CHAPTER EIGHT

ATLAS

As much as I loved and trusted Jasiel, I knew he didn't follow orders, not all the time. He liked to disobey, and he liked to push the boundaries, but I was there to swoop in and protect him. I enjoyed taking care of him, it gave me purpose.

"Fuck," Midas shouted from the living room.

I was busy unpacking my guns in the bedroom. I liked to make sure I kept stock of everything I had. Handguns, snipers, silencing equipment, and ammunition. I liked to stay stocked up, and I liked to make I took everything with me.

"What happened?" I called out to him as I pressed the barrel into the handgun and lifted it, feeling the weight was nice. I hadn't shot a gun in months, mostly because I was supposed to be dead, so I didn't have many people after me, not like I usually did.

"They're at the fucking bar," he said. Midas sat on the sofa, looking at a computer screen. He shook his head. "Fucking hell. Thought you told them not to go there."

"Sambo?" I asked. That was the name of the bar where we'd tracked Alonzo, and now it was a waiting game to get him. "Are you sure it's them?"

Sure enough, it was them.

On the screen, there was a map with the signal from Trojan's phone, showing the location of the bar, and to the side of that map, there was the CCTV live footage. Jasiel and Trojan were sat at the bar, pounding shots of tequila back.

I let out a sigh.

"Aren't you worried?" he asked. "Should I get them to come back?"

The moment I forced Jasiel to do anything that was remotely unfun, and I'd be met with resistance. I knew what he was there for. He was going there to cause trouble, and I couldn't exactly blame him. He'd been in prison, locked away against his will, and stripped of everything he'd once had.

"No," I said. "I'm not worried. Jasiel knows what he's doing." I continued to watch the screen as the CCTV camera footage rotated between the cameras, each one of them had Jasiel as a focus. There was a guy at the end of the bar. They'd nodded to him. "You recognize him?" I asked.

Midas shook his head.

The man didn't look like anyone I'd seen before, and he certainly wasn't Alonzo, but they were nodding and gesturing to each other, almost like they'd picked him as their victim. I was considerably unhinged when it came to violence, so I knew the signs of picking a fight.

"Well, now we have to get involved," Midas said. For a moment, I thought he was referring to our boys, but then I saw it, the snake in the grass, Alonzo, walk into the bar. "I'll text Trojan and tell him we're on our way."

Jasiel stood and walked to the man at the bar. The man, sipping on a small glass of amber liquid. There was no sound, but I could lipread well enough to know he's said. ‘You think you could fuck with me.' And then, from nowhere, he had a knife in his hand. He rammed it through the back of the man's hand, immediately striking a gush of blood.

It brought a smile to my face to see him do that. And he smiled too, not directly at the CCTV camera, but he smiled, almost knowing I was watching.

Trojan got the text seconds later, alerting Jasiel who pushed the blade of the knife deeper through the man's hand.

"We should go now," Midas stressed me.

I was ready to grab some popcorn and let Jasiel play out, but Midas was right. Alonzo was there, and I wanted to gut that rat bastard for what he'd tried doing to me.

A knife sliced through the air of the bar, hitting Alonzo.

People were scattering.

"We need to go," I said.

It was a short drive, even shorter when you were as reckless as me. I wore my cartoon animal mask and got us to the bar within minutes. People were still running out when we got there.

"Get Alonzo, get the boys," I said to Midas as he jumped out of the of the SUV. I had both hands on the wheel and my foot on the gas.

We were close to find out what was going down in those shipping containers, and then fixing a plan to have it all seized or taking it for ourselves if it was useful.

Jasiel came out, dragging the man by a gold chain around his neck. The same man he'd stabbed through the hand.

"Baby," I said, shaking my head at him. "We don't have time to play with strays."

"No, he's the one who ordered the hit on us," he said. "At the gas station."

The man on the ground whimpered.

"Put him in the back." I had told Trojan not to bother with running his plates or finding him, but since he did, and they found him, I couldn't exactly be mad. It was just not something high on my to-do list.

Jasiel stood around the back of the car, out of my view. I heard the man continued to scream out in pain. I was jealous I couldn't see, but I assumed it had something to do with Jasiel's penchant for knives.

Midas arrived with Trojan, and between them, they carried Alonzo. His body had been stabbed several times with the throwing knives. Hitting at his knees and arms, nothing fatal, but also like killing an animal slowly, it stopped them from getting away.

In the back, the two men were lumped together, both bleating out in agony.

Police sirens echoed out from a nearby street. My eye twitched at the screech. I hated the sound of sirens; they triggered a part of me that told me I was doing a bad job. I'd learned that if you could hear the sirens, then you were close to being caught, and if you were close to being caught, then you weren't an asset.

Once everyone was in the car, I stomped my foot down on the gas.

Jasiel sat at the front, his hand wrapped around my forearm, getting his bloodied hand on my skin. It was a familiar feeling, like we were sharing.

