My Milf Conqueror System

The restaurant was called El Catrachito and it sat on a strip of NW 36th Street in Doral between a tire shop and a pawn store, the kind of place that served good food to people who didn't care about signs or ambiance because the food was cheap and the portions were large and nobody asked questions. Darius arrived at noon. Marcus parked across the street, engine running. Thirty minutes. Marcus could hold a number.

The restaurant was half full. Construction workers. Delivery drivers. Darius scanned the room in three seconds. Two exits. Front door, kitchen door. The man he was looking for sat in the back corner, alone, facing the door.

Victor Salazar was not what Darius expected. He was small. Five-seven, maybe five-eight, with a narrow frame and delicate hands and a face that belonged on a professor, not a supplier. He wore round wire-frame glasses and was reading a menu with the concentration of a man who took his food seriously. A plate of baleadas sat in front of him, half eaten. He looked up when Darius approached and smiled, and the smile was warm and genuine and completely at odds with what Darius knew the man did for a living.

"You must be Darius," Salazar said. "Sit. The baleadas are excellent. You should try them."

Darius sat. He didn't order. He looked at Salazar and Salazar looked at him and the looking was the first test, the way it always was. Two men sizing each other up across a table, each one deciding what the other was worth.

"Tito speaks highly of you," Salazar said.

"Tito speaks highly of everyone."

Salazar laughed. It was a light laugh, easy, the laugh of a man who enjoyed conversation. "Not everyone. Tito speaks highly of very few people. He spoke highly of you three times in one phone call, which, in Tito's economy of words, is practically a love letter."

"He told me you'd test me."

"I'm not testing you. I'm eating lunch. If I were testing you, you'd know." Salazar picked up a baleada and took a bite. He chewed slowly. He swallowed. He looked at Darius over his glasses. "Tell me about yourself."

"What do you want to know?"

"Who you are. Who you work for. How much you can move. The usual."

Darius had prepared for this. He'd spent two days shaping the answers, making sure each one was true enough to hold up and careful enough to protect. He didn't lie. Lies were liabilities. But he selected. He chose which truths to tell and which to hold, and the choosing was its own kind of honesty.

"I'm Darius King. I work for myself. I'm building an operation in the northwest. Hialeah Gardens, Miami Lakes. Small to start. I need product."

"Who's backing you?"

"I'm backing myself."

Salazar set down the baleada. He studied Darius the way a man studies a document, line by line. "A man who backs himself is either very rich, very confident, or very stupid. Which are you?"

"I'm careful."

"Careful is good. Careful survives. But careful doesn't move volume, and volume is what I sell. I need to know you can move what I give you. If product sits, it attracts attention. Attention attracts police. Police attract problems. I don't like problems."

"I can move it."

"How much?"

"Start small. Five kilos a week. Build from there."

Salazar raised an eyebrow. "Five kilos is a hobby, not an operation. The people I supply move twenty, thirty, fifty. Five kilos is a man selling to his friends."

"Five kilos is a start. In three months, I'll be at twenty. In six, I'll be at fifty. But I start at five because I start smart. I don't rush. I don't overreach. I build a customer base that's solid before I scale. You've seen what happens when men rush. They get sloppy. They get caught. They get visited by Rodriguez's people because they grew too fast and drew attention. I won't draw attention."

Salazar was quiet. He picked up his glass of water and drank. He set it down. He looked at Darius and the warmth was gone from his face, replaced by the thing underneath, the thing that did the business and made the calls and decided who lived and who didn't.

"You know about Rodriguez," Salazar said.

"I know she owns the coast. I know she doesn't allow competition. I know the last man who tried to set up outside her network ended up in a canal."

"And you're setting up outside her network."

"I'm setting up in the gaps. The territory she doesn't care about. The margins that are too thin for her people to bother with. I'm not competing with her. I'm filling space she's not using."

"And when she notices?"

"I'll deal with that when it happens."

Salazar studied him. The professor face was gone. The glasses were the same but the eyes behind them were different, calculating, measuring, the eyes of a man who'd been in this business for twenty years and had seen every kind of person who walked through his door. The desperate ones. The greedy ones. The ambitious ones. The dead ones.

