Brodie stood on the farmhouse porch, looking at the bunkhouses. The blenders in Bunkhouse A had been grinding all day, crushing cold medications into the powder that was the raw material for cooking meth.

They didn’t have enough time. This fucking thing was blown, and there wasn’t enough time, and Brodie knew it.

The cook cycle still needed a good thirty-six hours; Brodie didn’t think they had it anymore, but he’d received his orders and he had no choice. The pseudoephedrine had been processed, and the cooks were in the kitchen. If it worked out, by tomorrow night they’d have another forty pounds of pure meth, with a street value—once the middlemen had cut down the purity—of well over a million; that wasn’t chicken feed.

How much time before the bust? It had to come, and soon. He’d learned in California that it doesn’t matter how many cops you have on your team: if one dies, they all come after you. Craine was connected, sure, but not connected enough to stop that wave when it came. Their best hope was that the locals wouldn’t get their act together—it would take the feds at least a couple of days to pull their thumbs out of their asses and green-light a strike team on some rich guy’s property.

Of course, it was cake for some guy sitting at a desk in a shabby office in Tepalcatepec to tell them to risk everything to finish that last batch—he, after all, risked nothing. But that was the nature of the business.

That morning, when word had come to close up shop after this cycle, Brodie had taken it as a sign. This was a good time to retire. He’d fly down to Costa Rica, take a cab to his beautiful mountainside villa in Playa Hermosa, and unpack for the last time. He’d shower off the filth of the last three years, scrub himself until his skin was pink and stinging, then walk naked through his palatial home and climb into his beautiful pool, cantilevered out over the mountainside, the pool’s invisible edge fusing with the horizon so it looked like he could swim forever. He’d float in the warm water and look at the stars and think about the millions in cash buried in the grounds and buildings in insulated steel cases, and it would be the last time he’d ever think about the things he’d done to get that pool.

The western sky had grown dark and heavy, the clouds sinking onto the horizon; it’d rain soon. Down the slope, a farmhand chased a loose piglet across the field, laughing, driving it back toward the feeding pen.

The pathologist was pretty much buttoned up now, Brodie figured—too compromised to be a threat. It had cost Craine a little cash, but nothing compared to what that rich fucker had raked in over the last couple of years.

Brodie hated the way the cartel handled Craine, all white gloves and finger sandwiches. One time in Sinaloa, he’d watched them cut the ears off every member of some poor bastard’s family when they thought he’d shorted them—sliced the ears right off the grandmother, the father, the wife, the daughter, the baby. It made him sick they pulled shit like that while they massaged Craine like a prize cow—filled his offshore accounts to overflowing, gave him cash by the bucket-load, fed his hunger for skinny little girls.

Brodie spat. The fucker made him puke. Craine was visiting the farm that night, and Brodie would have to listen to him prance around like some kind of criminal mastermind. The man was totally in awe of his ability to straddle two worlds, one foot on the top rung of Port Fontaine society, the other in narcotrafficking. And that was the word Craine used—narcotrafficking.

Fucker.

In front of Bunkhouse A, Tarver and Bentas were bickering like an old couple; Tony sat on a chair, watching in mute disgust.

Brodie’s lip curled. God, Tarver was a loathsome fuck. When everything wound down, they’d do a cleanup operation and then they’d clear out. Brodie had decided that, son-in-law or not, Tarver was one of the things that needed cleaning up.

The thought cheered him, and as he felt the first drops of rain strike his face, he looked up and grinned. His daughter would never know exactly what happened—in this business, bad things happened all the time. When she got out, her life would be all the better for being rid of that psycho.

Besides, it would leave the world a better place.