by Tod Goldberg
Like, say, the presence of Fiona.
“You didn’t tell me you were bringing your poodle with you,” Junior said. He sat at one of the outdoor tables with a half-eaten burger and a pile of fries in front of him. He took a sip from his milkshake and then set it down beside his plate of food. The shake probably made his throat feel better.
“I thought it would be good for you two to settle your differences. In the spirit of teamwork, of course.” I motioned to the other seats around his table. “Mind if we join you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I chose to sit outside to avoid the noise inside.”
We sat down, anyway.
Inside the restaurant, a little girl’s birthday was in full swing. There must have been twenty kids running rampant. Even outside, the high-pitched squeals were enough to make me want to swear off sex permanently.
“My friend has something to say to you,” I said.
“I am truly sorry for choking you with my whip,” Fiona said. “Though there are places in this world where the service you received would be the culmination of a lovely night out. It’s all about how you appreciate the finer things.”
Junior grunted. “Save it,” he said.
“So, we can’t be friends?” Fiona said.
“I don’t deal with you,” he said. “Just Mr. Rosencrantz.”
“I told you,” I said. “You have to dig if you want the truth, Junior. I didn’t buy my security at Staples, like you did. And maybe, if we become good friends after tonight, I’ll just show you my passport. And next thing you know, we’ll be having Thanksgiving dinner together. Your family of gangsters. My family at the Shayna Grove Assisted Living Facility. It will be lovely.”
Junior made that grunting noise again. “Why’d you pick this place to meet?” he asked.
“I like the fries,” I said.
“When I was in the joint,” he said, “I used to have dreams about this place.”
“Then you should be happy,” I said.
“Funny thing is,” he said, “all those years, and when I got out, I forgot to come to this place.”
“Too wrapped up in your little plans for revenge?” Fiona said.
Junior actually smiled. I think we might have been having a moment of some kind. “Just happy to cook for myself again. You get a little tired of burgers and fries in prison.”
“You do have a lovely kitchen in your house,” Fiona said.
Junior checked his watch, but didn’t say anything.
“You late for something?” I asked.
“I asked a friend of mine to stop by, too,” he said. “You have a problem with that?”
“No,” I said. “Any friend of yours is a friend of mine.”
“We’ll see,” he said, and just then a police cruiser, followed by a tow truck, pulled into the lot beside my Charger. “You may not want to tell me who you are, but I’m going to bet that you have fingerprints on file somewhere. I got to watch a lot of CSI in prison, so I asked my friend Officer Prieto to get a few ... what do they call them? Latents?”
I had to hold myself back from clapping. It was a great move by Junior. Instead, I said, “Junior, if you attempt to move my car without using the key? It will blow up.”
“You bluff.”
“One way of finding out,” I said. “But from this distance? We’ll all be dead, too. So if you don’t mind, I’m going to go behind the building. I’ll pop inside and see if I can get the birthday party to cower beneath the tables.”
Officer Prieto and the tow-truck driver stood behind my car, presumably waiting for some sign from Junior. He didn’t make any, so I went ahead and decided to rectify the situation on my own. “Just tell our friend that I’m happy to give him my prints.”
The advantage of being a covert operative, and one that has had certain nebulous organizations proctoring his work recently, is that I happen to know my prints aren’t in the system. Or if my prints are in the system, they don’t come up as belonging to Michael Westen.
But Fiona’s just might be. Not that she couldn’t handle herself, but it probably wouldn’t do anyone any good to have certain government agencies aware that she was in town.
Junior stood up and whistled. Officer Prieto and the tow-truck driver exchanged a few words, and then the truck drove off. “Give me a minute,” Junior said, and started off toward the policeman.
I got up from the table when Junior was far enough away that he couldn’t hear me. “Here,” I said. I handed her my phone. “Take some candid photos for our memory book, won’t you?”
“Love to,” she said.
“Keep my face out.”
“That officer is very handsome,” she said. “I’ll focus on him.”
“Good,” I said. “When I go over, you wait here. But keep snapping photos. You never know when we’ll want to relive this experience.”
“That was a smarter move than I would have anticipated,” Fiona said. “The fingerprints? The car? Very savvy.”
“He’s had a lot of time to think of great ideas.”
“Are you sure you’ll be fine?”
“What’s the worst that can happen—he finds out I’m a spy? Spy trumps local cop every day.”
“I hazard to remind you that you’re not a spy anymore,” she said.
“You know what I mean.”
Officer Prieto dipped into his car and came back out with something small and square. Probably an ink pad. Junior waved me over.
“I’m allowed to use a real gun here, right?”
“Try not to shoot the kids,” I said.
By the time I reached the Charger, Junior and the cop were already back in conversation. “You must be the crooked cop,” I said. I extended my hand to shake, but instead, Officer Prieto pressed my fingers into the ink pad and then onto a piece of paper. He did it in under ten seconds. It was fairly impressive. Since I knew it was coming, and since I thought maiming a cop would be more trouble than I needed that afternoon, I opted not to stop the process by breaking his arm in two. All that, and I don’t even think Prieto made eye contact with me, though it was hard to tell, since he wore mirrored aviator glasses.
