“It’s not his case.”
Billingham shrugged. “Maybe he’s taken an interest.”
“He could be putting Gael’s life in danger, sir.”
“We can’t go after a DEA agent with a single recorded conversation, Rankin, especially if we don’t know the motives behind that conversation.”
“Best scenario, he’s working a case he’s not authorized to work and endangering the whole operation. I don’t want to sit on this and—”
“You’re not sitting on anything. You’ve told me. If you really think he’s crooked, stay on him, try to get something we can use. That’s the end of our conversation on that matter. Do you have anything else?”
“No, sir.”
* * *
George flipped through the paperwork they’d gathered so far. The phone records looked like a dead end unless they happened to arrest people with corresponding cells in their pockets. They’d managed to connect several numbers to local businesses, but George would bet green money that those calls were legitimate. Otherwise Rocha talked to people using burners or to people with cell phones he paid for. The bank account information was a different story. The wire transfers were going from accounts in Alejandro Rocha’s name into an account belonging to a man named Mulligan Shoibli. The one record they had was for a transfer in the amount of five hundred thousand dollars. The DEA had subpoenaed records from both banks, but they were in the Cayman Islands, which meant they’d never get them.
For two hours, George sat at his desk and with both his computer and telephone, tried to build a man out of fog. But Mulligan Shoibli never solidified, never took on shape or form. No fingerprints in any database. No address other than that bar in Chicago where no one knew him. No pictures on file. No Facebook page. No LinkedIn account. Not even an abandoned Myspace page or a comment on a three-year-old New York Times article. The man was a ghost.
There was something about Chicago floating just under the surface of his consciousness, but George didn’t know what it was, and didn’t know if it would be useful when it finally breached the surface of his mind. Such unconscious connections were useless almost as often as they were useful. You looked for patterns and sometimes saw them where they either didn’t exist or weren’t relevant.
But still: Chicago. He let it lay there below the surface and hoped it floated up at some point, like a bloated corpse.
George moved on to James Murphy and his sister Layla, working under the assumption that they shared a last name. Layla Murphy didn’t have an arrest record, but her death had been page-nine news in Austin, Texas, two days after her body was discovered.
EL PASO—Layla Murphy, daughter of well-known local car dealer Brian Murphy and sister of Marine Corps Sergeant James Murphy, recipient of the Silver Star Medal for distinguished service in Afghanistan, was found dead Friday morning of an apparent drug overdose. Two boys, whose names have been withheld by police due to their status as minors, found her body while walking to school in northeast El Paso.
An autopsy revealed that Ms. Murphy had died of “fatal respiratory depression” due to heroin use. El Paso Police Department spokesperson Michael Samonek said in a statement yesterday that there was “no reason to suspect foul play.” Ms. Murphy’s family were aware that she had a drug problem and had attempted to convince her to enter a recovery program.
Barbara Allan-Murphy, the decedent’s mother, asks that those considering cards or flowers instead send a small donation to the Austin Recovery Drug and Alcohol Treatment Center.
There was more on James Murphy, who’d been an offensive guard for the Aggies up until six years ago. He’d declined to enter the draft when he became eligible and instead joined the Marine Corps as a private after graduation. There was a big write-up about this decision, as many thought he might be a third- or fourth-round pick. Local man turns his back on millions in order to serve his country. Even though a middling offensive guard with fourth-round prospects probably wasn’t turning his back on millions, there was something admirable about walking away from what might have been a four hundred thousand dollar salary in order to pick up a weapon and maybe get yourself killed in a desert country for fourteen hundred bucks a month. George also found a piece from two years ago about Murphy being awarded the Silver Star Medal. What exactly he’d done was kept vague, but Silver Stars weren’t Chiclets; they didn’t hand them out to just anybody.
Finally, an item about James Murphy being arrested in La Paz, Mexico, last Wednesday. A young man with NFL prospects who chose duty over cash wasn’t the kind of person to end up arrested with five kilograms of cocaine, a pistol, and a sniper rifle in his car. Especially not when he’d only been back in the states for a month. He wasn’t the kind of person to end up arrested for anything, except maybe an on-leave DUI, a charge that would probably never be filed.
The arrest stunk.
Not that he hadn’t been up to something. According to the news item, a rifle of the type found by La Paz police in James Murphy’s car had gone missing from Fort Bliss, and though they didn’t have that weapon now to match serial numbers, chances were good that when they did, it would turn out Murphy had taken the thing. Though he didn’t like to admit it, this made George admire the guy. It meant James Murphy had gone to Mexico to find justice for his sister. He had either known Layla was murdered—as yesterday’s conversation between Diego Blanco and Francis Waters had made clear—or he’d blamed Alejandro Rocha for her overdose. Either way, he’d been acting out of love.
If La Paz police had nailed James Murphy for the guns alone, George might have bought the arrest as legitimate. Might have thought Murphy was the victim of nothing more than bad luck. Wrong place, wrong time. That kind of deal. But he didn’t believe the drugs. His guess was that Rocha’s men had seen James Murphy watching his estate and Rocha decided to have him locked up until he knew what his motives were. He owned the police force. It would have taken nothing more than a phone call to make it happen.
