Ransom (Dead Man's Ink #3)

by Callie Hart

  “So what do we do? Tell me there’s a way to fix this,” she says, lifting the mug to her mouth and drinking. Cade sends me a look that tells me he knows exactly what I’ve done, and exactly how much trouble I’m going to be in because of it. I scowl at him. Over the next fifteen minutes we talk about ways in which we might be able to rescue Alan, and Sophia starts to go a little cross-eyed. The Zolpidem is potent to say the least.

  Eventually Soph begins to realize something’s up. She looks at me, eyes glazed, and I see the moment when she understands what’s happening to her. She glances dopily down at the coffee I gave to her, and the betrayal in her eyes is impossible to miss. “You…motherrr…fuckkker,” she slurs.

  Cade manages to catch her just as her eyes roll back into her head. I’m gonna be in so much shit when she wakes up.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  REBEL

  Cade swings the Humvee around a sharp bend, hugging the turn so that I need to brace myself against the dash. I’m used to his hectic driving. Two tours together in Afghanistan and I’m really fucking grateful he drives like a Nascar boss. He’s saved our asses more than once by putting his foot down when we were drawing heat. The drive into town is only twenty minutes today, less with Cade at the wheel, but I have enough time to send Danny, the Widow Maker’s resident hacker, a text:

  Me: Find me a number for Ramirez? Or one of Ramirez’s men. ASAP?

  I get a response twelve minutes later:

  Danny: 5O5-328-9887. Hope there’s a shot of Jack headed my way for that, man.

  There’ll be more than a shot of Jack in it for him if this number puts me in touch with Hector. I copy and paste the number into contacts and hit the green call icon, and then I wait. Cade watches me with one eye as I hold the phone to my ear and I wait. Buildings begin to appear, dotted out in the desert on either side of the road. As the phone continues to ring and ring, more houses and a gas station spring up in front of us, signaling that we’re approaching the town limits.

  “No one picking up?” Cade asks.

  “No,” I tell him, canceling the call. “Fucking frustrating. Danny never normally gives out bad information.”

  “Danny never gives out bad information. Period. Maybe try again?”

  “Yeah.” I about to hit redial when the phone lights up in my hand, flashing UNKNOWN NUMBER on the screen in time with the shrill tone that fills the car. I look at Cade. “Coincidence?”

  He looks doubtful. “No such thing, right?”

  “Mmm.” I answer the call, not saying anything, holding the sleek black metal up against my ear as I wait for the person on the other end of the line to say something. At first, it’s so quiet I think maybe the connection didn’t take, but then a loud cracking distorts the line, followed by a series of smaller cracks and crunches, and I know someone is there. Someone who just so happens to be eating something by the sound of things.

  “I was wondering how long…” a voice says quietly. It’s Hector, of course. Hector, with his thick accent, eating his godforsaken sugared almonds, sounding as cool and collected as ever. I fucking despise the man.

  I play along. “How long what?”

  “How long it would take you to call. Or show up. Or do something, anyway. Alfonso told me he had a run in with one of your boys. Sounded like your delightful vice president. And in light of the information Mr. Preston obtained, I assumed you’d be in touch sooner rather than later.”

  Hector’s a well-educated man. My guess is he was schooled in America. Probably went to an expensive, exclusive college, where he studied economics or business. No doubt his parents, whoever they might be, wanted him to relocate permanently stateside and make a new life for himself. Become something. Accomplish all that they couldn’t in Mexico. Of course, I could be wrong. He could have simply watched a lot of television and learned English that way, or maybe his parents were criminals too and they taught him everything he knows, but listening to him speak now I get the distinct impression that I could easily have studied alongside him at MIT. There’s something really intimate about talking on the phone with him. Like he’s actually here, sitting with me, whispering into my ear, and it’s creeping me the fuck out. My skin is literally crawling.

  “Let’s meet,” I say. “Somewhere public. Let’s just hash this shit out once and for all, shall we?”

