After I hung up the phone, I groaned loudly. It had been three weeks since I was able to attend the usual weekly dinner with my sisters, Montessa and Harley. It was the third time I had to cancel, and they were getting testy. Since our parents died, it had just been me and my sisters, and we almost always had dinner together once a week just to stay close. I was running out of excuses, and using work wasn’t going to fly for a whole lot longer, even if it was true.

They didn’t know what I did for a living. I’d been working for the DEA for ten years, and they still thought I went into some boring corporate office job every day. When I was away on assignments, they’d think that I was on a business trip. Most of my time away was short, but this case was dragging on. As smart as they both are, I was continuously shocked they never figured it out. Montessa was a big shot lawyer, and Harley, the youngest, was a computer game designer. We were all named after motorcycles. My parents had a thing for them, and ultimately, it was also what killed them. They died doing what they loved, riding, when a car cut them off and they crashed to their death together.

Maybe because they both had boyfriends, even if Montessa would never admit that her colleague was more than just a colleague, they never questioned me. They didn’t think to dig deeper into what I did. Harley could go for days without talking to anyone if she got into one of her games and she was writing code, so she wouldn’t have noticed if weeks had gone by without our usual dinner anyway. Her boyfriend, a Delta Force guy named “Coach” always looked out for her, which made my job as the big brother a lot easier. I used to worry about her often, particularly because she lived such a solitary life as a game coder. He never actually admitted he was Delta, but when I met his “friends”, it was pretty clear that he was special forces. It was nice feeling like I didn’t have to protect either of them as much as I did when we were younger, but I missed spending time with them, and they were starting to get pissy about the fact we hadn’t gotten together. I missed having a normal life; whatever “normal” means.

I never brought anyone to our dinners. I hadn’t met anyone I felt strong enough for; that was meaningful enough to introduce to my sisters. Hell, I didn’t even really date. I wouldn’t have even known where to begin. At thirty-eight years old, I was starting to feel like that ship had sailed, and even my sisters gave me shit for it. While they didn’t always bring their guys along for our dinners because it was our thing, just the three of us, occasionally they did. And it wasn’t lost on any of us that I never brought anyone to meet them.

That aside, this job could be fucking cool sometimes. After all, I got to take down the bad guys, and carry a gun just about everywhere. Cool shit like that. But times like these, I wished I did have a normal office job. I’d been undercover for six fucking months, and I was totally over it. Pretending to be someone else for that long required a lot of work. And it required hanging out with scumbags socially. I think that was the worst part.

Normally, I didn’t go under that long, but I was convinced that a huge shipment of drugs was going to come through at any moment, and then all the time I spent with these pieces of shit wouldn’t be a waste. Going undercover sounded way cooler than it actually was, especially when a case dragged on like this. In fact, if it weren’t for the fact that my brass was so busy with cases, they probably would’ve pulled me off this one long ago. I’m sure they wished they’d left it with intel and the Department of Homeland Security divisions now, with the way it was going - which was nowhere, it seemed. Still, I wasn’t willing to throw in the towel yet; I’d come too far, and had spent too much time getting close to people to just up and quit. I was sure that something was coming, and that it would be big.

We’d received some intel, back when this all began, that a pretty well known group of drug smugglers was going to be orchestrating a large shipment across the border. My job was to get in with the lower level-guys to find out who the players up the top were. Get the info on the shipment, and get out. Shouldn’t have been more than a two-week gig, tops. Unfortunately, the shipment didn’t happen, but the guys I’d come to know assured me that it was coming. The only real information I’d gained was that they reported to a guy named Diego, and after another few weeks, I’d finally had the opportunity to meet him.

As it turned out, this Diego guy was new on the scene, and was trying to take over an area that was historically run by another smuggler, Carpio. Now, Carpio was a name we knew over at the DEA, and we’d never been able to catch him. He somehow always managed to disappear into the wind whenever a case was closing in on him, as if he had his own informant. Which was always possible. Money makes people do some things they wouldn’t otherwise even consider.

Once I’d found out that Diego was trying to usurp Carpio’s territory, things started to get interesting; since the bravado of a drug lord if you will, is gigantic, to say the least. By working on Diego’s team, I’d hoped to be in the mix when the gangs went up against each other, which was almost a definite. It was just a matter of time.

The drugs generally came in from South America, made their way through Mexico, and then crossed the border. So, it stood to reason that Diego’s intent was to intercept Carpio’s delivery from Columbia or wherever it was coming from, and take over the border crossing aspect of the deal, securing himself as the new “go-to” guy for drugs coming in from that area. Originally, I assumed that we’d be bringing down Carpio, but the possibility of bringing down both kingpins was far too rich a reward to bail out after all this time.

Notoriously, the area across the border was rife with corruption, so it was impossible to tell the difference between the good guys and bad guys, so I had to assume everyone was a bad guy. My point of contact back at the home office was growing more frustrated with my reports, or lack there of, and I knew that if something didn’t happen soon, they were going to yank me off the case. I had to dig deeper and faster to put this thing to bed before they all slipped through our fingers.