The Cartel (A Sarah Roberts Thriller Book 15)
Page 23
The RV pulled up. Parkman jumped out before Daniel fully stopped the vehicle.
They helped Sarah inside and placed her on the back bed where Benjamin still slept.
Daniel turned the RV around and drove away from the ruined Enzo Cartel compound and headed for the border.
Aaron collapsed at the edge of the bed, holding Sarah’s hand, and forgot everyone else for a time as he wept, her hand pressed gently into his cheek.
Chapter 49
The vehicle came to a stop, the engine revs lowering. She opened her eyes, disorientation waxing over her.
Vehicle?
A camper on wheels. She lay on the bed, Aaron holding her hand. He was staring at her inner elbow where Eduardo shot her up with heroin several times.
Aaron’s bloodshot eyes turned toward her. They locked eyes for a moment, then he leaned in and gently hugged her.
“I thought you were gone for good. I’m so glad you’re still with us.”
“Where would I have gone?” she asked. “How did you find me?”
Aaron lifted his head. “I knew about the reservoir. Figured you’d use it.”
The RV edged forward, then stopped.
“Name everyone.”
“What?”
“Tell me who is in this camper thing with us.”
Aaron told her all the names, even Darwin’s mercenaries. Casper came back to tell her she was one tough woman. Parkman made an appearance and hugged her gently.
“I don’t want to get up just yet. Ribs ache.”
Parkman nodded and left her with Aaron.
“We have so much to talk about,” Aaron said.
“Yes, we do. Let me see your finger.”
Aaron raised the bandaged appendage. “Once we’re home, I’ll get this properly cleaned. It’ll be okay. I can still work with it gone.”
“I’m sorry they did this to you,” Sarah said.
“I know, baby.” He looked at her arm. “I’m sorry they did that to you.”
She was already feeling the urge. One little fix and she’d be all set. She wouldn’t touch the stuff ever again. Just one more fix.
“It’s fine,” she said. “I’ll get over it.”
His face softened and he offered her a half smile. “Any chance you could take a break? A vacation? I felt like I lost you back there.”
“I was thinking the same thing. This is it for a while. I need to heal, work out, eat a full meal. I’m starving.”
“Are you going to have issues with that?” he asked, gesturing at her inner elbow. “Those tracks tell a story.”
She looked at her arm, then averted her eyes. “No. But if I do, I will get treatment, do rehab. It’s not an issue because it wasn’t my fault. I couldn’t stop them. I’ll beat it. I’m stronger than any substance.”
She hoped her eyes didn’t betray her as she had just betrayed Aaron. If heroin was beside her, she wouldn’t ignore it. She would shoot up. At least once more. But she couldn’t let anyone know that because she would beat it and never feel the urge again. She decided to blame her weakened state for the urge. It had to be that. Nothing else. Thinking about it, having Aaron bring it up, only made her yearn for one more fix. Just one, then it would be truly over.
“I didn’t mean anything by it,” he said.
She closed her eyes as the RV moved again. “Where are we?”
“At the Mexican border. We’re about to enter the States.”
She opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling. “With mercenaries on board? Isn’t that risky?”
“Casper made a call. They’re expecting us. Some kind of diplomatic immunity for this vehicle.”
She smiled. “I’m sure glad that guy’s still alive. He’s good for something, eh?”
Aaron nodded beside her. “He sure is. Probably wouldn’t have escaped the compound if it wasn’t for him.”
“I’m so glad everyone is here. I can’t believe the friends I have.”
Benjamin woke beside her and tried to sit up. “Yeah, I can’t believe the friends I have. Took a bullet for them.”
They laughed together. Sarah’s urge increased. She needed a fix or she was going to withdraw. She wasn’t sure what withdrawal symptoms were like as she’d never had heroin in her system before. Would the withdrawal be that bad? She’d only been high for a few days. But it was a permanent high. They’d kept shooting shit into her veins. The unknown weakened her resolve. She detested weakness and had never felt so weak in her life.
I’ll beat this, right Sis?
“One thing is for sure,” Aaron said. “We need a vacation.”
“Take me to my parents in Santa Rosa. Give me a day or two and then the two of us will find a beach hotel somewhere and turn the world off for a few weeks. Deal?”
“Turn off the world, this one and the one on the other side?”
“Yes, Vivian too.”
“Deal.” Aaron turned to the rest of the men in the RV. “Guys, we’re officially on vacation.”
A small congratulations and cheers went up, then died. Daniel pulled closer to the border. Sarah squirmed on the bed. Her forehead beaded up in sweat. This wasn’t like her. Feelings of need and weakness didn’t become her. She left a part of herself back at the compound. She lost something back there and it was going to take considerable effort and time to get it back. If she didn’t get a small fix, Aaron would think he was losing her and she never wanted him to ever feel that he was losing her.
A small fix … or Losing Sarah.
