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)
Crew Finlay
Delgado stopped talking after I’d patched him up.
I’d even been nice enough to give him water and half an energy bar.
Granted, he’d been close to fainting, and everything in his body probably hurt like hell.
I did have some good news to share tomorrow, though. If what Delgado had told me was true, of course. About the whole rescue mission. Delgado seemed to believe Elliott and his “friends” were out to hunt down Vincente. I’d studied Delgado’s expression real close, and I hoped he meant what he’d said.
Lying down in my bed, tossing an empty water bottle to myself, I listened to Delgado’s soft snores and watched the faint flickers of the two candles dance across the ceiling. A couple insects flew in the light.
I was too wired to sleep.
Too tired to write a report.
Instead, I let my thoughts run wild, and I thought back on everything Delgado had told me.
“I don’t know the details of Carillo’s initial plan—or who did the work for him to find Jones. He just told me what’d happened. He heard about a reunion of some sort. A bunch of Jones’s friends were visiting, and Carillo wanted to hit them all to get their attention.”
“I knew Elliott Jones’s true identity before Carillo did, because I was debriefed after he was arrested. It’d been a joint operation between the DEA and a private contractor agency in DC.”
“I’ll admit, my first response to Carillo when he’d told me about the attack on Jones was that he would likely go after Carillo instead, not Vincente. But last I heard, the plan was working. Carillo left a message with an address for Jones, and mere hours later, there was an attack where Vincente was hiding.”
I caught the bottle again, then sat up and reached for my phone. Tired or not, I had to get my thoughts in writing. Otherwise, I’d forget.
If I just ignored Delgado’s stubborn lies about being a Fed, I’d still gotten some information tonight that I really wanted to trust.
However…if I did trust it, and if it did turn out to be true, more questions would be raised.
Because here was what I knew about the “attack on Vincente’s hideout.”
It wasn’t Elliott and Joel. They’d been there. They’d been at Vincente’s estate in Cozumel when eight men had attacked from the outside. And the boss was under the impression that it was Carillo’s men—except…
I grimaced and scrubbed a hand over my face.
Why would Carillo urge Elliott and Joel to murder Vincente in Cozumel, only to send his own guys to shoot up the place? Because that was how you made a drug lord run for the hills. Vincente had obviously escaped shortly after the attack.
Holy fuck, this was dizzying.
I started writing things down. I fucking had to.
Fact: Carillo’s men attacked Elliott—and all of us—and kidnapped Blake, Marisa, and Shay.
Fact: We started our hunt, and all of a sudden, Carillo’s men were turning up dead in San Diego. Like, low-men.
Fact: Elliott confirmed that Vincente had started “cleaning the streets” of San Diego because he wanted everyone associated with Carillo dead and gone.
Another fact: Between the attack at the boss’s house and Carillo reaching out with the message that he wanted Elliott to kill Vincente, seventy-two hours passed. And in that time, he managed to escape from prison after a hospital visit. He also made it to safety somewhere, we assumed.
I pinched my bottom lip and tapped my foot restlessly.
We were on day six now.
Or seven, technically. It was past midnight.
My biggest question was, who the fuck had attacked Vincente’s estate in Cozumel? Because Elliott had initially believed it was Carillo, and according to Delgado, Carillo believed it was Elliott…?
If we had a third player involved, I was gonna fucking lose it.
Scratch that. I had another question. Delgado wasn’t a goddamn Fed, okay? But he’d supposedly known Elliott’s true identity before Carillo did? In that case, how? How had he known?
That could be a simple lie, I guessed.
It’s very quiet.
I glanced over at Delgado. He wasn’t snoring anymore. He was slouched against the wall and staring drowsily at nothing. Some spot on the floor, maybe.
Could he be a Fed?
Those names he’d rambled, the names of children… Could a freelancing criminal have a list of names at the ready just in case he needed to look like an angel? Or maybe it was the actual list of the kids he’d bought, and they weren’t with loving families at all.
“Why would I believe you’re a Fed?” I asked.
He didn’t look away from the nothingness that held his interest. “You’re asking the wrong question,” he muttered. “Ask me how I can make you believe instead.”
I sighed, regretting my first question already. He was such a pain in my ass.
He winced. “Once upon a time, a woman named Elena Santos got so sick of her parents wondering when she was gonna settle down and get married that she left in the middle of dinner. She got in her car and just drove. She drove all the way from Syracuse to Montreal and ended up in the parking lot of a fast-food joint that’d just closed for the night. She was cursing up a storm and counting her money when the janitor of the restaurant opened the door and wondered why she was yelling.”