by Daniel Pyne
“Yeah.” Mahrez nodded to his bodyguard, grim. “You’re gonna have to hire some more security people, Emilio.” He linked arms with Rose and she steered him up the walk. Under his breath, disgusted, or maybe more disappointed, he muttered, “Give me grace to accept with serenity the things that cannot be changed.”
Rose’s hands danced: Say the rest of it.
Mahrez shook his head and signed back at her: That’s all there is anymore.
—
KIRBY FELT A QUEASY URGENCY to straighten out the Mahrez mess as soon as he could. Letting it fester would only increase the likelihood that a rot would follow, and the rot, Kirby knew, would eventually make its way back to him in some even worse form of Holy Hell. It was just him and Fish in Kirby’s cramped office, files from the rolling arrests with mug shots of each suspect clipped to the front of a folder were tiled across an already overloaded desk, wing table, guest chairs, and the floor.
“His name was in the Filofax.”
“It’s not a crime to have your boss’s phone number written down.”
“Shoeboxes filled with crack.”
“In a personal work locker. And nothing to link Mahrez to the drugs.”
“’Cept the Egyptian.”
“Who is about as toxic as Chernobyl. You want to rest your entire case on Saad Fanous, Hazel?”
Fish sighed. “Okay, so if Nick Mahrez is just an innocent bystander to this, can I just emphasize, for the record,” Fish said, “how much that would suck, big-time, because I’ve been getting serious props from my DEA brothers for my historic bust of the man nobody thought could be got.”
“I appreciated your candor. Let’s work backward through our night and see where it went sideways.”
“I was maybe even looking at a promotion.”
Kirby decided to just wait this out.
“Fine. Let’s recap.” Fish walked through it: “My happy hooker gave us the street fiends who gave us the roof jumper, Tigger. Tigger, he gave us the motel tweakers. Solid ground, yes? Said tweakers rolled over on Flavian, car salesman extraordinaire, who, again, we can totally prove was selling the bump to them.”
“Good so far. Saad?”
Kirby let Fish think about it. “Saad Fanous? Personally, I don’t even think he indulges in the monkey dust. He’s too twitchy all by his own self, he doesn’t require any chemical additives. I think Saad Fanous was telling us the truth, he just bought cocaine to impress his girlfriends at the Hot Box.”
“I agree with you,” Kirby said. “But bought it where? Not from Mahrez.”
Fish considered this. “Okay, so walk it back one.” He found and picked up the Flavian folder, referencing it, and said, “In your version, Flavian isn’t just a street dealer, he’s a wholesaler with some retail outlets?”
“Keep going.”
Fish talked it through. “Flav turned reality upside down, what a surprise: he was the one selling to Saad. Not the other way around. In your scenario, Flavian gave us a bum steer—ratted out Saad to protect his supplier. Counted on Saad to go crazy-helpful and confuse everything.”
“Which he did.”
Fish seemed unmoved. “None of this holds up in court any better than Saad’s version, the one where Stix Mahrez is at the top of his food chain.”
They both fell quiet. Fish put the paperwork down and looked for his cup of coffee, which was lost. Kirby said, “How does Flavian know Saad?”
Distracted, Fish gestured to the Fanous file. “The Egyptian leased that righteous red Vette from Flavian seven months ago . . .” Kirby knew where the coffee was, but liked to watch Fish do a slow burn, looking for it. Lifting files, pushing paper piles around, Fish found his Styrofoam cup next to the wastebasket, on the floor, under the desk, where he’d put it so it wouldn’t get tipped. “. . . he could have made the drug connection sometime after, I guess.”
“Okay. Different angle: Who’s Flavian protecting?”
“I don’t know.”
Kirby wanted Fish to catch up with what he just said out loud, but the DEA man took a sip of his coffee, made a face: bitter and cold.
“He make bail?”
“I think it was fifty grand.”
“Do we believe Flavian had fifty grand lying around?”
“I don’t think his double-wide qualifies as collateral,” Fish said, and then, having thought it all through again, saw where Kirby had led him. “Somebody put up the bond.”
“Somebody who didn’t want Flavian ratting him out.”
Fish drained his cup and started out the door. “Well, hell, let’s ask the little snitch.”