"There's something you should know," Salazar said. "Rodriguez has been quiet lately. Unusually quiet. My contacts in Hialeah say she's been pulling her people closer, tightening her inner circle, reducing her external footprint. That means one of two things. Either she's consolidating because she's preparing for something, or she's contracting because something's threatening her. Either way, when a woman like Rodriguez goes quiet, the silence is louder than the noise."

"What do you think it means?"

"I think someone has her attention. And when Camila Rodriguez pays attention to something, that something disappears. So when you set up in the northwest, Darius, and you think you're invisible because you're small, remember that the woman who owns this city has eyes everywhere."

Darius absorbed this. Rodriguez was quiet. Rodriguez was tightening. The environment was changing, and a changing environment was both danger and opportunity.

"Are you telling me not to do this?" Darius said.

"I'm telling you to do it with your eyes open. I'll supply you. Five kilos to start. If you're at twenty in three months, we'll talk about expanding. If you're not, we'll talk about why. The price is market. Payment is cash. No credit. You pick up from a stash house in Pembroke Pines. Marcus, your driver, stays outside. He doesn't enter the stash house. He sees the parking lot and the road and that's it."

"You know about Marcus."

"I know about all four of you. Marcus Velez, driver. Nina Reyes, bookkeeper. Oscar Delgado, soldier. And you, Darius King, the man who used to stand behind Jake Hart and is now standing in front of his own operation." Salazar paused. "I know things, Darius. It's how I stay alive. The question is whether what I know makes me want to do business with you, and so far, the answer is yes. But yes is conditional. Yes lasts as long as you're smart, and the moment you stop being smart, yes becomes no, and no in this business doesn't mean we shake hands. It means I stop returning your calls."

Darius looked at him. Salazar looked back. The restaurant was emptying. It was just the two of them and the waitress and the sound of a Spanish soap opera from the kitchen.

"I'll be smart," Darius said.

"I believe you. Now eat something. The baleadas really are excellent."

Darius ordered. He ate. He and Salazar talked about logistics, pickup times, packaging, the practical details of moving product through a city watched by cameras and cops and the eyes of a woman who owned everything. Salazar was precise. Thorough. The kind of man who made you feel like business was a conversation and the rest of it, the product and the money and the violence, was somewhere else, behind a different door.

Darius walked out thirty minutes after he walked in. Marcus had the car running. Darius got in. Marcus pulled onto 36th Street.

"Well?" Marcus said.

"We have a supplier."

"That fast?"

"That fast."

Marcus drove. Darius sat in the passenger seat and looked out the window at Doral passing by, the ordinary world that existed on top of the other world the way a tablecloth covers a table, hiding it, making it look like something it wasn't.

Salazar had told him something important. Rodriguez was quiet. Rodriguez was tightening. Something had her attention. And Darius couldn't help but wonder if that something was Jake.

Jake, who was somewhere in Miami, doing whatever he was doing. Jake, who had asked Darius to build this without explanation, without reason, without anything but a word and a handshake and the trust that had held since the weight room.

Darius hoped Jake knew what he was doing. Because Darius was building something out here, brick by brick, and if Jake's operation and Darius's operation collided, the collision would be a detonation, and the shrapnel would hit everyone.

Darius called Jake from the car. The phone rang once.

"I have product," Darius said. "Five kilos a week. Starting this week."

"That's fast."

"That's what I do."

Jake was quiet. Then he said, "Be careful, Darius. Salazar talks to people, and people talk to Rodriguez. You're in her world now, even if you're in the gaps."

"I know."

"Do you? Because the gaps are only gaps until someone decides they're not. And Rodriguez decides everything."

Darius looked out the window. The city passed. The world was bright and loud and full of people who didn't know what was coming, living their lives on top of a table that covered something they'd never see.

"I know," Darius said. "I've been in her world since I took the job. I just didn't know it."

He hung up. Marcus drove. The body shop on 68th Street was waiting, and the product was coming, and the operation was real now, and real meant dangerous, and dangerous was the only world Darius had ever lived in.

The gap was his. For now.