Until I drift off, curled around the only man I’ve ever beeninlove with.
My last thought, before I fall into a dreamless sleep, is that I’m going to have to figure out how to tell him.Three little words can’t be so hard.
But they are. At least, when you’ve never said them before.
Twenty
Moses
There’s a knock on our suite early in the morning, and I carefully untangle my arms and legs from Magnolia’s. After throwing on a pair of shorts, I quietly leave the bedroom, closing the door behind me, and make my way to the one in the living room that leads to the hallway.
“Thank fuck you’re awake.” Trey’s face is beet red, and he’s bouncing like a tweaker on payday. “I texted you like two hours ago, and I’ve been dying to fucking tell you what I found.”
I rub the sleep from my eyes, willing my foggy mind to clear. “What?”
“I found him. I’m damn sure Ortiz has a brother. An older brother. That’s who’s in the picture.”
This isn’t surprising, and basically what we all assumed. Hopefully, there’s more to his urgency than this.
“How did you find out?”
He slaps the door frame. “NOPD caught him on camera running a red light three days ago. It’s a shit picture, but the features are a close enough match to the picture I aged up to get the hit—I combined them and refined the image to get another hit. An article in a tiny fucking free community newspaper from ten years ago that no one would ever have thought to wipe, because it went out of business shortly after. But our guy? They reported he was killed.”
Fuck yeah. There’s alwayssomethingpeople miss, and it’s the little details that’ll get you.
“For-real killed or ...” I start to ask the question, assuming that Trey wouldn’t be this excited if the guy was dead for real.
“Everyonethinkshe’s dead for real, but the article said the cartel was suspected to be behind the murder. They were using it as a call to arms to get residents to patrol the border and protect their town.”
Relief shoots through me.Finally, a concrete link to a possible lead. “Thank fuck for that. If they suspected the cartel was behind the faked murder, there’s a damn good chance that’s why he had to disappear. It would also explain why Ricardo’s a ghost too.”
Trey nods excitedly. “Yeah, exactly. Because we fucking know the cartel don’t just go after one person, they go after their whole fucking family too. Whatever he was into, it went sideways as fuck.”
“What’s his name? Tell me everything you got on him.”
“Antonio Reyes. And fucking embarrassingly, I got almost nothing on him except that article and the NOPD picture. Everything else has been erased. I don’t know what the hell he could’ve done to put himself in the cartel’s crosshairs, but they found the body—presumed to be his—in a ravine ten days after he was reported missing by a neighbor.”
Frustration charges through me at the lack of information, but I lock onto what we do know. “Do we know how they identified the body as his?”
“No,” Trey says with a shake of his head. “The article was light on facts and heavy on trying to get people riled up. But I swear this is our guy. Anyone else, I’d have his whole life story by now, but there ain’t shit to find.”
“Why the different last name? Was there anything in the article on his brother?”
“I’m guessing two different fathers. I don’t know for sure yet, but I’m trying to find out. The article just said he was the last surviving member of his family. Apparently, there was a car fire a few months earlier that wiped out the rest of them, but they didn’t mention names. Like I said, community paper.”
Even without names or more details, I’m with Trey—it sounds like this is our guy. “He could’ve arranged the car fire to get his family clear when shit started to go bad then.”
“That’s what I thought,” Trey says and then lights up like a goddamned Christmas tree. “But now we know he’s here from that NOPD red light camera. It’s him, Moses. We really fucking got him.”
“Fuck yeah.” I clench my hands into fists. “Now we just have to find him or draw him out. We need to meet with Mount as soon as possible this morning. Tell him what we got.”
“Yeah, boss,” he says, already turning to head down the hall to his room. “I’ll go get all the shit.”
“Give me ten minutes. I gotta wake up Mags and tell her what you found, and let her know this fucking nightmare is almost over.”
Trey gives me a nod and hurries the rest of the way down the hallway. I close the door and make my way back to Magnolia. When I open the door to the bedroom, she’s awake and watches me walk inside.
“What’s going on?” It’s not surprising that she doesn’t expect good news. Her face is pinched at the brow and she’s worrying her bottom lip.