by Tod Goldberg
This was wisdom I was well acquainted with and, as I explained to Father Eduardo Santiago, a strategy that would work well for us. All he had to do was wait, and Junior would trip up and we’d be ready to pounce. In the meantime, we’d put into place all of the nets that would ensnare his fall.
It took three days of waiting. Three days of watching Junior’s every movement in his office. Three days of listening to his every phone call. Three days of reading his e-mails.
And three days of me actually going into an office every day, which was far more taxing than I could have ever imagined. Each morning, I picked up Eduardo from my mother’s and drove him to his office, where he conducted his business as usual. This meant keeping all of his appointments, which typically started at eight A.M. (which automatically excluded Sam from duty).
Father Eduardo taped his part for the community news program on Thursday morning, spent Thursday afternoon having lunch with two city councilmen who wanted his opinion on a new land deal that would give jobs to inner-city kids and on Thursday night, it was a charity dinner where he served as the MC. And then there was the actual managing of the day-to-day business of Honrado and the business of being a priest: the café, the auto shop, the job placement services, the people who need not just a word with you, but a lifetime with you.
And then it was Friday.
For three days, Father Eduardo conducted this business with me standing very near to him.
“He is writing a story on me for a magazine in Nevada,” he told the news program people and the charity organizers who noticed my presence.
“He is here to oversee the architectural development of our new buildings,” he told the Honrado employees who noticed me in his office day and night.
“He is here to protect me,” he told himself and, when Leticia called Fiona, it’s what I told her to repeat. It was Saturday morning and Father Eduardo was at my loft, along with Sam and Fiona, while we piled through all our surveillance of Junior. Barry was busy upstairs snoring through the important discovery process, which was fine. There was plenty of incriminating evidence, none of which Barry needed to see or hear, since a lot of it mentioned how they were going to kill him as soon as they had the opportunity. My mother had been kind enough to offer him a few of her horse tranquilizers to help him calm his jitters, and now he was on hour number eleven of sleep. We’d wake him when we needed him, which would be soon, as we had to make our moves today.
Saturday was to be a big day: Barry and Sam would train Junior’s men on how to operate the printing press and utilize the money plate. Sam had no actual facility with this skill set, but sort of wanted to learn, and also happened to be pretty good about shooting people who needed to be shot ... even if he’d sworn to Father Eduardo that he’d only shoot them with a paintball gun. And that meant today would also be the day I had Junior’s men pull the job I wanted done at Harding Pharmaceutical, so that by Sunday, if everything worked according to plan, Father Eduardo might just have his day of worship.
But then Leticia called.
She’d been missing since Sam and I showed up to Honrado three days earlier, which meant she likely saw her boyfriend Killa and Junior arriving in one condition and leaving in a slightly different version, and knew that this might be her only opportunity to steal away with her son. But she could only go so far—a fact Fiona had predicted too well, so that when Leticia phoned her, she wasn’t all that surprised.
After she answered the call, Fi put her hand over the phone and whispered, “It’s Leticia.”
“She’ll want to talk to you,” I said to Father Eduardo. “You ready for that?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Let her know Father Eduardo wants to speak to her,” I said to Fiona. “And make sure she knows he’s not angry with her.”
Fi spoke with Leticia for just a few moments and explained to her what had probably grown to be obvious: it wasn’t an accident that they’d met up that afternoon earlier in the week, and that it was all part of a larger plan to disrupt a conspiracy she’d been unwittingly pressed into, one best explained by Father Eduardo. Fiona handed him the phone and he spoke with the girl as calmly as possible.
“They are here to protect me,” he said to Leticia. “They are here to protect you and your son. Whatever you might have heard that is the contrary is rumor and innuendo. They will protect my brother, too, if it comes to it.”
Father Eduardo looked at me when he said that. It wasn’t something I was entirely certain was possible, not because it was physically impossible, but because it might be morally and ethically impossible. I’d already hobbled him, which would likely preclude him from taking part in anything involving standing for a few weeks, effectively keeping off the production line for the money and out of the heist, too. The rest? That would have to be up to him.
But, in that particular moment, there wasn’t a lot of space for nuanced thought. I just nodded my assent.
“Pardon me,” Father Eduardo said to us, “but I need some privacy to continue this conversation. I’m going to continue this call outside.”
We waited for Father Eduardo to step outside before we continued our previous conversation—which was just how we were going to position Junior to fail.
“You think he’ll be able to keep it together?” Sam asked.
“Right now? Yes,” I said. “If we keep him out of the lines of fire, he’ll be fine. But when we turn this information over to the authorities, and they call Father Eduardo as a witness? Well, that will be up to him. But my feeling is that he’s led a dual life before. A little white lie here and there to the police will be fine.”
The bugging of Junior’s office, just over the course of three days, had provided all the information needed to get Junior put back in prison and people like Peter Prieto into prison for the first time. There were phone calls, all recorded, between Junior and Peter. There were e-mails between Junior and “clients” in other countries ensuring delivery of product as soon as production was resecured. There was video of all of this, too.
