Page 16 of Running Scared
“Complete change of plans,” Dean said.“Vlade was hit, Bailey’s a witness, and if I’m lucky, I’ll get to the hospital and bail him out before our hit men realize it and get him too.”
“Well, shit,” Marcus muttered.“How in the hell did that happen?”
“Bad fucking luck.”
Dean hadn’t told Bailey about Vlade.For one thing their little interlude in the hospital cot room had happened about two weeks before Marcus and Dean’s carefully cultivated CI had been transferred to Outskirts General, and Marcus and Dean had beenbusy,dammit, trying to make sure he’d be safe.
The sour man with the attenuated build hadn’t been Dean’sfavoriteperson of all time, but hehadbeen a font of information about the inner workings of the Russian mob and how they’d been planning to take over the Corazones de Sangre—the Hearts of Blood.
The Karkov branch of the mob had been pretty slick about it, using the muddle at the border and the United States’ draconian policies to hide the ladders of bodies they were using to climb to the top of the drug trade.Racism wassucha good tool to use against the stupid.
A Russian smuggled in undocumented through Cuba and Florida wasn’t looked at twice if he had a fake ID that said “Smith,” but a Mexican who actually had documentation was still considered good riddance.
Marcus and Dean did a lot of target practice with red hats and ICE windbreakers, and Dean wasn’t sure it was even therapy anymore.
Because whether the bad guys were the Russian mob or the Columbian cartels, they were both still winning.
This time around, the mob was smuggling drugs, weapons, and humans with even more brutality than the cartels themselves, and Dean and Marcus weren’t going to quibble about how politics could turn things on a dime.
They were going to go after the assholes who had been leaving big shipments ofpeopleto rot in the Texas heat as a signal to the cartels that nobody was safe.
Fortunately both shipments had been found, but there’d been casualties.One of the survivors of the second shipment had positively identified two men—not “coyotes,” which were bad enough, butbuitreanddiabolicoshe had called them.Vultures.Partly because of the flapping black suits, Dean had thought while interviewing the poor woman in the hospital, but also, he was sure, because of their grim delight in death.
She’d heard the men speaking in thickly accented English as they’d crammed the back of the semi to standing room only.They’d talked of “needing to cook the meat extra-long to be juicy,” and even knowing she was the meat, she’d rather take her chances inside the truck than try to escape.
There’d been rumors about the big one and his fondness for knives.
When Vlade Karkov had come to them voluntarily, asking for nothing more than a change of venue, Dean and Marcus had jumped at the chance to milk him for information.
They were aware—veryaware—that he was probably a plant.For every bit of truth he gave them, two-thirds of what he said was lies.If he said the shipment of girls was going over the border at Nogales on Friday, the odds were a shipment of boys was coming up from the border in Nogales on Thursday—but that didn’t matter.He’d said Nogales, and Dean and Marcus both had an almost uncanny sense of lie detection with people.Marcus said Dean’s came from an inability to manufacture bullshit himself, so he knew when other people were doing it just by the smell.Dean claimed Marcus cooked up so many scenarios in his fertile imagination, he’d already unconsciously run through what was plausible and what wasn’t.Either way, both of them knew the sound of truth when they heard it, and so far, their ability to navigate the treacherous waters of Vlade Karkov’s attempted false flags had simply added to their stellar records.
And it hadn’t hurt that Vlade had kept Dean in Austin after that first encounter with Bailey.
“Fuck bad luck,” Marcus said now, breaking into Dean’s simultaneous musing and packing.“It’s our fault, Dean.We should have let him fool us once or twice.”
Dean grunted.Subterfuge wasn’t one of his strong points, but he could see where Marcus was heading with this.“What do you mean?”he asked, not because he didn’t understand in his gut, but because Marcus was better with words than he was.
“I mean that they probably thought Vlade was passing us the real—not everybody knows about your super brain, Dean—and it’s best we keep it that way, but remember?We talked about missing a few of his leads, but….”It was not like Marcus to trail off, but Dean understood.
“Every lead he passed was human trafficking,” Dean filled in grimly.It would be one thing if the shipments had been of arms, or of drugs—Dean and Marcus had played the game of “predict the shipment” often enough to be confident that they could track the goods until Vlade was off the hook for the info.
But this month it had been allpeople,and the gathering of the Vultures (as Dean thought of Vlade’s branch of the mob) had been particularly bloodless about leaving those shipments to rot just to hurt the cartel’s cred.
“Unavoidable,” Marcus said now, crisply.“It was unavoidable that Vlade would get popped, one way or another.What is unfortunate is that it happened when your guy could get involved.What’s your plan?”
Dean took a glance around the apartment, thinking sadly that he’d been happy here and that Bailey was going to have to go away for a really long time.
And that Bailey’s father might need to be picked up as well.
And that Bailey would really miss his cat.
Dean regarded Mr.Bumble (he couldn’t keep calling the cat Bumble—it felt disrespectful somehow), and the cat returned a crossed blue-eyed gaze.Mr.Bumble was an unusually chill cat, Dean was beginning to suspect.He didn’t mind a trip to the vet’s, but that could be because Bailey sedated him whenever he went.Actually, Dean knew where Bailey kept the cat’s sedation and medication, and….
“I’ll tell you the plan when you get me in ten minutes,” Dean said.“You may want to come up.I’ll need help.”
Marcus didn’t ask questions.He never asked questions, not after their first six months together.But then, Marcus had once thrown Dean out of a third-story window, knowing there was a rescue cushion on the ground floor.Dean hadn’t known this until he’d been midair and had been able to adjust his body accordingly, and while he’d been briefly terrified he was falling to his doom, he hadn’t, not once, questioned that Marcus had done what he’d done because the alternative would have been deadly.
Sure enough, Marcus followed him down right as the room had erupted into flame, taking out their unsubs.
