by M. A. Lawson
—
You know who this is?” Kay said when María answered the phone.
María paused, then said, “Oh, hi, Mama. What’s going on?”
Kay knew Tito had left the house, but she figured one of his guys must be standing near María.
“Yeah, that’s right,” Kay said. “It’s your mama. I want you to tell whoever you’re with that Mama’s having one of her bad days and you need to go see her.”
“I can’t, Mama,” María said. “Not today.”
“Yeah, you can,” Kay said. “I know Tito’s not home. He just teed off at Torrey Pines, and my guys tell me he’s got a hell of a slice. He’s not going to be back for at least five hours, and I want you to meet me in Balboa Park, by the El Cid statue.”
“I’m sorry, Mama. I just can’t do it.”
“María, I’m not in the mood. Don’t fuck with me. I’ll see you in an hour.”
—
Kay took a seat on a stone bench near ol’ El Cid, up there on his big bronze horse, a spear clenched in his right hand. She’d bought an ice-cream cone to munch on while waiting for María but had forgotten to get a napkin and now had chocolate chip running down her fingers, making a sticky mess. She scanned the park as she ate the ice cream, trying to spot anyone who seemed out of place, but everyone she could see looked like typical tourists and city folk on their lunch hour out for a walk.
Kay loved San Diego. She liked it even better than Miami. While most of the country was experiencing a typical January with freezing temperatures and icy roads, here in San Diego it was a perfect seventy degrees and the air was perfumed by whatever flowers still bloomed at this time of year. Kay didn’t know one flower from another. All she knew was that it felt good sitting with the sun on her face, and she couldn’t remember the last time she’d taken a day off.
She was licking her fingers to remove the ice cream when this kid, who’d been giving her the eye, finally worked up the nerve to approach her. He was maybe twenty-two, a slim, dark-haired, good-looking kid dressed in cargo shorts and a Hard Rock Cafe T-shirt. Since she was thirty, Kay figured he had some kind of cougar fantasy. He flashed her a smile that must have cost his parents ten thousand bucks in orthodontist bills and said, “Hi. I just saw you sitting here looking kind of, you know, lonely, and—”
Kay rolled her eyes, then opened her blazer so he could see the Glock. “Cop. Go away.”
Still, she was flattered.
María was only half an hour late, which María considered being right on time. She was wearing a white tank top without a bra, black jeans that hugged her butt, and red high heels, Jimmy Choos that sold for eight hundred bucks. Kay didn’t know flowers, but she knew shoes.
“Why do you need to see me? This is dangerous for me,” María said. She was speaking Spanish, talking a mile a minute, which is what she did when she was upset.
“It’s not dangerous,” Kay said. “I wouldn’t meet with you if it put you at risk.”
Actually, she would if it meant putting Tito in a cage, but why say that?
“So what do you want?” María asked.
“I want to know what’s going on between Tito and Cadillac Washington.”
“How the hell would I know?”
“María, we heard Tito the other day having a hissy fit about Cadillac, and I know you were in the room at the time. I could hear you telling him to calm down. So tell me what’s going on.”
“I’m telling you, I don’t know. Tito doesn’t tell me anything.”
“María, the sooner you give me something I can use to put Tito in jail, the sooner you and your brother can get back on with your lives. Now quit saying you don’t know, and tell me what’s happening with Cadillac.”
María looked away, as if she was searching for a doorway to some universe that didn’t include Kay Hamilton. “Caesar told Tito to buy him out.”
“Buy him out?”
“Yeah. He told Tito to give him twenty million.”
“For what?”
“For Cadillac to just go away, and Tito will take over his operation.”
That actually made good business sense, Kay thought. Cadillac was getting old, so maybe he wasn’t averse to retiring if his severance package was big enough, and $20 million was practically pocket change to the Olivera cartel. The Olivera brothers would make back the money in less than a year. On the other hand, she could understand why Tito wasn’t happy with the arrangement. He didn’t care about the money. What he cared about was his pride. He hadn’t been able to defeat Cadillac, and Cadillac would view this as a victory and rub it in Tito’s face.
