Rosarito Beach

by M. A. Lawson

  There were no Justin Bieber posters on her walls or those of any other teeny-bopper heartthrob. There were a couple of nature photographs—waterfalls and forest scenes—and Kay thought that maybe she or her parents had taken them. Whoever took them, they were important to her, and she wanted them shipped to San Diego.

  Even though she didn’t have any boy-band posters, she did like music. She had a bunch of CDs, and her taste was pretty wide-ranging, from reggae to rock to hip-hop. She even had some classical piano and violin stuff—the kind of music that instantly put Kay to sleep when she heard it. When Kay asked if she wanted to keep the CDs, Jessica said no, that she now had everything on her iPod.

  There were lots of books in the room, mostly fiction, but there were also some heavy-duty science textbooks. One was called Beyond Genetics: The User’s Guide to DNA—and Kay thought Whoa. Jessica packed up almost all the books, and Kay was thinking she was going to have to buy a couple of IKEA bookcases for Jessica’s bedroom back in San Diego. The kid had more books on one shelf in her room in Cleveland than Kay had probably read in her entire life.

  Jessica didn’t seem to have a whole lot of interest in clothes. She didn’t have that many, and it appeared she mostly wore jeans and sweatshirts and T-shirts and shorts. Kay didn’t see many dresses and skirts, and none that she saw were particularly sexy. Kay liked to shop for clothes when she had the time, and she got the impression her daughter didn’t. In fact, she got the impression that they had absolutely zero in common.

  She didn’t see any sports equipment in the room—no soccer shoes in the closet, no little trophies for T-ball from when she was young. She did have a couple pairs of hiking boots and a decent backpack, the type with a lightweight frame you took when you went camping. Maybe the nature photos came from some camping-hiking trip.

  One last thing Kay noticed was a picture of Jessica and a cute little curly-headed guy. They were dressed like they were going to a prom, and Jessica looked pretty and excited—and incredibly innocent. Kay wondered if she herself had ever looked that innocent. When she asked Jessica if she wanted to pack the photo, she looked embarrassed but said yes.

  —

  Finding a school for her daughter became a major problem. Kay didn’t know anything about the school system in San Diego. She did know that she didn’t want the girl going to a public school; public schools were combat zones. She looked online, found a Catholic high school a few miles from her house, and decided the place would be perfect. It was on a bus line, and Jessica would only have to walk a couple of blocks to catch the bus. It was also horrendously expensive. Nobody ever said that American Catholics weren’t capitalists.

  Kay and Jessica visited the school, both of them dressed like they were interviewing for jobs: conservative skirts and blouses, minimal makeup, hair neatly combed. Kay left her gun in the trunk of her car. As they were waiting to see the principal, Kay visited the girls’ restroom—and the smell of marijuana was almost enough to give her a contact high. Hmmm, she thought.

  The principal was a tall, gaunt woman in her fifties; her honey-colored hair looked as if it had been sprayed with something that would withstand a Force 5 hurricane. She was also a condescending, snooty bitch. When Kay explained that she wanted to enroll her daughter, the principal said, “I’m afraid you don’t understand, dear. We don’t accept just anyone here. We have a rigorous admissions process and all applicants have to be approved by the admissions board. We require references not only from the student’s previous teachers but, well, references for the parents as well.”

  “Look,” Kay said, “I’ve got kind of an emergency here. I work full-time and I don’t have time to go school shopping. And Jessica’s grades are fantastic. She has a three-point-nine-five GPA from her school in Cleveland. I have a copy of her transcript with me if you’d like to see it.”

  Kay had figured out that Jessica was bright—but she hadn’t known that she was straight-A’s, off-the-charts bright until she saw her transcript. The kid’s intelligence both impressed and intimidated her.

  The principal was less impressed. “Well, I’m not sure what a three-point-nine GPA means from a Cleveland high school,” she said with a sniff—and Kay had to put a hand on Jessica’s forearm to keep Jessica from coming out of her chair.

