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I roll my eyes. “Just let him continue.”
“Well, at the time I thought it was a good deal,” Eddy says, smirking a bit. “Way better than what I was making as a mechanic, and I figured I didn’t have to do it forever. Just a few years, and I’d be rich enough to retire. But that’s when they took me to Mexico and showed me the real stuff, the Protodafinil, and then things started getting weird. Would you mind giving me a little puff of that?” He points to my cigar.
“Have the rest of it, please,” I say, handing it to him. “I really shouldn’t be smoking, anyway.”
Dream scoffs. “Eddy shouldn’t be smoking either.”
“Relax,” he says, taking a few puffs and savoring the taste for a moment. That’s got to feel good after being locked up so long.
Dream narrows her eyes and studies Eddy closely. She probably thinks he’s going to drop dead from a little cigar smoke, but he’s been through hell and lived. I think he’ll be alright.
“Okay, that’s good. Dream is probably going to scold the shit out of me after this,” Eddy says, handing the cigar back to me. “I just wanted a little bit to take the edge off, you know?”
“We’re all in trouble already, it seems,” I say, teasing Dream to see if she’ll crack. She’s been moody all morning, so I’m not sure what’s up. Maybe just her period, but I wouldn’t know. I’ve never dealt with a woman this long before in such close proximity.
Dream looks at me, smiling a little, but I can tell she isn’t terribly amused. She’s used to getting her way, and the fact that Eddy isn’t taking her side with everything is probably bothering her.
But we’re about to find out what his reason is.
Eddy adjusts his posture in the velvet chair, his skinny fingers gripping the sides as he continues his story. “They wanted me to kill someone to prove I was hard enough to push their most valuable drugs. Gang type shit, but I wasn’t into it. I just wanted to make money. It was a hard no from me, but they kept pushing, talking about how many Americans they had picked off close to the border. Naming names and showing me pictures of their victims like the only reason I wouldn’t agree to it was because I was afraid of getting caught. They couldn’t fathom that I had morals. It was beyond their comprehension.”
He runs his fingers through his blonde hair, shaking his head.
His eyes are unfocused. Distant.
“I saw things that didn’t want to see… But that wasn’t what set me off. There was one couple, two people they had killed about a decade ago while they were driving down the interstate late one night.” He looks Dream dead in the eyes. “It was your parents.”
The noise in the room drops to utter silence, and we all freeze. Even the smoke seems to stand still, locking in an intricate swirl in the middle of the room.
“What are you talking about?” Dream’s voice is barely even a whisper.
Eddy’s eyes glow, sparked with the kind of energy I’m all too familiar with.
I know what this is all about now, how things went wrong with the Cartel, but I want to know how the P50 relates to all this. He must’ve taken it for a reason.
I’ll have to wait to find out, though, because Dream’s questions are more urgent than mine.
“You know,” Eddy says, leaning further forward. “Your parents had nothing to do with the Cartel. Zilch. Absolute zero. They were good targets because they were so random. That’s how they like to do it. You see, it’s much harder to pin a murder charge on someone who has no relationship with the victim.”
“But… why?” she asks, unable to comprehend the senselessness of it.
“Because they’re evil. It took me a while to realize it, but they get off on cruelty. They wanted to drag me down, to make a devil out of a normal man, and I couldn’t do it. I spent the rest of my time with them trying to dig up more information on who specifically killed your parents. That’s when they got suspicious, stole my bank cards, drained my account, and dumped me in the desert. Which is kind compared to what they normally do, but that was only because they couldn’t prove I was actually doing anything wrong.”
He chuckles, which feels misplaced until he lets us in on the next part of his story. “But they didn’t search me before they finally dumped me. I stole as much shit from them as I could get my hands on, and I took to the United States to sell. I figured I could recoup my losses and run far away, but it didn’t take long for them to catch up to me.”
Eddy runs his index finger across his neck. “First guy tried to kill me. Just straight up. They got creative after I put their hitman in the hospital. Set me up with a fake buyer, but I didn’t bring any drugs with me. They kidnapped me anyway, and I basically had to beg them to contact Dream to deliver the drugs in exchange for my life. It was selfish, but… I don’t know. I didn’t want to die.”
“It wasn’t selfish,” Dream assures him. “You did everything for me growing up. I’d walk into Cartel territory a million times over for you, but please… don’t ask me to do that,” she laughs.
Dream is loyal. I admire that.
“I won’t ask anything more from you, just that you allow me to stay here and help take down the Cartel. Those bastards deserve it.”
“I agree,” I say, perhaps a little too loudly. Everyone looks at me, and I lower my voice. “I mean, if we don’t know who was responsible for killing Dream’s parents, then the only way we can be sure to get revenge is to eliminate all of them. Every last member of the Dimalona Cartel.”
“He has a point,” Eddy says, waving his finger at me. “But how the hell are we going to do that?”
I grin. “If you have a location, I have an army.”
