The Big Lie

by James Grippando

  “I can’t make it” was all it said.

  No “Sorry, sis.” No explanation.

  Megan did that kind of thing.

  Charlotte made the most of it. She ordered the fried blue crab claws with coleslaw and ate alone in the shade of a big blue umbrella.

  Things had not been right between Charlotte and her sister for years. The “Pink Panty Road Trip” was just the tip of the iceberg. Charlotte couldn’t say for sure if Megan truly believed that her sister would have called the police—to find Megan passed out in her underwear—just to make herself look like a hero. One thing was certain: Megan resented the fact that she was always “the screwup” and Charlotte was Mom and Dad’s favorite. Charlotte remained Dad’s favorite until the day he died. Not so with Mom. It was a few months after the kiss-on-a-dare at Clyde’s when everything had changed. Charlotte sat her mother down to tell her about the new friend she’d made and the feelings she was having. Big mistake.

  “It would hurt less if you told me you’d slept with every boy at school.”

  Her mother had cried for a week, and not just in front of Charlotte. Everyone in the family knew that Charlotte had broken Mom’s heart in some unspeakable way. Megan had decided to make it her business, got the truth out of their mother, and took it straight to Charlotte. Boy, did Megan take it to her. The slap across the face had split Charlotte’s lip, leaving it so swollen that it physically hurt to speak when she met with Amanda to tell her where things stood between them. Charlotte was just a teenager.

  “I can’t believe that bitch did this to you.”

  Amanda reached for her hand, but Charlotte pulled away.

  Charlotte tried to explain that it wasn’t just Megan giving her “what for” and then moving on. Amanda was from Miami; Pensacola wasn’t Miami. Charlotte had taken ten years off her mother’s life, and there would be no forgiveness of this sin.

  “I can’t do this, Amanda.”

  Amanda had given her a hundred reasons why they had to fight through this and why it would be worth it. But Charlotte had made up her mind. Or someone else had made up her mind for her. It was not without tears, but Amanda accepted the decision.

  “You can do this if you want, Charlotte. But either way, no one will ever hurt you again.” She planted a kiss near the cut on Charlotte’s lip, then whispered the last words between them:

  “That’s a promise.”

  Charlotte dropped her crab claw right onto the picnic table. She dug her cell phone out of her purse and quickly scrolled through her photo library to find the screenshot she’d snapped of a text message. She was looking for the spoofed message from Theo’s number, the one that she’d taken as a warning to remind her of the oath she had sworn as an elector. The same message that, later, the attorney general had twisted to mean that Charlotte had sold her electoral vote, and that “a deal was a deal.” The image came up on her screen, and the memory of Amanda’s words gave it an entirely different meaning.

  “A promise is a promise.”

  Charlotte stared at the message for a moment, then laid her phone aside in disbelief.

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Amanda.”

  Charlotte attacked her cell phone with both thumbs, starting with an Internet search of Amanda’s full name. The top news story was almost five years old, about a Miami woman who became one of the first female soldiers to enter combat training at Fort Benning. It wasn’t directly about Amanda, but she was mentioned in the story as an example of “another Miami woman” who, before the repeal of the Department of Defense Direct Combat Exclusion Rule, had been part of the de facto integration of women into frontline combat, the military police. Charlotte felt a rush of pride but quickly moved on to the next listing: a social-media address. She sent a friend request with a message:

  “I need to see you.”

  She didn’t know when Amanda would see it or if she would respond, but she felt the urgent need to get on the road. She left more than enough money on the table to cover her bill and a tip, grabbed her purse, and headed for her car, anxious to get back to Tallahassee.

  Chapter 54

  Jack and Theo returned to a quiet beach house. Andie had proved quite effective at telling visitors to back off and leave Harry alone for a while. Jack found his wife and father alone, playing chess in the Florida room. Harry had nothing left on the board but his king and a couple of pawns.

  “Your wife’s a chess machine,” said Harry.

  “Actually, I’ve never played before,” said Andie. Harry’s jaw dropped, but she quickly came clean. “Gotcha.”

