Falling as Opposed to Jumping
DEAN WAS at the apartment, packing his go bag and giving Bumble one last chuck under the chin before he had to give the lint roller a pass over his clothes, when his phone, set to relay texts over his earbuds, began to tell a three-text horror story with Bailey as the star.
He hit Marcus’s number before the final text came through.
“What, you done honeymooning and ready to leave early?”
“Where are you?” Dean asked crisply.
“Leaving the coffee place you love so much. What’s up?”
Oh thank God, thank God, thank God, thank God, Marcus was just as big a stickler for being on time as he was. They’d been booked on a flight out, and Marcus had taken a Lyft from his nearby hotel room and grabbed the rental Dean had used for some last-minute errands.
But no errand was as important as the two of them being on time for their plane. That’s why they got along so well.
“Complete change of plans,” Dean said. “Vlade was hit, Bailey’s a witness, and if I’m lucky, I’ll get to the hospital and bail him out before our hit men realize it and get him too.”
“Well, shit,” Marcus muttered. “How in the hell did that happen?”
“Bad fucking luck.”
Dean hadn’t told Bailey about Vlade. For one thing their little interlude in the hospital cot room had happened about two weeks before Marcus and Dean’s carefully cultivated CI had been transferred to Outskirts General, and Marcus and Dean had been busy , dammit, trying to make sure he’d be safe.
The sour man with the attenuated build hadn’t been Dean’s favorite person of all time, but he had been a font of information about the inner workings of the Russian mob and how they’d been planning to take over the Corazones de Sangre—the Hearts of Blood.
The Karkov branch of the mob had been pretty slick about it, using the muddle at the border and the United States’ draconian policies to hide the ladders of bodies they were using to climb to the top of the drug trade. Racism was such a good tool to use against the stupid.
A Russian smuggled in undocumented through Cuba and Florida wasn’t looked at twice if he had a fake ID that said “Smith,” but a Mexican who actually had documentation was still considered good riddance.
Marcus and Dean did a lot of target practice with red hats and ICE windbreakers, and Dean wasn’t sure it was even therapy anymore.
Because whether the bad guys were the Russian mob or the Columbian cartels, they were both still winning.
This time around, the mob was smuggling drugs, weapons, and humans with even more brutality than the cartels themselves, and Dean and Marcus weren’t going to quibble about how politics could turn things on a dime.
They were going to go after the assholes who had been leaving big shipments of people to rot in the Texas heat as a signal to the cartels that nobody was safe.
Fortunately both shipments had been found, but there’d been casualties.
One of the survivors of the second shipment had positively identified two men—not “coyotes,” which were bad enough, but buitre and diabolico she had called them.
Vultures. Partly because of the flapping black suits, Dean had thought while interviewing the poor woman in the hospital, but also, he was sure, because of their grim delight in death.
She’d heard the men speaking in thickly accented English as they’d crammed the back of the semi to standing room only. They’d talked of “needing to cook the meat extra-long to be juicy,” and even knowing she was the meat, she’d rather take her chances inside the truck than try to escape.
There’d been rumors about the big one and his fondness for knives.
When Vlade Karkov had come to them voluntarily, asking for nothing more than a change of venue, Dean and Marcus had jumped at the chance to milk him for information.
They were aware— very aware—that he was probably a plant.
For every bit of truth he gave them, two-thirds of what he said was lies.
If he said the shipment of girls was going over the border at Nogales on Friday, the odds were a shipment of boys was coming up from the border in Nogales on Thursday—but that didn’t matter.
He’d said Nogales, and Dean and Marcus both had an almost uncanny sense of lie detection with people.
Marcus said Dean’s came from an inability to manufacture bullshit himself, so he knew when other people were doing it just by the smell.
Dean claimed Marcus cooked up so many scenarios in his fertile imagination, he’d already unconsciously run through what was plausible and what wasn’t.
Either way, both of them knew the sound of truth when they heard it, and so far, their ability to navigate the treacherous waters of Vlade Karkov’s attempted false flags had simply added to their stellar records.
And it hadn’t hurt that Vlade had kept Dean in Austin after that first encounter with Bailey.
“Fuck bad luck,” Marcus said now, breaking into Dean’s simultaneous musing and packing. “It’s our fault, Dean. We should have let him fool us once or twice.”