And Sam had gone back to the Ace after our first meeting with Junior and managed to pick up the two missing fingers, too. Physical evidence is always a bonus.
“What’s our move?” Fiona asked.
“Our first one is to get Junior’s people positioned,” I said. I put my cell phone on speaker and called Junior at his office. Just like every other office drone, he answered on the third ring.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Is that how you greet a business partner?”
“We are not partners,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Killa’s son is, would you?”
“Why would you ask me that?”
“Because he and his mother disappeared on the same day you showed up,” he said.
“Let’s just say,” I said, “that maybe I’m more careful than you are.”
There was silence on the other end of the line, but I could tell that Junior was trying to contain his anger. He wasn’t the kind of guy prone to long, contemplative silences.
“What do you want?” he said again.
“I need your guys,” I said. “And your cop.”
“When?”
“Tonight,” I said. “There’s a shipment leaving Harding Pharmaceutical at six P.M. that I’d like to own.”
This got Junior’s attention. “What is it?”
I decided being honest was the best policy. “About a thousand stop-smoking patches.”
“There a market for that?”
“There is in Bolivia,” I said, thinking that a quarter century in prison might have made Junior a little dim on the black markets and geography. Or where people still smoked.
“What’s my cut?”
“You don’t get a cut,” I said. “It’s the price of doing business at Honrado. We discussed this right before my friend choked you out with her whip.”
“Change of rules,” Junior said.
“You don’t make the rules,” I
said.
“You think I’m stupid? I spent some time looking into you, Mr. Solo,” he said. “You don’t exist.”
“And yet here I am, talking to you on the phone.”
“You think you’re the only person who can run a license plate?”
I looked at Sam. He was the man in charge of making sure I had plates on the Charger that couldn’t be traced back to anything prudent. It had been so long since we’d changed them that I had no idea whom or what they belonged to. I gave Sam a look that I hope conveyed this. He just shrugged.
“I trust that Officer Prieto can do all sorts of services for you,” I said. “But do you think I’m the type of person who just rolls up into the DMV and registers my ride? You better have your man dig deeper.”
Junior sighed. It was an odd sound. You never want to think of terribly menacing people feeling resigned. It ruins your idea of ultimate evil on all levels.
“We either start understanding each other on a better business level or one of us is going to die,” Junior said.
“Are you speaking euphemistically?”
“I’m speaking bullets to heads,” he said.
I laughed. It wasn’t a funny thing to be hearing, but it’s always nice to give psychopaths reason to believe you’re just as crazy as they are. “I like how you think, Junior,” I said. “Look, we can only both bleed this whale for so long and then we’ll have to fight for his oil and blubber once he’s dead; that’s what I’m hearing. So why don’t we do this. You send your guys and your cop over to Harding Pharmaceutical this evening, grab the truck, don’t kill anyone in the process, and in good faith, I’ll give you forty percent of my take.”
“Fifty percent.”
“What are you willing to give me to get fifty percent of a score you wouldn’t even know about without me?”
“You can keep the girl. What’s her name? Leticia. She’s yours. But my man wants his kid. That’s Latin Emperor property.”
Fiona was already angry, but this last demand got her ready to blow. So I did the only thing I could do. “Deal,” I said. “Why don’t you and me go to the job tonight, too. Make it a real gentlemen’s agreement, and that way I can make sure none of your boys goes crazy and caps someone and then we both lose.”
“When do we get the kid?”
“Sunday morning,” I said. “I’ve got buyers ready tonight. They’ll inspect the truck, see if it’s all kosher, we’ll get paid and we’ll make the trade in the morning at Honrado—that way no one goes gun crazy. No one gets cut. Father and son are together. We all go get some Jesus together, maybe. Make it real easy. And I’ve got one less crying kid to worry about. You ever listen to a kid cry for an entire night? And then there was the food he ate. You can have him, Junior. You can have him.”
Junior considered all of this. “Where do we meet tonight?”
I told him to meet me a few blocks from Harding at four forty-five. “The truck is scheduled to leave at six,” I said. “I want you to send Officer Prieto there to clear out the building well before then. Tell them there’s a bomb threat.”
“I don’t tell him what to do,” Junior said.
“You won’t. I will. He can tell them whatever he wants. Just get the people out. I don’t trust that your boys won’t stomp the shit out of someone just for kicks.”
“Then what?”
“You just make sure everyone’s out of the facility, and then have your boys take the truck from the loading dock. Your boys know how to steal cars, right?”
“I’ll find someone,” he said.
“Be good if they knew how to drive a truck,” I said. “You got any kind of program in the Latin Emperors that teaches manual-transmission driving?”
“Why don’t you just do this yourself?”
“Because I don’t trust that you wouldn’t have your officer Prieto arrest me. Or shoot me. And we’re a team, Junior. Remember?”
“Where do I tell them to take the truck?”
“Bring it to the back of Honrado,” I said. “Park it next to loading bay by the press. One of my people will be waiting. The truck doesn’t show up, you don’t get your money plate.”
