The Devil's Elixir

by Raymond Khoury

  Jules didn’t have time to think about it any further. All she knew was that she couldn’t let the bastard warn the others, and that if she drew her weapon, the situation would immediately spin out of control. So she did the only thing she could think of.

  She threw her whole body forward and charged.

  She saw his eyes narrow and his head pull back with a look that was somewhere between amusement and disbelief a split second before she slammed into him with her right arm bent tight against the front of her body, crushing him against the side of the Tahoe, forcing the air from his chest and breaking three ribs before using the tail end of her momentum to shove him to the ground.

  She fell on top of him and scrambled to get her cuffs out while trying to keep him pinned down, but he was too strong for her. He spun her arm back and caught her across the shoulder, then twisted on himself and shoved her back viciously against the car, her head thudding heavily against its door and jarring her vision. Her eyes recovered just in time to catch an unmistakable flash of steel as the enforcer pulled a vicious-looking stiletto from his left boot.

  She dove at him again, clamping her left hand around the hostile’s wrist while she jerked the heel of her right hand full force into his nose. He grunted with pain and momentarily lowered the blade before flicking it right back at her stomach. He was stronger than she anticipated, and Jules knew she wouldn’t get much more of a chance to survive the fight.

  She kicked the knife arm away and threw herself at it with both hands, smashing it against the tarmac, but the enforcer refused to relinquish his grip on the knife. He lashed out with his right knee, catching Jules in the kidney full force. She allowed the momentum to topple her from him, but held onto his right wrist with both hands as she rolled off him and onto the ground. He went with her, trying to maneuver his weight on top of her, but with a final surge of adrenaline she twisted his arm around and used all her body weight to spin the blade around and drive it into his midsection.

  His eyes shot open and he gasped heavily as Jules rolled him right over her and flat onto his back. Not wanting to take any chances, she pulled out her Glock and slammed it into the side of his head, knocking him out cold. She patted him down, pocketed his phone and his stainless steel handgun before throwing a pair of cuffs on him as an added safety. She pushed back to her feet and noticed several tourists staring at her with expressions ranging from terror to You go, girl.

  “FBI,” she shouted as she flashed her badge to them. “Stay back. This man is dangerous.” She quickly pulled out her phone and called it in, asking the dispatcher to radio local PD and get them to send as many uniforms as they can to the lot.

  Her entire body was sizzling with trepidation. Tess and Alex were in serious danger. She couldn’t be sure how much the guy she took out had told his compadres, but she had to assume they now suspected they’d been duped, and that Tess and Alex could be closer to where Jules was. She charged off to meet them and was heading toward the lot when she glimpsed the two hostiles entering the parking lot at the north end. They hadn’t seen her, but they knew where their buddy was and they’d soon find him. She turned and sprinted down the service road toward the parking lot and saw her gray SUV immediately, sitting across the lot, by the exit.

  Jules was moving as fast as she could, weaving through people, trying to make it to the car before they saw her. She skirted around the lot’s south side, throwing looks over her shoulder every couple of seconds—then saw one of the enforcers spot her and alert his buddy.

  The two men were moving now, coming fast, drawing their guns as they cut across the lot to intercept her.

  She pulled out her weapon as several rounds sliced through the air and whistled past her. A couple of kids who were climbing back into their family car started screaming as a nearby windshield shattered, and the lot turned to mayhem with people yelling and taking cover. Jules was leveling her gun at the lead killer, looking for a clear shot, when, to the right, a black-and-white drove into the lot. The hostiles saw it, too, and as one of them slowed to fire at it, Jules stopped, crouched and let off five shots in quick succession, missing him but forcing him to take cover behind the corner of the building on the west side of the service road.

  The other kept going, staying low, ducking for cover behind successive cars, heading straight for the lot’s exit—and the Ford Explorer.

  Jules’s body ignited with alarm.