Dean grunted. Subterfuge wasn’t one of his strong points, but he could see where Marcus was heading with this. “What do you mean?” he asked, not because he didn’t understand in his gut, but because Marcus was better with words than he was.
“I mean that they probably thought Vlade was passing us the real—not everybody knows about your super brain, Dean—and it’s best we keep it that way, but remember? We talked about missing a few of his leads, but….” It was not like Marcus to trail off, but Dean understood.
“Every lead he passed was human trafficking,” Dean filled in grimly.
It would be one thing if the shipments had been of arms, or of drugs—Dean and Marcus had played the game of “predict the shipment” often enough to be confident that they could track the goods until Vlade was off the hook for the info.
But this month it had been all people , and the gathering of the Vultures (as Dean thought of Vlade’s branch of the mob) had been particularly bloodless about leaving those shipments to rot just to hurt the cartel’s cred.
“Unavoidable,” Marcus said now, crisply. “It was unavoidable that Vlade would get popped, one way or another. What is unfortunate is that it happened when your guy could get involved. What’s your plan?”
Dean took a glance around the apartment, thinking sadly that he’d been happy here and that Bailey was going to have to go away for a really long time.
And that Bailey’s father might need to be picked up as well.
And that Bailey would really miss his cat.
Dean regarded Mr. Bumble (he couldn’t keep calling the cat Bumble—it felt disrespectful somehow), and the cat returned a crossed blue-eyed gaze.
Mr. Bumble was an unusually chill cat, Dean was beginning to suspect.
He didn’t mind a trip to the vet’s, but that could be because Bailey sedated him whenever he went.
Actually, Dean knew where Bailey kept the cat’s sedation and medication, and… .
“I’ll tell you the plan when you get me in ten minutes,” Dean said. “You may want to come up. I’ll need help.”
Marcus didn’t ask questions. He never asked questions, not after their first six months together.
But then, Marcus had once thrown Dean out of a third-story window, knowing there was a rescue cushion on the ground floor.
Dean hadn’t known this until he’d been midair and had been able to adjust his body accordingly, and while he’d been briefly terrified he was falling to his doom, he hadn’t, not once, questioned that Marcus had done what he’d done because the alternative would have been deadly.
Sure enough, Marcus followed him down right as the room had erupted into flame, taking out their unsubs.
The rest had been sprains and contusions and paperwork, and another story Dean made Marcus swear upon his life he’d never tell Dean’s family.
Just like Dean swore to never tell Marcus’s parents that Marcus’s ratio of bed partners was 60/40 men.
Dean assumed these were the things partners shared, and since he and Marcus never shared with anyone but each other, nobody had disabused him of that notion yet.
And Marcus had not once questioned Dean’s attachment to Bailey.
Dean could only be grateful he didn’t question it now.
Okay. First things first. Where to deliver the package.
Dean was still moving about the apartment, packing Bailey a go bag.
He knew the basics of Bailey’s wardrobe and figured jeans, cargo shorts, and T-shirts would about cover the spectrum in June, but he added a hooded sweatshirt just in case, as well as socks, underwear, and a pair of tennis shoes, all of which he rolled into tiny bundles, fitting everything Bailey could possibly wear into a Rollaboard Dean found in his closet.
He packed a satchel with water, power bars, and kibble, and stacked that neatly next to the two small suitcases near the door entrance.
He stripped out of his suit and into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt, along with his rubber-soled hiking boots, and then, while the plan was still fresh in his brain and not spoiled by too much thinking, he called his brother.
“Val? Where are you?”
“About an hour from Fort Stockton. Left Vinnie’s place near Austin about three hours ago. Just dropped off some breeding cows, why?” Val did a lot of business for Vinnie, who was Val’s best friend and sort of a millionaire cattle rancher.
“I need you to do two things for me in quick succession. The first is going to involve talking to a man in Fort Stockton you’ve never met and convincing him and his dog to go with you.
The second is going to be… trickier. Once you have the man and his dog, I need you to head southwest to the Chihuahuan desert. ”
“The fuck— ”
“Yes, I know it’ll take about five hours. I will have instructions for you by the time you get there.”
“Dean, I was slated to do a pickup in an hour—”