“Tell your men to drop their guns and phones as well as any devices they can use to contact someone.”
Raul is quiet while the four men still standing watch us closely, guns held tight.
“You really think I would have put myself in a position where I would have lost?” I ask.
“Even the Sandman can die,” he says.
“Yet I still stand. I want to talk, Raul.”
“Ah… joy, do I get to hear who hired you to kill my son and then me?”
“No one hired me, and I didn’t kill your son. Teo threatened someone close to me and when he failed, he drew me in anotherway, all so he could try to convince me to kill you so he could take over the family business.”
Raul snorts. “Funny.”
“Believe me or not, I don’t give a shit. But I did not kill your son. There was someone else there who killed everyone, and I watched him put a bullet in Teo’s head.”
“So you came here to tell me that?”
“I came here to tell you to remove the bounty on my head. Leave me out of your life and I’ll walk away,” I say, really hoping that Cassel is getting what he needs to destroy Raul so the words I’m telling him can turn out to be lies.
We’ll wait until we can destroy him to either send the information to the police or kill him. And next time, I wouldn’t have to crawl over a fence; I’d shoot him in the head when he least expected it.
“You think I’ll trust you?”
“You don’t think I could have shot you? Come on, Raul. If you’re so afraid of me that you put such a bounty on my head, you must know who I am. You must know that I could have shot you again and again. But I chose not to because I thought we could talk this out.”
He grits his teeth, irritation rushing through him as his fists ball up. “Why the fuck do you think I would trust you?”
“I’m not asking you to trust me. I’m asking you to stay the fuck out of my life while you continue to destroy your own.”
Raul grins at me, and the look is quite malicious. “Are you afraid?”
“Of you? No.”
“I think you’re afraid. You’re begging for your life.”
The earpiece suddenly jumps to life.
“Leland, you have two minutes. I have the information I need. Get out of there whether or not you’ve located him,” Cassel says.
I look over at Henry as I question what to do. I could kill Raul. I would feel absolutely no remorse over doing so. This man is a monster who raises monsters and destroys lives. He’s like Lucas, but instead of fixating on one child at a time, he raises an army of them, tricking them into a life of hell filled with drugs and sex and violence, and then swoops in to “save” them. There isn’t a single person he has saved.
But if he dies, his son takes over and the cycle continues. I need to break him. I need to tear this organization apart, and shooting him in the head right here, right now will not accomplish this. Either we start killing and we don’t stop until we’ve taken down every single person, or we retreat and get the information we need for the police to finish him for good.
“How about you think on it. You think about how your own son decided that your death was really the only way forward. You have raised an army, but where has that gotten you? Pull the target off my head or you’re going to find the target is never going to leave yours until you breathe your last.”
“I’m not afraid of you,” he says with a smirk. “Like you said, if you were going to shoot me, you’d have already done it. Go fuck yourself.”
My finger itches for my gun, but it’s an old desire to just end the lives of people who would dare fuck me over. Who could come back and cause me issues.
But if I shoot him now and we reveal what information we have to the police or decide to take matters into our own hands, all eyes would turn to who killed him. They would dedicate time into investigating it. It could give Raul’s son the time he needs to dispose of or hide Raul’s victims.
So I withdraw. It’s all I can do.
“Let’s move,” Henry says.
Raul laughs, like he thinks he can keep control over any part of this. “You’re not fucking going anywhere. You’re sure as hell not leaving this place alive.”
