Rosarito Beach

by M. A. Lawson

  In person, Hamilton was even better-looking than she appeared in the pictures she’d seen on the Internet—she looked like a cop on a TV show with her blond hair, full lips, and the body she had. There was also an edge to her that Jessica hadn’t seen in other people she’d known—an air of cockiness or confidence or something. Maybe you had to project that sort of attitude when you were a female cop going up against dangerous criminals, but whatever the case, Hamilton was . . . she was intimidating.

  All of a sudden, she felt like crying again—it seemed as if she’d been crying almost constantly since her mom’s funeral—and that had to stop. She was on her own now, and she was going to have to get used to that fact. It was time to quit acting like a kid. She could survive a month or two with Hamilton—it shouldn’t take longer than that to get the legal stuff squared away—and then she’d move on with her life. Alone. She had no other choice.

  —

  Kay left the restaurant and went out into the parking lot and called Jim Davis at home. She thought for a minute about telling him about her daughter and then decided she didn’t want to get into all that right now, and definitely not over the phone. She just told him she needed a few days off for something personal. Davis didn’t object; she hardly ever took any time off.

  Now what? Now what was she going to do?

  And at just that moment, as if God had decided to give her a preview of her life to come, a woman and a girl about Jessica’s age walked past her in the parking lot. The woman was saying, “I’m telling you, Heather, you’re never going to see that boy again. Do you hear me?” To which the girl responded, “Oh, yeah. What the hell are you gonna do? Lock me in the fucking basement?”

  Oh, Lord, help me.

  She walked back into the restaurant and out to the table where Jessica was sitting, staring out at the bay. The kid looked so small and alone that for a moment Kay really felt sorry for her.

  “Okay,” she said. “The day after tomorrow, we’ll fly to Cleveland and deal with this social worker and the guardianship stuff. We’ll also get a real estate agent to get started on selling your mom’s house.”

  “I already have the name of a real estate agent,” Jessica said.

  “Fine. Then after all the legal sh . . . stuff is squared away, we’ll pack up your things and ship them out here. We’ll let the real estate agent deal with the furniture in your house and anything else you don’t want. When we get back, we’ll enroll you in a school.”

  Kay sounded like she was taking charge, but the truth was that she didn’t know what she was doing. She didn’t know how one became a legal guardian; short of DNA testing, she wasn’t even sure how she could prove that Jessica was her kid. She didn’t have a clue about schools in San Diego.

  “Anything else you think we need to do?” Kay asked.

  “I have to get all my school records sent out here,” Jessica said. “You know, transcripts and stuff. Probably my medical and dental records, too.”

  “What grade did you say you were in?”

  “I didn’t. I’m a sophomore.”

  A sophomore! It would be two and a half years before she graduated from high school. Two and a half years!

  When they returned to her house, Kay showed Jessica the room where she’d be staying. Kay used one bedroom as a home office; the second bedroom, the one with the walk-in closet, was where she slept. The third bedroom would become Jessica’s. The room had a queen-size bed she’d bought at a yard sale, a chest of drawers, a night table, and a bedside lamp, but nobody had ever slept in the bed. She and Jessica made up the bed together and then Kay showed her the second bathroom, which, she guessed, was going to become Jessica’s.

  Kay asked if she needed anything else—toothpaste, a snack, whatever. Jessica said no, and Kay said, “Well, uh, good night. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  “Wait a minute. What do I call you?” Jessica asked.

  “You can call me Agent Hamilton,” Kay said with a straight face. When Jessica’s blue eyes expanded, she said, “I’m kidding. Lighten up. I guess you should call me Kay. I don’t think either one of us would be comfortable with Mom.”

  “You got that right,” Jessica said. Then she said, “I’ve read about you, you know. There’s a lot of stuff online about what you did here with that Tito guy and what happened in Miami.”

  Aw, Jesus. Miami. Kay had never been embarrassed about what she did in Miami—until this moment. She went into the kitchen, took a bottle of Stoli from the freezer, and poured straight vodka into a water glass.

