Chapter 34
Donavan
I don’t know if Angel teaming Fox and me up together is his way of punishing us or his way of getting rid of us. I swear I’ll slit his fucking throat if he clears it one more time.
I clench my hands into fists as he sniffs.
“Do you need a fucking tissue or some goddamned cough syrup or something?”
“Getting over a fucking cold. Get off my ass,” he grumbles.
“We aren’t going to find shit. It’s like that motherfucker has an inside man. He’s always two fucking steps ahead of us.”
Fox doesn’t respond. The man hates to talk more than I do and that’s saying a lot.
“What’s your connection to Cortez?” I ask, even though I know he’s not going to answer me.
He clears his throat again before reaching for a fucking cough drop in the cup holder.
“You better not be fucking contagious,” I mutter, keeping my eyes on the front of the house we’ve been instructed to watch.
I want to get this shit over with so I can get back to Alani.
I had to leave her sleeping two days ago because if I woke her up, I was going to be even later than I was.
We were supposed to meet at the office at three in the morning.
I overslept and didn’t get there until half past, but Fox was even later, arriving dead last and looking like we were the villains in this fucking story.
The house is non-descript, looking like every other damn house on the block.
It’s rundown but still a few years before it would be considered needing to be condemned.
It’s in a neighborhood where people turn their heads when they see shady shit going down because they expect the same thing when they’re up to no good.
Two men walk past, their heads bent over as they look at the baggie they just scored on the corner three blocks down.
No one pays attention to us. Hell, I’d bet we aren’t the only vehicle with people lurking inside even though I don’t see anyone else when I look around.
“Are we waiting for someone to leave or for someone to show up?” I ask.
He shrugs, the best response I could probably expect at this point.
“Does Angel think this is where Cortez will show up?”
“He better,” Fox growls.
“The man is the leader of one of the biggest fucking organizations in Mexico. I doubt he’s going to be caught dead in some shitty neighborhood.”
“No one would expect him to be here. That’s why he just might.”
“We’ve been sitting here for hours.”
“And you’re acting like you’ve never cased a fucking house before. Shut the fuck up, man. You’re getting on my nerves.”
My hand flinches as I do my best to resist putting a bullet in the side of his head.
I could blame my impatience on Alani. Surely, she has something to do with me wanting to be near her rather than working. I know the tables have shifted some. Hell, this would be fun if she was with me, if the night would end with us cutting up someone together.
Instead, I’m forced to sit beside this surly bastard who is probably going to get me sick by breathing all of his contagious fucking breath into the closed vehicle.
I use the hand crank in this old-ass vehicle to roll my window down an inch or so, angling my face in that direction in an effort to get some uncontaminated air.
“Have any desire to tell me exactly how you’re connected to this motherfucker?”
“Not a one.”
I nod. Maybe his reason for being the way he is happens to be just as painful as mine.
“I fucking knew it,” he mutters when a car pulls up outside the house.
It’s a beat-down piece of shit, much like the one we’re in, because anything new and flashy would bring the wrong kind of attention.
“That fucking bitch,” Fox whispers as a woman climbs out of the back seat.
The back passenger door of the old Explorer opens.
“Holy shit,” I mutter. “That’s fucking Raul Cortez. Do you know the woman?”
“That’s his daughter.” The disdain in his voice speaks of something personal, but I’m not opening that can of worms.
She stands on the curb, her eyes roaming down both sides of the sidewalk as her dad gathers a suitcase from the back of the vehicle. The second he closes the back hatch, the vehicle drives away.
They walk through the gate, not bothering to close it as they walk closer to the house.
The door is unlocked, and I realize from the flash of the inside that the house isn’t what it seems.
From the outside, it looks rundown. The yard is overgrown with dead grass left tall before winter hit. The front porch is sagging and looks like a handful of safety hazards on its own.
The wall inside the house that’s visible when the door opens, however, is clean and pristine, the tray ceiling inside not matching the condition of the outside.
The door closes behind them, all light from the inside snuffed out.
“The windows are fake,” I say. “At least they’re blocked. The inside was lit up, and none of that is visible from outside.”
It wouldn’t be the first house that I’ve encountered that looked like shit on the outside on purpose.
“I fucking knew Cortez wouldn’t be caught dead in a house like that. It’s been remodeled on the inside,” I say.
Fox is still staring at the front door as if he can’t believe what he saw.
“Are we going in?”
He pulls his eyes from the door and looks over at me. “He probably has men inside.”
I nod, knowing that’s extremely likely.
He points. “Those guys are probably on his payroll.”
I shrug. “So we kill them first.”
He nods.
