Page 10 of Reno

El Pollo had been trying to find me for years. I guessed that after receiving word from someone as to where I was, he caught a ride over the border with one of Angel’s drug mules who was on his way to make a delivery.

“He’s a drug dealer,” I responded. “More or less.”

“More or less?” He laughed like I’d told a joke. “There’s fifty kilos of cocaine in the bed of that truck.”

I wasn’t surprised.

It was time to tell him the rest of the story. I offered a consoling look, hoping it might lessen the aggravation. “My ex was Angel ‘El Alacrán’ Ramirez.”

“El Alacrán?” He gave me a side-eyed look. “Not the drug kingpin that’s all over the news? Not that El Alacrán?”

I nodded sheepishly.

His eyes bulged. “So those two friends of his are Tijuana Cartel?”

I gave the same nod. “Not friends. Stop calling them friends.”

He covered his face with his hands and growled.

I felt terrible for not telling him beforehand, but there was no changing it now. I waited nervously for him to calm down, sneaking looks in the parking lot every few seconds to ease my nerves.

When the growling stopped, Reno lowered his hands. “Here’s our current situation—”

“Our situation?”

“Yep. You and me.”

I peered into the parking lot. Pee Bee was making a motion with his hand like he was swinging a hammer. The truck was still nowhere in sight. I wondered where El Pollo was, and what Pee Bee was talking about.

Reno cleared his throat. “Are you paying attention?”

“Sorry. I was watching Pee Bee.”

His eyes thinned. “How the fuck you know his name?”

“Other than you and the guy with the tattoo on his hand, everyone’s got their name’s sewn on their vests. It’s kind of hard to miss.”

He crossed his arms over his chest. “How badly do you want El Pollo and that other turd out of your life?”

“More than anything.”

He drew a breath through clenched teeth and then let it out. “I hope you mean that.”

“I do,” I said. “I need them to go away forever, but the more I think about it the more I know that’ll never happen. They’ll be back. Sooner or later.”

“They won’t be back.”

No matter what he did to convince them to leave, they’d be back. In fact, it probably wasn’t safe for me to return to work. My head began to spin at the changes I was going to go through in the next few days. My mother and father were going to be extremely disappointed. I wondered what the weather was like in southern Oregon. Rainy and cold, I decided. Not ideal for me, that was for sure.

“Yes, they will,” I argued. “They’ll keep coming back, until—”

He cleared his throat. “After tonight, they won’t be back.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Because,” he said flatly. “They’re both dead.”

My heart stopped beating. My ears rang. I looked around the dining room, scanned the parking lot and then looked at him. “Really? Dead? Like dead?”