What George needed to know now was how involved Layla had been in Rocha’s operation, how much James Murphy knew about it, and if he knew a significant amount, whether he’d be willing to testify. About the last question he had some doubt. James Murphy, based on the evidence at hand, wanted Rocha buried, and he’d be hard to bury if he was locked away in prison. He might refuse to testify to keep Rocha out of jail and therefore accessible by bullet. George could understand this, part of him would even approve of the murder, but he was a man of the law, which meant he couldn’t allow it.
While George worked, while he thought about the situation, he also listened to Francis Waters through their shared cubicle wall. Mostly he was quiet. There were a few telephone conversations early on, two business calls and one personal, the latter being an argument with his third wife, Lydia. For an hour after that, George heard only the tapping of fingers on a keyboard.
George had stopped paying attention, concentrating on his work, when Francis Waters got a call on his cell phone.
“Yeah,” he said, answering the call. This one word was followed by a long silence. When Francis Waters finally spoke again, he said, “I’m on my way.” He got to his feet, grabbed his suit coat from the back of his chair, shrugged into it, and strode across the gray carpet to the door.
George hesitated only a moment, locked his computer, and pushed away from the desk. He didn’t know where Francis Waters was going, but he intended to follow him there.
15
Coop drove his rented Toyota toward the jail, the desert sun floating just over the eastern horizon behind him, its light shining into the rear window and bouncing off the mirrors. Normal sat in the passenger seat, looking out at the desert, eating jalapeño pork rinds. He had a plastic grocery bag filled with snacks sitting on the floorboard by his feet. The sound of his chewing was already irritating Coop and they’d only left the convenience store five minutes ago.
“How long you think we’re gonna have to sit out here?”
“Until we get the info
rmation we need.”
“How long you think that’ll be?”
“I don’t know, Normal. If I knew enough to tell you that, we wouldn’t need to come out here in the first place.”
As they approached a road sign telling them the jail was five kilometers away, Normal rolled his window down, hawked up a loogie, and spat. Coop heard the mucus thwack against the sign. Normal said, “Got it,” put another pork rind into his mouth, and rolled up the window.
They continued west, driving into the wavering distance. As the road curved around the low crescent of brown hills that surrounded the jail, the buildings, fences, and guard towers came into view, gray and forbidding. But that might have been Coop’s mind. He knew what they were planning, knew the dangers involved, which meant he knew the likelihood of something going wrong was greater than the likelihood of things going well.
He cut the car right, turning the wheel hand over hand, leaving the asphalt for the bumpy desert sands. Weaved his way around any rocks or boulders he saw, but let the car rumble over desert shrubbery, listening to the push-broom sweep they made as they brushed against the vehicle’s undercarriage.
Normal squinted toward the hills and when Coop brought the car to a stop, he said, “I’m gonna go for a walk.”
“Reconnoiter?”
“Yeah. I also need to piss.”
“All right. I’ll do my thing here.”
Normal shoved his pork rinds into the grocery bag, pushed open the passenger door, and stepped out into the sun. He slammed the door shut. Coop watched him as he walked toward the hills, then turned his attention to the jail. The yard was quiet, empty of people, the guard towers uninhabited hunting blinds, but already friends and relatives of the imprisoned were arriving and parking outside the fences, walking to the yard and looking in, waiting to see those inside.
The presence of vehicles besides theirs, and of people besides them, would make their own presence less noticeable, less worrisome, which was a good thing. If theirs was the only vehicle out here it would be suspicious, so Coop was glad for their presence, but he was also concerned. If there were too many cars here tomorrow, they might be an issue, might stand as a wall between James and escape.
Unfortunately, there was nothing to be done about it. The situation would be what it would be. They’d have to assess, act in the moment, and hope things turned out okay.
Given their current plan, Coop figured they had maybe a 50 percent chance of success, which wasn’t terrible. But he didn’t want to think about the consequences of failure. Neither for James nor for the rest of them.
He picked up a bottle of Pepsi from his cup holder, unscrewed the cap, and took a swallow. He squinted toward the empty jailhouse yard.
* * *
Normal walked along the base of the hills, looking back and forth between those great mounds of dirt and the jailhouse yard, gauging distance and angle. He squinted toward the sun and tried to envision its movement throughout the day. Its arc across the blue. If they were going to do anything from this side of the jail, it’d be best to do it before the sun reached its apex, with it behind them, blinding the guards in their towers. Anything after three o’clock in the afternoon and shooters on the hill would be looking into the sun, which—while also being dangerous—would make them damn near useless. Their scopes would reflect the sun for the towered guards, making targets of them.
It should be done before noon, if at all possible.
He stopped at a desert shrub and unzipped his fly. Pissed into the sand behind it, trying to write his name, but he only managed NORM before he ran out of liquid. He continued walking, looking between the jail and the hills.
When he reached a hill he liked he began hiking his way up, kicking sand even as it slid out from under his Emericas, using rocks as footholds whenever possible.
