Jan was under no illusions about Joel Alan Rapaport. She remembered the grass runs to Ann Arbor when they were students, the fine coke he’d bring from trips home to Long Island, the ’ludes he handed out like cough drops. It was impossible for her to believe all his crossings to Canada were clean. So why had the feds let him get away?
Or did the question answer itself? They let him get away. They wanted him to get away. Rap had always believed in plowing profits back into the business; maybe he’d paid off Koeppler, or someone even higher, to leave him alone and grab the van instead of the Layla.
Jan barely noticed the squat, middle-aged matron who stepped into the cell with an air of hostile authority. She was slow to realize that the woman with her was a fellow prisoner, and that the matron was going to leave her here, in the cell.
I don’t need company, damn it. I have to think.
“Hi,” the newcomer said shyly, “my name’s Marie.”
“I’m Jan.” Nothing more; no indication that conversation would be welcome. She turned her eyes toward the sand-colored cinderblock wall.
Rap and Dana got away. Why?
Bits and pieces of whispered conversation, hastily shushed when she came near, slipped into her consciousness. Dana had mentioned a “factory” hidden somewhere in the boonies. Something about illegals in trailers, people she wasn’t supposed to know were there. What were Rap and Dana doing besides transporting political dissidents?
“Uh, do you mind if I smoke?” The voice was small, childlike. Jan barely looked at her cellmate as she nodded her okay. She took out one of her own, lit up. Smoking helped her think, helped keep her hands from nervously twisting her long hair.
“I’ve never been arrested before,” the young woman on the opposite bunk said. “I guess I’m a little scared.”
And you want me to be your Big Sister. Forget it. You got your troubles; I got mine.
Thanks to whoever had dropped a dime, she and Ron were under arrest, Miguel was dead, and Pilar and Manuelito faced deportation. Back to El Salvador, not just Mexico. Back to where General Duarte had sworn to execute them so the whole country would know what happened to academics who spoke out against the regime.
Who the hell could do such a thing?
Rap and Dana got away.
“It wasn’t my fault. Really.” Marie seemed intent on telling her little story. She leaned forward on the bunk, her pale skin tinted fluorescent-green, her platinum hair wispy.
Jan hated wispy little child-girls. Especially ones who figured nothing was their fault.
“I mean, it was my boyfriend’s idea.”
“Look, could you do me a favor and maybe shut up?” Jan dragged on her cigarette. God, she sounded like Ma Barker. The experienced con talking to the new kid, setting her straight about life in the joint.
“If that’s the way you want it.” Marie turned her head toward the door, her shoulder-length hair shimmering in the eerie light. Dark roots. No surprise; people really didn’t have hair that color. But somehow the dark roots made Marie human. A real person, not a doll.
“You work in a beauty parlor?” Jan asked.
“Howdja know?” Marie turned back, her face animated. “I’m just a shampoo girl now, but my friend Patti says I’ve got a real flair for hair. She did my color.”
“Looks great.” Jan was sorry already that she’d opened communications.
“So what are you here for?”
Jan pulled out another cigarette from the pack in her pocket. “Long story.”
“Yeah, well, I bet it wasn’t your fault either,” Marie said. “Like me believing my boyfriend when he said the old guy signed the check over to him. Instead of which Joey’s ripping the guy off, stealing his Social Security check right out of his mailbox. Which is two kinds of federal crime right there. And just because I went with him to the grocery store to cash it, they think I was in it with him. Is that fair?”
Fair. She wants to talk about fair. Was it fair that Miguel was dead? Was it fair that somebody wanted her ass in jail—that somebody used her, set her up?
Heat flooded Jan’s face; she shook so badly she leaned against the cool cinderblock wall. Her teeth chattered; her sweat turned to ice on her clammy skin.
“Hey, you okay?” Marie asked. “You detoxing or something?”
Jan shook her head. She’d never felt like this before.
Or had she? Yes, it came back now. The night she pulled a knife on Hal, the night she decided he’d hit her for the last time, she’d been filled with this fury.
Fury. Like one of the Furies. Avenging women who—who avenged. Who fought back, who didn’t let themselves be used as pawns in anyone else’s game, who destroyed out of sheer, purifying rage. That was Jan: a Fury stripped of all emotion except the healing fire of rage.
