Hunters, Matt Rogers [pdf ebook reader .txt] 📗

you think because you’ve made good business decisions you can pull the wool over the eyes of entities far more powerful than you’ll ever be. But you can’t, Fabio. You just can’t. My employers pay you a handsome fee for your loyalty and your influence. They pay you so that when they need a helping hand, they get in your ear and you get in the ear of your political associates and El Salvador enacts sweeping policy changes that are advantageous to the United States. What they don’t pay you to do is double-cross them. That would be a very foolish business deal, don’t you agree?’

Torres flapped his lips, at a loss for words. This stranger knew everything about him. It was indescribably violating. Now it made him sick that he’d engaged in such a passionate act with her. It turned his stomach that she was still gripping him with her hips, trapping him inside her, long after he’d gone soft.

She said, ‘I asked you a question.’

He couldn’t nod at risk of cutting his own throat, so he grunted in agreement.

She said, ‘What do Cártel de Texis want with you?’

‘The same deal. My influence. Policies that benefit them, not America.’

‘Do they know about your previous arrangement?’

‘No.’

‘So that wasn’t their threat? To expose your corruption?’

He said, ‘They’re the cartel. They’re a little cruder than that.’

She waited for him to elaborate.

He didn’t care to save face anymore. He wanted this nightmare over, so he told her. ‘They told me they would disembowel my wife and children in front of me. They’d force me to watch before they killed me.’

‘You love your wife?’

‘I do,’ he said, despite the irony of his current predicament.

‘Then you’ll come back to our side and we’ll never need to have a conversation like this again.’

‘They’ll kill me.’

‘Do you think America got where we were by being nobler than everyone else on this godforsaken planet, Fabio?’ she said. ‘Whatever they threatened to do, we’ll do it. But worse.’

He said, ‘What do I tell Texis?’

‘That’s for you to figure out. Use those businessman brains of yours.’

Finally, mercifully, she climbed off him. She took the knife away from his throat, retracted the blade, and slipped it into a concealed pocket of her long summer dress, which she pulled back up over her body. He watched her without so much as a hint of retaliation.

She smirked. ‘Good, Fabio. You’re a smart man.’

‘Why?’ he said, his pathetic frame still spreadeagled on the four-poster bed.

‘You know you’re going to let me waltz out of here without a word of this to your security. You know if I don’t check in with my superiors, there’ll be hell to pay. This little compound will be eviscerated by sunrise if I show up with so much as a scratch on me.’

He lay there, helpless, deflated.

He said, ‘I’m dead either way.’

She said, ‘Maybe. But if you do what we say, you have a small chance. The other way round, not so much. Take your pick. Cártel de Texis or the United States.’

She breezed out of the giant bedroom, leaving him in a cold and sweaty heap.

33

Light trickled into the small safe house early the next morning.

King was already awake, lying motionless in bed as he stared up at the ceiling to allow Violetta much-needed rest. Last night she’d packed his nose with gauze, placed a splint over it, and administered him a light dose of painkillers. Slater had needed the same treatment, minus the painkillers. It wasn’t so much that he thought he’d get addicted to OxyContin, but that the mind-numbing pleasure of the drug would remind him of what he was missing with his abstinence from alcohol.

So if you can’t sleep with painkillers, King thought, how do you think Slater’s faring without them?

He doubted they’d managed more than a few hours collectively.

Violetta blinked awake as the room became progressively brighter. She rolled over, checked the time, then rolled to King. ‘How did you sleep?’

He turned his head to look at her. It hurt. He could tell the swelling was bad from the apprehension on her face when she saw him. ‘Not great.’

She said, ‘Do you honestly think El Salvador is the right move?’

‘Alonzo knows more than we do right now. He seemed to think it was best. And we’re not in a position to make demands.’

‘We aren’t?’

‘What cards do you think we hold?’

She tried to muster the courage to show defiance, but she couldn’t. She was still half-asleep, bleary-eyed, and as soon as she remembered what had happened yesterday she tightened up.

She said, ‘No matter how hurt you and Slater are, you two are still—’

‘Violetta,’ King said, reaching out and placing a hand on her shoulder.

She quietened and looked into his eyes.

He said, ‘What if you were kicked in the stomach instead of Alexis?’

Silence.

King said, ‘That’s all it takes. One moment of anti-chance. A single instant of bad luck. The next squadron that comes after us … one of them decides to go for you instead of me … all they need to do is rough you up unnecessarily. And then we have nothing to look forward to.’

He could see the horror in her eyes, but he needed her to understand.

‘El Salvador,’ he said. ‘Until this is all a distant memory.’

She softly bit her lower lip. ‘By the time this is a distant memory—’

‘We’ll have a baby,’ King said, and smiled. The pain throbbed, dull and incessant in his head, as his cheeks crinkled against his swollen nose. But he didn’t stop smiling.

He couldn’t.

‘So yesterday might have been it for a long time?’ she said.

He used his good right arm to gesture to his left, keeping it pinned to his side, resting on the mattress. He still didn’t know the extent of the damage but it had pained him all night, even with the Oxy dulling everything. He was leaning toward a bad sprain rather than torn muscles in his forearm, but the limb would still be functionally useless for over a week. Then his gesture