The chamber was brightly lit, with metallic siding and a tiled floor. But the compelling imagery that stood out was the single, well-dressed Mexican gangster in the back, facing us with a highly reflective revolver in his hand.

More compelling were the three white girls he was pointing the gun at… They sluggishly glanced up at us as we entered the room, clearly doped up out of their goddamn minds.

The cheerleaders!

“Arturo Alvarez,” Hunter replied coolly as he held his pistol high. “If I’d known I’d have the treat of seeing your pretty face again, well… I’d have sprung for a nicer gun.”

“It’s… it’s you,” the cartel leader muttered in disbelief. His face curled into one of undying rage. “You, after all these years… oh, amigo, how I have longed to put a bullet between your eyes after you killed my cousin!”

“Your cousin struck first. He tried to sell my sister into sexual slavery,” Hunter replied with gritted teeth. “As far as I’m concerned… the man got what was coming to him.”

“Who is this guy?” I asked.

“Arturo Alvarez is one of the most dangerous men in Víboras Verde,” Hunter replied, his eyes glued to our adversary. “Doesn’t surprise me that you’re heading up the kidnappings side of things here… although that’s a little disappointing, all things considered.”

“And why’s that?” He laughed. “You were so happy to see me again, you white demon…”

“There are much fouler cockroaches in this organization than this fucker,” Hunter answered, verbally knocking Arturo down a couple of notches. “You are horseshit in comparison to what I’ve seen.”

Our enemy bristled with irritation. “Horseshit, amigo? You think that I’m nothing? I’ve come a long way since we’ve last seen each other, pendejo… don’t underestimate me.”

“If you’re the guy in charge here then your cartel just might survive my little midnight ride,” Hunter replied. “Which is a damned shame. I was hoping to find someone worth my time…”

Arturo bristled with anger again. “The others aren’t needed to deal with you.”

Hunter remained unfazed, but he lowered his voice to address me. “Víboras Verde is led by a vicious inner circle known only as The Brothers. This leadership is a union of four close friends, bound by spilt blood and heinous crimes… and eight years ago, I killed one of them.”

“The one who took your sister?”

“Not exactly… but the one who oversaw their kidnapping operations,” Hunter explained. “That leaves three Brothers left to put in the ground. I’m stuck with the runt of the litter here… this guy is nothing compared to the others.”

I realized quickly what Hunter was doing. He was egging Arturo on… Trying to get him to make a mistake.

“Nothing?” Arturo demanded. “You think that I am nothing? We are equals, the three of us are equals, you stupid motherfucker!”

I expected Hunter to chuckle, but he regarded Arturo Alvarez with something akin to pity. “You were always the weakest link… weaker than the one I’ve already put in the ground. Arturo, you will always be in their shadow. Why else would they send you so far from home? They put you in my fucking backyard for a reason Arturo.”

Arturo moved slowly, pressing his gun against the nearest cheerleader’s head. “I will never be in their shadow.”

His hostage mumbled incoherently, still trapped in her drug-fueled daze. I had to do something. We were trapped in our standoff, and Arturo was about to splatter her brains against the wall as a final act of defiance…

“Drop the gun,” I demanded.

Arturo’s smile faded.

“You would have me kill this girl?” He demanded, shaking her shoulder as he held his pistol to her head. “I’ll put a bullet in her skull…”

“And you’ll join your friends in hell,” Hunter said, his arm steady as a rock as he kept the barrel of his gun carefully trained on Arturo.

“If you were going to kill me, you’d have already done it,” Arturo replied, the edge of his lip curling upward. “You want something from me, don’t you pendejo?”

Hunter took a step forward. “The Brothers have been playing you. They put you here to get my attention and they knew one of us would end up dead… So yeah… I want something from you.”

Arturo glared at us.

“Spit it out white devil.”

“I want your brothers,” Hunter replied coldly. “You give them to me and I’ll let you walk out of here alive.”

“You want my blood? You want my family?” Arturo asked furiously.

“I want the men who sent you here to die,” Hunter replied as Arturo moved behind the cheerleader, placing her between the two of them like a makeshift shield.

“I’m walking out of here with this bitch… You touch me and I kill her.”