  17

  MIAMI

  Kay sat at the bar, sipping a virgin piña colada, watching Marco Álvarez out of the corner of her eye. In the three years she’d been with the DEA, this was definitely the best job she’d been given. She’d spent entire nights being bitten by mosquitoes and sand flies, watching through night vision goggles, until a cigarette boat filled with marijuana landed on a beach. She’d dressed up in grungy clothes that hadn’t been washed in two weeks, her teeth blackened to give her that stinky, appealing meth-head look. Because she spoke Spanish, she spent mind-numbing hours listening to phone taps of some moron talking to his girlfriend, his mother, and his idiot buddies, just hoping to hear the moron say something that could land him in jail.

  This assignment, however, it was . . . hell, it couldn’t get any better than this. She’d used a government-issued credit card to buy the slinkiest dress she could find and a pair of high heels she’d only dreamed about; got a manicure, a pedicure, and her legs waxed all on Uncle Sam’s dime; and was now drinking sixteen-buck drinks at the taxpayers’ expense. It was just a basic surveillance job like others she’d been given, but what a place to do surveillance: The Blue Halo, the newest, hottest—and priciest—club in South Beach.

  The DEA had learned from a confidential informant that Marco Álvarez might meet a new heroin connection tonight, and they wanted to know who it was. Marco liked meeting people in clubs because clubs were noisy and it was hard to record conversations, and because most federal agents would stick out like sunflowers in a rose garden. The other reasons he liked clubs was that they were typically filled with hot young women, and Kay Hamilton—twenty-five years old, tall, long blond hair, long shapely legs—was definitely hot. Her job—if you could call it a job—was to use her cell phone to take photos of everyone who sat with Marco in his regular booth. If it appeared that one of those people looked like he or she might be involved the heroin industry, Kay would e-mail the photos to agents outside the bar and tell them when the person was leaving so they could follow. There was nothing strange about a young woman sitting at the bar using her cell phone. So far, however, the only people who’d sat with Marco was the guy who owned the club, two girls who looked young enough to be freshmen at Miami Dade College, and a big-time real estate agent who was also one of Marco’s customers.

  Kay called the bartender over and said, “Give me another colada, but put the booze in it this time.”

  —

  Kay’s dad had been a New York City cop, and after he put in his twenty, he retired and became the chief of police in a little town in Connecticut. Kay grew up around cops, hearing their stories, and she decided in high school that she was going to be some kind of cop. After she had the baby, she finished high school in Maryland in her aunt’s hometown, was accepted at the University of Maryland, and got a degree in criminal justice. Her dad wanted her to get a law degree, but she didn’t want to be a lawyer.

  She gave a lot of thought to what kind of cop she wanted to be. She considered being a big-city cop like her dad had been, but ultimately decided she wanted to go federal. She thought that’s where the real action was—terrorism, drugs, organized crime—not wife beaters and kids killing each other for tennis shoes in the projects.

  She didn’t want to Protect and Serve. She wanted to arrest bad guys.

  The FBI—and maybe her dad had made her p
rejudiced—just sounded too uptight and straight-laced to her. Dad always said the Feebs were like accountants with guns, spending more time looking at spreadsheets than anything else. As for the Secret Service, she had no desire to stand around being a human shield for a politician, and the U.S. Marshals Service—protecting witnesses and tracking down criminals who’d skipped—sounded monotonous to her.

  The DEA was the one she wanted. She thought the war on drugs was a war that would never be won and that legalizing drugs would be the smartest thing to do, but until that happened the DEA was . . . well, it was the next-best thing to playing cowboys and Indians, except all the cowboys and Indians were armed to the teeth.

  She was assigned to Miami right after she finished her training and had been there three years. She’d been involved in a number of small busts, operated as an undercover agent a dozen times because of her looks and her age, but never had the opportunity to do something really spectacular. Then along comes Marco Álvarez.