—
THE INCREDIBLE VIEW was why Mahrez had bought the land, years ago, and staked a big Bedouin tent on it, thinking, this was it, this was the shit. Back in the day Vic had razzed him mercilessly for putting down roots, common wisdom being in their line of work fungibility equated directly with survival. Vic had a sailboat that he moved every few months to a new berth in a new marina, up and down the coast, Gaviota to Chula Vista. Which is why, while Vic was in Oxnard—having three bullets put into the back of his head by a couple of hired men when Vic jack-in-the-boxed up the main hatch from belowdecks, starting to tell a dirty joke to his fiancée that he never got to finish—Stix was romancing two La Jolla High School surf bunnies with a ball of Lebanese hash and a bottle of mescal in the sultry half-light of his goat hair bayt. He’d gone off the grid and hence survived the first of the Sinaloa Cartel’s bloody territorial purges, 1981: cashed out, put some seed money into the gifted hands of the legendary Dana Point board shaper Primo Santini, and went legit.
RIP Vic. Theirs was a friendship grounded in commerce, Mahrez didn’t so much grieve him as miss the certainty of their bond and word. Not friends, partners, whose unquestioned trust in each other was, ironically because they were drug dealers, so fundamentally American, rule of law, absolute. The fiancée, a hatchet-faced anorexic who called herself Bunny because no one else would, was an early freebaser who fed Vic’s paranoia and spent all his money and probably fingered him to the cartel’s assassins. She had the body cremated and scattered Vic’s ashes in the parking lot at Zuma Beach, where she’d first set eyes on him. Took the sailboat north, intending to go to Portland, but nobody ever saw or heard from her again.
“It’s Stix Mahrez, yeah. I’ve left a couple of messages for him already . . .” Struggling to will his tension headache away, Mahrez listened impatiently to the City Hall side of his call, and watched Rose, out on the grass, playing with her new teacup poodle puppies. They danced away from her arms, barking. She was laughing, and her laugh, unleashed, guttural, raw, always made him smile.
“I understand. Just tell him—” The receptionist on the other end wouldn’t stop talking: meetings, schedule, ground-breaking ceremony in San Ysidro, yadda yadda, Mahrez finally just saying his piece over her, “—sure, sure, I understand, if you could just tell the mayor to call me back soon as he can, yeah. It’s pretty important. Nick—no, Stix—yeah, that’s right, Mahrez. Like the ballplayer, you remembered. Thank you.”
Click.
Steel-gray ocean bled to steel-gray sky.
Viscid stratus clouds hung shallow over water and shore. The Channel Islands loomed like phantasms in the far gloaming, and Coronado Bay was pimpled with the white sails. It was past noon. The bled-out sun wasn’t going to burn through this dozy haze, Mahrez thought, and then wondered how long it would take him to drive to the border.
—
TWO SLOE-EYED GIRLS in halter tops blew bubbles from the steps of a neighboring Winnebago on blocks, listening to Wham! on a boom box and watching Fish pound on the trailer door, and ring the bell, and knock again. Nothing.
“Hey, Johnny Law,” the girls sang at him.
Fish ignored them. “Flavian?” He listened for movement inside the double-wide, and heard only the faint, thrumming tone of
water running in a leaky toilet.
Fish’s government ride was parked in front of the familiar, shaded, rust-streaked house trailer at the end of a cul-de-sac. The hot gray day did nothing to improve the neighborhood. Fat, salt-rusted Detroit iron was parked in nearly every carport, excepting the occasional Toyota Camry with a coat hanger where the aerial should be. A big blue dumpster reeked of spoiled meat and grass clippings.
Behind the trailer he found that a piece of flattened cardboard box had been duct-taped over the bathroom window through which Flavian had come crashing into Fish’s arms the other night. Tape intact. No escape or forced entry evident.
A fingertip pull-up on the sill got him eye-level with the back living room window. He could see an unmade sofa bed, a television atop a laminated faux-cherrywood eight-track stereo console, a pile of pornographic magazines spilt across a split leatherette recliner, and a framed, shimmering foil art print of The Last Supper, but with San Diego Chargers instead of the apostles, and Don Coryell sitting in for Jesus Christ.
Fish dropped down and moved through overgrown grass back along the trailer to the bedroom window, repeating his pull-up. There he saw the naked body facedown on the bed’s bare mattress.
