Cadillac Payback: Rising Tide by AJ Elmore (the false prince .TXT) 📕

works, a fact that everyone just kind of inherently knows. But security is an entirely different beast. We have to work with everyone, know everything that's going down in order to protect it.

All data is kept by hand, nothing digital, so it's easy to destroy if it ever comes to that. Shipment numbers are hidden behind imported fruits and vegetables, toys made in Mexican shops, coffee, and a handful of other fronts. Distribution follows the same lines.

Jack and Noah, for example, get their produce from local farmers’ markets, but on paper, they get their shit from Cebolla Rojo Distributing. We don't get the full accounting information, but we have weights and locations.

Each division has its own schedule, and the teams stay regularly with their schedule, for the most part. That means if I had to pull a team off of the plantation for emergency detail on a live deal, they wouldn't know their heads from their asses. It's a problem, and it's my first fucking day on the job.

I loose a quiet sigh, and watch a gaggle of females on the street below, all dressed up to go sit in a class. They scurry by in little skirts and designer shoulder bags, and the only reaction they stir in me is aggravation. They don't need to be any closer for me to know they're annoying as fuck.

I want to get high.

I'm a work first-get what I want later kind of guy, but it's Sunday. It's been my day off for years. My body has been accustomed to wake and bake, eat mid-day, if there's business, it's casual. Mateo will be negotiating a schedule soon. Some things are sacred.

I'm also not a sucker for memories or melancholy, but just now my mind skips back to playing poker until three in the morning, until everyone was out but me and Charlie, and everyone was drunk but me. Sometimes we'd line up cans and bottles on Sunday afternoons, and see who could shoot the most the fastest. It was usually me, but Maria gave me a run for the money, every time.

Back then, I ran security, too, but it was just our crew. We weren't important enough to have protection from above. We took care of each other. Even dickhead Isaiah. I never particularly liked the guy, but I have to admit that he was a solid right hand. His cold and remote bit was a perfect guise for the position, and though it was definitely a guise, nobody ever really managed to get around it.

Isaiah! The big mystery we’ve been trying to figure out.

Frederick, you fucking idiot. I suddenly want to slam my head against the desk. Why wasn't that the first damn thing I looked for? I'm sitting with an extensive map in my hands, and I'm staring at nothing. I scan through different books until I find the right code words: lemons, limes, oranges. Opiates. Jorge's operation in a nutshell.

It's huge. Way bigger than Maria's, or any other profit-making venture we have. My stomach turns.

Sure, I've always been aware of the long arms of my employers, and sure I pushed the shit for Gram and Derrik, but that doesn't mean I like it. I detest people weak-willed enough to get roped on opiates. Let them overdose and drop off already. But to see the figures of how much of this shit we're trafficking, it blasts what I thought was the bigger picture off the horizon.

There's no new operation on the books, which means the deal for which he was praised isn't actually made yet. Still, for Abuela to throw a dinner celebration means it's really big. Of course, it would be too easy for me to get anything useful from the shit storm of information I've been handed.

I scan the names of the teams that work with Jorge on a regular basis. As I do, I feel a strange pride in my history. I didn't build a life beneath an umbrella like this cartel. I scrounged through the gutter and to the top of a high-risk, balls-out ladder. I made my own place, and my own connections.

My eyes land on a familiar name. It's not much, but it does give me somewhere to start.

Chapter 19 Tourists

Joshua

“You're fucking with me, right?”

We're staring up at the glittering face of the Audubon Aquarium of the Americas. I can hear the slosh of the Mississippi chugging at our backs. Steady throngs of people move around us like we're rocks in a river. It's sunny, somewhere around seventy degrees, but the eighty-three percent humidity makes it feel like summer: hot, sticky, heavy.

Maria's expression – what I can see of it despite the aviators – is folded in a strange combination of slack-jawed disbelief and narrow-eyed suspicion. Her hands are on her hips, and her hair is pulled up off her neck. She finally rips her gaze away from the scene to turn her attention on me.

“I'm not, in fact, fucking with you,” I answer with a smile.

She stares at me for a stretch, maybe trying to figure out if I'm lying. Then she shakes her head and says, “What are we, eight years old?”

“Oh, come on, when was the last time you came here?” I ask, my smile bordering on teasing.

She hesitates, and her hands fall slowly to her sides. Two children run by us, laughing, leaving behind a set of yelling parents. The kids snag her attention, and she watches them pass. She's much quieter when she answers.

“I was young. My dad was still alive. He brought Charlie and me once.”

The vague pain in her tone thins my smile. She's never talked about her parents to me, or her childhood. She's only just recently started mentioning her brother without tearing up. I guess it's fair to say that she dealt with the loss of Charlie the same way as her father – by not talking about it.

I can't let