Total pages in book: 51
Estimated words: 49215 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 246(@200wpm)___ 197(@250wpm)___ 164(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 49215 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 246(@200wpm)___ 197(@250wpm)___ 164(@300wpm)
Very funny.
“Come on,” he said, jerking his chin up the street. “Let’s go meet our boyfriend’s family for the first time and pretend we’re normal for a hot second.”
Normal. What the fuck was that anyway.
Reese Tenley
2023
“Surveillance is up and running in the last location,” Riv said, closing his laptop.
I nodded with a dip of my chin and pocketed another mag. Then I adjusted my earpiece and tested the sound. Since the Quinns’ baby sister Willow was nonverbal around people she didn’t know very well, we’d asked Ramirez to be our intelligence tonight. He was stuck in a waiting game in a hotel in Spain, so he’d been pleased with the task.
Besides, we’d recently given Willow fourteen new locations to keep track of, so she was swamped as it was.
Fourteen addresses to which we’d followed Luiz Gomez in the past week. He knew something—I was sure of it. He was the nephew of one of Carillo’s closest associates, and the guy, Luiz, traveled with an impressive security detail. You didn’t do that if you were disposable.
Tonight, we’d grab him.
I checked my side pockets, making sure I had everything, then scanned our beds. We weren’t leaving our motel room lookin’ like a crime scene. While I packed the rest of our shit into three duffel bags, River continued gearing up.
“Where are the helmets?”
“In the truck,” I replied. We didn’t have room for them in our bags, and it didn’t look great walking into a seedy motel with two combat helmets. Actually, it wouldn’t look great anywhere in the civilian world.
The black utility pants and combat vests were a bad enough combination.
On the flip side, we picked motels where nobody asked questions. Where you paid in cash and minded your own business.
I pressed a button on my earpiece. “We’re out in two. ETA fifty minutes. We’ll be back online in about forty.”
“Copy that,” Ramirez answered.
I pushed the button again.
We’d parked right outside our room, so the moment River was done, we loaded up the truck and took off.
I checked the rearview as we left the last chunk of LA behind us, and we drove north toward Malibu. We only stopped once, before we reached the PCH, so I could run out and switch plates on the truck. Then I was back behind the wheel.
Almost midnight.
We put on our face coverings but tugged them down to our necks for now.
Riv grabbed my hand, and I threaded our fingers together and gave his a squeeze.
We had nothing to say.
It’d been fifteen days since an in-house cartel war had robbed Riv and me of our future and turned us into our pasts. They’d targeted Elliott, reminding my brother and me that a PMC could never really walk away from the field. ’Cause we were always fucking targets. We always risked someone finding us, someone we’d put away or…whatever. It’d happened before, and it was going to happen again.
Carillo’s biggest problem was that his attack hadn’t harmed Elliott—or me or River or any of the other old grunts. It’d harmed the people we loved.
Even though we didn’t have as many leads as we would’ve liked, we were closing in on the motherfucker. We’d eliminated over a dozen affiliates with ties to official members of the cartel, all on Carillo Mesa’s side of this new war, and we’d ruled out and searched through countless addresses. Tonight, we’d hopefully shrink the number of Carillo associates further.
We were done with stakeouts. We were done collecting addresses and places to put up surveillance. We were done mapping out the remains of Carillo’s operations in California. We were done gathering intel.
Carillo had amassed an interesting mix of criminals to join his breakout from the well-known Blanco Family. He wasn’t picky about who he chose, that’s for certain. His associates had roots all over, from Brazil and Colombia to Mexico and US states like California, New York, and fucking Ohio. We even knew of a Russian guy. We knew names and family ties and officially owned properties. In short, we had all the information we didn’t give a shit about, because the only intel that mattered in the long run were the locations and trails that would lead us to Shay.
We didn’t have a single fucking clue about where our boy could be, other than it was most likely in California.
River withdrew his hand as he checked his phone. “We have an update from Willow in the chat server.” He frowned at the screen. “Someone blew up Vincente Blanco’s estate in Mexicali, and she’s wondering if we’ve been in contact with Emerson and Danny.”
That made me frown too. What did one thing have to do with the other? “Are the two updates related?”
“Well, the way she phrased it, I’m not sure. It sounds that way. But you haven’t reached out to the Paynes, have you?”