Intimate Enemies (40 page)

“Rio.” Kollman’s voice was tight, barely restrained, but compassionate. “We’ll find her.”

“I’d prefer we do it while she’s still
alive
.” He disconnected and chucked the phone across the Jeep. Grabbed the steering wheel with both hands and dropped his head to his forearms. “God,” he groaned. “Please.
Please
.”

He dragged his shattered mind back together and sped toward the house. Just as he threw the Jeep into Park, his phone rang. Rio scrambled over the center console and dove to the floorboard, answering before he’d returned to his seat.

“It’s not the gangs,” Mike said, his voice dark. “At least not the
Muertos
or the
Diablos
.”

Rio stifled a choke. If it wasn’t the gangs, it was Saul, which meant Rio had failed her in the worst way. The most unforgiveable way.

And he had to get her back before the unthinkable happened. “Are you sure?”

“You know exactly what these guys are risking by getting this information to me. You’re one of them. And we all think of Cassie as one of our own. She’s family as far as I’m concerned, which makes her family to them. It’s good intel.”

Rio’s body drained of heat. An uncomfortable numbness spread through him. He gritted his teeth, nodded, just to reinforce himself. “Okay, then.”

They both knew what he had to do now.

“I’ll work the back end,” Mike said. “I’ve got calls out to reinforcements.”

Rio closed his eyes. Cassie was there, in his memory, her lush body beneath his, her hands touching him everywhere, a satisfied, blissful sigh on her lips.
“I could love you. So easily.”

“Hey,” Mike said, pulling him back. “She means just as much to me. I’m here. You won’t see me, but you won’t be on your own.”

Rio disconnected. He wouldn’t argue with the man, but there was no way Cassie meant as much to him as she did to Rio.

He walked through the front door and straight to Saul’s office, where he threw the door open without knocking. His boss stood at the windows in a typical stance of deep thought, hands clasped behind him.

“You’ve made a royal mess of this,” Rio said.

Something jabbed his spine. The door closed behind him.

“Don’t move,” Pedro said, far too much dark pleasure in his voice. “Hands where I can see them.”

Rio stiffened, but surprise flowed directly into rage. He lifted his hands and glanced over his shoulder, placing Pedro, identifying a single weapon. “What the fuck is this?”

“
I’m
running this operation, Rio.” Saul turned to face him, and his expression was as flat, as empty as Rio had ever seen it. His danger meter spiked. “You seem to have forgotten where your loyalties lie.”

Rio decided not to decipher the cryptic message with a gun at his back. He turned, gripped Pedro’s wrist above the weapon, and twisted hard. Pedro’s hand went limp as he screamed. Rio slipped the weapon from his hand, shoved him against the wall, and jammed the barrel under Pedro’s chin.

The jerk was still whimpering. Rio was breathing hard, nearly dizzy from the adrenaline rush.

“I could say the same for you, Saul.” Rio cast a sidelong look at his boss, pleased with the shock in his expression. “Where do
your
loyalties lie? With a shit-for-brains like this?”

Rio gripped Pedro’s shirt, pulled him from the wall, and threw him into the middle of the room, holding on to the idiot’s gun. Rio’s own weapon was out of bullets. He’d emptied them at the tires of the truck after the metal door had closed. But it had been too far away and moving too fast.

“This?” Rio said. “This is who you want between you and Hezbollah-trained terrorists? This is who you want to trust with your success? Your safety? Your life?
This
is where you
truly
want to invest your loyalties, Saul?”

Pedro was on his knees, bent over his arm, glaring up at him. Rio considered holding the weapon to Saul’s head until he told him where he’d stashed Cassie, but from past history, he knew Saul was far more motivated by money than fear.

“And you think I should trust you? A man who chooses loyalty to a
puta
over me?”

Rio narrowed his eyes on Saul. “What the hell are you talking about now?”

“The bitch was gone,” Pedro growled from the floor. “And you tipped her off.
You
told her to run.”

Rio’s stomach iced over, but he scoffed. “You don’t know what in the fuck you’re talking about.”

Pedro got to his feet, flexing and clenching his injured hand. Rio wished he’d broken it. “Yeah, I do. One of the workers heard you bribe Solana to get Nina out of town so we didn’t take Cassie’s cousin. I found out when I got there to snag her and they were both gone that you’d been there, and that right after you left, Solana and the bitch had an argument, then jammed.”

