Page 7 of Married with Blood
I sighed, reaching for my phone and ready to intervene and ask what the fuck was going on. He held up his hand, though, making me pause. “That’s not all.”
I narrowed my eyes, bracing myself for more trouble.
Right then, Viktor and Lev entered the house, joining us. Viktor shook his head, scowling, as they approached. “Dean just called.” He faced me but deferred to Adrik before he opened his mouth to speak.
Adrik cleared his throat and sent him a warning look. “Elena?”
She nodded and backed up. “Right. Um, yeah. I’ll go. I’ll be in my office if you need me. But as of right now,” she said, frowning at me, “no money has been collected for this shipment.”
We moved outside under Adrik’s guidance. He probably wanted to avoid going up to his office, which would be nearer Elena. If he was trying to keep things out of her earshot, stepping outside onto the wide porch was quicker.
“Dean called,” Viktor repeated. “The shipment’s been compromised.”
“Fuck.” I turned away for a second and scowled. “How? When?”
“The guns never showed up at our handoff site,” Lev said.
I furrowed my brow. “Why? It’s the same one we’ve always used with Garcia.” The Garcia Cartel was an old alliance and a solid business partner. My father had arranged the lucrative trade deal with Miguel Garcia when I was just a boy. “Are they fucking with us because Father’s no longer in the lead and he’s taking over?” I shared a look with Adrik.
“No.” Viktor shrugged. “At least, not as far as I can tell.”
“Dean’s at the handoff site,” Lev said.
I nodded. “Yes. I wanted him there early, just in case.”
Sometimes, the logistics of getting things over the border had to be flexible. Deliveries could happen sooner or later than expected. The presence of the border patrol and any Feds at the sensitive area between the countries made the exact timing of shipments an unpredictable variable.
But that was nothing new. We weren’t testing this out as a first-time endeavor.
“And he’s seen no sign of the Garcia runners,” Lev added.
“Instead,” Viktor said, “they’re being spotted further east. They’re heading to hand off the guns we wanted to the Hernandez Cartel.”
“What?” My anger and frustration spiked into a maelstrom of fury. “They’re all the way over in fucking Texas?”
“Dean sent a couple of men out to investigate. They’re still on the road, but it looks like Garcia changed something last minute. He’s sending our guns to the Hernandez crew in Texas.”
What the fuck?
What theactualfuck?
I paced, trying to process and slot this new information as quickly as possible. Any change in the delivery should have been given tome, in advance. I had just gone through the texts and emails that I had with the Garcia liaison. Everything was set up to go as planned.
Arturo Garcia somehow deciding to swap the delivery location and give the guns we expected to a rival Cartel didn’t add up.
“It must be some kind of error or something?—”
“No.” I cut off Lev’s guess. “This isn’t a fucking error. Everything was planned.” Nothing about this was new or different. We’d bought guns from the Mexicans too many times to count. Our father had done business with both Miguel and Arturo Garcia. Nothing should’ve been different with this run. “I doubt this is something as simple as a fucking mistake.”
Adrik caught my attention, watching me closely. “What are you thinking this is, then?”
“It stinks like goddamn sabotage. Like he is up to something, reneging on a standard deal that we’ve gone through before.”
Adrik rubbed a hand over his face, not losing his stony glare. A hit of guilt filled me with the fact that he was relying on me to make this go smoothly. I was letting him down.
“It’s clearly an issue with the sender,” I said, shoving aside the guilt and focusing on solving this. “We have the funds. They accepted the funds. It’s not a flaw on our side.”
“Maybe there is, though,” Viktor said. “Maybe they were heading to bring the guns as expected, but something went down near the border.”
