Wages Of Sin (Luis Chavez Book 3)

by Mark Wheaton

  Luis looked down. There was nothing left for him here. On one table was the evidence that his great-uncle had tried to do something right, however small, by the locals, only to be rejected. On the other was evidence that the church was at least partially complicit in one of the worst and longest-running bloodbaths Mexico had seen since the conquistadors.

  “What does God say to you?” Luis asked.

  “I haven’t asked,” Father Arturo admitted. “I haven’t prayed, or at least I haven’t listened, for an answer to prayer in some time. He must know I can’t face him.”

  “Is that why you brought me here?” Luis asked. “As some sort of penance?”

  Father Arturo was silent for a moment.

  “They murdered my son,” he said. “And by my actions I too . . .”

  Luis nodded. He thought back to his conversation with Father Arturo after he had confronted the older priest in the confessional at San Elias Nieves.

  Tell me, Father Chavez, what would you do in my place?

  Luis didn’t have a chance to contemplate this. The sight of movement in his peripheral vision snapped him back to reality. No, not movement. He looked to his phone. The information on the screen had frozen.

  “Time to go.”

  Michael Story was on his deck in Silver Lake, staring out over the palm trees, when his cell phone began to buzz repeatedly, announcing the arrival of several e-mails. He’d been trying to recall the exact feeling of standing in that spot a couple of months back, arms wrapped around Naomi’s waist, chin above her hair, her back pressed against his chest as a light, misty rain fell around them. The memory was secure, every aspect as fresh in his mind as if it had happened yesterday. What he was beginning to lose was the ability to recreate the sensations he’d felt, the loss he’d felt after, the warmth of being loved and loving someone else. The residual light in his life that Naomi had created was flickering, soon to be extinguished altogether.

  He moved to his laptop, which was open on the picnic table. Swiping the mouse pad, he made the screen light up, showing no less than a hundred new e-mails delivered to the remote account he’d created for this purpose. They were all from Miguel.

  Here we go.

  He’d planned to take notes as he opened the files, but it was instantly overwhelming, the breadth of what Miguel had managed to extract from the Mexico City archdiocese so great, it would take a team of FBI investigators months to—

  Wait.

  FBI investigators? Sure, they were waiting across town for this, but with Deborah out and Michael interim district attorney, shouldn’t he perhaps have his own office address this? Wasn’t that his sworn duty? Besides, the FBI was sure to throw him over the moment they had what they needed from the cache, right?

  Might as well make his case that “interim” should be dropped from his title as soon as possible, no? Particularly given the various skeletons in his own closet that might come out during a special election.

  With a case like this he couldn’t lose.

  The only question—and it was a big one—was, could he afford to make an enemy out of the FBI?

  Of course. I’m the goddamn district attorney of Los Angeles.

  Luis hustled Father Arturo down the hallways of the Mexico City archdiocese as fast as he could without attracting attention. It was late at night now, so there were few others around, but the cameras were everywhere. Luis felt the eyes of the security guards watching from some monitor bank buried within the building boring into him with every turn.

  He’d tried to communicate with Miguel, but the phone was frozen and soon shut down completely. Luis pocketed it and hurried on.

  They took another turn, only to see two men in the white uniform of the archdiocese’s internal security police at the end of the hall. Luis did a 180 and led Father Arturo away. Behind him he heard the voice of Father Manka call out to the guards. “That’s them!”

  Shit.

  “Hurry,” Luis whispered to Father Arturo, who tried in vain to pick up the pace.

  The sound of the guards’ quickening footsteps reached Luis’s ears, and he sped up even more, practically dragging his fellow priest alongside him.

  “Father Arturo! Father Chavez!”

  Luis didn’t turn. The footsteps broke into a run. It was only a matter of time before they caught up. But then Luis caught sight of a closing elevator door to their left and swung Father Arturo toward it. As the guards closed the distance between them, Luis pushed Father Arturo through the closing doors and slipped after. He turned in time to see the frustrated faces of the guards in the gap between the doors.