  The DEA office in Miami had decided it was time to focus in earnest on Marco. He’d been getting bigger and bigger, running cocaine, heroin, meth, and marijuana—anything a junkie could inject, snort, or smoke. And as he got bigger, the body count increased as he dealt with his rivals. Then he made the mistake of killing a DEA snitch, and that’s when the administration decided it had had enough.

  —

  A man and a woman, both in their forties, entered the club. They were well dressed, looked upscale, but were not the type you’d expect to see dancing the salsa. The man was balding, had a dark complexion and a big hooked nose. The woman looked just like him, except her nose wasn’t so pronounced—and Kay wondered if they might be related. She found out later they were brother and sister, both originally from Lebanon. They walked over to Marco’s table and sat down, and Kay took their picture a dozen times. They spent an hour with Marco, everybody looking serious, and when they left, Kay called the team outside.

  Kay’s orders were to stick around until Marco left, although she was pretty sure he’d just met his new connection. She thought about ordering another drink but figured a DUI might not look too good on her record. At that moment, Marco rose from his table and walked in her direction.

  “I can’t believe somebody would stand up a woman who looks like you,” he said to her.

  For the last two hours, she’d been beating away guys trying to pick her up. She was particularly rude to some of them—the ones who stood on her left and blocked her view of Marco’s table.

  “What makes you think I’ve been stood up?” Kay said. “Maybe I just like sitting here by myself.”

  He smiled at her—and he had a gorgeous smile. In fact, everything about Marco Álvarez was gorgeous: tall, well-built, curly dark hair, bedroom eyes. His eyes reminded her of the eyes of that actor Benicio Del Toro.

  Kay laughed. “Okay. So I’ve been stood up, but by a girlfriend, not a guy.”

  But she was thinking, Could this really be happening? Could this possibly be the chance of a lifetime?

  “Why don’t you come sit with me?” he said. “I just ordered a few things to nibble on, and I hate to eat by myself.”

  Kay pretended to hesitate, then said, “Sure, why not?”

  Two hours later, when Kay was drunk enough to know she’d have to take a cab home, her squad leader called her on her cell phone.

  “Hamilton,” he said, “what the fuck are you doing in there?”

  “Oh, hi, Dad,” she said.

  “Dad? Hamilton, are you drunk?”

  “Yeah, okay, Dad, I’ll be right over. Just take it easy.”

  She explained to Marco that her mother had just had surgery and her father was the kind of guy who panicked every time she sneezed.

  She could tell Marco was, as they say, smitten with her. He asked if she might be free this weekend. He said he was thinking about heading down to Key Largo on his yacht. “It’s got two bedrooms,” he added, maybe thinking she was worried about the sleeping arrangements.

  “Why don’t you give me a call,” Kay said.

  The next day, she met with her boss and her boss’s boss and said she might have a chance to get close to Marco Álvarez—really close. Her boss, another pretty good guy like Jim Davis, said, “Are you sure you understand what this could mean, Hamilton? I mean, what you might have to do?”

  “I understand,” Kay said.

  In a month she was Marco’s live-in girlfriend. She reeled him in like a fish, playing a little hard to get but not too hard, making it clear she was the jealous type and not about to put up with him screwing around on her. One night, after she walked out on him for flirting with a waitress and said she never wanted to see him again—Marco was used to women who’d put up with anything to be with him—he asked her to move in with him.

  For the next seven months, she lived a life that only movie stars and heiresses can imagine, eating in five-star establishments, traveling with Marco to resorts all over the world, dressing in designer clothes he bought for her, staying on yachts and in palaces owned by other drug merchants. And during those seven months, she collected enough evidence to put Marco away for life and twenty-seven of his people in jail for anywhere from five to twenty years.

  With a lot of help from electronic wizards hired by the DEA, she bugged Marco’s phones, installed GPS devices on his cars, inserted spyware into his computers, and downloaded copies of his banking transactions. She personally heard Marco, in a very crude code, give the order to murder two men.