  “Hmm, well…” Ramirez ponders this silently. “I have a full schedule today, Jamie. I’d be happy to host you at my rustic, charming farmhouse, though. If you have the time.”

  “Oh, come on now, Hector. I’m not that stupid. If I walk through your front door, I won’t be walking out again. You and I both know that.” We’ve had someone watching his place night and day ever since he showed up here in New Mexico, and there are never any less than twenty armed men moving and rotating through his property. If I went on over there, gave a polite knock on the front door and asked to come on in, I’d be dead within a minute.

  Hector laughs. “Worth the offer, right?” He laughs some more. Crunches some more. “So where would you propose we have this very public meeting of ours, Jamie? And who will you be bringing along with you?”

  “Just me and Cade. Outside the public library off Main. Come now. We’ll be waiting.” I hang up before he can object. There’s no real reason why Hector Ramirez should come and meet with us given that he’s the one with the leverage in this situation, but he has to make his demands after all. And I know the guy. He’d never pass up an opportunity to rile me in person. There was a time when I’d do the occasional shift at Dead Man’s Ink, purely for the enjoyment of tattooing and meeting new people, but not anymore. Hector and his boys make a point of walking down Main Street every morning and every night just before dusk. They come to see if I’m around; they come to show their faces, to show they’re not going anywhere anytime soon, and I have a pretty fucking short fuse these days. I want to hurt him. I want to do unspeakable things to him, so I stay away, keep my wits about me, and I bide my time, waiting for the day I go rolling up on his place of business.

  “Why there?” Cade stabs a finger at the buttons on the Humvee’s radio until static crackles out of the speakers. For a second I’m transported back to the desert, and I’m straining to hear snatches of distorted sound from my hip radio as bullets whip and sing overhead. Cade frowns. “Why the library?”

  I block out the chatter of the radio, staring straight ahead out of the windshield in front of me. “Because she’s back. Because she’s brought a team, and it looks like she’s staying.”

  Cade knows precisely who she is. Denise Lowell, agent for the DEA. Lowell was pursuing Ramirez last year, and arrested both him and myself after we had a bust up at Dead Man’s Ink. She tried to lay the pressure on me back then to talk, to say something that might incriminate Ramirez (and potentially myself) in illegal activity. I got the feeling, as I sat there in that interview room being interrogated by her and her little DEA friends, that she wouldn’t have really cared where I slipped up or what I inadvertently confessed to. She would have taken a misdemeanor crime and somehow twisted and turned it, moulding it like clay, until it was suddenly murder one. She’s the type of woman who can perform magic tricks like that.

  “Is she here for him?” Cade holds onto the steering wheel tight, glaring at the straight road ahead of him. Any moment now he’ll have to turn right, pull off into the sleepy, lazy town of Freemantle, but until then he looks intent on gunning the engine as hard as he possibly can.

  “I don’t know. I fucking hope so, man. I really fucking hope so.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  CADE

  Rebel’s looking twitchy as we get out of the Humvee and walk across the street. There are some kids playing on the patch of grass outside the library; they have some kind of electric skateboard and three of them are watching as the tallest, gangliest pre-teen zips up and down the sidewalk, wobbling, looking like he’s about to fall off and crack his head open any second. To be honest, I’m surprised that there even are four kids in
Freemantle. I can’t say that I’ve ever noticed any before. I don’t even think there’s a school here.

  Rebel puts his hand in his pocket and pulls out a roll of twenty-dollar bills. “Hey.” He beckons to the kid on the skateboard. “Wanna make some money?”

  The tall kid cocks his head to one side, coming to a stop. “How much?”

  “Forty bucks. But you gotta split it between you. Ten each.”

  “Pssshh. Ten bucks is nothing. What do you want us to do?” Four sets of owlish eyes blink up at my friend like he’s a god.

  “Are you any good at math?” he says. All four of them shake their heads. “Okay, well how about I make it simple for you. Who’s got a pen and some paper?”

