by Cora Kenborn
With a flash of light, and a deafening blast from the gun, my brother was gone.
I awoke to my name being called. Well, not necessarily my name. I’d taken enough high school Spanish to know what a puta meant, and it wasn’t complimentary. It wasn’t the first time I’d been called a whore, but disorientation had me frantically trying to come to grips with the situation.
My head hurt. I ran my fingers over the back of it and felt a big knot. Taking stock of my surroundings, I realized I sat in the middle of a pantry closet with a thick wooden shelf behind my head.
Nash had thrown me inside after the back door rattled and…
Oh, God.
I’d passed out after they…
Tears tumbled down my cheeks with reckless abandon. I squeezed them to block out the images that flashed through my head on constant replay.
The bright light. The crack of the gun. The vacantness in my brother’s eyes as he fell.
The men from the hardware store murdered my brother, and now they were coming for me.
With a jolt, I remembered my car sat parked behind the cantina. My license plate shone like a beacon. All they had to do was look it up and they’d see who it was registered to. They’d know it was mine and that I worked for Emilio.
Emilio.
I’d accepted that murdering bastard as my friend. I’d never make that mistake again. I’d never allow any man that close to me. I’d honor that vow until the day I died.
I remained quiet as the voices moved from the kitchen into the main cantina. My skin crawled with fear, but I’d made a dying promise to my brother.
As low to the floor as I could get, I belly slithered across the tile on my elbows toward the back door. Every instinct pulled at me to go to Nash. I couldn’t just leave him here. But as my body instinctively twisted toward the right, his voice boomed loud and clear in my head.
Gumshoe, Cherry. You promised.
Swallowing my heart, I commando crawled, forcing my mind to think of nothing but the door. I didn’t look back. The voices from the cantina turned around, and I was running out of time. I reached for the door on my hands and knees and flung it open into the darkness.
Once outside, I pulled my keys out of a cross body bag slung around my chest. My chest burned, and my thighs screamed as adrenaline surged through my veins. Fumbling with the keys in the rain, I dropped them, cursing as my tears fell. The reality of the situation started to crash down on me as I tried to hold it together. Flinging the door open, I dove in and slammed on the accelerator.
Every part of me shook. I drove erratically, swerving across yellow lines, passing in no passing zones, and driving at least thirty miles over the speed limit. If I got pulled over, fine. They could just follow me back to Caliente and arrest the men who’d ended my brother’s life.
Eventually, the adrenaline would fade, and the shock would wear off. I’d have to deal with the cold reality of what had happened, but right now, everything seemed surreal. The whole thing almost felt like it happened to someone else, and I’d played a movie role I’d never prepared for. How would I go on living tomorrow when the numbness wore off, and pain destroyed what little humanity I had left?
Tonight, however, I had one thing on my mind.
I needed answers, and there was only one man who had them.
Chapter Ten
Valentin
After an early morning of hitting the punching bag and splitting my knuckles, I’d worked out enough aggression to walk through the doors of RVC Enterprises and not throw punches. Tugging the sleeves of my dress shirt over my knuckles hid the destruction of the bag. I’d punched the hell out of it, imagining it was my father’s face.
As I rounded the corner to my small office, incessant heels clicked behind me. Clenching my jaw, I inhaled slowly before coming to a complete stop. “What is it, Janine?”
She barreled into the back of me, papers flying everywhere. “Oh, goodness, I’m sorry Mr. Carrera.” Her red framed glasses slid down her nose as she vomited apologies. “I didn’t mean to wrinkle your suit or upset you…”
I glanced over my shoulder and let her squirm. Stammering, she nervously pushed the glasses back into place with her forefinger four times before working up the courage to look me in the eye. My silence made me a giant asshole, but I enjoyed watching her anxiousness. I’d practiced my entire life at being intimidating as fuck. Unfortunately for my secretary, her skittishness around me made her my primary source for daytime entertainment.