There were two large boulders in the side of the hill near its crest and he squatted behind each of them to be sure they’d work. The view was good from each. They didn’t offer ideal protection, but this hill was almost a thousand yards from any of the guard towers and he doubted the guys who manned them would be able to make thousand-yard shots on anything even approaching a regular basis. They weren’t sharpshooters; they were used to watching inmates within a hundred-yard radius and the last time they’d fired their weapons was almost certainly on the range. But sometimes it didn’t matter who was squeezing the trigger; the more bullets you fired in a general direction, the better your chances of getting lucky once, and a guard getting lucky meant either Bogart or Normal getting dead.
Still, these were the best positions available, and they’d probably suffice. Getting back down would be the real danger—at least it would be if they descended the front of the hill. They wouldn’t be exposed for long, but if someone was shooting at them, it would feel like an eternity. He walked to the top of the hill and looked down the backside.
After a moment’s consideration, he decided it wouldn’t work. Things needed to happen fast if they expected to get away. Going down the back of the hill would eat up a lot of time. The descent itself wouldn’t be much slower. It was the pickup that concerned him. Their position would be inconvenient, the getaway vehicle having to hook around the hills to reach them, adding at least a quarter mile to the distance it must travel, and the time that took might be the difference between a clean getaway and being caught.
They needed to get in and out in a hurry.
He and Bogart would just have to risk going down the front of the hill and hope that the sun blinded the motherfuckers who might otherwise kill them.
* * *
For the next several hours, Coop and Normal sat in the rented Toyota and watched the jail. Coop with a notepad resting on his leg and a ballpoint pen in hand, making note of when the guards went to the towers, how many guards were stationed in the yard, when prisoners were let out, and how many at a time.
Though the car was parked some distance from the jail, he thought he saw James standing near the fences at one point, around eleven o’clock, talking to another man, a dark-skinned Hispanic guy maybe six inches shorter than James himself.
The sun moved across the sky.
Wispy clouds like masses of cotton balls drifted through the blue.
Normal talked and pulled snacks from the grocery bag and pissed two more times outside the car. It was like being on a road trip with a child.
But finally the time came when Coop believed they’d gathered as much information as they could. He put down his notepad and his pen. He grabbed the shifter, thumbed the button, and shoved the car into gear. He pulled his foot off the brake pedal and pressed it against the gas. The tires spun, kicking up dirt, and they turned toward the road.
“Thank God,” Normal said.
“I hope Bogart and Pilar have good news for us when we get back to the hotel.”
“They’d better,” Normal said, “or James is dead for sure.”
16
James was sitting on his cot with shoulders slumped, staring at the wall opposite and thinking about how there was no way out of this, when two guards walked down the corridor to his cell, their footfalls echoing against the cinder block walls, and told him to stand up, cabrón. He got to his feet. One of the guards unlocked his cell door and told him to step out. He did, and they marched him through the corridors. They didn’t tell him what this was about and he didn’t ask. He already knew.
After five minutes—being led through the labyrinth like a rat—he arrived at a door. One of the guards opened the door. The other guard pushed him through, then shut and locked it behind him.
Rocha was sitting on a metal folding chair at a steel table. The corner of his mouth was turned up in a smirk. His eyes sparkled.
“Have a seat.”
“I’d prefer to stand.”
“Please sit.”
“Only because you asked so nicely.” James sat down across from Rocha. He laced his fingers together and rested his hands on the table. The steel was cool against his sk
in.
“I’m beginning to find our conversations boring, Mr. Murphy.”
“Beginning to? I guess your threshold for boredom is higher than mine.”
“Then time in jail must be torture.”
“Not really. You bore me, solitude I can live with.”
“You must be glad this is our last conversation.”
“I wish that were true.”
“I assure you it is—unless you intend to spend the afterlife haunting me.”
“I’m not dying tomorrow.”
“Denial never did anyone any good, Mr. Murphy. Tell you what.” Rocha reached under his seersucker sport coat and removed a revolver. He held it up a moment before resting it on the table, keeping his fingers wrapped around it, index finger tapping the outside of the trigger guard. “There’s one thing you can do to avoid dying tomorrow.”
“Die today?”
“A possibility but not a requirement.”
Rocha lifted the revolver again, clicked out the cylinder, let six bullets fall into the palm of his left hand. He pocketed five of them, put one back into the cylinder, and spun it like a roulette wheel. Eventually it clicked to a stop.
He set it back down on the table and pushed it toward James.
“I’ve done some research on you, Mr. Murphy.”
“Have you?”
Rocha nodded. “I know who you are and I know what you have against me. Your sister Layla was once in my employ but, sadly, overdosed a couple weeks ago. I can only assume that you blame me for this. If I were in your position, I might blame me too. You want the world to make sense. You want justice. I get it. But nobody’s to blame for your sister’s death but your sister. That might be a hard reality to face, but unless you do face it, you’ll end up dead.”
“You introduced her to this life, and it was this life that killed her.”
The Breakout Page 13