  “That was close!” Father Arturo said.

  It wasn’t over yet.

  The elevator doors opened near the reception area where they’d encountered the young priest. Still at the desk, the young man got to his feet and waved down the exiting priests.

  “Father Chavez! Father Manka needs a word!”

  Luis didn’t respond, practically holding Father Arturo up as he walked. They were only a few yards from the glass doors that led out of the archdiocese when two more security guards appeared directly outside, the pair staring in at Luis and Father Arturo. Luis turned left and right, but the other exits seemed miles away.

  “Father Arturo!” shouted Father Manka behind them.

  Luis reluctantly turned as the formerly welcoming priest ran to him from the elevators, flanked by two guards, whose frustration had turned to anger. Father Arturo stepped in front of Luis and nodded grimly at Father Manka.

  “What is it, Father?” he asked.

  “There’s a fire at your parish! It’s consumed the building. It started on some construction site behind the chapel.”

  “The school!” Father Arturo cried. “It’s gone?”

  “Is that what it was?” said Father Manka. “I’m afraid so then.”

  Father Arturo’s face fell. He sagged, until he was on his knees, head in his hands. “It’s gone!” he bellowed.

  One thought filled Luis’s mind: Sebastian.

  He was about to ask Father Manka if anyone had been hurt when his cell phone rang. When he saw his father’s number on the caller ID, he said a silent prayer and answered. “Dad?”

  There was silence, followed by a chuckle. “You are a very clever priest, Father Chavez. That I will give you.”

  The voice was instantly familiar. The pain in Luis’s lower back, all but forgotten, returned at the sound of it.

  “What do you want?”

  “It’s not what I want, but it seldom is,” Munuera said. “Your father, however, wishes for you to join us. I would put him on the line, but he’s screaming in pain right now. Perhaps you’d be so good as to come here. Bring this phone with you, of course, as I’ve been told the information your friends absconded with is copied there. So at least we can understand the breadth of the damage you’ve done. Then we can discuss how to put an end to your father’s pain.”

  “I don’t believe you,” Luis said.

  “Yes you do,” Munuera replied. “But if it makes you feel better—”

  The inhuman sounds that filled Luis’s eardrums a second later related such pain, such agony, he could hardly bear it. Worse, the voice making the sounds, however strained and distorted, was unmistakably his father’s.

  When Munuera returned to the line, he sounded more amused than vicious. “Convinced?”

  Luis was. He’d never felt so helpless before in all his life.

  XIX

  The return trip to Michoacán was so slow Luis felt as if they were driving to the edge of the world. There was little to mark their progress. The highway and surrounding landscape were completely dark, the only thing illuminated being the stretch of road immediately in front of the headlights. Somewhere at the end of it all, Luis hoped, was his father.

  The address given to him by Munuera, the 10K man, was in the middle of nowhere.

  “It might be an abandoned ranch or something,” Father Arturo said. “But it’s one of those roads wit
h nothing down it. It doesn’t make sense.”

  “Locating it won’t be the problem,” Luis said.

  “He wants us to find them,” Father Arturo agreed.

  “He specified me alone,” Luis said. “You’ve done enough for me and my family already.”

  “But I have nowhere to go,” Father Arturo said. “They destroyed my church. They burned my school.”

  Your church? Your school?

  “Then is this really the moment your parishioners can afford to lose their priest, too?” Luis asked. “They need you now more than ever. Yours would be an empty sacrifice.”

  “The cartel will come for me when they learn of my connection to my son,” Father Arturo said.

  “Die then,” Luis said. “But until that last moment, be of use to your parish.”

  Father Arturo said nothing for the rest of the drive. Luis took this for penitence, until he realized that the priest had fallen asleep a few kilometers before the State of Mexico–Michoacán border.

  Luis took the opportunity to empty his mind before saying what might be his final prayer. He asked God for guidance, but not for himself but for Father Arturo, for Oscar, for Miguel, for Michael Story, and for Sebastian, if he was alive.

