Dirty Angels 01 (5 page)

My heart thumped loudly. “Of course,” I said, trying to keep my voice steady. I hadn’t planned on seeing him or Salvador today.

I opened the door and got in the backseat. To my surprise it was empty. My limbs were heavy with dread.

“Where are we going?” I asked David as he quickly sped away from the curb.

“To see Salvador,” he said simply.

“I parked just around the corner from work,” I said feebly, looking behind me as it all got lost in the traffic.

“I will return you to your car after,” he said, not looking at me in the mirror. “Salvador has a few things he needs to discuss with you.”

He could have added, “Don’t be afraid,” but he didn’t. I’d probably always be afraid when Salvador wanted to talk with me whether we were married or not.

After about twenty minutes, we were coasting up the dry, cactus-strewn hills outside of the city. David pulled the car over, and in a minute the door opened and Salvador stepped in. He was wearing jeans and a grey, sweat-stained T-shirt that was covered in a layer of dust.

“Turn up the air conditioning,” he barked at David as he closed the door and the car pulled onto the road.

Salvador sat across from me and pushed his shades to the top of his head. He was sweaty and his eyes were extra puffy, perhaps from drinking too much. For a split second I wondered if I could marry this man, let alone share his bed. There was just nothing to attract me to him. If he had a good personality, it might have been different. But he didn’t have that, not even when he was faking it.

“I am sorry, princess,” he said, still overly polite with me. “I’m afraid I cannot stick around Los Cabos any longer. It is no longer safe.”

Well, you were kind of flaunting that you were here
, I thought to myself but didn’t dare say.

He reached into the back of his pants and pulled out a small, cloth wallet. He took my hands in his and placed it in them. “Here. This is one thousand American dollars. It’s enough to take care of you for the next month, just as I promised. But it’s not enough to buy you a new life, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

I opened my mouth to protest, fear coursing through me.

He shook his head. “I am only joking,” he said, though I could tell from the cold, wicked glint to his eyes that he wasn’t. “But in one month, I will be back for you. We will have our wedding less than a week after that. Don’t worry about the dress, I will pick that out for you as well.”

I could only stare dumbly at him. “We’ll be getting married in a month…”

“More or less,” he said. “I thought you’d be happier.”

I forced a smile on my face and leaned over, placing my hand on his clammy arm. I swallowed my revulsion. I played my part. “I am happy. Very happy. I am just surprised and sad that you are leaving me for so long.”

He smiled at that, his bushy mustache twitching up, droplets of sweat gathering in it. “You will survive. You have until now. And after we are married, you will always be at my side. You will never be alone again.”

Those words rang through my head as I later drove back home, toward my mother and father, the fat wallet on the seat beside me. I had one month to enjoy my life as it was before it would change for good.

Javier

T
he whore was beautiful.

Then again, Este usually did have good taste in women, if not in fashion. I watched as she walked uneasily down the cobblestone driveway, heading toward the guards at the gate, heading toward freedom. She reminded me of a spindly-legged fawn, her high heels a poor match for the uneven ground, and for one brief moment I felt sorry for her. Pity, even. Such a pretty thing selling her body for riches that never came. She only got money, but that was never what the whore really wanted. What she really wanted, she would never, ever get.

She was better off dead.

And at that thought, the twinge of pity was gone.

I watched as she approached the gate. Though the two guards were facing forward, their eyes hidden by sunglasses, I could tell they were exchanging a look, wondering who was going to kill her first. Orders were orders.

They didn’t need to debate for long. A shot rang out, a bullet to the back of her head, and the whore fell to the ground slowly, as if she had just grown too tired to stand. Blood began to flow from her head.

I craned my neck, mildly curious to see who had done it. I couldn’t see anyone but the guards, which meant it had to have been Franco. It had turned into a hobby for him lately, as if he discovered he had a taste for being a sniper, but it was better the whores than anyone else at the compound.

Somewhere I knew my gardener, Carlos, was cursing himself. Franco never disposed of the bodies, and it would be Carlos’s job once again to do something with her, wash away the red mess from the hot stones. Naturally, he would never complain to me, or someone else would have to clean up his own blood.

There was a knock at the door behind me. I kept my hands behind my back, my eyes glued to the blood that was pouring out of her head, a hypnotic, moving painting.

“Come in,” I said. I didn’t have to turn around to know it was Este. “What was the whore’s name?” I asked, still staring at the growing crimson pond.

The door clicked softly and I felt him step into the room. “Laura,” he said. “She could fuck like no one’s business, hey. You should have tried her. You know I don’t mind sharing.”

I ignored him. “Don’t you think it’s a bit, oh, I don’t know
… crude, to have the whores leave this way?” I asked him. “Wouldn’t it be better to kill them in bed?”