  “Grade point isn’t the only thing we look at, either,” the principal continued. “Extracurricular activities, community service, all those things are taken into account. So what you need to do, Mrs. Hamilton—”

  Kay didn’t bother to correct her.

  “—is fill out the application forms—my secretary will give them to you—and if Jessica meets our standards, maybe she can be admitted next year.”

  Her tone of voice said Not a chance in hell.

  “I see,” Kay said. “Jessica, would you mind waiting for me in the outer office? I need a private word with Principal Ford.”

  After Jessica left, Kay pulled out her DEA badge. “I’m a DEA agent, I’m busy, and I don’t have time to fuck around here. You’re going to admit my daughter into this school today.”

  “You can’t speak to me that way,” the principal said.

  “Maybe not, but let me tell you what I can do. I smelled pot in the girls’ head when I took a pee in there five minutes ago. I’ll bet half the brats that go to this school smoke pot and use prescription meds they’ve stolen from Mama’s medicine cabinet. They’ve got OxyContin, Valium, and Vicodin squirreled away in their lockers and backpacks. So if my daughter isn’t admitted, this place is gonna become the new front line for the war on drugs. I’m gonna get warrants for car and locker searches. I’m going to park agents on this campus looking for drug dealers, and follow kids to see if they hook up with any. I’m also going to leak every arrest to the media, and the people who send their kids to school here are going to think this place is a crack house in Chula Vista.”

  “This school is not—”

  “I think it’s time for you and this school to do a community service. Namely, a service for me. I’m a federal agent who spends her life protecting you, your students, and this country, and in return, I want my daughter enrolled here so I can get back to work.”

  The principal looked like she was going to explode—she was a minor demagogue and used to having people kiss her bony old ass—but she was also a pragmatist.

  “Well, when you put it that way, that we need to pay you back for what you’re doing for the public, I’m willing to make an exception in your daughter’s case. But do you have any idea how much the tuition is here? I’m willing to enroll your daughter, but she’s not getting a free ride.”

  The principal was thinking there was no way in hell Civil Servant Hamilton could afford to send her daughter to her posh school.

  “Yeah, I know what it costs,” Kay said, “and the tuition isn’t a problem.”

  The reason why it wasn’t a problem was that the late Marco Álvarez was going to pay for her daughter’s high school education. When Kay was living with Marco, he lavished presents on her, and many of those presents had been in the form of jewelry: necklaces, tennis bracelets, rings, watches, and earrings. There was probably some rule that said she should have reported the gifts to her employer, but she never did. She figured she’d earned them, and estimated that she had almost fifty grand in stones. She’d been planning to use the money someday for something really extravagant—maybe a used Beemer convertible or a down payment on a beach place—and she was actually astounded with herself that she was willing to give up her treasure trove for her daughter. She had no idea, however, how she was going to pay for college.

  Having a kid was a pain in the ass—particularly when the kid didn’t like her or trust her or want anything to do with her.

  19

  In the three months following the attack on the marshals—as Kay was struggling to adjust to the concept of motherhood—the San Diego Police Department, the DEA, the FBI, an
d ICE went on a rampage, particularly the San Diego cops. John Hernández, chief of the SDPD, unleashed the dogs. He wanted to prove that just because three of his cops had been busted for being in cahoots with a drug cartel, he sure as hell wasn’t in cahoots with anyone. Four gang members were killed in battles with San Diego cops, and hardly a day went by when a SWAT team wasn’t seen on television, battering down a door in a Hispanic neighborhood. Drug dealers and users were rounded up in such numbers that the jails and courts were overwhelmed, and illegal immigrants were shipped out of the country by the busload. John Hernández waited until complaints against his department for violations of civil rights and police brutality reached a screaming crescendo before he told his boys to back off.

  The Olivera cartel suffered in particular. Olivera’s operations in California didn’t exactly grind to a halt, but the cartel definitely lost significant revenues, and the gains Tito had made in taking over territories from other organizations were mostly lost.

  But Caesar Olivera didn’t care; all he cared about was getting his brother out of jail.

