rafa and Chumillo, who were in charge of hers.
“She’s got an instinct for this,” Chumillo to
ld me. “She uses hats and scarves to change her silhouette; she avoids security cameras and even crosses the street at an angle.”
“And unlike Loli and Julia, she never tries to ditch her phone or us,” Quique added. “It makes life very easy.”
So it looked like Solitaire was fine, but I worried about my girl because she was suffering from bad dreams and flashbacks galore. It wasn’t obvious. In fact, she tried to hide it from me, pretending she was cold when she got a flashback from glimpsing herself in a window and sneaking out of bed in the middle of the night so I wouldn’t know she’d had a nightmare.
“Sirena, you can’t fool me,” I told her when I caught her slipping out of bed in the middle of the night. “You’re talking in your sleep, and you’re hotter than a three dollar pistol.”
“I’m okay,” she said stubbornly. “I just need a drink of water.”
“You’re soaked with sweat.”
“I’m just hot.”
“You’re shivering.”
Solitaire sighed. “Arturo, I love it when you’re all protective but drop it, okay?”
“But –“
“No.”
“A doctor –“
“I said no.”
By this time it was me giving her the evil eye. “You know you’re as stubborn as a mule, right?”
“Yes.”
“I could make you go.”
Her chin went straight up. “Try it.”
I had visions of trying to manhandle her into Bautista’s office. “All right, sirena. You win.”
Although I’d told her okay, I watched her carefully, determined that if she got any worse, I would take her in, kicking and screaming if necessary.
I also found myself trying to minimise the shit she might see. When one of our dealers was found to be working both ends of the street, working for the Gulf and boasting about it, the stupid fuck, I ordered the men to give him the salami treatment. In case you haven’t guessed, it’s what we call taking someone apart, slice by slice. I know, we have a sick sense of humour. It comes with the life.
Seeing that making salami is a noisy business, I told them to do it in the helicopter hangar. It’s a mile from the house, on my own land, but its solid doors and the distance mean the screams don’t travel into the private compound.
Actually, Solitaire was in town for a foundation meeting when it went down, but I wasn’t risking her coming home early. She’d not said a word about the American kid’s punishment, but I had the suspicion that it did bother her, so I made sure Solitaire was protected.
“I do the same,” Kyle told me later. “Chloe thinks she’s seen it all, and she probably has, but I don’t want her reminded.”
Chloe lives in sylvan ignorance, but Solitaire is in my home, the centre of my business. Luckily a lot of my work is legit, and she made it clear she had no problem with me trafficking coke, either. “If people want to sniff, snort or whatever, let them,” she said. “They’re adults, and it’s not like they don’t know the risks.”
That was my thought too, so we were all square about that. However, cutting a man into pieces while he’s still alive is a different ballgame, so I made certain she would never know. But as usual, Solitaire surprised me. She came home from town, told me all about her meeting and then let me know there was no point in me trying to pretend I’d been in my office all afternoon.
“I know about that dealer who was working for the Gulf,” she said. “You’re right, Arturo, I don’t like the violence, but I do understand that you need to protect your business.”
“Can’t hide anything from you, can I, sirena?”
“Not when the crew are worse gossips than Perez Hilton.”
Even though she let me know I didn’t have to tiptoe around her, she did ask if I were absolutely certain. “You got it wrong about Chloe,” she reminded me. As she was right, I found myself rethinking some of my ways. Over the next few weeks I began giving borderline cases the benefit of the doubt. Then Jesus from Reynosa came to lunch, and I ended up making a significant change to my operations.
At this point Solitaire had been with me for about six weeks, and her Spanish was now excellent. She’d also shown such an interest in my work and I found it so useful to bounce ideas off her that I’d let everyone know they could talk business over lunch like we did in the old days. So Jesus came round for English style roast beef and filled us in on recent events in Reynosa.
“With all the new houses, we’ve got a good basis for some superior services, so I think we should start a strip club. There’s a place with a dozen rooms, so we can add on a whorehouse, too.”
“Sounds good. Show me the figures.”
It did look excellent, and I was all set to agree when Solitaire frowned. “The girls are volunteers, right? And over eighteen?”
“Of course,” Jesus soothed.
Solitaire gave him a cold look. “Don’t fuck with me, Jesus. You didn’t even think about it.”
Jesus shrugged. “Look, we work with brokers, and we don’t exactly ask for a birth certificate.”
“Brokers or breakers?”