I heard him snort. “No,
that
would be crude. We might as well let them have that bit of hope that they’ll make it out alive, don’t you think? Besides, this is more sporting. It’s hunting. Hunting is elegant.”

I nodded. I supposed he was right. It wasn’t very sporting otherwise. I watched as Carlos came scurrying toward the body and started to drag Laura away. I never asked what he did with the bodies, but as long as I never saw them again, it didn’t really matter. Out of sight, out of mind.

I turned around and eyed Este. “I suppose in a perfect world, we wouldn’t have to kill them at all.”

He smirked and leaned on my desk. “Well, look at you getting all soft.”

I raised my brow. “It’s just a shame that you can’t buy silence anymore.”

He shrugged. “One whore talks and then you get fuckers at your door. We all need to get laid, well at least I do.” A wry look came across his face at that. “There really is no other solution.”

“I suppose not,” I said, and sat down at my desk. I adjusted my watch and stared up at him expectantly. “So, why are you here? Showing off your terrible taste in shoes? Are those made of cardboard?”

He peered down at his feet. As usual the man looked like he’d rolled out of the California surf with his T-shirt, board shorts, and terrible Birkenstocks. Not the image the cartel had at all, but there was no talking style into him. Believe me, I had tried.

He placed a large envelope down on the desk. “Got the email from Martin just a few minutes ago and had these printed out for you.”

I stared at the envelope for a beat before laying my fingers on it and sliding it toward me. A quiver of anticipation ran up my arms and I did my best to quell it.

“I didn’t respond,” Este went on. “He mentioned that the location of the wedding changed at the last minute yesterday, but he was still able to get everything done. I printed out the email. It’s in there too.”

I nodded and slowly opened the flap.

“Should I get anything more from him?”

I shook my head and slid the papers out of the envelope and onto the desk. “No, it doesn’t matter. Martin is dead.”

I glanced up to see Este staring at me with a stunned expression. “So soon?”

“Yes,” I said absently, looking back to the paper in my hands. I skimmed the printed out email.

“What a shame, I liked the guy.”

“I didn’t,” I said. “But he got the job done and that’s all that matters.”

“Kind of like the whores.”

I pursed my lips. “Mmmm,” I conceded. From the email, Martin had done the job well. He had observed Salvador Reyes and his bride from a few days before the wedding and gotten photographs during the ceremony. “But killing women is always so ugly, isn’t it?”

“You see,” Este said, crossing his arms, “right there, that sort of shit surprises me. You know, considering your issues with women and all that.”

I shot him a piercing look. “I don’t have issues.”

“No,” he said slowly with an easy smile on his lips, knowing all too much. “Of course not.”

It was those moments that I hated Esteban Mendoza. Hated that he was my right hand man, hated that he was the closest person to me, even though that never amounted to much. I hated that it would hurt me so to kill him.

“Martin would have talked,” I said to him. “Much like the whores. He did well. Don’t worry, his wife and children will be taken care of.”

Este raised his brows.

“With money,” I supplied quickly. “They will be fine without their father, who was stupid enough to get involved with us to begin with. I’m not cruel.”

“Well, you’re not shooting whores,” he said. “And I’m not worried. You know I rarely worry about you.”

“How touching,” I said wryly.

He walked around the desk and stood behind me, looking over my shoulder. I hated when he did that. “I’m interested in what you think,” he said.

“About what?”

“About
her
,” he said while I slid a photograph out of the pile. “Mrs. Reyes.”

It was black and white and printed on paper, making it less sharp than a photograph, but it did the job. It was a picture of a woman in a white strapless wedding dress, very fluffy and extravagant from the waist down. Her hands were clasped demurely at her front, her face caught in a nervous smile.

She was extremely beautiful but that was to be expected. The country’s most flagrant excuse for a drug kingpin would never marry anyone less than stunning, and this woman, Luisa, fit the bill. But despite her body, with her round, perky tits and elegant neck, her long dark hair and classic face, there was another layer to her that immediately got me hard. It was this look in her eyes. They were so pure and soft, giving her radiance that seemed to leap off the page.

I wanted nothing more than to have her on her knees, have her fix those round, angelic eyes on me and watch as I pinned her down and came right into them. I would take her purity and make her see the world for what it really was—a hot, sticky mess at the end of my dick.

“I bet she’d be a tight little fuck,” Este leered over my shoulder.

I shot him a disgusted look. “She’s not a whore, Este,” I chided him.

“Not to you,” he said, as I looked at the next picture of her, now with Salvador at her side.

“I mean it,” I said, my eyes drawn to her again and again. “No one is touching her. Not you, not Franco.”

“I give you my promise,” Este said. “But Franco can barely control himself around the whores.”

