Epilogue: Apex Predator

Albert Diego Villalobos Sr., the last Howler, is lying low inside the panic room of his mansion. No one has any idea where he is, and no one will, because the panic room is ingeniously tucked away behind a tasteful and innocuous granite wall. The door is like some door-to-the-Lonely-Mountain shit. It’s camouflaged like a solid wall of cladding tiles, but a doorway with jagged edges opens and locks electromagnetically; impenetrable to any lock manipulation. The bulletproof vault door also has one-inch steel shear pins and the walls and ceilings of the panic room are all reinforced.

But Albert Diego Sr. never planned on holing up like a rat. Security for him doesn’t mean compromising on style and creature comforts. The room has dark wood paneling, a pool table, a pinball machine, a curved sofa that rotates to give him the best possible view of a wall-mounted, 84-inch television. Or, at the moment, the bank of CCTV monitors on the opposite wall.

Albert Diego Sr. can’t bring himself to p