  The game ended with Harry’s surrender, and Jack invited Andie to take a walk with him. She grabbed her coat, Jack took her hand, and they headed down the sandy road in the cool night air. A sliver of a moon hung over the tree line. Jack never shared specifics about his cases, but that didn’t stop him from picking her brain every now and then.

  “What can I learn from an FBI agent about legalized marijuana?”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “There’s a dark side to everything, right?”

  “Not Righley.”

  Jack smiled. He missed their little munchkin. “True. But more to the point: just because you call it ‘medical’ marijuana doesn’t change the fact that you’re growing and selling one of the most profitable recreational drugs in the history of the universe. There has to be a dark side.”

  “No question,” Andie said. “No surprises here. It’s the cartels. Cuban, Chinese, Mexican. They were all smart enough to realize that profits on imported pot would shrink as more states warmed up to legalization. The import market has shifted to harder drugs, like heroin. And the marijuana market is moving from imported product to cannabis grown north of the border.”

  “Homegrown, you mean?”

  “Not literally in homes. They cultivate in states where it’s legal to grow a limited number of plants for personal or medical use, but these narcos come up with all kinds of schemes to grow massive quantities way above the limit. Then, like any other drug dealer, they distribute it to states where marijuana is still illegal and sell it at market rates.”

  Jack wanted to ask how a pain-management physician like Perez might be connected to one of these narco operations, but he had to be careful about getting too close to the facts of his own case when talking to Andie while she was wearing her FBI hat. The fact that South Florida pill mills led the nation in the overprescription of opioids, however, gave Jack some clue.

  “How established is this business in Florida?” he asked, keeping it general.

  “You’ll have to talk to someone in DEA. But the risk analysis for the narcos is a no-brainer. They can use the old business model and rely on illegals to transport foreign-grown marijuana and hope the mules don’t get caught at the border. Or they can use illegals who are already in the U.S. to cultivate thousands of plants on land that’s licensed to grow a few dozen plants a year, and probably never get caught. Who’s going to blow the whistle? The illegal farmhands who are spreading the fertilizer?”

  “Thanks,” said Jack. “That was helpful.”

  They continued down the road, and then at Andie’s insistence, they stopped. She wanted to face him squarely to put her question. “Did this come up in your case for Charlotte Holmes?”

  “Sorry, honey. You know I can’t—”

  “I know, you can’t talk about it. But listen to me, Jack. These narcos are just as ruthless in their U.S. operations as they are outside the U.S. It would worry me less if you were defending a serial killer on death row. Please be careful.”

  “Okay,” said Jack. “I will.”

  Dr. Perez was sweating through his shirt. He shouldn’t have been. The apartment came with a Savant home-automation and climate-control system that maintained the indoor air temperature at seventy-one degrees Fahrenheit and, more important, kept out the smog. Like all luxury residences in Mexico City’s Federal District, this seventeenth-story gem with wraparound views of the city and moun
tains also came with state-of-the-art security and twenty-four-hour guards.

  No security system, however, could keep out the deputies sent by the apartment’s owner.

  “Mr. Ortega wants to see you,” the man at the door announced in Spanish. He said his name was Cesar, which didn’t mean anything to Perez. He had two other men with him. They were all business, the kind of business that made Perez nervous—and sweaty.

  Perez had met Ortega only once, and that was in Miami. His accountant had made the introduction at yet another Ortega penthouse, and it was even more exquisite than the one Perez was using in Mexico City. On the terrace overlooking the Miami River, the three men had worked out the terms of their arrangement. Perez brought to the table his network of “cooperating physicians” from the halcyon days of Florida pill mills. With the exception of one or two who were still in jail, those same docs would be on the ground floor of a business built on a Florida appellate court ruling that patients had a constitutional right to grow their own medical marijuana. Each doc would write a bogus script to five “patients”—handpicked by Ortega or his deputies—to grow a “limited amount” of cannabis for “personal medical use.” With just average growing skills, those five patients could grow about five hundred plants every ninety days. A plant typically produced a pound of marijuana, which could sell in the illegal market for about four grand per pound. The Miami meeting had been about Dr. Perez’s cut of the $8 million in annual revenue generated by each cooperating doc under his umbrella.

