The Shadow Cartel (The Dominic Grey Series Book 4)

by Layton Green

  The Boss.

  Felix Gutierrez, the short but compact spokesman for Mexico’s oldest surviving drug cartel, spoke first. “Buenas Señor Guiñol, ha sido mucho tiempo. Como está El Jefe?” It’s been a long time, Mr. Guiñol. How’s the Boss?

  The twinge of nervousness in Felix’s voice made everyone more on edge than they already were. Felix was a hard man, feared across the country for his dispassionate brutality.

  His question had been addressed to a man with thinning hair and a double chin at the head of the table, a man whose intelligent but paunchy face and wire-framed glasses evoked a dissolute urbanity. The madame found her pheromones repulsed by this man.

  Though wearing a suit, Guiñol looked as if he would be more comfortable slouched over a computer in a food-stained shirt, stalking an Internet chat room. He was the representative of El Jefe and the only participant allowed the presence of bodyguards—four heavily armed men standing in the corners, each a mercenary from a different South American country.

  Instead of answering, Guiñol stood and stepped to the wall of windows showcasing the dreamy slice of the Caribbean separating the Yucatan Peninsula from Cuba.

  “El Jefe es El Jefe,” Guiñol said. The Boss is the Boss, uttered in a tone that implied that El Jefe was as unchanging as God, and the question needn’t ever be asked again. He stood over his seat, placed his palms on the table, and spoke with a Colombian accent. “You know why I’ve come.”

  A goateed man seated near the door gave a nervous tug on his chin. His name was Ricardo “Ricky” Orizaga, and he was high in the food chain of the Alianza Cartel, which controlled a sizeable portion of the South Florida drug trade. He was in charge of the Alianza’s Miami subsidiary, and was ultimately responsible for the Ecstasy overdoses at the nightclub in Brickell.

  Guiñol leveled his gaze on Ricky. “I’ll attend to you in a moment,” he said, causing another grab at the goatee. Ricky also felt an odd lightness, as if he had taken a hit off a joint, as well as a tingling in his jaw that seemed to be spreading downward. He chalked it up to stress.

  “The deaths in Miami—the third such incident in a year—are endemic of a larger carelessness,” Guiñol said. “The cardinal sin in El Jefe’s organization is public exposure. Do you think that you are untouchable, or that the society in which you live is so easily cowed? Do you think that a few well-placed bribes of local politicians and law enforcement officials allow you to operate with the relative impunity in which you work? Especially those of you with a foothold in the United States?” Guiñol wagged a finger, only the hum of the air conditioner breaking the silence. “No, no no no no.”

  Ricky’s weightless feeling had spread, and he was having trouble concentrating on Guiñol’s words. Somewhere deep inside, in the mysterious core of the subconscious, he felt a shiver of fear.

  “El Jefe has much larger concerns,” Guiñol continued. “The ICE, NAFTA, MERCOSUR, federal judges, presidents, dictators. People who can legalize drugs and shut down borders and seize your banks. People who can put all of you out of business.” A snap of his fingers crackled through the room. “Like that.”

  Guiñol walked slowly around the table until he was standing behind Ricky, whose entire body had numbed. “Do you know what happens,” Guiñol asked, his voice now low and insidious, “when the will of the people is pushed too far? They say no more and press the government to become involved. The elected officials forget our bribes and a revolution results—against us. Look at Colombia: a shell of its former self. If the internal war does not calm, Mexico will suffer the same fate.”

  A smirk lifted Guiñol’s face, a heavy violence brightening his eyes. He slipped on a pair of gloves, placed one hand on Ricky’s shoulder, and a scalpel appeared in his other hand. “We allow you many things, but we will not tolerate a risk to our principal market. We are powerful, but only in the shadows, outside of the public eye. We must—we must—avoid the publicity that the incident in Miami has caused. Do you not agree, Ricardo?”

  “Yes,” Ricky said, though his brain seemed lost in the grayest of fogs. He couldn’t seem to form his own opinion on what had been asked.

  “So your cartel will punish those responsible?”

