night, asked me to check on his…” one hand flopped around.
“Medicinal crop?” I supplied.
Another jerky nod. “Yeah, that shit. Haven’t heard from him since.”
I shared a look with Kayden. That sounded like Tito had rabbited. I turned back to Carlos, “Anyone else been looking for him?”
A crafty shadow flitted across his face.
Kayden increased his menace factor as he towered over the twitchy man.
“Don’t fucking think about lying.”
Watching Carlos pale was a lesson in how white olive skin could get, and it
was close to snow level. “Some scary mother fucker and a young guy.”
I dug my cell out of my front pocket one-handed, and pulled up Reeve
Ellery’s image that I downloaded the night before. I tapped Kayden’s shoulder and handed him the phone.
He shoved it under Carlos’s bloodless face. “One of them look like this?”
A jerky nod of confirmation. “The scary mofo.”
Great, we had a definitive link between Tito and Ellery. Although I wasn’t sure what good it would do now. If that wasn’t enough, we had additional, unknown players poking around in this mess.
Without taking his attention from Carlos, Kayden handed back my phone.
“When did the scary one stop by?”
“A couple of days after he split.”
Something heavy hit the front door behind me, rattling it in its frame. “Yo, Carlos, que pasa?”
I stepped to the side and adjusted my stance. “Tell him you’re fine,” I hissed.
Explaining a gunfight in downtown Phoenix with some lowlife drug dealer
would not go over well with Delacourt.
“Nada mucho, así estoy bien.” Carlos’s voice emerged somewhat steady with
a hint of impatience.
We all stared at the closed door. On the other side, a muted conversation in
Spanish ensued, before heavy footsteps moved away. I shared a look with
Kayden. We needed to get the hell out of here before our luck ran out.
“What did the scary mother fucker want?” Kayden’s low question snapped
Carlos’s attention back around.
“Same as you, where Tito was.”
“What did you tell him?” he pressed.
“Same thing I told the other dude and now you, nothing, man, swear. He
didn’t leave a forwarding, didn’t say shit to me about nothin’.” Carlos’ hands
curled into white-knuckle fists in his lap, and a little bit of spine emerged. “What the hell is going on, man? Why’s everyone after him?”
I ignored his question in favor of one of my own. “Where would he go if he
had to hide?”
He started to shake his head, but Kayden cut him off. “Think! If things were
going to go south, where would he go? Family? Friends? Someone he’d run to
for help, maybe?”
Carlos’s narrow face scrunched up as he tried to get his remaining brain cells
to function. “There was this dude he served with, he mentioned him a couple of