  —

  U.S. Marshal Kevin Walker was called back to Washington, and his handling of Tito Olivera’s transfer to the courthouse was reviewed by a panel of bureaucrats. The Attorney General felt that somebody had to be held accountable for the seven marshals who were killed, and Walker was the obvious guy to hang.

  Walker’s biggest mistake, the panel said, was doing the dry run from the correctional center to the courthouse, as that gave Olivera’s men time to study the route and plan the attack. Walker’s defenders said that this was bullshit. The marshals had been taking the same route from the correctional center to the courthouse for almost a year as the courthouse tunnel was being repaired, and the only reason Walker had his people do a dry run was to reinforce the idea that Tito was going to be transported in the usual way. Walker’s job, after all, had been to get Tito to court—and Walker did his job.

  Walker’s real mistake was that he, just like everybody else, including his bosses at the Justice Department, didn’t believe Jim Davis when he warned them of the extremes Caesar Olivera might go to to free his brother.

  Walker’s supporters in Washington eventually won the day. They convinced the panel that the one who should be held accountable was Caesar Olivera and not a man who had devoted twenty years of his life to his country, first as a soldier and then as a federal marshal.

  The AG finally relented, although Kevin Walker personally didn’t care if he was fired or not. In the month after the attack, he attended the funerals of his men. He saw their widows sitting in graveside chairs, so numb with grief they were like statues, their kids sobbing, knowing they’d never see their fathers again. Every time he handed a widow an American flag, he went home and drank until he passed out. Kevin Walker’s father had been an alcoholic. It appeared Kevin was becoming one as well.

  —

  Assistant U.S. Attorney Carol Maddox, the lawyer who would be prosecuting Tito Olivera, met three times with Jesús Rodríguez and Ángel Gomez, the men who had accompanied Tito to the bar on the day Tito executed Cadillac Washington. Maddox told them that if they didn’t cooperate, she was going to prosecute them as accomplices to first-degree murder.

  Maddox’s case was weak, however, and she knew it. She could say they knew what was going to happen to Cadillac in advance, and the video showed them calmly standing by when Cadillac was shot, but she couldn’t really prove they had conspired with Tito to kill Washington. Nonetheless, when Maddox was talking to Jesús, Ángel, and their lawyers, she made it sound as if a guilty verdict would be a slam dunk.

  “You think there’s a jury in this state that’s going to let you two scumbags walk?” she said.

  Carol Maddox didn’t really want to convict the two men, however. What she wanted was for them to testify against Tito and give her all the information they had on the Olivera cartel. Their response to her generous offer of immunity in return for their cooperation was Lady, go fuck yourself. They knew they were dead men if they cooperated with the U.S. Attorney.

  Two months after they were arrested, they were dead anyway.

  It happened like this: Two psychopaths at MCC, each with double-digit IQs, who belonged in mental institutions instead of a jail, somehow managed to acquire knives. And these were real knives—hunting knives with five-inch blades—not the homemade shivs manufactured by prison inmates out of toothbrush handles and scraps of sheet metal. Then two men who were barely capable of rational thought, much less coordinating their actions, killed Ángel and Jesús less than five minutes apart, Ángel in the shower and Jesús while he was talking on the phone to his girlfriend.

  Raphael Mora was pleased with the way the operation had gone.

  —

  Tito Olivera had settled into a routine at the Camp Pendleton brig. The only time he was allowed out of his cell was to exercise, and the exercise consisted of walking up and down the corridor outside his cell. He was served meals in his cell by the marshals guarding him, and before they served his meals, they poked their fingers into his food to make sure no one was sending him a message, drugs, a cell phone, or any other sort of contraband. They didn’t give a shit if someone poisoned him.

  The only visitor Tito was allowed was his attorney, Lincoln Prescott, who bitched mightily about having to drive to Camp Pendleton, being subjected to “draconian” security measures, and who was convinced that his conversations with Tito were being recorded, which they weren’t.

  Assistant U.S. Attorney Carol Maddox never met with Tito or his lawyer. Maddox had no intention of making Tito any kind of deal.