  She bolted forward again as the black-and-white screeched to a halt. Two SDPD cops jumped out and went to take up positions behind their car, but the driver was hit and dropped to the ground before he could make it. Without coming to full halt, Jules took aim at the hostile who had taken down the cop, but there were civilians all around the lot and she couldn’t fire. She had to keep going. The hostile heading for Tess was still rushing down the side of the lot, closing fast on the parked SUV.

  Jules looked right and left. There was no way she was going to get to Tess first. Not without running straight into to the hostile’s path.

  The hostile was now beelining for the car—he seemed to know Tess and Alex were in it, possibly because Tess wasn’t in a parking spot but waiting by the exit. As their trajectories converged on the Explorer, Jules saw him train his gun on it—but she couldn’t shoot at him, not with all the people and parked cars between them.

  Instead, she veered right and leapt up onto the hood of a parked car, climbing quickly onto its roof, where she could get a clearer shot at the man. She lined him up, gripping her gun with both hands, about to pull the trigger when shots cut the air past her from the right, from the shooter farther back. A round grazed her shoulder, throwing her off balance, and she fell off the roof and hit the asphalt hard, her gun skittering out of her fingers.

  The shooter she’d tried to take out was now barely twenty yards away from her and charging in for the kill.

  Jules was on her hands and knees, looking for her gun, eyes darting from under the cars and back to catch glimpses of the killer closing in, seeing a wicked grin creep over his face as he anticipated the kill—then she heard a wild screech from behind her and turned to see the Explorer lurching backward, wheels spinning, coming right at her.

  She rolled out of its way as it drew level with her, its tires squealing as it slewed to a stop.

  She didn’t need an embossed invitation.

  She pulled the back door open and leapt inside.

  “Go!” she yelled.

  Tess threw the car into gear and floored the gas, and as they blew out of the exit, Jules caught a glimpse of the receding gunman who was already pulling back and disappearing into the crowd.

  As Tess swung onto Park Boulevard and pulled away from the park, Jules knew the area would soon be crawling with cops. They’d deal with the shooters. Still, she wasn’t sure she’d made the right call. She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself as she wondered about it.

  Either way, Alex and Tess were safe.

  That had to count for something.

  45

  I could breathe again.

  Tess and Alex were now out of harm’s way, tucked away in a bureau safe house that Jules had driven them to, straight from Balboa Park and bypassing the hotel. Villaverde had sent a couple of agents to the hotel to pack up their stuff and take it over; one of them would stay with them to beef up security. I promised Tess I’d be there as soon as I could. Until then, I was in Villaverde’s office with him and Munro, chewing over what Pennebaker’s little news flash meant.

  “It’s got to be someone who was close to Navarro,” Munro speculated. “Someone who knew what he was working on and is now trying to get his hands on it, one of his lieutenants who climbed up the ranks after he was killed.”

  That’s how it works down there. Every time some kingpin is arrested or killed, you get a bunch of his underlings going to war with each other over who’s going to take his place, all while trying to fend off takeover attempts from other cartels. The violence spirals and is often far worse than it was befor
e the takedown. It’s like we can’t win either way.

  We weren’t going to get anything out of his shooters. The one Jules had knifed was DOA before he reached the hospital. The other two had melted away into the crowd and disappeared.

  Villaverde asked, “What is this drug anyway? What was so special about it?”

  “We don’t know,” Munro told him. “All we know is that it’s a very powerful hallucinogen that McKinnon found through some godforsaken tribe in the middle of nowhere.”

  I remembered the recording I’d heard of McKinnon’s distress call. It had come in unexpectedly, via a cell phone that had been smuggled in to him.

  His message was brief, chaotic, and intense.

  He gave his name and said he’d been kidnapped several months earlier by armed bandits while bioprospecting in the rainforests down in the south, near Chiapas. The banditos had thought to ransom him to whatever big pharmaceutical company he was working for—a common occupational hazard for researchers working in the hinterlands in that part of the world. When it turned out McKinnon wasn’t working for anyone but himself, they debated killing him before coming up with another way to monetize their catch. They offered him to Navarro, figuring El Brujo would be interested in the kidnapped chemist’s talents.

