The Beasts of Juarez by R.B. Schow (best books to read for beginners txt) 📕

try to save her. He prayed she wasn’t already dead. If her vest took the rounds and not her body, he had a chance. Besides, she was too beautiful of a creature for that kind of damage and too finely-tuned of a weapon to lose her life to a pack of low-brow chumps. That had to count for something with the big guy above.

On the road again, he called Cira, who answered right away.

“It’s me, Yergha.”

“Why are you calling so early?”

“You know about the kidnapping, right?” he asked.

“I’ve been brought up to speed.”

He told her about the ambush, the shoot-out, Esty getting taken. She let out a long sigh, then said, “This is not only really bad, Yergha, this is worse than bad.”

“Have you been training?”

“For the last six months, yeah.”

“You need to get down here,” Yergha said. “I’m only half a team without Esty and now the job just doubled.”

“How did it double?” she asked.

“Are you even listening?” he shouted into the phone. “They took ESTY!”

“I hear you, Yergha, but this is Leopold’s team, not yours. Besides, I’m in California, right about to get Atlas.”

“Look, I’m sorry for yelling,” Yergha said, sweating. “If I don’t get Esty fast, we may find her on the side of the road somewhere with her head cut off.”

“What are you thinking of doing?”

“I’m thinking, forget the wife and kids, I need to get Esty back.”

“Do you even know who took her?” Cira asked.

“Codrin gave me a lead.”

“Well, I can tell you this, you can’t forget the family and you have to find Esty. So yes, the job has doubled, but you have to do it yourself, so just suck it up and accept that.”

“Easier said than done,” he said, wiping his brow.

“As a friend, I’m telling you to pull yourself together and try to think. In the meantime, I’ll see if I can get a hold of the family’s bodyguard and send him down to you.”

“The bodyguard is in the hospital with broken ribs,” Yergha said. “So he’s a no-go.

“I’ll get Atlas as quickly as I can. If I call, pick up quickly.”

“I don’t need you to tell me how to answer my phone, Cira,” he said sounding a bit too testy. “I’m just saying, all I care about is Esty right now.”

“If you talk to Leopold, you better change your tune. Right now you sound like you’re trying to bail on the job in the first twenty-four hours so forgive me for treating you like an amateur.”

“We’re all fucking amateurs!” he shouted into the phone.

“Right now, it’s just you,” Cira said softly.

He bit back on the panic, the fear, the hysteria, and he tried to calm himself. It wasn’t working, though.

“There are other elements in play here,” she said, trying to assure him.

“Well, call me when you can get them in order because I’m on my way to get Esty back. And as far as the wife and kids go? They don’t exist until I’ve got Esty.”

“You’re your own worst enemy, Yergha.”

With nothing more to say, he hung up the phone. He closed his eyes, took three deep breaths, and told himself to pull it together. When he opened his eyes next, it was with the burning determination to find Esty and lay waste to the guys who took her.

Chapter Twenty-Two

LEOPOLD WENTWORTH

Leopold’s plane touched down at the private airstrip just outside Blacksburg, Virginia. The landing was smooth, his wait for a ride virtually nonexistent. A black-on-black Range Rover with tinted windows was waiting to pick him up just as it had the last time he was there six months prior. The same driver held the Range Rover’s back door open for him.

“It’s a pleasure to see you again, sir,” the driver said.

“You as well,” Leopold replied as he climbed inside the vehicle and buckled up.

When the driver got inside the Range Rover, Leopold said, “No Isabelle?” He tried to say this in a manner that conveyed his disappointment.

“She told me to tell you that you aren’t important enough for her to waste her time on a car ride and small talk. She said you would understand.”

Leopold drew a deep breath then let it out slowly. “I am ever the child looking for his mother’s approval. It seems as though Isabelle Norwood will not be a suitable mother-figure after all.”

The driver seemed to tense up. Leopold laughed and said, “It’s okay, my friend. I didn’t expect her to be here.”

“Your asset is in training right now with people who are as inaccessible to Miss Norwood and our facility as Miss Norwood is to you.”

“Well isn’t that something,” he said.

“Indeed it is, sir.”

As they approached one of Blacksburg’s many ridges, he recognized the one that housed Monarch Industries’ primary facility. His phone suddenly buzzed. Fishing it out of his pocket, he checked the caller ID then took the call.

“Leopold here,” he said.

“Leopold, it’s Esty. We picked up a tail the second we got into Juárez.”

“Jesus, that was fast,” he said. “Driver, please pull over.”

Without further prompting, the driver pulled the Range Rover onto the side of the road and out of the way of traffic.

“Where are you?” Estella asked.

“I just arrived in Virginia,” he said, “but I’m about to go out of range.”

After a brief but precise call with Estella and Yergha about their concerns with Juárez, and with the possible tail they picked up, he hung up and said to the driver, “We can go now.”

“Yes, sir.”

They entered Monarch Industries by the same route as last time and just as before, Isabelle Norwood was there to greet him. When he first met her, she had appeared to be in her early- to mid- sixties. For some unfathomable reason, she now appeared to be younger than that and still quite handsome for an older woman.

“It’s been too