Black Onyx Duology (3 page)

5

Dillon leaned back in the chair. “You found them?”

“To be more precise, a colleague of mine has fou
nd them. A classmate from Yale, geologist named George Anston. He found an entire city, Dillon. Buried under half a mile of ice. He hasn’t explored it fully and he’s mounting an expedition. He would like me to finance it and I said I would. I was hoping you and James could be on that expedition.”

“To Antarctica? I hate the cold, Henry.
Ever since Everest. And why would it matter to you if we were there?”

“There is no doubt in my mind that there would be
, shall we say, a king’s ransom in buried treasure. We’re talking about an advanced ancient civilization with probably no rivals.” He looked around. “Think of what type of wealth they could’ve amassed.”

“Oh, I see. You want us there to steal.”

“Not to steal, it doesn’t belong to anybody, well, technically Norway but not really. They didn’t know about it. And you can’t steal something that doesn’t belong to anybody. The British, Dutch, Norwegians, and French will be arguing over which nation can claim the find as its own for years. In the meantime, we can sweep in there and make certain that all the treasures are preserved. Who knows where they’ll end up if we don’t? We’ll take them and sell them to private collectors who will preserve and look after them.”

“Hm
, and I thought I was the con man.”

“If you don’t want to partake I’m happy to leave. You’re not the only one in your profession that I have a relationship with you know.”

“Don’t get your panties in a bunch, Henry. When is this expedition?”

“In five days
. Which means you’ll have to be leaving in two days to make it on time.”

“And what, exactly, would your cut be for setting this up?”

“Fifty percent, off the top before any of you split anything else.”

“What? Are you out of your mind? I’m taking all the risk.”

“And you will be handsomely rewarded with half. Look I’m the one setting up all the details to ensure you make it in and out on time and I’ll be the one controlling the selling of any items taken. I’ve secured crew and porters…I’m doing the heavy lifting between us. You just have to be cold for a couple of days and put a few things in a backpack.”

He exhaled. “I need to think about it.”

“What’s to think about?”

“I’ll let you know tomorrow.”

Dillon rose, leaving the box with the crown on the table. “And don’t forget to get that money to us. I’ve got a new Ferrari to buy.”

Dillon pulled to a stop in front of his house and
strolled around back. James was just walking to his car and stopped in front of him.

“I just spoke to Henry.”

“Yeah?”

“Yes, and he explained the…situation we have on our hands.”

“What did he say?”

“Well,”
James said, “he said this could be enough for all of us to retire on. He said his friend George showed him something. A gold coin the size of a doorknob. And he believes there’s a lot more there.”

“
James, don’t tell me you’re thinking this is a good idea.”

“I’m not a young man, Dillon. Our priorities are completely different. Now I have enough to perhaps,
perhaps
, get me through my twilight years without having to work but it’s not certain by any means. My nightmare, what keeps me up at night, is imagining that I’m eighty years old and having to live on the four hundred dollars a month the Social Security Administration is going to pay me, if they still exist then.”

“If you wanted security, you should have become
a banker or a doctor, James. What we do doesn’t have any security.”

He exhaled. “I know exactly what bed I’m lying in, Mr. Mentzer. I chose it fully understanding the repercussions. But Niles and I are retiring, and I would like just a little security.” He put his hand on Dillon’s shoulder. “I’ve never asked you for anything, Dillon. Never. But I’m asking this. Please help me this one last time. Now, if you’ll excuse me, we have a luau to get to. I believe a pig is being roasted.”

Dillon watched him walk away before walking around the house to the beach. Jaime was having a barbeque and at least twenty people were getting drunk on her patio. She was sitting on the banister with two men in front of her, flirting. Dillon stopped and watched her a moment, the way her strawberry blond hair quivered on the breeze. The sun was hitting her in just the right way, her smile spreading across pink lips. She felt him staring and looked over and waved. He waved back as she hopped off the banister and ran over.

“Hey,” she said.

“Hey.”

“Where were you all day?”

“Some errands to run. So you havin’ a little party?”

“Y
eah, my sister finished her master’s degree and we’re just throwing her a little thing.”

“Oh. Looks fun.”

“Why don’t you come?”

“No, no that’s fine. I wouldn’t know anybody.”

“So what? Come on, I’ll get you a beer.”

“I don’t think so, I’m really beat.”

She took his hand and he felt his stomach flutter. “Come on, don’t be shy. I’ll introduce you around.”

“All right. You talked me into it.”

He followed her up the steps onto the patio where she took him by a cooler and gave him a beer. He set it down and opted for a Dr. Pepper instead and she took him inside. Several women were taking Jell-O shots on the island in the kitchen and Jaime put her arm around one and said, “This is my sister, Amy. Amy, this is Dillon.”

“So you’re Dillon,” the girl said. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

“Really?” Dillon said, looking at Jaime. “You talk about me when I’m not around? I’m flattered.”

“Don’t be an ass
; I just said I like your jeep.” She kissed her sister and yelled, “Let’s get some more shots!”