  They had no idea.

  In a desperate attempt to stay alive by proving his usefulness, McKinnon made the mistake of telling Navarro about something he’d discovered, something he’d been searching for for years, something the shaman of a small, isolated tribe living deep in the rainforest had shared with him: a radical hallucinogen that was, according to him, unlike anything else out there. Navarro tried it, loved it, and became obsessed with it.

  “McKinnon was very cagey about giving us any specifics,” Munro told Villaverde. “It was like pulling teeth. He said it was an alkaloid that would be irresistibly popular, and described it as ‘ayahuasca on steroids.’ But Navarro had a problem. With most of these tribal hallucinogens, like ayahuasca—taking them is like drinking mud. Literally. Thick horrible sludge that tastes like shit and makes you puke your guts out for days. No one would want to try that. Navarro needed McKinnon to turn his discovery into an easy-to-pop pill that didn’t have the horrible side effects—and once it was a pill, Navarro could easily add chemicals into the mix to make it highly addictive. He threatened McKinnon with a slow, drawn-out death—we know how convincing he can be on that front. So McKinnon got to work. And he did it. He told us he figured out how to synthesize it into pill form, but he hadn’t told Navarro—not yet. He wasn’t sure how long he could hold out. We looked into McKinnon and he checked out. He had the profile and all the know-how he needed to come up with something like that. So we had to do something. We couldn’t afford to let that drug hit the streets. That’s why we had to get him out.”

  Or kill him, I thought.

  “But you don’t know what its effects are?” Villaverde pressed.

  “McKinnon wouldn’t say. I guess he thought it was too damn dangerous to say more. That’s why he called in his SOS. And that’s why he didn’t leave any record of it behind. At least, nothing we’ve found.”

  Villaverde nodded, soaking it in. “So now we’ve got another player after it, whoever hired the bikers.” He turned to me. “Why you? What do they think you can give them?”

  I said, “I have no idea. But they must know I was there”—I turned to Munro—“we were there, and maybe they think I found McKinnon’s notes and still have them.” I looked at Munro, curious about something. “You were there, too. Why is this about me and not you?”

  He gave me a nonchalant shrug. “No fucking clue.”

  Bottom line was, we needed to know who we were dealing with if Tess and Alex—and maybe I—weren’t going to spend the rest of our days boxed up in some kind of witness protection wonderland. And something was bothering me about that very question.

  I turned back to Munro.

  “What do you know about Navarro’s death?”

  From the knowing half-grin on his face, it was clear he knew exactly where I was going with this.

  “I can’t tell you for a fact that the bastard’s dead, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  I felt a little charge go off inside me. “It is.”

  Again with the shrug. “We went after him, as you know. DEA doesn’t take an attack on any of its agents lightly, least of all some coked-up maricón coming after someone like Hank Corliss.”

  Any narco, Navarro included, had to be well aware of that. It was gospel, ever since Enrique Camarena was yanked out of his car and tortured to death in Mexico in the mid-eighties. The DEA had pulled no punches in bringing his killers to justice, even going so far as to kidnap suspects that were proving hard to extradite and smuggling them into the United States to face trial. And yet, Navarro had come after Corliss himself, brazenly and in plain sight.

  A bad move.

  A mad move, even.

  “The narcos beat us to it,” Munro continued. “Navarro had brought down so much heat on them all that they decided it was in their best interest to end the witch hunt themselves. But they weren’t about to hand him over to us alive, not with everything he knew. So they invited him in for a chitchat. He wasn’t buying.”

  “So they took him out with a car bomb,” I threw in. I remembered going over an interdepartmental report on that. “How solid was the coroner’s paperwork?”