“Oh, come on!” Jesus was offended. “It’s just business.”
Jesus didn’t care but Chumillo and Kyle, who were also at the lunch, did. They’ve been at me before about these things, and so have some of the others. We don’t deal in paedophilia like the Russian gangs do, nor do we handle any snuff business like some of the Chinese tongs, but the flesh trade is a nice source of income for us. We’ve got escort services, topless bars, porno film services, the lot. It’s not much money compared to everything else, but it’s steady and easy.
The flesh trade can be a tricky issue, especially as the women tend to be young – I mean, the market for naked, wrinkled old ladies is a limited niche, right? While we all own a bit of something here or there, the family men are usually a bit cautious, while the younger ones are more inclined towards leveraging the bottom line as much as possible.
Generally speaking, the cartel does whatever makes the most money, but ever since we brought in the new rules – like the one that protects women and kids from fallout – the family people have been a lot happier, and it’s not cost us anything in terms of respect. In fact, quite the reverse. We’re getting a rep for being decent, for fuck’s sake, which means less hassle, more people coming to us for loans, and even the clean cops (I think there are two) are focusing on the Gulf rather than us.
So when Solitaire spoke up, I remembered that being seen as the good guys had been useful. I also knew that she was thinking of her time with Escamilla. From the way she talked in her sleep I knew she was reliving part of it, and it was hurting her. She was thinking of the girls who might be forced into the same situation, and she hated the idea.
I thought about it and made my decision. “I’m all for it, but hire directly, no brokers, okay?”
“Sure, jefe. No problem.” Jesus was all right about it, although it would mean more work for him, but the others were smiling. It was definitely a popular decision; I’d see in a few months if it was a good one. If it wasn’t, we could always revert to our old ways.
“Do you mind?” Solitaire asked later.
“Not really. It’s all part of the new system.” I spoke automatically, but I was wondering if I was making decisions from weakness rather than strength.
“Don’t worry, Arturo, nobody will ever think you’re turning into a pussy.” Solitaire grinned at me. “You’ve still got lots of bad boy mojo going for you.”
“Thank God for that.”
Solitaire was teasing, but apart from the failure to find Songbird, business was fantastic, and for the first time in my life, I was discovering true love. I watched Solitaire settle arrangements with Luz for the Saturday family gathering and thought about how much she was changing my life. For the first time ever I had a woman who was loving, giving, and strong – as strong as me, actually. I was looking at her, and as always her beauty had my breath catching in my throat. My Solitaire was a h
eartbreaker, all right. We’d had only a few weeks together, but I knew this was for life. I wanted her, and I wanted her forever.
I knew with sudden clarity what I wanted.
“Solitaire,” I started to say.
But Solitaire was looking out of the kitchen window with surprise. “Arturo, we’ve got company.”
Before I could go to see, Rafa was ushering someone in. He was tall, dark, and dressed in Armani. It took me a second to realise who it was. Miguel Fuentes, Solitaire’s ex.
“Hey, Arturo Vazquez! We meet at last!”
He was oozing all over me like a rash, the fucker. Then he turned to my girl.
“Solitaire! More beautiful than ever!”
Then he was all over her. It was just as well I didn’t have a gun.
Fuentes finally let Solitaire go and turned to me. “Listen, we’ve got to talk. Have you heard of Songbird?”
So much for everything going well.
Chapter Twenty: Solitaire
I thought he looked familiar because he’d been part of the crew, but the second he hugged me I realised that this was someone who had known me in the past. I remembered I’d seen him in my dossier. This was Miguel Fuentes.
I thought that Arturo’s jealousy was just a bit of a show he put on as part of the macho image of the cartel man. Turns out Arturo is a hot pot of red possessive fury. Oh, he tried not to show it. In fact, he tried to pretend he was totally cool with Fuentes turning up, but when Miguel kissed me, I saw a vein begin to throb in Arturo’s forehead. His hands were twitching convulsively, too, like he was strangling someone.
Miguel didn’t appear to notice anything wrong. “Solitaire, you’re more beautiful than ever!”
“Thanks, but do get off me –”
“– because you’re not a stripper’s pole,” he said calmly. “I see you haven’t changed.”
“Why would I change?” It came out cold. What’s more, I didn’t like him pawing me. He was holding my hands, rubbing his thumbs over my palms. I shook him off. “Quit mauling me, Miguel.”
“Joder, Solitaire! You’ve still not forgiven me?”