The Eye of the Tigress

by Paul Coggins

  “Simple fix,” Cash said. “Appoint someone to assist Goldy. The new lawyer will technically sit second chair but actually take the lead at trial. That way Freddy the….” He caught himself before blurting out the defendant’s nickname. “Foster is covered, and Goldy saves face. Problem solved.”

  “So glad we’re on the same page.” She took the pen in hand, signed an order, and passed it to him. “Congratulations on your appointment as backup counsel for Foster. You and Mister Goldberg will be a dream team for the defendant and a nightmare for everyone else, including me.”

  Cash bolted to his feet. “You can’t be….” He sat just as abruptly.

  He was tempted to spill everything. Go into all the gory details of why it would be dangerous to pair him with Goldy, or with anyone. He was radioactive. But he couldn’t think of a way to come clean without dragging Fine through the dirt.

  Since resorting to the whole truth was not an option, he settled for a half-truth. “With all due respect, Your Honor, this is a really bad idea. Goldy and I didn’t part on the best of terms.”

  “Never too late for you to apologize.”

  “Me? Why should I be the one to apologize?”

  “When my husband got Parkinson’s, it was hard on the whole family. We had to make allowances for him and adjust our lives around his condition. Thank God, I never bailed on him. Couldn’t live with myself if I had.”

  Hard to push back when she got personal, but Cash did his damnedest. “Are you trying to guilt me into going along with this charade?”

  She smiled.

  “Well, you did a damn good job of it.”

  “Watch your language in my chambers, Mister McCahill, or I’ll be forced to send you to lockup, again.”

  Eyes dry. Temporary truce over.

  ***

  At Goldy’s downtown apartment, Eva answered the door. “What are you doing here?”

  “Happy to see you too.” Cash tossed off the words, as if it was a throwaway line. Truth be told, he was ecstatic to see her. “I came to check on Goldy. And on you.”

  “We’re fine.” She didn’t sound fine and tried to close the door.

  He blocked it with his foot and barged in. Eva was dressed for flight, not fight. She wore sneakers, running shorts, and a sleeveless shirt. Hair in a ponytail. No jewelry to weigh her down.

  Because Goldy had a history of losing houses in divorces, his residence at the complex meant he was between mansions and between marriages. He referred to his exes by the order of their appearance in and exit from his life, from G-1 to G-5.

  Shambolic: the perfect one-word description of the apartment. Papers, law books, and empty pizza boxes littered the floor. Taped to a wall were two large poster boards of lists: witnesses on the left, exhibits on the right. The odor of burnt popcorn and stale pizza fouled the air.

  “Maid’s month off?” Cash said.

  “We’re prepping for trial,” she said, “so we don’t have time to visit today.”

  “That’s why I’m here. Judge Tapia in her infinite wisdom appointed me to assist you on the case.”

  “We don’t need help,” she said, “certainly not from you.”

  “That’s the beauty of being a federal judge. Tapia doesn’t have to consult you or me before issuing a decree that throws us together.”

  She grabbed Cash by the arm and squeezed. “I’m not going to let you hurt him, not any more than you already have.”

  Her words stung. Her grip, not so much. “Is it so hard for you to believe that I might be here to patch things up?”

  “Are you?”

  “I figure it’s time to get the band together again.”

  Goldy emerged from the kitchen, beer in one hand, a limp slice of pepperoni pizza in the other. He wore a baggy warmup suit that failed to flatter his lumpy frame. It took a lifetime for him to cross the living room and confront Cash. “What are you doing here?”

  “Business is slow at my shop.” Not far from the truth. “I came with an offer to sit second chair at the Foster trial.” A little farther from it.

  Goldy harrumphed. “Figured you’d come crawling back on your belly.” He took a bite of pizza, washed it down with beer, and belched. “I guess you can carry my briefcase to and from court.”

  As the old man limped from the room, he said to Eva, “Put him to work on the jury instructions, but keep an eye on him.”

  A text pinged Cash’s phone. The message gave him twenty-five minutes to get to Love Field. It didn’t spell out what would happen if he missed the flight.

