The Savage Dead by Joe McKinney

ten minutes. Pilar was scheduled to board the Gulf Queen right at noon, and assuming that it would take a minimum of two hours, but probably closer to four, for the senator and her party to get from the airport down to Galveston, and then through the customs line at the Cruise Ship Terminal, she figured she would have just enough time to get herself aboard and get what she needed to do done. It’d be close, but she could make it.
    She tossed her phone back into her purse and glanced out the window at the Gulf Queen . At 256,000 tons, beautiful and gleaming white in the Texas summer sun, it towered above the terminal’s facade. Besides its 2,400 staterooms and room for 6,400 passengers, the Gulf Queen featured twenty-one decks, two casinos, dining rooms, dance halls, cafés, pools and playgrounds, theaters, and even a shopping mall and a skating rink. She was more than the floating hotel the Caribbean Royalty Cruise Line billed her as. She was practically a city unto herself.
    Which was kind of a shame, Pilar thought. Because in three days she was going to be nothing more than a plague ship.
    Up ahead, terminal employees were helping buses and taxis to unload a lot of smiling, yet still somehow anxious-looking American passengers. That anxiousness, that chronic inability to relax, Pilar realized, was a fundamental part of the American cultural identity. It followed them around like the hum of a live electrical wire.
    She glanced toward the front of the cab and caught the driver, a white-haired, fat white man with bad teeth and a sunburned face and neck, staring at her legs in the rearview mirror.
    She bristled. The man had been leering at her since he picked her up at the airport and a part of her wanted to kick in the few front teeth he had left just to show him where he stood in life. Instead, she took the big floppy hat she’d brought and draped it over her bare knee.
    Realizing he was caught, the man said, “This is you up here, ma’am.”
    She nodded. A few years ago she’d watched as three of Ramon’s soldiers tied a rival cartel member’s hands behind his back, sat him on a sidewalk in front of a garbage Dumpster, and cut his head off with a chainsaw. She remembered the way the blade had made its first bite into the man’s throat, the way he’d thrown his head back against the metal Dumpster, and the way disbelief and fear had colored his pale face.
    It wasn’t hard to imagine this pig’s face on that doomed man.
    It wasn’t hard at all.
    The driver stopped the cab and popped the trunk and opened her door for her. She let him hold the door, but made as though she didn’t see his outstretched hand. Frowning now, no doubt thinking she was just another one of those stuck-up Mexican nationals with too much money and not enough humility, the cabbie tossed her bags on a porter’s handcart. Pilar said nothing. Instead—and she was kind of enjoying this—she took out a conspicuously large sheaf of bills and carelessly rolled off five twenties for him. “That should cover the ride and your gratuity, I believe,” she said.
    He looked at the bills with a mixture of greed and distaste. He’d figured out that he was being dismissed as a simple hireling, as though she had the power to buy and sell him, and she could tell how it galled him.
    â€œYes, ma’am,” he said through gritted teeth.
    â€œThat’ll be all.” She turned to walk away, and with a lilt in her voice said, “Thank you.”
    Behind her sunglasses, her eyes were blazing with mischief.
    Sometimes it could be so much fun to be a bitch.
    The porter was a different story. He was younger, Hispanic, with a quick, alert gaze that Pilar knew well. As the cabbie pulled away, he made a show of asking for her boarding papers and scanning them with a barcode gun.
    â€œSolo las dos bolsas, señora?” he said, abruptly switching to Spanish.
    Excellent, she thought.