It didn’t matter anymore who had tipped off Koeppler. It didn’t matter why Rap and Dana got away. What mattered was that she was through, finished with being used. Whoever dropped that dime better look out.
Fire filled her soul. Because when I find out who did it, I’ll—
“Would it help to talk about it?” Marie leaned forward, an eager light in her pale blue eyes. A light Jan recognized in her newly transformed state as a Fury. It was the light of avarice, of consuming curiosity, of betrayal.
“Why?” Jan rapped out the word, hard as a boxing glove. “So you can run to Walt Koeppler with whatever I say?”
She stood up and began to roam the cell. Looking up at the ceiling, peering into corners. “Or has he got this place bugged? Huh? Which is it?”
Jan strode to where Marie still sat on the edge of her cot, swinging one leg. “I ought to slap it out of you;” she said, her voice harsh, “but that would only give them more ammunition.”
She sat back on her own bunk, motionless, wordless, arms crossed over her thin chest. Inside she seethed like a pressure cooker, her thoughts hissing, steaming, raging. They’d done it again. Just like last time. Just like when Kenny died.
They wouldn’t get away with it this time.
It was no surprise that within five minutes the matron came back and removed Marie.
Where there’s a will, there’s a way. Words to live by. Words Walt Koeppler lived by. Okay, so Marie had failed. Marie, who’d conned confessions out of some pretty tough broads, had been made in thirty seconds by this leftover hippie. But there had to be someone she’d open up to. He’d considered letting her see the boyfriend, the guy in the wheelchair, but decided that was too obvious. It was then that routine paid off, the way he’d always told rookies it would.
She had a visitor. Not her lawyer; Sobel hadn’t been around yet. And there were problems, legal problems even Koeppler wasn’t ready to face just yet, with monitoring conversations between lawyer and client. But where was it written in the goddamn Constitution that a prison visit with a civilian was sacred?
He nodded at the guard who’d brought in the request. “Put them in room six,” he said. “And turn up the volume on the mike, okay? I don’t want to miss a whisper.”
Jan walked into room six on rubber legs. Harve Sobel. It had to be Harve, her lawyer. Her lawyer and Dana’s father. Rap and Dana got away. Could she trust Dana’s father to represent her? She’d wrestled with that problem for the better part of last night, but still hadn’t resolved it. Harve was a good lawyer, the best, and he believed in the cause, but if Dana had dropped that dime, she couldn’t afford to trust him.
On the other hand, if Dana had turned informer, Harve would disown her.
Her breath whooshed out with relief when she saw her sponsor, her AA lifeline, sitting on the other side of the Plexiglas partition.
“Ritamae,” she breathed. “Thank God it’s you.” She looked long and hard at her sponsor’s black-coffee skin, her thick shiny hair, her bright magenta lipstick. The one person in the world she could truly trust.
“God, if there’d been a bar on the women’s side of this prison,” Jan laughed, “you’d be looking at one fallen d
runk.”
“Honey, I been in jail myself. It’s a damn good thing they got no bars behind bars.” Another reason she was grateful to have Ritamae as a sponsor. She wasn’t some yuppie drunk who’d come down to the jail afraid to get dirt on her white gloves. She’d walked the same walk.
Ritamae had known fame; she’d been a Vandella for about five months, until booze and dope ended her dreams of Motown glory. She’d done time in a Michigan prison before coming home to Toledo. “If only I’d known—” Jan began. If only I’d known someone was selling us out, she wanted to say. But what if Ritamae thought she was paranoid? What if the one person she trusted didn’t believe her?
“Uh-uh,” Ritamae interrupted, shaking her head violently, “don’t be talking that trash, girl. None of that ‘if only’ crap. Jan, girl, you cannot change that man’s death. He is gone, honey, the cops done shot him right in fronta your face.”
Jan dropped her eyes to hide the fury—no, the Fury—who lived inside her now. Last night, alone in the cell, she’d punched her pillow, screamed without noise into its meager softness, like a dried-up breast. She’d pounded her fists till the knuckles were raw into the hard-spring mattress and pictured Walt Koeppler dead, bloody dead with hundreds of stab wounds from the kitchen knife she’d used on Hal.
