Finally the guard station’s window slid open and the guard began to check identification and let cars into the visitor parking lot.
* * *
They were told at the door only one of them could meet with James. They walked into a waiting room. The room was lined with chairs, six of them occupied by those who’d entered before them. They talked and decided that Pilar should be the one to speak with James. She was closer to him than anybody, which meant they’d probably get more out of him if she went in.
That was important.
* * *
James was lying on his cot, staring at the ceiling and thinking about his fate, when he heard footsteps coming toward him. Two sets of footsteps, which grew louder as they drew near. They stopped in front of his cell. His cell door unlatched. He sat up and looked. Two guards looked back. They wore crisp uniforms, pepper spray and saps and handcuffs tucked into their belts, their faces expressionless.
One of them said, “You have a visitor.”
James got to his feet and walked out of his cell. Trudged down the corridor, one guard in front of him and the other behind. They stopped at five other cells on the block, collected five other prisoners. Wended through cinder block–walled corridors, left and right, right and left, until they reached the visiting room.
The prisoners were led through a door.
The room was about eighty feet wide and thirty feet deep, no windows, guards in each corner and at the midpoint on each wall. The room itself was filled with small round tables, two chairs at each of them. The tables were wood, with graffiti scratched into them.
James scanned the faces of the people sitting in the chairs and saw Pilar. She was hunch-shouldered, fingers laced together in front of her, looking down at nothing in particular. Her eyes had a faraway look, short black hair hanging down to her jawline, dark skin flawless. Her brown eyes, even now, flickered with the light of whatever was sparking in her mind. She was wearing blue eye shadow. Lips the color of a cabernet sauvignon and pursed slightly. She was wearing a faded gray scoop-neck T-shirt that said BROOKLYN.
He hadn’t known who he was going to find here, but despite the fact he didn’t want Pilar to see him in jail—in a jumpsuit, face needing to be shaved, eyes tired—he was glad it was her. It might be the last time they had a chance to talk. It was Monday. If everything went how it had been going, and he still had no idea what might change his circumstances, he’d be dead by Wednesday. Nothing of a legal nature could be accomplished by then, and after thinking about it long and hard, he wasn’t sure much of an illegal nature could be accomplished by then either.
He walked to the table at which Pilar was sitting. She looked up as he neared, saw him, and smiled. She stood up and hugged him, her arms wrapped tight around his middle.
A guard shouted at them in Spanish to separate, no hugging, but James continued to hold her for a moment anyway. Inhaled her scent, a combination of soap, lotion, deodorant, and clean sweat. Felt her back warm under his palms. Felt her hair against his cheek. He wished he could fall asleep holding her, his face in her neck. He wished he could feel the rhythm of her slow breathing, his palm on her breast while he dreamed.
Finally he let her go and they sat down across from one another.
“I’m glad you came.” He reached across the table and took her hand in his. Waited for one of the guards to say something, but none of them did.
“I had to see you. You look a little ragged.”
“I feel a little ragged. I’m sorry I left the way I did.”
“I understand.”
“I don’t know that you do under—”
“You weren’t going to the funeral, you were coming to Mexico. Whatever you intended to do here, you intended to do alone. Given that you’re in jail, I can assume you were trying to protect me. You were wrong and stupid to do whatever you did, and I wish you hadn’t done it, but I think your heart was in the right place.”
“I guess you do understand.”
“I understand that part.”
“What don’t you understand?”
“Everything else. What the hell were you doing here, James?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Did it have something to do with your sister?”
“Yes.”
“I do want to know. I liked Layla. She’s the only person in your family I’ve met.”
Layla had come to visit them in North Carolina three years earlier, stayed with them for a week. While James spent his days at Camp Lejeune, Pilar and Layla had Mario Kart battles, went shopping, ate several lunches, and talked about everything. They’d become friends, and through that friendship, Pilar told James, she’d begun to understand him better.
James knew what appealed to Pilar about her: she was smart and funny and seemed not to give a fuck, which made her real. So many people pretended to be something else (James himself did this). Layla let it all hang out, emotions and opinions alike. She’d been mercurial, possibly a bit unstable, but somehow she’d made even that aspect of her personality charming.
“I know. She liked you too. She told me I should marry you.”
Pilar held up her left hand and wiggled her fingers. “You didn’t listen to her.”
“If I get out of this, I plan to.” He paused a moment in thought. “If you let me.”
“I won’t be able to help you get out of this if you don’t tell me what you were doing here, if you don’t tell me what happened.”
“You won’t be able to help me anyway.”
“Did you have cocaine in your trunk?”
“No.”
“So it was planted?”
“Yes. But can we talk about something else?”
“No. It’s the most important thing happening in your life. Which means it’s the most important thing happening in my life. You might think you’re protecting me from this, but you’re not. If something’s happening to you, it affects me, whether you like it or not. I won’t put my head in the sand about this. Tell me what’s going on, James. Were the guns yours?”
