I shook my head quickly. For a second I thought I was going to throw up, but then it passed.
“Let’s keep going,” I said.
I stepped on something when we got to the front yard. It was a Wiffle ball, or what was left of one. Brian hit them so hard, he caved them in. I thought about Brian then. Watching my oldest son play his first football game back in New York, the smile that creased his face on that rainy, freezing field when the coach sent him in off the bench.
I turned and looked at the open front door as the SWAT team went inside. There was a sudden bang of another door being flung open. “Clear!” someone called. I squatted down and stared at the dirt as I listened to more bangs and more shouts of “Clear!” as the SWAT guys swept the house.
Then one of the agents appeared at the front door. It was the preppy-looking one I’d hit. He waved us up.
“Mike, you really, really don’t have to do this,” Emily said.
I lifted the crushed Wiffle ball and stared at it as I gathered myself.
“Yes, I do,” I said, standing and stepping toward the house.
“Mike,” said the agent, holding up his palm. “I don’t know what this means, but there’s no one here.”
“What do you mean?” I said, staring over his shoulder, into the foyer. “You mean they’re dead? They’re all dead?”
“No, Mike,” the agent said. “There are no bodies. There’s no anything. Your family isn’t here, Detective. The house is completely empty. Everyone is gone.”
CHAPTER 85
THE TEST FOR THE fentanyl powder actually turned up negative. I quickly shucked off the suffocating mask and frantically searched the house.
It was true. Everyone was gone. I looked through the rooms. The beds were unmade. Everyone’s clothes seemed to be all there, including their sneakers. I even found Mary Catherine’s cell phone charging on the bookshelf beside her bed. It was hard to say if there was any kind of struggle, but it was obvious that they had all left quickly and suddenly, in the middle of the night.
I stared out Mary Catherine’s window at the dark mountains, going crazy. Perrine had my family. He’d taken them away.
Roadblocks were set up in the entire area. Troopers and local police came with bloodhounds. The dogs kept running around in circles in the farmyard, indicating that it was unlikely that anyone in my family had left on foot.
I peeled off the hazmat suit in the kitchen and just sat there at the table, rubbing a hand through my hair over and over again as I stared at the worn pine floor, trying to think. Why would Perrine come to kill my family and just take them instead? The implications of it wouldn’t stop coming, the possibilities of what he could do.
It was worse than finding them dead, I decided. I couldn’t believe that this was happening. How could I?
I looked up to see Emily take a seat next to me. She began to cry.
“I caused this,” she said. “You didn’t even want to go to LA, and I came up like a good little soldier and put on the con job and the pressure. You didn’t want to leave for exactly this reason. I caused this. I’m responsible.”
I wanted to tell her she was wrong, but I was in no shape to comfort anyone. The lead jacket of what was happening was too heavy. I was surprised I had the strength to breathe.
That was when the dog came in through the open back door. It was Cody’s border collie. She rubbed against my shins, and I reached out and patted the sad-looking pooch on the head.
As I was doing it, I remembered what Cody had told me about border collies. How brave and smart they were. How they always kept moving, kept circling. How they never quit.
I suddenly stood and took out my phone.
“Emily, listen to me. Stop crying. There’s still a shred of hope,” I said quickly, thumbing through my contacts.
“There is?” Emily said.
I nodded.
“That my guys are not here, all dead, means that Perrine is going to want to use them somehow, right? We need to find Perrine before that happens. We still have one shot.”
I finally found the LAPD detective John Diaz and pressed Dial.
“Emily, call the airport and tell them to get that plane ready to go,” I said to her as Diaz’s phone rang. “We need to get back to LA and pay Tomás Neves another visit, and he’s going to tell me where Perrine is or he’s going to die.”
CHAPTER 86
THE PLAN I SKETCHED out with Diaz over the phone was hazy at first. But as Emily and I raced back to the airfield and the waiting air force jet, refinements were made and remade.
When we touched back down at Southern Cal Logistics Airport, Diaz texted to let me know that our course of action was irretrievably under way, for good or for ill. I no longer had the time or energy to care.