  The point of the Mexico City meeting was not so clear.

  “What does he want to see me about?” asked Perez.

  Cesar stepped into the foyer. His wingmen followed. “He wants to renegotiate.”

  Perez assumed he meant the revenue split. “Why?”

  “Because you fucked up.”

  Perez felt like he’d been punched in the chest. Hiring a lobbyist to push Tallahassee bureaucrats to issue more cultivation licenses had been a smart move on his part. Trying to bribe his old friend Charlotte to put a marijuana-friendly president in the White House was the dumbest thing he’d ever done. And now there would be consequences.

  “I don’t think a meeting is necessary,” Perez said nervously.

  Cesar tugged at his jacket just hard enough to reveal the outline of a pistol just behind the breast pocket. “Mr. Ortega wants to meet.”

  Perez glanced at the other two men, then back at Cesar. “I’ll get my coat.”

  He didn’t need a coat. He needed a plan. This unexpected visit from Ortega’s men had all the markings of a one-way trip to nowhere, and a seventeenth-floor apartment didn’t offer many escape routes.

  “I’ll go with you,” Cesar said, and he followed Perez to the bedroom.

  Perez went to the closet and found a jacket. His cell phone was charging on the dresser. A call to his accountant, the man who’d introduced him to Ortega, might save his life. Or maybe sometime during the car ride to wherever they were going he could send an emergency text to put a stop to this insanity. He walked to the dresser and reached for his cell.

  “Leave it,” Cesar said.

  “But—”

  “No phone,” he said firmly.

  Perez wondered if he’d seen the news accounts of journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s iPhone recording of his own murder, which had exposed the dirty work of a Saudi-sponsored hit squad in Turkey.

  “Let’s go,” he said, and Perez followed him back to the foyer. Cesar led the way, followed by Perez, with the two other men trailing behind him like the Secret Service, narco-style. Cesar had his own passkey to the apartment’s private elevator, as if to validate his direct nexus to Ortega. Perez was starting to feel nauseous. The elevator opened directly to the main lobby, and a sedan was parked right outside the front door. One of Cesar’s men opened the rear door on the passenger side and climbed in. Cesar directed Perez to sit in the middle, and the other man got in last. Cesar drove, with Perez sandwiched between two goons in the back seat. He supposed that it was better than being bound, gagged, and stuffed in the trunk, but it was hard to feel good about anything at the moment.

  “How far is it to Mr. Ortega’s place?” he asked.

  “Shut up,” said Cesar.

  Perez sank back into the seat. His options were narrowing. He could take this ride to its unhappy ending, or he could figure his way out of a very bad situation. He was a bright guy. Top ten percent of his medical school class. Smart enough to marry a rich woman to put him through med school. Talking his way out of trouble wasn’t a realistic strategy with these blockheads. The guy on his left had a neck like a bull, and probably the brain of one, too. The other smelled like the sticky floor of a college bar on dollar-a-shot night. The whiskey stench was overpowering. Each bump in the road set his head in motion like a bobblehead doll. He was hungover, no doubt about it, and barely awake. And the stink. Perez wished Mr. Whiskey-Breath would open the window—or, even better, the door.

  The door. The sedan had power locks, and Perez had no recollection of the distinct sound of those locks engaging. Could the doors be unlocked?

  It was decision time. They were still inside the city, and Cesar was focused on negotiating his way through urban traffic. Perez craned his neck for a glimpse of the dashboard: forty kilometers per hour. Around twenty-five miles per hour, but his clinic had managed the chronic pain of patients who’d merely fallen out of bed, so he knew it would hurt like hell to hit the pavement at any speed. He might even break a few bones or hit his head and kill himself. But it was better than a drill bit powering through one ear and out the other—or whatever execution method Cesar fancied.