James thought about it for a long time, thought about how much he should tell her. It was true he wanted to protect her from the situation, but what she’d said was also true. There was no way to do that, no way to keep her outside of it. So he’d tell her what had happened and why—and he’d tell her what was happening now.
“Yes,” he said, “the guns were mine. Do you remember when I mentioned a man named Alejandro Rocha?”
“I do,” she said.
He told her everything.
* * *
Coop was sitting in the waiting room between Bogart and Normal when Pilar stepped through the door. She looked like she was in shock, face expressionless but eyes wide and staring. She walked jerkily, as if she were a wind-up toy.
Coop got to his feet, stepped toward her, and said, “What happened?”
She blinked, raised her head to look at him. “What?”
“What happened?”
“Let’s get out of here,” she said. “I need a drink.”
11
Gael Morales walked up the steps that led to the second floor and made his way down a long hallway, feet thudding against the polished hardwood floor. He reached the fourth door on the left, tapped it with his knuckles, and waited. After a short time the doorknob rattled, turned, and was pulled open from the other side. Danielle Preston, a pretty Midwestern woman in her mid-twenties, stood facing him. She wore sweatpants, the fabric visibly thin, and a fitted Armani Exchange T-shirt. She smiled when she saw him and stepped to the left, welcoming him inside with her body language if not her words.
“Hey, Gael, what’s up?”
He looked past her a moment to the bedroom, to the posters thumbtacked on the white walls, to the unmade queen-size bed, to the shoes piled next to it, to the pair of 501s thrown over a desk chair, to the flat-screen television sitting on the dresser, the volume low, the screen flashing frames from a Roman Polanski film.
“The
Tenant?”
“It’s my third favorite movie.”
“What are the first two?”
“Brazil and There Will Be Blood. Daniel Day-Lewis makes me tingly.”
“So you like happy movies, then.”
Dani laughed. It lit up her eyes and made her more than pretty, made her beautiful, but only a moment after it began the laughter stopped and the light died. “I was gonna go to film school before I got involved in all this.” She swept her right hand out, like a real estate agent displaying the room to a prospective buyer, but she didn’t mean the room.
“You’re young. You could still go to film school.”
“In eleven years I could also run for president, but I don’t think it’s gonna happen.”
“I’m not sure those two things are equivalent.”
“From where I’m standing they are. But you didn’t come here to talk about my discarded ambitions. Come in if you want.”
Gael hesitated a moment, then stepped into Dani’s bedroom. She closed the door behind him. It latched with a metal click. He had yet to say anything to her but he still felt vulnerable. What he intended to do here was dangerous, bordering on stupid, and for a moment he thought about leaving the situation as it was.
He liked Dani, but she was a junkie, and junkies couldn’t be trusted. That old saying was true: an alcoholic will steal your wallet and feel guilty about it; a junkie will steal your wallet and help you look for it. He glanced toward the television, watched as Trelkovsky pulled a tooth from a hole in his apartment’s wall.
Dani walked to the unmade bed and sat down.
After a moment he said, “I want to talk to you about something.”
“I assumed as much.”
“I know you’re not happy with this life.”
“I’m paid well for an easy, if dangerous, job. I have no complaints. What I’m not happy with is myself. I never thought this was who I’d be.” She laughed through her nose, but there was no humor in it. “I used to have dreams.”
“What if I told you, you don’t have to be who you’ve become?”
“I—I don’t know. Depends on what you mean by that.”
Gael exhaled in a sigh. Never before during an undercover operation had he revealed himself as a DEA agent. He’d been found out once, and that had almost ended in his getting killed with the claw end of a hammer. His instinct for self-preservation made him resist giving himself up even now, but if he hoped to make this case, he thought it necessary. The paperwork might lead somewhere—he hoped like hell it did—but he couldn’t count on that alone. He needed more, and in order to get it, he’d have to talk.
It was best, he thought, if he just came out with it.
He built himself up, readied himself, and blurted:
“I’m an undercover DEA agent.”
She laughed. “Yeah, okay, Gael. I’m the financial director of the Lollipop Guild.”
He turned and looked at her, his expression deadpan. “Dani, I’m an undercover DEA agent.”
Something about his expression, or the tone of his voice, made her stop laughing at once. Her mouth snapped shut, teeth clacking. She looked at him in silence for a long time.
“Is this some kind of test Alejandro set up?”
“No. I don’t work for Alejandro. Not really.”
“You’re DEA?”
“I am.”
“Don’t fuck with me, Gael. I’m serious.”
“So am I.”
“Were you the one talking to Layla?”
“Nobody from the DEA was talking with Layla.”
“Yes, they were.”
“Who?”
“She didn’t say.”
“How do you know?”
“She told me. A few days before she died, she told me she’d been approached by the DEA, asked me what she should do.”
“What did you tell her?”
Dani was silent for a moment. Her eyes went dull as she turned her focus inward, thinking about what had happened. Finally she looked at him again, her focus external once more. “I was worried about her. She’d lost a lot of weight. She was depressed. Looked unhealthy. I told her she should talk to the DEA if they could get her out of here. But that was a mistake. I’d take it back if I could. She’d be alive if she hadn’t agreed to meet with them.”
