Chapter 3
THREE
The motel outside San Antonio buzzed with the hum of insects and passing semis. Ferrera sat on the edge of a sagging bed, elbows on his knees, hands clasped. He'd traded the prison scrubs for jeans and a faded work shirt. The television was on in the background, muted.
The Sicaria stood by the window, curtain drawn just enough to watch passing headlights without being seen.
Ferrera couldn't place her face. She had too many clashing details: Latina skin tone, Slavic bones, those cold blue eyes.
She wasn't pretty, and she didn't pretend to be.
She looked like someone built for utility, not admiration.
He'd stopped trying to work out exactly where she fit.
Thirteen years inside had a way of scrambling the org chart—men he'd left as runners would be lieutenants now, and the network had grown limbs in places he'd never authorized.
She was one of his people, that much was clear.
La Mano Negra didn't pull a man out of a federal transport van for anyone else's benefit.
She'd come when he called, she'd done the work, and she'd shown up here to settle accounts.
That was enough. He didn't need her pedigree.
He reached into his shirt pocket and took out the folded square of paper he'd been carrying since the night before the transfer, the one thing he'd guarded through the strip searches and the holding cells, the thing he'd promised himself was worth every day of the wait.
He held it out to her.
“Here's your end,” he said. “Same as we agreed.”
She crossed the room and took it and unfolded it without expression. Two names. Two neatly written addresses.
Jessica Meeks. 114 Shoreline Drive, Corpus Christi, TX 78401
Dante Cruz. FM 3090, Agua Dulce, TX 78379
“My boys did good work,” Ferrera said, watching her read.
“Took them a while, but they found a motivated source down in Corpus.
Couple of weeks back. Some cop with a gambling problem and a girlfriend he didn't know much about.” He smiled at the memory of the report that had reached him in his cell, in carefully coded language.
“Turns out he knew more than he thought.”
The Sicaria's eyes moved over the page. “You're certain of these.”
“I'm certain.” He leaned back, the bed frame groaning under him.
“She's been hiding thirteen years and she was right there the whole time. And him—” his jaw tightened “—him I'd given up for dead. But there he is. Same county. Going by Cruz.” He shook his head slowly.
“After all these years. Both of them right where my people could reach out and touch them.”
He'd run it a thousand times behind his eyes, in the dark of the transport van and the worse dark of the cell before it.
The ballerina who'd turned rat. The runner who'd vanished with her.
The two of them had cost him everything—his operation gutted, his freedom, thirteen years he was never getting back—and now their addresses sat in the hands of his own woman, and the only thing left was to give the order.