Total pages in book: 61
Estimated words: 59119 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 296(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 59119 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 296(@200wpm)___ 236(@250wpm)___ 197(@300wpm)
“Not really…”
“I’m willing to bet the majority of that cost was from producing fake papers to get the kids outta the country.”
I shook my head and tightened my grip on the wheel.
The second we arrived near Delgado’s address, I was changing into tactical gear. We hadn’t checked in to our “holiday home” yet, and I’d honestly like to avoid it. Squeezy had provided the code to the lockbox where we’d get the key to the house—which belonged to an old couple. They were civilians. They’d sent an automated email to Squeezy, welcoming us to their retirement dream. There’d been a picture of them and all. And a little “About us” section where they introduced themselves and said they rented the “cottage” out to bring them one step closer to retirement.
The fuck were we gonna do, bring a human trafficker there and interrogate him?
I’d rather take him straight out into the woods and slit his throat.
It was tragic that we needed him to find Carillo.
Well, he was one of the people we needed. Elliott had provided a list of names of men who were closely linked to Carillo. River and Reese were chasing two of them in California, Ryan and I were going after Delgado, and Elliott, Joel, Ramirez, and Javier were gonna split their focus between Marseille and Valencia to try to intercept Carillo’s possible arrival in Europe. We didn’t know. We had a handful of educated guesses, and that was one of them.
All signs pointed to Europe—that Carillo was not merely leaving the Blanco Family but the whole continent. And Monaco, Marseille, and Valencia were the locations that popped up most frequently in our search into Carillo’s history. The Blancos had established drug routes via Marseille and Valencia decades ago, and we were guessing that Carillo was going to ride the Blanco wave of connections for as long as he could. He’d already tried to recruit a bunch of people.
Hopefully, getting close to Delgado, actually catching him, would turn some of our guesses into facts.
He was the only one we had this much concrete intel on, and that spoke volumes too. He wasn’t afraid to get caught.
As we got closer to Delgado’s house, I started cataloguing the surroundings. The mountainside was so steep that the houses to our left were approximately fifty feet higher up than the houses to our right. The road was too narrow to park along too, so we would have to get creative with where we hid the car.
“Maybe we should continue on foot.” Ryan was looking around us too.
“If we get a shot at grabbing Delgado tonight, we don’t wanna roll down the mountain with him in tow,” I answered. “I propose we knock him out and throw his ass in the back.”
“Your suggestion wins. I’m not in the mood for cardio.”
“Go figure, Gramps.” I smiled to myself and made one last turn to climb even higher. The road was dead at this hour. Most houses were dark too.
“Remember when you called me sir? I miss that.”
I grinned and eyed one of the houses we drove past. I wondered if people lived in all of them. Or if a good portion of them were more like vacation homes. Every house wasn’t a millionaire’s paradise; many of them were smaller and older, and I could imagine as the previous generation—who’d grown up here before the country became a bastion for wealth and gambling—died out, those particular houses went on the market for way less than the grand villas.
The middle class loved to invest in smaller property.
I made a final turn, and I sank into a familiar mind-set of focusing solely on our next move and the one after that. We were two houses away from Delgado’s address, and I slowed down at the sight of another older property. It had no gate, no cars parked, no lights on, no wealth on display…so I made a snap decision and veered down their narrow driveway. The shutters were closed on the windows on both floors. No motion-sensor-driven lights, it appeared.
Mom came to mind as I looked at the greenery in the yard. I didn’t know much about flowers and plants, but I had grown up with a mother who didn’t like to plant stuff that required a lot of maintenance, partly because we were a road-trip family, and my childhood summers had been spent on the road.
Dad’s grandparents had had a house in Chesapeake Bay before they’d died, so I had a few vague memories from that too.
“What’re you thinkin’?”
I raked my teeth across my bottom lip and killed the engine. “I’m thinking there are no flowerpots anywhere. Shutters are closed, no visible surveillance or security, no cars in the driveway—” Or in the carport, for that matter. “The house looks like it was painted not too long ago, the welcome sign on the front door is in English, and I bet that water hose hugging the edge of the lawn is set on a timer somewhere.”