  God, if you are with him, please ease his pain. Amen.

  Luis considered prolonging the prayer, then decided it was unnecessary. He stared out the window into the darkness, watching for the subtle differences in the silhouettes of the neighboring hills to differentiate earth from sky. If he was going to his death, he wanted the last things he saw to be earthly, not man-made. He focused on the sand creeping onto the shoulder of the road, the tall oyamel trees that rose abruptly against the dark backdrop, and the occasional star he could see over the halo of the pickup’s headlights.

  In a flight of fancy, he wondered if there was some way to communicate to Sebastian that he was coming as quickly as he could.

  Either to rescue him or to die alongside him.

  Oscar awoke in the middle of the night. His mouth was cotton dry, reminding him he’d been drinking the night before. He’d heard somewhere that the body began processing the sugars from alcohol a few hours after it was consumed, which was why so many casual drinkers popped awake at two or three in the morning.

  As a committed alcoholic, Oscar was surprised to find it happening to him.

  He looked down at the silhouette of Helen as she slept beside him. He loved her. Oh, how he loved her.

  He climbed out of bed and wandered into the kitchen. He found his cell phone plugged in by the stove—he’d kept it in the bedroom for a while, until Helen decreed there were boundaries—and checked the messages. There were no voice mails, but there was a text from an international number. The area code was 664.

  Tijuana.

  It was a video file. He debated not playing it, unsure if it was some kind of virus that would capture his phone. Then he realized it could be much worse. Did he really want to see, say, Luis’s head chainsawed off this early in the morning? There were things he didn’t want to see.

  He hit “Play” anyway. A house appeared on the screen, one shot from a distance out in the middle of nowhere. Oscar gathered from the terrain that it had been taken in Mexico, though the modern-enough-looking house could have been almost anywhere in the Southwestern United States. The cameraman walked around to the side and zoomed in on the backyard, where there was a short brick wall around an in-ground pool. After a moment a man and a woman exited the rear of the house, moving toward the water. Oscar was struck by a sense of dread as he recognized one half of the pair.

  Dear God, what have you wrought now?

  It was about an hour before dawn when Luis dropped Father Arturo off on the outskirts of El Tule. The older priest pointed off toward the east, where the sun rose.

  “Down there. Take you half an hour.”

  “Thanks,” Luis said. “I’ll leave the keys in the truck when I drop it off later.”

  Father Arturo smiled at this. It was clear that neither thought Luis had much of a chance of returning alive.

  “See that you do,” Father Arturo said.

  Luis was about to pull away when Father Arturo took his arm through the driver’s-side window. Luis thought he meant to bless him, but Father Arturo bowed his head.

  “Will you give me a blessing, Father Chavez?”

  Luis put the truck in park and climbed out as Father Arturo knelt. They remained that way for several minutes while Luis spoke over the older priest, then finally put a hand on Father Arturo’s shoulder. When he drove off a moment later, he saw in the rearview that Father Arturo remained on his knees in prayer.

  Luis turned away and drove toward the sun. As Father Arturo had suggested, the road described by Munuera went off into the middle of nowhere. The pickup’s suspension didn’t do well on the unpaved, hard-packed dirt, launching Luis into the roof more than once. If it weren’t for a recent set of tire tracks in the dust, he would’ve lost the trail long before.

  He’d been hungry earlier, but it was worse now. He was also parched. He’d meant to stop for food and water at a gas station or supermercado, but everything he’d seen on the way back from Mexico City was closed.

  After one particularly high bounce, the pickup came down hard on the right side, and Luis knew immediately he’d lost the tire. He glanced into the bed and saw a spare. If he made it back, he could change it then. He turned off the engine, placed the keys on the dashboard, left the door unlocked, and climbed out to begin the long walk.

