The Cocaine Princess Part 5 (Cocaine Princess Series #5)(19)

Blake mulled over Nona’s wise words for a long moment as he came upon an open stretch of highway and accelerated up from eighty to a hundred and seventy miles-per-hour. Then he slowed down and turned onto an off-ramp that led him into his hometown—Michigan City, Indiana; the city where he had met and fell in love with not only the dope game, but also Alexus Costilla.

“You got a sexy-ass voice, you know that?” He said, flicking the blunt out his window.

“I know,” Nona cockily retorted. “I got some sexy faces, too.”

“Sexy faces?”

“Sex faces. And I can do magic with this *.”

Blake chuckled. “I’ll holla atchoo later, li’l momma,” he said, and hung up.





Chapter 13

Six Costilla’s were seated around the long oak conference table. Juan “Papi” Costilla; his younger brother, Flako Costilla; Flako’s three adult children, Antoney, Pedro and Isabella; and Santiago Costilla, the son of soon-to-be-released Jennifer Costilla. All of them were clad like elite Wall Street bankers, in expensive navy blue suits. They were in a conference room on Papi’s six-hundred-million-dollar yacht in Mazatlán, Mexico. Their eyes were glued to a seventy-inch, wall-mounted computer monitor that showed Alexus from the neck up as she sat in front of her own computer inside her Chicago home.

Papi leaned forward and asked Alexus, “How do you feel about the Zeta and Sinaloa cartels encroaching on our territory?”

“I didn’t know they were,” she replied, signaling for a Mexican butler to fetch her a bottle of water. “However, if either of them are found to have soldiers in Matamoras, I say we take out as many of their head guys as physically possible.”

“Get to that later,” said Flako. Like his three children, he was short and corpulent. Alexus always said he looked like an overweight George Lopez. Taking a puff from his Cuban cigar, he added, “We should be talking about that missing uranium and what that could mean to our entire operation. The CIA’s already shut down our tunnel. We’re lucky it wasn’t the FBI, or else we’d all be in prison by now.”

“Jenny didn’t steal that uranium,” Papi said. “She has no knowledge of how to build a nuclear weapon, and we would know if she had paid a scientist or a nuclear physicist to build one for her. The only reason she was in Germany is because she was on the FBI’s top-ten most wanted list in the States.”

Alexus tossed her head back and laughed. “Papi, you cannot be serious. Aunt Jenny was involved with the world’s most dangerous terrorist group, for Christ’s sake.”

“And what’s that supposed to mean?” Santiago snapped; jumping to his mother’s defense. He was also short and chubby, though nowhere near as heavy as Flako and his children.

“You know exactly what it means,” Alexus shot back. “She had those al Qaeda militants hijack that plane in Miami and crash it into my beach house, had the whole country on high alert. Then she was captured inside the compound of the world’s most wanted terrorist. That gives us good reason to be concerned about that uranium. She’s already tried to kill me and my mother several times; she set up Papi and Uncle Flako and had them sent to federal prison; and I’m pretty sure she had the waitress at that downtown restaurant poison my drink, the same drink that killed Granny Costilla. With that being said”—she rolled her white leather swivel chair closer to her white marble desk—“I believe we can all agree that she cannot be trusted.”

When no one spoke up, Papi lifted his razor-sharp, golden machete from beside his chair and laid it on the table next to his open briefcase. “Any of you familiar with the Yakuza?”

Pedro said, “Isn’t that, like, the Japanese mafia?”

“I guess you could say that,” said Papi. “The Yamaguchi-gumi branch of Yakuza is looking to purchase twenty-five hundred kilos of cocaine. They want it delivered to an airport in Kyoto, Japan. I’m charging them twenty grand a kilo. We also have shipment requests from other organizations in Iceland, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and the Netherlands.”

Alexus was already shaking her head in disagreement. “They’re all NATO members. Granny Costilla didn’t do business with them for that very reason. We don’t need to become an international drug cartel.”

“I’ve already cleared it through the CIA Director Bowden, and the governments in all those countries can’t wait for the first shipment to arrive. Our monthly revenue will go up to eight or nine billion. We’ll be as rich as the Walton Family in no time.”

“Question,” Antoney said, raising his hand. “Why would those governments want illegal drugs in their countries? That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

The Mexican butler returned with two bottles of ice-cold water on a solid gold serving tray. Alexus grabbed one of the bottles, opened it, and gulped down half of it while Papi answered Antoney’s inquiry.

“You see,” Papi began, “the governments of First World countries are steadfast capitalists. They capitalize off just about every human in their countries. Now, since slavery is generally looked down on these days, the only way to pay men and women twenty cents an hour for strenuous labor is to imprison them and strip them of their rights. So they entice their prey with drugs, arrest them for dealing the drugs, then put them to work, paying their victims slave wages for producing products for billion-dollar companies. Strategic capitalism at its best.”