“Look,” Ritamae said, her tone brisk, her voice devoid of accent. Over the phone she could have passed for white. “You got a lawyer, or what? I can get on the phone and find someone from the Program if you—”
“Harve Sobel is my lawyer,” Jan said. Like saying the rosary, she’d repeated the words over and over after her arrest, to any cop who came near her. “Harve Sobel is my lawyer.” Words like charms to keep the vampires away.
But could she trust Harve? Could she trust Dana’s father? Could she trust Dana?
She already knew she couldn’t trust Rap.
“I’ve heard them talking,” Jan said, staring into her sponsor’s deep brown eyes. “Just bits and pieces, but I know there’s some kind of factory somewhere. And there are more refugees, but I don’t know where they are either. Rap—he’s the guy with the boat—I think he deals drugs. But I don’t know where he gets it or what he does with it. All I know for sure is there’s a whole lot more going on than I knew about. They used me. They fucking used me.” Jan’s voice rose and her throat ached with tears she wouldn’t shed.
She paused and took a deep, ragged breath. “Not only that,” she went on, more calmly, “somebody tipped off Koeppler. Somebody told him we’d be out there. Just like before.”
Ritamae’s brow creased in a frown. “What you mean, like before?”
Jan felt light-headed; she’d said forbidden words, told secrets, named her suspicions, and she was still alive. “Like when my cousin Kenny—” She broke off and swallowed hard. “Somebody called the cops then too, and we were all arrested and Kenny died.”
Ritamae pursed her lips. “This Kenny,” she said, “how long ago the boy die?”
“Thirteen years ago,” Jan said, almost dreamily.
“Then what the fuck you messing with it now for?”
Jan looked up, fear flooding her. All sense of safety had fled with her sponsor’s accusing tone. “But—but Koeppler stopping the van, knowing just where we were—it’s the same thing all over again. Somebody tipped him off. Don’t you see, it’s the same informer, still working, still selling us out.” Please, God, please, she prayed, let Ritamae see this. Don’t let her laugh at me.
Ritamae stared ahead, a black Buddha. A seer staring into an African fire for visions.
“Way I see it,” she said at last, “this shit is not where you need to be at right now. You need to worry about it later.”
Jan melted with relief. “Later like the Ninth Step?”
Ritamae laughed. “Girl, eighty days ago you thought the Big Book was a telephone directory, now you quotin’ it at me like a Bible-thumpin’ Baptist. I’ll tell you when you ready for the Ninth Step and don’t you even be thinking about it until then. Got that?”
Jan nodded, but some of last night’s fury welled up and came out her eyes and burned into Ritamae.
“Honey, you ain’t thinkin’ about no Ninth Step,” her sponsor pronounced, her tone a warning. “You thinkin’ about paybacks and that is in no way the same thing. Hear?”
Jan heard. She didn’t like it, but she heard. Her sponsor sat on the other side of the visitors’ table, talking too loudly into holes that didn’t let the sound through. Jan felt caged. Caged by the cramped, ugly quarters and trapped by Ritamae’s clarity. Caged by the truth.
“The Ninth Step,” Ritamae shouted into the holes, “is about asking forgiveness for what you done to others. Not about carrying grudges for what you think they done to you.”
Jan nodded. She felt her face go stiff. Wood-stiff, like a little puppet. The same face she used to wear when Sister Mary Whoever would call her into the office and ask how things were at home. She’d wear the wooden mask and nod and say quietly that things were fine and she didn’t know what Sister meant. All the time knowing, her inner face burning with shame, that somebody’d seen her daddy drunk again.
It had served her well, her wooden outer face, her mask that could smile or look just plain puzzled while the inner face raged and cried and blushed and nobody could see it.
Except Ritamae. Sometimes. Like now.
“Jan, talk to me,” Ritamae called, her voice reaching through the holes, grabbing out to her. Trying to pull her to her side of the barrier. “Tell me what you thinkin’, babe.”
Paybacks. She was thinking paybacks. A nice word, one she hadn’t used before, not even to herself. Ritamae had given it to her, like a precious gift. Even if she hadn’t meant to. Even if she was trying for a warning instead.
