Traitor, The Read Online Free PDF

gave him a little shove, her arm
braced against his chest. "What kind of idiot reacts to an event hours
after the fact?"
    He smiled. "A normal kind of idiot." He picked up
another bandage and affixed it to her shin where a smaller abrasion had begun
to redden. Then he sat back to admire his handiwork. "There, I think you're
put back together again, Humpty."

 
     
    Chapter Six
     
    Diego Vargas stepped back from the dead body and wiped his
feet on the short grassy patch at the water's edge. "Fuck!" He leaned
over to peer at his shoes. "These loafers just came last week from Italy.
You want to know how much they cost me?"
    Gabriel Santos glanced up in carefully controlled irritation
from where he crouched over the man's body. The question was rhetorical, he
knew, but still a ridiculous comment when compared to the more serious problem
he knelt over – the bluish body lying on a black tarp.
    He eyed his boss's scowl and erased all emotion from his own
face. Santos had been an actor in the old days. Well, a stunt man at any rate.
But perhaps that was not the same thing. Perhaps he was no actor at all, but
had only the credentials to take and give a serious beating.
    The dead man lying naked before them had been an actor too,
an up-and-coming young star full of bright promise. At least, according to the
tabloids. He lay on his back, his lips a darker blue than the pale tinge of his
flesh, his muscled body glowing in the light from Santos' flashlight. Fresh
needle tracks marred his right arm, and his open eyes showed wide dilations of
black that nearly eclipsed the blue of the irises.
    Santos knew if the actor's so-called friends had called 911
at the onset of overdose, the naloxone cocktail the EMTs administered might
have saved his life. But paramedics and emergency room doctors asked too many
questions whose answers could not safely be scrutinized. So the young actor had
died with fatally low blood pressure, rattling respirations, and convulsion.
    It was an ugly death to behold.
    Apparently the dead actor was too estúpido to realize
the smack he'd just purchased at the Blue Mango Cocktail Lounge in Bakersfield
should be used sparingly. The China White was much purer than the black tar
heroin the gang-bangers schlepped over the border from México. A fraction of
the drug was enough to kill someone.
    As evidenced by the body before them.
    "¡Idiota de mierda! Fucking idiot. Such pure
smack is wasted on someone like this . " Diego shook his head and
spat toward the body.
    Santos sighed inwardly and shuttered his eyes. "DNA,"
he reminded, referring to the spit, although of course, the warning was too
late. Ay, sometimes he believed that Diego was the idiot. Spitting near
a dead body? Now Santos would have to dump the young actor's body somewhere
else to avoid any chance of El Vaquero's DNA being connected to the
overdose victim.
    Santos sighed again as he reached for the edges of the tarp
he'd used to transport the body. He wrapped it around the stiffening corpse,
hefted the slight weight onto his shoulders, and trudged toward the black sedan
parked in the breakdown lane at the top of the promontory. Diego strolled ahead
of him, fishing in the breast pocket of his jacket for a cigarette and
whistling a tuneless melody.
    Santos wondered yet again why he worked for such a man.
    On the drive to another dump site, Santos thought of the
beautiful face of Magdalena Vargas and knew exactly why he put up with a pig of
a man like Diego Vargas. He smiled to himself. It was true that El Vaquero paid
very well for the kind of services only Santos could deliver.
    But it was also true that the wife of Señor Vargas was worth
more than gold. What was it the Bible said? Her price was far above rubies.
    "Why do you grin like a jackass?" Diego complained
from the back seat. "A man's death is a funny event?"
    "Vaquero, I deal in death every day." Santos
shrugged philosophically. "If I did not find humor at such a time, when
would I