  —

  The Delgato family, up in Neah Bay, Washington, was driving soon-to-be-retired DEA agents Mike Figgins and Ray Patterson absolutely nuts.

  Sofía Delgato wasn’t too bad. She seemed fairly content to sit in the waterfront house and cook and read and watch TV. She missed her friends, but she liked to fry the oysters she could scoop up off the beach. She liked the ocean view. She also enjoyed the company of Figgins and Patterson, pretending to be shocked by their offers to warm her bed at night if she was cold.

  The real problems were Miguel and María. Miguel had been at the Neah Bay house with the two agents for almost a year, and although he liked fishing and drinking with them, he’d had enough. And since María had arrived, Figgins and Patterson couldn’t take Miguel fishing or to the golf course, nor could they visit the hookers in Forks. They knew the Olivera cartel was looking for María, so they had to play it completely straight and stay in the house at Neah Bay—and Miguel was sick of Neah Bay. He wanted to experience the bright lights of a big city again, and he wanted female companionship on a steady basis.

  But María was the worst. She was a prima donna. She hated the rainy Northwest and she hated being cooped up in a house with Figgins, Patterson, and her mother. She complained the TV didn’t get enough channels. She complained about the food, but never cooked. She complained about being bored, but showed no interest in doing anything to relieve her boredom. She had a full-blown temper tantrum about every other day.

  Figgins called Kay Hamilton one day and said, “This broad’s a fuckin’ nightmare. I don’t know how long we can keep her hidden up here before she decides to bolt. If you want to keep her alive until the trial, you might have to put her in a cage somewhere.”

  “Mike,” Kay said, “you have to make her understand that her best chance for staying alive is to lie low up there. If I put her in a prison, anywhere in the U.S., Caesar Olivera will get to her.”

  “I’ve told her that! I’ve talked to her until I’m blue in the face. Maybe we can take her on a . . . I don’t know, a day trip to settle her down. You know, take her over to Canada, Victoria, Vancouver, someplace where she can go shopping or something.”

  “No! She’ll fuck up. She’ll do some dumb thing and Olivera will find her. Tell her if she doesn’t stop being a little
cunt, I am going to put her in a cell.”

  —

  Raphael Mora was frustrated. He couldn’t find María Delgato or her family, and he couldn’t think of a way to get Tito Olivera out of Camp Pendleton. Mora’s frustration was exceeded only by Caesar Olivera’s, and Caesar was not a man you wanted to frustrate.

  Mora had his people looking at everything. They continually checked the phone records of María’s and her mother’s friends, looking for out-of-area calls. They tried to locate María via her cell phone and checked daily to see if she had used her credit cards. They even tried to find María’s mother through her medications. She took pills for high blood pressure and high cholesterol, and normally refilled the prescriptions at a pharmacy in National City, but the medications were so common they could be refilled anywhere, and Mrs. Delgato never contacted her doctor or her pharmacist after disappearing from San Diego.

  Mora also looked at flights taken by DEA agents and by the U.S. Attorney who would be prosecuting Tito. The attorney never left San Diego, but one flight intrigued Mora. Two days after Tito was arrested, the DEA agent who arrested him took a flight to Portland, Oregon, and she rented a car at the airport. She put almost seven hundred miles on the rental car but didn’t use a credit card to pay for gas or for anything else in the Northwest. On the rental car form, she put down Crescent City, California, as her destination, and a round-trip from Portland to Crescent City was about six hundred miles, so the mileage on the rental car was consistent with her driving to that location. But why would she go to Crescent City? And why would she fly into Portland to get there?

  The other thing Agent Hamilton did was take a trip to Cleveland. The Cleveland trip appeared to be personal and not business related, as Hamilton used her own credit card to pay for the flight and a rental car in Cleveland. There were no motel or hotel charges in Cleveland, which meant she might have stayed with a friend. More inquiries showed that Hamilton was on annual leave from the DEA during this period, so maybe she went to Cleveland for a vacation. But who the hell went to Cleveland in the winter for a vacation?