Outlaws by Matt Rogers (phonics books TXT) 📕

they did, predictably reactionary, tearing apart the plant he’d been cowering behind seconds earlier. But now he was a world away, and his mindset became ice, and his thoughts fell away, and all he saw was tunnel vision. A wrecking ball in human form. Still prone, he sandwiched himself between a pair of desert plants and got a clear view of the front doorway and found two men bundled up together in a supposed rush to riddle the enemy with lead.

Except all they riddled with lead was a native plant.

King aimed the Glock — methodically, surgically, and shot one in the chest, then the other. These two weren’t wearing protective clothing, so he didn’t bother with headshots. They collapsed limply atop one another, forming a makeshift barricade in the doorway, and King saw it all laid out before him and kept deathly still, so still he might as well have been part of the landscaping.

Because he knew what was coming.

A hotheaded adrenaline-fuelled sicario eventually spotted the barricade of corpses and figured he ought to use it as cover, so he did just that. King only had to wait ten calm seconds before he spotted movement behind the bodies, and then he simply unloaded all the remaining rounds in the magazine through the doorway. Corpses are terrible bullet-stoppers, and at least a couple of lead parcels got through the dead flesh and slammed home against the living.

An inhuman shriek rose from the entranceway.

King reloaded again, leapt to his feet, and sprinted through the front door.

He found the third sicario writhing in a pool of his own arterial blood and put one through the top of his head to put him out of his misery.

Then he took a breath.

Three dead here.

Three dead upstairs.

Seven dead outside.

There are sixteen of us here, the perimeter guard had said. We can take it by force.

‘Not anymore you can’t,’ King muttered.

Three left.

He settled into berserker mode and advanced into the darkened house.

83

He should have remembered how the cartel functions.

All sixteen of the occupants couldn’t be foot soldiers. There had to be a hierarchy, a chain of command, which meant top dogs. But that was far less reason to worry. It’s easy to slack off at the top. It’s easy to convince yourself you’re invincible. So when King swept the whole corridor and stepped out into a large communal living space and found the last three members sitting bolt upright on the sofa with an entire bowl of cocaine in front of them, he wasn’t surprised.

Absolute power might corrupt absolutely, but a little power can do the trick also.

Not one of them was a shade over twenty-five. Two guys, one woman. She was dressed in skin-tight leggings and a tube top that pushed her breasts up, but there was nothing superficial about her. Her eyes were the eyes of a killer. She had to be, to be sitting where she was, ordering the rest of them around. She’d draped a leg over the skinny guy with the mop of unruly black hair on the left, and not even King’s arrival had made her take it off. The other guy was a little further away from them, a little beefier, fat in the face and red in the cheeks.

King understood.

The skinny guy was where the nepotism lay.

He was the son of someone important. King drew eerie parallels to a kid named Rico he’d met a few months ago, the scion of a cartel over the border. Rico had lashed out needlessly at Slater, and ended up paying for it with his life. Slater hadn’t killed him, but the nature of their profession usually made that sort of thing inevitable.

Now, King regarded this kid sitting before him.

Even weaker than Rico.

He was trying to shrink into the corner of the sofa, as if he could turn himself invisible on a whim. There was no aggression or confidence in his eyes. King turned to assess the girl and realised her eyes were flooded with those very things. The fat guy on the right was a hanger-on, unimportant in the grand scheme of things.

The girl was the ringleader.

King sat down on the footstool in the middle of the room, facing the couch.

The girl tried to look smug.

King said, ‘Is this the part where you convince me there’s more guards?’

‘Of course there are,’ she spat.

‘I got them all.’

‘You sure?’

‘Uh-huh. Thirteen.’

‘There’s fifteen.’

‘No,’ he said, looking right at her. ‘There isn’t.’

She didn’t lose any of the arrogance, but she relented. ‘What are you hoping to achieve?’ She reached out and tilted her boyfriend’s chin up, trying to give him some dignity, trying to make a man out of him. He couldn’t have been any older than nineteen. She, on the other hand, had to be in her mid-twenties. She said, ‘Do you know who this is?’

King said, ‘No. But I know he doesn’t want this life.’

The kid looked at him, his eyes hollow, his face blank.

She said, ‘Of course he does. He’s—’

‘If you’re going to rattle off a name,’ King said. ‘I don’t care. I’m sure his surname means something. Speed this story up.’

‘He is the heir to the throne,’ she said. ‘Señor Álvaro is his father. You kill him, you start a war with the whole Álvaro clan. Do you understand what that means?’

‘I’ve started wars before,’ King said. ‘It doesn’t bother me.’

‘You clearly don’t understand.’

‘Oh, I understand,’ King said. ‘He’d rather do something else. Anything else, really. Whatever doesn’t involve killing a bunch of people and then dying young. Because that’s what happens to most of you. I’m sure he’s buried brothers and sisters and aunts and uncles. But you … you’re grooming him for the throne. You’re the one who wants it. What’s your name?’

‘María.’

‘María, what will you do once you get it?’

‘His name is Damien Álvaro, and you will—’

‘If it mattered,’ King said, ‘he’d tell me himself.’

Damien Álvaro seemed like he’d rather be anywhere else. And not just because a hulking executioner was across the room with a loaded semi-automatic pistol.