He sighed. “You said you smoked it in the truck. If I go in there and search it, am I gonna find any drugs?”
Six months ago, I hadn’t been able to lie at all. Even now, it took every last shred of ability I possessed...but I kept my voice level. “No sir. We left all that stuff in LA. This is a fresh start for us.” I stared into his eyes,begging,and that part I didn’t have to fake.
“Fresh start, huh?”
I nodded. “We’re going to sell ice cream at fairs and...and rodeos and things. That’s what the truck’s for. We’re going to do it up, paint it and everything. Vintage. Traditional.”
The cop stepped closer. “You seem like a sweet girl,” he said. “So this one time, I’m going to let this go. But you promise me you’llbehave.” He nodded to the truck and lowered his voice. “I’ve seen your boyfriend, all muscles and attitude. He probably persuaded you to smoke that joint, didn’t he? Guys like that ain’t nothin’ but trouble.”
I nodded solemnly. “I’ll be careful.”
“And stay away from the drugs!”
“That’s absolutely my intention, sir.”
He gave one last long-suffering sigh. “You drive careful.” And then he was ambling back to his car.
I went around to the passenger side and climbed in, motioning Sean to move over. “You drive,” I said weakly. “I can’t—I can’t even….”
I collapsed into the passenger seat as the cop pulled away and drove off into the distance. I let my head tip back against the headrest and just melted into the seat, nothing but a floppy bag of twitching nerves.
“What the fuck happened?” asked Sean as started the truck.
“Karma,” I whispered, closing my eyes. “That was every speed limit I’ve ever stuck to, every empty intersection I’ve ever waited at. It finally paid off.”
66
LOUISE
The meet was at an old,abandoned airfield way out in the boonies. We got there with only twenty minutes to spare and pulled up alongside the runway, the ice cream truck sitting incongruously next to a couple of rusted aircraft carcasses. Even in September at nearly eight in the evening, the Texas sun was hot, bleaching the tufts of grass that had grown up through the cracks in the concrete and gleaming off the broken panes of glass in what had once been the tiny passenger terminal.
The door to the control tower had long since been broken open, so we climbed up to the top and stood looking out over the airfield. Some local teens must have discovered the place, because there were empty beer cans and graffiti all over the inside. “You think we can pull this off?” I asked, nudging a can with my foot.
Sean wrapped his arms around me from behind. “Just remember,” he said. “It’s all about attitude.”
The sun glinted off a speck in the distance, a speck that slowly grew bigger and bigger in the clear blue sky. Then, with a roar of engines that shook the tower, the private jet was throttling back and sweeping in to land right in front of us. Sean led the way down the stairs.
The first three people out of the plane were men in suits, all carrying machine guns. The fourth was an older guy in slacks and a shirt. He removed his big, gold-rimmed sunglasses as he approached us. “Sean? And Louise?”
They’d demanded our full names on the phone. With the cartel, you didn’t fuck around with false ones. We nodded.
“I am Francisco.” He sounded cautious, but not unkind. “These men will search you.” It wasn’t a request.
Two of the men stepped up to us while the third kept his gun pointed right at us. Hands swept up my legs and over my ass, up my sides and across my back. Having a man do it should have felt uncomfortable—awkward, at least. But the men were as clinically professional as doctors, far from Malone’s heavies or Murray’s leering thugs. It made it even scarier: I suspected they’d be just as clinical if they were ordered to drag our bodies into shallow graves.
The men stepped back and nodded that we were clean. “The weed is in the truck?” asked Francisco. Sean nodded. Francisco spoke in rapid-fire Spanish to two of the men, and they hurried off to the ice cream truck. “We’ll try some samples,” he told us as an afterthought. Again, not a request.
We spent an agonizing ten minutes standing there while the packets of weed were unloaded, counted and stacked up on the runway. Packets were selected at random to be sliced open and tested. Francisco sniffed the weed, rubbed it between his fingers and finally smoked joints of it, just one slow inhalation of each sample before he crushed the joint underfoot. It was impossible to read his expression. At last, he pulled out his cell phone and made a call. Just one word:Sí.Then he crossed his arms and just stared at us as if waiting for something.
“So?” Sean asked at last. “Are we making a deal?”
“Not with me,” said Francisco. “With her.”
Behind him, a woman emerged from the plane. Her long, coal-black hair blew in the wind, as did the long, gauzy layers of her exquisite white dress. Everything about her was coolly elegant andoff-the-scaleconfident. One of those people who’ve held so muchpower for so long that they’ve become accustomed to it, like a president. The men with guns stepped back respectfully as she approached.
I’d seen her in photos, but only grainy black and white ones shot with a long lens. This was Isabella Gallego. The head of the entire Gallego cartel.
It was very difficult to gauge her age. She could have been anywhere between mid-thirties and mid-fifties. Her skin was soft and barely lined, her hair still completely black—natural or dyed, I wasn’t sure. She wasincrediblybeautiful.
