“But why did you go to Mexico?”

“To murder a bunch of cartel assholes.” Now Letitia smiles and leans forward. I can see the cop in her eyes. I get the feeling that she’s very good at her job.

“You don’t need to tell us if you don’t want to,” Peter says.

“So glad to have your permission. We were talking about enemies.”

“Have you heard the name Jacqueline Sastre?” Chu says. Shit. Now it starts to make sense.

“La Niña Quemada,” I say. “Yeah. I heard about her in Mexico. She kills a lot of people. She’s really good at it.”

Chapter 9

“Jacqueline Sastre’s a high priced sicaria, an assassin, for the cartels,” I say. “They call her The Burning Girl, La Niña Quemada. She’s very good at what she does. She’ll do the beheadings, the sniper attacks, garroting, whatever. But she really likes to set people on fire. Last I heard she was working for Cartel del Golfo.”

I also heard that she’s a demon or a Bruja, but I’m doubtful. The Federales can’t catch her because the ones who aren’t corrupt are incompetent as fuck. They named her after a couple dozen burnings and the demon/Bruja story stuck.

Chu manifests a thick manila folder in the air in front of him. It glides over to my side of the table and I have a really hard time not rolling my eyes. Dude. Just use your fucking hands.

I open the folder to a series of reports and photos from various agencies and police departments in Mexico and the U.S. In the most recent photos, she’s a bottle-blond, light-skinned Latina, tall, with dancer’s legs and model looks. She’s been at this job for only a few years as far as anyone has evidence. They say she started as some narco’s girlfriend, and when he wouldn’t kill the snitch his betters told him to, she picked up a gun and put two in the snitch’s head herself. Then she put two in her boyfriend.

From that point on, the story goes, she gets plenty of work. Young, pretty, charming, ruthless. For a while she specialized in killing cartel rivals in what you’d think are safe places, their homes, their clubs, their beds. Nobody checks you for weapons if they know you’re blowing the boss.

The photos show the progression of both her career and her inevitable jump off the deep end. Cartel violence is brutal, cruel, and messy, but she really cranks it up to eleven.

I’ve seen worse than what’s in these photos, but man, this is some harsh shit. Beheaded bodies hanging from meat hooks off freeway signs, coolers filled with body parts, severed heads with the victims’ genitals stuffed in their mouths.