THE men lugged cartons all day, unknowing or uncaring what they now hauled over the border. Alejandro fussed like a mother hen over Jaime, and no longer smiled while he worked. Bo crawled down inside of himself, too, barely speaking but to give directions.
Cruz worked the pulley like a man possessed, lost in his own thoughts.
The gloom and doom vibe followed them into the evening.
Wary eyes met Lucky’s over the dinner table. Bo divided his attention between Stephan and Lucky, mumbling all the while to Cruz.
Stephan strutted and preened. All his little deranged dreams were coming true, until Bo and Lucky got a chance to form a plan.
The normal glass of juice sat on the nightstand. Lucky was through taking chances but still needed sleep. He pulled out the bottle he’d taken from the warehouse and an individual serving of orange juice he’d snagged from the local store with the meager pocket money Stephan doled out. Enough cash to keep him fed, but not enough to leave on.
Juan hadn’t come back to work and Jaime was a bit shaky, and the remaining men had to take up the slack. Lucky and Bo didn’t need a gym to keep fit—they worked their asses off hauling boxes down to the open tunnel for the brothers to push across the border on carts. They needed the closed tunnel open again. Its rail system would make their lives so much easier.
“Tired” didn’t come close to describing how Lucky felt. If he didn’t get a good night’s sleep, he just might find a bridge to jump off.
“In the field, you do what you must,” he heard his boss say. But first to bar the door and latch the window.
He took a dose with the juice, not enough to addle him, but enough to get some rest. “You do what you gotta,” he toasted himself and settled beneath the covers. This probably wasn’t what Walter had in mind.
***
“You arrogant bastard!” penetrated Lucky’s drug-aided sleep. What the fuck? Pants half on, he hopped down the hallway to Stephan’s office tugging up the denim. He stopped short.
“What gives you the right—” A resounding slap cut off Stephan’s words.
“Shut up. Listen!” another voice shrieked.
Stephan’s fuck of the evening stood trembling in the hallway, with a fat tear rolling down his face. “Please, señor,” he said in heavily accented English. “I want to go home. Please take me home. Don’t let those men find me here.”
The unmistakable click of a gun cocking reached Lucky’s ears. Yeah, take the kid home. Good idea. He’d hotwire a car if he had to. “Which way?”
The boy—not a boy, but younger than most of Lucky’s socks—grabbed Lucky’s arm and pulled him in the opposite direction.
A shout of “Now wait a damned minute you—” from the office hastened his steps. Whoever and whatever went on in there, Lucky wanted no part of it.
“Who’s in there?” he asked.
Frightened eyes stared back at him. “I don’t know. They don’t like him”—the kid nodded toward the office—“and want him gone. Or for him to give them money.”
Yeah, sooner or later opportunists were bound to show up. Nestor needed to either piss or get off the pot with this partnership deal. Promises weren’t helping.
In a moment of calm, bawling tires rent the night. Anguished cries froze Lucky’s blood. “Aureo!” The gates squealed open. Not good at this hour.
The boy’s eyes widened. “Come!” He darted down a hallway Lucky hadn’t seen before. Lucky followed his guide out a side door.
Both Jeeps skidded to stop in the courtyard, barely missing the sobbing guard. He knelt beside a bloody lump, illuminated in two sets of headlights. “Aureo!” the man cried again.
The front door slammed. Two men sauntered across the yard. They didn’t display guns, they didn’t have to. One look said they were forces to be reckoned with. One stalked up, kicked the body, and spat on the guard.
Cruz and Bo jumped from the Jeeps. Oh shit. Now was not the time for heroics. Lucky darted toward Bo. The kicker got right up in Bo’s face. Oh, hell the fuck no. Lucky charged. His tackle knocked the man back into the dirt.
“You will pay for that, my friend,” the man shouted.
“Put it on my tab.” Lucky pulled back his fist and let fly.
The man’s head snapped back. Hands grabbed him, but Lucky fought. About time he got to do something other than sit around with his thumb up his ass, waiting for the right time to make a bust. He swung, but a pair of arms held him tighter than iron bands. “No, Lucky. Now’s not the time.” Bo tightened his grip.
The man stood, dusted himself off, and marched out of the gate to a waiting car, clutching his jaw. He pulled a knife from his pocket and reached down to something tied to the bumper. A rope. From the bumper to the bloody lump’s leg. Oh, dear God. He sneered. “A warning.”