“Layla died of an overdose.”
“How?”
“What do you mean?”
“How did she die of an overdose, Gael? How could she?”
“She ran away, found a connection in El Paso, and she overdosed.”
“She didn’t run away.”
“What do you mean, she didn’t run away?”
“She left to meet with her man from the DEA and never came back. If she’d been running, she would have taken her personal belongings and some clothes, but until Alejandro had it cleaned out, her room looked like she was still living there.”
“She didn’t want to be weighed down. She wanted to get away.”
“We’re not prisoners here, Gael. I could pack my bags and walk out tomorrow. Alejandro would have Diego drive me stateside and drop me off at a bus station. Probably give me a couple hundred bucks for the journey.”
“Why don’t you?”
“You know why. Same reason Layla didn’t.”
She was right. Rocha’s girls weren’t in prison. They could do what they liked. Or would have been able to if they weren’t leashed by drugs. If Layla had run, she wouldn’t have had any reason to leave behind everything she owned. Gael should have realized that on his own, should have sensed that something wasn’t right about the way Layla died.
Now he had revealed himself, and because of Layla’s death, Dani would almost certainly refuse to speak to him. But that wasn’t even the most important issue.
There were two possibilities for the man who’d approached Layla. Either he was someone who worked for Rocha testing loyalties or he was an actual DEA agent—and also working for Rocha by testing loyalties.
Both situations were bad, but the latter might be devastating for both the case and for him, because if there was interference from someone inside the DEA, that interference would be coming from someone with access to all sorts of inside knowledge.
But he could think about the consequences of that later. He pushed those thoughts to the back of his mind and looked at Dani. “I don’t know who Layla talked to,” he said, “but it wasn’t me. I’ll have to find out who it was, and I will find out, but right now I want to talk to you about Rocha and his cartel—if you’re willing.”
“Talking got Layla killed.”
“Talking to someone on Rocha’s payroll got her killed.”
“You’re on his payroll.”
“I’m undercover.”
“I know you say it wasn’t, but as far as I know it might have been you she talked to. If I talk to you, I could end up dead too.”
“Look at me, Dani,” Gael said. She looked him in the eyes. “I’m exactly what I say I am. If Layla was your friend—and since she confided in you, I assume she was—you must want some kind of justice for her. Rocha killed her, or someone who works for him did, and the only way we can get justice, the only way we can take Rocha down, is if you talk to me. I know, despite what I say, that you’ll be taking a risk. But I’m taking a risk too. If you tell Rocha what I’ve told you, he’ll kill me, and he won’t do it with an overdose. He’ll shoot me in the head and bury me in the desert. My body will never be found. My wife, who’s not involved in any of this shit, will never know what happened to me. So you need to understand that we’re in the same situation. You might not be certain you can trust me, but I’m not certain I can trust you either. I’m talking to you because I believe that I can. If you believe you can trust me too, I urge you to talk. If you do, the information you provide might prove invaluable even if you don’t testify when we put our case together. But if you do testify, the DEA will put you through rehab. We’ll give you a new identity and set you up in a new life
. You’ll be able to go to film school—or do whatever else you want to do. I know you want to get out of this life. Talking to me can be your way out.”
Gael stopped his speech, but continued to look Dani in the eyes, and as he did, as he watched her face and waited for her response, he wondered how similar his pitch was to the one that Layla had heard, the one that got her killed.
Dani didn’t respond for a long time. She stared back at him for a moment, then dropped her head, looking down at her hands. She popped her knuckles, one by one. After what felt to Gael like a long time, she finally spoke:
“Okay—what do you want to know?”
* * *
She told him everything she knew. Told him about the tunnel leading from the church to a feed shed on an ostrich farm across the border. Told him about heroin deliveries to Chicago, Los Angeles, and New York. Told him the names of the men she’d delivered to and to whom she’d probably deliver again.
She told him these things and more.
But when she was done, she said, “You use that information how you want, use it to nail Rocha if you can, but I won’t testify.”
“If you don’t testify, we can’t protect you.”
“If I don’t testify, I won’t need you to. Build your case with what I’ve given you.”
Gael opened his mouth to say something, but before he could she shook her head. “Don’t insult me, Gael; don’t talk to me like I’m stupid. I like you and I wanna keep liking you.”
“Okay,” he said.
He stepped out of the room.
12
Diego Blanco knocked on Alejandro’s bedroom door.
“Come in.”
He pushed open the door and found Alejandro standing naked by the bed, a pair of boxer briefs gripped in his fist. He’d just showered after a swim and was getting dressed for an afternoon meeting, and though usually Diego would go with him, he had a meeting of his own to get to. Alejandro glanced over at Diego and stepped into his underwear.
“What is it?”
“Just letting you know I’m heading to El Paso.”
Alejandro picked up a pair of pants from the bed and slipped into them, squeezed the button through the eye, and zipped up. He threaded a belt through the loops. “Let me know how it goes.”
The Breakout Page 11
