Total pages in book: 48
Estimated words: 45785 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 229(@200wpm)___ 183(@250wpm)___ 153(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 45785 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 229(@200wpm)___ 183(@250wpm)___ 153(@300wpm)
It couldn’t be Vincente. Even though I’d be the last man on earth to trust him, I happened to know his biggest enemies weren’t US law enforcement—or an old PMC who’d gone up against him a few times years ago.
Ortega’s frown deepened. “Of course I’m sure. That’s what he said before I killed him. If he hadn’t been aiming a gun at Crew, I would’ve asked him nicely to elaborate.”
Right. Nicely.
I scratched my forehead with the end of the pen and turned to the board again. My mind was a fucking mess, still processing everything that’d happened. Memories resurfaced for a hot second before they went under again, and I couldn’t be sure a broken fragment of an image belonged to tonight’s clusterfuck or if my brain was rehashing old experiences.
If you worked on the right side of the law in San Diego, you heard about the cartels every fucking day. There was always something.
“Is this Vincente guy the head of the Blancos?” Joel asked quietly.
“In this region, anyway,” Crew muttered.
I raked my teeth over my bottom lip and went back to writing on the board. “Let’s see what we’ve got. Military weapons, a shock-and-awe operation, someone referring to Vincente, and…they sent, what, twenty heads?”
“Somethin’ like that,” Ortega agreed. “I don’t think they were high-ranking either.”
No, I was with him on that. Southern California was packed with gangs of diablos and falcons who wanted to prove themselves.
I’m scared, Uncle Ellie!
I winced and gnashed my teeth. I’m coming, darling. I promise.
I had to write it all down. Ortega, Crew, and I were well versed in how these motherfuckers operated, but I didn’t know the extent of the Tenleys’ knowledge. Or Joel’s, for that matter. He was one of those who worked on the front line of the drug war but didn’t get involved in the analytics and investigations. The job of a Coast Guard sniper was all about shooting boat engines and stopping a smuggler’s approach to US territory.
“We’ll start with the Blanco Family.” I scribbled as fast as I could to give Joel a quick rundown. “Vincente Blanco is a regio. He controls the Southern California trafficking route for cocaine, and he’s the nephew of the big boss Luca Blanco down in Colombia. They’re a Colombian-Sicilian cartel, pushing primarily coke from their own region as well as heroin from Laos and Afghanistan.” I stepped aside and faced the others so they could see the board. This was mostly for Joel, but I preferred not to look him in the eye. “Under Vincente, we have a handful of capos with their own crews and territories. Then we have their crusaders—they fight exclusively with rival gangs to protect the drug route. Add low-men to that, lieutenants and sicarios—hit men—plus the diablos—”
“What’s a diablo?” Joel asked.
Ortega answered. “They’re essentially Americans who wanna become official members. They’re small-scale hustlers and a fucking pain in my ass.”
“They’ll do the dirty work in hope of climbing ranks.” I spelled it out. “Tonight, for instance? I don’t know where the order came from, but a capo somewhere told a lieutenant or a comandante to carry it out. So they send a bunch of expendable pricks, and nothing gets back to the higher-ups.”
That was how I knew River and Reese wouldn’t find anything tonight. At most, they’d locate a scattered hit man who was dead either way. If he talked, the cartel would finish him. If he didn’t, the Tenleys would.
“So why don’t you think it’s Vincente behind this?” Crew asked.
“Because he’s been working with law enforcement,” I admitted. “Myself included.”
Ortega’s eyebrows flew up.
“Tariq and I finished our final contract with Hillcroft last year,” I went on, referring to the PMC group in DC we’d worked for. “We were undercover for three months as freelancers working for Vincente, and our job was to put one of his capos away for a long time. We got the fucker extradited in a joint op with the DEA, and now he’s doing thirty years in Texas.”
Crew furrowed his brow. “Why didn’t he just kill the capo?”
“He did his sister a favor.” I pointed the pen at Ana Blanco on the board. “She’s married and has four kids with the capo we put away.”
Joel read from the board. “Carillo Mesa.”
I nodded. “There’s a guy with a grudge. If he found out our true identities, I’d bet that’s our target.”
“Can we eliminate other suspects before we pull at that thread?” Crew asked. “What, um…what about a rat?”
I hated considering the possibility, but I’d been fucked over in the past, so we kind of had to.
“We’ll talk about that later. Carillo—he wants Vincente’s seat, making him our main suspect.” I scratched my jaw and eyed the board. “Can’t be the Perez brothers, can it?”
“No.” Ortega shook his head. “They lost their last turf war to one of Blanco’s capos. Last I heard, they were trying to move their operations to Cuba.”