  “Sí.”

  “And be careful whom you employ from now on, never letting such a careless act happen again?”

  “Of course,” Ricky said.

  “Excellent. Now put your hand on the table, so that I can remove one of your fingers as punishment, as a lesson to all present.”

  Ricky did as he asked, in complete agreement with everything Señor Guiñol had proposed.

  Hardened criminals all, not a single person at the table uttered a sound as Guiñol leaned down and sliced off Ricky’s index finger with the scalpel, spraying blood across the room.

  What shocked them was not the act itself, which most of them considered a rather routine response to failure, but Ricky’s chilling complicity.

  The real lesson.

  “Pick up your finger,” Guiñol said.

  Ricky obeyed. He felt no pain, and had the overwhelming urge to do whatever Señor Guiñol asked. The same submerged part of Ricky’s subconscious that had shivered in fear was now screaming, buried alive and clawing through the dirt, but the barest whisper of that scream, a flicker of synapse, reached Ricky’s conscious mind.

  Guiñol’s eyes swept the room, to ensure he had made his point. “Show your punishment to your cartel,” he said to Ricky, “and see that this mistake is properly handled.”

  “Sí, Señor Guiñol.”

  MIAMI

  Grey sweltered in jeans and a black T-shirt on the patio of a nightclub in Brickell, Miami’s swanky business district. A row of banana trees at his back provided some relief from the declining sun, and he had a view of the entire establishment, from the sofa patio seating to the stainless steel bar to the living room-size dance floor, thrumming with frenetic Latin techno.

  Salsa, in his opinion, was not something that needed a faster beat.

  It was Friday night and sleek Miami patrons were spilling in, thinly clad women with skin tones all over the map, groomed and handsome men in designer slacks and open-collared shirts.

  This was the club where Sekai and the others had died. Grey had used Viktor’s Interpol connections to check on the status of Sekai’s case, and so far no progress had been made. The girls who had died were black, African, and had been using drugs. Probably not a priority for Miami PD.

  Grey had been in place for an hour, watching the scene unfold, eyes in perpetual motion for underground activity. He concentrated his attention on a young and tanned white guy with cropped blond hair and an untucked teal shirt. He was sitting at a corner booth with a much larger dark-haired man. More than a few patrons had slid in beside the blond guy, exchanged greetings, and traded hand movements under the table.

  Grey had also been watching a swarthy guy on the other side of the room, dressed more akin to Grey than to the socialites, trying to blend in but not doing a great job. The police presence, Grey assumed, keeping an eye on the place after the recent tragedy. The blond guy was not in the cop’s line of sight.

  Something else of interest: two of the managers dropped by on occasion to trade grins with the blond guy, but the third manager, a ferret-faced man with a businesslike manner, avoided both the blond guy and the cop.

  Grey maintained his vigil, but his mind kept wandering back to Nya. It didn’t seem to want to travel anywhere else since they had dined at a hole-in-the-wall Argentinean steakhouse on South Beach, talked the night away as only they could, and taken a cab to the airport the next morning. He held her while she cried over Sekai, and after that she had hugged him tightly, brushed her hand through the cowlicks in his hair, given him a lingering kiss on the mouth, and entered the line for airport security.

  Then she was gone.

  He stood in the airport for a long time after she left, engulfed by a wave of regret. Miami lost its luster, and he was left with the familiar stab of
loneliness that came from being in a beautiful place and not belonging.

  Maybe he had built Nya up too much, let the memory overcome the reality, but he didn’t think so. He had never met anyone with her combination of gentleness and strength, beauty and character. She had plenty of rough edges, but Grey understood why. Nya didn’t know how to deal with the state of her world and those who had ruined it, so she chose not to trust, and made you prove otherwise.

  Enough. He would fill the hole inside him by fulfilling his promise to her, and deal with the rest later. If she really wanted to give their relationship another chance, he had some decisions to make.

  After waiting until the blond guy was alone with his bodyguard, Grey sauntered to their booth. “Mind if I join you?”