“You got anything to hide?” Officer Prieto said.
“I’m a criminal mastermind,” I said, “but that’s probably pretty apparent. Other than that, you now have all the clues you need to my existence.”
“I find out you’re not who you say you are, I’ll bring your whole world down,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Good luck with that. I can tell you right now, I’m not really Cy Rosencrantz.”
The three of us stood there for a moment without saying anything. It was a nice form of posturing, one usually only seen in the wild. I decided to wait it out a few moments longer and then said, “You done?”
“A real joker here,” Prieto said.
“I’m just concerned that we have a job about to jump off, and you’re trying to stare me down. Either you’re a crooked cop or you’re not. If you’re not, just go on and run my prints. If you are, you need to decide how you’re going to get everyone out of that warehouse in the next twenty minutes or so.”
Prieto reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone and a phone number. “You want some diversion? You make the call,” he said, and gave me the cell. “My voice isn’t appearing on anything. I’ll do my job, but you do yours.”
I examined the phone. It looked like a burner, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I went into the Charger and took out one of my own disposables from the glove box. “I come prepared,” I said, and then dialed the number.
“Harding Pharma, this is Dan.”
Huh. Dan was a good choice.
“Dan,” I said, “this is Kirk Peterson from Diagnostic Partners. You in the warehouse?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ve got a report here that the cooling systems are going nuts there. What do you have?”
“Uh, well, I’m just on duty for the loading dock, sir. You got the loading dock on
the line.”
“Then I need someone in the lab,” I said.
“No one like that here. It’s a Saturday.”
“Son,” I said, “I’m going to make your life real simple for you. You’re about fifteen minutes from a stage-three collapse in the CDH units. Who’s on call?”
“Uh, uh,” he said. Panic. It makes you sputter.
“Settle down, son,” I said. “Just calmly get everyone out of the dock. I got a call in to the police. They’re on their way.”
“We’ve got a truck leaving in the hour,” he said.
“Leave it,” I said. “And get your ass out of there, son. Police will be on-site in a few minutes. God help you all if this gets into the water.”
I clicked the phone off, took out the SIM card, and then crushed it on the pavement.
Junior and Prieto just stared at me.
“I told you,” I said, “you’re dealing with a criminal mastermind. So, why don’t you get moving there, Officer Friendly, before someone gets smart and starts actually thinking over there at the warehouse?”
Officer Prieto got into his car without saying a word and drove off. Within a few seconds, we could hear his siren.
“Nice work,” Junior said. He extended his hand.
Old friends. That’s what we were. I took his hand and said, “You ever try to corner me like that again, and I’ll torture you to death in a way that will make your ancestors hurt. We got a deal, hoss?” Junior said nothing. “Great.” I patted his hand lightly. “Good talk.”
I waved Fiona over. She sashayed across the parking lot, and when she got close to Junior, she gave him one of those smiles she normally reserves for men she’s about to hurt. “Always a pleasure,” she said, and then she got into the car.
I looked at my watch. “If that truck isn’t at Honrado within the hour, I’ll assume you want that ancestor thing early.”
When we drove off, Junior was still standing in the middle of the parking lot, looking for all the world like a man without a country.
18
The final execution of a counterinsurgency plan is to not just defeat the insurgency, but cripple the will of anyone who might want to follow in the insurgents’ footsteps.
For a man like Eduardo Santiago, there would always be people gunning to bring him down. He was too powerful now. He’d forgotten where he came from. He was no more than a crook with a collar. And then people really gunning for him: The Latin Emperors were not going to disappear. As long as there were prisons, as long as there was poverty and drugs and violence, there would be the Latin Emperors. And as long as Father Eduardo was alive, there would be a Latin Emperor who would think that the way to earn his stripes would be to get the man who snitched out Junior Gonzalez.
Unless they were too damn scared of the power Father Eduardo still had from his perch in the church. That meant creating a mystique of fear. And the only way you scared hard knocks like the Latin Emperors was to attack them in a way they could not quantify.
Like through the air.
Fiona and I sat idling in the Charger across the street from Honrado when we saw an eighteen-wheeler roll tentatively down the street. I couldn’t make out the face of the driver in the cab, but thought that the tattooed arm draped out the window was a pretty good sign that the driver wasn’t under the employ of Harding. It was seven P.M. and the Honrado campus was clear of people ... except for the ones Barry and Sam were training in the art of counterfeiting this fine evening.
I called Sam. “Delivery is here,” I said.
“That’s great,” Sam said.
“You sound a little distracted,” I said.
“Mikey, we’re printing money in here.”
“I’d like to remind you that you’re a federal employee,” I said.
“You know that pension I was worried about?”
“Sam.”
“I just saw it roll off a press and get cut into exact replicas of twenty-dollar bills. And that was just on a practice run.”
“Where’s Barry?”
“He’s holding forth with the gangsters,” Sam said. “You know, in another life, he might have made a pretty good professor. The kids really respond to him.”
