“Get ready for the next set. And here’s a tip: If he has a fucking M tattooed on his neck, keep your distance.” It’s a condescending remark, as most around here know to stay away from members of the Matamoros cartel, if they can help it. The lowly folks embroiled in the darker society, anyway. I wouldn’t expect a suburban mom to be so perceptive, but Marcelle is nowhere near suburbia.
Maybe she thought the money the guy flaunted would magically appear in her thong by the end of the night, but that’s not how the assholes work. They’re just privileged enough to think sex and money is owed to them, in exchange for not ripping someone’s face off.
Maybe it is.
But not in my club, particularly when a large percent of my earnings lines their boss’s pocket.
Back in my office, Flashy Shirt sits slumped over in the open chair beside Luc. “Thanks for hauling his ass up here,” I say to Levi, passing him on the way toward my desk. “Guy must weigh a ton, with all that bloated sense of self.”
Levi chuckles and gives a quick salute in play. “I’ma leave the bubble burstin’ to you, Boss.”
“Good man.” I pour myself a glass of bourbon from a decanter on my desk, and hold it over a second glass, brows raised, as I glance up at Luc.
“Mais, non. Last time I drink dat fancy liquor, I was ass up in da swamp next day.” Sometimes, Luc has his own sayings that, even in the thick of the shitstorm I’m about to face with the guy beside him, whose nose has begun to turn purple, I can’t help but smile. “I’ll let you get back to it. You an’ me goin’ fishin’ next week, Cous’. I won’ take no for an answer dis time.”
“I’ll get you penciled in. Been a long time since I took a day off, anyway. Could use some time on the water. Sorry to hear about you and your fille.”
“Ah, yeah. C’est la vie.” A quick shrug, and he hikes his thumb toward the guy passed out beside him. “Have fun wit’ dis couillon. Someone’s gonna be mad when he wakes up.”
He isn’t kidding. Any other man who’d have busted his nose like that would surely end up strung up and flayed, as an example to all of why you don’t fuck with the Matamoros Diablos.
I hold my glass up to Luc as if in toast. “Laissez les bons temps rouler.”
Let the good fucking times roll.
3
Thierry
In a perfectly pressed gray suit, Cuban cigar parked between his lips, Julio paces the room with his hands behind his back. At five-foot-ten, he’s not a particularly intimidating man in appearance, but I once watched him stab a guy in the throat for calling him Jules.
One of his men stands guard at the door, but I ignore him. Instead, sitting behind my desk, I tamp down the urge to knock the skull-fuck stare Flashy Shirt is throwing at me from where he sits, like a kid sent to the principal’s office, daubing his nose with ice.
“So, you say he disrespected you, and your course of action was to bash his face in?”
It’s only out of respect for Julio that I break the staring contest first, to shift my attention back to him. “He harassed one of my dancers.”
“And you bashed his face in. Over some whore dancer?” Lips crimped in repulsion, Julio tips his head in scrutiny.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch the shit-eating smirk on Flashy Shirt’s face, and I suddenly regret not killing the bastard earlier.
Better to beg for forgiveness than ask for permission.
“She’s the best dancer in this club. Draws more tips and patrons than anyone else. Which means more cash.” My gaze falls to Flashy Shirt again. “Unless she’s tied up with some cheap motherfucker who likes to touch without paying.”
He thrusts his crotch upward. “Chupa mis bolas, puto!” Suck my balls, bitch.
Julio raises a hand to silence the little prick that has my trigger finger twitching. On a huff, Julio pinches his nose, eyes clamped shut. He tugs his gun from a side holster and, with nothing more than a quick glance, blows a shot through Flashy Shirt’s skull, sending bits of brain and bone across the pale gray carpet of my office and up onto the equally pale gray walls.
I don’t so much as flinch at the sight.
Watching a man’s skull explode with a bullet is nothing new to me. In fact, I expected more of a spectacle. Julio isn’t stupid. A man who disrespects and draws that much attention is one who can’t be trusted. And with the kind of money the cartel has been pulling in lately, there’s no room for sloppy sicarios.
Gun still in hand, he waves it toward Flashy Shirt, now slumped over and bleeding out in the chair, and twists back toward the bigger man by the door. “Call someone to get this fucking mess cleaned up.” With a sharp nod, the man pulls his cellphone out, while Julio takes the empty seat beside Flashy Shirt’s body.
“Lo siento, my friend. We may have to replace the carpet.”
Leaning forward, I pour two drinks into a glass and push one toward Julio. “Not a problem.”
In one fast swill, he downs the drink, then holds his glass out for another, to which I oblige.
“It’s a bitch finding good help these days.”
“I imagine it is.”
“Which is why I’m going to have to ask you a favor.”
Putain. I should’ve seen this coming from a mile away, but I was too distracted with the events of the evening, I didn’t even pay attention to the consequences of all this.
“I have a job that I trust only to the elusive Black Wolf.”
The nickname has me inwardly groaning. It isn’t enough that the locals refer to me as a fucking werewolf, of all things, but the cartel has adopted this showy supervillain reputation, thanks to Julio, who made it a point early on in my criminal career to use a childhood scar as a means of branding me a dangerous sicario.
“Since I’m out an employee, I’ll need you to fill in for him.”
The small, paranoid voice inside my head tells me he planned this all along. Maybe set it up, made sure Flashy Shirt unwittingly entered my club with a death wish, just so Julio would have the perfect excuse to put me on a job.
I haven’t worked in contract killing for a couple years now. Retired and moved on to money laundering, as a means of keeping myself valuable enough so the cartel doesn’t find me to be more useful as a corpse. The last job nearly killed me, thanks to some tip-off given to my target. Since then, I’ve been laying low. Biding my time, until I can fully leave this bullshit behind me.
Refusing him, though, would mean the cleaner is left sopping up two blown out skulls.
“Three men,” Julio continues. “At the moment, they’re holed up in a safe house, just outside of Houston. You’re to eliminate two, and bring the third back here.”
“Transport?”
“Yes. Which means you’ll need to purchase a vehicle. All expenses will be paid, of course.”
“And is the third to be kept alive?”
“Yes. This is a more personal matter for my employer. He wants a bit more flair than the usual search and eliminate.”
His employer is some mysterious and obscure capo of the Matamoros cartel, who’s rumored to live in a luxurious guarded mansion somewhere in Mexico and never leaves the compound. I’ve never met him, personally, but on his command, people die in brutal ways.