“Now, that doesn’t sound nice,” Blake said. “I might have to wash your mouth out with soap, but first I’ll call Mendez and chat first. He might not think it’s worth cleaning up.” Blake reached for his phone, wondering why the hell Mendez wouldn’t tell him about a sideline operation, not overly surprised when the man answered on the first ring.

“This better be important,” Mendez growled, his tone as biting as Blake’s gun in Eduardo’s forehead.

“Are you running some sort of slave trade operation on the side you didn’t tell me about?”

“Why is this important?”

That would be a “yes”. Mendez knew about the women and just didn't tell him. He’d analyze why that felt so off later. “It’s important,” Blake replied, “because one of the girls told Kara she’d been contacted by the feds and that she was wearing a wire tonight. You all but got taken down. She saved everyone’s asses.”

“Kara,” he said flatly. “My secretary.”

“That’s right. The same one holding a gun to one of your men’s heads right now for being a pinche Mexican who almost destroyed you. We need to talk, Mendez. I’m going to deal with the problem this woman was about to cause and make her go away. Saving you from complete annihilation covers my contract. I won’t operate with half the facts. We re-negotiate or I’m done.”

Silence. “We should talk in person.”

Blake ground his teeth. “Let me think about that while I save your ass. I’ll get back to you.” Blake hung up, but didn’t drop his gun. “Mendez might know what you’re doing, but he has no patience for stupidity like what happened with these two women. I’m handling them. You go think about how you’re going to convince Mendez you should stay alive.” He let his gun drop and stepped back from the car. The windows of both sides of the car rolled up a moment before it pulled away.

Blake joined Kara to walk side by side toward the truck. “The son of a bitch knew about the women and didn’t tell me. He wants me to find out who’s skimming drugs from him by playing head of security and he tells me half the story.”

“I gathered that,” she said, “but we have another problem.”

“Of course we do.” They stopped at the hood of the truck.

“Juan works in the finance department at the corporate office. He’d have the means to doctor the reports Mendez gets on product moving in and out of the restaurants.”

“But you caught discrepancies. Wouldn’t he stop that from happening?”

“I intercepted the reports before they went to finance. My guess is I caught what he hadn’t had time to fix.”