34. The Jekyll
34
THE JEKYLL
T he minute I heard the Guatemalan and the Mexicans in the bar, talking about a five-million-dollar bounty, I knew I was in business. Hours of surveillance led me here. Every shred of intel I had was telling me the Cartel was on its last legs as it suffered infighting and massive financial losses. Not to mention all the underhanded work I’d been doing in the background to sabotage them. My efforts were not going in vain.
The five million dollars for them was a windfall. Of course, someone would have to pay with their life for them to make that money. Possibly another sacrificial lamb. I heard them say something about a girl. They gave me enough identifiers that I was able to climb into the dark web and sift through the pending jobs until I found her. A twenty-seven-year-old reported from the US. And apparently, she was currently in Guatemala, which made their job easier.
I continued my surveillance until I finally got the thread; she’d be in a car on her way to the airport the next day. I got enough information, even down to the car she’d be in, and exactly where she’d be intercepted. I just had to find a way to get to her before the Cartel did. And find a way I did.
The police now believe her dead. The cartel is accused of botching the job and won’t be paid a cent, and I won’t be cashing in on the bounty, so there’s no issue for me there. If news of her “death” spreads, the bounty will be null and void, buying me precious time.
I’d had to be rough with her when I pulled her out of that car, if only to get her out of there before emergency services arrived. If she’d been taken to the hospital, it would have been easy for the cartel to track her down and retrieve her like she was an asset, a means to an end.
But now I had the issue of what to do with the girl. I’d saved her from some rough house types who would’ve used and abused her before cashing in the bounty. In the process, I’d inherited a problem I didn’t know what to do with. I’d cleaned her up as much as I could with the little resources I had, but that still didn’t solve the problem of what to do next.
* * *
My phone chirps as I walk into the tiny makeshift office. I look at the screen and bite the inside of my cheek in irritation. I don’t know why Marden keeps calling, but I swipe my hand across the screen and wait for him to speak.
“Brother,” he says into the phone, but all I give him is a grunt.
I’ve never been much of a talker, and Marden is exceedingly chatty when it comes to me. Sometimes I think he deliberately tries to irritate me with his chattiness. He’s used to my silence by now, so he pushes on without waiting for a reply.
“We need to meet,” he says, then falls silent. So unlike him. “I hear you’ve been busy crossing the wrong sort of people.”
Another grunt. Although I am curious. Marden is pulling me up, which is something he rarely does. He rattles off his goodbye after telling me he’ll send me a text with details of the meet. I don’t even stop to wonder if it’s a trap; Marden would never. That’s the one indisputable fact I know beyond all reason. We were neighbors before we were friends, growing up together in the neighborhood and attending school together since we were in kindergarten. We had always been in sync with each other, from the first day we’d stood side by side and watched Danny Miello scooting down the road in a home-made go-cart and known he was going to crash and crack his skull open. We saw the bigger picture together, and we saw it the same way.
Marden is the courageous one of us, though. He’s the one that approached me when I was in my twenties and told me to stop chasing my tail and marry his sister already. Even though I’d never told him about my feelings for her, he had picked up on the signals anytime we were in the same room.
Eventually, I’d married Sisely and Marden and I were promoted from best friends to blood relations. That bond between us hadn’t ended, even after Sisely was killed. Although these days our time together was limited due to my insatiable thirst to burn down the world, he still had my back. He still called to check in on me, urging me to come back to the fold and resume my place by his side. Something I couldn’t do. Not until I made sure Sisely’s memory was honored and my hands were awash with the blood of the men that killed her.
I strap a firearm into my holster and grab a bottle of water. I can’t leave without ensuring my captive is well hydrated. She’s awake, her new bonds holding her to the chair. She looks at me wearily as I approach and hold the bottle to her mouth. She takes a deep breath as she wraps her mouth around the neck of the bottle. I watch as she swallows slowly, her eyes never leaving mine. She is obviously still in so much pain. She reminds me so much of Sisely. Her features are so similar, it’s uncanny. And I wonder if it was merely the hand of fate that sent me to that bar that day when I learnt about the bounty on her head. There had to be a deeper reason why I ended up there. Why she literally landed in my lap. This could very well be my redemption; I wasn’t able to save my wife, but maybe I could save this innocent from falling into the wrong hands.