Cartel (3 page)

I stopped myself from reeling off a snappy comeback.

And his last comment made me wonder. How many people
had
he killed? How much blood was on his hands?

As I wiped my own bloody palms on my dress again, I decided I didn’t really want to know.

The unsealed road closer to my family’s home was corrugated and rough, hundreds of small stones flicking out and flying back at the expensive car, creating a constant metallic dinging noise. Good. I hoped it scraped the paint off the car and made it look like shit.

Ten minutes could have been ten years, the way it was dragging on. My palms were sweaty and I continued to rub them nervously on my black sundress.

‘You’re a long way from Italy,’ I said finally, my curiosity getting the better of me. ‘Colombia? Really?’

He chuckled, returning to his newspaper. ‘I like the humidity.’

‘I bet it helps the coca plants grow nice and tall,’ I replied, suddenly irritated at his casual manner.

‘Yes,’ he answered slowly, not moving his eyes from the newspaper. ‘The coca plants that paid for your private schooling,
cholita
. The coca plants your father gambled with.
My
coca plants,
cholita
.’

I opened my mouth to talk again.

‘Stop,’ he said. ‘Stop talking. I’m sick of listening to your voice.’

I closed my mouth and looked outside. We were pulling into my driveway.

Arriving at my death.

A black stretch Mercedes pulled in behind us, reminding me of a funeral heass, and I watched nervously as the three men from the shooting climbed out and made their way over to the car we were in. One of the men who had shot Esteban approached my door, and I nervously twisted the black onyx ring that wrapped around my middle finger.
This can’t end well.
I thought of fighting for a brief moment, until he jammed the muzzle of a revolver under my chin and pulled me from the car.

‘Please,’ I implored Emilio. I hated begging. I’d begged for only one thing in my life, and it hadn’t made a damn lick of difference to the way things turned out. In my eyes, begging was for the weak. But my primitive survival instincts were kicking me in the ribs like painful steel-capped boots. I didn’t want to be executed on my knees and dumped into a hole in the dirt.

I didn’t want to die, and so I begged.

Emilio just smiled. His canine teeth showed when his lips drew back, making him look like he was going to devour me.

Maybe he was.

The man who had wrenched me from the car shoved me in front of him. ‘Walk,’ he said gruffly, in Spanish.

I fought to retain my balance, skittering up the steps to my front door. I didn’t want to fall in front of these men. I was already humiliated enough, and falling would only make me an easy target for their boots.

I stared up at the house I had grown up in. Maybe I was looking at it for the last time.
Oh, Jesus. This is happening. They’re actually going to kill us.

The house was nothing special, a limestone-rendered villa that blended into the hill just like the rest of the houses that surrounded it. A sea of middle-class families, a little better off than those in the slums, but not by much. With the money my father had made over the years in trading powders and people, he could have purchased a house on millionaire’s row by now; had it not been for his crushing compulsion to gamble it all away every night.

If he had been smarter with his money — if he had done what I had told him years ago — he’d be able to pay off his stupid debt to this deplorable cartel kingpin, and my family wouldn’t have to die.

On the crumbling mosaic-tiled steps that my mother had always nagged my father to repair, I made a vow to myself. I vowed that before my father got his bullet between the eyes, I was going to make him understand just how stupid and reckless he had been with our lives.

Seconds later, I was being pushed into the house. The house was like a cool balm after the hot summer night outside. I glanced down at the orange tiles that lined the floor and remembered how, as children, we would all lay on them on the hottest days, our bare bellies sucking every iota of coolness from their porous depths.

And now our blood would flood those porous tiles, staining them forever.

‘Keep going,’ the man behind me muttered, shoving the barrel of his pistol deeper into my neck. I winced at the pain, walking a little faster lest his trigger finger get itchy.

I rounded the hallway and saw my mother sitting slumped at the dining table, sobbing as she clutched my sister to her side. Karina was only ten months younger than me, and so two months of each year we were the same age. We had always been a fiery duo, two sides of the same coin in a constant struggle to be the one in charge. We fought more than we ever got along, but I loved her deeply. And seeing the panic in her glazed eyes as she tried to comfort my mother broke my goddamn heart. A man I hadn’t seen before stood behind them, looking bored, clad in black military fatigues and aiming a Beretta sub-machine gun at my sister’s head.

‘Ana,’ my mother gasped when she glimpsed me. She pushed on her heels, obviously intending to stand and rush to me, but large hands dug into her shoulders and thrust her back down into her seat.

I choked on everything I wanted to say right then, but couldn’t.

