by M. A. Lawson
After Hamilton’s trip to Portland, Mora had people roaming the Northwest looking for any sign of María Delgato. He hired private detective agencies in Seattle, Portland, and Sacramento and had them scouring nightclubs, restaurants, expensive boutiques, and hair salons, showing employees María’s photograph. The detectives from Sacramento spent almost a month in Crescent City trying to prove that María had been there. Mora also knew that María liked a little coke now and then. She wasn’t an addict and took the drug only occasionally, but she took it. He put out the word to dealers—and the dealers’ network was vast—to see if any of them had sold to María.
Nada.
20
This is Hamilton,” Kay said when Carol Maddox answered the phone. “I was wondering if you could meet me for a drink when you get off work.”
“What?” Maddox said. Kay had never socialized with Maddox in the past; she never had any interest in socializing with Maddox.
“Does this have to do with the case against Tito?” Maddox asked. “I mean, is this so urgent it can’t wait until tomorrow?”
“Uh, it’s not about the case. It’s . . . it’s personal.”
“Personal?”
Aw, shit. She was going to have to tell Maddox why she wanted to meet; otherwise, Maddox would tell her that she had to go home to take care of her brood. “It’s about my daughter.”
“Your daughter? You have a daughter?”
“Yeah,” Kay said. “It’s a long story and I need to talk to someone—someone who has kids. I need some advice.”
“You gotta be shittin’ me,” Maddox said, and started laughing.
—
Maddox surprised Kay by ordering A. H. Hirsch on the rocks. Maddox may have been a frumpy-looking mother of four with a goofy haircut, but she knew her bourbon.
Kay told her about getting pregnant when she was fifteen and Jessica showing up on her doorstep and how she was now her legal guardian. The whole time Kay was talking, Maddox had this amused expression on her face, as if the whole thing struck her as being incredibly funny. When Kay finished, however, she shook her head and said, “That poor girl.”
“What do you mean That poor girl?”
“Hamilton, there are probably species of crocodile that are more maternal than you.” Before Kay could object, Maddox said, “So what’s the problem? Is she acting like a little bitch? I mean, I have a fourteen-year-old and girls can be a real handful at that age. They’re worse than boys.”
“No, she’s not acting like a bitch. In fact, she’s damn near perfect.”
Kay explained how the girl was super bright and on top of that she was a serious student. “She’s got almost a four-point-oh grade point. Not only that, she’s really mature for her age, probably because of what happened to her mother—I mean, her adoptive mother. She got breast cancer, and the kid had to deal with that all by herself.
“Anyway, she’s not really a problem. She doesn’t leave crap all over the house and she takes care of her own clothes. When she comes home from school, she does about three hours of homework and then just diddles around on the Internet or reads. She reads a hell of a lot more than I ever did, or do, for that matter. And because she gets home before me, she usually makes her own dinner. She knows how to cook; I don’t.”
“Jesus,” Maddox muttered—and Kay didn’t know what that meant. “Has she made any friends since she’s been here?” Maddox asked.
“Yeah, a couple of girls. She’s actually pretty outgoing with everybody but me. Anyway, she hangs out with them on weekends and they go to the beach, the movies, that sort of thing. I checked them and their parents out; they don’t have records. I followed them once when Jessica said they were going to the beach, and they behaved themselves.”
“Good Lord,” Maddox said.
“Hey! I had to make sure they weren’t doing dope.”
“So then what’s the problem? I mean, if she’s not dating some little shitbag, not doing drugs, not turning into a bulimic stick figure—”
“The problem is I don’t know how to act around her. I haven’t had sex since she’s been living with me. I don’t drink when I’m at home, because I don’t want to set a bad example. I try to talk to her, but she doesn’t want anything to do with me. She wants to move out and get her own place, but I won’t let her.”
“Of course you can’t let her do that. She’s fifteen.”
“I know that. But she acts like she’s doing time in my house, just serving out her sentence until she turns eighteen and can leave and have access to her own money. I mean, it’s like living with a damn cat, this really smart, independent cat who looks down its nose at you.”
Maddox took a sip of her bourbon, then sat for a moment like she was collecting her thoughts. “You have to do three things with kids. First, they have to know you love them, and that’s kind of tough in your case. But they have to know that you’re going to be there for them, no matter what. Second, you have to set some boundaries. They expect you to do that, and if you don’t, as odd as it sounds, they think you don’t care. More than anything else, though, you have to talk to them. You have to get inside their weird little heads so you can figure out if something’s bothering them, and they have to know they can come to you when they have a problem.”
“But she doesn’t talk to me. I ask her how school’s going, and she says Fine. That’s it. Fine.”
“You can’t accept fine. She says fine, you ask what did you do in school today, how did your classes go, are any of your teachers giving you a hard time? You ask if there’s a dance coming up or a game, or if she’s met any cute boys. You grill her, Hamilton. That’s your job now. You also tell her about what you did at work during the day, just to get a conversation started. Or you tell her about some experience you had when you were in high school so she can relate to you.”
