Alvaro Guzman Jr. sits behind his handsome mahogany desk with his hands braided and his hard gaze burning holes into everyone in the room. The Colombian drug lord is infamous for his explosive temper. Undoubtedly, someone in the room is just seconds from getting maimed, shot, or stabbed for this latest fuckup. Alvaro means for his erratic temper to instill fear in his men, but the truth is, the new Colombian king is nothing more than a spoiled child. His father, God rest his soul, is the one who built the Guzmans’ vast drug trade to what it is today. Some speculated that Junior would run the organization into the ground within two years. So far it’s been sixteen months.
“What happened?” Alvaro asks in a menacingly calm voice. “How is it that the government seized a half billion dollars of MY MONEY?!” He slams his hand down onto the desk, causing everything and everyone to jump.
Visibly trembling in his white linen suit, Alvaro’s right-hand man and childhood friend Delmar steps forward with his forehead slick with sweat. “At the moment we’re not sure, but I got our best people on it.” He runs a hand through his greasy hair.
Alvaro’s brows stretch up. “Our best people?” He laughs. “These wouldn’t happen to be the same best people who lost my shit in the first place, would it?”
Delmar swallows and shifts his gaze back around the room.
“Half a billion dollars,” Alvaro barks. “Half a fucking billion dollars!” His fist hits the desk again. The desk jumps and everyone else jumps as well. “I want to know how this happened. Now.” He opens the top drawer of his desk and pulls out a chromed 9 mm, a favorite of his that Father bought for Alvaro’s eighteenth birthday. “You, Delmar.” He points the gun. “You tell me what you think happened. We’re boys, right? I can trust you to be honest with me.”
Delmar’s large Adam’s apple bobs up and down in his throat.
Seeing the fear in his best friend’s eyes, Alvaro strolls casually from behind his desk and then up to his friend. He wraps his free arm around his neck. “See, I know that you would never lie to me, my friend. So tell me.” He presses the gun against the center of Delmar’s chest. “How could such a monumental fuckup happen under your watch?”
Sweat rolls from Delmar’s greasy hairline and then nests in his guff-looking day-old beard. “I … I suspect that we had a breach … somewhere. A mole, I believe.”
“Ah. A mole,” Alvaro repeats with his eyes growing blacker. “But, my friend, what does this matter? Do I not pay law enforcement handsomely enough to look the other way? I mean, tell me. Am I a cheap bastard or something?”
“Of course not. You’re most generous—more than generous.”
“Then why are they fucking with my shit?” Alvaro’s arm tightens around Delmar’s neck while the barrel of his gun damn near cracks his breastplate.
“It’s not the local police. It’s the goddamn DEA. Somehow they got a man on the inside and hit those three states.”
Silence.
Delmar is trembling so bad that he looks like a human earthquake. If he survives this bullshit, his men aren’t ever going to let him forget this humiliation.
Finally, Alvaro sucks in a deep breath. “You mean to tell me, amigo, that I don’t have eyes and ears in the DEA? Is that what you’re telling me?”
“I … well, yes, you do. But I don’t know if they knew about this bust.” Delmar senses that he’d said the wrong thing when the other men turn their faces away. Some even shake their heads. “But I will find out, Alvaro. I promise. There has to be some reasonable explanation.”
During the next long silence, Delmar just goes ahead and closes his eyes. In his mind, he pictures his six-month-old son, sucking on his wife’s tit this morning. They’d looked so beautiful and peaceful when he’d left them. Had he known that it was possibly the last time he’d see them, he would’ve taken the time to kiss them good-bye.
“I’ll tell you what else you’ll do,” Alvaro whispers. “You’ll get me my shipments back.”
Delmar finally reopens his eyes. “Excuse me?”
Alvaro laughs. “C’mon, amigo. You’ve known me for a long time. When have you ever known me to stutter?” He removes his arm from around Delmar’s neck, but the gun stays put. “I want it back—all of it.”
Delmar’s mind races to how such a request can even be possible.
Alvaro winks. “You’re my right hand. You’ll make it so, sí?”
“Sí.” Hell, there isn’t any other answer. To deny Alvaro is to deny life, and knowing how fucked up Alvaro can be sniffing his own shit, chances are that his amigo wouldn’t stop at just putting a bullet in his head. His son and his wife would undoubtedly receive courtesy bullets as well.
“Good. Good.” Alvaro finally removes the gun from Delmar’s chest only to swing it left toward Felipe and pull the trigger. Everyone in the room jumps while their colleague’s lifeless body propels backward and crashes into a glass table. “That’ll be all.”
Delmar is sure that he pissed a little bit in his pants, but he bows to Alvaro and quickly rushes out of there, wondering how he’s going to steal a half billion dollars’ worth of drugs back from the DEA. “Dios me ayuda.”