St Kilda Consulting 01 - Always Time to Die

okay,” he said to Armando, mixing languages into a common border slang.
    Armando nodded and led his wife back into the warmth of the house.
    “ Los niños, how are they doing?” Armando asked, closing the door behind him.
    Lucia forced herself to act like everything was normal, because for Armando it was.
    “They are at the top of their classes, even with this awful flu,” she said. “Your brother and father will be very pleased.” She looked at her husband’s pale brown eyes and black hair. Threads of gray were showing in the thick natural waves. The life he’d chosen was a brutal one. It showed in the deep lines of his face. “Are you hungry?”
    “For your posole and carne asada, always.” The response came easily, in spite of the hangover that made Armando’s head feel like the soccer ball in a World Cup match.
    His cell phone rang. He pulled it out of his back pocket, read the incoming caller ID, and shooed his wife into the kitchen. When she couldn’t overhear anything, he answered the call.
    “Bueno.” He listened, started to answer in Spanish, and thought of the kids in the back room. To them, English was still a second, often difficult language. Much safer to use it right now than Spanish. “Listen to me, Chuy,” he said in a low voice. “You will cross the border at the usual spot at the usual time. All is in place. Mano is at the drop house in Las Trampas. When he okays the load, the money is wired to Aruba. Your jefe is told when it’s done. Savvy?”
    Chuy understood.
    Armando punched a button to end the call.
    Immediately the cell phone rang again.
    He looked at the incoming number, swore under his breath, and dodged the call. The cell phone was necessary for his business, but it was worse than a nagging wife. He set the signal to vibrate and shoved the unit into his back pocket. Now that he’d talked to Chuy, he didn’t have anything urgent to worry about until tonight, when the load would arrive.
    Armando went to see the children, treating his nephews as warmly as his own kids. All of them were pale, tired, and cranky. He took temperatures the old-fashioned way, cheek to cheek. Joking, teasing out smiles, he straightened blankets and let each child discover the sweets he’d hidden in various pockets.
    Lucia stood in the doorway, watching, smiling despite her fear each time Armando came home. It had been years since violence last exploded in the Sandoval smuggling trade, but Lucia would never forget the sight of Armando’s cousin and best friend bleeding on the floor of Armando’s house, dying with sixteen slugs in him. The miracle was that none of the children had been hit by the hail of bullets coming from the front yard.
    After that Lucia had moved into a separate house and had taken a job to support herself and their young child. To this day the sound of gunfire turned her stomach. She couldn’t make Armando change jobs, she wouldn’t divorce him, and she feared that someday he would be murdered in her house in front of the horrified eyes of his own children.
    Armando kissed and tickled the smallest child, a girl with her father’s eyes and her mother’s luminous skin. Then he stood, stretched wearily, and told himself he had to cut back on the homemade pulque and cocaine. The hangovers he’d thrown off with ease twenty years ago now hunted him throughout the day. Right now he should be sleeping at his luxurious condo in Taos, getting ready for the dangerous time when the heroin arrived and had to be repackaged for his distributors.
    But first he had to know what Dan Duran had been doing in his wife’s home on Monday night.
    He followed Lucia into the kitchen, saw the icy beer and hot soup waiting for him, and hoped his stomach was up to the job. He sat and ate a few tentative bites, then more eagerly. Even the beer tasted good. Maybe it was food rather than youth he needed. When his soup bowl was empty he turned to the carne asada. He ate the way he did everything, with speed and no subtlety.
    “More?” Lucia asked.
    He shook his head.
    She sat down next to him with a cup of coffee for herself and a smile for him.
    Armando ignored the cell phone vibrating against his butt. “Tell me who was here last night.”
    “Dan Duran and Ms. May.”
    “The old curandera’s historian?”
    Lucia nodded, not at all surprised that Armando knew who Carly was, much less that she’d been in the house. Armando’s business required that strangers were investigated instantly and