“What about it, Rio?” Saul asked, hands in the pockets of his slacks, chin up so he could look down his nose at Rio. “Why were you at the clinic this morning?”

“To make sure Nina
would
be there,” he said as if the answer were as obvious as red and yellow make orange. “To make sure there wouldn’t be any surprises.” He shoved Pedro’s weapon alongside his own in the waistband of his jeans, put his hands on his hips, and stared Saul down. “Are you seriously going to stand there and take his word over mine?”

Pedro looked like he was going to say something, so Rio grabbed his throat and drove his thumb into his trachea until the fucker was rasping for every wisp of air.

“I’m questioning who I should trust at this very delicate point in our operation, Rio,” Saul said.

That was the final push. Rio had to use his ace in the hole. Pull out all the stops. Cassie’s life depended on it. If Saul called his bluff…Rio knew the chances of finding Cassie on his own dwindled considerably. But if Rio didn’t at least try, Cassie was dead for sure.

Rio released Pedro with a snap of his wrist, leaving the other man wilted and gasping for air. As he backed toward the door, his hand ready to grab for his weapon, he snarled, “I’ll make that easy for you, Saul—I’m out. After everything I’ve done for you, if you still don’t believe you can trust me, if you believe this trash can serve you better”—he put one hand up in a gesture of surrender—“the deal is yours. We part ways right now.”

Saul’s mouth twisted in a pained grin. “But you know I can’t do that, Rio, don’t you? You’ve cultivated a loyal follower in Ahmed. He wants your assurance that the men will be put into the right hands. Wants confirmation that he’ll be paid. Threatened to call in an anonymous tip to the authorities if you didn’t call him within the hour. Of course, he doesn’t realize that the local authorities are no threat to us. But you should give him a call anyway, smooth his feathers.”

“Not interested,” Rio said. “Ahmed’s not the only game in town. There are others willing to sell men just as valuable. As I said, Saul, you can have this deal. I’ll simply cultivate my business elsewhere.”

“I was afraid you’d say that,” Saul said. “Which was one of the reasons I had Pedro take Cassandra. As insurance.”

“In—
What?
” Rio turned on Pedro and suddenly saw the similarity between the height and build of the kidnapper. Rio lost it. He just lost it. His last image of Cassie filled his mind—the rifle slamming against the side of her head, her head snapping hard, her small body careening across the cargo space and hitting the floor like a rag doll. He clamped a hand around Pedro’s throat and rammed him against the wall. He’d never wanted to kill anyone so badly in his entire life—not even Saul.

“Well, your new amigo here has royally fucked you, Saul.” Rio had to use every brain cell he had to compartmentalize his thoughts and feelings before he voiced his next words. “Because the bastard clocked her so hard with his rifle, I’d be surprised if she’s still breathing. And if she’s not breathing, not only can you kiss this whole estate and all its income good-bye, you can hightail your asses to Kazbekistan,
because the Mexican military, the American CIA and FBI, and who the fuck else knows what other law enforcement will be crawling up your asses within twelve hours. You won’t have time to spend any money or develop any enterprise.”

Saul’s gaze sliced to Pedro, and his jaw hardened. “I told you—”

“The bitch was still breathin’ when Alvarado dropped me off.”

Rio tightened his grip and drove his thumb into Pedro’s trachea. The reptile clawed at Rio’s hand. His eyes bugged out, and his dark skin turned the color of eggplant.

“Pedro, wait outside,” Saul said, looking past Rio. “Get the weapons from the vault and pull yourself together.”

Rio released the scum. Pedro curled in, half wheezing for air, then stumbled for the door, muttering, “I’ll kill you for this, man.”

“Uh-huh.” Rio waited for the door to close before he turned to Saul. “I thought you were smarter than this.”

“It seems I’ve made the same overestimation of you,” he said. “I believed you were far too smart to fall for Cassandra.”

“We had this discussion last night.”

“And then this morning…”

“We’re going round and round here. It comes down to whether or not you’re going to believe what I’m telling you. Have I lied to you in the past, Saul?”

He paused, narrowed his eyes. “You’re telling me that you didn’t blur the line between business and affection with her? That you didn’t warn Nina to save Cassandra the heartache?”

