Page 74 of Married with Blood
I shook my head slowly.
“Don’t believe me?” he snarled.
I stopped moving. I wasn’t arguing with him. I was stunned. “That shipment was arranged less than twelve hours before it took place. How the fuck could anyone have gotten word about it that quickly?”
“Maybe you got a leak,” he said.
No leaks. Not from our end. It had to be the Colombians who let the word out that we wanted arms from them and had the intention to transport them along the edge of Arturo Garcia’s territory.
“Who contacted you for this job?” Alexei asked.
“Some fucker who’s been contacting all the Cartels,” he replied, hanging his head. Like a plant wilting without sunlight or water, he was fading fast. He wasn’t bleeding out to die this instant, but his energy to fight was waning fast.
“Not someone within the Cartels?”
He shook his head and coughed again. “No. I left the fuckers near the Gulf years ago. Been on my own and helping some others like me.”
Independent, then. Defectors from the Cartels were common, but they never lived for long.
“Not with the Garcia Cartel?” I asked.
“No. But this asshole who gave me and the others this job is in with them.”
“The Garcias?” I glanced at my cousins, making sure they were hearing this as clearly as they could with how the man was slurring and hunching over.
“Yeah. Arturo Garcia.” He huffed a weak laugh and shook his head. “This ugly motherfucker’s been targeting any Cartel faction he can. To get as much territory reached as he can.”
“Who is he?” I asked, on edge and expecting to hear one.
Gregori Volkov.
He’d been listed as Gregori Fyodor V. on paper, but that was him, with his middle name used almost as an alias for his surname.
“Yusef.”
I narrowed my eyes, barely hearing him with how quietly he spoke. “What?”
“Yusef,” he repeated.
I looked at my cousins again, seeing the recognition on their faces. The same recognition I couldn’t deny feeling with that name.
“Yousef Antonov?” I asked.
As a rule of thumb, it was idiocy to offer a name in the process of an interrogation. It was better to get answers than imply the idea of the ones I wanted to hear. But I had a hunch it wouldn’t backfire on me now.
“That’s him.” The man lifted his head to squint at me, as if he were dizzy and dehydrated with how he swayed and licked his bloodied lips. No sympathy came to me for him. “Yusef Antonov. Some ugly motherfucker who’s been sniffing around the Cartels for over a year now. Trying to meddle. Sneaking around and two-timing bosses, not that I give a shit about them anymore.”
That settled it.
Gregori was definitely encroaching too close to home.
Elena had provided us with this name when she went digging into the shell company trails that led to the discovery of Gregori’s network. Yusef was reputed to be his second-in-command, his lieutenant.
If Yusef was interfering with shipments near us, with shipments comingtous, that was an action and threat from my uncle himself.
“Garcia seems to think he’s found himself a new friend in him,” the man said, chuckling darkly.
“How so?” My heart beat faster with the excitement of finally having a confirmation of a connection.