“I’m not upset, Janine.” I ran my hands down my red tie, straightening it. “You’re my secretary. If you need me, that’s fine.”
“Oh, good. Then you probably—”
I held up my hand, silencing her. “But, let me walk into my office first, all right? I don’t need a shadow.”
Her lips tightened as she nodded quickly. Janine was efficient and knew her way around real estate, but if I walked up behind her and yelled ‘boo,’ she’d probably hug the ceiling fan.
Strange girl.
My office boasted the same extravagance as my home, moderate but adequate. The lone brick building stood unassuming and dull. Each agent had a tiny cubicle, and I insisted technology be kept at a bare minimum. The less opportunity for the Feds to bug our office or hack into our computers, the better. Not that I’d ever left a trail the DEA could find. Mateo outfitted the entire office with wiretap detectors, data scramblers and closed-circuit television.
Once seated, I folded my hands in front of me and leaned forward. I learned the power play move from watching my father during meetings. “So, what’s so urgent?”
She rubbed her palms over her mouth. It was a move I’d come to know as her telltale sign of anxiety. “Well, sir, Rob called in sick early this morning, so I assumed there was no way you’d want to miss a chance at the Toller property.”
Rob Young needed to be knocked down a few notches. He had an overextended sense of self-worth I found irritating. However, he’d proven to be my best flipper, so I’d let his attitude slide. All my house flippers were men. I’d never send a woman to a job site. It wasn’t sexist; it was good business.
I was still alive, because I took nothing for granted. No situation was safe.
I didn’t like where this was going. “I don’t care about Rob. What happened?”
Janine wrung her hands while shuffling the papers in her hand. “When I got to the site, the house was a total wreck, as we expected. No one was there yet, so I thought I’d walk around the perimeter and check out the foundation.”
A coldness filled the space where my soul used to be. I had no feelings one way or the other for Janine, but I’d hate to see ambition end her life. Only an American civilian would do something as stupid as wander a foreclosure in the second ward, alone and unarmed.
The lengthy conversation began to lose my focus, and I clenched my fingers around the edge of my desk. “For fuck’s sake, what happened, Janine?”
Bristling from my comment, she hugged her chest, as her chin trembled. “As I rounded the back of the house, a man came up behind me. He scared me at first, because I thought no one else was around.” She paused, dabbing at her eyes.
Tears. Wonderful.
I raised an eyebrow and waited, my stare fixated on her.
“Yes, well,” she continued, sniffling, “he grabbed my shoulder and asked me what I was doing. I know I shouldn’t have responded, but I was so scared, Mr. Carrera.”
“What did you say?”
She finally looked me in the eye. “I told him I was looking at the property to buy for my boss. He asked who you were, so I told him.”
Blood pulsed against my temple. “You told him my name?”
She winced. “I said I represented RVC Enterprises.”
At least she didn’t use my name. That may’ve saved her life.
“Go on,” I encouraged, my knuckles turning white.
She sniffled again. “He dug his fingers into my shoulder and told me the place was already under contract. I told him
I’d just looked at the MLS listings and there’d been no update. That’s when he got in my face and yelled at me.”
Getting information out of this woman frayed all my thinned nerves.
“Words, Janine,” I bit out between clenched teeth. “What did he say?”
She nodded her head. “He said he didn’t give an f-word about my listing, and to back off and tell El Muerte, it’s not over.” She slouched forward, her earlier poise vanishing. Worried lines coated her eyes. “Who’s El Muerte, Mr. Carrera? And what’s not over?”
“Shit!” It pissed me off how quickly things derailed when my mind was consumed with flame-haired bartenders. I’d allowed the worst breach of my cleanest sanctum, and I had only myself to blame.
And maybe Janine for being stupid.
I stood and stormed to my office door. Throwing it open, I motioned to the cubicles lined outside of it. “Go, Janine. I need to think.”
She paused, halfway out of the chair, her doe eyes rounded. “Who’s El Muerte?”
