family was remnant of cartel history. Carmen, with her sad eyes and surprising knack for stealth, torture, and precise aim. She’d placed the bullet just where it needed to go to show Carlos that Vail was a goner, while simultaneously doing the least amount of damage and giving him a fighting chance. Though the rage and regret etched into her face said she didn’t want to kill him, had it not been for the note she’d left Khani, she would have sealed his coffin.
How she fit into the puzzle he couldn’t yet tell. Carlos Félix-Ruez aimed for the top office, his father be damned. He apparently hadn’t been satisfied with his rich but powerless life of exile in the small fishing town of Puerto San Carlos in the southern Comondú Municipality. Five years ago the bastard began buying up real estate in Tijuana, Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango. An alias protected his identity, until Vail had coaxed it out of him. La Muerte. The name spoke of foreboding. Vail thought about the man, the malice in his stare, and knew if left to his deeds Carlos would ratchet the level of death in Mexico’s streets. Ruez had bought enough land, black market weapons, and people to mount a war.
His agents and contacts had heard the name La Muerte whispered over dark beers in even darker corners of rowdy cantinas. And though he’d suspected The Death to be one arm of a cartel falling away to become its own entity, as so often they did, it was good to know exactly who they were dealing with.
Three and a half weeks ago Vail unbound the file and separated the last five years of documentation into piles. Four in all lay in their respective heaps. Real estate. Known associates. Weapons. Income. A cabin in the wilderness of Kentucky.
The cabin stack had started as a single sheet. A buyer’s agreement between two men—Hank Higgins—an old guy being placed in an assisted living facility closer to his children in Lexington—and Charlie Ranger—a false front. The Base Branch system had flagged the transition because its routing number matched the routing number to another of Ruez’s aliases. Nothing about the cabin had fit into the equation. Not until Carmen dropped through his ceiling and started making demands.
If you needed to hide someone and had a sister willing to rip Mexico from its bedrock and toss it across the ocean to find that person, what better place to hide the person than somewhere she’d never think to look?
Carlos had been stopped in Tennessee on a simple traffic violation. The officer had hauled him in after running the license of one Charlie Ranger, which showed a federal warrant for his arrest. Those two pieces had been enough for Vail to move, but accustomed to checking and rechecking facts for his teams, he dug deeper.
Yesterday’s search yielded several other properties the good Charlie Ranger purchased in the States. Houses in San Diego, Tucson, and El Paso tipped the scale from likely to definite in Vail’s mind. Carlos Ruez had been planning something big. And from the way he ran his mouth before Carmen had left—before ripping a hole in his belly and screwing with his mind—he’d guess the crazy son of a bitch still hoped to carry it out. It made sense. He’d given them vital information, which allowed the Base Branch to take out several key Sinaloa facilities. And he bet the information dump had been another strategic move on Carlos’s part.
Vail placed the glass in the dishwasher and then pulled the topographical map of Kentucky and the cabin plans from the stack. Stiff after being still for only a couple of minutes, he shuffled around the high bar—the only thing that separated the kitchen from the living room, and dining room for that matter—past the fancy sofa and chairs with their accent pillows as the decorator had called them, and stopped at the eight-top dining table he’d never used. Well, he used it. Just not for its intended purpose. Most often he walked around it to the bank of three
How she fit into the puzzle he couldn’t yet tell. Carlos Félix-Ruez aimed for the top office, his father be damned. He apparently hadn’t been satisfied with his rich but powerless life of exile in the small fishing town of Puerto San Carlos in the southern Comondú Municipality. Five years ago the bastard began buying up real estate in Tijuana, Sonora, Chihuahua, Sinaloa, and Durango. An alias protected his identity, until Vail had coaxed it out of him. La Muerte. The name spoke of foreboding. Vail thought about the man, the malice in his stare, and knew if left to his deeds Carlos would ratchet the level of death in Mexico’s streets. Ruez had bought enough land, black market weapons, and people to mount a war.
His agents and contacts had heard the name La Muerte whispered over dark beers in even darker corners of rowdy cantinas. And though he’d suspected The Death to be one arm of a cartel falling away to become its own entity, as so often they did, it was good to know exactly who they were dealing with.
Three and a half weeks ago Vail unbound the file and separated the last five years of documentation into piles. Four in all lay in their respective heaps. Real estate. Known associates. Weapons. Income. A cabin in the wilderness of Kentucky.
The cabin stack had started as a single sheet. A buyer’s agreement between two men—Hank Higgins—an old guy being placed in an assisted living facility closer to his children in Lexington—and Charlie Ranger—a false front. The Base Branch system had flagged the transition because its routing number matched the routing number to another of Ruez’s aliases. Nothing about the cabin had fit into the equation. Not until Carmen dropped through his ceiling and started making demands.
If you needed to hide someone and had a sister willing to rip Mexico from its bedrock and toss it across the ocean to find that person, what better place to hide the person than somewhere she’d never think to look?
Carlos had been stopped in Tennessee on a simple traffic violation. The officer had hauled him in after running the license of one Charlie Ranger, which showed a federal warrant for his arrest. Those two pieces had been enough for Vail to move, but accustomed to checking and rechecking facts for his teams, he dug deeper.
Yesterday’s search yielded several other properties the good Charlie Ranger purchased in the States. Houses in San Diego, Tucson, and El Paso tipped the scale from likely to definite in Vail’s mind. Carlos Ruez had been planning something big. And from the way he ran his mouth before Carmen had left—before ripping a hole in his belly and screwing with his mind—he’d guess the crazy son of a bitch still hoped to carry it out. It made sense. He’d given them vital information, which allowed the Base Branch to take out several key Sinaloa facilities. And he bet the information dump had been another strategic move on Carlos’s part.
Vail placed the glass in the dishwasher and then pulled the topographical map of Kentucky and the cabin plans from the stack. Stiff after being still for only a couple of minutes, he shuffled around the high bar—the only thing that separated the kitchen from the living room, and dining room for that matter—past the fancy sofa and chairs with their accent pillows as the decorator had called them, and stopped at the eight-top dining table he’d never used. Well, he used it. Just not for its intended purpose. Most often he walked around it to the bank of three
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