The Escalade the cartel sent to the beach hotel was a slick pearl gray beast with black tinted windows. Twenty minutes up above La Crucecita, a flock of pigeons scattered before it as it swung off the curving asphalt onto a dirt road.
Lou looked out its back windshield to see if the Ford F150 escort vehicle with them would follow. It did, the two young sicarios strapping AR-15s in the bed of it, laughing at each other as they ducked down their black bush hat covered heads to avoid the jungle underbrush’s low-hanging fronds.
“Are we having fun yet or what?” said Manny beside him, thumbing back his black cowboy hat to show off his swag Rick Ross–style sunglasses.
Dressed to the nines and seemingly coked to the gills, Manny seemed even more amped-up than usual. As if in direct contrast, Alessandra, beside the driver, was placid, unruffled.
He watched as Alessandra said something to the driver to make him laugh then touched up her lips with some gloss.
In her pale flowered silk dress and nude heels with her hair done, she could have been a bored aristocrat on the way to a charity event.
Yeah, Lou thought. Alessandra was the shit all right. Smart, quiet, played her good looks like a virtuoso. She fluttered among all these psycho killers like a butterfly, didn’t she? he thought. One with ice in its veins.
Lou brushed a finger nervously over his soul patch as he looked at the back of her done-up hair.
He had good reason to be nervous. Now he was entering the sanctum sanctorum.
Alessandra had used her connections to get in with someone she said was a real player, a group that was referred to as El Aleman.
El Aleman, Spanish for “the German,” was actually a name Lou had heard before. Some people that he knew in the drug trade talked about El Aleman Group with a kind of fearful reverence.
If Alessandra’s connection came through, they’d be made. Made in the shade drinking lemonade in fact. They’d be doing a hundred kilos a week or even more. After one run, they could practically get another plane. After two or more, you were looking at exponential growth, corporation level money. The potential money that would roll in would be mind-boggling.
Lou only needed a fraction of it off the top for his own personal marital issues, of course.
And then he’d retire.
Sure you will, said a little voice in Lou’s guilt-ridden mind.
Sure you will.