Page 38 of Our Tricks

“If I didn’t know any better, I’d think it was just a normal shipping invoice. There was nothing else about it that would have given me pause until we found this here.” I gestured to the computer. “The supplies were garden shit, so why would I question if it was going to a garden?”

The screen was suddenly covered in a map of the office cubical area, and there were names typed near each desk.

“Lucky for us, one of the new managers made it so he could keep track of who was who and where they were,” Wes shared. “Now which was the desk you found the papers in?”

Getting my bearings for what angle this was being made from, I pointed to the back corner, only this desk didn’t have a name. Instead, it just said keep open for interns.

“What the fuck does that mean?” I demanded like the computer was going to tell me.

“Wait, there was a list in here somewhere, one of the managers was super big into the whole make your people feel known. He kept notes on all his employees to remember things like kids’ and wives’ names. This guy even made sure to have birthdays written in his calendar so he could buy them lunch,” Wes explained. “Right now, I could kiss the man because it makes everything so much easier.”

When he pulled up a list of interns, there were tons of information down to days they worked, where they went to school, and if they were getting credit or not for it. The list was thankfully a short one, about fifteen of them, and they all used the same desk. Reading over the names, I didn’t see any that caught my attention until the last one—Alvaro De León—Diego’s second youngest son with Mariana, if I remembered correctly.

“Didn’t he already graduate college?” I asked. “Why would he be an intern for his own father’s company if he could just be hired to work?”

“Seems tomorrow we’re gonna need to talk to Mariana. Cam said they needed a day or two for the meds to really start helping, but we don’t have that kind of time,” Wes reasoned. “She’s the best link we have to put all the various pieces we have together.”

Running a hand through my hair, I glanced at the time. Two in the morning was becoming all too familiar. Before Dax, we’d had a far more routine schedule, but now it seemed we slept when we could and drank enough coffee to keep us going.

“Think we can manage to make it through a day without someone trying to kill us?” I wondered aloud.

Wes snorted. “Wouldn’t count on it.” Closing the laptop, he got to his feet then looked at the bed. “I’m gonna crash in the other room. It’s gonna be hard enough to sleep without someone kicking me.”

“Smart idea, but I’m gonna chill here for a bit. My mind’s just too fucking wound up for me to even think about sleeping,” I said, letting my head fall back to rest on the couch.

“God, do I feel that, but my body is fucking screaming at me to get some sleep. The laptop is unlocked if you need to use it,” Wes offered, and I gave him a thumbs up.

As a kid, I loved fucking puzzles. It’s one of the reasons I became such a good mechanic. Being able to figure out how all the parts fit together just did something that made me feel like I had a purpose. Now here I was with all kinds of fucking mismatched pieces of a puzzle scattered on the floor. Each time I tried to pick one up and figure out what it could possibly fit into, nothing seemed to work. It was almost as if there were two different things we were trying to tackle instead of one.

Could it be that simple? Were there two different mysteries we were trying to solve at the same time? It would make sense. Diego was running things for Marco, but I got the feeling he was trying to branch out into his own venture as well. So how did we determine what was tied to Marco and what was tied to Diego?

Once that was separated, we could clearly see what leads we needed to hunt down. Wes was right, talking to Mariana would be a major help and give us some direction to start bringing Marco down. At this moment, whatever Diego had been up to wasn’t our problem that needed to be handed off to Tommaso. Our only focus should be on Marco, but I don’t think we’d expected how Diego was trying to free himself from his master.

That thought had me questioning if these recent attacks and the bomb had anything to do with Marco at all? Could they be from the second party that Diego was working with? Eagle had filled us in on the FBI agent and the fact that Cam was moving to the CIA. That would also give us some extra insight if they gave him access to the files and such about the Tesoro Cartel. Marco is the king now, but he hadn’t been long, and I had a hunch Dax was right about him being in the US before taking up his mantle as the new boss.

Rubbing my head, I felt like everywhere I turned, we were running into dead ends. Marco was fucking worthy of being our arch-nemesis, that’s for damn sure. Yet as Dax had repeatedly told us, he’s going to fuck up now that we’ve taken his biggest supporters.

If I were him, left with no army in the Mad Dogs and no general to lead things now that Diego was removed, what would I do?

“Hey,” Dax’s sleepy rasp pulled me out of my thoughts.

Cracking open an eye, I found her standing there in one of Wes’s T-shirts, hair all mussed, looking far sexier than she should. “Hey.”

“Why are you awake?” she asked, coming over to straddle my legs and sit.

Instantly, my hands were on her hips, needing to hold her as much as keep her safe. “I should be asking you that question. When I left, you were passed the fuck out.”

“Yeah,” she murmured, her eyes drifting down to her hands not wanting to meet my gaze.

Lifting a hand, I caught her chin and forced her to meet my eyes as I searched her face. There was a glimmer of fear and what I might have guessed to be dried tears on her cheek. She’d had a nightmare.

“You want to talk about it?” I asked as I cupped her cheek.

She shook her head and instead wrapped her arms around my neck, and I pulled her tight to my chest. After Dax had been shot, she suffered from lots of nightmares. Dani thought it was a side effect of the medication since she seemed to get better once she was off of it. We never told her, but every so often she’d still have them. Normally, we could soothe her before she woke herself up, but it seems we failed tonight.

I let my hand stroke gently up and down her back, just offering her the comfort she clearly needed. To be this vulnerable was a lot for her, and I was going to do everything in my power to show it was safe to do that with us.

“I didn’t shoot him in time,” she rasped. “I failed and got you all killed.”