by Mark Wheaton
He was going to die.
That was when he spied the teenage boy approaching with an iPad. He sidled up to the driver’s window and nodded to Gennady. “Why did you set up Michael Story?”
Gennady stared at the boy in disbelief. Ignoring him, he punched at the window. When it wouldn’t give, he leaned back and kicked at it with both feet. It wasn’t only shatter resistant but bulletproof, something he’d had done for both his vehicles. A decision he now regretted more than anything else.
“Did they get to you in some way?” the teen asked. “Make you some kind of offer? Anything?”
Gennady snapped out of it and shook his head.
“It’s a hundred-foot drop,” the boy said. “So unless you want your last words to be a lie, I’d lay it for me: Why did you set up Michael Story?”
“Gnnnh,” Gennady groaned, his throat throbbing from the effort. The car was only yards away from tumbling over the edge now. “Nnn!”
“Come on now. You write something on that pad that tells me how they got to you and maybe—maybe—I’ll send a few hundred thousand grand to your wife and kids. What do you think?”
Gennady grabbed the pad and wrote a single line. He slapped it against the window.
“‘Go near my family and you die. No question.’ Brave words for someone who can’t even get out of a car.”
Gennady sat in silence. He was done here. He could no longer see the patch of grass between the two houses. The car’s front bumper was already over the edge.
“Okay,” the teen said, touching a button on the iPad.
The car stopped rolling. Gennady stopped breathing.
“Park it over there,” the teen said, nodding to a spot in front of the seventies house. “Then when you’re done pissing yourself, join me in that other house.”
The boy went inside the house across the street, closing the door behind him.
Gennady grabbed the door handle and, finding it unlocked, scrambled out of the car. He ran around to the other side, opened the passenger-side door, and plucked the 9mm automatic from under the seat. He made his way up to the door of the house the teen had disappeared into, ready to blow the kid away.
“Mr. Archipenko,” the teen called from inside. “I told you to park your car. Then we can get down to talking about who sent that bullet through your throat.”
Gennady hadn’t known what to expect, but it had not been on his list of possibilities that the master hacker and tech expert for the Armenian mob would be a teenage boy—one who had threatened to kill him no less. He jammed the gun into his waistband, returned to his car, and reversed it into a spot in front of the house. He stood there for a moment, figuring he should hightail out of there, but was riveted in place regardless.
“Well, come in!” the boy said through the open door.
Gennady entered to find what looked like the teenager’s oversized bedroom rather than a living room. Clothes were piled everywhere. The largest flat-screen television he’d ever seen dominated one wall, with multiple game controllers on the floor in front of it. Elaborate-looking bongs were set up on the coffee table like trophies. A stack of sneaker boxes stood in one corner, reaching all the way up to the ceiling. There were boxes and boxes of cell phones and iPads, with dozens more out of their packages and lying around the room.
Miguel was seated on the sofa, an iPad in his hands. He held it out to Gennady and indicated a chair. “You probably type faster than you write,” Miguel said. “Use the text screen. Words’ll come up on the television.”
Gennady took the iPad and sat. Who are you?
“Miguel Higuera. But you knew that.”
You know who is behind all this.
Miguel read this from the screen and nodded. “I have an idea. I don’t know how all the pieces fit together, but I’m pretty sure I know who put that bullet in your neck.”
Gennady was confused. He eyed Miguel a moment before typing. It was that junkie.
“Yeah, right. You think somebody shot you in the voice box by accident? These guys don’t miss. They didn’t miss when they killed Naomi Okpewho. They didn’t miss when they killed those priests. And they sure didn’t miss when they shot you in the neck. And it wasn’t some junkie either. He was down the street. You got shot from behind. Angle of difference of about twenty-five degrees, but that’s everything. Or didn’t you realize that?”
Gennady had no idea what Miguel was talking about.
“The man who shot you is named Munuera, but no one calls him that. He was born in Acayucan or maybe Puerto Escondido or maybe Arriage in Chiapas.”
