“Good. Now. Look at this woman,” Jamie says, producing a photograph from his pocket. “This woman was kidnapped three weeks ago. We’ve searched high and low for her and found nothing. You’re going to tell us who runs the biggest human trafficking rings in the States. You’re going to give us names and locations, and you’re going to do it quickly before my friend here loses all patience whatsoever and decides to put you down.”
Jamie says this coolly, calmly, in a flat, monotone voice that doesn’t sound like his own. In all the years I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him act like this, never heard him speak like this. No matter what kind of shit his father put him through, he always managed to maintain an air of light-heartedness to him, but now that seems to be long gone. In its place is a cold, icy demeanor that doesn’t leave any room for second-guessing. He will follow through on his words if Eli doesn’t comply. He or Cade will kill the man, and I can tell that neither one of them will lose sleep over it.
I’ve tried to hide this side of myself from my family. From him, specifically. He’s always seemed so innately good, yet right now he’s anything but. Jamie’s been capable of this, being reckless and cold, the whole time I’ve been out taking care of problems for people like Charlie Holsan, and now here he is, threatening to kill someone right in front of me and he’s not even batting an eyelash.
Good for him.
Bad for me, since he nearly fucked things up for me with Sara, and god knows what Charlie’s moronic henchmen saw when we were idling outside his place, but hey. Good for him.
“I don’t…I don’t fucking recognize her, okay?” Eli screeches. “Only big time guys I know running women in the states are Julio Perez and some guys out Chicago way.”
“We already visited the guys in Chicago,” Cade snarls. “Their head guy lost three fingers before he caved and showed us through his books. She wasn’t there. We told Perez we wanted to buy a girl so he let us look through his stables, and she wasn’t there, either. You’d better come up with some new names, fucker, otherwise I’m gonna go find my cigar cutters.”
“I can give you as many names as…as you like,” Eli grinds out. “That doesn’t mean any of them will have this girl of yours. If she’s been gone for three weeks, she’s in…the fucking wind. No one will be able to find her now.”
This is obviously the very last thing Cade wants to hear. Even when we were younger, Cade was broad and strong. Now he’s built like a fucking Sherman tank. I wince as he punches Eli in the ribs, hard enough that the overweight guy pinned to the table wheezes out the contents of his lungs, turning redder and redder.
“Fuck!”
“Do I need to tell you again?”
“No, no, no. Shit. If you want skin traders, there’s Mendez’s group in Phoenix. There’s Proctor and his boys over in Texas. And…and…you could always try Richter in Oregon. He’s normally drugs and guns, but his outfit’s been expanding recently. Seems…seems that there’s more money flowing in for them. Could be that they’re dipping their toes, too.”
Cade and Jamie exchange glances. Neither of them look particularly impressed. “Why would any of those guys go to Alabama to kidnap women?” Jamie asks.
Eli makes a strangled, grunting sound. “Alabama? No one would bother there. If this woman was taken from Alabama then it’s more likely she was taken across the border.”
Folding his arms across his chest, Jamie frowns at Cade. “What do you mean, ‘across the border?’ You mean into Mexico?”
“Not Mexico. Colombia. There’s a crazy bitch down there. A woman, head of a cartel. She fucking skins people for fun. She’s not right in the head. I heard she sometimes sends crews up into the lower states to snatch people. Usually it’s wealthy politicians, but her guys take women too if they think they’re pretty enough. If they think they’ll get a decent return on them.”
The words ‘wealthy politician’ almost echo around the room. Jamie’s father is most definitely a wealthy politician. One of the wealthiest, most powerful politicians in America, in fact. If this woman, whoever she is, sent up a gang of guys to try and kidnap Louis for ransom, only to have their plans foiled by the sheer number of people at the property that night, they might well have taken a beautiful blonde woman instead, to temper the sting of losing out on their original target.
“Colombia,” Cade says, letting go of Eli. He steps back, shoulders sagging. “How the fuck are we going to find her if she’s been taken to Colombia? She could have been sold on and moved anywhere in the world from there.”
“Maria Rosa is a patient woman,” Eli says. “Fucking out of her mind crazy, but patient. She doesn’t sell on her people. She keeps them, looks after them. It’s not in her interests to sell on commodities, at least until she knows their true value, anyway.”
“You seem to know a lot about her,” Jamie says.