Two door slams later, the car pulled away.
“Lucky!” Stephan snarled from the porch. “I don’t care if you have to suck his dick, get Nestor on board. Now!” He waved a hand at the man lying in the yard. “And…get rid of that!” His heels clicked when he whirled and ran back in the house. Coward.
“Aureo, Aureo,” the guard moaned.
Oh fuck it all. Lucky dove to the man’s side. Dark eyes stared at him and blinked. “B… Cyrus! This man’s still alive.”
Bo joined him on the ground, shoving his fingers into Aureo’s neck and leaning down to listen to his chest. He straightened. “We have to get him to a hospital, now. Cruz! I need you!”
Lucky looked for an undamaged body part to grab and help haul the guy up. Parts of Aureo’s leg stuck out that shouldn’t have.
“Here, let me.” Bo scooped the man up like he weighed nothing and bustled him to the first Jeep.
“I’m coming too.” Lucky climbed into the back, sinking to the floorboard to give the injured man room on the seat.
“Ride up front,” Bo said. “He needs me back here in case something goes wrong.”
Lucky further broke the already broken “oh shit” handle when Cruz took off.
“What happened?” Bo’s voice was a faint murmur over the roar of the engine.
“Two men paid Stephan a call. Stephan’s latest boy toy…” Crap. The kid! Surely someone took him home. No sense worrying now. The other Jeep followed, no doubt carrying the distraught guard. A lot of folks ‘round these parts seemed to be kin.
“How did you happen to be here?” Lucky glanced from Bo to Cruz and back again.
Bo stiffened. “After I left here, I got word that two guys grabbed Aureo out of a bar. Cruz and I went looking. We were coming back when we saw the car—” Bo made a retching noise. “We saw the car dragging something. It wasn’t ‘til it pulled up at Stephan’s that we saw what.”
There were at least three people in the car. Three asses Lucky owed a stomping.
“Lucky?”
“Yeah?”
“What do you remember of CPR?”
Lucky slipped between the seats to the back. “One-one thousand.” Hands laced together, he compressed Aureo’s chest. Bones crackled under his hands.
“Easy,” Bo said. “At thirty, stop and I’ll breathe.”
After five minutes, they switched off. Bo murmured, “Hang in there, buddy.”
Aureo didn’t answer. Thank God. If Lucky had a syringe full of Stephan’s magic elixir, he’d have dosed the man. In the low light of the Jeep’s interior light, he gazed at a bloody mess of a face, scraped arms and legs, muscles showing in places through tattered clothes. This man’s life would never be the same—if he lived.
“One and two!” Bo bobbed up and down in the back seat, fighting for a man he barely knew.
“One and two!’
Bo stopped, and Lucky delivered two breaths. Breathe, damn it, breathe!
In a blur they worked. Cruz stopped the Jeep and other hands took over. A solemn doctor delivered the news with a shake of his head.
Bo would have been howling about the injustice of it all and mourning the loss of a friend. Instead, Cyrus stared with dry eyes at the sheet-covered gurney. No emotion. Nothing at all showed on his face. “Let’s go home.”
“I can’t. If I go back to Stephan’s tonight, I might just beat him to death.”
Another death racked up to Stephan’s indifference, added to the unfortunate Hector and the nameless man Lucky had found in an Atlanta apartment. And Mateo Reyes, and possibly Vincent Mangiardi. How many more had to die? They should take what intel they’d gathered and call the case done. But if they did, chances were Stephan would track them down or run. That couldn’t happen. The man needed to pay for his crimes.
Bo placed an arm around Lucky’s tired shoulders. Chest compressions made one hell of a workout. A living Aureo would make another ten hours of spaghetti arms worth the effort.
“Then come home with me. We need to talk. Cruz can drop us off and pick us up in the morning.”
In the future, a showdown with Stephan loomed. Not tonight. Not on too little sleep and too much adrenaline letdown. “Good idea.” An hour or so in Bo’s arms wouldn’t erase the horror of the night, but it sure as hell beat an hour or so not in Bo’s arms.
***
“No gloves, no mask, and blood all over us. Our first responder coach would have our asses.” Bo led the way into his living area. He kicked aside a chair by the sink to expose the drain set directly in the floor. He turned the taps in the sink and pulled out a handheld shower nozzle. “Get your clothes off. We need soap and water.”