Dillon waited b
ehind the girls as they took shots. When it was clear Jaime wasn’t stopping, he went outside. A couple of the women tried striking up conversations with him but he couldn’t take his eyes off Jaime long enough to engage them. Instead, he just sat in one of her deck chairs and watched the ocean.

After a while, she came and pulled up another deck chair and sat next to him.

“Your sister’s nice,” he said.

“What’re you doing, Dillon?”

“What?”

“Two of my friends threw themselves at you and you barely gave them the time of day.”

“I’m not interested.”

“Why not? They’re hot.”

“No complaint about that. I just don’t feel like that type of girl right now.”

“Really? And what type of girl do you feel like?”

“I don’t know. If I was Dillon the garbage man instead of Dillon the guy with a big, nice house you think they’d even look twice at me? I bet you told them I’m rich.”

“You are rich.”

“That’s not the point. They don’t even know that for sure and they’re willing to give me whatever I want. Now, don’t get me wrong, most of the time, that’s just fine by me. But I just didn’t feel like it right now.”

She looked to the ocean and then him. “Something’s bugging you. I can tell cause you wrinkle that little space between your eyebrows. What is it?”

“Nothing.”

“Don’t be coy. Just tell me.”

“I have an opportunity to go somewhere I don’t want to go. But it could be a lot of money for me and James. Enough to retire.”

“So are you gonna do it?”

“I really, really don’t want to. I think it’s all theory and conjecture and it’s not going to payoff at all. But James asked me for a favor.”

“You really care about him, don’t you?”

“He took me in when I had nowhere else to go. I owe him everything.”

“Well,” she said, looking back out
over the sea, “what’re friends for?”

He nodded. “I’m going to head home.”

“Already?”

“I’m beat, and if I’m actually going on this thing I have to leave in a day.”

“When would you be back?”

He grinned. “Why? You gonna miss me?”

“Believe it or not, Dillon, I can get along perfectly fine without you always being around.”

“I don’t believe you. But that’s cute that you’d lie to me.” He bent down and kissed her cheek. “Bye.”

“Bye.”

He walked to the sand and then across to his house b
efore glancing back. She looked over to him and smiled.

He got inside and flopped on his couch and turned on the TV. He absently flipped through the channels without paying attention to what was on. He glanced around to the photos on the wall.
James had no children, so most of the photos were of Dillon when he was younger. There was one by the kitchen of Dillon and James on their first hunt together. They were after a jewel in the Congo. A villager had supposedly found some sort of diamond/emerald hybrid and had stashed it away from the authorities. They had contacted someone who contacted someone who eventually got in touch with James.

The trip was hot, long and full of bugs that ate them alive, but Dillon couldn’t have been happier. It was the most time he had ever spent with anyone, and on top of that,
James was nice to him. He treated him with respect and taught him things.

When they arrived, the jewel turned out to be
a hoax but James had bought it from the man anyway and had given it to Dillon. To always remember the trip by. Dillon pulled it out of his pocket and looked at it. James didn’t know he carried it around with him.

Dillon took out his cell phone and texted Henry:

I’m in

6

El Sacerd
ote woke and looked to the sunshine coming through the skylight. He watched white clouds drift and morph before him. An arm was laid across his chest, connected to the nude body of the model he had slept with last night. She was nineteen and beautiful and psychologically a mess, the way he liked them.

He rose and walked out to his balcony and looked over the city, his city. Juarez had been where he had grown up. His father was a bus driver, an honest man
who did his best to provide for his wife and newborn son. His mother, Maria, had been a chef before he was born and every night their meals consisted of the best foods they could afford, which wasn’t much. He remembered the summers where he and his mother would cultivate the little garden in the back of their one-room house so that they could have more variety in their dinners.

El Sacerdote had been happ
y as a child, he remembered. But at around six years old, things began to change. He was at school one day and the boy next to him was drawing. He could hear the markings of the graphite on the paper and it sounded like nails on a chalkboard. It seemed to entomb itself into him, into his very bones, and El Sacerdote calmly stood, took the pencil, and buried it into the child’s eye. Then he sat back down as if nothing had happened.

There were no special programs for juveniles in Juarez at the time so he had been let off with a warning. But his father saw something change in him. He insisted that his son
prepare for the priesthood, and from the time he was six he was taught Latin and scripture and the history of the church. This was the time when he had been given the name El Sacerdote.

But plans had changed. A fire had taken the lives of both of his parents and, at twelve, El Sacerdote sat on the steps across the street and watched the house burn with his parents inside. The fire had been declared an accident, but the neighbors didn’t believe it had been an accident. From that time forward, El Sacerdote lived on the streets, learning the art of theft until he had earned enough of a reputation on the street, by killing a police officer in broad daylight, that he was entrusted with
smuggling marijuana into El Paso.

The boss at the time, Hernan Guzman, saw something in the young boy. He took him under
his wing and began teaching him the business. How to outsource everything and build layers between himself and the men on the street. How to buy politicians and reward them handsomely, and how to use extreme violence to terrorize those that wouldn’t accept. “Maximum terror,” Guzman always told him, “was in killing the innocent. Killing the guilty rarely frightens people enough.”

