“I don’t care whose ashes they are,” Lupe Duarte stormed. “I don’t want anybody’s funeral urn on display in my house.”
“It’s actually my house,” Felix told her firmly. “Mine. And if I want to have a dozen funeral urns in every room, I will. Understood?”
“It’s bad luck,” Lupe insisted. “It’s like asking for trouble.”
“I don’t care,” Felix told her. “I want the urn here, and it’s staying.”
“Suit yourself, then,” she said, flouncing out of the room.
Of all Felix’s wives, Lupe had been around the longest. She had not aged well. Too much Botox in her younger years had left her with a face that was almost as disfigured as her husband’s. She could be shrewish and demanding on occasion. Sex had disappeared from their marriage years ago. She was no longer interested, and, to be honest, neither was he. There were plenty of places where someone as powerful as El Pescado could find willing bedmates should the need arise.
No, the real secret behind Lupe’s long-term staying power had to do with her ability to manage Felix’s household and keep that part of his life running smoothly. Sex partners were easy to come by; good housekeepers were not. As a consequence Felix seldom vetoed anything about the way Lupe ran things. However, the presence of Christina’s funeral urn in their living room was an exception to that rule. On that one issue El Pescado refused to budge. In fact, over Lupe’s objections, he had positioned the urn in a place of honor on the mantel of the fireplace.
Pouring himself a tumbler of his favorite scotch, he sat down in his customary armchair and settled in for an afternoon and evening of quiet grieving. The alcohol gave him free rein to think about Christina—about both of them—as they had once been, before things had gone so very wrong.
An hour or so later, El Pescado was half dozing in the chair with the empty glass on the table at his elbow when the front door slammed open and Manuel, his younger son, marched into the room uninvited. Despite the fact that both his sons had homes located inside the Duarte compound, very little in-person visiting occurred among them. For one thing, both Manuel and Pablo despised their stepmother, and the feeling was entirely mutual; Lupe didn’t like them, either.
One glance at Manuel’s face told Felix something was wrong. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Something weird,” Manuel announced. “I think we’ve been set up.”
“Set up? How?”
“I just heard from one of my informants in the ATF. Someone carried out a hit in Arizona early this morning. According to my guy, the ATF is working on the assumption that we’re involved.”
“Are we?” Felix asked.
The cartel didn’t operate on a strict command structure. El Pescado wasn’t always aware of everything that was going on, and neither were Pablo and Manuel.
“Not as far as I know,” Manuel answered.
“What kind of hit?”
“The kind our friends at MS-13 like to use,” Manuel replied. “After that mess in Las Cruces, anytime there’s a Molotov cocktail involved, the cops come looking at us.”
The mess in Las Cruces—El Pescado remembered it well. In recent years, increased border enforcement had made it more and more challenging to get both people and product back and forth across the border. When MS-13 had posted ads for hit man services on the dark Web, Felix Duarte had been happy to outsource those jobs to someone else rather than risk losing his own personnel.
MS-13’s preferred MO was for the assassin to show up on a motorcycle or motorbike, race up to the intended victim, toss a burning firebomb at him, and then get the hell out. Most of the time, it worked just fine. In Las Cruces, however, it had been a disaster. There the intended victim had been a former associate of Felix Duarte’s—a once trusted lieutenant turned snitch. Since the victim would have recognized his former workmates on sight, the MS-13 option had been particularly appealing.
Except it had all gone horribly wrong. The guy throwing the firebomb had screwed up and held on to the weapon for a moment too long. When it blew up, it took out the bomber rather than the intended victim. Now in witness protection, he was the one who had pointed the investigation in the direction of the Duarte Cartel. And the investigators weren’t wrong. The Duarte Cartel had been directly involved in all four of those still-unsolved bombings, but Felix didn’t like having the cartel’s name linked to something that had nothing to do with them.
“Do we know who’s dead?” Felix asked.
“A guy named Ron Webster.”
“Is he a dealer?” Felix asked. “Competition, maybe?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“See what you can find out about him,” Felix suggested. “I’ll do the same. And thanks for bringing this to my attention, Manny. If someone is trying to set us up to take a fall here, we need to know who and why.”
After Manuel left, Felix poured another scotch. El Pescado hadn’t gotten as far as he had in the world by sweeping potential problems under the rug. Felix dealt with them. Pablo had been a mess lately—drinking too much, sending his wife and child packing. Just because Pablo was El Pescado’s son didn’t give him carte blanche. In his younger days Felix might have gone straight to his contact at MS-13 and raised hell. Now he approached the problem in a more roundabout way by sending Graciella a text. Something’s come up, he told her. Call me.