What do they call him?
“Ah, many things,” Miguel replied. “El Hombre Invisible he gets a lot, but everybody in a cartel tries to put on that name, right? He’s also Cara de Fantasma and the Ten-Thousand-Dollar Man. This because he recruits the poorest of the poor to be hit men alongside him. They’re like the Sinaloa version of Middle Eastern martyrs brigades. When you join, it’s the equivalent of putting a bounty on your own head. When you die, your family gets the money. You’d think they’d let themselves get shot, but it becomes a pyramid scheme. You survive one job, and the bounty rises another ten thousand dollars. The most he’s ever given out is fifty thousand, almost a million pesos.”
He’s with the cartels? Is he a boss?
“Not even close,” Miguel said. “He’s either too crazy or too shrewd to want any power. He prefers to be the most useful angry dog in the kennel. They say he looks like one, too. His face is all messed up with scars—maybe from burns, bad plastic surgery, or just all his bones fusing back at odd angles after he took a few bats to the face.” Miguel pointed to a pile of equipment on a nearby table that looked both mechanical and electrical. “He’s also the guy who modified Naomi Okpewho’s car into a self-driving vehicle, which he then hijacked and drove off a bridge. I had it done to your car last night to see how easy it was. My boys were in and out in twenty minutes. I figure they did Naomi’s car while she was eating dinner.”
It was a lot to digest. Gennady had barely considered the drug cartels, as their control shifted so often. In the late seventies and early eighties, the prime movers in the drug trade were the Medellín and later Cali Cartels in the cocaine-producing regions of Colombia. After the death of Medellín boss Pablo Escobar and the dismantling of the Cali operation, the cocaine trade became more and more controlled by elements in Central America and up through Mexico.
Previously, Mexican drug lords had been relegated to transport, providing a means for South American drugs to reach their North American users. Times had changed. The sort of drug war that had turned Colombia into an inferno of murder and kidnappings in the eighties had now come to Mexico, resulting in tens of thousands of deaths over the past decade.
It didn’t make any sense for these shifting regimes to all have partnered with Charles Sittenfeld, given how many years the man seemed to have been working as a high-dollar money launderer.
“Before you ask, no, despite uncovering evidence that some invisible someone made regular payments to offshore accounts controlled by Sittenfeld, I couldn’t link those payments to any of the Mexican drug cartels past or present. I went back further and couldn’t connect him to any of the Colombian cartels either. These guys are good, but they’re not that good. So if we’re agreed it’s drug money, it means they went through that invisible third party. Best I can do is check when deposits were made to Sittenfeld and try to match the dollar amounts to transfers out of cartel accounts. But that’s nothing you can build a case on.”
So it’s a dead end? Why is this 10K guy involved then?
“That’s the ten-thousand-dollar question, isn’t it? But there’s always been invisible hands like you and me out there making connections between the bad money and the good. And laundering through American banks is as good as it gets. What you have to do is look for the original ‘you and me’ who put them together way back when. Find that silent partner, and you’ve got the story. Until then you’ve got nothi
ng.”
XII
It had been weeks since Luis had prayed through the Divine Office over a full day, from early-morning prayer to vespers. He felt compelled to set aside his own prayers for guidance and go through those prescribed by canon law. He remembered the breviary Bishop Osorio tried to give him and wished he’d been able to put aside his arrogance long enough to accept it. He did what he could from memory, which wasn’t much.
When the sun rose the next day, the biting feeling of the phantom blade in his back had subsided, and he asked Vera if she thought it would be all right if he went for a walk around the grounds.
“Are you sure, Padre?” Vera asked. “The worry is that you might pop something. Not a stitch per se, but a muscle not fully healed. Maybe a vein? They recommended you stay in bed for at least a couple of months.”
“My stasis may help my body, but it is doing more harm than good to my mind,” Luis responded. “If I feel or hear anything pop, at least I’ll already be at a hospital.”
