in his gut. The wanton murder of innocent villagers was a good reminder of why he did the work he did—to stop tragedies like this from happening. The crime lords of the area considered the locals disposable pawns in their games, and gave even less thought to the countless victims of the drugs and guns they sent north on a regular basis.
“Come on.” He grabbed the boy by the arm and pulled him outside before the smoldering roof could collapse on them.
A third woman’s lifeless body sprawled behind the hut, the sight sending the kid into a renewed fit of crying.
“Para,” he told the boy. Stop. Then pushed the kid behind him. Someone was coming.
Alejandro burst from the jungle. “What the hell happened here?” he asked in rapid Spanish.
“Cristobal is pushing his boundaries forward,” Jase responded in the same language.
Alejandro’s facial muscles tightened as he raised his gun to the sky to squeeze off a jungle telegram.
Jase lifted his hand to hold him off. “Those bastards can’t be too far. The huts are still burning.”
Alejandro nodded and lowered his weapon. “Better take the news back to Don Pedro as fast as we can. I’ll go tell Lucas.”
If Cristobal’s men were pillaging through this corner of the jungle—a group that likely outnumbered Jase’s small team judging by the damage they’d wrought here—their best bet was not to engage them but to take information to Don Pedro instead. The big boss could then decide how he wanted to respond to Cristobal, an ex-captain of his who’d recently turned against him.
Alejandro ran off with a scowl on his pockmarked face.
Jase waited until the man disappeared from sight before turning to the kid.
“Go to the other village.” He pointed east.
The small collection of huts they’d left the previous morning was a day’s trek for the adults, would be only slightly more for the kid. The boy should be safe there. Cristobal’s men weren’t heading that way. Jase and the others would have met them if they had been.
He stepped back into the smoldering hut and grabbed some fruit that had been spilled to the ground, took a piece of cloth to wrap the food, then added his canteen to the bundle. “Here.”
The boy wouldn’t move an inch.
He shoved the kid gently in the right direction.
The boy stepped two feet away, then stopped and stared at him expectantly.
“¡Vamos!”
Might as well have been talking to a wild fig tree.
He turned his back on the boy and moved toward the jungle, hoping the kid would understand that the both of them needed to get going.
But instead of heading for relative safety, the kid followed him.
“You can’t come with me,” he said in Spanish, having no idea if the kid spoke that language or some isolated native tongue. A day’s trek in the jungle to the nearest village would be perilous for the boy, but a day’s trek in the jungle with a team of seasoned killers would be even worse.
The kid knew the jungle. With some luck, he had a chance to reach the village. But if he went to Don Pedro’s place on the river, his life wouldn’t be worth a damn thereafter.
“Run for it.” Jase put on a scary face and stomped his foot.
But instead of taking off, the boy began crying again, which made him feel like a heartless bastard. Which he was, by the way, so he didn’t fully understand why his conscience would choose this moment to have a fit.
“Go,” he said again, his tone suspiciously close to pleading.
But Alejandro reappeared from the jungle, followed by the other four, and the boy’s options disappeared.
The team spread through the village, looking for evidence of Cristobal’s men and picking out whatever they wanted to take. No sense in waste.
Alejandro came for the kid.
Jase stepped between them in a stance that would allow him action no matter which way he needed to move.
“I saw him first.” The man put his hands on his hip.
His protest drew the others’ attention. Lucas strolled closer. As team leader, he was responsible for settling trouble.
Jase being the latest addition to the group, he ranked lowest, firmly on the bottom of the pecking order. He didn’t have enough influence to take what he wanted, and to show weakness by admitting that he wanted to save the boy would make the others suspicious. It would conflict too much with the killer image he’d been taking care to cultivate.
“I looked into his dead mother’s eyes. Her spirit said it’ll curse me if I don’t take care of the kid.” He nodded toward the charred hut with a grave face.
Lucas moved on. Jungle superstition was its own thing. Nobody went against it.
Alejandro kept the scowl on his face. “Don Pedro would pay me a hundred dollars for him.”
Unlikely. Maybe twenty, if Don Pedro needed someone to help out around the dog-fighting rings he ran in the larger towns downriver, or another runner, or a jungle spy—all jobs with a very low life expectancy.
Jase pulled his second-best knife, the one with the serrated double edge that Alejandro had coveted from the beginning, and held it out on his palm.
The man accepted it with a shrug as if being generous, as if the knife wasn’t worth ten times more than what he could have gotten for the boy.
“Hey, Jase found himself a little brother,” he called out to the rest, and joined in their laughter as he loped off, not wanting to miss any of the scavenging.
The men thought of the forest-dwelling natives as little more than animals, so calling one Jase’s brother was an insult. Like calling him stupid, which he was. He risked a multimillion-dollar mission almost a year in the making for a scrawny kid.
He shook his head, then squatted in front of the boy and pointed at himself. “Jase.” Then lifted his eyebrows and pointed at the latest complication in his life. Now he would have the responsibility to protect the kid at the compound, and find a way to get him out of this godforsaken corner of the jungle to safety, the sooner the better.
“Mochi.” The boy wiped his tears with the back of his dirty little hand.
Jase rubbed the bridge of his nose then looked at the men picking through the village. Rough and tough killers, every one of them. On some level, he wasn’t much better. He’d certainly seen and caused plenty of violence over the years. What on earth was he going to do with a kid? It’d be a miracle if his cover wasn’t blown and they both survived the day.
THE LAST LEG of the trek back to camp had exhausted the men. They sat around the beaten-up table in the kitchen at the back of the barracks half asleep, taking their last puffs of smoke, their last swigs of the homemade tequila that was being passed around. Night had settled on the jungle around them, thick and dark, exhaustion pulling them toward their bunks in the barracks.
“I need to talk to Alejandro,” Lucas said, and nodded toward Jase. “See if he’s up at the house.”
That got his attention and woke him up. A seal of approval. He’d never been sent up to the house before, not once since he’d joined Don Pedro’s empire of crime two months ago. But now it seemed he’d proven himself with the weeklong trek through the jungle and his assistance with the collection of debts.
Plus, he’d discovered the burned village—important intelligence. He’d fully gained Lucas’s trust at last, which brought him one step closer to Don Pedro himself, one step closer to crucial information on his operations and business associates.
He glanced at Mochi, who