“No one is touching her,” I repeated. “She will be our hostage. She is collateral. No one is laying a hand on her.”

“Except for you, I assume.”

She almost seemed too good to even touch. I couldn’t wait to break her down. “She is very valuable,” I admitted.

I flipped through a couple more photographs and grew harder at each one. I wished Este would just fucking leave so I could deal with it. I almost wished Laura was still alive so I could flip her over and come all over her back. I never fucked the women around here, but that didn’t mean I didn’t use them.

“You know,” Este said, his lazy voice starting to grate on me. “If Martin had been there close enough to spy on them, close enough to photograph, why didn’t you just get him to put a bullet in Salvador’s head? Especially if Martin was going to die anyway.”

I eyed him warily, disappointed that he could be so rash. “Because life is a game and we’re all just trading cards. We play the right hand to get ahead.” I studied the smiling, ignorant face of Sal as he stared at his bride. “Death stops the game. It’s too final, too inflexible. Death is viciously stubborn.”

When Este didn’t say anything, I looked up to see a dull gleam in his eyes. I sighed and pinched the bridge of my nose, annoyed at his ineptitude. “What good would killing Salvador do? Right? David Guirez or whoever, anyone, someone, they would step in and take over faster than you can shit after your coffee, and nothing will have changed. Look at Travis Raines. The moment he died, I was able to slither on through to the top, to right here, right now.”

“Only because you killed Travis,” he noted. “More or less.”

“We killed Travis,” I corrected him. “Anyway, the point is that the dead make lousy deals. If we want the shipping lane, we have to force him to give it to us. Killing him does nothing. Taking his new bride, now that will do something.”

“You sound so sure,” Este said, walking around the desk.

“I have no reason not to be sure,” I said. “They are newlyweds. He needs her, he wants her. We will get her soon, before he gets bored of her cherry ass. Sal has pride. We all do. It is our weakness. I know that enough about myself to know it about others.”

He smoothed his hand over the scruff on his chin and gave me a smooth nod. “All right.”

I stared at a photo of them at the altar, a lavish outdoor ceremony. He was staring at her with that pride I was talking about. And she was staring at him with a look that was all too familiar to me.

“She doesn’t love him, though,” I commented, almost to myself.

“How can you tell?” he asked, taking a step closer and peering at the photos again.

I shrugged. “I just can. She doesn’t.”

“So is she marrying him for money then?”

I took the papers and sorted them until they were neat and evenly stacked before slipping them back into the envelope. “Probably. Does it matter?”

“No. So when do we act?”

“Soon,” I said, putting the envelope in the first drawer. I knew I’d be taking it out again after he left. “But we’ll do it slowly. Start with recon first, perhaps see if we can track down Derek to help us with this.”

Este gave me an odd look. “Derek
… we haven’t talked to him since he … I’m not sure he’s even in Mexico anymore.”

“Perhaps not,” I said. I wasn’t too worried. Derek Conway was an American ex-military man, an assassin for hire. He had been contracted to us during some of our more important moments. In fact, the last time I saw him was three years ago. He’d put a bullet through Travis Raines’ head. Ordered by me, of course. Then he screwed us over, but I couldn’t fault him for that. He would be loyal to whoever paid him the most.

But he wasn’t the only man at my disposal. Since I had taken over the cartel, I had a whole legion of men to do my dirty work, the best of the best. For the next month or so, I wanted someone who would be sleek and loyal. Kidnapping the wife of Mexico’s largest drug lord wasn’t going to be a walk in the park, but with the right people, it wouldn’t be impossible.

Perhaps I was just being overconfident, but it had only served me well in the past.

I gave Este a levelling stare. “I’m putting this in your hands. Can you handle it?”

“When haven’t I?”

“Oh, I don’t know. I sent you to Hawaii once to finish a job but you ended up fucking some suicidal surfer chick instead.”

“I still got the job done. What’s the difference if I get action at the same time?”

I rolled my eyes at his crassness and gave him a slight, dismissive wave. “Go put this all together. And don’t disappoint me.”

“Funny,” he mused. “I’m not sure what it’s like to
not
disappoint you.” Then he turned and left the office, shutting the door behind him.

I got up and walked over to the window. The driveway was wet where Carlos must have watered it down, and the body of Laura was gone, the blood all washed away. It was like nothing ugly ever happened. I took in the mountains, the violently green foliage that stretched beyond the property and melded into the cliffs of The Devil’s Backbone. Sometimes I wondered if there was someone out there plotting something in the way I was plotting for Salvador. I usually decided there was. You didn’t run a cartel without having an army of people out there wanting to kill you. After all, I used to be a solider in that very army. I just never dwelled on it—I moved through each day thinking that I was better off alive, a card that kept the game going.