  Didn’t have to.

  Cash held off speaking until he trusted his voice not to break. “I’ll work on the instructions on the plane.”

  “Where are you going?” Concern crept into Eva’s voice.

  “TBD.”

  “How long will you be gone?”

  “Also TBD,” he said on the move. At the door he turned back to Eva. “Give Paula a call. She’s worried about you.”

  He left before she could hit him with more questions he couldn’t answer. Everything was up in the air. Not only the destination, but also whether the trip would be one-way or round.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Cash made it to Love Field with a minute to spare and boarded the private jet. The Airbus 319 sported a black-and-gold color scheme outside and in, down to the gold-plated seatbelt buckles.

  A tricked-out plane fit for a Bond villain or a Saints fan. Hard to tell which was more deranged.

  Half of the sixteen black leather seats were empty. Cash recognized none of the passengers, save one.

  Cash stopped in the aisle. He had half a mind to wheel around and run like hell for the exit. Instead, he stared at Shorty, the mini-muscle who had met him at the Culiacan Airport for his first face-to-face with La Tigra. Cash based the positive I.D. partly on stature—five-five give or take an inch—but mostly on the LeBron jersey.

  On the ride to La Tigra’s compound in the past, Shorty had talked nonstop. Today he didn’t have that option. Gagged and strapped to the seat, he blinked out a signal of some sort. A silent message that meant either pull me from this mess or put me out of my misery.

  Cash reached the obvious conclusion. La Tigra had caught Shorty defecting to Los Lobos. According to widespread media reports, she was bleeding support in the countryside and losing her few remaining friends in power.

  Not that she ever had an actual friend in government. Public officials were for rent, not sale. On both sides of the border.

  If Shorty had been busted switching sides, his fate would serve as a lesson to the rest of La Tigra’s troops. And to Cash as well.

  A flight attendant led Cash to his seat and offered him a drink. He ordered a scotch and soda and made it a double. As the jet took off, a sinking feeling swept over him. He took a long, last look at Dallas.

  He had left too much unsaid and undone. His strategy of sparking a bidding war between the agencies for La Tigra’s snitch services had barely gotten off the ground. The best bad deal on the table was a ticket to a prison camp in West Virginia and the permanent loss of her daughter.

  Even that outcome, however, might prove as flimsy as a cloud. Nothing would prevent the feds from checking her into Alderson one day and transferring her to a hellhole the next. Once she went inside, the Bureau of Prisons—BOP for short—owned her body and soul. Not the FBI or DEA. Certainly not the judge.

  The current offers wouldn’t tempt La Tigra, and cartel leaders weren’t noted for taking bad news well. Best Cash could hope for would be relaying the bids without losing his head.

  He studied his fellow passengers. Two gangbangers wore Beats headphones, lip-syncing the lyrics leeching into their brains. Two others were snorting lines on tray tables.

  The lot displayed an array of scars and tatts, including telltale teardrops on their temples. Every teardrop told a story. A hit earned the badge of dishonor and an entry-level job in the cartel.

  The brute in the last row must’ve inked a notch for
every kill. Tatt Face had a mug awash in rainbow-colored tears. No doubt merely a drop in the ocean of real ones shed by his victims and their families.

  Cash faced a wall of stone faces. Not a jury he would’ve chosen to render a life-or-death verdict. Way too many “M”s for his taste: male, macho, and middle-aged.

  Well, middle age in the cartel world, which meant early twenties. Took a miracle for a drug soldier to reach the ripe, old age of thirty.

  His sights set on seeing fifty, Cash launched into his defense. Oh, and Shorty’s as well. “Where are we going?”

  “We are not all going to the same place,” Tatt Face said.

  “Let me rephrase my question. Where are you going?”

  “Veracruz.”

  “And me?”

  Tatt Face smiled, flashing a mouthful of gold teeth. “Remains to be seen.”

  Cash could take remains to be seen two ways. One bad, the other worse. Might indicate that his destination was up in the air. Alternatively, it could mean that regardless of his fate, at least the authorities would find his remains.

