by M. A. Lawson
The second thing she had to do was get María Delgato out of San Diego.
She told Jackson to turn off the cell phone jammer for exactly thirty seconds and made a call to one of the agents who would be transporting María. She then used her throat mic to call Conroy, the agent in charge of the team guarding the back of the bar, and told him he was coming with her to transport Tito to the Metropolitan Correctional Center. “Bring your M16,” she said. Unlike Wilson, Conroy was a guy who followed her orders without questioning every decision she made.
Wilson immediately came running over to Kay. “Are you leaving the scene with those guys still in there?”
“Yeah, and until I get back you’re in charge. That should make you happy. The San Diego cops will be here pretty soon, and they’ll give you a hand if you need it.”
“You shouldn’t be leaving the scene,” Wilson said.
“I don’t have time to argue with you, Wilson. Just do what I tell you.”
Kay walked over to the hostage negotiator. He was a tall man in his forties with narrow shoulders and thinning blond hair. He looked like a nice, easygoing, laid-back guy—probably a prerequisite to being a hostage negotiator. He’d made no attempt to contact the men inside the bar yet; he wanted to give them a little more time to think things over before he did.
“I’m taking your car,” Kay told him. “I’m taking Tito to jail.”
“Okay,” the negotiator said.
Kay went to the surveillance van next, where María Delgato was waiting.
As soon as Kay opened the door, María began to curse at her in Spanish. Kay, who was completely fluent in Spanish, didn’t think there was a Spanish swearword María didn’t use. The gist of María’s diatribe was: You insane bitch, you could have gotten me killed. He was holding a gun to my head.
“Aw, he wasn’t going to kill you,” Kay said. “He knew if he killed you, I would have killed him. You were never in any danger.”
“Bullshit, you . . .” More swearwords.
“Oh, shut the hell up,” Kay said. “You’re alive.”
“And why did you let them handcuff me?”
“I was trying to make it look like you were a prisoner and not my informant, but when you shot your mouth off and told Tito you knew me, that plan probably went out the window. Turn around and I’ll take the cuffs off. Some of my guys are going to be here in a couple of minutes, and they’re going to take you and your mother to see Miguel.”
“Where is he?”
“A long way from here, María.”
—
Kay figured she broke some sort of land-speed record getting from Logan Heights to the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Union Street in downtown San Diego. MCC is the federal lockup where prisoners are often incarcerated until their trials; it’s a towering, twenty-three-story monolith the color of wet sand, with windows so narrow it’s surprising they allow light to enter. She and Conroy marched a handcuffed Tito Olivera into the building, and Kay told Conroy not to leave Tito’s side until he was in a cell.
She walked over to a doughy-faced correctional officer and told him she needed to speak to the MCC warden. The officer informed her that as it was Sunday, the warden wasn’t there. “Then get him on the phone,” Kay said.
“This is Kay Hamilton. DEA,” Kay said when Warden Clyde Taylor came to the phone.
“Why are you calling me at my home, Agent? You should be talking to the weekend duty supervisor.”
“I’m calling because I just delivered Tito Olivera to your jail.”
“So what?”
“So what is that you need to take special precautions with him. He should be placed in an isolation cell on one of the upper floors, and you need to make sure the people who come into contact with him—including your guards—don’t give him a phone so he can call his big brother in Mexico.”
“I resent you implying that my people would do something like that.”
“You can resent it all you want, but I know that half your damn guards are on the take.”
Half was an exaggeration, but Kay was correct in principle. In the last year, five MCC correctional officers had been arrested or fired for passing contraband to inmates—drugs, cell phones, cash, and weapons.
“What did you say your name was?” Taylor shouted.
“Hamilton.”
“Yeah, well, you listen to me, Hamilton. I’ll decide how my prisoners should be guarded, and I’m going to be talking to your boss about your goddamn disrespectful attitude.”
“Warden, you need to understand something. Tito Olivera is not your average prisoner. His big brother is richer than God, and he’s going to do everything he can to get Tito out of your jail.”
“I’ll be talking to your boss,” Taylor said again, and hung up.
Asshole.
—
Kay and Conroy drove back to Cadillac Washington’s bar. Nothing had changed while they had been gone: Leon James, Ángel Gomez, and Jesús Rodríguez were still inside the bar, refusing to come out. They didn’t realize there was a camera in the bar, and they sat there drinking, Ángel occasionally snorting a line of cocaine, cursing their luck and cursing Tito Olivera. They talked about trying to fight their way to one of the vehicles outside, knowing they didn’t stand a chance. When the hostage negotiator got them on the landline in the bar, they taunted him, telling him to send the cops in after them. By this time, the SDPD had brought in banks of lights to illuminate the area around the bar, and there were TV cameras everywhere—on the street and in the sky in choppers—filming everything.
Kay sort of wished the cameras had been there when she arrested Tito.
She went to sit in the surveillance van with the hostage negotiator and was soon going out of her mind with boredom. There was nothing for her to do but twiddle her thumbs while the negotiator tried to talk the knuckleheads into surrendering. She finally found a piece of paper in the van’s glove compartment—a flyer advertising a pizza place—and she turned it over and made a sketch of her backyard. She was thinking about building a deck off the back door and maybe sticking in a hot tub, so she started fiddling around with the shape of the deck and where the hot tub would go.