No, he hadn’t blurred the line. He’d erased it.

“Cassie is as important to me as any prime piece of ass would be to any man with decent cojones.” He stepped toward Saul, purposely towered over him. “And if anyone was going to smack her around, it should have been me. That was my right. After all you forced me to put up with from her, to give that pissant the privilege of beating the bitch into submission? I’m the only one who had the right to pistol whip my own bitch.”

Saul’s mouth pursed, his brow furrowed. He nodded. “That is very true. Had I not doubted… I would never take that right away from a man.”

The bastard was dead serious. The depravity of the people he dealt with sometimes still scrambled Rio’s mind.

“But I have another concern,” Saul said. “I heard you were at the docks today with someone from out of town.”

Fuck
. That was what this was really about. He’d been made. Someone had identified Mike as a cop, and Rio’s cover had been blown. Which meant he was a walking dead man. Which meant that if Cassie was still alive, she wouldn’t be for long. And Tomás was in deep jeopardy.

“So?” Rio said.

“I can understand how tempting it would be to entertain traitorous offers.”

Saul’s voice had shifted to his more contemplative, congenial, deal-making tone as he walked toward the window again. Rio’s mind whirled.
Traitorous offers?

“The tangos are worth a great deal of money.” Saul paused at the windows and turned to face Rio. The ice-cold anger in his eyes could have cut stone, but his tone remained cool. “You’ve done most of the work, the follow-through. But if you were unhappy with the financial arrangements, you should have spoken up before entertaining other propositions.”

Rio had no idea what in the hell was going on here, so he just rolled with it. “First, you haven’t been either trusting or forthcoming, so negotiation never crossed my mind as a viable option. And second, talking is in no way negotiating. Someone asks for a meeting, I meet with them. I never know what they’ll want to talk about and generally walk away from these meetings with inside information. And third, I’m getting really sick of you accusing me of these random acts when you have no evidence and are just fishing for me to confess to something.”

“Are you saying you were not planning on selling out to the
Muertos
closer who came from Agua Prieta?”

Christ.
Would have been nice of Mike to tell Rio he’d posed as a fucking
Muertos
fat ass when he’d come into town. If Rio lived, that jerk was so going to get a piece of his mind.

“I was placating him,” Rio said. “But, hell, with the way you’ve been treating me the last few months, and now this motherfucking screwup, I have to admit, their offer is looking mighty interesting. Especially if your ass is in some filthy military prison cell for offing a US citizen.”

“She has to die,” Saul said without a flicker of emotion. “Dominic didn’t trust her responses to his questioning after the Santiago murders. He was certain she would bring in bigger guns to investigate. And several guests at the party were uneasy with her seamless composure so soon after Alejandra’s and Santos’s deaths. Her presence in Baja and the rumors of her activities have caused quite a stir. Her elimination has been demanded by those far more powerful than I. They have assured me there will be no military reprisal, no American government involvement in her death.”

Rio snorted, even though acid had eaten a hole through his stomach lining. “And you believe them?”

A dry smile turned the edges of Saul’s lips. “I’ve been asked that a lot today…who I believe.”

“Fine. You know what, it’s your ass, Saul. Here’s my offer. Listen close, ’cause it’s the only one you’re going to get.” He was done with these games. Rio straightened his shoulders, tucked his thumbs into the front pockets of his jeans, and scraped air in through his closing throat. “I’ll go through with this deal, get your terrorists sold, and get everyone paid. In return, you let me be the one to kill Cassie. Then, and only then, we’ll decide whether we move forward in business together or part ways.”

* * * * *

Late afternoon pushed the arroyos and gullies of northern Mexico into bruising shadow. Rio rested his pounding head against his hand as he drove. Saul sat silently in the passenger seat, gun resting in his lap, hand nervously clenching and flexing on the grip. He’d taken all Rio’s weapons while Pedro had pointed a semiautomatic rifle at his chest, then sent the gofer ahead to meet Tomás and Alvarado, which told Rio the man wanted to talk. But neither of them had uttered a word in over an hour.

Rio allowed the silence, his mind alternately torturing him over the fear that Cassie was already lying dead in the back of that truck and trying to figure out how, on the off chance she was still alive, he would keep her alive until he could get her to a hospital.