No curtains, no door. The best Lucky could hope for was not to splash the bed. Bo held the sprayer up, soaked him down, and handed him a bar of soap. At least the thin gray sliver smelled nice. Rusty water ran down Lucky’s body from the blood he’d smeared from his hands to his face. He lathered himself up with his fingers, then worked soap onto Bo’s lightly furred chest.
Bo exhaled slowly. The day’s stress couldn’t have been easy. Bo had cared for Aureo, like he did for any man working with him. If not for Bo, Lucky would have just called him Shorty and not bothered to learn anything about him to keep a professional distance. But the distance Lucky tried to maintain didn’t lessen the heartache. A man who’d had a life and people who loved him died tonight. Lucky didn’t get close to folks for a reason. One way or another, caring led to pain.
“How well did you know the guy?”
“Not very. The guard’s his brother. His wife is eight months pregnant with their third child.” Bo let out another ragged breath. “They killed a man horribly to send a message. A motherfucking message!” He grabbed the soap and hurled the bar across the room. It bounced back to land at his feet. “And then Stephan wants us to get rid of that! Sometimes I hate the human race.”
Join the club. Lucky hated most humans most of the time. “I need you to promise me something.”
“What?”
“Promise me we’ll never have a night like this one again.” Lucky didn’t bother drying off. He hobbled over to the bed, dripping wet.
He awoke in the night to the sound of gentle sobs. Without a word, he wrapped himself around his lover. Together they’d mourn the fallen man.
***
Lucky studied Nestor with new eyes. Like Stephan, he held the power of life or death in his hands. What was it like to say the word and a man died or lived?
“A man was dragged to death last night, as a warning to Stephan.”
“And what do you want me to do?” Nestor cocked his head to the side.
The son of a bitch had to ask? “Make it stop.”
“Make what stop? The death? The threats? Stephan?”
“All of the above.”
“Done.”
Wait! What? “Just like that. All this time you haven’t given an answer and now you say yes. Why?”
“Because you asked for someone other than yourself and Stephan. I do believe Victor would be proud. I merely waited until you asked me for help and meant it.”
Sorry bastard. “You’re as bad as Stephan.”
Nestor jerked upright in his chair. He brought his fist crashing down on the table. Knives and forks clattered. “Do not ever, ever compare me to such a monster. You think you know me. You know nothing.”
Drug dealer, money launderer, cartel kingpin, murderer, either directly or indirectly, if anyone who’d ever taken the poison Nestor sold fatally overdosed.
Nestor dropped his voice to conversational level. “If you don’t like Stephan, and don’t agree with his leadership, take it.”
What the fuck? “What do you mean, ‘take it’?”
Nestor leaned across the table, fixing Lucky with his unblinking, soul-dark stare. “Exactly what I said. His men have no love for him. No loyalty. He looks down on them. They’re coming to respect you and Cyrus.”
“I could never…”
“Maybe not alone, but with Cyrus at your side, you’ll have a loyal force. He won’t back down from a challenge, and neither will you. You forget, I’ve played poker with you. The fact you stayed with Victor so long speaks of your strength.”
“I wasn’t born to this life.” Lucky waved a hand, meant to include Nestor’s organization and not the cantina where they sat. “I’m a farmer’s son from North Carolina.”
“And an accident of birth made me the son of a marijuana smuggler. An accident of death made me his heir.” Nestor heaved out a sigh, his years etched into his face. “I was an art student. Doted on by my mother and sent to the States to further my education. No need for me to learn the family business, with three older brothers already working for my father.” His eyes clouded. He blinked the sorrow away, forming his face into an unreadable mask. “I was away at school when I heard the news. An upstart, very much like Stephan, killed my father and brothers.”
He paused from sipping his beer, lips twisted with bitterness. Lines deepened around his mouth and eyes. “I gave up my dreams and returned home, to head my family. I meted out justice.” He sipped again.
Meted out justice. The closest he’d likely come to a murder confession. And here Lucky’d considered Nestor born to violence and shady deals. He’d seemed such a relentless man at times, yet he’d relaxed when he’d been a guest at Victor’s home.
“Then I married a wealthy, powerful man’s daughter. He offered to back me. Together we conquered our rivals. In the end my only son was used against me. His killers paid for his death. His mother’s madness I couldn’t avenge. She killed herself.”