  The blond guy looked him up and down, eyes shrewd. “Do I know you?”

  “No, but I hear you’re the guy to talk to.”

  “Yeah? About what?”

  “About a good time.”

  The blond guy cocked his head, indicating for Grey to sit. Grey slid in beside him. The dark-haired muscle watched Grey like a bird of prey.

  “So? What kind of girl you like? Cindy, Hannah, Xena, Isabella? I got some painted ladies also.”

  “Xena,” Grey said.

  The blond guy clicked his tongue. “Single, twins, triplets?”

  “Single. But hey,” Grey leaned in closer, “I heard about what happened in here. She’ll be clean, right?”

  His face tightened. “Listen, asshole. I wasn’t even here that night. You want something or not?”

  Grey put his hands up. “Easy. After something like that, I gotta ask. You know how it is, some people sell the good stuff, some don’t. Who was the guy, anyway? I’d like to know who to avoid.”

  The dealer’s white teeth flashed like a tiger’s. “You just stick with me, you’ll be fine.”

  “Sure. Never hurts to know, though.”

  “You want the girl or not?”

  Grey rose. “I’ll come back another night,” he said, moving his arm away, “when it’s calmer.”

  “How about you go someplace else from now on.”

  The bodyguard rose, and Grey took a step back. He put his hands up in mock submission, lowering his eyes as if cowed by the presence of the larger man. Backing away, he noticed the heft of a handgun under the bodyguard’s shirt.

  He left the club hoping the goon would follow, but he never did. After taking a walk around Brickell, Grey stopped for a late-night snack at a dive bar called Tobacco Road. By the time he returned to the nightclub, the place was winding down, and both the dealer and the cop were gone.

  Grey stood by one of the banana trees and nursed another beer. When the music cut off and the lights came on, Grey approached the third manager, the one who had avoided the dealer.

  “Mind if I ask you something?” Grey said.

  The manager kept straightening tables. “Sure.”

  “Not too fond of that blond drug dealer, are you?”

  The manager stilled. “Are you a cop?”

  “No, but I know you’re also not very fond of the one on the take who was here. Jeans and tight-fitting T-shirt at the corner table.”

  He grimaced. “Look, man. I don’t know who you are or what you want. If it were up to me, things would be different around here, but they aren’t.”

  “I’m looking for the guy who sold the stuff that killed those girls.”

  “You know one of the girls?”

  “Something like that.”

  He nodded in understanding, eyes sparking. “I’ll tell you what I already told the cops. That cocky piece of shit Frankie García was dealing that night. Everyone knows, but doing something about it is a different story.”

  “No one’s willing to come forward?”

  “You don’t mess with the Cubans in this town. Frankie wasn’t a kingpin, but the people he works for are.”

  “Any idea where I can find him?” Grey asked. “Wait—did you say wasn’t?”

  “Yeah, you can find him at the morgue. Police found his body a few days ago in a field in North Miami. His supplier probably whacked him in retaliation. Don’t you read the Herald?”

  “I don’t suppose you know the supplier?” Grey asked, knowing he probably wouldn’t.

  “Do I look like DEA? I don’t want to know. I know his partner, though. Manny Lopez. No big secret on the club scene. Manny cut pills for Frankie, and they ran the UM beat out of Manny’s house. My sister used to buy from him.”

  UM=University of Miami, Grey guessed.

  “I know because she called me to pick her up once,” he continued, “bombed out of her mind. Dumpy purple and white bungalow a few blocks behind UM, just off Sixty-Second Terrace. Though if he cut up that X for those girls, he might have skated.”

  “I appreciate the info,” Grey said. If Manny Lopez was still around, he and Grey were going to have a little chat.

  “I got no love for dealers, man, especially ones who sell to my sister. But take my advice and let it go. Manny’s a nasty piece of work.”

  DER HEILIGKEIT DES LUFT SANATORIUM, SWITZERLAND

  Cappuccino in hand, Viktor Radek leaned on the windowsill and indulged his eyes on one of the most beautiful vistas on earth: the jagged, snow-capped peaks of the Swiss Alps sweeping across the horizon.