“When is this supposed to happen?”
“In a few days. Maybe this week. I don’t know exactly. But Tito says he’s not gonna do it.”
“So what is he going to do?”
“He says he’s gonna kill Cadillac.”
“Do you believe him?”
Tito Olivera was a guy who often talked a better game than he played. Like his golf game, come to think of it. Kay had heard him lie on the tapes about how he made birdie on a hole at Torrey Pines that the pros were lucky to par.
“I don’t know,” María said. “He’s pissed. He’s like a maniac about the whole thing.”
And Kay thought that maybe, finally, she had what she wanted.
3
Kay sat there tapping her fingernails on her knee, looking at her watch about every two minutes. She was with an Assistant U.S. Attorney named Carol Maddox and they were waiting for a judge to finish reading their application for a warrant.
Two hours earlier, Kay had found out—via a cell phone call made by one of Tito’s men—that Tito was meeting with Cadillac Washington at a bar in Logan Heights. The meeting was taking place at five p.m.—in just four hours—and Kay wanted to put video cameras in the bar.
Kay was worried about the judge—a pudgy guy named Wingate with white-blond hair, bushy white eyebrows, and a face that looked like a red candy apple. She and Maddox had never dealt with him before and they couldn’t be sure he would grant them the warrant. It wasn’t like in the movies, where the cagey prosecutor would go to his favorite judge, a guy he played poker with on Friday nights, to get a warrant approved. In the federal system, you couldn’t cherry-pick your judges, and to make matters worse, it was Sunday. When you applied for a federal warrant, you ended up with whatever magistrate or district judge was on duty that day, and Kay and Maddox didn’t know if Wingate leaned to the left or the right when it came to the Fourth Amendment. Kay and Maddox preferred right leaners, as their primary objective was putting drug dealers in jail and they weren’t all that concerned about privacy protections afforded to criminals by the U.S. Constitution.
As Wingate flipped back a couple of pages to reread something he’d already read twice, Kay looked over at Maddox and tapped the face of her wristwatch. The expression on her face said: What the fuck is this guy doing? Kay could have read the Tribune front to back in the time it was taking Wingate to finish the ten pages in his hand. Maddox gave her a look back that said: Just settle down.
Maddox was okay, though. Kay had worked with her to obtain previous warrants, like the ones she needed to monitor Tito’s phones and install the listening devices in his house. Maddox, a frumpy-looking woman in her forties with a hairstyle Dorothy Hamill made popular in 1976, could weave her way through Fourth Amendment roadblocks like an Indy driver and she could quote the Patriot Act in her sleep. Kay loved the Patriot Act. It may have been designed to catch terrorists, but it was used ninety percent of the time to spy on drug dealers—legally.
The only problem with Maddox was that she had four kids and was constantly dealing with some problem her brats were having when Kay needed her. Kay just hoped that if they got enough evidence to convict Tito, Maddox’s kids wouldn’t interfere with preparations for the trial. As far as Kay was concerned, women ought to m
ake up their minds: Did they want a career or did they want to be mommies?
Taking off his reading glasses, Judge Wingate said, “So the gist of this is that you have probable cause, as stated in previous warrant applications, to believe Mr. Olivera and Mr. Washington are involved in narcotics distribution; you know, via an approved listening device, that Mr. Olivera is meeting with Mr. Washington; and you know, via a confidential informant, that money will change hands. Is that correct?”
Yes! What’s so fucking hard to understand about that?
“Yes, Your Honor,” Maddox said.
“Well, I don’t see a problem with the warrant—”
Then sign the damn thing!
“—but I’m not familiar with the Olivera cartel. Tell me about these people.”
Kay started to say that she didn’t have time to give him a history lesson, but she knew that wasn’t going to fly.