“Yeah, a bloody vacation,” she whispered. “Brilliant.”
The RV edged closer to the border.
Afterword
Dear Reader,
I wanted to address cartels in this novel due to the seriousness of their existence. The amount of cocaine entering through America’s southern border is incredible. Canada too. Cartels are responsible for 90 percent of the cocaine entering the U.S. alone. Cartels have a wholesale earning estimated as high as fifty billion per year. When they arrest the leader of a cartel, violence escalates as rival cartels move in to fill the void and claim the disputed territory as their own.
Currently the Sinaloa Cartel and the Gulf Cartel have taken the trafficking of cocaine from Columbia to worldwide markets.
But they’re a relatively new thing. The birth of the Mexican Cartel is traced back to 1980 when Miguel Gallardo—“The Godfather”—founded the Guadalajara Cartel. He was a former Mexican Judicial Federal Police agent.
Among the atrocities attributed to cartels in 2011, 177 bodies were discovered in a mass grave in Tamaulipas. It’s the same area where seventy-two migrants’ bodies were found in 2010.
Just recently, on September 26, 2014, forty-three students on a trip went missing. Mexican authorities are suggesting local law enforcement took part in a shootout that night where buses carrying dozens of students and soccer players were attacked. When the authorities came to this southern Mexican town to search for the missing students, they found unmarked mass graves of other victims. Twenty-eight bodies were covered in gasoline and burned before they were buried. Too brutal for reality.
You have probably heard that El Chapo, the Sinaloa Cartel drug lord, recently escaped. And the saga continues.
April 2015, CNN announced that DEA agents have been attending sex parties filled with prostitutes, paid for by drug cartels. They discovered that fifteen to twenty parties have been organized by drug cartels. In some cases, DEA agents have received expensive gifts and weapons from cartels. One DEA agent beat a prostitute over a payment dispute and received a two-week unpaid leave as punishment. His security clearance wasn’t revoked. He wasn’t fired. He wasn’t disciplined further. In fact, no DEA agent has been fired for their actions in partaking in these cartel bought and paid for hooker parties.
I chose Tijuana as the location for this novel because it’s a major portal city to the north. There were 844 homicides in Tijuana in 2008, more than double Detroit. Cartels are always looking for more and more dread
ful ways to kill and stimulate fear in their enemies.
Hugo Hernandez, twenty-six years old, was kidnapped from Sonora in 2010. A week later, in the city of Los Mochis, they found his corpse. He’d been chopped to pieces. His face had been skinned off and sewn—stitched—to a soccer ball.
Finally, and not to belabor the point, let me add more.
-Masked gunmen dump thirty-five bodies on a street during rush hour in Mexico. Twitter lit up immediately as drivers tried to warn others to avoid the area.
-A female blogger who routinely blogged about drug traffickers was found decapitated, her head atop the keyboard she typed her blogs on.
There are hundreds of other stories, hence the reason I wanted Sarah to fight a cartel.
Here’s the good part—names in this novel were used as an ongoing program I’m doing with readers. If you ever want your name featured in a book, email me at jonassaul@icloud.com. Or if you just want to say hello or state an opinion, hit me up.
Credit and thanks go to:
Ellen Burns - Parkman’s safe house Special Agent #1.
Kira Junod - Parkman’s safe house Special Agent #2.
Tessa McCurry - Sarah’s sassy nurse in the Mexican hospital when she cracked a rib.
Book group/writer group members of WASP—Writers, Artists, Specialists and Perusers. Here they are:
Alexia Purdy - President
Sandra Gonzales - Vice President
Debbie Lyons - alter ego Penelope
Charlotte Cross - Researcher
Lesley Weiler
Lavern Skipper
Debra Smith
Lisa Wesley
Thank you to all of you who allowed me to use your names and thanks for saving Sarah’s life. If WASP didn’t show up at the compound when they did, Sarah might’ve died in the barn. Because they were at the gate, they delayed Enzo long enough that he ended up taking her on the helicopter in his feeble attempt to escape his own compound. So thanks for that.
And thanks for reading. Not just the people above, but all of you. Thanks for coming back, time and again to see what Sarah is up to. I love you all and wish you the best wherever you are. And know you’re in my thoughts as I’m eternally grateful to have you as readers. I couldn’t do this without you. No really, I couldn’t.
Great pains are made to make sure everything in this novel is accurate and error free. Any and all mistakes that might appear are mine and mine alone.
Stay safe, be well, take care of yourself and each other. And get caught reading …
Love,
Jonas
Good reviews are important to a novel’s success. If you enjoyed The Cartel, please leave a review wherever you purchased the book.
Sincerely,
About Jonas Saul
Jonas Saul is the author of the Sarah Roberts Series and The Mafia Trilogy.
Visit his website, www.jonassaul.com for upcoming release dates, and to sign up for the newsletter. Jonas lives in Washington, USA.
Contact Jonas Saul
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