I hardened a steeled look, my eyes informing her that we were done. Nodding her head, she hugged the papers to her chest. Her face held a mix of concern and fear as she exited my office.
Locking the door behind her, I tugged at my meticulously combed back hair until it hung disheveled in my face. I needed to be careful. Every decision I made from here on out affected everyone I met.
Janine wasn’t in danger. Janine was a message. Muñoz enforcers were following an order.
Punching the wall, I rested my forehead against the molding. “I’m El Muerte,” I whispered to an empty room. “The Reaper.”
As the office cleared out for the day, I opened my desk drawer and pulled out the gun from the hidden back compartment. Holding it up to my face, I marveled at the intricacies, definition, and power behind it. One small squeeze of a man’s finger could extinguish another man’s life. It was simple to think about, but devastating on the psyche of a young man eager to find his place in a world he wasn’t wanted.
The room smelled of metallic rust. I may’ve only been sixteen; however, I knew blood when I smelled it. It singed my nose and gagged my throat, but I’d never show it. I steeled my expression, showing nothing on the outside, just as I’d been taught. One solitary overhead light swung, and my eyes followed it back and forth. Somehow it gave the room more of a death shadow than what already hung over it. One chair rested in the middle of the dusty floor, and the rest of the room stood bare. I assumed the reasoning was for easier clean up, but what did I know? This was the first time I’d been brought inside. Every other time, I’d stood guard outside the door, hardening my soul to the screams for mercy. Eventually, the begging stopped tearing at my insides.
Eventually, I’d become him.
A man, not more than twenty, sat bound in the chair with his face beaten and his eyes swollen shut. My two friends had worked him over good. I didn’t ask what he’d done. Sometimes no one knew. Sometimes the one in the chair didn’t even know. Strangely, no one questioned it. That’s how you knew power ran deep. When you sat tied to a chair, bleeding and waiting for the hammer to fall on your execution, and you didn’t ask why. You’d crossed the wrong people.
I smelled him before I heard him. My father had a distinct permanent scent of gunpowder and charred wood that roiled my stomach every time he drew near. Standing in that small room, I stood straighter. I squared my shoulders. I showed no fear.
“Take it, son,” he commanded, handing me a black .22 caliber handgun. Curling my fingers around the trigger, I stared at it as a frenzied war raged quietly inside of me. I knew what he wanted. He’d been warning me that I’d be expected to prove my loyalty to the cartel.
I just didn’t expect it to be so soon.
My father walked over to the weakened man with a sadistic smile, removed the cigar from his mouth, and pressed the lit end into the man’s exposed shoulder. His tortured cries forced my eyes downward, the stench of burnt skin filling the room.
Alejandro’s voice echoed against the bare walls. “Pon atención, Valentin!” Pay attention, Valentin.
My head snapped up in time to see the smile curl my father’s mouth, his dark mustache curled heavy at the ends from weeks of moving locations. Usually a very meticulous man about his appearance, his dishevelment gave him a sinister look I had no desire to push into a corner. We locked eyes, and he nodded to the victim, showing off by sliding into broken English.
“This man. He’s committed a crime. Take him out.”
Knowing this was a test, I stared at my father. If I failed, I could be in the chair next. Blood ran deep in cartel lines, but loyalty ran deeper. Steeling my breath, I raised the gun and aimed it at the man’s heart. A clean shot seemed the most humane. I was a killer, but I wasn’t an animal.
The dark side of me wanted him to curse me or spit at me. I wanted anything to provoke me into a rage. Instead, his eyes bore into me with a finality of acceptance. No fight remained inside of him.
At some point, I must have lowered the gun because my father’s voice boomed from across the room. “Valentin!” Our eyes met, and as always, his coal black stare burrowed its way into my head. “This man, he raped his sister.”
Bright white light burst across my vision. I no longer saw a defenseless man resigned to his own death. Rage welled beneath a bubbling surface of hate. I didn’t hesitate.
I blinked and pulled the trigger. One clean shot between the eyes. The back of the man’s head blew across the room, and my father laughed maniacally.