Emilio appeared in front of me, blocking the view of my mother and sister.

‘Take her in there with the boys,’ he instructed, and terror gripped me as I wondered which boys I was being taken to. I stayed rooted to the spot despite the guy behind me pushing between my shoulder blades with the tip of his gun. I wasn’t about to make it any easier for them to take me to boys who would pin me down and hurt me.

Emilio smiled, a fake gold tooth catching the light from the old brass chandelier that hung above the dining table. ‘
Cholita
,’ he mocked, smiling at me. ‘Don’t you want to say goodbye to your father?’

Oh. Those boys. My father and brother.

I shivered despite the hot Villanueva night, refusing to acknowledge his question, but following him into the kitchen. My heart sank even lower as I saw my brother and father kneeling side by side in front of the refrigerator, a guy in front of them also holding a Beretta sub-machine gun. My brother’s face was cut up and covered in his own blood, and he had thick packing tape stuck over his mouth. I guessed by the way he swayed unsteadily that he’d put up a fight. And lost.

Another guy stood in the corner, slightly removed, wearing a pressed grey suit and studying his fingernails. My skin prickled as I turned my attention back to the thug who had his gun casually pointed at the male half of my family, as if it were just another day at the office. I was used to seeing AKs slung over the shoulders of mercenaries and guards, not these sub-machine guns.

Still, it made sense. Emilio was Italian, mafioso, and obviously proud of it.

I tore my attention away from the gun and back to my father and brother. Pablo was a year older than me, and we’d always been close. He had always been less fiery than my sister and me, much more mellow, and his laidback temperament meant that we got along most of the time.

‘Papa?’ I choked. Revulsion and despair engulfed me as I looked upon the man who had raised me. Physically, he was everything Emilio Ross was not — balding, overweight, a sheen of sweat coating his brow as he knelt in one of the cheap suits he wore like a uniform. He’d been on his way out, judging by his slicked-back hair and the fact he was still wearing a suit this late at night.

Emilio’s men had probably arrived just as he was getting antsy and about to go out and spend whatever cash he had on a losing bet. His biggest weakness was cards, poker, more specifically, but he’d been known to bet on anything and everything. He almost never won any money, and if he did, he just lost it all again. The house always won.
Our
house always lost.

Emilio nodded at the guard in front of my father and brother and the guy responded without missing a beat, aiming his Beretta expertly between my father’s eyes.

‘Wait!’ I cried, and the thug flicked me a look of derision before returning his attention to my father. I watched in horror as he applied a few pounds of pressure to the trigger, millimetres away from letting the clip loose into my papa’s head.

‘Emilio,’ my father said nervously, pressing his meaty palms together in a desperate prayer, ‘please believe me when I tell you I was ambushed by those motherfuckers. They were tipped off!’

I sucked in a breath, watching Emilio as he stared my father down. ‘You lost us a lot of money, Marco. A
lot
of money. And you were
drunk
. You understand?’

‘I know,’ my father blubbered, still holding his hands together in prayer. I doubted that Emilio Ross was going to take pity on him because he was begging. ‘I swear, Emilio, I swear I will repay you. Everything of mine is yours. Take my house, take it all.’

Emilio’s mouth turned down at the edges as if he’d just sipped sour milk. He glanced around at the peeling wallpaper, the dented fridge, and then, he looked at me
.

‘I’ll take her,’ he said, his eyes lighting up as he pointed at me.

My stomach dropped.
He’ll do what?

My father’s eyes grew wide. ‘No, please. Anything, Emilio, but not my family. Please, sir, not my family.’

Sadness washed over me as I listened to my father beg for my life. I might have been mad at him, and he might have been a shitty father, but he didn’t deserve to die on his knees, execution style. It would be like ripping the last piece of his dignity away and grinding it into the dirt he’d be buried in. But it seemed those were his only two options — die in the dirt, or let Emilio take me away and do God only knew what with me.

‘Then I kill you all now,’ Emilio said, nodding at the guy with his gun to my father’s head.

‘Wait!’ I demanded shrilly, reaching out and closing my bound hands around Emilio’s arm. ‘Take me. I’ll do whatever you want. Just please don’t kill them.’ The words tasted like ash in my mouth as I observed the look in this man’s eyes. Soulless.
He was enjoying this.

‘Your father has disrespected me greatly,’ Emilio said, shaking my hand off like it was a dead cockroach. ‘Whether I take you or not,
cholita
, he must pay the price for his mistakes.’