Lucky watched the man’s hand encircling a beer bottle. An artist’s hands, not a killer’s. And yet, when he’d had to, he hadn’t shrunk back, and spoke so casually of loss of life. Nestor wasn’t given a choice. Lucky had chosen his own wrong path. “I’m sorry.” Didn’t happen often, but what could he do?
“I don’t dwell on what I can’t change. I focus on what I can. Our marriage was arranged, but in time my wife and I grew to be…friends. I miss her wise advice. And she gave me my boy.”
No talk of love. Lucky’s parents had disowned him, yet they’d clung to one another, even if Daddy didn’t often say the word “love.” He’d showed it often enough, a bunch of wildflowers picked from a field. A heated gaze. A kiss as he headed out the door.
“What about your art?”
“I still paint sometimes, as a hobby. It helps me deal with my life. I believe you’ve seen my greatest work.”
“Mama Mangiardi.” The painting in Lucky’s room. The one Victor had cherished and fought his siblings for. He’d only been three when his mother died. Perhaps he’d valued the work as much for the artist as the subject.
“A gift for Victor’s twentieth birthday, painted from an old photo. To hide our relationship, I presented the painting to the family.”
“You were lovers.”
“A long time ago. He had to hide who he was here. His grandfather and father didn’t deal heavily in illicit trade, but on occasion needed my brokerage services. I took young Victor under my wing.” He shrugged. “As I’ve heard you Americans say, ‘Shit happens.’”
Yeah, shit happened sometimes. The men Victor took to his bed when Lucky wasn’t around hadn’t bothered him much, and he’d never mentioned having ever been in love. The wistful way he’d studied the painting sometimes and even raised a glass of brandy in toast made sense now.
Instead of jealousy, the truth about Nestor inspired kinship. “He loved you.”
“I like to think so. I believe you might call it ‘puppy love.’ I taught him how to be ruthless. But I also taught him respect for Mexican culture. Together we toured museums, attended plays. And when his father died, I helped him establish himself and redefine his business. Mostly in the States. He kept himself above reproach here.”
“He trafficked illegal drugs.”
“But he wasn’t violent and didn’t join in the power struggles. He wanted to protect his family. He’d have done anything for his family.” Nestor would likely defend Victor to the death. Maybe the love went both ways.
Nestor rubbed at his eyes with a fingertip. “He grew into a truly great man. Merciless when he needed to be, yet still loving and patient. His business didn’t define him as it does so many others. Victor never lost touch with who he was. Even I’ve strayed on occasion.” Lucky swallowed back against the lump forming in his throat. Nestor spoke fondly of Victor. Yes, there’d been true feelings between them.
“And you don’t believe he’s alive.”
“Do you see him here?” Nestor’s hand wave did indicate the cantina. “I believe he loved you as much as he did me, if not more. If he was here, he’d ask me to watch over you, help you. For an old friend, I do this.”
Nestor offered what few could refuse. After all, for years Lucky had learned from Victor, though not everything. Nestor could fill in the gaps. What the fuck am I thinking? I’m a narcotics agent, not a drug lord. Another agent who’d disappeared and been presumed dead came to mind. On a later raid the man turned up, alive and well, running his own smuggling ring. Sometimes the lure of money and power became too much to ignore.
While undercover, Lucky met with similar temptations: flashy cars, pockets full of cash. In the end, he traded in high dollar living for his ancient Camaro and rented duplex. With the kind of money to be made down here, he could afford to build Bo a mansion instead of rooting around for a decent fixer-upper.
And yet, even without the threat of the SNB hunting him down, he couldn’t. “That’s a kind offer, but I can’t.”
Nestor patted his hand. “I know. Victor always said your big heart would be the ruin of you. But you want Stephan to pay for his sins. I understand, and I’ll help in any way I can.”
“Thanks.” Lucky stood from the table to end their meeting. Time to tear Stephan down.
“Lucky?”
“Yeah?”
“Make no mistake. I loved Victor too. I regret never telling him so.”
Victor, running gentle fingers over an oil-painted canvas. His excitement when he announced an old friend coming to visit. The way he’d encouraged Lucky and Nestor to get to know one another and smiled when Lucky met with Nestor’s approval.
“He knew.”