He brought up the freeze-frame image to full size on the monitor. All twelve screens disappeared but one. Munoz stared at the face captured in the still shot. And he was shocked to recognize the person in it.
The woman who had come into the police department early that morning was now staring back at him. The security camera up above the DJ's turntable captured the face of Daphne Nighthawk.
He called a number and waited. Raphael Fuentes answered. Strange, because he had always been in the backdrop, hiding in his father's shadow. Munoz hadn't had many dealings with Raphael, and in the few times he did, it was never over matters of security.
"I needed to speak to your father."
"I'm handling this now," Raphael said.
"Then you have a problem."
"What is it?"
"It's not a what. It's a who," he continued to look at the woman on the screen. "The Nighthawk woman burned down the club. All five girls are gone."
"I'll handle it.”
"Allow me."
"I'll be in touch." Rafael ended the call.
Munoz put the phone away and spent the next several minutes tracking the Nighthawk woman on her skillful rescue mission. He watched the pole camera capture the departing black van as it sped away into the night away from Nogales.
Munoz wasn't sure where she was headed. But he was sure a whole ton of trouble was heading her way. And he hoped to be a part of it.
Nineteen
Raphael turned to his father, who was taking the first sips of his favorite brandy. It was all he permitted himself to drink after midnight. He said it left him with a clear mind in the morning. Rafael never saw the logic. It never bothered him before, but since the murder of his mother, everything his father did only further fueled the hatred Raphael felt for the man.
"Problem?"
"Daphne Nighthawk. The woman Munoz called us about just burned down the nightclub and freed five of our girls." Money and property were two things Rafael's father took very seriously. Raphael watched the ripple of anger pass across his father’s brow at hearing the news.
Hector set his drink down and looked at his son. He was quiet, his reserved thoughts never permeating his facial expression.
"I think it's time for Juan Carlos and his men to take over." His father's native tongue always took on a lyrical note when he was pensive, as he was now.
"We need to think about this carefully. Having Juan Carlos hunt her down and kill her could possibly do more harm than good."
"Go on." His father raised a brow.
"Sometimes the heavy hand is not the way. Sometimes a more delicate approach may be advantageous."
"Delicate? Like a flower? Would you like to invite the Nighthawk woman to dinner so we could discuss her decision to burn down one of our nightclubs and steal five of our whores?" Juan Carlos Moreno strutted into the immaculate barroom in the west wing of the Fuentes palace in the desert. The room, designed to comfortably seat twenty people, felt empty with only three.
Juan Carlos was the only man Hector allowed to speak to Rafael in such a way. Not that he took advantage and abused that privilege, but the smug look on his face as Juan passed by and greeted Hector sure looked like he enjoyed it when he did. Rafael never offered a response to his father's top enforcer and personal bodyguard. Not out of respect, but out of pure, unadulterated fear.
Juan Carlos Moreno, a vicious man with a short temper, was feared by any who crossed him long before he ever came to work for Rafael's father. His reputation for the ruthlessness with which he dispatched his enemies grew by exponential leaps and bounds once he became head of security for the Fuentes Cartel. Moreno executed his orders with precision and violence, carrying out a variety of unsavory tasks for the family, and to this day, had yet to fail in that regard.
Rafael had borne firsthand witness to Moreno's ruthless delivery of his father's orders. The blood on the thick-necked man's hands could fill buckets. He was, in Rafael's opinion, the scariest man on the planet. Raphael hated any moment spent in Moreno’s presence. Seeing Juan’s face reminded Rafael of his tenth birthday, a memory he'd spent the years since trying to erase.
The scar rode down along Moreno's face at an odd angle, beginning at the top right side of his head two inches into his hairline, then spreading across his forehead until it stopped abruptly in the center of his left eyebrow. The day he received it etched a scar of equal size and proportion on the young Rafael's mind. He still felt its tingle as he recalled the memory of that horrible day.
On the morning of his tenth birthday, Rafael's father had the family barber come to the house for a grooming of all the Fuentes men, including Hector. Hector believed then, as he did now, certain events dictated perfection. Celebrating one's birth fell into that category, as did funerals. Maybe that's why the sight of Moreno now had triggered his memory. Rafael absently played with a curled tuft of his black hair. His mother's burial was in three days.
When the barber came, Rafael remembered excitedly waiting for a fresh haircut. As a kid, it wasn't the haircut he was excited about, but one of the few times he was guaranteed to spend time with his father. Up until the morning of his tenth birthday, it had been one of his most revered memories. Even the memory of preceding birthday mornings with the family barber were tainted in the darkness of that day.
Unbeknownst to Rafael’s father, the barber, Gerardo Guzman, who’d been grooming the family for nearly twenty years, had been extorted by a rival cartel. They took his grandson as leverage. None of that mattered anymore. Anybody who was even remotely involved had been later hunted down and killed. Most at the hand of Moreno himself.
This was the day Raphael Alejandro Fuentes decided he would never grow up to be like his father. It was the wish he never told anyone, even his mother, when he blew out his birthday candles later that day.
Down the hall from the bar where the three men currently convened was the barber shop. His home had a two-chair barbershop built inside. Immaculate as it was, it was nothing compared to his mother's spa nestled against one of their three pools. Some days Rafael swore he could still see the blood stain on the barber shop’s tile floor.
His father had been reclined in the soft brown leather of the barber chair with a warm, moist towel draped over his eyes. Rafael used to love the smell of the barber's foam. The fresh clean scent overwhelmed the air. He remembered watching his father in the chair and longing for the day when he could receive his first shave.
Guzman ran the length of the blade against the sharpening strap as he always did. Rafael used to love the thwack and swoosh sounds steel made against worn leather. He pictured the next moment with reverence. The image of Guzman's stoic face and sad eyes as he stood behind Rafael's father’s foam-covered, exposed throat while holding the razor-sharp edge against the edge of his neckline. The image had come to symbolize a line of departure in which the course of his life was changed forever.
Moreno spent most of his life around death. Rafael had given much thought to what he’d witnessed that day and came to this conclusion. Moreno's experience enabled him to see in a way that few others could. Only a killer can recognize another by the look in their eyes. Moreno was as lethal as they come and saw a glimmer of himself that day in the sad eyes of the barber. But Guzman lacked the killer instinct. And Moreno could smell it on him.