Flavian.
Executed.
Hands duct-taped behind his paper-white buttocks, shot twice in the back, neat little entry wounds, bubbled and blue. Blood had spritzed the headboard and the wall and leaked all over, dry now, almost black. Flav’s clothes were balled on a plastic, stackable chair in the corner, and his Air Jordans neatly lined up below it.
Fish said, “Oh, man,” and let go of the sill.
6
THE SHARP SHADOW of the serial billboards hawking to border arrivals and departures gave shade to the small herd of news crews and spectators at the ground-breaking for a new immigration center that was the centerpiece of Mayor Richard Poole’s economic redevelopment plan for south San Diego. Just an empty scrape of San Ysidro commercial land, its few acres tufted with half-buried garbage and goatgrass and smother weed, within walking distance of the Tijuana border crossing and a long spit from the permanent gridlock of traffic crawling through customs. At the back of the gathering, where two local news mobile vans were cabled up to Betacams on tripods, was Stix Mahrez with tiny twisted reflections of the smiling mayor twinned in his Ray-Bans.
His side still ached, where the blade had done its crazing. He didn’t want to be here, but so much control of his existence, since the Feds showed up at his door, had been slipping like sand through his fingers, he had to do something. Anything. To keep hold of what remained.
Strategically fenced by an SDPD uniformed security detail, Poole gave a short speech, thanking the sundry politicians and businessmen who made this possible, including a few Mexican nationals, one of whom Mahrez recognized as Juan Blanco. Those mirror Revos, that big arrogant smile, Blanco was surrounded by his own honor guard consisting of tattooed, shaved-head, leather-clad steroid freaks suggesting a quorum of B-list Luchadores backstage at intermission.
That the Mexican narco was attending Poole’s dog-and-pony show was not the surprise; it was how he was thanked for attending that struck Mahrez as odd, possibly worrisome. Rumors sifting across the border like the stories of the Greek gods had it that after the recent arrests of Quintero and Carrillo, God of Gods cartel jefe Félix Gallardo had gone into seclusion and apportioned his empire to a collective of relatively unknown subsidiaries: Juárez to the Carrillo Fuentes family, the Sonoran corridor to Miguel Quintero, Tijuana to the Arellano-Félix brothers, the Gulf territories would stand pat with Abrego, and Joaquín Guzmán and Ismael García would take over the Pacific Coast routes, henceforth to be called the Sinaloa Cartel.
Blanco, a midlevel suck-up not known for having more than single-syllable thoughts, was generally considered to be barely another brick in the wall, but his presence here might mean he was soon to be more than that. Mahrez mused darkly that if Richard Poole knew this, it was bad—and if he didn’t, it was worse.
—
KIRBY WAS, at that same time, having a wrestling match, dueling Armani suits, with Mahrez’s attorney in Kirby’s Federal Building office, which he’d made a self-conscious half-assed effort to clean up by stacking all his case files precariously on the minifridge in the corner.
Several of them had already avalanched back onto the floor.
“Don’t do this, Kirby.” Damien Belasco decided not to sit, well aware that the guest chairs often also served as food trays for various high-risk burritos brought back from roach coaches that prowled the streets around City Hall.
“It’s not my call.” Kirby, hating himself, toed the company line. “My boss wants your client’s help.”
“Your boss. Your new boss?”
“Yes.”
“I heard she’s a piece.” A roguish delay. “Of work.”
Kirby said without mirth, “Ha ha.”
“Look, man, the girlfriend, Rose, is deaf and disfigured, for Chrissakes. I mean. Kirby. C’mon.”
Kirby made a vague, helpless gesture. His phone line lit up, got answered. The receptionist’s interoffice message ID scrolled: GUNN. Kirby tapped the CALL BACK key.
“This is so beneath you.”
“I am just glad Mr. Mahrez finally contacted his attorney,” Kirby said.
“Yeah, now that everybody and his uncle thinks he’s your informant.” Belasco was the best criminal lawyer south of San Francisco, and still refused to take any cases in L.A., which took balls. Kirby admired him. Kirby admired anybody who wasn’t AUSA Kirby, these days. Belasco had noted the wardrobe uptick. “I bet you haven’t worn a suit like that since you were at Gibson and Dale.”