  Her biggest fear during the time she was living with him was that too many people knew that the DEA had an undercover in Marco’s camp: other DEA agents, judges who granted warrants, federal attorneys giving guidance on the evidence needed to get convictions, technicians contracted to help with the bugging equipment. And somebody—right when they were about to arrest Marco—gave her up. She didn’t know if it had been a mistake or if someone sold her out for a price.

  Marco Álvarez was a man with poor impulse control, and when he learned Kay was DEA, he went berserk. He was naturally upset to learn that a woman he thought loved him had betrayed him, but more than that, he was enraged that he’d been played for a fool. He beat the shit out of her.

  He broke two of her ribs, her nose, knocked out a tooth, and cracked one of the bones around her left eye. Then he told two of his thugs to grab her arms so he could cut out her tongue before he killed her.

  Kay was saved only because one of the thugs wore a gun in an ankle holster for a backup piece and, when he bent down to pick her up off the floor, Kay grabbed the gun. She figured the only reason she lived was either that Marco and his men were lousy shots or that there was an angel in the room protecting her. She didn’t know how many bullets were fired at her, but she fired five. She killed Marco, the two bodyguards with him, and then a third guy who heard all the gunfire and came in with an Uzi to see if he could help out.

  Three things happened after she killed Marco, only one of which was good. First, after a short stay in the hospital and the care of a good dentist and a plastic surgeon, Kay got the commendation and the promotion she deserved for what she had done to bring down Marco Álvarez’s drug empire. That was the good thing. The second thing that happened was that her name and her photograph were leaked to the media, which ended any chance of her being an undercover agent again.

  The third thing was the reaction of the men she worked with.

  If a man had done what she had done—penetrated a criminal organization by having sex with the woman in charge—everybody would be patting the guy on the back. They would have approved of a man knocking off a good-looking piece of ass in the name of God and country. But when Kay did the same thing, her fellow agents looked upon her as some kind of slut and snickered—and not always behind her back—about how she’d spread her legs to bring down Marco. It wasn’t fair—but that’s the way it was. She was glad when she got the trans
fer to San Diego.

  The other thing was, although Kay didn’t tell anyone this, she had a great time being Marco Álvarez’s girlfriend, living the high life, going to nice places—and spying on Marco. And Marco—other than the night he almost beat her to death—was actually a lot of fun to be with.

  Regardless of what her fellow agents thought of her, Kay was proud of what she had done in Miami. That is, she was proud until she discovered that Jessica knew what she had done.

  How do you explain something like that to your fifteen-year-old daughter?

  18

  Naturally, it took longer than Kay had expected to become Jessica’s guardian and mother again. She ended up spending almost two weeks in Cleveland dealing with all the legal and financial crap, boxing stuff up to send back to San Diego, getting the process started for selling Jessica’s house, and dealing with the social service “dragon.” The dragon turned out to be a sweet, caring woman who only had Jessica’s best interests at heart. Kay was also impressed with the real estate agent that Jessica selected, a blue-haired barracuda who had a jewel on her ring finger the size of a walnut. Judging by the bling, she’d sell Jessica’s house in no time. She thought that Jim Davis might be upset with her taking so much time off, but once he understood what was going on, he told her to take all the time she needed. The guys who worked for her were delighted she was gone.

  She learned more about her daughter from her bedroom in Cleveland than she did from talking to her. It seemed like the only time they talked was to deal with some practical matter, like whether to ship this or that back to San Diego or where to go for dinner. But the bedroom—that was enlightening.

  Kay hadn’t been around fifteen-year-old girls since she was fifteen, and the ones she encountered in shopping malls or on the street seemed incredibly dimwitted and shallow, saying ya know and like about every other word, cell phones glued to their ears, butterfly tattoos just above their butts. Jessica, as near as she could tell, was nothing like those girls.