Chapter 6 #4
panicking.
She frowned. “Why doesn’t the boss go?” she asked.
“Because he’s known down there. He doesn’t want his name mentioned or they’ll up the price and we’ll lose money.”
“Oh,” she said.
He pulled out onto the road that led to a secluded landing strip, where a single-engine aircraft was waiting, along with a
bored-looking man sitting under an umbrella in a lawn chair.
It wasn’t a long flight but Raines loved country-western music. He had it on his cell phone and maxed it to overcome the engine
noise. To Josie, whose heart was in the classics, it was absolute misery but she had to keep her thoughts concealed. Also,
he was a chain smoker. He did, at least, apologize for not being able to crack a window when she began coughing her head off.
Not that he put out the cigarette . . .
“Do you have a birth certificate or a passport on you?” he asked suddenly after they’d landed at the hidden airstrip and jumped into a car to go across the road into Mexico at the border crossing.
“Hell of a time to ask,” she muttered as she pulled hers from her purse. “Lucky for you that I went to Barbados on my vacation
two years ago.”
“Yeah. Lucky.”
He pulled out his own passport and passed both of them to the guard. He asked them a few questions, checked the boot, returned
the passports and waved them through.
She put hers up. “How much farther?” she asked with pretended boredom.
“Not too far. It’s a bar in the first town we come to.”
“Another bar. Oh, joy. If only I drank.”
“You really don’t drink?” he asked.
“I really don’t. My stomach kills me if I touch anything alcoholic.”
“Gosh, I’d die if I couldn’t drink.”
She didn’t answer him. But she was memorizing the roads they’d taken, so she could pass them along to the bureau later.
He stopped at a dingy bar with a sign that looked as if it had been the victim of several bullets.
“This is the place,” he said. “You really don’t speak Spanish?”
She made a face. “I took French in high school, but I already forgot how to speak it. I never wanted to learn Spanish,” she
lied, because she could read Spanish colonial history—in Spanish. She’d minored in it, in college. It helped her if Raines
and his group didn’t know she was bilingual. They were more likely to talk about secretive things if they thought she only
spoke English.
“That’s probably a good thing,” he said to himself. “Okay, let’s go in. He’s here.”
She wondered how he knew that, until she spotted a big new Lincoln parked in back along with two beat-up and rusted pickup trucks and a car that was obviously never going to be driven again.
Inside, the bar was dark and dirty. The floors were unswept and there were spider webs in the corners. A couple of old men
lounged at the bar. There was a single man, in a suit, seated at a table near the back door. He looked up as they approached.
He was tall and thin with thick black hair, perfectly styled, and a scarred face.
Raines greeted him in Spanish. He and Josie took a seat.
“This is my boss’s woman,” he lied to the suited man, in Spanish. “He insisted that I bring her, but she speaks no Spanish,
so you need not be afraid to talk in front of her.”
“No Spanish, huh?” the tall man replied. He smiled at Josie and told her she was truly beautiful, and he was proud to meet
her.
She simply stared at him as if she didn’t understand a word.
Then he added a couple of very nasty curses, while he continued smiling, but she only stared at him with both eyebrows risen.
Convinced, he outlined the deal for Raines. A certain number of pallets of fentanyl, delivered to this bar in two weeks exactly,
at which time Raines’s boss would bring him half a million dollars in cash. American dollars.
Raines agreed to the amount and the date for the transaction.
An old man at the bar turned to the man in the suit. “Senor, puede ayudarme?” he asked in a hoarse tone. “No tengo ninguno
dinero y mi ninita es muy enferma. . . . !”
The bartender grabbed him by the collar and yelled at him not to insult their distinguished guest in such a stupid manner.
He didn’t want people coming into the bar and begging for money.
“Por favor. Necesito ayuda!” the old man wailed. Josie knew he was asking for help.
The bartender dragged him to the bar. His hand moved, and there was a sound like a firecracker exploding. The old man clutched
his belly and groaned. His open eyes met Josie’s as he fell to the floor.
“Pendejo,” the bartender spat at the dead man. He motioned to another man. “Get it out of here,” he said icily and kicked the body.
As Josie and Raines and the man in the suit watched, the body was carried out the back door. The old man’s daughter was sick.