“Don’t let him leave with anything in his pockets tonight,” I said.
“Mikey, I’m not going to frisk him.”
“Sam, I will have Fiona frisk both of you,” I said.
“Fine, Mikey, fine. Just know that I have seen temptation and I have walked away from it a better man. Or I will. I will. Yes, I will.”
“Where’s Father Eduardo?”
“He finished up the bake sale at three, and I brought him back to your mother’s. He’s far away from here.”
“No one followed you?”
“There was a car that picked us up leaving here,” Sam said. “And then another that picked us up at the corner. So I had Father Eduardo call the mayor and see if he could pop into the mayor’s quarters for a quick talk about something pressing. But the mayor wasn’t in.”
“So what did you do?”
“Drove over there, anyway, and sat around for twenty minutes while Father Eduardo chatted up the security detail and mentioned that it looked like some gangsters were loitering around out front. So the security detail went out and arrested them. Turns out they were bad guys. I gotta tell you, Mikey, it’s hard to be a covert operative and a hard-core gangster at the same time. Tough to be inconspicuous while you’re thumping your bass.”
“Occupational hazard,” I said.
“I got the truck in my sights here,” Sam said.
“Let it back into the loading dock and then get rid of the driver. Don’t open the container until the driver is gone. Got it?”
“On it,” Sam said, and hung up.
Outside, a young woman pushed a baby in a stroller. A man sat on the porch of his apartment and read the newspaper. Two boys rode by on matching low-rider bicycles.
“What’s the point of that?” Fiona said.
“The bikes?”
“Yes, the bikes.”
“Look cool, I guess,” I said.
“Father Eduardo needs to start talking to these kids from the moment of conception.”
In the backseat of the Charger was the residue from fifty cakes of portosyt. We’d stopped off at Lowe’s on the way over and purchased enough of the chemical to either stave off an entire football field of wild grass or render unconscious, with the help of fentanyl, an entire generation of gangsters. It was now stacked innocuously inside a garbage can just beside the loading dock where Sam was.
“You sure we have the right combination of chemicals?” I asked.
“If not,” Fiona said, “what’s the worst that could happen?”
“Fiona, I’d prefer not to deal with those kinds of scenarios. It’s the grounds of a church.”
“Oh, Michael, always so pious,” she said. “We’ll need at least five hundred fentanyl patches’ worth of gel to dissolve with the portosyt.”
“We should be fine,” I said.
In an optimum situation, we’d pump the gas into the ventilation system of the printing-press room, but the entire facility was enjoined by the same system, which meant that we’d need to dissolve the chemicals in the same space as the gangsters in order to control it.
Our plan was extraordinarily high-tech: We’d combine the two chemicals, along with the appropriate amount of distilled water, in this case two jugs, which we’d already poured inside the garbage can, and place it in the facility while they worked. It would take about five minutes for the chemicals to become a strong enough gas to knock them out. The sustained propagation of the gas, combined with the oxygen in the room, would keep them under like an anesthetic for the duration of the dissolve time. Which in this case would be about three hours.
Or enough time to alert the proper authorities to a bunch of gangsters who’d broken into the plant and started making counterfeit money.
Provided nothing went wrong, which seemed to be
the case until Junior Gonzalez and Killa pulled up in front of us in the parking lot, hood to hood. Except that Junior and Killa were in a lowered Honda Accord and we were in the Charger.
“Act natural,” I said through my smile to Fiona. “And by that I mean don’t shoot them until it seems like the last resort.”
“Always with the rules,” she said.
I got out of the car and walked to the driver’s-side window and peered in. “Something I can do for you, Junior?”
“Just wondering what you were doing sitting here on point,” Junior said.
“Wanted to make sure the truck arrived,” I said. “How’s your knee, Killa?” Killa kept staring forward. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of black wraparound sunglasses.
“Where’s the boy?” Junior asked.
“Safe,” I said. “You’ll get him tomorrow. As we previously determined.”
“You see, that’s funny,” Junior said, “because Leticia doesn’t know anything about that.”
Shit.
“Why would she?” I said.
“You separate a mother from her child, maybe you think you’d let her know,” Junior said. “You think I’m stupid? You think I can’t get to her? You think her home-girls will keep her secrets? You’ve never had her or him, have you?”
“Junior,” I said, “you really want to play this game? You’re an old man working in a young man’s game now.” I looked over my shoulder at Fiona. Her focus was unwavering. I didn’t know how to tell her with simple body language that she needed to let Sam know that he needed to rush the chemicals right this very instant .
“And something else,” Junior said. “Julia Pistell? She’s on a cruise right now. Yeah. Summer at Sea, her mother called it. You wanna know how I found out? I picked up the phone and called her. Four-one-one. Still works.”
Shit again. I looked back at Fiona, and this time she had her head down for just a brief second. When I looked back into Junior’s car, Killa had a nine pointed at my chest.
“Why don’t you get in the backseat,” Junior said. “And you and I can have the conversation we should have had a week ago.”
“And if I say no?”