Following Diaz’s directions, Emily and I drove thirty miles southwest, straight from the base to Wrightwood, California, a pine-covered valley north of LA in the San Gabriel Mountains. About a mile north of a ski resort shuttered for the summer, we pulled onto a narrow, winding road called Lone Pine Canyon Road. We followed it to its end and then turned onto a long and steep, thickly wooded driveway.
It was about ten in the morning as we pulled the car into the pine-needle-covered front yard of an old, faded forest-green cabin. Diaz’s Mustang was already there, under a corrugated carport, along with a blue Jeep.
I rolled down the Crown Vic’s window to a low hum of chittering crickets. You could see some hogbacked hills in the distance behind the cabin, but there wasn’t another house to be seen. There weren’t even any power lines. It was like we’d driven back in time.
For a few moments, I stared at the faded cabin, mulling things over. I wondered what I would find once I went in there. Nothing good in the slightest, I knew. But we were past that. Way past that.
“Stay here,” I told Emily as I finally opened the passenger door.
“No. I’m going in,” Emily said, opening her door. “I’m in this as deep as you, Mike. I don’t care what happens next. I’m responsible.”
“No, you’re not,” I said, reaching across her and slamming her door shut again. “I’m the one with nothing to lose, Emily. If you want to help me, I need you to stay and just sit here.”
“But, Mike —” she was saying as I got out and shut the door.
Diaz had already told me that they were set up downstairs. Around back, I pulled open a rusty sliding door and entered a musty-smelling, pine-paneled room with a stone fireplace. Diaz looked up from where he was sitting on a folding chair in front of the fireplace, smoking a cigarette. He was dressed head to toe in black. Beside him, propped up against the hearth’s river stone, were two AR-15s.
“What’s the story?” I said, shaking his hand.
“He’s in there,” Diaz said, pointing his cigarette at the closed door behind him. “We Tasered the shit out of him as he was coming out his front door. Talk about not knowing what hit you.”
“What does he know so far?”
Diaz blew a smoke ring up at the yellow water stains on the drop ceiling.
“We told him we work for Perrine’s rival, the Ortega cartel, and I think he’s fallen for it. He also thinks we have his family. He came on pretty hard at first, but right before you arrived, I got creative and convinced him that if he didn’t start being helpful, I was going to make a call and turn his wife HIV positive. He started with the waterworks then, boy. Broke like a glass hammer. Funny, the things that can hit a nerve.”
Diaz was putting the cigarette out on the sole of his boot when the door behind him opened and a large man wearing a ski mask stepped out. I stood there with a very puzzled look on my face as the man peeled off the mask. It was Detective Bassman.
“Wow! You’re in on this, too?” I said as I shook his massive hand. “Risking your ass for me? I’m never going to be able to pay you back for what you’re doing for me. Either of you.”
“No problem, brother,” Bassman said, flashing a smile. “My pleasure, believe me. I think he�
�s ready to talk to us now.”
Diaz handed me a ski mask.
“Let’s do this,” he said.
CHAPTER 87
NEVES WAS IN HIS underwear, lying on his back at the bottom of an empty, dated six-person hot tub. He had a puffy black eye and was gagged with tape. He was also handcuffed at the ankles and the wrists, and he was wearing a forty-pound weight vest that pinned him down flat onto the floor of the tub.
When I saw Neves lying there, scared and helpless in his underwear, I felt my resolve waver for a second. Gangbanger or not, Neves was a man. A man we’d kidnapped. A man we were about to extract information from by force, if necessary. Staring down at him where he lay shaking, I felt wrong, sick inside.
Then I remembered that somewhere right now, Perrine had my family, my kids, and I steeled myself with a long, deep breath.
Diaz lifted another vest from a corner and stepped into the tub. There was a ripping sound as he tightened up the Velcro straps of the second vest around Neves’s lower legs.