But the word struck a deep chord in Jan’s heart. The inside face, the one that wasn’t made of wood, smiled at the word. Paybacks.
She rolled it around on her tongue like single-malt.
Walt Koeppler ran the tape back as soon as Ritamae Johnson was ushered out of Jan’s presence. He smiled as he listened to the talk of Rapaport running drugs. As an agent of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, he didn’t have jurisdiction over narcotics trafficking. But he knew someone who did. He picked up the phone and dialed a number from memory.
The phone was answered on the first ring. “Drug Enforcement Administration, Krepke.”
“Dale, it’s Walt. I’ve got a line on that guy you were after a while back. Joel Rapaport. Yeah. Let’s have some lunch and I’ll fill you in.”
There was more than one way to skin a cat, Koeppler decided as he and Dale agreed to meet at Tony Packo’s on the east side, far, far away from downtown ears.
A factory, Jan Gebhardt had said. To Walt, that meant only one thing: Joel Rapaport and his ex-wife were using illegal aliens to make methamphetamines. The five years max Gebhardt and Jameson might get for yesterday’s arrest would pale in comparison with the nice long sentences the whole group would receive for conspiracy to manufacture and sell hard drugs.
And what was even better was that he could use Jan Gebhardt as a stalking-horse to lead him into the inner workings of the sanctuary movement.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
All the times I’d dreamed of seeing Wes Tannock again I’d visualized myself as: (a) glamorous, in a silver lamé sheath gown, hair tossed back like a tawny mane; (b) sophisticated, in a designer silk suit and jade green pumps; (c) professional, swaying a recalcitrant judge with my eloquence while he looked on, admiration in his eyes; (d) sexy, in a red leather miniskirt and skintight sweater, boots up to God knows where; (e) all of the above, an unlikely combination of Sandra Day O’Connor and Frederick’s of Hollywood.
The upshot of these fantasies was that Wes saw me for the first time, saw Cass, not Ron’s little sister, not tagalong Cassie who worshiped from afar.
Instead, I’d crashed into him like a clumsy idiot.
I stepped back and made my apology, trying to regain some venee
r of dignity.
“Cassie,” he said in a pleased tone. I shook his hand numbly.
It was strange seeing Wes grown up. Jowlier, heavier in the face. Hairline receding, but in a sexy way. Manicured hands veiny, fingers knobby with early arthritis.
Still sexy as hell. Just looking at the dark curly hairs on his wrist sent my pulse racing. What would it feel like to have those manicured hands roving my soft naked skin? How would it feel to ran my fingers through the thinning hair, gaze into his eyes and watch the sun glint off the little green flecks in the iris?
Not that I was going to find out. I’d just recovered from one charismatic, driven, stimulating man and I had no intention of starting anything with another. The attraction I felt was powerful—but that very power warned me off.
An olive-skinned man I’d never seen before stepped briskly toward the picnic table. Wes turned toward the new arrival. “Everything went okay at the focus group?” The man nodded, then smiled broadly.
“Cassie,” he said, his deep voice warm. He reached out a hand on which a class ring shone like a ruby firefly. His other hand held a stub of cigar.
My God, Tarky! Gone was the Dutch Master haircut, the thick beard, the faded sweatshirt. In place of the Armenian hippie I’d known that summer stood a stocky lawyer in a blue three-piece suit, a gold watch chain spanning his broad belly, cordovan wingtips on once-sandaled feet.
Shock must have shown in my face. Tarky gave a single harsh bark—what passed for laughter with him—and said, “Hey, we all grow up.”
“Yeah, sure, Tark,” I muttered. And reminded myself that I’d traded in her own stick-straight hair for a salon perm ten years earlier. And started buying clothes at department stores instead of the Rajarani Indian Boutique. Times change.
One thing that hadn’t changed: As soon as Tarky came, Wes grew larger. Even though Wes was the one working the room, meeting each of our eyes in turn with his compelling gaze, Tarky’s presence was, in some mystical way, the source of his energy. As though Tarkanian had always been his campaign manager, even when both were radical law students with nothing but contempt for conventional politics.
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