Black Onyx Read Online Free Page B

had bought it from the man anyway and had given it to Dillon. To always remember the trip by. Dillon pulled it out of his pocket and looked at it. James didn’t know he carried it around with him.
    Dillon took out his cell phone and texted Henry:
    I’m in

6
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
     
    El Sacerdote woke and looked to the sunshine coming through the skylight. He watched white clouds drift and morph before him. An arm was laid across his chest, connected to the nude body of the model he had slept with last night. She was nineteen and beautiful and psychologically a mess, the way he liked them.
    He rose and walked out to his balcony and looked over the city, his city. Juarez had been where he had grown up. His father was a bus driver, an honest man who did his best to provide for his wife and newborn son. His mother, Maria, had been a chef before he was born and every night their meals consisted of the best foods they could afford, which wasn’t much. He remembered the summers where he and his mother would cultivate the little garden in the back of their one-room house so that they could have more variety in their dinners.
    El Sacerdote had been happy as a child, he remembered. But at around six years old, things began to change. He was at school one day and the boy next to him was drawing. He could hear the markings of the graphite on the paper and it sounded like nails on a chalkboard. It seemed to entomb itself into him, into his very bones, and El Sacerdote calmly stood, took the pencil, and buried it into the child’s eye. Then he sat back down as if nothing had happened.
    There were no special programs for juveniles in Juarez at the time so he had been let off with a warning. But his father saw something change in him. He insisted that his son prepare for the priesthood, and from the time he was six he was taught Latin and scripture and the history of the church. This was the time when he had been given the name El Sacerdote.
    But plans had changed. A fire had taken the lives of both of his parents and, at twelve, El Sacerdote sat on the steps across the street and watched the house burn with his parents inside. The fire had been declared an accident, but the neighbors didn’t believe it had been an accident. From that time forward, El Sacerdote lived on the streets, learning the art of theft until he had earned enough of a reputation on the street, by killing a police officer in broad daylight, that he was entrusted with smuggling marijuana into El Paso.
    The boss at the time, Hernan Guzman, saw something in the young boy. He took him under his wing and began teaching him the business. How to outsource everything and build layers between himself and the men on the street. How to buy politicians and reward them handsomely, and how to use extreme violence to terrorize those that wouldn’t accept. “Maximum terror,” Guzman always told him, “was in killing the innocent. Killing the guilty rarely frightens people enough.”
    El Sacerdote became Guzman’s personal assistant, and, when he was only fifteen, his bodyguard. He had a reputation for being deadly with his two 9mm pistols and ruthless in the enforcement of his boss’ will. He murdered judges, police officers, border patrol agents, and, something Juarez had not seen yet, their families and friends. He even once murdered the dog of a judge that refused a bribe and forced the judge to eat it.
    Guzman began teaching him the intricacies and art of the drug trade. The true lessons that Guzman, until this point, had reserved only for his two sons. He believed that El Sacerdote would make a good counselor for his sons when they took over the business. But that never happened.
    At the young age of twenty-one, El Sacerdote had become head of the cartel. Guzman, and his two sons, had disappeared without a trace. El Sacerdote had told people that they had turned into informants and fled Mexico. No one questioned him.
    “What are you doing?” the woman