“Jimmy’ll be staying at your place while you’re gone?”
“Yeah,” I replied. “He and Naomi will be out later this morning and staying on permanently.”
“I’d heard she was moving out of her apartment.”
“Hope they don’t get too wild,” I said with a half grin.
“Jimmy could never be as much a pain as Tru,” he said with a laugh.
Trufant was Mac’s first mate. He was a lanky Louisiana Cajun with a mouthful of pearly whites you could see from a mile away. The man had a penchant for finding trouble. And crazy women.
“Where is Tru?” I asked. “Not like him to miss work.”
“He called and said he was running late,” Mac replied. “After an hour, I figured it’d be faster for me to go to him.”
“Ah, one of those situations.”
“Some girl he and Pamela met at Burdines last night.”
“Well, be careful out there,” I said, starting the engine.
“You do the same,” he replied, pushing the bow toward the channel.
I put the engine in gear and idled toward the flats south of the channel until we were far enough away.
“Hang on,” I told Alberto. “We need to be moving fast to get across the sandbar.”
He leaned forward and grabbed the rail on the starboard side of the console as I pushed the throttle forward.
The little boat leapt up onto the surface of the water and we skimmed across the shallow sandbar with no more than eight inches of the lower unit in the water. I glanced over at Alberto.
The grin on his face said it all.
An old Chevy crunched across the gravel and came to a stop beside its modern cousin. It was still dark but would be light soon. The white, 1964 Bel Air sat incredibly low on hydraulic suspension—a lowrider. The system had a leak and during the drive from Fort Myers, the car had settled lower and lower, until finally, it was almost scraping the gravel in the parking lot.
Manuel “Bones” Bonilla had been to the warehouse only once before, just over a year earlier, but he was certain he was in the right place. By the door, a beefy-looking Hispanic man leaned back in a chair on two legs. That was a good indication. As was the SUV Bones had parked next to.
As Bones got out of the car, the man in the chair rocked forward onto all four legs and stood. “We heard you was dead, Bones.”
Lifting his shirt, Bonilla revealed a large bandage on his lower left shoulder, as well as many gang tattoos. “An inch lower and I would have been.” He glanced over at the Cadillac Escalade beside his old Chevy. “Is the jefe here?”
“Yeah, man, yeah.” The guard opened the door and nodded to another man sitting behind a desk just inside the outer office. “Bones is here, Julio,” he announced. “Wants to see the boss.”
Bones stepped past the guard and entered the warehouse’s reception area. Julio Mendoza rose from behind the desk and stared, slack-jawed.
“I need to talk to Carlos,” Bones said.
“We heard you got shot.”
“I did,” Bones replied. “But I ain’t dead.”
“Hang on,” Julio said, picking up the desk phone’s handset and pushing a button. “Bones is here, jefe.” After a moment he said, “Si,” and hung up the phone.
“Go on back,” Julio said. “He’s questioning a puta negra we had brought here from Fort Myers.”
Bones walked down the corridor to the last door and knocked.
“Entra,” he heard Santiago say from inside.
He turned the knob and stepped into the private office. Santiago was standing over a black woman who was practically naked and bleeding from several wounds to her torso—razor cuts—one of MS-13’s favored methods for extracting information from rival gang members or police informants. Her face was a swollen mess from a beating.
“They said you were killed in the shootings,” Santiago said, coming toward him.
Once more, Bones lifted his shirt. “Shot twice, jefe.” He puffed his chest up. “But it wasn’t enough.”
The two men shook hands and Santiago waved him toward a chair beside the injured woman. Santiago’s personal bodyguard stood on the other side of her.
Bones sat down, ignoring the woman in the next chair. He’d seen, and done, much worse. The woman was alive, but he knew she wouldn’t be for much longer. She wouldn’t die from the injuries she’d received; Santiago could keep someone alive and experiencing more pain for a long time.
Santiago went around his desk and sat down. “Tell me what happened.”
“I was with Razor,” Bones said. “This crazy Indian and a woman, with probably three others with them, busted in. Diego and Esteban are both dead. So is Razor. I barely got out alive.”
“Yes, we heard.” He nodded toward the woman. “And now we know the name of one of the people who was a part of it.”
“The woman who rounded up all the putas?” Bones asked, amazed that Santiago had found out so fast.
“Woman?” His eyes cut to the bloody girl sitting next to Bones. “She said it was a white man named Jesse McDermitt.”
Bones nodded, putting what he’d learned on his own together with what Santiago had just told him.
“I learned from two sources that a white man picked them up, but it was a woman named Savannah, talking to them with one of those Bluetooth things.” He twirled a finger around his ear. “She was the one who talked them into checking into rehab. The Lake Boyz shootings happened later that night. I found one of them still alive, just before the cops got there, and he described the same man who’d picked up the girls.”
Santiago sat back in his chair and thought for a moment.
“They were a team, this McDermitt and the woman,” he finally said. “And they had others.”
“Si, jefe,” Bones said. “From what I learned, they hit three Lake Boyz locations at once, not long after they hit Diego.”
“So, this crazy Indian was a part of their gang? Someone new trying to take over