“Valentin,” he said, clapping me on the shoulder. “It is done now. A new life for you, yes?”
It was a new life. One that would turn me from a boy with a shred of decency into a man with nothing but twisted black regret.
The man I killed was an only child. He had no sister.
I ran my fingers across the smooth metal. I supposed somewhere deep inside a sliver of a soul remained, but beatings and threats ripped most of it away years ago. Now, most all I felt was a sense of relief when I killed.
Relief that it was them and not me.
Kill or be killed.
Shoot or die.
At the end of the day, I’d trained myself to wipe their last gasp of breath from my memory and forget their empty eyes over a glass of tequila and a willing woman.
Live by the sword and die by the sword.
Eventually it’d come for me. Because of my solitude, there’d be no innocent family members to suffer my same fate. At least I’d learned that valuable lesson from Alejandro.
Shoving the gun in the back of my pants, I pulled my suit jacket from the back of my chair. My head swam with ways to navigate shit, now that the Muñoz cartel made the first move against a civilian employee of mine. That kind of thing didn’t happen on American soil. That was a practice from home that’d specifically been left there.
As I adjusted my collar, my office door burst open, causing me to rip the gun from my back and aim it at the dark head that emerged.
“Shit! Boss, it’s me!” Emilio stood crouched in the doorway with his hands held high and his chin ducked, as if that would stave off a bullet to his brain.
“Jesus, Emilio, knock! How many times do I have to tell you people to fucking knock?” I shoved the gun back in my waistband. “I could’ve blown your head off.”
Emilio stood frozen in the doorway, with matted hair and bloodstains splattering his shirt and pants. The sight alone would’ve sent most people screaming for their phones to dial the police, but the scene was nothing new in our world.
Nothing new except for the ravaged look of regret on his face.
That look concerned me. Not because I particularly cared, but because regret had no place in our lives. It had to be checked at the door, along with a conscience if a man was to survive.
“Emilio?” I asked with an annoyed tone. I’d had a long day and was in no mood for this.
Emilio ran a shaking hand over his oily, slicked back hair, repeating the move as he mumb
led. “I don’t know what happened. We never get it wrong. Never wrong. And so, what if we do? It happens. It’s the way of home, right? You play, your family could pay.”
“Emilio?”
“But they pay with torture. That’s the way you taught us, boss. There are no mistakes. Never admit mistakes. But I didn’t look in the side lot. I never thought…”
“Emilio!” I yelled, fed up with his incoherent ramblings.
He looked up, his eyes rimmed red. “We got the wrong guy.”
“I thought you said it was done?” Alarm crawled up my spine as I ran over every order I’d given in the past few days.
“Lachey. The debt he owed us.” He stopped and shook his head as if remembering something unpleasant. “We got him and took him to Caliente after hours. I did just as you ordered, but boss…” He trailed off, tugging at his collar. “I just found out my crew were taken out. The men who dropped off Lachey at Caliente weren’t our men, and they didn’t get the man who owed us. They got his son.”
I walked past him, pulled him inside, and slammed the door. Circling him, I crowded right beside him and growled in his ear. “What the fuck? What son?”
Emilio visibly swallowed. “Lachey had a son who worked at his store. The old man has been MIA for weeks. My men wouldn’t have gotten it wrong. This had to be Muñoz work. I swear, boss, I only took his fingers and roughed him up. That’s when I went outside to call you.”
Emilio’s normal commanding presence shriveled as he shook his head violently. A sense of dread filled me that I couldn’t explain. I motioned for him to continue.
“I saw her car after we hung up. The cantina was empty. She told me she’d gone home. I don’t know what happened.”
My fists curled inward at my side. “Who?”
He closed his eyes as if blocking out the sight of me would block out the punishment he knew would come. “My bartender, sir. She was there. I went back to take Lachey home.” He paused, his face growing pale. “But men came in after me and put a bullet in the back of his head.”
