Page 32 of Jacking Jill

The silence stretched to what felt like eternity.

Finally Diego spoke.

One word.

“Darkwater.”

Romeo cast a furrowed look at Kay. She shrugged and shook her head. Romeo was about to bark out another ultimatum, but then Diego started talking.

He talked, and Romeo listened.

Romeo listened as Diego talked about intercepting the good ship Rivington and losing an entire team of Zetas within minutes of boarding, all of them cut down by this mysterious Darkwater group headed by an ex-CIA man named John Benson.

The name didn’t ring a bell for either Romeo or Kay, but there was something about the way Diego spat the name out with venom that seemed at odds with the cold-blooded reputation of the infamous Zeta leader. Clearly this guy John Benson and his team of former Special Forces men had gotten under Diego’s skin. And Diego had cursed in Spanish when Romeo mentioned that Jack Wagner was already here, ready and waiting, a hunter on the prowl, a predator poised to pounce.

Shit, maybe he should take Kay’s advice and back off, Romeo thought.

Maybe Romeo should just cut Diego loose, let this shadowy CIA-guy John Benson and his off-the-books killers hunt Diego down. Maybe it wasn’t worth getting caught in the crossfire between Diego and Darkwater.

A chill went down Romeo’s spine. Getting pulled into this Darkwater thing worried him in a way that nothing ever had. It gave him the fucking creeps. Made the hairs on the back of his neck rise up like some primitive instinct was being awakened by the word Darkwater.

Now Romeo’s mind flashed back to those strangely alluring tattoos adorning Kay’s body. They made his hairs stand up in an eerily similar way, like there was some cosmic connection that was drawing all of this together, connecting past and future in ways that defied logic and reason, like this was fate shuffling the deck, destiny dealing the cards, space and time waiting for the players to place their bets, make their choices, call their shots.

And so Romeo called it.

He made his choice.

A choice that seemed spontaneous but somehow fit this strangely mystical mood that Diego’s tale of Benson and his boys had evoked.

“All right, listen,” Romeo said quietly into the phone. “Jack Wagner is at the Winchester Hotel right now. He’ll be on his way back to the mansion soon. Are you close enough to intercept him on the road? He’ll be alone, driving a red Honda hatchback. Here’s your chance to prove that you aren’t working for the feds or Darkwater to set me up.”

“Fuck you,” snarled Diego. “I’m not working for any puta U.S. agency, and certainly not for fucking Darkwater. They fucked everything for me.”

“All the more reason to take out Jack Wagner.” Romeo smiled calmly even as red panic streaked across Kay’s ash-white face. “You get rid of the guy hunting you. And you strike back against your buddy John Benson who seems to have planted his foot firmly up your ass more than once already.” Romeo took a breath, exhaled slowly. “Look, we can’t proceed anyway with this Darkwater goon sniffing around here. You’ll have a clean shot at him on a dark empty road within the next half-hour or so. Finish him and then disappear for a few weeks. Lose the burner phones, go completely off the radar. We’ve received your package with details of the test-shipments. It’s enough for us to get started. We’ll re-establish contact using new burner phones on the day after the last test-shipment, which is in . . .” Romeo glanced inquiringly at Kay, who’d recovered from her shock enough to slide out the brown envelope Diego must have left for her at the Winchester Hotel’s front desk.

It contained a hand-written coded list of ship-names and container-numbers, along with arrival dates at the various Philadelphia-area docks. The ships were all large container-carrying vessels flying Chinese flags. They would all stop at the Zeta Nation’s seaport on the Northeast coast of South America, where the Zetas would offload their usual containers filled with synthetic Fentanyl and the precursor chemicals for large-scale production. Then the Zetas would hide a sizeable load of raw Fentanyl in a single container on each departing ship heading north for the United States. The Carmine-connected dockworkers at the ports of Philadelphia would open those marked containers, offload the drugs, and drive them out of the docks past the paid-off customs guys. Those ship-names and container-numbers would never be typed into a phone or computer. The only written record was in Kay Steffen’s hands.

“Six weeks,” Kay said, looking up from the paper, then folding it carefully and sliding it back into the brown envelope. “One test-container per week for six weeks to make sure our process works.” She leaned closer to the phone. “We’ll connect via the dead-drop if all goes well. Get a new burner phone and drop off the number in our agreed-upon dead-drop location in six weeks.”

Diego stayed silent for a long time. “All right,” he said finally, speaking softly, a dark coldness in Diego’s tone now. “We have a deal. Jack Wagner will be dead within the hour. It will be my pleasure to make it so.”

12

I need to make it to Jack at the hotel, Jill thought frantically as she stood frozen between the bar and that empty corridor down which the mysterious and devious Kay Steffen had disappeared after stealing Jill’s bag.

Jill managed to move her feet now, but just barely. She had no idea how long she’d stood there frozen in fear, not sure whether to seek out Kay or say something to Nina or ask one of the security guys for help. She hadn’t actually seen Kay take the bag, but Jill was certain it was her.

But that was about the only thing Jill was certain about when it came to Kay Steffen. Jill’s head still spun from the contradictory signals that slender, dark-haired, pale-skinned woman with the hidden tattoos had sent with that oddly personal conversation littered with warnings.

The last of which still echoed in Jill’s head.

Jack’s going to get nothing but killed.

“I need to warn Jack,” she muttered, speaking out loud just so she’d stop thinking. It was pointless to confront Kay right now—assuming Jill could even find her down that corridor leading to the innards of this maze-like mansion. Not to mention it could be dangerous to start snooping around a mafia boss’s mansion when clearly there was something going on which was way the hell out of Jill’s league.

Just like Kay had warned.

“You need to warn Jack,” she told herself again, more firmly this time, her feet finally responding to her brain and beginning to take her step-by-step towards the parking-lot-exit where they’d come in.

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