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FUCK.
Silently I cursed the whole messed-up situation. Our entire plan hinged upon meeting the Ancella cartel before the Lozanos even knew they were in town. Instead, they’d gotten here first.
“To be honest I can’t wait to see what it is,” Aimon Lozano snarled, as he took another step forward. “I mean it must be something big, right? Something pretty spectacular, if it’s worth dragging the Ancellas all this way?”
Another man stepped forth, then a half-dozen more. They came from every direction.
Shit…
Javi Lozano joined his brother, distinguishable only by the purple-yellow bruising around his neck. He’d tried hiding it with a tall collar and a dark tie, but there was too much of it not to be noticeable.
“You should tell us all,” teased Javi. He made a whirling motion with one finger. “Everyone at the same time.”
His brother nodded toward the man in the hat. “Our family as well as theirs.”
If the boys looked surprised they certainly weren’t showing it. Cody had moved toward me previously, the moment I ran to Evan. Now he took another few protective steps in my direction, as Santiago and Silas held their ground.
None of them said anything, though. They were too busy staring, quietly strategizing. Counting their potential enemies. Calculating the odds.
Or at least I sure hoped that’s what they were doing.
“Well, let’s hear it then,” the man in the hat finally said. His voice dropped a couple octaves, to a more menacing level. “And it had better be good.”
“The Lozanos have been skimming off you,” Santiago spoke loudly. “They’ve been doing it for years, but only recently they’ve ramped it up.”
The man in the hat let out a sigh. He actually looked bored.
“That’s it?” he huffed. “Skimming?”
“Why? You’re okay with skimming?” Cody challenged, adding a laugh.
The man in the hat definitely didnotlike the laugh.
“If there were a problem with my books people would already be disappearing,” the man barked venomously. “And they are not. So…”
“It started with Frederick Barone and Marco Tallman, who you know as Crisco,” explained Santiago. “They started getting cute with the product more than a year ago. Another three accomplices were looped in after that. Two because they were sloppy and needed help covering their tracks, and one because he accidentally stumbled upon what these morons were doing.”
If there was a confidence to the man’s posture, these words seemed to shatter it. For a split-second his smug mask of indifference slipped, revealing a whole host of new emotions just beneath.
Anger. Rage. Uncertainty.
All these and more flashed across the man’s face in the span of a single heartbeat.
Doubt…
Even the Lozanos couldn’t help but show their own weakness. Aimon tilted his gaze downward, as if worried he might give something away. His brother Javi’s eyes glowed with some internal fury.
“Your books will say everything’s fine,” Silas spoke up, taking over where Santiago left off. “And that’s because your bookkeeper’s been on the Lozano payroll for months. You know who I’m talking about, because you already looked and couldn’t find him. And we couldn’t find him either.”
All this was new to me; information the guys no doubt received from their contacts and kept to themselves. In this case I didn’t begrudge them for it. Any info I’d be given would be information that could potentially be extracted from me later on, in the horrific event things went very, very badly.
“Then there’s someone who actually works foryou,” Santiago explained. “A man by the name of Lucas Almon.”
The man in the hat’s eyes shifted from left to right. He made another motion, and a tall blond man materialized out of the darkness… with two large men accompanying him on either side
Oh shit!
Lucas Almon looked a little more than worried. His upper lip quivered, right beneath that unfortunate hook nose. He was doing his best to hold it together, though. For better or worse.
