Read Online Cartel by Chuck Hustmyre - Free Book Online Page A

sister.
    Samantha looked up at Scott. "Daddy, don't you al-ways-"
    "That's enough, you two," Victoria said. "Time to eat."
    The two kids dug into their roast beef and mashed pota-toes.
    "I didn't hear your car," Victoria said.
    Scott looked at his wife. Tall, blond, green eyed, and quite beautiful at thirty-five, in a Dallas debutante WASP sort of way, with the trim well-toned legs of an avid tennis player and a self-esteem-boosting postpartum boob job. "I took a cab home."
    A crease of worry crossed Victoria's face. "A cab?"
    He nodded.
    "What's wrong?" she said.
    Scott looked at the kids. They were chomping down dinner, seemingly oblivious to everything else, but he knew that both of them kept at least half an ear cocked toward anything their parents said. And that was especially true with Samantha, who, like all women, had bionic hearing. So Scott nodded and Victoria followed him into the den.
    "What happened?" she said. "Are you in trouble again?"
    "What's that supposed to mean?"
    "Nothing," Victoria said. But of course that wasn't true. "Tell me what happened?"
    "I lost three agents."
    Her forehead wrinkled. "What do you mean, lost?"
    "Killed."
    Victoria's hand shot to her mouth. "Oh, my God." She didn't know his agents well. She'd only met them once, when, at the end of his first week as the new resident agent in charge, Scott had hosted an all-hands barbeque at their house, but she knew their names well enough to at least put faces with them. "Who?"
    "Miller. Lundy. And Kat."
    "Kat?" Victoria said with pain in her voice. "I talked to her for over an hour about...nothing. Girl stuff. She asked me where I got..." Victoria covered her mouth again with her hand. "Oh, my God, Scott. How?"
    "Across the border."
    "Jesus Christ," Victoria said. "Were you there?"
    "Nearby," he said. "But we got separated."
    "How did they...How did it happen?"
    "I don't want to talk about it," Scott said. Then he saw the look of hurt on his wife's face. "I really can't even if I...There's an investigation."
    She stared at him for a moment. "That's not all, though. There's something else. Something you're not...Why did you come home in a cab?"
    He hesitated. But Victoria didn't say anything. He al-ways thought she would have made a good interrogator. She knew how to use silence as a tool. Finally, he said, "I got suspended."

Chapter 18

    Marcus parked the Suburban a block from Scott Greene's house and on the opposite side of the street. Dwayne sat next to him in the shotgun seat. Dwayne was in his late-twenties, five or six years younger than Marcus, also a lot bigger, and had spent three years in Special Forces, until getting busted out with a dishonorable discharge after a third piss test came up positive for steroids. In the six months Dwayne had been with Dynamic International, Marcus had worked out with him several times and had seen that Dwayne's back and shoulders were covered with zits, acne being a common side effect of steroid abuse. Dwayne also had a hair-trigger temper, another common side effect, what people called 'roid rage.
    "Why are we sitting on this guy?" Dwayne asked. "He's suspended. What the fuck can he even do?"
    "Why don't you call Gavin and ask him yourself?" Mar-cus said and held his cell phone out to Dwayne. Gavin also had a temper, and he was one tough old bastard. He could eat kids like Dwayne for breakfast.
    Dwayne turned his head and stared out the side win-dow.
    "Yo, Cyril, you awake back there?" Marcus said.
    "I'm here and yes I'm awake," came the muffled voice of Cyril from the back of the Suburban. "The way you drive it's impossible to sleep."
    This was no ordinary Chevrolet Suburban, and it wasn't the same one Marcus had been driving that morning with Gavin when they had almost caught up to the DEA agents on the bridge and maybe ended this whole operation. This Suburban had been tricked out at a clandestine shop in Miami run by a retired spook from the CIA's Office of Sci-ence and Technology. The upgrade had