“I told you, Gia!” Clark yells. “He’s fucking dead!”
I sigh, looking at the guard again. The guard looks perplexed and stunned, eyes a little wider now. “Do you speak English?” I ask.
“Yes,” he answers.
“Have any men who know how to make two dead bodies and a jet disappear?”
His lips smash together as he looks around me at the agent on the ground. “I know people, yes.”
“Then call them. Tell them we want the jet to be untraceable and for the bodies to never be found again. There is another body on the jet.”
“They’ll expect pay,” he says. By his tone alone, I know he’s not just talking about the men he’ll call who, I know, will expect to be paid. He wants to be compensated for this, too.
I sigh, taking my tote bag off my shoulder and slinging it around. Unzipping it, I snatch out a few rolls of the money I packed. “It’s $50,000. All I’ve got right now.” That’s a lie. I have more on me.
He bobs his head, taking the case. “It’s more than enough. Gracias, Patrona.”
“How quickly can you get it done?”
“I’ll make the call now. It won’t take long for them to get here. Maybe thirty minutes or so. Your people aren’t too far away. Close to the border, which is a little over forty-five minutes from here. You are welcome to wait inside the booth. It’s air-conditioned.”
“It’s fine. I’ll wait out here. Make the call to your people.”
He nods and turns, marching back to the booth and picking up his phone to call. I make my way back to Clark and Travis.
“We’ll get you out of here soon enough,” I tell Travis.
“What did that motherfucker say?” Clark asks, pointing at the booth. “And did I just see you give him money?”
“Yes, I gave him money to take care of the bodies and the jet. We have to cover our tracks and make sure nothing links back to your father. Right?”
He sighs. “We could have gotten him to handle that shit without pay. He knows the Jefe doesn’t fuck around.”
“The money means nothing to me. There’s more where it came from.” I look down at the agent, blowing a breath. Swiping a hand over my sticky forehead, I bend down and take the badge off his holster. I place my bag down next, taking off my leather jacket.
It takes about forty-five minutes for the guard’s “cleaners” to show up. They pull up in a brown vehicle, speak to him briefly, and then come right for us.
“This one of them?” one of them asks.
I nod.
He bends down, grabbing the agent by the ankles and dragging his body through the gate and toward the jet. Another man comes hustling after him, climbing on board first and tossing things out. Mostly papers and folders.
Once they have the agent’s body on the jet, they come back down, dusting their hands off and walking toward us. One of them hands me a paper. I look it over—Big Jack’s registration for the jet.
I hand it to Clark who folds it up and tucks it into his back pocket.
The man who dragged the agent’s body says, “We’ll fly the jet to an abandoned strip—not many know about it. If it is vacant, we’ll pour gasoline and burn it. Once we burn it, we’ll send the pieces to a dump to smash and compact them. Then,” he grins, like this truly excites him, “we’ll burn it again, just to be on the safe side.”
“All with the agents inside of it?”
“Oh, we were going to chop and burn them, but if you want us to just torch the bastards while they’re on board, we can do that too. Either way, you’ll never see them or that jet again.”
I bob my head. “I don’t care what you do with them. Just get it done please. Make it seem like they and the jet never existed.”
“You got it, Patrona.” They take off for the jet, climbing back on again and starting it up. As the engine of the jet warms up, I hear the crunch of tires over rocks and dirt, and when I look to my left, I see a white Chrysler driving toward us rapidly.
Clark snatches his gun out, holding it at his side as the vehicle swerves and parks sideways, blowing a gust of dirt in our direction.
When the car parks, it’s just my luck that Patanza bustles out of the car, brows stitched, pointing her gun at Clark, swaying it between him and Travis.
“Put your fucking gun down!” she roars in Spanish.
Clark scoffs. “What? I’m sorry! No hablo Español!”
“NOW!” She barks the order in English.
“Patanza! He’s with me!” I step in front of Clark. “You don’t need to shoot him—either of them!”
“Fuck that, Gia! No one told you to bring them! They know about you—about Jefe! He’s already a fucking liability, now get the fuck out of my way!”