‘Please,’ I begged. ‘Please just take me and let them go.’ My heart leapt as a spark of
something
appeared in Emilio’s eyes and he raised his hand to the guard, who lowered his gun slightly and took his finger from the trigger.

‘You could kill him,’ I pressed on. ‘He probably deserves it, for what he’s done. But wouldn’t it be so much better to let him live? For him to know, every day for the rest of his life, that his transgressions were paid for with the life of his daughter? For him to suffer, knowing it was all his fault?’

I was angry, but I could not watch my father — my whole family — be executed in front of me.

A small glimmer of hope wrapped itself around my chest and contracted painfully; Emilio was listening
.

‘Wouldn’t it be more satisfying,’ I continued, ‘to destroy him completely, instead of just putting a bullet in his head? Isn’t that too kind a retaliation? Your cartel is named Il Sangue. What is more important to any man than blood, the blood of his family?’

Emilio’s lip curled.

‘If it doesn’t work out, you can still kill us all,’ I pleaded. ‘
Please
. My mother and my brother and sister don’t deserve to die because of my father’s mistakes.’

‘No, baby,’ my father said urgently. ‘Better for them to kill me than put their hands on you. You don’t deserve that.’

I narrowed my eyes as I took in his stricken expression, softened by booze. I could tell he was struggling to keep up with things since he was half drunk, and that realisation lit my veins on fire as anger burst inside my chest. ‘That’s not an option,’ I snapped. ‘They either kill us all,’ I flicked my gaze to Emilio, ‘or this man is smart enough to realise how much more money he could make from me.’ I swallowed the last of my lingering fear and stood straighter.

‘I’ll clean your house, I’ll smuggle your drugs, I’ll suck your dick, I’ll do your books. I’ll fuck your sons and I’ll lick your boots if that’s what it takes. Just
please
,’ there was that horrible word again, ‘please don’t kill them.’

‘Mariana!’ my father yelled. ‘Stop this talk!’

Emilio frowned, completely ignoring my father. ‘I prefer blondes.’

I fought the urge to roll my eyes as I tried not to imagine just
what
this dirty old man preferred doing with blondes.

‘For you,’ I said sweetly, ‘I’d wear a wig.’

That made him chuckle. ‘I like this one,’ he said to my father, jerking his thumb towards me.

‘Your girl is a real
cholita
. Wonder how tough she’ll be when my boys take turns fucking her in her fleshy Colombian ass.’

My father lunged at him, but didn’t get very far, the guard smacking the bridge of his nose with the barrel of the gun.

‘Well, this has certainly been an interesting turn of events.
Cholita
, I admire your loyalty to your family. It is something your father clearly lacks.’ He glared at my father. ‘So, although your life will never recompense me for the street value of my cocaine, it will more than cover the production cost. I can recoup my initial loss and make an example of you at the same time, Marco.’

The wolf looked positively excited.

‘I told you!’ my father yelled. ‘I have thirty thousand American dollars for you! I’ll wipe my debt clean and kill those DEA fuckers who interrupted the transfer!’

My heart sank. Thirty thousand dollars. A little under four hundred thousand pesos. It was nothing. It was
everything
. It was what I was worth in this cruel world.

Emilio tutted, waving his long, bony finger in the air in front of my father’s face. ‘Thirty thousand was the production cost. Do you know how much money you’ve lost me? That was half a million big ones on the streets,
bandito
. Half. A. Million.
Dollars
.’

He raised his hand in a fist, smashing it down into my father’s nose. Another girl might cry out, struggle to get to her father, maybe mop the blood from his face and kiss his temple.

But I was not that girl. I was a girl with a rage inside me. Este.
Oh, God
. I clutched at the small crucifix that hung around my neck and said a silent prayer for Esteban’s soul.

I pushed down the urge to cry. My mother’s muffled sobs reached me from the next room as I drew a solemn, burning breath into my lungs and tried to stop the room from spinning.

‘You are giving yourself to me, yes?’ Emilio asked, clenching and unclenching the fist he’d just hurtled into my father’s face.

I nodded.
Oh, fuck. What am I doing?

‘Words,
cholita
. A nod means nothing in my world.’

‘Yes,’ I said defiantly, head high, chin stuck out stubbornly.

‘For how long?’ He was testing me.

The breath hitched in my throat. ‘For as long as you spare my family.’

He nodded, and began to pace in the several feet of bare floor that separated my father and me.

‘And you submit to do anything I tell you?’

This time it was harder. ‘Yes … Wait,’ I added falteringly.
Oh, God
. ‘Do you promise not to kill me?’