Arturo bristled with anger again. “The others aren’t needed to deal with you.”
Hunter remained unfazed, but he lowered his voice to address me. “Víboras Verde is led by a vicious inner circle known only as The Brothers. This leadership is a union of four close friends, bound by spilt blood and heinous crimes… and eight years ago, I killed one of them.”
“The one who took your sister?”
“Not exactly… but the one who oversaw their kidnapping operations,” Hunter explained. “That leaves three Brothers left to put in the ground. I’m stuck with the runt of the litter here… this guy is nothing compared to the others.”
I realized quickly what Hunter was doing. He was egging Arturo on… Trying to get him to make a mistake.
“Nothing?” Arturo demanded. “You think that I am nothing? We are equals, the three of us are equals, you stupid motherfucker!”
I expected Hunter to chuckle, but he regarded Arturo Alvarez with something akin to pity. “You were always the weakest link… weaker than the one I’ve already put in the ground. Arturo, you will always be in their shadow. Why else would they send you so far from home? They put you in my fucking backyard for a reason Arturo.”
Arturo moved slowly, pressing his gun against the nearest cheerleader’s head. “I will never be in their shadow.”
His hostage mumbled incoherently, still trapped in her drug-fueled daze. I had to do something. We were trapped in our standoff, and Arturo was about to splatter her brains against the wall as a final act of defiance…
“Drop the gun,” I demanded.
Arturo’s smile faded.
“You would have me kill this girl?” He demanded, shaking her shoulder as he held his pistol to her head. “I’ll put a bullet in her skull…”
“And you’ll join your friends in hell,” Hunter said, his arm steady as a rock as he kept the barrel of his gun carefully trained on Arturo.
“If you were going to kill me, you’d have already done it,” Arturo replied, the edge of his lip curling upward. “You want something from me, don’t you pendejo?”
Hunter took a step forward. “The Brothers have been playing you. They put you here to get my attention and they knew one of us would end up dead… So yeah… I want something from you.”
Arturo glared at us.
“Spit it out white devil.”
“I want your brothers,” Hunter replied coldly. “You give them to me and I’ll let you walk out of here alive.”
“You want my blood? You want my family?” Arturo asked furiously.
“I want the men who sent you here to die,” Hunter replied as Arturo moved behind the cheerleader, placing her between the two of them like a makeshift shield.
“I’m walking out of here with this bitch… You touch me and I kill her.”
“You’re not leaving this room with that girl Arturo. You can die here now, or you can tell me what I want to know…”
“And why should I believe you?”
“Because you’re dead if you don’t, and that pretty little thing you’re holding isn’t going to stop a goddamned magnum from punching a hole straight through your sorry ass.”
“If I accept… I have your word that I leave here alive?”
Arturo hesitated. I watched as the cheerleader he was holding up floated on the edge of consciousness, her head rolling slightly to the side. It fell forward, and he shifted her body just slightly, the barrel of his gun moving ever so slightly away from her face.
And a shot rang out.
My glock kicked upward, a single cartridge skittering off the floor to my side.
Arturo fired, a round bouncing harmlessly off the roof and sending a shower of concrete flakes across the room. There was no further movement as he crumpled to the floor, taking the cheerleader with him.
My eyes were on Hunter in a heartbeat.
“What the fuck? Why?!” Hunter snarled. “He was surrendering! He could have helped us destroy the entire fucking cartel!”
Hunter walked over to Arturo Alvarez and kicked the gun from his hand.
“And the second you let your guard down, he’d have taken your head off with that holdout up his sleeve,” I replied, nodding to the body. Hunter reached down and pulled the sleeve back, exposing the little silver nine millimeter.
“He was never going to take the offer,” I said.
“We haven’t destroyed the real men in charge Sarah. They’ll keep coming back if I can’t stop the other brothers…”
I wasn’t listening. My ears were still ringing from the gunshots, but my eyes were trained on the wall behind Arturo… And the small scratches on the floor.