  They were on Avenida Paseo de la Reforma, a wide and historic artery that cut a diagonal path through nine miles of countless neighborhoods. Perez had traveled on it many times, but they were farther north than he’d ever been before, heading through barrios unfamiliar to him. He lived by the handy rule of thumb for infrequent visitors to Mexico City: “Stay safe, stay south.” If the road to Señor Ortega’s residence really did lead north, it seemed to Perez that it should have taken them farther west, to the Colonial Californiano–style estates of Lomas de Chapultepec or to the trendy apartments of Polanco. The north side of the city was famous for its street markets, los tianguis, where shoppers bargained for cheap clothes, foodstuffs, and electronics—“que se cayeron del camión,” a colloquialism for things that “fell off the truck.” Los tianguis at Tepito, La Lagunilla, and Nezahualcóyotl had their dark side as well, drawing not only adventure seekers but hard-core criminals dealing in everything from drugs and illegal weapons to endangered species and sex slaves. The most notorious streets were downright lawless, especially at night. Perez didn’t have the luxury of choosing the perfect location for his exit. Time and daylight were running out. Whiskey-Breath was at most half-awake, fighting off too much drink, his day likely having started with breakfast shots. Perez watched him out of the corner of his eye and waited until the moment was right: eyelids heavy, chin on his chest, his breathing deep. And then he launched.

  Perez was no athlete, but the adrenaline propelled him from the rear seat like an Olympic sprinter from the starting blocks. Before Whiskey-Breath could react, Perez reached across his lap, yanked the door handle, and pushed open the door. They were midway through a multilane roundabout, and with traffic flowing like a giant wheel around a granite monument at the axis, the centrifugal force created by the sedan’s circular path added to Perez’s momentum, carrying him through his captor, not over him. The two men catapulted from the vehicle like human cannon balls. Perez heard bones cracking as they hit the pavement, but the bones weren’t his. Whiskey-Breath took the brunt of the landing and cushioned Perez’s fall. Perez kept rolling toward the perimeter, finding daylight between bumpers like an urban cat with nine lives. It was a blur, but to his amazement, he was alive and fully conscious as he rolled up the curb and onto the sidewalk. Whiskey-Breath lay motionless on the pavement until a delivery truck ran over him, crushing his t
orso like roadkill beneath a set of double rear tires. Horns blared and traffic screeched to a halt. Perez picked himself up from the sidewalk, as a string of cars collided in a bumper-to-bumper chain reaction that led all the way to Cesar’s sedan.

  Perez didn’t wait for Cesar to give chase. He turned and ran, but he had no idea where he was headed. He simply knew he had to hide. If a narco-style execution hadn’t been Cesar’s plan all along, then turning Whiskey-Breath into a human pancake had certainly marked Perez for an unpleasant death. He’d seen Mexican newspaper accounts of charred and headless bodies found on the side of the road, the narcos liking to roast their victims alive by placing a rubber tire around the neck and setting it afire.

  Perez took the first street off the roundabout, racing past a few pedestrians who seemed to be in a hurry to be off the sidewalk before dark. Street vendors were packing up unsold merchandise, closing down for the night, and the trash that littered the pavement was the only sign of bargain hunters by the thousands who had gone home. He ran past a Laundromat, a small grocery store, and a farmacia—all closed. Most of the brightly painted shops were no wider than a box truck, and shopkeepers had already secured their storefronts for the night with burglar bars and steel roll-down doors. There was a gathering of a dozen or more men and women at the end of the block. Perez ran toward them, intending to ask for help. But as he approached, he noticed the makeshift altar surrounded by a ring of votive candles, the sacrificial offerings of cigarettes and tequila spread across the sidewalk, and, at the center of it all, the three-foot statue of the Santa Muerte. Perez sprinted right past it. The “Saint of Death” was an occult figure depicted in everything from statues to tattoos as a scythe-toting skeleton with flowing dark hair and a toothy grin, often dressed in a bridal gown. Perez knew from his recent business acquaintances that the Santa Muerte was not only the patron saint of Tepito, the most dangerous barrio in Mexico City, but also of Mexican narcos, who appreciated her tolerance of vice.