“Caesar Olivera,” she said, “is the leader of the most powerful drug cartel in Mexico, Your Honor. He joined a small outfit in 1985 when he was seventeen years old, starting out as a simple soldier. In 1990, he wiped out his boss’s entire family, including second and third cousins, and assumed command. Now, after almost twenty-five years in the business, the Olivera cartel is the Walmart of drugs south of the border, and we estimate Caesar moved $500 million worth of dope into the U.S. last year. I don’t know if they put Mexican drug lords on the Forbes 400 list, but if they do, Caesar would probably be on it. His net worth is about three billion, and that’s dollars, not pesos.”
This caused one of the judge’s white eyebrows to elevate.
“Until five years ago, Caesar was primarily a wholesaler to U.S. drug dealers. His people in Mexico manufacture meth and grow marijuana, they bring in heroin from the Middle East and cocaine from Colombia and Peru. He ships the sh . . . the stuff north and lets gangs in the U.S. handle the street-level distribution. But five years ago, his little brother, Tito, moved up here.
“Caesar gave Tito two jobs. The first was to manage distribution of the cartel’s products in the U.S. In other words, Caesar wanted to cut out all the middlemen between the supplier, meaning himself, and the street-level dealers. Tito’s second job was to make sure everybody in the American Southwest buys their product only from the Olivera cartel, and to make that happen, Tito’s had to eliminate a lot of people: dealers and their bosses, drug mules, security personnel, folks who make their own meth or grow their own grass. We estimate that Tito’s thugs have killed about three hundred people in four states since he’s been here. We’re not sure of the exact number, because lots of times guys just disappear. Obviously, we can’t tie Tito directly to these murders or to any other crime; if we could, he’d be in jail and we wouldn’t be sitting here.”
“Why haven’t we deported him?” the judge asked.
“Tito Olivera is not an illegal alien, Your Honor. He’s a U.S. citizen. His brother Caesar is Mexican, but Tito was born in L.A. and his mother is an American. Anyway, one of the people Tito’s been trying to get rid of ever since he got here is Cadillac Washington. He’s tried to kill him twice. Now it looks, as I’ve specified in my affidavit, like Caesar told Tito to cut a deal with Washington. You may have read that a couple weeks ago there was a drive-by in the Gaslamp Quarter, right in front of Jim Croce’s bar? We ended up with four dead bangers and one old lady who just got in the way. Well, the bangers worked for Cadillac, and SDPD is about ninety percent certain that Tito’s people did the shooting. We think that incident was the catalyst for Caesar telling Tito to make a deal with Cadillac. He’s tired of all the headlines his idiot brother is generating, and he doesn’t want more heat than he already has coming down on his U.S. operations.”
“Which is why we need this warrant, Judge,” Maddox said. “If Tito Olivera gives money to Cadillac Washington, it raises issues related to where the money came from and may allow us to get Tito for income-tax evasion. But what we’re also hoping is that Olivera and Washington will make statements when they meet tying them to past murders and drug transactions.”
“Well, okay,” Wingate said. “Agent Hamilton, please raise your right hand.”
Kay did.
“Do you swear that everything you told me and provided in your affidavit is true?”
“Yes, Judge,” Kay said.
The truth was, Kay had lied to her boss, Maddox, and now a federal judge about what she really expected to happen when Tito met with Cadillac Washington. Well, it wasn’t exactly a lie; it was more a sin of omission. She didn’t tell them what María had told her: that Tito might kill Cadillac.
Fuck income-tax evasion.
4
I can’t get the second camera to work.”
“You make it work, goddamnit!” Kay said. “I need to be able to see the back of the bar.”
“I’m telling you, the connector—”
“I don’t want to hear it, Jackson. Fix it!”
It had been a real scramble to pull a team together on a Sunday, yanking guys out of church and away from family barbecues, getting weapons and surveillance vans, and then breaking into the bar without being obvious about it so Jackson could install the video cameras.
Kay and four other DEA agents were crammed into one surveillance van; Kay was the agent in charge. Everyone was wearing black combat fatigues and body armor. Helmets with face shields were sitting at their feet. They had enough assault rifles, shotguns, and pistols to invade Canada. Kay and her team had been inside the van for almost two hours, and although it was only sixty degrees outside, with the heat generated by five live bodies all the agents were sweating and the van smelled like the monkey house.