  In one piece or many.

  Shorty jacked his sobbing to a migraine-inducing level, reminding Cash there was another life on the line.

  “And him.” Cash pointed to Shorty. “Where’s he going?”

  “For a swim.”

  Three goons with switchblades pounced on Shorty. They slashed the tape binding him to the seat, sticking him a few times for good measure. Their stabbing was surgical in its precision. The superficial cuts missed major bleeders.

  Shorty fought like crazy, but the trio beat and kicked him senseless. Screams muffled through the gag gave way to pleas, all the more piteous for being unintelligible.

  They dragged Shorty to a backroom and closed the door behind them. The plane dived toward the water before leveling off low enough to see the white caps of the waves below.

  The plane turned as silent as a tomb. Cash assumed the traitor had bled out until a racket in the back erupted. Shorty’s screams became full-throated and frantic. The door failed to filter any of the fear from his voice.

  A roar like a tornado from the backroom drowned out the screams. The plane shuddered.

  “Look out the window,” Tatt Face said.

  The jet banked hard right. Cash caught sight of Shorty, as he was flushed from the bowels of the beast. He tracked Shorty to splash down in the Gulf of Mexico.

  That’s what Cash thought he saw, anyway. It happened so fast that he couldn’t swear to what had been tossed out like trash. For all he knew, it could’ve been waste from the shitter. Except the roar had died, along with the screaming and begging, lending weight to his first instinct.

  Shorty now slept with the fishes. Remains, not to be seen.

  The LeBron jersey also supported the leading theory on Shorty’s fate. When the takeout team returned from the backroom, the last in line tossed the blood-soaked jersey to Cash. Like passing a baton. A silent way to say, “You’re next, sucker.”

  Cash held up the jersey. “It won’t fit.”

  “No matter,” Tatt Face said.

  “You guys had better hope that La Tigra doesn’t have second thoughts about what you just did to her lieutenant,” Cash said.

  Tatt Face did a double take. “La Tigra! Who gives a flying fuck what that puta thinks? Somos Los Lobos.”

  ***

  Cash never made it to Veracruz.

  Two hours out of Dallas, the plane dipped under the cloud cover. Cash stared out the window. Nothing but water below.

  Two toughs grabbed him by the arms and yanked him to his feet. They dragged him toward the back, for Cash’s turn on the diving board.

  He wouldn’t go down without a fight. He elbowed one thug in the face, managed to kick the other in the groin. A reinforcement with a baseball bat took a full swing and connected with Cash’s gut.

  He fell to his knees, puked pure scotch, and fought for breath. The slugger dragged Cash by the hair and dumped him in the seat next to Tatt Face.

  Tatt Face handed him a sat phone. “You have a call.”

  Cash held the phone to his ear. He picked up the sound of steady breathing and recognized the jazz classic in the background. Dave Brubeck’s “Take Five.”

  Excellent advice, which Cash had given to countless clients.

  “Who is this?” Cash wheezed.

  The music died. “The dude who will decide where you get off.” The tone marked the speaker as an alpha, accustomed to giving orders. “And how.”

  A new instrumental played in the background, this one also familiar to Cash. “The Beautiful Maria of My Soul.”

  “Give the phone back to Carlos.”

  Cash handed the phone to Tatt Face, who listened for a few seconds before placing it on a tray table and pressing the speaker button. “Carlos, tell Mister McCahill his options.”

  “You have only two.” Carlos sounded matter of fact, almost bored. “You tell us where La Tigra is, and we let you walk off the plane in Veracruz and catch the next flight back to the States.”

  Cash didn’t need to hear the second scenario to know what it was.

  Carlos continued anyway. “Or you do not tell us where she is, and you join Shorty for a swim with the sharks.”

  Cash took no pleasure in having guessed what was behind door number two. “What if I don’t know where La Tigra is?”

  Tatt Face snickered. “That is what Shorty said and the option he took.”

  “It’s not really optional,” Cash said, “if I don’t know.”

  “If that is the case,” Alpha said, “we have no reason to keep you alive.”

