“How long it would take you to call. Or show up. Or do something, anyway. Alfonso told me he had a run in with one of your boys. Sounded like your delightful vice president. And in light of the information Mr. Preston obtained, I assumed you’d be in touch sooner rather than later.”
Hector’s a well-educated man. My guess is he was schooled in America. Probably went to an expensive, exclusive college, where he studied economics or business. No doubt his parents, whoever they might be, wanted him to relocate permanently stateside and make a new life for himself. Become something. Accomplish all that they couldn’t in Mexico. Of course, I could be wrong. He could have simply watched a lot of television and learned English that way, or maybe his parents were criminals too and they taught him everything he knows, but listening to him speak now I get the distinct impression that I could easily have studied alongside him at MIT. There’s something really intimate about talking on the phone with him. Like he’s actually here, sitting with me, whispering into my ear, and it’s creeping me the fuck out. My skin is literally crawling.
“Let’s meet,” I say. “Somewhere public. Let’s just hash this shit out once and for all, shall we?”
“Hmm, well…” Ramirez ponders this silently. “I have a full schedule today, Jamie. I’d be happy to host you at my rustic, charming farmhouse, though. If you have the time.”
“Oh, come on now, Hector. I’m not that stupid. If I walk through your front door, I won’t be walking out again. You and I both know that.” We’ve had someone watching his place night and day ever since he showed up here in New Mexico, and there are never any less than twenty armed men moving and rotating through his property. If I went on over there, gave a polite knock on the front door and asked to come on in, I’d be dead within a minute.
Hector laughs. “Worth the offer, right?” He laughs some more. Crunches some more. “So where would you propose we have this very public meeting of ours, Jamie? And who will you be bringing along with you?”
“Just me and Cade. Outside the public library off Main. Come now. We’ll be waiting.” I hang up before he can object. There’s no real reason why Hector Ramirez should come and meet with us given that he’s the one with the leverage in this situation, but he has to make his demands after all. And I know the guy. He’d never pass up an opportunity to rile me in person. There was a time when I’d do the occasional shift at Dead Man’s Ink, purely for the enjoyment of tattooing and meeting new people, but not anymore. Hector and his boys make a point of walking down Main Street every morning and every night just before dusk. They come to see if I’m around; they come to show their faces, to show they’re not going anywhere anytime soon, and I have a pretty fucking short fuse these days. I want to hurt him. I want to do unspeakable things to him, so I stay away, keep my wits about me, and I bide my time, waiting for the day I go rolling up on his place of business.
“Why there?” Cade stabs a finger at the buttons on the Humvee’s radio until static crackles out of the speakers. For a second I’m transported back to the desert, and I’m straining to hear snatches of distorted sound from my hip radio as bullets whip and sing overhead. Cade frowns. “Why the library?”
I block out the chatter of the radio, staring straight ahead out of the windshield in front of me. “Because she’s back. Because she’s brought a team, and it looks like she’s staying.”
Cade knows precisely who she is. Denise Lowell, agent for the DEA. Lowell was pursuing Ramirez last year, and arrested both him and myself after we had a bust up at Dead Man’s Ink. She tried to lay the pressure on me back then to talk, to say something that might incriminate Ramirez (and potentially myself) in illegal activity. I got the feeling, as I sat there in that interview room being interrogated by her and her little DEA friends, that she wouldn’t have really cared where I slipped up or what I inadvertently confessed to. She would have taken a misdemeanor crime and somehow twisted and turned it, moulding it like clay, until it was suddenly murder one. She’s the type of woman who can perform magic tricks like that.
“Is she here for him?” Cade holds onto the steering wheel tight, glaring at the straight road ahead of him. Any moment now he’ll have to turn right, pull off into the sleepy, lazy town of Freemantle, but until then he looks intent on gunning the engine as hard as he possibly can.
“I don’t know. I fucking hope so, man. I really fucking hope so.”
CHAPTER SIX
CADE