“You’re not leaving this room with that girl Arturo. You can die here now, or you can tell me what I want to know…”

“And why should I believe you?”

“Because you’re dead if you don’t, and that pretty little thing you’re holding isn’t going to stop a goddamned magnum from punching a hole straight through your sorry ass.”

“If I accept… I have your word that I leave here alive?”

Arturo hesitated. I watched as the cheerleader he was holding up floated on the edge of consciousness, her head rolling slightly to the side. It fell forward, and he shifted her body just slightly, the barrel of his gun moving ever so slightly away from her face.

And a shot rang out.

My glock kicked upward, a single cartridge skittering off the floor to my side.

Arturo fired, a round bouncing harmlessly off the roof and sending a shower of concrete flakes across the room. There was no further movement as he crumpled to the floor, taking the cheerleader with him.

My eyes were on Hunter in a heartbeat.

“What the fuck? Why?!” Hunter snarled. “He was surrendering! He could have helped us destroy the entire fucking cartel!”

Hunter walked over to Arturo Alvarez and kicked the gun from his hand.

“And the second you let your guard down, he’d have taken your head off with that holdout up his sleeve,” I replied, nodding to the body. Hunter reached down and pulled the sleeve back, exposing the little silver nine millimeter.

“He was never going to take the offer,” I said.

“We haven’t destroyed the real men in charge Sarah. They’ll keep coming back if I can’t stop the other brothers…”

I wasn’t listening. My ears were still ringing from the gunshots, but my eyes were trained on the wall behind Arturo… And the small scratches on the floor.

“I wonder,” I murmured, walking past Hunter.

“Hmm?” He glanced over. “Do you have something, Sarah?”

I lifted the butt of my gun. With a steady whack, I hammered it into the back wall.

“What is it?” He asked curiously, rising to his feet and leaning near me.

I smacked the wall again.

“Do you hear that, Hunter?”

He tilted his head curiously, gazing between the wall and me. “No. What are you doing?”

“I noticed something when Arturo dropped,” I noted. “This floor isn’t connected to the back wall.”

Hunter’s eyes flared wide open, and he grabbed the gun from me. With a quick swing, he bashed the wall again. At the reverberating sound, a sly smile crossed his lips.

“Detective, you’re a genius,” he chuckled…

“He was guarding something in here,” I realized, pressing against the wall and feeling the click of a latch.

A few bikers had filed in behind us, and they started helping Hunter pull the shelves away from the wall, exposing the wide doorway.

“Well, look at that,” Hunter grinned, turning back to his fallen adversary. “You were holding out on me? That’s no way to treat a friend…”

With his pistol held high, he pushed the door open. I backed him up, my glock at the ready. Fumbling along outside the doorway for a light switch, I felt a slight bump beneath my fingertips. With a quick glance at the biker president, I flicked the switch on and doused the room in light.

It was surprising how similar Arturo’s secret chamber was to Hunter’s war room. Dominated by a large table in the middle, with no windows and little in the way of décor, the walls and tabletop were covered in maps, diagrams, and notes – all scribbled in Spanish.

The men around us seemed more interested in the huge stacks of hundred dollar bills piled neatly against the far wall.

“What is this?” I asked aloud.

Hunter surveyed the area. “No idea…” He lifted a few pages up, gazing at the scribbled text, and his gaze drifted across a couple of maps of Mexico.

“This looks too important to leave behind,” I commented. I noticed how conspicuous red marks were chiseled into the maps, highlighting what appeared to be areas of interest.

Hunter’s gaze met mine, and he nodded in agreement. “It does. We’re going to have to take this all and have it translated back in El Paso. We could have stumbled across something pretty good here…”

As if drawn like moths to the flame, more and more of the Outlaws were pouring into the room, carting out armloads of money as we studied the table. I pulled out my phone and snapped some pictures of the arrangement. “Just in case the positioning matters,” I mentioned offhandedly to him.

“Good thinking,” Hunter nodded with a sly smile.

“I’d like to think you love me for more than just my body,” I told him, laughing. “Now let’s go ahead and round up the kidnap victims and get the fuck out of here before it’s too late.”

“Anything you say, Detective…” Hunter replied, pulling me into a deep and heavy kiss.