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Deo stepped back, and I breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, this meeting was over.
Delgado turned to leave, and his cronies followed, eyeing me for one last, lingering moment. Lucky me, I’d probably be making an appearance in a few fantasies tonight while they jerked off or used some poor girl like a come depository.
“I need a drink,” I told Deo as his driver for the evening (and local contact) opened the back door of our limo, and Deo, Vito, and I got into the back seat.
He chuckled. “When don’t you, Greta?”
“Hey! Have you spent the past hour with Central America’s scum ogling your tits like they want to sink their teeth into them? I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “When you have, then we’ll talk. Until then, let’s drink.”
“She has a point,” Vito said. His jaw was clenched tight, and I think I could see a vein pulsing in his bald head.
What can I say? Vito was a bit of an overprotective uncle. He didn’t like it when scumbags eyed me like I was dinner. We didn’t agree on much, but on that, we were in perfect accord.
“You do know you didn’t have to come along,si?”Deo said, though, he looked more amused than concerned.
I shrugged. “The only way men in our world are ever going to accept that people with vaginas have brains too is if they’re forced to confront it, over and over again. Bang it into their heads often enough, and eventually the message will sink in. If it means dealing with a few leers that kind of make me want to shower in disinfectant, such is the price of progress.”
Deo laughed. EvenZiettoVito cracked a grin.
“You’re a true martyr for your cause, aren’t you?” Deo joked.
I glared at him good-naturedly. “More drinking, less talking.”
In truth, I couldn’t complain about the progress I’d made thus far. Sitting in the back of a car after a business deal, joking and mouthing off to the heir to the Luciano throne? Yeah, I’d say that was progress.
“I appreciate you bringing me with you, Deo,” I said because it was true, and because it wasn’t something I said very often.
“Ugh, don’t do that.” He shook his blond head and held up his hands like he was warding me off. “I have no idea what to do with ‘nice Greta’. Just stay snarky and sarcastic, and that’ll be thanks enough.”
“Then I guess I’ll stick with ‘more drinking, less talking’.”
He nodded and told the driver to take us to the nearest watering hole.
“So, that’s the last of the cartels that did business withEl Víbora?” I asked as our driver drove away from the docks.
We’d worked together with several other families to take downEl Víbora—the epitome of South American human scum—and his cartel,Las Serpientes, not that long ago. Since then, it had been a race to move in to take over his deals before other human scum got their fingers in that pie.
“That’s it,” Deo said, nodding in satisfaction. “Between us, we’ve scooped up all his business, and Morales is going to keep an eye on the routesEl Víboraused.”
Nacio Morales, the man who everyone else knew as the kind of man who sliced up his enemies into tiny, bite-size pieces (no exaggeration here). To me, and to others who were fortunate enough to see beneath the surface, he was the man who rescued baby skunks and gave airplane rides to a kid who wasn’t even his own. Pretty damn cool, in my opinion. I had no trouble seeing past the bite-size pieces of his enemies.
I sighed and stared out the window as we passed by cobblestone walkways and pretty buildings toward—presumably—the nearest decent-size town.
It couldn’t have been more than ten or fifteen minutes before our driver pulled into the parking lot ofLa Taberna, which, when translated into English meant “the Tavern”. So… not the most inventive name for a bar.
Inside, the middle of the floor was taken up by a dozen or so tables. The quartz-topped bar stretched across the far-right side of the big room, and along the opposite side, cushioned benches lined the wall, two of them taken up at the moment by middle-aged men with pretty, young girls sitting on their laps.
No stage, no poles, but I had a feeling this was the kind of bar where it wasn’t uncommon to find women taking their clothes off. There were probably a few rooms in the back for those high-paying customers who wanted… more. Not that I was judging.
Iwasspeculating, though. Something didn’t seem quite right with the girls here.
“Isn’t this cozy?” Deo mused under his breath as he signaled to the bartender for a round of tequila.
I looked around as we made our way to a table near the bar with a good view of the door and the hallway that led to the back.
There were three other girls like the ones acting as lap-warmers, all of them scantily dressed, and two of them had fairly fresh bruises on their cheeks. The other had a fading green-and-yellow bruise on her arm that kind of looked like someone had hit her with a baseball bat.
So… not your ordinary Americano strip club.