A block away was a second surveillance van containing five more DEA agents. When Kay gave the command, they would move into position and cover the small parking lot behind the bar and stop anyone from leaving by the back door. The two vans being used by Kay’s team were long-body panel vans with no rear or side windows. One was identified as belonging to a plumber, the other to a catering service. Kay was in the plumber’s van, and, because of the locale, it was old, beat to shit, and tagged with graffiti. A hostage negotiator was in his car two blocks away.
“Jackson!” she screamed into her mike. “It’s almost five. What in the hell are you doing? I still don’t have visual on camera two yet.”
“I’m telling you, this connector—”
“Cadillac’s here,” an agent said. He was looking through a low-profile periscope that penetrated the roof of the van and was hidden by a battered ventilation scoop.
“Shit,” Kay said. “Jackson, get out of there. Forget the second camera. We’ll have to go with one.”
“Copy that,” Jackson said, sounding relieved. Officially, Jackson was an agent, but he was primarily Kay’s go-to guy when it came to computers, cameras, and other high-tech gizmos. He was a geek. He wore a sidearm but barely knew how to fire the thing, and he was scared being inside the bar by himself. Kay could now visualize him scurrying out the back door like an oversized rodent, lugging all his equipment—equipment that obviously didn’t work like it should.
“You should have had Jackson check his gear before he went inside,” an agent said.
She looked over at the speaker: Wilson, her second-in-command on this operation and the guy who thought he was the one who should be in charge. He was the shortest man on Kay’s team—even shorter than her—and he compensated for his lack of height by lifting weights two hours a day. He compensated for male-pattern baldness by shaving his head. As usual, he had this pissy look of disapproval on his face; he would have disapproved if Kay had given him a birthday cake. Or a blow job. Wilson was brave enough—she’d trust him with her back in a fight—but he was a stiff, by-the-book little prick, and he did everything he could to undermine her. She needed to get his ass transferred out of her unit.
“I did tell him to check his gear, Wilson,” Kay said,
“and when we’re done here, I’m going to suspend him.”
Before Wilson could say anything else, she said to the man on the periscope, “Donovan, move over so I can take a look.”
—
Cadillac Washington—his mother had christened him Ronald—was just stepping out of, what else, his Cadillac, when Kay looked through the periscope eyepiece. He was in his mid-fifties, which made him an elder in the drug business.
Cadillac was short—about five foot six—and weighed almost three hundred pounds. He wore glasses with heavy black frames. He looked like a nearsighted bowling ball with feet, and his appearance struck people as comical until they found out how many people he’d killed. This evening he was wearing a black hoody and black sweatpants with a gold stripe running down the legs. He almost always wore sweatpants, probably because he liked the elastic waistband.
Two other men stepped out of the vehicle: Cadillac’s top guys, Tyrell Miller and Leon James. Tyrell and Leon, both about six foot four, had the kind of muscles you get when you spend all day at Pelican Bay lifting weights. Unlike their boss, they were also clotheshorses, wearing expensive suits and shirts. Leon had on pointy shoes made from the hide of a reptile whose species was almost extinct.
Cadillac looked around the street, and for a moment he focused on the plumber’s van containing Kay and her four-man squad. Cadillac was paranoid—you didn’t reach your fifth decade dealing drugs unless you were paranoid—and for a minute Kay was afraid that he was going to send one of his goons over to see if anyone was in the van. But he didn’t—and she suspected the reason why was the tire.
Kay had deflated the left rear tire on the van when they’d arrived on the scene. She figured that if Tito or Cadillac saw the flat tire, they’d ignore the old van. Police vehicles on stakeouts don’t have flat tires. Naturally, Wilson had argued with her, saying if they had to go mobile they’d be screwed, but she overrode him. She told him if they had to go mobile it meant the operation had failed and they’d have plenty of time to change the tire.