When Kay was in Miami, she bought a place there—a real fixer-upper, in real estate lingo—and was able to flip the place for a decent profit when she moved to San Diego. She was hoping to do the same thing with the house she’d bought in California, a three-bedroom ranch-style home in Point Loma, about six miles from the submarine base. The houses in her neighborhood didn’t have a view and went for about three hundred to six hundred grand, but she’d gotten hers for two-fifty because it had been foreclosed on and the owner was desperate to sell.
She didn’t really have any hobbies—other than sports like surfing and skiing—so when she was at home she worked on the house, doing some of the work herself and using a Mexican illegal, who was a master carpenter, to do the hard stuff. She also didn’t spend much on furnishings or pictures or anything else to make the place homey. She didn’t care about homey; homey didn’t increase the value of the house. She painted all the interior walls in neutral colors, because she’d been told that was best for selling. She installed the most energy-efficient heating and cooling system she could find, and got a tax break on that. The kitchen had been in pretty good shape when she bought the place—lots of cabinets and counter space, the appliances fairly new—so all she did in the kitchen was have the Mexican put in granite countertops because everybody went all gaga over granite.
Right now Kay didn’t really care what sort of house she lived in; at this stage of her life, a house was only an investment and a place to sleep. But one of these days, after she retired—which was a long way off—she was going to own waterfront property in Southern California. She had this hazy vision of herself in her sixties: tanned, in good shape, playing eighteen holes every day, then going
home to sit on the deck of her fabulous home to sip piña coladas and watch the sun set on the Pacific. There was a man in this hazy picture, too, but she didn’t have anyone specific in mind, just that he had to have a little money, a sense of humor, and couldn’t be a total slob.
The hostage negotiator interrupted her reverie. “Rodríguez and Gomez are coming out.”
“What about James?” Kay asked.
The negotiator shook his head. “Just the two of them,” he said.
Kay folded up the sketch, put it in her back pocket, and stepped outside the van. She didn’t bother to pull her weapon.
Four hours after they had locked themselves inside the bar, Ángel and Jesús came out with their hands in the air and were immediately taken to the ground, handcuffed, and placed in a transport van. Both men were very drunk.
Leon James was a different matter. After Ángel and Jesús left the bar, he sat there, sipping whiskey slowly, then pulled out his cell phone and checked, for maybe the twentieth time, to see if he had a signal yet. When he saw he didn’t, he disappeared from view for a couple of minutes, then returned to the table with some paper and spent fifteen minutes writing two short notes. Leon was faster with a pistol than he was with a pen.
Kay found out later that one of the notes was to his daughter and the other to his mother. In the note to his mother, he told her to go to their special place and pick up a package he’d left for her. Kay assumed it was cash he’d stashed away for a rainy day. Even men like Leon James loved their mothers.
Then Leon committed suicide by cop.
Kay watched on the monitor as he took out his gun and headed for the door of the bar, and she knew what was going to happen next: Leon came out and started shooting, even before he had acquired a target. After he’d fired no more than three shots, DEA agents and SDPD cops opened up with automatic weapons and put—according to the coroner’s report delivered two days later—twenty-one bullets into him. The TV cameras captured his execution, and the talking heads wondered aloud on the news the next day if it had really been necessary to shoot the man so many times.
After Leon shuffled off this mortal coil, Kay got into a screaming match with a patrol lieutenant from SDPD. The cameras recorded all the angry gestures and waving arms, but fortunately weren’t close enough to pick up the dialogue, which consisted mostly of four-letter words. The SDPD lieutenant wanted to know why the San Diego police hadn’t been notified in advance about the DEA raid; the screaming and swearing started when Kay said, “Telling you guys about the raid in advance would be like the SEALs telling the Pakistanis they were flying in to kill bin Laden.” She clarified this statement by adding that SDPD leaked like a sieve, and if the San Diego cops had known what was going to happen, the television crews would have gotten there ahead of Kay’s people. She didn’t tell him that three SDPD narcotics detectives were on Olivera’s payroll and her biggest fear had been a San Diego cop warning Tito. The lieutenant ended the discussion by calling her an arrogant bitch and saying that he would be talking to her boss.
“Well, you’re gonna have to get in line,” Kay said.
6
By the time Kay finished dealing with all the issues related to removing the corpses of Cadillac Washington, Tyrell Miller, and Leon James from Logan Heights, and processing Ángel Gomez and Jesús Rodríguez into the Metropolitan Correction Center, it was six a.m.—approximately thirteen hours after she arrested Tito Olivera. When she arrived at the DEA office on Viewridge Avenue, she saw that Wilson had gotten there ahead of her and the little prick was sitting in the boss’s office, still dressed in fatigues, giving Davis his version of everything that had happened—and everything that he thought Kay had done wrong. Fuck him.
