The Mercado de Mariscos breathed at midnight and smelled of rotting fish. At first appearances, it was the same tourist trap as always. There were plastic tables under strings of colored bulbs. Pitchers of beer sweated on tabletops. Couples picked at their ceviche with plastic forks. But behind the facade, and past the narrow hallways lined with dead-eyed barracuda, the real market worked in the shadows and dark deals were made.

  The air back there was heavy with salt and rot. The fluorescents hummed overhead and irritated Sawyer’s skin. The concrete path was slick with fish blood. Men in rubber aprons shouted half-heartidly as they chopped, gutted, and hauled away fish. Not every cooler carried ice packed fish. Sawyer and Cormac spotted more than one container with vacuum sealed bricks of Columbian cocaine which sold more easily than the piles of snapper which poorly concealed it.

  Sawyer moved down a cramped aisle with his collar up. His eyes cut left and right. Cormac followed a half step behind him. One hand was buried inside his jacket pocket, gripping his concealed sidearm.

  Their contact was exactly where he’d said he would be. He sat on an overturned plastic crate under a busted light. Sawyer hoped that this lead, which must have been their hundredth, would finally pay off and would lead them to Ashley and the Black Ledger.

  “Skunk” wasn’t a nickname that needed explaining. The stench that permeated from the local hit harder than the stinking market. It was the smell of rancid sweat, stale cigarettes, and an unwashed funk. His greasy hair hung over his eyes which were too small and too quick. He was definitely on something.

  Sawyer nearly turned around and gave up right there. From the start, it didn’t feel right and it certainly didn’t smell right.

  “Thought you’d chicken out,” Skunk said. He grinned, revealing a full mouth of uneven teeth. “Most gringos are afraid when they hear my name. I have a reputation.”

  “Can we get this over with?” Sawyer said.

  They kept to a corner of an abandoned market stall and spoke low. Skunk’s pitch was sloppy. He’d once been a cop, he said, then bragged how the cocaine game made him rich. He claimed he’d served as a bus boy at the Gamboa Luxury Rainforest Reserve, where they first encountered Harland Morrow. Skunk claimed he saw him recently. “Yeah…I saw him. He’s a starched silver hair corporate suit and he stinks of pride. There isn’t an ounce of good inside him. I’m bad, but this man’s pure evil. He never spoke to nobody except the fools he seduced with cash and vice.”

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  “That’s it?” Cormac said.

  Skunk shrugged. “He’s the Vice President of BlackDiamond. He’s the big man on the canal, on both ends. He buys whatever he can. He kills for sport. You don’t think bodies here go missing by accident, do you?”

  Sawyer’s jaw tightened. “You’re giving us headlines. We need more details. Where is he right now?”

  The stink of the place pressed in. The warm and metallic tang of blood mixed with fish guts. But what really pulled Sawyer’s focus wasn’t the smell. It was a shift in the room. The fishmongers who’d been barking orders a minute ago had gone quiet. A man who gutted tuna nearby froze mid-slice. Another turned his back entirely. Even the hum of conversation from the far end of the market seemed to have bled away. He still heard the hard chopping of fish heads, but no conversation.

  Cormac’s voice dropped. “Sawyer…six o’clock.”

  Two men were coming down the aisle. They wore black suits in a place where rubber boots were a mandatory part of the uniform. These blokes wore crisp shirts and BlackDiamond cufflinks whose edges caught in the light in sharp little flashes. They moved smoothly like they owned the place. Their hands dipped into their jackets and came back out gripping long, narrow, silver daggers.

  Sawyer felt the temperature drop.

  Skunk chuckled low like he’d been waiting for this the entire night. “You two are even dumber than I thought. Harland’s going to give me a fat bonus after I cut off your heads and stuff them in boxes. You’re going to smell like dead fish, but I’m still going to mail your heads first class. Hah!”

  The words hung in the air for a quarter second longer than Sawyer preferred. He unholstered his silver dagger and stabbed Skunk in his heart. Skunk dropped like trash. Somehow, the smell he gave off instantly grew so much worse.

  The two suits didn’t flinch. They split to either side. Their silver blades caught the light and so did their pale white fangs.

  “Vampires,” Sawyer hissed.

  He gripped his silver dagger even tighter. The metal gleamed in the light. Beside him, Cormac was already gripping his own silver dagger. They decided early that if this kind of trouble showed itself, they didn’t want to risk the loud gunfire from their pistols attracting any more unnecessary heat. So they fought the hard way.

  The surrounding fishmongers melted away into the shadows. Sawyer hoped they didn’t immediately run to find the closest police officers.

  The two vampires in suits came fast. Sawyer stepped forward to meet them with a coldness in his gaze and his step. The fight was on.