Diaz plugged the drain before he stepped out of the tub and sat on its edge. Bassman flicked open a butterfly knife and slid the blade in between the tape and the man’s mouth. When he cut the tape away, a thin string of blood flowed from a slit in Neves’s lip.
“Dang. Nicked you there, Tomás. My bad,” Bassman said as he violently tore the rest of the tape off Neves’s face.
Neves’s chest heaved as fresh tears sprouted in his light-brown eyes.
“Please,” he said between hacked-off sobs. “Please. My wife, man. Please. She’s pregnant, man. Two months. Don’t hurt her like that. Don’t give her the monster. The baby get it, too.”
When I heard the amount of genuine pain and fear in Neves’s voice for the second time, I felt something sway unsteadily inside me. I squeezed my hands into fists, willing myself to ignore him. I had no other choice.
“Hey, don’t worry so much,” Bassman said, pinching the gangbanger’s raw, red cheek from the other side of the tub. “I hear they’re doing amazing things on the AIDS front these days. Making some real medical break-throughs.”
Neves closed his eyes, his bloody lip quivering as he cried.
“OK, OK, OK!” he suddenly yelled. “You win! What do you want? Get me a cell phone. I’ll give you everything I have. I got eighteen kilos at a safe house right now. Eighteen. You can have everything.”
“We don’t want everything. We want Perrine. Where is he?” I said.
Neves did some more flopping around and moaning.
“Shit, shit,” he said.
“You in the shit, all right, Tomás,” Bassman said, loudly palming Neves’s head. He banged it back loudly against the floor of the hot tub. “You heard of quicksand? Well, you just stepped in quickshit.”
“He’s in Mexico, OK? He was here in LA. We set up some houses for him, but he’s gone now. I swear to God. Perrine went back to Mexico early this morning. One of my guys got him over the border.”
“To where?!” I said. “Where did he go?!”
“I don’t know. You think he’d tell me? I don’t know.”
“Wrong answer,” Diaz said, squealing open the tub’s tap full blast.
“No! It’s true! It’s true!” Neves yelled out over the water splattering loudly off the side of his face.
We stood there as Neves screamed, lying flat on his back, and the water rose. In thirty seconds, it was up to his earlobes. After a minute, the water had reached his cheeks. He strained his neck, trying to raise himself up. Covered in the segmented weight vests, he looked like an overturned turtle trying to pull himself unsuccessfully out of his shell.
“He went to his summer place near Mexico City,” Neves finally said, sputtering, the water now at his lips. “I’ll tell you exactly where on the map. Just turn it off! Turn it —”
Diaz put a hand to my chest as I reached in to grab the criminal who was screaming bubbles now under the rushing water.
“Give him a second, Mike,” Diaz said. “He needs to see how serious we are.”
“Exactly,” Bassman said, taking out a smartphone and thumbing it. “Let this guy soak his weary bones for a minute in peace, Mike. Can’t you see he’s had a hard day?”
CHAPTER 88
THOUGH HE HADN’T BEEN to it in over a year, the estate in the Sierra de Pachuca, fifteen miles outside the central-eastern Mexican town of Real del Monte, was by far Perrine’s favorite.
Built around a once-flourishing silver mine, the twenty-plus square miles of his property had been part of one of the original haciendas given by the Spanish crown to one of Cortés’s captains. The original grant was hung in a frame above the fireplace in Perrine’s office. At parties, Perrine made a point to show his guests the section on the yellowed parchment that granted the landowner not only the acreage and natural resources, but full ownership of all the area’s inhabitants as well.
The beauty of a good ranching hacienda like Perrine’s was not just its plush main house and gardens, but its complete self-sufficiency and sustainability. On the twelve thousand rolling acres, they farmed massive herds of cattle and sheep, countless chickens. They even had corn and soybean fields and several freshwater resources, including a fish-filled mountain river. The staff who lived on the hacienda all year round was in excess of forty people. They were mostly vaqueros, whom Perrine took great pleasure riding with whenever he was in attendance.