  Cash couldn’t argue with the logic and figured he had about thirty seconds to come up with a counter, or at least a stall. That’s how long it would take to drag him to the rear and load him into the chute.

  Money was off the table. How do you bribe a cartel that burns more in an hour than he’d earn in a lifetime?

  So Cash went with a pitch that had clicked before. “If you take over La Tigra’s territory—”

  Alpha cut him off. “When we take over her territory.”

  Copy that.

  “When you do, you’ll need a good lawyer in Texas. You’re talking to the best. What say I give you a friends-and-family discount on my fees to handle your legal problems north of the border?”

  “To save your skin a year ago,” Alpha said, “you promised La Tigra that you would work for free.”

  Cash sighed. The bottom line was about to take another hit. Then again, better to drown in debt than in the Gulf of Mexico. “Okay, you can have the same sweetheart deal.”

  The longest silence of Cash’s life robbed years from it.

  “I don’t think so,” Alpha said. “Your services did not work out so well for La Tigra.”

  A shorter silence this time, but it still shaved what little remained of Cash’s life. “Mister McCahill, enjoy your swim.”

  The toughs grabbed Cash by the arms and legs and dragged him toward the back. For every wild punch or kick by Cash, the thugs landed three or four. Cash’s blows became feebler. He flirted with a blackout.

  They pulled him into the backroom. Though his limbs were limp, his mouth still worked. As the door was closing, he shouted, “You haven’t heard my best and final offer.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  The thugs tossed Cash from the jet.

  Fortunately, he fell only ten feet onto a private landing strip, where the Airbus had made a pit stop. His wrists and knees absorbed the brunt of the fall. He kissed the baked, brown earth.

  It didn’t kiss back.

  He rolled onto his back and choked on the dust kicked up by the departure of the plane. The sun wrung tears from his eyes. Or that’s how he explained the burst of waterworks to himself.

  Threatened with a watery grave on the flight, he had kept his cool, more or less. In the solitude of a barren stretch of desert, he could let go, and he did. Took only a couple of minutes to flush the tears from his syste
m and scream himself hoarse.

  He struggled to his feet. Los Lobos had kept his watch, cell phone, and wallet, leaving him a passport, less than a hundred dollars in cash, a Topo Chico, and no clue of his location.

  Well, one clue. He was smack dab in the middle of nowhere and for damn sure closer to hell than heaven. Doomed to wander across a wasteland that might prove to be the boondocks of west Texas or northern Mexico, as if there was a difference.

  Given the flight plan and his time in the air, he bet on the latter.

  He walked an hour or so along a dirt road, failing to flag down the first three vehicles to pass by. All three had Mexico license plates, confirming his belief of being south of the border.

  As dusk descended, an old man in a pickup pulled alongside Cash and stopped. The deep creases in the driver’s face almost swallowed his eyes. His leathery skin blended into the landscape. While he looked to be in his seventies, Cash subtracted a decade, based on the toll of a hardscrabble life.

  “Dónde estamos?” Cash said.

  “Coahuila.” Phlegm crackled the old man’s voice.

  “A dónde vas?”

  “Monterrey.”

  “Puedo ir contigo?”

  The driver nodded toward the pickup bed, a silent invitation to join the other passengers. Cash thanked the driver and climbed aboard, sharing the space with a tied goat and two caged chickens. Given a choice of travel companions, he’d pick critters over cartel killers every time.

  Cash hopped off in the first city of any size, Saltillo, and boarded a bus for a ten-hour trip to Dallas. Buying a one-way ticket, bottled water, and a day-old cheese sandwich left him with $3.67.

  ***

  Dead tired, he made Dallas at 10:00 a.m. and went straight to the office. He expected to find it dark but walked into a hive of activity. Tina was marking trial exhibits at the reception desk. Wearing a tank top that showcased her latest pair of enhancements, she barely glanced at him before returning to her task.

  “You look like shit,” she said.

  He couldn’t argue with that. Much as he needed a shave, shower, and sleep, he didn’t have the luxury, not given the looming deadlines imposed by courts and cartels.