At first light the Gulfstream II set down on a private airfield in Guaridón. A convoy of matching SUVs waited at the edge of the airstrip. Except these had their license plates removed. Evan had little doubt that they were the ones that had carried Anjelina away.
Raúl Montesco took Evan with him, just the two of them in the back, a mute chauffeur behind the wheel.
Friends close, enemies closer.
Tattered bedsheets painted with the Leones emblem—that blue-eyed lion—flapped from the overpasses, along with various slogans praising La Familia and El Moreno himself. The point of the bedsheets wasn’t in the messages written on them. The point was that the authorities did not feel safe to cut them down.
A show of who ran this section of Nuevo León.
Even so, Montesco’s chauffeur made sure to stop ten yards back from other vehicles at the first red light they hit, leaving room to escape in the event of a shootout. A blue Dodge Charger with a white stripe idled at the intersecting road before the just-changed traffic light, POLICÍA FEDERAL written in blocky letters on the side. Though the federal had the green light, the officer gave a respectful tilt of his head to El Moreno’s chauffeur, allowing him to coast ahead through the red light along with the rest of the convoy.
They wound their way through the broken city, the wreckage of brutal cartel rule on display at every turn. Men slinging bodies into the back of a pickup truck, pausing to wipe their foreheads and watch the SUVs speed by. A scrum of boys kicking a ragged soccer ball on a dirt field, a street dog jogging along the sideline with a human arm in its mouth. The boys played on.
The sun rose, achingly bright, making Evan squint even through the tinted windows. They headed out of the city into the bleached light of morning, everything arid and bleak. Heat mirage-wavered the potholed asphalt. Broken glass along the roadside gave off stabbing glares. A waft of sweet musk washed from the not-too-distant Chihuahuan Desert, graveyard to a thousand would-be dreamers.
Across a broad valley, the tarmac washed with desert grit. The dotted center line disappeared at intervals beneath deltas of sand layering the highway into oblivion, a reminder that one day the earth would reclaim all of them and all of this. Rumbling upslope and down as the terrain dimensionalized. Veering off onto a pinched dirt road, heading through ambush-ready walls of wind-carved rock. Evan started to notice power lines and rusty storm-drain grates, signs of encroaching civilization.
A buttonhook right fed the convoy into a path cut through limestone formations.
A majestic wooden archway marked the entrance to El Moreno’s estate, featuring carvings of the three monkeys of lore. A trio of sentries with bandido-style face coverings and MP7s manned the gate.
The desert oasis was everything that Aragón’s home was not, a Disneyfied sprawl of luxury and wealth. Succulents nested in quartz beds, swans bobbing in man-made rivers, hardscaping and xeriscaping and landscaping. An adobe-style mansion with ranch fixings and a number of smaller buildings trailing behind it like lesser islands of an archipelago. Solar panels, backup batteries and generators, sewer grates up the long driveway and beyond. A pool with a grotto surrounded by a scattering of bikinied women on chaise lounges, a horse corral with no horses. The now-familiar Leones león plastered across a water tower, surveying the entire expanse with a king-of-the-jungle gaze.
They arced through a circular white-rock driveway and piled out, Montesco stretching his arms. “Let’s get you fixed up,” he said to Evan. “Mi casa, su casa.”
Despite its splendor, the house was designed to withstand a siege. Heavy metal doors with slits just wide enough to fit a muzzle through. Thick window shutters designed to halt sniper rounds. Guards at every entrance.
Rats scurried through the shrubs, intruders in paradise.
Beside the eight-car garage was a building Evan initially took for a horse stable. A second glance confirmed it to be a jail. Women in various conditions and levels of undress were barely visible in the light slanting through the bars. Crammed four, five to a cell. Buckets and mattresses.
“Ah,” Montesco said, “you are admiring the chicken coop. Come see.” A sweaty hand on the back of Evan’s neck as he steered him over. “These ones are too ugly for personal use. They’re for trade. At month’s end we ship them to Vegas. I like having them here to look at.” A good-natured grin. “My own personal zoo.”
They walked past the women, Evan doing his best to ignore the scores of eyes following them. Montesco pointed to a brass-plated skeleton key hung from a nail on a wooden pillar, just out of reach through the bars. “The key to their freedom, just past their fingertips.” A rumble of a laugh. “I like to play with my food.”
Moving to the end of the structure, he yanked open an unlocked cell door. A ten-by-twelve space literally filled with currency straps—euros and rubles, pesos and good old-fashioned hundred-dollar bills.
“What do you want to be paid?” Montesco asked. “It doesn’t matter. Twenty million? A hundred million? It’s in there, rotting. Come, I’ll show you.”
He escorted Evan around the side, yanking open a half dozen other doors, each room filled with the riches of nations. He gripped both of Evan’s shoulders, his sweaty face close. A drop of sweat wavered at the tip of his nose, but he didn’t seem to notice, his eyes aflame.
“You find the third Gulf Cartel shooter,” he said. “You deliver the San Bernardino market to me and then Los Angeles? And I will make you a king.” He caught himself. “No, not a king. A prince. A duke. A very rich man.”
Evan said, “I can do that.”
“What would you like now?”
Evan eyed a hundred-thousand-dollar brick of hundreds. “One of those should do.”
Montesco nodded. “Not too greedy. Smart.” They started back to the main house. “I will have it brought to your room. Do you want women? Girls?”
“No,” Evan said.
“Boys?”
“Just some rest. I don’t like distractions.”
A half step in the lead, Evan froze. Ambling around the side of the house no more than fifty yards away was a full-grown lion. He glided languidly with the confidence of an apex predator. At each step muscles rose at his shoulders like plates of steel. He turned to stare at Evan. His muzzle, bloodred and sopping.
A moment later a handler came into sight behind him, grasping a mosquito-nosed tranquilizer air rifle.
The lion bared his teeth and roared.
Evan felt the vibration at the base of his brain stem.
Bored, the lion swung his head away and sauntered forward, collapsing in the shade of a palm tree to lick his massive wet paws.
Evan allowed himself a breath. He understood better the rats rustling through the bushes, scavengers awaiting leftovers. The pulse in his neck made itself known. One of the girls in the cell at his back tittered at him.
A flutter of movement in an upstairs window caught his eye—a feminine form shadowed at the pane, mostly lost behind the yellow glare of the day. Anjelina, the proverbial captive princess in the tower? It brought back an echo of Belicia self-quarantined in her room, alone with her grief.
He blinked, and the figure was gone.
Quickly, he returned his stare to the lion, who continued to eye him even as he worked his paws, his sandpapered pink tongue turning redder.
Montesco watched Evan with amusement. “You’re afraid of the wrong lion, muchacho.” He pinched Evan’s shoulder, shook him roughly yet affectionately, and steered him toward the front door.