Kay went to her desk, dropped her sidearm into a drawer and locked it, then went to the restroom, washed her face, and made an attempt to comb her hair. She gave up on the hair after a couple of minutes, but looked into the mirror and smiled. She had just busted the brother of Caesar Olivera. This was even bigger than what she had done in Miami.
When she walked back into the bull pen, her boss yelled, “Hamilton, get your ass in here.”
His office was where she’d been headed anyway.
Wilson was still sitting there, and the first thing she did was point at him and say, “I want this asshole transferred out of my unit.”
“Shut up, Hamilton,” Davis said. He made a motion with his head for Wilson to leave, which Wilson did after smirking at Kay.
“Close the door,” Davis said.
Kay thought that Jim Davis was actually a pretty good guy and a decent boss. He was fifty-six and was planning on retiring next year. He was tall and had played guard at Wichita State; he hadn’t been a superstar but a solid team player, a guy who made more assists than baskets—and the same could be said of his career at the DEA. His hair was short, thick, and white, and he wore a neatly trimmed white mustache. Kay thought he looked like the good town marshal in an old Western movie.
“Hamilton, I don’t even know where to start,” Davis said. “I received a call from the warden at MCC telling me that you called him at his home, accused his people of being corrupt, then—”
“They are corrupt. By now Caesar Olivera knows exactly how his brother’s being guarded and probably everything else he needs to stage a jailbreak.”
“I know that, Hamilton, but until we can make different arrangements we’re going to have to trust Warden Taylor and we’re going to have to work with him.”
Kay just shook her head. It wasn’t a matter of trusting Taylor, and Jim Davis knew that. It was going to be almost a year before Tito Olivera went to trial, and there was a very good possibility that Caesar Olivera would try to free his brother before the trial. Caesar had so much money he could bribe almost anyone—he could certainly bribe a few low-level correctional officers—and if he couldn’t bribe them, he would kidnap members of their families and force them to do what he wanted.
“John Hernández also called me,” Davis said.
John Hernández was the San Diego chief of police.
“He was appropriately outraged that we didn’t notify him in advance of the operation and—”
“But you agreed we shouldn’t notify him.”
“I know that, Hamilton. But did you have to compare his department to the Pakistanis? I mean, couldn’t you have been just a little bit diplomatic with his fuckin’ guy?”
Kay shrugged. Diplomacy wasn’t her strong suit.
“I also got a call from a lawyer representing some kid, some girl. The girl’s mother said you traumatized her daughter when one of your guys, looking like Darth Vader dressed up in riot gear, ordered her into a building and wouldn’t let her and three other kids leave for three hours.”
“I couldn’t let them leave,” Kay said. “If one of Tito’s guys had started shooting—which one of them eventually did—one of those kids could have been hurt.”
“You could have had the San Diego cops escort them safely out of the area.”
“Well, the truth is, boss, I actually forgot about them for a while.”
“Jesus, Hamilton.”
“Hey! They weren’t hurt and they weren’t traumatized. Donovan said they had a great time, drinking beer, listening to shit on a boom box.”
Finally, Davis got to the real point of the meeting. “Hamilton, did you know Tito Olivera was going to kill Cadillac?”
Kay looked at him for a long moment, then said, “Do you really want to know if I knew?”
“What?” Davis said.
“You heard me,” Kay said. “I got the warrant for putting cameras in that bar based on a confidential informant telling me a deal was going down between two major drug dealers. What do you think would have happened if, hypothetically, I told the judge that I knew that Tito might execute Cadillac? Do you think, maybe, the judge would have told us we needed to do something to protect
poor Cadillac, a subhuman piece of shit who’s been killing people for thirty years? I mean, do you really care that Cadillac’s dead? I don’t. What I do care about is that I have Tito on video shooting the guy, and I have a witness to back up the video. And Tito is either going to get the needle—assuming they ever execute anyone in this fucking state—or he’s going to give me information I can use against his brother. So I don’t know why you’re ragging my ass here. You ought to be congratulating me.”
Davis sighed and shook his head.
“Hamilton, I don’t know what to do with you. You just suck with people. You piss off everyone outside the agency and, as bad as that is, you piss off the guys who work for you, the guys who ought to be loyal to you.”
“They don’t like me because I got the supervisor’s job instead of Wilson.”
When Kay was transferred from Miami to San Diego two years earlier, she was immediately placed into a vacant supervisor’s slot. And in spite of what she’d done in Miami—and there wasn’t a person in the entire Drug Enforcement Administration who didn’t know what she’d done in Miami—the people who worked for her, particularly Wilson, resented that she got the job. No one had the balls to say to her face that she’d slept her way into the position—although, in a way, she had.
“That’s not true, Hamilton,” Davis said. “Your guys don’t even like Wilson. Wilson’s a prick. But they don’t like you either, and the reason why has nothing to do with Miami or the fact that you’re a woman. They don’t like you because you don’t trust them and you don’t include them when you’re planning something. They don’t like you because you refuse to recognize that they have wives and kids and can’t work twenty-four hours a day. They don’t like you because you’re a constant hard-ass and you never cut them any slack when they don’t measure up to your standards.”