“How much is this job worth to you?”
This I had no idea about, so I came up with a number that would make Junior interested. “Fifty g’s, easy. Maybe more. And this is real money. Not your photocopies.”
“Four forty-five,” he said and hung up.
Leaving the planning and execution of the job to Junior meant that I could keep my hands clean. But it also meant that there was a better chance Officer Prieto wouldn’t let anything go wrong.
Dealing with Fiona would be enough for me to handle.
“Michael,” Fiona said, “what are you thinking? You can’t give them Leticia’s son!”
“I’m not going to,” I said. “But we just got him on tape agreeing to buy a child. Well, actually, he’s trading a child. Either way, it’s a crime.”
“Oh,” Sam said, “you’re a fast one, Mr. Westen.”
“I’m trying my best,” I said. “You want to tell me where they traced my license plate to?”
“Well, if my memory serves me correctly here, he just traced your existence back to a wrecked Dodge Charger I saw out at the dump a few months back.”
“No idea who owned the car?”
“I ran the plates, and they came back as being owned by a gentleman named Cy Rosencrantz, who currently resides in the Shayna Grove Assisted Living Facility in Ventura, California. I think you’re safe.”
“That’s fine work there, Sam.”
“There’s only one of me,” he said.
Father Eduardo came back inside the loft then and handed Fiona back her phone.
“Where is she?” I asked.
“She’s got a homegirl lives near Coral Springs. So she’s there for right now.”
“She going to stay there?”
“You can’t tell with these girls,” he said. “All she knows is the streets. I’ve tried to help get them a new life, but when things get tough, they slip back into what they know. She’s scared, but she understands the situation now. And she’s been forgiven for what she’s done. That helps.”
“Look,” I said, “tonight it’s going to happen. Either we’ll have the Latin Emperors where we need them—and that means Junior, too—or people are going to start dying. Junior’s about three steps behind right now, but he’s gaining speed.”
I didn’t bother to tell him about his demands, which showed he was emboldened now, and which also showed he was beginning to get close to the truth of who we were and what our intentions were. It helped to have a cop on the payroll for these purposes.
“What do I do?”
“Today,” I said, “you go into your church and you do your job. We’ll tell you if and when you need to move.”
“What are you going to do?” he said.
“All due respect, Father, if I told you, it would put you into a bad position,” I said.
“With the law?”
“With the law, with God, probably with yourself. Just know no one’s getting killed on my watch, and all crimes committed are for a greater good.”
Father Eduardo seemed dubious about my claims, but wasn’t in much of a position to argue. “What about my brother?”
“That will be up to him,” I said. “If I can keep him out of the endgame, I will. But no promises. If he’s at the plant tonight when Sam and Barry start running the money with Junior’s men, we can see if we can pull him out. That’s the best I can offer, because I’m not going to look for him.”
“Fine,” Father Eduardo said. “It will have to be.” He looked at his watch. “I need to get to the church. We’re having a bake sale today.”
“Sam’s going to go with you to work today while I do all that greater-good stuff.”
“I’m handy at a bake sale,” Sam said. “And if you have any overflow of people needing holy advice, I’m happy to help in that capacity, too.”
&nb
sp; Father Eduardo still looked distressed, but agreed because he had to. He and Sam started to make their way for the door. “Wait,” I said. “Sam, are you armed?”
“No, Mikey. I know the rules.”
“Sam,” I said, “are you armed?”
“I have a .22 on me. It would hardly do any damage,” he said. He turned to Father Eduardo. “Little more than a pellet gun, really.”
“No guns,” Father Eduardo said.
I walked upstairs and came back down with two paintball markers and handed them both to Sam. “Both are filled with pepper spray,” I said. “Try not to shoot anyone at the bake sale.”
Through the window, I watched Sam and Father Eduardo drive away. In any other circumstance, they’d make for enemies, but here they were, in the same car, going to church. You never know when the occupied will rise up and become the enemy, and when the enemy will become the ally.
“Fi,” I said, “why don’t you make Barry’s life complete and wake him up from his golden slumber?”
“Does this involve me kicking him?”
“He’s got work to do today. Let’s try to keep his internal injuries to a minimum,” I said.
So Fiona tramped up the stairs to the top of the loft, where Barry was still snoring away, and shouted “Alarm!”
One thing about Fiona: She can be subtle when she wants to be. It’s just an issue of how often she wants to be anything but what she is.
While Fiona made Barry alert, I went about assembling what we’d need to either convict, imprison or kill Junior Gonzalez. There’s no joy in this sort of work, the gathering of evidence to ruin a person, but if you’re willing to do the crime, as the adage should say, you have to be willing to be outsmarted by a spy.
When working with someone for the first time, it’s wise to let them feel like they have the freedom to express themselves without fear of rebuke. So when Fiona and I arrived at the meet-up spot with Junior that evening—the parking lot of a Steak-N-Shake a few blocks from the industrial park that housed Harding Pharmaceutical—I decided not to get angry with the man if he reacted poorly to anything.