Up to South Miami Heights where we'd prepared the plastic sheets, I was ready to extract as much information from Alonzo as possible. Then, he'd die. He wasn't going to bargain for his life, he could try, but every single person who worked for the Coronado family was going to be in some type of grave. And it started with Alonzo.

Back at the old safe house, we had both men with us, and both tried to call out to someone around for help. I had Alonzo in the living room, and Jasiel took the rest of the plastic sheeting and took his man into Midas and Trojan's old empty bedroom.

On a foldable metal chair, Alonzo was tied still.

I walked around his bleeding body with the knives still sticking out of him. My mask still on, I hadn't yet revealed to him who I was, but he was soon about to find out, and then his bragging about killing me would've all been for nothing.

"You know," I said, grabbing his face by the chin. I wished my hands were strong enough to crush bone. "When you go to kill someone. Make sure it does the job."

"You don't know who you're messing with," he spat, writhing around, he was only causing himself more pain with the knives still tearing through his muscle tissue. "I'm—"

I pulled away the mask to reveal my smiling face. "You really think you're something special," I said. "I saw your hesitation. I saw your feebly shaking hands when you held that big boy gun." I grabbed my handgun from the holster around my back and shoulders. "It's a shame, really, because I thought you had potential when you first joined the family."

"Listen, listen, listen." His body continued to wriggle around, and more blood pooled around him as he did. "I was just trying to impress them. You know how hard it is to climb the ranks."

"I—I know, but I've never climbed them," I said, stroking the side of his face with my gun. "I didn't approach them. They wanted me. You know how many people I've killed around the world? You know how much money people have paid me to kill? And this—well, this one, I'm doing for free."

"Don't kill me, don't—don't—please."

Midas chuckled as he watched from the doorway from the kitchen. They'd almost had him too, and I'm glad he turned down every opportunity. My situation was different, I loved to travel, but I'd been searching for a place to settle, and the Coronado family had given me that, until I wanted to leave, and then they wanted me dead.

"You know," I said, letting out a giggle from the back of my throat. "It's funny. I kept myself calm. I did everything I was asked. And you thought you could take me out with a single bullet. Unless that bullet is in my heart or head, then just assume it didn't kill me." I slapped his face with the side of my gun. His head spun around on his neck. "Please, with everything you have in that little head of yours, I want you to think real hard."

Trojan and Midas whispered to each other in the doorway. I still had to ask this man about the cargo shipments. And I should do that sooner, since I was getting ahead of myself.

"So, now that you've made a little name for yourself," I said, pressing the gun to the side of his face to stop it going up and down, left to right. "You know more than you did, right?"

"They're going to—they're going to send everything after you when they find out you're alive," he said.

"Good," I said.

"No, you don't understand. They're going to send everything."

I figured that was a hint. "Is that what's inside those shipping containers?" I asked.

Alonzo's bloodied face smiled. "I—"

"You know I'm going to kill you, so tell me, and I'll make it quick," I said. "Don't tell me, and I'll—wait, what was that thing you once said to impress me. I'll take little bits of your flesh off until all your nerves are exposed. Then, with some hot oil, I'll splash at that exposed flesh so you can smell yourself being cooked alive." I smacked my lips. "Isn't that what you said?"

"That—that was just something I heard a serial killer do once, and—"

"And you thought it would impress me?" I asked, grabbing the silencer and twisting it over the end of the gun. Glancing at Midas in the doorway, he frowned at me. We weren't serial killers. We were killers for hire, and that was completely different. "No. It didn't. In fact, I was concerned about you." I wrapped a hand around a blade on his arm, near his elbow.

"I'll tell you—I'll tell you what you want to know."

"He got these in deep." I dragged the blade of the knife from his body. Jasiel continued to amaze me with his precision. Tonight, we'd fuck until we had no fuck left in us, that was a promise. "So, those cargo shipments coming in," I said, wiping the blood from the blade across his cheek, slicing him with the sharpness.

"Firearms," he said. "It's powerful stuff. They're—they're arming themselves for war."

"War?" Now my interests were piqued. "War with who?" It clearly wasn't me, they assumed I was dead, and it can't have been with Jasiel, those shipments were on the manifest long before we broke him out.

"The Agosti family," he said. "They've been coming for our drug territory, undercutting our prices, nobody is buying from us anymore."

From memory, the drugs offered by the Coronado family weren't exactly high quality. Their cocaine was awfully chalky, like they were cutting the product with cheaper substances to get a higher profit. I didn't take drugs often anymore since they impaired thought, but when I did, I only went for the good stuff, gold standard, and the Coronado family were anything but.

"So, the Agosti family are on the hit list," I said with a smile. "Things are getting interesting."

"Listen," Alonzo said. "You can't let them know it came from me, or—"

I held the gun to his head, placing a single shot through his skull. "That's how you kill someone," I whispered as his head dropped back and smoke from the tip of the gun dispersed into the air.