In summers past, in exchange for the local governor’s discretion and friendship, the hacienda often ran a children’s camp for local charities. But the last two weeks of August were reserved for Perrine’s expansive family’s dozens of children. The last time he had attended, two years before, eleven of the children were Perrine’s own. The children’s eight different mothers also stayed.
Perrine fondly remembered eating dinner with them poolside, night after night, flirting with them as the endless courses and wines were brought by an army of waiters. After the fifth course, he would have trouble putting names to faces. After the seventh, he’d stop caring.
He smiled at the memories. Had he ever been happier than during those two weeks, playing with the bands of his happy, screaming children all day and with their mommies all night? Had anyone?
But as his plane touched down on his airstrip late that morning, the estate was empty of all guests. Though he had sold the hacienda to a dummy buyer years before, he knew that it was possible for the Americans to know his connection to it, so he very rarely and briefly visited it these days. He’d come now only after a trusted source high up in the local policía had assured him there were no special directives to watch the place, no suspicious gringos suddenly filling the local hotels.
Even if there had been any chatter, even with his current American project under way, Perrine would have been hard-pressed to cancel the affair that he was putting on tonight—it would have been unthinkable to shutter the event. He lived for the cartel’s annual bonus party, a formal dinner for himself and his top one hundred captains, resplendent with speeches and toasts and culminating in waiters carrying valises filled with cash on silver trays.
Perrine sighed wistfully along with his Global Express’s whining jet engines as the plane taxied down the runway behind his twenty-one-thousand-square-foot mansion.
What a life, he thought, taking off his sleeping mask and handing it to the new, blond American stewardess, Marcia, with a wink. He was truly a blessed man.
CHAPTER 89
OLD BETO, PERRINE’S HEAD vaquero, was standing beside his long-faced butler, Arthur, on the other side of the forty-five-million-dollar aircraft’s drop-down stairs.
“Beto, what is it? You look excited,” Perrine cried in Spanish as he handed his English butler his silk sport coat and began rolling up his sleeves. “Don’t tell me she foaled?”
Bowlegged Beto nodded rapidly and smiled, the laugh lines around his bright eyes like cracks in brown glass.
“Show me immediately.”
They walked along the front of his massive,
marble-stepped mansion and around the pool to the air-conditioned barn. Though he had several Thoroughbred racehorses, Perrine’s real passion was for the show horses. They walked past stalls filled with several million dollars’ worth of them. He stopped to pat and pet his favorites, She-Wolf, and Blue, and Troubled Queen. The prize horses took their names from the Jackson Pollock paintings that hung in the mansion’s front hallway.
Perrine peered into Troubled Queen’s stall at the new-born foal. It was a filly, like he’d predicted. A pale-strawberry roan as pretty as her mother. The little horse peered back at him shyly before tucking itself back in, next to its mother.
“Look! She is afraid of me, Beto!” Perrine complained. “Can you believe this? Afraid of me?”
There was a troubled look on Beto’s face.
“What is it?” Perrine asked.
“What are we to call her?”
Perrine stared at the baby horse, a finger pressed to his pursed lips. He finally raised his finger in the air like a maestro.
“We shall call her La Rose,” Perrine announced.
“La Rose,” Beto repeated reverently as Perrine patted the old man on his shoulder and turned.
What he didn’t tell Beto was that “La Rose” came from the name of the captivating Paul Delvaux painting that he’d just picked up at Sotheby’s. Eighteen million was probably a tad pricey for the Belgian surrealist, Perrine thought, rolling his sleeves back down, but, hey, you can’t take it with you.
Arthur was waiting for him outside the front door of the barn, holding his cream-colored jacket. Perrine slipped back into it and shot the cuffs.
“Arthur,” he said.
“Yes, Mr. Perrine?”
“A plane will be coming in about twenty minutes with quite a few, uh, lake-house guests aboard.”
Arthur nodded without batting an eyelash. The lake house was where the men liked to blow off steam after the bonus-party festivities. Morning cleanup usually involved hoses and shovels, but boys will be boys.
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