Page 161 of Frisco

When he kissed me.

When he claimed me.

When he defended me to Foley.

They all knew, and that was a truly shitty feeling.

But was I different because I hadn’t told Claudia? Because I already knew that when we got the call that he was knifed in prison, and was dead, that I wasn’t going to tell her the real reason behind it? I already knew I wasn’t. And in my mind, there was only one thing I could do that would make any of this worth it. One thing that would appease my soul.

So because of that, I kept quiet and I stayed in the background, and I watched.

In a way, it was anticlimactic. The road getting here was the most harrowing, with all the pitfalls and realizations but I guess it was fitting.

Marco Estrada was just a man. He may run a cartel and he may have his men to take over as a backup, but he was still just a man. I didn’t know if he loved. If he had a woman, or women? Or a man? If he had children? Or parents? Or siblings? A part of me wanted to think he was soulless. He cared for no one, but himself. It was a guarantee that he was narcissistic. Who could run a cartel and not be a narcissist? The lack of caring? Empathy? Being so ruthless? That person must’ve been hard inside themselves when they were first born, or were raised in a world where you killed or were killed?

It was all that made sense to me.

The Red Demons had separated into three groups.

A third went down the road by a mile. Another third went ahead. I went where Shane went because in the end, it’d be him with Estrada. Felt that’s how it was going to play out, all the way down to my bones. He was with the middle section.

Five trucks were driving down a gravel road. They’d pulled off a main highway and were weaving through the hills to where we were. I was watching with the same binoculars as the caravan of trucks were speeding when suddenly an explosion went off by the road.

It cut off the last two trucks from the rest, but because they were dickheads, they went even faster. They left those two trucks behind, and a barrage of gunshots rang out. I could see as the Red Demons were moving in from the top of the hills, shooting down into those two trucks.

Boom!

Another explosion, and this time the front two trucks had been separated from the middle truck. The explosion caused a whole crater in the road so the middle truck literally couldn’t go forward. One of the trucks had been upended by the explosion. Men were starting to crawl out through the windows, but like the last two trucks, they were under fire.

So much death.

It was all senseless. Every one of them. But I wasn’t doing anything to stop it, nor did I want to.

What did that say about me?

The middle truck reversed fast.

There was a crater in front, one behind. They had nowhere to go, so they went into the ditch. That didn’t last long because we were in the middle of a forest. I wouldn’t have believed it myself if I wasn’t here, but we were. Desert. Cliffs. And trees everywhere.

The truck crashed, which was a given by now. The driver was panicked, and he looked like he was tossed out.

The guys that I stood with, they raised their guns and they lit into him.

He was dead. I was certain.

I noticed movement in Shane’s direction and saw he was pulling on that same white hockey mask as before.

Then I was distracted as I heard more gunfire.

They threw another guy out from the truck. Same result.

I wasn’t understanding the logic, but suddenly there was an explosion on the other side of the truck.

Now I got it, or I got the Red Demons’ logic.

There was nowhere to go.

They began moving down, converging like they had at the other house, and I went with them so I guess ‘we’ were converging.