  “Come on. You know what we’re dealing with here. Mexico.” He pronounced it may-hee-koh, the sarcasm loud and clear. “But we did what we could. We had our own guys run DNA tests and ask the right questions. And their take was, it was him.”

  “But you were basing that on, what?”

  “Whatever we could get our hands on. Stuff we found at his house—his toothbrush, hair, spunk on his sheets. General height, weight.”

  “Fingerprints?”

  “Yes, on two fronts. They matched ones we found at his house. And they matched a file the federales had on him, one that had prints from an arrest early in his career.”

  None of that was foolproof. If he had enough money and the right connections on whom to spend it—which someone in his position had to have—Navarro could have staged the whole thing.

  Which is where my suspicions was converging.

  There was no way of knowing for sure. Not yet, anyway.

  Either way, it didn’t really matter. Whether it was Navarro or one of his ex-lieutenants, what mattered was that one of them was after something they thought I had. Because of a mistake, an error of judgment I made—a crime I committed, let’s not mince words here—five years ago. What goes around comes around, right? I’d heard that piece of twaddle all my life. I never gave it much thought—until now. But if that was the case, if my take on this was correct, it meant the bad guys’ game plan was to get hold of me. It meant I was their golden goose.

  And that was something I could definitely use.

  46

  The safe house was a three-bedroom ranch-style house close to the top of the hill in El Cerrito. It was pretty much what I expected. Someone with a more generous predisposition might use the terms minimalist, vintage, or functional to describe it. I’m thinking it came out of the gulag section at Home Depot. I wasn’t exactly expecting Four Seasons–level comfort, but I felt bad for Tess and Alex, more so since I didn’t know how long we’d need to keep them holed up here. The place was just grim.

  Still, its living room faced west and afforded a pretty decent view of the city’s skyline and the ocean beyond, especially now, with the sun melting into the horizon. Tenants who weren’t here for the reasons we were would probably find it inspiring or uplifting. I didn’t. I was just standing there, alone, somberly taking in the passing of another day, thinking about Mexico, about Michelle, and about how pulling that trigger had somehow created some kind of cosmic ripple that, five years later, had sent a similar bullet ripping into her.

  “Nice view.”

  Tess sidled up next to me, looking out, he
r hand brushing up against my back before snaking around my waist.

  “Only the best is good enough for my gal, you know that.”

  She smirked. “You spoil me, kind sir.”

  I glanced back toward the bedrooms. I could hear Jules and the new guy, Cal Matsuoka, chatting quietly in the kitchen.

  “How’s Alex?”

  “Not great. He’s still shaken up about what happened,” she told me, her tone dejected. “Moving here wasn’t great for him either.” She cast her eyes across the room. “I don’t know what to tell him anymore.”

  I nodded. “We’ll figure some way out of this.”

  She shrugged and looked out, her eyes lackluster and failing to mask the frustration and unease that were engulfing her.

  “What happens after you get these guys—the ones who got the bikers and the deputy? What happens then? How do we know whoever sent them won’t just send others after us?” She turned to face me, and she really looked spooked. “How do we know it’s ever going to end?”

  This was the moment to look squarely into her eyes and say something heroically reassuring and supremely confident like, Don’t worry, we’ll get them. But Tess knew me better than that, and she knew the world didn’t really work like that. The thing is, standing there beside her, I couldn’t imagine not getting these guys. I was going to see to it that they were out of our lives for good. So I actually did say, “We’ll get them. Them, and whoever’s behind them.” And to her credit, she didn’t scoff or even show any hint of doubting it. She just nodded, and her face tightened up with resolve.

  She looked out at the sunset again.

  “Tell me what happened,” she said. “The guy you shot. The scientist. Tell me about it.”

  I’d given her a quick summary of the Eagles’ ties to Navarro and—in broad, intentionally vague strokes—told her how it all linked back to the mission in Mexico. I’d never told her about it, just like I hadn’t told Michelle at the time. And this time around, I hadn’t gone into detail because I didn’t want her to know the whole story.