Kirby shrugged. “New dress code.”
“Only for you, I guess. Lipstadt’s still wearing that J. C. Penney polyester two-piece his mom bought for his bar mitzvah.”
“Maybe he didn’t get the memo.”
“Do you even know the story? Of Rose and Stix?” Belasco put his hands in his pockets, casual, the way he did when he gave his summations; he had a faint Denzel Washington vibe, right down to the contagious smile. “She’s a former Paris runway model who found a little trouble with the junk. Her heroin dealer got her a green card, brought her to America, and then pimped her out to his wealthiest clients.”
“I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know. Your stories always make me want to start drinking at, like, ten in the morning.”
“She spirals down, you can only imagine, conventions and shore leave, but crawls back out, meets Nick at an AA meeting, tells him she wants to quit the life, so he gets her some catalog work with Hang Ten. Pimp finds out and attacks her with battery acid.” Belasco said it simply, but took a pause to let the full weight of this sink in. “Ruined her face, pain so intense it shorted out her auditory nerves. But Stix took her in, man. That night. To his own house, hired security. Found her specialists, nursed her himself. He fell in love with her after she was maimed. He saved her life.”
Kirby started to say something cynical, but stopped himself. Belasco wasn’t just working him. There was real feeling in this. And yet— “What happened to that pimp?” Belasco started to answer, but Kirby beat him to it, “Lemme guess: Somebody pounded two feet of rebar through his head, and his body washed up on the beach. Or, no—no, a hiker found him rotting on the banks of the Salton Sea, sans hands, teeth, and feet. Or maybe he just vanished one day. Never to be seen again?”
Belasco said something under his breath.
“This isn’t the movies, Damien. Whores don’t have a heart of gold, bad guys don’t see God and get grace. Our version of a happy ending is where Jack the Ripper gets taken out by Charlie Manson.”
So much for avoiding the cynical.
Kirby laid it out. “All your client has to do is apologize for the stunt in the mayor’s office and talk shop with us. Fill in some blanks; advise and cons
ent. It’s not really snitching, per se, it’s . . .” Kirby couldn’t find the words, because the whole thing was such bullshit, his side, their side, an endless circle, “. . . more like consulting.” His shoulders sagged. Shit.
“Consulting.” Belasco stared at him. Kirby felt dumb.
“It is what it is,” Kirby said after a while.
“Unless it isn’t,” Belasco pointed out.
Kirby let his palms flutter out, helpless. Exposed.
Nothing.
Belasco seemed genuinely disappointed. “Don’t do this. Don’t do this, man. Just say no.”
—
SAAD FANOUS WAS SURE he’d figured it out. The FBI agent Tina Zappacosta, lovely today, he noted appreciatively, in her sharp black skirt and coat, sat on the other side of the visiting booth glass, waiting for him to explain why he’d summoned her, but the truth was he didn’t understand why he’d needed to summon her, he’d given everybody what they wanted, so, okay, maybe she was the problem since their case together appeared to have been derailed by his arrest and detention, potentially exposing him to the very suspects he and she, Tina, had been attempting to ensnare.
“I want you to get me out of here,” Saad said.
“I can’t do that.”
She seemed truthful. Perhaps, he thought, because she was a woman. “Get the government prosecutor to arrange it for us,” Saad advised.
“You’re in on a felony possession charge,” Tina said to him. “Your case will have to work through the system.”
“I have a deal.”
“You have an understanding that they’ll put in a good word for you at sentencing.”
This was where, for Saad, it all became a bit of a fog. But he had figured out his work-around. “I will make it possible for you to arrest a cell of Shia terrorists.”
“A she-what?”
“Yes. Let me elaborate.” Through a very lithe Moroccan stripper he’d met at the Hot Box, Saad had been introduced to some U.C. San Diego graduate exchange students, mostly Jordanian, he insisted, from very wealthy families and typically clueless; he was confident that he could persuade these earnest young Arabs to donate a portion of their allowance to give to the Hezbollah resistance in Lebanon without realizing that they would, in fact, be agreeing to the direct purchase of weapons and explosives for domestic mischief and, Saad believed, upon delivery to their apartment of the same, give Tina Zappacosta the local terror cell she needed to replace the local terror cell she’d lost. “Islamic jihadists.”