Now she might die, because how would they find out who she was? Josie felt sick to her stomach and didn’t dare show it. The
man in the suit made an insulting remark about the stupid old man annoying him with begging when he was trying to do important
business.
Raines turned the conversation back to that business, with no indication of sympathy. Josie managed to look bored and not
at all concerned that a man had just been killed in front of her. She’d have to find a way to help the old man’s daughter.
Surely, they had somebody down this way who could track her down. But she didn’t dare ask for help now. She couldn’t afford
to get involved in a murder, despite the fact that she’d have enjoyed turning the bartender in. This bar was her only link
to the drug lord and his henchmen. This was bigger than one death, however callous that sounded.
A few minutes later, Raines and the man agreed on a price, unbelievably millions of dollars, shook hands, and Raines motioned
for Josie to follow him out the door.
“Well, did you do the deal?” she asked, not even mentioning the murder that had taken place. Although she would certainly make sure her boss knew, so that he could tell one of the Federales across the border. The killer bartender would face justice, she thought.
“Yes, we did the deal,” he said. “And for less than he expected, but we had him over a barrel,” he chuckled.
“How so?” she asked, pretending ignorance.
“He’s under investigation by his government,” he told her, “so he has to move his product quickly. We get it for less because
he’s out of time and he doesn’t have another buyer on the string.”
“So we get more money?” she asked excitedly, smiling.
“We do.”
“How lucky!” she exclaimed. “I guess this long trip wasn’t so bad, huh? Does our boss go with you to deliver the money?”
“He never touches it,” he told her. “That way, if anybody gets caught, it’s us,” he muttered. “We take all the risk, and he
takes all the money.”
“That doesn’t sound right,” she said.
“It isn’t right. It’s just the way things are,” he added in a curt tone.
And there, she thought to herself, is a good way to sow discord. Which might work to their advantage when the deal was concluded.
Now all she needed was a definite date and place. No way would it be at the bar. She’d already figured that out. Probably
Raines had, too.
“It’s just not right,” she sighed, closing her eyes. “I mean, you risk so much, years in jail, and he just walks off with
all the money. He doesn’t risk anything.”
Raines glanced at her. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all.
“Why isn’t Pete around anymore?” she asked out of the blue.
He cleared his throat. “Best not to mention him again.”
“Oh? Why?” she asked absently.
He hesitated. “He was going to turn us in for the reward,” he said after a minute. “So he’s been . . . neutralized.”
She managed not to react. They’d killed him.
This business was getting more starkly real by the day.
She was going to have to be very, very careful.
If they even suspected her of treachery, she’d end up like that poor old man at the bar across the border.
But then, this wasn’t her first undercover gig.
It probably wouldn’t be her last, either.
“Does he want a lot of money for the shipment?” she asked absently.
“Yeah,” he said. “But the boss is rolling in dough.”
“Do we bring the money to this man, at this bar?” she wondered.
“We do.”
“But how will we move the product?” she asked. “Is there a lot of it?”
“Not much,” he lied. “And the boss’s right-hand man will take it to its proper place.”
“When?”
“Oh, in about three weeks,” he lied, smiling. “And then we’ll get a huge payday!”
“What if we get arrested?” she worried.
“Stop jinxing us,” he chided. “It’s all a well-run operation. No worries. We’ll take the money and the boss’s man will take
the product. Two separate operations, and not at the same time.”
Damn, she thought. That blew any hope of interdiction. She glanced at him. “Are we still going to rustle cattle?” she asked.
“Probably we’ll go for the steers they’re feeding out,” he said. “And the cow culls much later for the boss’s friend, but
we can just buy those without arousing any suspicion. And we can get lost on the ranch while our truck is moving the cows,
right?” he asked with a grin. “We can get an up-close look at security and everything else.”
The remarks about security worried her. She wondered if she should just tell the Everetts what was going on. But that might spook the operation, and they’d lose the chance to shut down Velasquez’s grand plan. Not that she was certain what it was.
She was certain that his man Raines was feeding her a line of pure bull. And she wondered what the true objective was going
to be. That intuition of hers had saved her many a time. She hoped it would work in time to shut down this unholy pipeline
of death.
She was careful to use the pay phone nearby only when she was positive there was nobody around. She didn’t dare use her cell
phone and she didn’t have a burner phone. It was a shame that she had no backup on this assignment. A partner with a car and
some burner phones would have been a godsend.