“You know the woman?”
He pulls his eyes away once again. “I thought I did.”
“I can tell she’s betrayed you, but you seem calmer than I’d expect.”
“I had my fucking suspicions.”
“She has to die, too,” I tell him, trying to see where his head is at with the declaration.
“She may be more fun to kill than her dad.”
I’m an evil fucking man. I’ve done some seriously bad shit. For as big a monster as Alessio and Marcello were when I was younger, I’ve done things some would consider just as evil.
The look in Fox’s eyes right now speaks of more violence than I think I could fathom.
“Keep your head on your shoulders, yeah?” I say. “I don’t plan on fucking dying tonight.”
I open my door when Fox opens his, going around the back of the vehicle so we can sneak up on the dealers on the corner.
They go down easily enough, and neither one of us bother to pick up the baggies that fell from their hands when we slit their throats.
We each drag one into the bushes, unconcerned about how soon they’ll be discovered.
We’ll be done with this thing in a couple of minutes.
I don’t think people understand just how quick you can kill a couple of people.
Most perps are long gone before someone even discovers a body, and a lot of distance can be created in as little as five minutes.
In silence, we walk toward the house, the streetlights having been busted out by someone prior to our arrival. No one in a place like this wants light shining on what they’re doing.
Despite us knowing that we’ll more than likely be met with force inside, Fox doesn’t hesitate to kick the front door in.
You’d think it would be more secure than just a basic lock and deadbolt. With the way the doorframe splinters, it’s clear they didn’t even replace the regular screws with the longer ones like everyone should do.
Gunfire echoes around me, but it’s Fox pulling the trigger on two men who come around the corner. We wait for the briefest of moments, but no one else moves toward us.
I follow Fox down the narrow hallway, simply because he’s moving faster, not that we had any sort of fucking plan. I fucking hate working with other people, but if he wants to get shot first, fucking let him.
I nearly run into his back when he stops cold in the doorway.
“What the fuck are you doing here?” a female voice asks.
Fox pulls a pair of handcuffs from his back pocket as I step around him into the room.
The woman Fox identified in the SUV earlier is standing in the middle of the room. Cortez is there looking smug as if he thinks he’s going to get out of this.
“Handcuff him,” Fox demands, throwing the cuffs at her feet so hard she has to step back in order not to get hit with them. “So much as fucking twitch and I’ll blow your head off.”
She scoffs. “I know better than that.”
I flinch as the echo of a shot rings out. The woman narrows her eyes but doesn’t try to dodge the bullet as the shot goes wide mere inches from her head.
She has seen some shit. She has been through some shit for her to have such a blasé reaction.
“Behind the back,” Fox says when Cortez holds his hands out in front of him.
“Who the fuck are you?” Cortez spits as his daughter clips the cuffs on.
He winces, telling me she either put them on as tight as possible or he’s trying to make us think she did.
Fox waves his gun, indicating she needs to step to the side. I go back behind the man, making sure the cuffs are in place before patting him down to make sure he has no weapons.
I pull a chair from near the blacked-out window and force him to sit.
“What are you going to do?”
“Nothing more than what was done to me,” Fox snarls.
“You?” Cortez spits. “I’ve never seen you before in my fucking life.”
Fox doesn’t look away when he pulls a tattered picture from his back pocket, holding it up so he can see.
“My wife and daughter,” he says before sliding it back into his pocket.
“Papa?” the woman asks, a waver in her voice that I know can’t be trusted.
Evil people will turn on anyone to save their own hides.
It seems Fox has more skin in the game than any of the others who managed to escape one of Cortez’s houses of depravity.
“You can go,” Fox says to me.
I shake my head. “I won’t leave you alone.”
“I’m not alone,” he says, waving his gun to indicate the two others in the room. “Let Angel know it’s over and I’ll send proof in the next couple of days.”
“Fox,” I say, a pleading in my voice. “At least let me help you get them to a safe location. I don’t want you to end up dead.”
“I died the day my family did,” he says, no emotion in his voice. “What happens here tonight doesn’t even matter.”
I know I don’t have a valid argument as he holds out the keys to the vehicle outside. I take them, not bothering to ask him a second time.
I walk out the front door without looking back, unsure if I’ll ever see that man again.
He deserves his vengeance. There are so many of us that won’t get it.
Alessio’s twin sister took that chance from me.
It left me feeling like I never got vindication.
I didn’t avenge Maya’s death. I didn’t get the chance to torture her murderer or peel his skin from his body.
Maybe even if Fox dies tonight when some of Cortez’s people come looking for him, he’ll do so with more peace than he woke up with this morning.