Rodrigo
He wasn’t breathing.
“He went up there hopped up on coke and they killed him,” Gabriel continued. His voice was steady, clinical. He’d already processed it. Already moved past grief and into calculation because Gabriel didn’t have time for feelings when there was work to do. “We need to plan our attack.”
“How?!” I stopped pacing and turned to face him.
“We don’t even know how to catch Quest. Every time we swing at this man he ducks and comes back harder.
Mehar has security on her around the clock.
The casino is locked down. The sister is in Connecticut somewhere and we can’t find her.
We’re running out of family to go after because they’re running out of family to leave unprotected. ”
“We kill the security,” Gabriel said like he was ordering lunch. “Two private guards at the hotel. We handle them, we get to the woman. That brings Quest to us.”
“And then what? He comes with his brothers and those King niggas and we’re outnumbered and outgunned?”
“Then we make it count. We don’t need to win a war, Rodrigo. We just need to hurt him bad enough that he feels it for the rest of his life. Kill the woman. Kill the baby. Let him live with that.”
I looked at my brother and saw the same darkness in his eyes.
Gabriel wasn’t afraid of dying. He’d made peace with that a long time ago.
What drove him wasn’t survival, it was vengeance.
Mateo, Manny, Fosso, LaLa, Paco. Five people he loved wiped off the earth by one family.
He wanted blood and he didn’t care if his own spilled in the process.
“Alright,” I said. “Let’s figure out how to get past the security at the hotel. If we can isolate Mehar while Quest is occupied somewhere else, we have a window. It’s small but it’s there.”
Gabriel leaned forward and we started talking through it.
Entry points at the Ritz, timing, how to pull the guards off position.
It wasn’t a sophisticated plan because we didn’t have the resources for sophisticated anymore.
No money for bribes, no soldiers to spare, no technology to compete with whatever drones and surveillance the Banks were using.
We were two brothers, a handful of guns, and enough rage to fill a cemetery.
We were maybe five minutes into it when Carlos, one of the few soldiers we had left, came running into the living room from the back of the house. He was pale and his eyes were too wide and he was holding a tablet with the security camera feed pulled up.
“We have a problem,” he said, turning the screen toward us.
I looked at the feed. The front gate camera showed two bodies on the ground where our gate guards had been posted fifteen minutes ago.
They were face down, not moving. The gate was open.
Beyond it, in the darkness of the tree line, I could see movement.
Shadows shifting between the trunks. Multiple figures advancing toward the house from at least two directions.
They found us.
“How the fuck did they find us?” I said, but the question was pointless because the how didn’t matter anymore.
They were here. Right now. On this property.
Moving through the trees toward the house where my mother was sleeping upstairs and my brother was sitting on the couch and the last remnants of the Rios family were gathered in one place like targets at a shooting range.
Gabriel was already on his feet. His face hadn’t changed. No panic, no surprise. Just that cold focus that lived behind his eyes when the time for talking was over and the time for killing had arrived.
“It’s time,” he said, walking toward the back room where we kept the guns. “Let’s end this.”