  Renowned professor of religious phenomenology at Charles University in Prague, perhaps the world’s foremost expert on cults, descendant of Czech nobility, Viktor had found the process of admitting himself into the sanatorium most humiliating.

  His last investigation had led him someplace dark and terrifying, a prison of the mind that was the one place he had proven unable to escape on his own: the cobwebbed corners of his past. To cope, he had embraced his longtime companion, his emerald absinthe muse, a bit too fiercely.

  Six weeks since his last drop. Four more to go.

  It wasn’t the wormwood that had gotten the better of him, Viktor knew, but the accumulation of horrors he had witnessed over the years. The psychotics and madmen, demagogues and megalomaniacs: it was a bitter tea in which his life’s work was steeped. Adding the memory of his beloved fiancée to the mix had tipped the scales too far.

  Yet he accepted his past, and was eager to resume his investigations—and not just because he enjoyed apprehending some of the world’s most devious criminal minds. Viktor’s true work, what he risked his life to unearth in the shadowy world of religious phenomenology, was knowledge. Probing the minds of believers, observing their rituals, unlocking their secrets.

  Viktor was currently ruminating on the voicemail Grey had left, as well as the police report Grey had emailed concerning the drug murders in Miami. Too proud to discuss his admittance into the sanatorium, yet unwilling to lie to Grey, Viktor had to decide how to respond.

  Because there was information Grey needed to know. There wasn’t much to go on, but if Viktor’s instincts were right, he knew what religion was involved, and it was a particularly bizarre one. Bizarre and dangerous.

  Steepling his fingers, he sighed as he contemplated the grandeur of the mountain peaks. He would have to conduct some research and ponder the wisdom of pursuing the case, but knowing Grey’s sense of justice and his feelings for Nya, he doubted anything he said would matter. Dominic Grey was Viktor’s employee in name, but if anyone marched to the beat of his own drummer, it was he. Grey had marched all the way out of the parade.

  As Viktor pushed away from the window, preparing to dress for dinner, his mind lingered on the part about the blue Indian woman. Viktor agreed with Grey’s assessment: Why concoct such an unusual element to the story? Most likely the witness had been hallucinating and thought she was telling the truth.

  The thing was, the coroner’s report had confirmed that a slingshot, or something like it, had caused the death of three of the men.

  A blue Indian woman with a ritual knife and a slingshot, murdering four drug dealers and then disappearing into the night.

  Now that intrigued
him.

  DEA OFFICE, MIAMI

  Fred drummed his fingers next to the keyboard, eyeballing the report before he made it official. He almost deleted the portion about the slingshot and the Blue Lady of Death, but decided to keep it. It made for a good laugh, and God knew this world needed one.

  Especially his world. The drug scene seemed to worsen every year. If it wasn’t the Colombians, it was the Haitians or the Jamaicans or the Venezuelans, and the current Mexican turf battles were as vicious as any war ever waged by man. If the average citizen knew of the atrocities he had seen, knew how much violence spilled across the border, knew how infested with dealers and cartel loyalists and crooked cops every city in America with more than a single stoplight was, then the next round of immigration reform would make Arizona look like an enclave of free-loving hippies.

  And anyone who thought America was the innocent victim needed to look at the user statistics. Which country’s insatiable drug appetite did they think fueled the industry?

  The current buzz was Krokodil, a homemade heroin concoction that literally ate people’s flesh from the inside out. Big in Russia, created by mixing codeine with gasoline or oil, it was a matter of when, not if, the drug hit the United States.

  It was all so hilarious. A creepy iron cauldron? Of course there was a cult involved! No one selling crank to kids bothered with a nice little religion like Buddhism. Narcos liked skulls and animal sacrifices and voodoo dolls and stupid colored beads. Drugs and cults had gone hand in hand in Latin America since the beginning of the drug wars.

  Anyway, the DEA did not investigate cult behavior, they investigated drugs and related crimes. And unless there was an angle, the DEA did not investigate the murder of a drug dealer by other drug dealers.