El Sacerdote became Guzman’s personal assistant, and, when he was only fifteen, his bodyguard. He had a reputation for being deadly with his two 9mm pistols and ruthless in the enforcement of his boss’ will. He murdered judges, police officers, border patrol agents, and, something Juarez had not seen yet, their families and friends. He even once murdered the dog of a judge that refused a bribe and forced the judge to eat
it.

Guzman began teaching him the intricacies and art of the drug trade.
The true lessons that Guzman, until this point, had reserved only for his two sons. He believed that El Sacerdote would make a good counselor for his sons when they took over the business. But that never happened.

At the young age of twenty-one, El Sacerdote had become head of the cartel. Guzman, and his two sons, had disappeared without a trace. El Sacerdote had told people that they had turned into informants and fled Mexico. No one questioned him.

“What are you doing?” the woman said, sitting up in bed.

“Six miles that way, there is the United States. A land so hypocritical they lock up the user of narcotic
s in their prisons while I make one hundred million dollars a year selling it to them and they cannot touch me. I am a product of their hypocrisy. I could not exist without it. They make me, feed me, sustain me, protect me, and betray their own people for me.” He exhaled. “It is sad actually.”

“What is?”

“They are the freest nation that has ever existed. One that was built on the idea of man as a rational being, a being that should be given his freedom and his choices. It is…a fantastical idea. Un milagro. It is in decline and soon it will fall. That is the way of empires. They are found, they rise, they decline, and they fall. When the United States falls, the world will fall. And we will enter a dark ages. People do not understand how easily we can fall into such things. How little a push it would take to destroy civilization and turn us into monsters. But it will happen…” He turned and looked at her. “I have a meeting.”

“Should I stay with you today?”

“No. Take the limo. Go to El Paso and go shopping.”

He showered and dressed in a pin-stripe suit before having a breakfast of coffee. He lit a
cigarette and went downstairs. Out front, three men were waiting for him by a Mercedes and they opened the back door and allowed him to get in before they did the same and pulled away.

The car drove through the streets of Juarez but El Sacerdote had his eyes closed. He was meditating on the meeting, playing out several scenarios in his mind. He visualized everything in his life and found that he was better prepared for the surprises that were part of his business.

They drove over the bridge and through the gates of El Paso and entered the United States. It was a short drive to the warehouse they were meeting at and they parked in the lot. His three men exited the car and checked with a man who was standing in front of a door. They spoke a few words and one of the men came back and opened the door for El Sacerdote.

“They are ready for you, El
Padrino.”

He stepped out of the car and walked through the door into the warehouse. A woman was sitting behin
d the front desk, a poster of another woman in a bikini behind her. She glanced up and then buried her head back down into the magazine she had open in front of her.

He walked down a corridor into a room with a conference table
, and several men were already there. He sat down at the table while his men stood behind them.

Three men sat before him. Two in gray suits on either side of a man in a black suit. The man wore a cowboy hat and he took it off and placed it on the table. His hair was graying and he was portly but not quite fat. He wiped his nose with a silk handkerchief, his Rolex gleaming in the sunlight coming through the floor-to-ceiling windows.

“They call you the Priest,” the man said. “What’s your real name?”

“It does not matter.”

“I’m not doing business with a man that won’t even tell me his name.”

“Then you won’t be doing business at all.”

The man paused. “You’re not the only game in town.”

“You may find m
y competition unwilling to do business with those that have displeased me.” El Sacerdote smiled. “We have not begun this meeting properly, Mr. Park. I am a simple man and do not understand the intricacies of negotiation. I am merely here to make a profit, and I believe that if you make a profit with me, we can have a long, sustainable business. I need access to Canada. I believe it is a large market that has yet to be tapped. But I cannot get there on my own. You may provide that. You wish for this as much as me, I believe. So the only question is how much do you wish for your services? Everything else is irrelevant.”

“I don’t know who the hell you are and you want me to risk my business, everything I’ve
worked for, smuggling your shit. Well, fine, but I need assurances. And a larger piece of the pie.”

“How large?”

“Forty-five percent of any load.”

“Deal. Now see, was that so difficult?”

The man looked to the two men seated to the right and left of him. “That’s it? You’re just going to accept the first figure I give you?”

“I don’t argue over pennies. Forty-five percent is fine. Miguel will see to all the details.” He rose and walked over and shook the man’s hand before leaving.

When they were outside, he glanced back to see Mr. Park staring at him from the windows. El Sacerdote smiled and waved before getting into the car. Once his men were in, they pulled away.

“El
Padrino,” Miguel said, “may I ask something?”

“
Yes.”

“Forty-five percent to this pig of a man, that seems high.”

“It is. It should be somewhere around ten percent. But I just need one shipment for now. Once he sees how easy it is we’ll renegotiate. And if he doesn’t want to we’ll take one of his three sons until he does.”

“What is to be delivered?”

“Death, Miguel. Death.”