Vera shrugged and retrieved a robe for Luis to wrap around the cloth pants and shirt the hospital had provided. With that draped loosely around his torso, Luis made his way to the elevator.
The elevator proved to be the hardest part of the trek. Given the modernity of the rest of San Juan Diego, that the car bounced and hitched like a century-old freight elevator was a surprise. It was one more thing to add to the disorienting nature of his visit to Mexico. He thought of Mexico as hot, so being in a temperate climate almost identical to that of Los Angeles occasionally had him waking up thinking he was back home. The food was completely different than what he was accustomed to at St. Augustine’s, but his mother had occasionally cooked the tamales, tlayudas, and chileajos of her youth in Oaxaca, and the carnitas, morisqueta, and churipo of Michoacán weren’t so far off. He’d had trouble with some of the heavily accented Spanish he heard as well but only in the same way he did working with his parishioners and their many dialects.
But as he stepped out of the hospital building—if only onto the grounds—for the first time, he finally felt as if he had stepped into Mexico. The air felt different, and the scent of trees and dust, muted but detectable in his room, was omnipresent here. With the soil free from a man-made protective shell of asphalt and the sky unblemished by layers of pollution, Luis sensed this was what it smelled like to be out on the earth itself.
Michoacán—at least this corner of it—felt like an impermanent post the natural world could encircle and reclaim overnight, taking its tens of thousands of people with it.
The courtyard, which he had to himself, had two paths, a few statues of saints not unlike the ones placed around St. Augustine’s, and a couple of benches. The hospital, which horseshoed around it, was then itself surrounded by a high white wall topped with short iron stakes. It stood in sharp contrast to the serene atmosphere of the rest of the small compound.
A truck rumbled past on the other side of the wall, though Luis could only see the exhaust and dust in its wake. The exhaust dissipated quickly enough, and Luis watched as the dust gently settled onto the wide leaves of the courtyard’s plants, giving them a hazy yellow tint.
At a corner of the courtyard closest to the wall, Luis spied a pay phone. He was surprised at the sudden urge to contact Michael Story. He wanted to know if there’d been any kind of break in the Osorio case or information confirming that Naomi had been murdered, though he doubted there was. How could there be? The attacks had been precise and deliberate. And with Naomi’s death believed to be an accident, seemingly unconnected.
Osorio. Uli. Naomi . . . Nicolas?
Charles Sittenfeld.
Luis was more certain than ever that this man, whose face he had never seen, was the key. And that someone had been willing to kill to safeguard him. To keep his secrets—and theirs—from coming to light. Luis felt a renewed sense of purpose. Not the kind born from the booming voice of God filled with confidence and authority, but a distant whisper.
He would continue to follow the path laid before him. Nicolas’s death had led him to the church and now might lead him full circle to his brother’s killer.
Maybe God placed me where I need to be and will let me figure the rest out.
The man who attacked him had such a distinctive indigenous Mexican-Indian accent, his words betraying an upbringing in the south of Mexico. Whoever was behind the deaths must have had authorization from someone south of the border, where Luis now found himself. The only organizations with that much power in Mexico were the cartels. And the cartels didn’t lend out their top killers. That meant there was a connection between the cartels and Charles Sittenfeld. It stood to reason that their connection to the banker was money—the root of all evil. Perhaps the money that his brother had uncovered.
The only thing that didn’t make sense in that equation, however, was that this meant his brother had flagged something to do with the Mexican cartels years before they were operating in a way that would generate the billions Sittenfeld had laundered.
“¡Buenos días, Padre Chavez!”
Luis turned to look for the speaker but saw no one.
“Up here, Father!”
Luis glanced to the hospital’s second floor and saw a fiftysomething man with graying hair, a thickening paunch, and most indicative to his identity, a Roman collar, smiling and waving back to him from a window.
Father Arturo, Luis realized.