  The smallest kid takes off his backpack and produces both articles. Rebel scribbles something down on the paper and hands it over to the tiny kid. He can’t be any more than six or seven. The kid squints at the scrawl on the paper, frowning, and then spins it upside down, trying to make sense of it that way. Rebel turns it back.

  “Take that into the library and find the answer for me. It’ll be in a mathematics book, I promise.”

  “Which one?” Tall kid’s looking suspicious.

  “I don’t know. But I’ll bet you a hundred bucks you’ll find the answer in there. You just have to look for it.”

  Unlike Freemantle, there were a lot of kids in Afghanistan. Hundreds of them, teeming, running up and down narrow alleyways, vanishing and emerging from the shadows when you least expected it. It wasn’t a place for a kid to be. Ever. Jamie used to pull this shit with them over there, too. He’d pull out a bunch of money and bribe them into completing some time consuming, pointless task for him that would take them far away from the dangerous situation we’d shown up to deal with. Afghani kids wouldn’t have been complaining about ten bucks each. They’d have been climbing over themselves to take the deal and disappear. Half the time they wouldn’t even complete the task he’d set them. They’d just run off with the cash, as far as they could get for fear that they’d fail and he’d ask for the money back. Didn’t matter, though. Jamie would have accomplished what he set out to do, and the kids would be gone.

  The motley crew in front of us discuss his proposal in loud whispers before Tall Kid turns around and holds out his hand. “Deal. And if we figure out the answer to the equation, we get a hundred bucks?”

  Jamie nods.

  “On top of the original ten each?”

  “Correct.”

  “Cool. Let’s shake on it.”

  Jamie tries not to smile as Tall Kid accepts the deal on behalf of his compatriots. “And don’t cheat. If you’re out here in the next fifteen minutes, I’ll know you googled it. You need to look it up in a book.”

  A chorus of groans goes up from the small crowd. Tall Kid rolls his eyes. “Fine.” He takes the money from Jamie and the four of them begin making their way toward the library, pushing and shoving each other.

  “Pity you can’t do that with Soph,” I say, elbowing him in the ribs.

  “I’d be fucking broke if I had to bribe her every time I wanted her to do something.” Jamie climbs up and sits on the lone park bench, ass on the back, feet on the seat. “I’d rather have money in my back pocket and a spirited girlfriend any day of the week.” He winks, and I can only imagine what kind of shit those two get up to in the bedroom. Jamie’s not one to kiss and tell, but I heard them well enough when I was waiting for Soph to come cook breakfast. It sounded like he was murdering her or something, and she was strangely fucking happy about it.

  “Where’s Lowell set up shop?” I ask, doing my best to shove Jamie and Sophia’s weird sex life out of my head. Jay points over my shoulder, up toward the second story of the tiny women’s clothing store on the other side of the street. There are three sets of windows up there, each shut tight, which is weird for such a swelteringly hot day. Net curtains block the view inside, but I can imagine Lowell has already noticed us and has camera lenses pointed our way.

  “Why d’you wanna do this in plain sight?”

  “Because if I know Lowell’s here, Hector knows Lowell’s here, too. And he’s not gonna pull any weird shit if he knows he’s got half a federal agency jammed up his ass. Or at least I’m assuming he won’t.”

  “Probably.” I turn my back on the windows again. “Think she can monitor the conversation?”

  Jamie looks at me. Shrugs. Looks away down the street. He turns a cocktail stick over and over between his teeth. Neither one of us have worn our MC cuts into town; we’re both in jeans and t-shirts, baseball caps turned backward on our head, sneakers on our feet. We’re just two guys in our late twenties. Or we would be if we weren’t covered in so many tattoos. Military tattoos. Club tattoos. Things that your average civilian might not recognize, but a cop definitely would.

  We wait for a while. We don’t speak. We’ve been friends for so long now that we don’t need to open our mouths to communicate. I know what he’s thinking from the way his forehead creases, or the way his eyes seem to flash occasionally, transmitting information and his mood in a way that few people can pick up on. He says the same of me. He knows if I’m pissed or happy by the nervous energy that pours off me. According to him, the air around me might as well be sparking with electricity when I’m about to go nuclear on someone. Regardless of the fact that I might seem perfectly calm to anyone else, Jamie always knows when to grab me by the collar and drag me away from a fight before it can start.

