Vice(24)
I consider leaving, just bolting from the house and taking Plato with me, but the man violently shakes his head when I make the suggestion. “We wouldn’t make it a hundred feet from the house. The forest’s full of booby traps. Fernando’s obsessed with hunting and trapping. He’d f*cking love to come back to the house later to find the two of us staked through on metal spikes. And believe me, that’s exactly what would happen. Plenty of people have tried to run before. And every single one of them has died.”
“Then what?”
“We stay here, and we wait.”
“No way. That * back there won’t wait long before he comes out and tries to rip my head from my body. Loitering here is just asking for it.”
Plato laughs a stony, cold laugh. “You don’t get it, man. No one apart from Ocho can come and go without being dealt the same hand. Player or Servicio, it doesn’t matter. Once you’re through the blue door, you do not leave. The players love the restriction most of the time. It feeds into their fantasies. They have an alpha pool running between them—who can own and dominate the most girls…or guys…while they’re trapped inside the room.” He looks away, rubbing his hand over his jaw. “Why did you do it, man? Why couldn’t you just leave well enough alone? Now you’ve probably gone and gotten us both killed. And for what? A newbie chick that’s probably getting f*cked by eight guys already now that she doesn’t have her sponsor in there to protect her?”
“That guy was not protecting her.”
“He was. If a guy brings a girl here and he’s sponsoring her, training her, then no one else can touch her. He might f*ck her. He might punish her if she doesn’t do what she’s told, but none of the other sick f*ckers in there can lay a finger on her. It’s one of Fernando’s laws.”
I just look at him. None of this is making any sense to me, but then again I’ve seen and heard plenty in my life that hasn’t made a lick of sense. It’s just…Fernando? Seriously? The guy I just met at the bunker was quiet and reserved. Nervous, almost. He didn’t seem like he’d have the mettle to feed a living, breathing human being to a pack of wolves, that’s for sure. What kind of guy has a room like this in his house, where his law is enough to keep grown ass men and women trembling behind an unlocked door?
Plato leans back against the wall, his bare skin resting against the plasterwork, and he sighs heavily. “This is highly inconvenient, y’know? I was planning on killing myself next week. I’ve been stashing toothpicks under a floorboard in my room. I was going to swallow them and eviscerate myself from the inside out. Now all of my scheming is totally wasted. ”
“Evisceration is any better than being eaten?”
“I’m a selfish person, my friend. I don’t give anything without deeply resenting it. So yeah…another animal consuming my body really isn’t going to sit well with me.”
I consider asking him how that ties in with the fact that he’s constantly giving away a part of himself when he f*cks the people in the room we just left, but I decide that pointing this out isn’t going to help either one of us, so I button my lip. “Just go back inside, man,” I tell him. “I won’t say a word. Fernando will never know that you snuck out for five seconds.”
Plato pulls a face. “Of course he will. Look.” He points up at a small, white, inconspicuous camera that’s mounted high on the wall in front of us; it’s tiny, and exactly the same color as the paintwork, but I should have noticed it. It should have been the first thing I saw when I walked down here with Ocho, but I’m so spun out and turned around that it slipped my attention.
“Ahh.”
“There are five of them inside the room as well.” Plato waggles his eyebrows in an ironic fashion. “Fernando likes to keep an eye on things from his office. Wherever he is right now, he already knows about this. It’s too late. So heading back inside is pointless. It’ll only make him madder. Better to stay here and hope he’s in a good mood when he gets back.”
Natalia said as much when we were on our way to meet him earlier—that he was in a good mood. Hopefully this incident won’t sour that. I’m not holding my breath, though. I’ve had a lot of experience with cartel bosses, and I can’t say any of them have ever taken kindly to me killing their guests.
Shit. This is going to be terrible.
I pull my cell phone out of my pocket. I could call the club. I’d only need to ask once, and Jamie would be on a plane in a heartbeat, bringing the full force of the Widow Makers MC along with him. I stare at the cell phone screen, trying to construct the request in my head:
I’m sorry, man. I f*cked up. Big time.
Hey, Jamie. I used your name to get into a cartel boss’s house, and then I killed someone. Now it looks like I’m gonna be fed to a bunch of wolves.
Hi, Jay. Remember when you said not to make a scene down here? Well…
I put my phone back into my pocket. How many times has Jamie put himself on the line for this? How many guns have been pointed at his head already? The answer is too many. I’m going to have to figure this one out on my own.
And if I can’t?
Well, then.
So be it.
******
It doesn’t take long for the head of the Villalobos cartel to show up. Plato tenses at the sound of tires crunching on gravel, and then he turns white as an over-bleached sheet when the front door of the building opens and the sound of people arguing floats up to us on the second floor.