To Love and Die (18+)

Chapter Five

Good things never happen to good people.

Meli was convinced.

At five years old, she could vaguely recall visiting the emergency room with her parents. The group met a sobbing Marie and disorderly Benny in the lobby. Meli was too young to understand exactly what was happening, but she knew now that all commotion was caused by the fact that her grandmother had suffered a severe stroke. The incident had left the sixty-two-year-old woman with complete paralysis of the left side of her body.

It was a sight that horrified an impressionable young girl and it was one of the many unpleasant childhood memories she possessed.

Not for nothing, her grandmother was probably the worst parent in history for the first half of Benny and her father's life. She was always high on something and Meli's dad would tell his daughter how drugs made people different. She sobered after Meli was born and she would consistently inform the young girl how happy she was to be a grandmother to such a smart and beautiful nieta. The old Dominican woman did everything she could to atone for her sins. She devoted herself to God, went to church every Sunday, and hung crosses all over her house. Yeah and look what all that got her.

"If your welita would have never gotten over her sickness, then I would have never met my beautiful granddaughter", the woman's fragile hands stroked Meli's untamed hair. "You know you have hair like mi mama. Wild, unruly, and yet perfect all at the same time."

Pushing down the memory, Melicia refocused on the scene in front of her. Through the pair of expensive-as-hell Galileo binoculars, she could see that "good" was a foreign concept to the cartel. Her vantage point was atop of a building that, quite frankly, was meant to crumble at any moment. A house with two old women and a young boy about the age of her own brother was across the street directly in front of the building.

Soldiers ran through the house like roaches. Rummaging through each room as if the key to life itself would be found as a reward for their destruction. The women sobbed and the boy stood tall and brave. He reminded Melicia of herself at that age.

"Where is he", one of the soldiers screamed.

There weren't many words the women could say that would convince those men of anything other than ending their misery sooner. Meli had seen it all before, except at this angle, she could use her sniper to pick every single one of them off like lint on wool.

She wouldn't though. Her last two victims faces vividly flashed in her mind. She hadn't felt much of anything other than anger in years and the sting of remorse that bubbled in her gut was enough to make her think twice about her hits.

The men toted AR-15's like they were just taught how to hold the guns the day before. Every time she saw the foot soldiers it seemed like they were recruiting kids progressively younger.

She peered through the field glasses once more before the woman rolled on her back and tucked her equipment into her duffle. This man-hunt that she was doing was aimless. Although she could have been tucked away soundly in her bed, Meli couldn't help but follow the current lead she had on the cartel.

She had gotten information, of the confidential variety, that La Paz's gun-smuggling ring operated primarily out of homes of older people to avoid suspicion. Admittedly it was smart, but she couldn't keep going around admitting too much to herself. Her current goal was to tail these guys whenever they finished what they were going on about, but she would actually be successful.

This time she was.

A nice auto-shop in Arlington served as the perfect cover-up for always having new cars in and out. If the Feds hadn't picked up on this lead, then they were very lazy indeed, or inadequate. Probably a bit of both.