  After about fifteen minutes, a black sedan with tinted windows slowly rolls down the high street, only the driver visible as the vehicle approaches. Jamie slides off the bench and gets to his feet. “Here we go,” he says under his breath.

  “Here we go,” I agree. I think I see a bright glance of light flash off one of the upstairs windows across the street, but when I look up they’re all still closed up, the curtains still at the glass. Jamie’s gaze flickers up there at the same time as mine, however, so I know I’m not imagining things. The sedan comes to a stop alongside us, and rear door closest to us.

  Hector Ramirez climbs out.

  He’s wearing a dark navy shirt, almost black, shot through with purple pin stripes, and his pants are long, heavy looking things that make me want to sweat just from looking at them. Hector isn’t sweating, though. He looks cool and refreshed, like summer isn’t kicking his ass the same way it is everyone else.

  “Gentlemen.” He dips his chin, lowering his head in a curt nod. “So wonderful to see you, as always.”

  Beside me, Jamie’s hackles are up already. I can tell by the way the muscles in his jaw are jumping, flexing, as he locks Ramirez in his gaze. “Hector.” He offers out his hand, and I can imagine how much the gesture costs him. Jamie’s a good guy. He’s a good guy until you do something to piss him off, or fuck him over in any way. When that happens, you quickly realize he can be decidedly bad when he wants to be. Ramirez knows that all too well. Maybe that’s why he wears a painfully smug smile as he accepts Jamie’s hand and shakes.

  “I can only imagine why you would have chosen such a place to meet,” Ramirez says, smiling, flashing his teeth. “But I can assure you, you would have been perfectly welcome and perfectly…” He pauses, eyes skirting down and to the left, as though he’s trying to assess if we’re being watched. Or listened to as the case may well be. “Safe,” he finishes. He turns that shit eating grin on me next and I have to fight down the overwhelming urge to plant my fucking fist in his face. “Mr. Preston, you look a little upset. Would you like a tea? Coffee? I’m about to send Alfonso across the street to grab me something. I’m sure he wouldn’t mind collecting something for you, too.”

  As he says this, a broad, barrel chested guy climbs out of the sedan’s front passenger seat, his face mottled purple and blue, his left eye swollen shut, burn blisters under his eye. I recognize him instantly—easily done, since I beat the living shit out of him not too long ago. He gives me a look that could sour milk. “I think I’ll be okay without,” I say
. I smile, grin in fact, as Alfonso backs away, staring at me with hate in his eyes as he goes to grab his master’s coffee.

  I know without a doubt that he’d be dead if he were working under Maria Rosa’s employ. She wouldn’t tolerate any of her men giving away her secrets, no matter how hard they were punched repeatedly in the face. Ramirez doesn’t strike me as the kind of cartel boss who would let something like that slide, but chances are he’s waiting to serve Alfonso’s punishment to him when he least expects it. The shitty part is Alfonso probably knows his boss is going to put a bullet in the back of his head one night soon, and there’s nothing he can do about it.

  “Now. What would you like to speak about, Jamie? I’m sure it must be pressing to drag me out here in the middle of the day on a Tuesday.” Ramirez leans back against the sedan, his hand reaching into the pocket of his heavy suit pants. I instinctively assume he’s going for a gun, but I don’t move to act on my assumption. Not yet, anyway. If Lowell sees me pull a gun, I’m going away for a very long time. Besides, I can judge a man’s intent in his eyes. Ramirez definitely looks like he would happily skin us alive right here and now if he thought he might get away with it, but he knows he won’t. He doesn’t pull out a gun from his pocket. Instead he pulls out a handful of almonds, some sugared some plain, and he offers them first to Jamie and then to me. “Sweet tooth. I have the worst sweet tooth. I can’t seem to stop eating these things. I suppose there are worse addictions to have, though, no?”