“Wait for me!” Father Arturo said, ducking back in.
Less than a minute later the priest emerged from the hospital, arms outstretched. “Father Chavez! At last we meet. It is so nice to see you on your feet.”
“Father Arturo,” Luis said, embracing the man. “I have much to thank you for.”
“What is better than helping a brother priest?” Father Arturo asked. “Even more so, God is allowing me to repay the debt I owe to your mother’s uncle, Ianis. It is fortuitous.”
“You knew him?”
“He was a mentor to me!” Father Arturo enthused. “Many here in El Tule still speak well of him. He was one of the first great bishops to rise from Michoacán and from one of the poorest parts of the state. He never forgot what he came from and encouraged those who also emerged into success to lend a hand back.”
“I don’t know much about him, unfortunately,” Luis admitted. “When I was a child, the names of these distant relatives went in one ear and out the other.”
“But here you are now, a priest in his old parish,” Father Arturo said. “Perhaps more remained than you knew.”
“Perhaps,” Luis allowed.
“I know they wish you to stay in your room and most definitely to stay on the grounds, but there is a wheelchair inside that door,” Father Arturo said conspiratorially. “We could compromise by having you ride as I push. Not far, just to the parish. I would love for you to see what your father has been up to on our behalf.”
Luis nodded. There was nothing he was more curious about.
Father Arturo fetched the wheelchair, an uncomfortable, spindly thing with half its spokes broken or thinned by rust. To Luis it was a chariot capable of carrying him farther from his hated bed.
“The ride might be bumpy,” Father Arturo warned him. “I’ll do my best.”
Luis settled in the chair and looked back to the hospital, expecting to see an angry Vera looking at him, but there was no one. San Juan Diego wasn’t particularly busy, though he occasionally heard the conversations and moans of other patients late at night, the cries of relatives when their loved ones passed on. Luis reflexively said a prayer for each even if he could not say their names.
The town was a reflection of its hospital. Though there were more people in the streets and in the neighboring buildings, it still had a ghost town quality to it. It was as if the place could easily sustain twice the population but folks had chosen to move on regardless.
“Everyone is at work,” Father Arturo said, slowing the wheelchair to let an old pickup truck pass on the dusty road. “There ar
e two factories outside of town and a distribution warehouse. The farms feed everything here, but there is still poverty.”
Luis nodded, taking in his surroundings as best he could. The city was hilly and the roads all single lane. It was hard to differentiate which were private residences and which were commercial businesses, given the lack of advertising. They passed a restaurant with a single awning, which read “Tortilleria Gomez,” with the hours of operation painted on an outer wall. Unlike an American restaurant, which would be overflowing with a myriad of ways to call attention to itself, that was it for Tortilleria Gomez.
Without so much competition, I guess you don’t have to go overboard, Luis thought. People know where the restaurants are.
They turned a corner, though without street signs of any kind, Luis had no idea if he’d be able to retrace his steps. This made a small part of him—a remnant of the boy he had been long ago—a bit uneasy. But this was another city, another life.
As they continued on their way, that small part of Luis also noted that there were dogs everywhere. Dogs hurrying down the street, dogs barking from behind garage doors, and even dogs on rooftops. Maybe he’d be able to backtrack once he became familiar with their barks.
“We are nearing the center of town,” Father Arturo explained. “The church is very old and unadorned, but it is still in the middle of things, near city hall, near the market, and so on. We don’t often get tourists, but I have seen a few take photographs of our façade, and it is on the Internet and in certain guidebooks. The best ones, naturally.”
They reached one of the largest structures Luis had seen so far, a construction site that took up half a block.
“Coca-Cola!” Father Arturo announced as if naming a saint. “Six hundred jobs! They’ve been promising it for almost a decade. We’ve been praying for it for twice as long.”
“Why the delay?” Luis asked, staring up into the steel girders making up the building’s two-story, warehouse-like frame.
