My sister, crying as she stares down the lens of a camera, a leather-gloved hand wrapped around her throat. I was half dead when Jamie showed me this image. Over seven years of searching and then, out of the blue, some asshole motherfucking cartel boss uses it as collateral in a hotel deal gone wrong. I wasn’t there, I had had both my legs broken and was lying in a pool of my own blood, but Jamie told me everything he’d discovered: that Julio Perez, a Mexican cartel boss we’re well acquainted with, knew where my sister was. That he possibly had something to do with her disappearance. It took me three months to heal and recover from my ass kicking well enough to ride a motorcycle, but now that I’m fit and able, I’m going to find my sister. Even if it fucking kills me, I am going to find her.
Perez has run for what he considers safe ground, back to Mexico with his tail between his legs. He thinks the Widow Makers won’t follow him there, that it would be too dangerous for a group of twenty guys on motorcycles to go hunting for him. And he was right. It is too dangerous for the whole club to go chasing him across Mexico. Me, on the other hand? One guy on a scrambler, sticking to the back roads and keeping my head down? That’s safe enough. I plan on finding the piece of shit and hurting him until he gives me the information I need. Hence the gruelling slog from New Mexico to El Cascarero. Hence the crick in my back and the ache in my poorly knitted together bones. Hence the cold, black, murderous urge in my heart, and the single point of focus on my mind.
After five days of riding non-stop, I finally draw close to my destination. El Cascarero is a small enough place; Julio’s family live twenty or thirty miles out of the town, on a peach farm of all places. Turns out Perez peaches are quite famous around these parts. I see signs for them for hours before I eventually arrive at the mouth of the dusty, worn single-track road that leads to the farm itself. I squint into the distance, straining to make out the layout of the buildings beyond. Four trucks parked outside the main house—trucks so beaten, rusted, scraped and scratched up that it’ll be a miracle if any of them run. Still. Four trucks. Could mean a lot of people. I lose my helmet. The scrambler is hardly inconspicuous, so I kill the engine and climb off it, wheeling it away from the road and laying it down flat to the ground beside a lone Ahuehuete tree. Looks like a swing used to hang from one of the sturdy, thick boughs overhead, but now a snapped and tattered length of rope is all that remains.
The long grass, sprouting almost to my knees, should hide the bike well enough. I shuck the bag from my back and dump it at my feet, opening the zip to check I have everything I’ll be needing:
One roll of duct tape.
One pair of pliers.
One thick black garbage bag.
One meter length of fine chain.
One small handsaw.
One small container of lighter fluid.
One box of matches.
I hadn’t been able to cross over into Mexico with the items I was scanning through, now. I had to buy them at a hardware store in Río Bailando, but that was easy enough. The weight of the gun I also procured down a seedy back alley in Juarez presses reassuringly into the small of my back. I don’t need to check on that. It’s fully locked and loaded—I already tested it out in the desert. It’s good to have a weapon, but in this instance it’s a last resort. I’ll only draw the gun if every other tactic I plan on employing fails. By that point, Julio will be a bloody, broken mess, and I’ll simply be putting him down. He won’t die quickly, though. A shot in the stomach means he’ll have plenty of time to reflect on his shitty, worthless life as he dies in agony over a period of days, and I’ll be long gone. Hopefully with Laura on the back of my bike.
Tiny sand flies swirl up from the damp grass as I hunker down and run quickly toward what looks like the main building. I swat at them with my hand as I hurry. Takes a long time to reach the perimeter of the building, though I’m sure I am unnoticed. White paint peels from the window frames of the crumbling two-story building. Inside, the sound of a rowdy game show blasts from low quality speakers.
Laughter. Applause. Someone speaking in Spanish, in that game-show-host voice that seems to translate across any number of languages. I crouch down below an open window to the front of the house, listening. How many people are inside this damn room? If I had the time, I’d sit in the grass and watch the comings and goings of the people arriving and leaving the house, but time is something I’ve run out of. Or rather I’ve run out of patience. I’ve already had to wait three months. Holding off for another hour is unacceptable. Another minute. Another second. I just can’t.
Inside the house, a chair leg scrapes on the floor, followed by someone coughing loudly, and then clearing their throat. A woman doesn’t clear her throat like that. No way. So there’s at least one male in the room. Loitering below the window, waiting to see how many people cough, sneeze or fart, will drive me crazy, though, so I do something reckless. Something we’re trained never to do in the military. I edge up, standing just enough so that I can peer over the splintered, sun-worn windowsill, and I take a look.
Four men, all over the age of thirty, as far as I can tell. One of them’s asleep, the back of his head resting against the sofa behind him, mouth hanging open as he snores lightly. Another of the guys is bent over a low coffee table, plastic card in his hand, finely chopping up what looks like an obscene amount of cocaine. The other two men are fixated on the television, watching the redundant antics of the show’s host as he bounces around, shoving a microphone into a stunned woman’s face.