“Oh, yeah. Like getting knocked up at fifteen.”
“As a matter of fact, you should talk to her about that. You have to talk to her about that. Tell her what it was like for you emotionally. How you dealt with the whole issue. How you came to terms with her adoption.”
“Came to terms with her adoption? Are you kidding? I dumped her on my cousin two minutes after she was born.”
“Whatever. You have talk to her about it. As for you not being able to act like yourself . . . well, you’re not yourself anymore. You’re a mother. You can’t come home and start swilling martinis around the kid, but it’s okay to have one once in a while. You can’t drag some stud home and have noisy sex in the bedroom. I mean, you could, but that’s probably not going to do much for your image or your relationship. So unless you want to be celibate for the next two years, you’re going to have to sit down with her and tell her the truth, that you need a sex life and every once in a while you’re going to be going out on a date and may not be back until the wee hours.”
“I don’t know,” Kay said, shaking her head. “I just can’t imagine having some kind of birds-and-the-bees talk with her.”
“She’s fifteen, Hamilton. She already knows about the birds and the bees. She’s probably wondering if there’s something wrong with you, never dating, not having a man in your life. The thing about kids is, you can’t pretend to be somebody you’re not. They can spot a phony from a mile away. You have to be honest with them if you expect them to be honest with you.”
Maddox left not long after that, and Kay ordered one more drink and thought about everything Maddox had said. She knew Maddox was right. She had to make more of an effort to talk to the kid; she had to establish some sort of rapport with her. But Maddox had no idea how Jessica had this . . . this force field around her.
She tried to think how she could start a conversation with her daughter about sex—but soon found herself thinking about Robert Meyer. She thought about him about ten times a day. Two days after Jessica moved in with her, Robert called her at work and
asked if she was busy that night—meaning his wife and daughters were out of town or otherwise engaged, and he wanted to come over to her place for a roll in the hay.
She met him for a drink that evening and told him about her daughter and that they were going to have to stop seeing each other. She couldn’t articulate it very well—that having uncomplicated sex with a gorgeous married man had never bothered her before but it bothered her now that her daughter was living with her.
“We’ll just go to a motel,” Robert said. “The kid will never know.”
“I can’t do it, Robert. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”
Robert took their breakup amazingly well. In fact, he took it disappointingly well. He’d been seeing Kay for over a year and probably figured that he’d been pressing his luck both professionally and personally, and it was time to move on. For all she knew, he had some little honey ready to take her place in the lineup. Now she was thinking—since she was horny enough to screw a mountain goat—that maybe a visit to the nearest Holiday Inn with Robert might not be the worst thing in the world. She’d call Jessica, tell her she was stuck on a stakeout, and . . .
Stop it! The whole point was that she had to be honest with the kid.
As she was paying her bar bill, she wondered if Jessica had made something for dinner.
21
Raphael Mora still had no idea how to get Tito out of Camp Pendleton. One day, after a so-called brainstorming session with some of his brighter people—a session that resulted in him losing his temper and calling them all idiots—he went to a movie. He just needed to clear his head, to think about something other than Tito.
The movie was one the critics had raved about, some ponderous drama about life and death and family, and he kept nodding off during the show. The third time his head hit his chest, he gave up on the picture and left, and on his way out he saw an older couple sleeping. He couldn’t help but think that a theater full of sleeping people said all there was to say about the movie’s quality.
And then he thought: A theater full of sleeping people.
—
Mora met Leonid Alekseyev at a café a mile from the Russian Embassy in Mexico City.
The Olivera cartel had connections in Russia that were particularly useful when it came to getting opium out of Afghanistan; Olivera’s Mexican poppy fields were not large enough or fertile enough to keep up with demand. Leonid Alekseyev, while pretending to do whatever Russian diplomats did in Mexico, was often used by the Olivera cartel to liaise with Russian drug honchos overseas.
Leonid was an unimpressive-looking man—fat, bald, red-faced, triple-chinned—and the ultimate survivor. He’d lived through the political purges of the Soviet Union and flourished in the rampant corruption following the demise of the Soviet Union. Mora was convinced that if you dropped fat Leonid Alekseyev naked on a desert island with nine Olympic-caliber athletes, Leonid would be the last man standing.
After coffee and pastries were served, Mora said, “I wanted to ask about the incident that happened in Moscow in that theater in 2002. You know, where all those people were killed with that gas?”
“Not our finest moment,” Leonid said.
In 2002, a group of Chechen nationalists, who claimed allegiance to an Islamic separatist movement, took eight hundred and fifty people hostage in a theater and made a number of political demands the Russians found unreasonable. After a two-and-a-half-day siege, Russian Spetsnaz forces secretly pumped some type of gas into the theater with the intention of knocking out both the captives and their attackers; the plan was to then swoop in and capture the unconscious Chechens. Unfortunately, the gas did more than knock folks out; a hundred and seventy people died, mostly hostages, because they were allergic to some element in the gas.
“I was wondering whether you might have something similar to the gas that was used in 2002,” Mora said, and then explained what he needed.
