Chapter Fifteen
Esteban Cortinas walked out onto the second-floor veranda of his expansive home in Reynosa, Mexico with the day’s first cup of coffee in hand. Sitting and greeting the sunrise in this manner was a ritual he’d long favored to ease into his day – particularly when meetings were scheduled by his father at ridiculously early hours – because the pre-dawn stillness gave him a chance to clear the cobwebs from his mind.
But it wasn’t lost on him that his subtle practice of gradually coming to full alertness was now completely at odds with the two massive lines of coke he relied on to jump-start his system each morning.
His lips curled downward at that bit of irony before he pursed them to blow softly across the surface of his drink and cool it just a bit. Then he sat and sipped,