  As he crossed the desert scrub, Luis imagined what it must’ve been like for the Franciscan friars who came with the Spanish to convert the Aztecs with the same collar around their necks. It was hard to be in Mexico and not think on the atrocities done in the name of Christian colonization. It was the greed for land and gold that motivated the Age of Exploration more than dogma. He wondered what the world would look like if the diseases that came west and wiped out the large Central and South American indigenous civilizations had instead originated here and gone to Europe with the colonists.

  What would a world driven by the Aztecs look like, as opposed to Europeans? Would there even be a Catholic Church?

  And yes, it meant that he wouldn’t be alive, but he marveled at who might be walking across this patch of land in his place if that had come to pass.

  He set these thoughts aside upon spotting a pickup truck up ahead with a couple of young men standing alongside. Munuera’s men. They stared at him as he approached, and he saw that one held binoculars. They’d seen him long before he’d seen them. When he was within a few yards, one of the young men pointed an AR-15 at Luis’s chest as the other hurried around to pat him down. Finding nothing, the young man indicated the bed of their truck, then got back behind the wheel.

  As he climbed into the bed of the pickup, Luis quietly thanked God for giving his feet a rest.

  About a mile down the road, an old, crumbling building appeared in the distance. A second pickup had pulled in line behind the first a few moments after they’d departed, and Luis realized they must’ve been in some kind of overwatch position, likely with a rifle aimed at his head if he had tried anything or brought backup. The caravan slowed as it pulled up to the rusted metal warehouse, where a couple of panel trucks were parked out front. Luis waited in the back of the truck until the driver parked and came around to lower the tailgate. A large sliding door was pushed aside on the warehouse, and two more young men emerged, carrying small machine guns. One nodded to Luis to follow them inside as the others waited by the trucks.

  It was in that moment that Luis felt God return to him.

  It wasn’t words or a thought but a feeling. The absence of one. Luis knew he should be terrified at this moment, but he was not. He felt the eyes of God on him, moving with him. A tension he didn’t even realize he’d been carrying throughout his body left it. A hot-blooded anger, the one he’d felt most acutely as he stood over the spot where his brother had died, eased out of his mind like a sub
siding headache. The sense of loss for the late Pastor Whillans, for his mother and brother, and for the earlier, more confident version of himself ebbed.

  He was whole again. He closed his eyes, said a prayer that somewhere within the building his father felt the same comfort, and entered the warehouse.

  It turned out that the building had been some sort of factory or mill but now housed pallets, wrapped for transport, of brightly boxed disposable surgical equipment—dressings, plastic forceps, procedure packs, needle and sponge holders—all with “Made in America” on the side and “Finished in Mexico” hidden somewhere on a label. By the back wall was a dwindling stack of the equipment boxes, a group of men in a makeshift assembly line opening each, inserting waterproof packages of what Luis took for cocaine into various interior crevasses, before repacking them and placing them on a last pallet.

  Luis figured if all of the boxes on the pallets contained as much cocaine as he was seeing being shoved into this equipment, it was literally tens of millions of dollars’ worth of drugs.

  A man who looked as if his facial features were sliding off of his face approached Luis, nodding to him matter-of-factly.

  Munuera.

  “Father Chavez,” the man said, extending a hand. “Obregon Bortolo Munuera. Thank you for attempting no tricks and coming as you said you would. Follow me please.”

  Munuera moved to a steel staircase running up the back wall to a covey of second-floor offices. Luis followed, casting an eye back to the boxes of medical supplies.

  “Ah yes,” Munuera said. “Medical supplies this week. Next week it’ll be peaches from Chile. In two weeks after that it’ll be fenders for Mitsubishi. There’s always someone on the north side willing to pay extra to CBP for expedited service. The trick is to know which, swim into that supply line, hijack enough for our purposes, then send them on their way. Our product is out before it even reaches their warehouse.”

  “Your doing?” Luis asked.

  “I’ve learned that it’s better to pay little notice to the other arms of the octopus,” Munuera said, shaking his head. “I didn’t want you laboring under the belief that every crime here doesn’t have a complicit partner on your side of the border.”