“I don’t know if we have anything like that,” Leonid said. “When I was in the army, they gave me a rifle, not a chemistry set. But I’ll make a few phone calls.”
“We will pay very well for this,” Mora said.
“I’m sure you will,” Leonid said.
—
Three days later, Leonid called Mora. “It just so happens the wizards do have something similar to what you have in mind. But it’s not a, oh, what do you call it? Ah. An off-the-shelf item. It will take about a month to get the quantity you need.”
“I want someone who’s knowledgeable to deliver it to me,” Mora said. “I don’t want a military instruction booklet translated from Russian to Spanish.”
“I believe that can be arranged,” Leonid said.
Now all Raphael Mora needed were two accomplices to execute his plan.
—
Mora found the actor he needed the same way movie directors find actors: through a casting agent. The man had only had a few small parts on Mexican television shows, which was a good thing as far as Mora was concerned. His primary qualification, other than his appearance, was that he was completely fluent in English.
Caesar decided he wanted to see the actor for himself, so Mora went with a couple of men to pick him up. When the actor saw three men on his doorstep—two wearing guns in shoulder holsters—and Mora told him that Caesar Olivera, leader of the largest drug cartel in Mexico, wanted to talk to him, the actor was bright enough to know that it wasn’t an invitation he could decline.
The actor met Caesar in the courtyard of Caesar’s lavish home in Mexico City. It was the sort of courtyard most Mexicans only dream of having in their homes: soothing, burbling fountains, the floor paved with exotic handmade ceramic tiles, trellises laden with red begonia. It was an incredibly tranquil place—but Mora could tell the actor was so nervous that the only way he would be able to relax was if Mora gave him Valium.
Caesar Olivera introduced himself, although the introduction was hardly necessary. He personally poured the actor a glass of wine, but before he could take a sip, Caesar told him to stand, then turn around, then walk a few paces so he could see the way he moved.
“Good,” Caesar said, but he was speaking to Mora, and the actor had no idea what was good.
“Okay, sit down,” Caesar said, now impatient to be finished with the man. “I’m going to pay you five million dollars for the job you’re going to do for me.”
“Five million?” the actor said, but he noticed that Caesar had said, “I’ll pay you for a job you’re going to do for me” and not “I’ll pay you for a job I want you to do for me.”
“Yes, five million,” Caesar repeated. “You need to look at this job in terms of your future. It’s going to require some sacrifice on your part, and it may cost you ten years of your life.”
“Ten years?” the actor said.
“That’s right, but imagine only having to work ten more years and at the end of that time, you’re set for life. How old are you?”
“Twenty-eight.”
“So by the time you’re thirty-eight, and maybe even sooner, you’ll be able to retire and never have to work again. Also, by doing this job for me, you’ll have earned my appreciation, and if you desire to continue to pursue your acting career, I will most certainly be able to help you.”
“What do you want me to do, sir?”
Caesar Olivera told him.
Raphael Mora thought the actor might throw up on Caesar’s handmade ceramic tiles. Fortunately, he waited until he was outside the house before he vomited.
22
Mike Figgins was trying to button a sport coat he hadn’t worn in a year. He turned to his partner, Patterson, and said, “Ray, can you see my gun?” He sounded like a wife asking her husband Honey, does this dress make my ass look fat?
Patterson ignored the question. “If Hamilton finds out about this, she’s going to kill us, Mike. I mean, we won’t just get fired, we’ll lose our pen
sions.”
“She’s not going to find out. It’s one fucking night. If we don’t do this, I’m gonna kill that little Mexican bitch. I can’t take any more of her whining and screaming and all the rest of her shit. This will settle her down for at least a little while, and pretty soon the lawyers will start prepping her for the trial, and that’ll give us another break. Plus, I need to get out of here, too.”
“We can’t drink,” alcoholic Patterson said to alcoholic Figgins. “We gotta stay sharp. You’re gonna have to stay glued to that broad like you’re Siamese twins.”
“Yeah, no drinking,” Figgins said, but he was thinking there was no way he could go the whole day without a drink. He’d just have to pace himself.
Fortunately, María’s mother had a cold and didn’t want to go. There was no landline in the house, she didn’t have a cell phone, the nearest pay phone was ten miles away, and they’d be taking the only vehicle they had. Sofía would be okay.
—
An hour later, at ten in the morning, they all piled into the Explorer: Figgins, Patterson, and the Delgato siblings, who were acting like two kids on the last day of school.
The nearest major city to Neah Bay—and calling it a major city was a stretch—was Port Angeles, Washington, population nineteen thousand. It was eighty miles from Neah Bay. The first thing they did was have lunch at a place overlooking the ocean. Figgins and Patterson both winced when the Delgatos ordered steak and lobster and the most expensive bottle of wine on the menu. The agents were personally funding this little outing, because if they charged it to their DEA credit cards, Hamilton might catch them. They had figured it would cost them each five or six hundred bucks, but as they were making so much in per diem with nowhere to spend it, they could handle the money. Now they were both thinking that maybe they’d underestimated.
