15

The rental car he and Vau had been driving was still intact. All the paint had been burned off and the windows had blown out, but the car had been parked far enough away from the warehouse to escape the worst of the blast.

Abi squinted into the sun. The last thing he wanted was to run into any of the cacique’s remaining foot soldiers coming back to check on why they hadn’t heard from their boss.

An old man and a young boy emerged from the woods and stood watching him from a corner of the plantation. Abi bunched his fingers and aimed a pretend pistol at them. The old man took the child by the hand and led him back into the undergrowth.

Almost gagging with nerves, Abi reached in through the back window of the rental and retrieved his leather holdall. He unzipped it. His false passports, his money, and his credit cards were all intact. As was his passport in his real name.

Abi glanced up at the sky. ‘Thanks, Vau. I owe you a big one.’

He threw the carryall into the back of the Toyota. Then he walked towards the ruins of the crank factory.

He stood for some time staring at the mayhem left by the explosion. The main fire had burned itself out long ago, but tendrils of smoke were still rising from the shell of the building twenty or so hours after the initial blast.

Abi re-imagined the warehouse in his head. It wasn’t a problem for him. He’d spent quite a little time there, and he had that sort of brain. He picked his way across the wreckage to where he and his brothers had hung Joris Calque from the rafters, with Adam Sabir squatting beneath him like in that scene from Sergio Leone’s Once Upon A Time In The West. Yes. This was the place he’d left the two of them when the cacique and his men had made their surprise attack.

No bodies. There were no bodies anywhere in the wreckage. And the fuckers should have been burned to a crisp.

Abi grunted. He stepped across to where the basement had once been. The source of the blast had obviously been down there. Near the crank vats. That much was clear. He stood on the lip of the crater left by the explosion and looked down. No Hummer. Not even the skeleton of a Hummer. Not even the photoplastic smudge of a Hummer.

So Sabir and Calque had got away after all. And not only that. They’d clearly caused the explosion in the first place, because it was hardly likely that the Mexicans would torch their own drug factory for a non-existent insurance payoff. And by setting the place off, they’d as good as signed his twin brother’s death warrant.

Abi took a deep breath. He would have a fair few scores to settle in the coming months. That much was clear. Calque and Sabir’s survival changed everything. Everything.

Without so much as a backward glance at the cenote – or a backward thought about his brother and sisters – Abi got into the Land Cruiser and drove out of the plantation gate in the direction of the main Cancun road.