Virgin Bride(111)

This is the first time I’ve really been out of the compound since coming, not counting the few trips to the surrounding beach area. We move through a small town, barely more than a collection of lean-tos and shanties. The people in the town are poor, incredibly poor, and I suspect that many of the guards actually live there. It would make sense, because as soon as we get out of that town, there’s nothing for miles.

I mean nothing. There are stereotypes about the Mexican landscape being all desert, and of course there are huge swaths of that all over, but Mexico is actually a beautiful country.

However, we are not in the beautiful part. We’re deep in the stereotypical Mexico, all cactuses and arid, red, sunbaked clay land. The road is barely a road, more like hard packed dirt with tire marks in it, and I’m pretty sure we’re driving in circles.

“What’s the plan again?” I ask Mikhail after we’d been driving for about a half hour.

“We go. We meet cartel. We give money. We go home.”

“Eloquently said,” I respond.

“Don’t be funny. Nobody likes a funny man.”

I grin at him. “You think I’m funny? Thanks, Mikhail. You’re sweet.”

He ignores me and keeps driving. I glance back at the guards but neither of them return my gaze.

So, we’re going to deliver cash to the cartel. “How much, exactly?” I ask Mikhail.

He pauses. “A lot,” he says after a second.

Okay, we’re going to deliver a lot of cash to the cartel.

But there’s something conspicuously missing.

There’s no cash in this car. Or at least there’s no bag large enough to be holding a lot of cash. The thing with cash is, it takes up space. And the more cash there is, the more space it takes up. Maybe it was already loaded in the back before we got in, but I really doubt that. I didn’t get a glimpse of any bags back there, and I did make a point of looking as we walked past.

So, no cash, or at least no obviously visible cash. Which means Mikhail here is lying about something.

I can guess what he’s lying about. This whole fucking mission stinks of a setup.

For one, why would they send me along? That makes no sense, I’m a stranger and it’s my understanding that drug cartels tend not to like strangers. If Anton is trying to maintain a good relationship with a cartel, he wouldn’t send some random fucking gringo along on the drop.

Then of course there’s the fact that Anton has been souring on me for a while now. Probably never liked me to begin with. He thinks my methods are bullshit and probably thinks I’m some kind of saboteur, which of course I am.

Anton isn’t stupid. I have to keep reminding myself of that fact. He’s been in this business for a long time and this is not the sort of industry that allows fools to thrive. The idiot human traffickers are all dead or rotting in jail. Meanwhile, Anton toils on and is even thriving.

That means he has to have some kind of instincts for this. And the way I walked into his life is for sure fishy at best. Clearly I’m not what he expected and he thinks my methods are bullshit, because clearly they are.

What I’m not sure about is why the Russians are okay with my firm taking Anton down. He probably shorted them, or has been shorting them, or they found some new supplier and they figure it’s easier to get Anton out of the way. It’s hard to really know what the Russians actually want when so much of this shit is so complicated.

I’m not an expert on any of it, and frankly don’t want to be. But if I can see that there’s probably some reason that the Russians want to get rid of Anton, it’s almost definite that he can see it too.

He’s probably paranoid as hell right now, and my company just dropped me into the heart of a dangerous, violent, paranoid psycho’s house. And he sniffed me out.

This is a fucking setup. We’re not driving out into the desert to meet with some cartel, we’re driving out into the desert so that these three men can kill me and then get rid of my body.

They’ll go back and tell the Russians and, by extension, my people that I died in a firefight with the cartel, no doubt. Although that’s a lie, of course. But it’ll take the blame from Anton, and then he can work to get back into their good graces. Or maybe he can work to kill his competition. I don’t know what his long-term plan is and it doesn’t really matter.

All that matters is he’s trying to kill me.

“What’s the plan here, boss?” I ask Mikhail.

“The plan is for you to shut your mouth,” he says.

I smile slightly at him. “If we’re making a drop with the cartel, it makes more sense to tell me what’s going down, right? That way I don’t screw it up by mistake.”