The first was a gunmetal-gray Suburban with tinted windows, big tires, and an even bigger engine. Eddy could hear it rumbling outside his trailer as it practically rolled right up to his front door—damn near through it—its big hood nudging the wooden steps. It sat there idling as the second vehicle pulled alongside it: a black Charger with equally dark windows. Now, that was a damn beautiful car, and Eddy knew by its own deep-throated hum it was a Hemi, big sucker, fast enough to escape gravity if it had to. That black Charger drank the morning light, and if a car could look mean, that one sure did, like it’d whip your ass and steal your money and fuck your girlfriend.

Eddy didn’t want to go out and meet his visitors and possibly get shot in the face, so he watched them from behind his blinds, turning over his options. He didn’t recognize the four men getting out of the Suburban, but he knew the type: nice jeans, boots, baseball hats, rolled-up shirtsleeves revealing taut arms, a few tattoos here and there. They had mostly short haircuts, and they were all pulling identical black bags out of the Suburban.

Heavy black bags. Like body bags, like these jokers were headed off to war.

Soldiers.

Or more likely, cops.

He did recognize the lone man who got out of the Charger. Eddy had seen him only a couple of times in person, once here at the trailer, the other times at a shitty bar in Rosenfeld where neither of them would be known. At those two meetings, he hadn’t driven that Charger, but it was the same guy.

Same haircut, same sunglasses. Same goddamn matchstick in his mouth.

Apache.

It had never occurred to him that Apache—the cold-blooded motherfucker who’d hired Eddy to meet his drug mules crossing the river—might be a cop. He’d always assumed he was just another cartel guy, a real narco, which was bad enough.

But if he was an honest-to-god, badge-carrying cop, that was infinitely worse.

—

THEY MADE THEMSELVES AT HOME, dumping their bags and checking every nook and cranny of his trailer. They told him to sit the fuck down in his ratty chair, not move an inch, and the one called Ortiz—slimmer than the others, with a high and tight crew cut—kept a gun trained on him. Eddy could practically smell the piss on this one, figuring he was the newest, or youngest. The guy didn’t want to look at him, not at all, and that worried Eddy even more—like if Eddy coughed, the guy might freak out and shoot him by accident. So he sat quietly with his hands in his lap, as if he’d been called to the principal’s office. That got Eddy thinking about how he’d never finished high school, and maybe if he had, his life could have been different.