The Verdict on Each Man Dead

by David Whellams

  DeKlerk let the discussion range all over the map. Henry understood. If he used up enough time on the particulars, the broad concerns of the feds might dissipate, or the clock would run out. The truth was, no one wanted the vanguard position in any encounter with González, lest they be tainted as the officials who “negotiated” with the enemy. Boog had good odds of keeping the meeting under the aegis of West Valley and within González’s conditions.

  Frommer, a loudmouth, took a cheap shot. “Use the opportunity to arrest him. It’s your choice.”

  “No, we have a deal.”

  “A devil’s bargain, and I don’t see the benefit. Makes us look bad.”

  “Us?” Boog flashed.

  Bureaucrats in a pack tend to become tiresomely aggressive. Henry saw that the feds were focusing their smug opprobrium on the West Valley contingent, and it wasn’t working.

  “Has he stated he’ll give us the name of the Watson killer?” said the JTTF liaison.

  Boog was almost home, but there was no easy answer to the last question. To Henry’s surprise, Rogers intervened. “We keep it narrow, in my view. There are no big opportunities here. We aren’t willing to set off a task force blitz against the upper echelons of the drug trade because of our problems with a local murder containing a drug link. We have a small opportunity. We take the shot, see what comes out of it.”

  Frommer persisted. “How do we know this wasn’t the first in a series of hits by the González cartel, designed to consolidate the street trade in grass?”

  “Because there hasn’t been a second incident,” Boog answered.

  It was at this point that Henry began to suspect that Boog had done some effective lobbying in advance of the meeting. The federal and state officials squirmed each time Boog spoke of yielding to the Mexican’s terms, but none openly denounced the setup, with one exception — Frommer never knew when to stop. He tapped his wide knuckles on the desk. “Why not seize the chance to wring some concessions from González? His gang’s active in trafficking in umpteen states. Tell him you’re considering arresting him. Lay down a marker.”

  Henry watched as DeKlerk, Phil Mohlman, and Rogers exchanged looks. González was not a crime lord whom you threatened to his face. Henry finally figured out Rogers’s gesture: he had been seconded recently to the State Bureau of Investigation, and that put him in the running for the Wendover meeting. Rogers had negotiated with DeKlerk to be the second man on the team.

  “González is approaching us, so let’s see what he has to say,” Rogers continued in a mollifying tone. “We don’t know what he has to offer. Obviously, he’s feeling some pressure. Let’s keep it low key, look for openings.”

  The objections subsided as all began to absorb the fundamental point: this was about one case. No one knew why González wanted the meet, and curiosity was justification enough.

  There was a final, uncomfortable pause. Boog said, “Look, there are local, state, and federal interests to be represented. I also acknowledge the interests of the Joint Task Force, and the Narcotics Task Force down in Iron and Garfield Counties, which couldn’t make it today. González insists on only two officers present, and frankly, that’s probably wise from our side. Otherwise, it gets crazy in the room. This has to be kept subtle, not become a negotiation of surrender. Therefore, I suggest our contingent include Rogers, covering state and federal narcotics concerns, and Henry Pastern, who knows the immediate case. Henry has background with the FBI and as well has the local perspective.”

  Henry tried not to let his jaw drop onto the conference room table.

  On the way home, Phil driving, Henry looked over at his partner. “Am I right that Rogers supported us because he knew he would get to be one of the two in the room with González?”

  “Yup. The fix was in. But the love-in with us is temporary. Watch that Rogers doesn’t turn on you out there. He wants to do the talking.”

  Henry stared out the window at the broad Salt Lake City avenues. He turned to Phil again. “Why didn’t Boog insist on being the second rep?”

  Phil made eye contact and pulled over to the curb. “Because, Henry, Rogers and the State B of I folks believe Boog DeKlerk is in Avelino González’s pocket. Boog knows this.”

  CHAPTER 13

  “Is it safe?” was Peter Cammon’s first statement when Henry stopped talking.

  It was late afternoon in England, but Peter had already started on his third beer. He had welcomed the interruption to his dull day and listened with amusement to Henry’s long summary of the multi-agency session.

  “It’s not safe at all!” Henry blurted.

  Peter was determined not to laugh — he knew that Henry had called for serious advice — but it was a strange thing about the telephone, Peter thought: it’s hard to conceal a smile.

  “What do you really want to know?” Peter said soberly.

  “I want to know why González requested the visit. I want to know the risk of meeting with him without backup.”

  For a few seconds, Peter hesitated. He wasn’t particularly adept at the fatherly aspect of mentoring young detectives but Henry’s passion was infectious. Peter went out to the veranda and sat down in his favourite Adirondack chair. He took in the familiar garden and the entrance to the old air raid shelter. Jasper, his old dog, didn’t rise when he came outside. Joan was off visiting their son and daughter-in-law in Leeds. Henry’s call was the only interesting thing that had happened that day. Peter felt old stirrings of the game afoot.

  “Henry, you aren’t worried about risk. You’ve already decided to take it.”

  “So, what do I do to prepare?” Henry responded, his tone ingenuous.

  Peter became all business. “Try to figure out the first question you posed. What does the drug dealer want from you?”

  “To relieve the pressure on his drug operations.”

  Peter harrumphed. “I wonder. You need to psych out the situation better. Then maybe we’ll see his motive. Is he taking a serious risk that one of those alphabet soup federal agencies will try to arrest him? You said he refuses to have any feds in the room.”

  “There was talk at the meeting of taking him down. The man I’m going to Wendover with is actually a DEA guy assigned to Utah state police. He’s aggressive with drug lords.”

  “You say the rendezvous spot is in the desert, near the Nevada border?”

  “I think so. We’re examining the GPS coordinates González gave us.”

  “What’s the air space like? Mountains?”

  “Yeah,” Henry said, “But the big thing is the Utah Test Range. Spy planes, drone testing, and such. The feds can’t fly choppers through a restricted zone.”

  “There’s your answer. González knows the desert, and better than you do. He holds the cards. I advise you to go in unarmed.”

  “Take our chances?” A macho tone had crept into Henry’s voice. Peter understood that this was about more than Henry advancing his career. This also concerned bravery, boldness, and self-control. The personal risk was substantial and Henry craved guidance. Peter had survived violent confrontations with men as wild as this drug czar, and Henry knew it.

  “Henry, you can do better than just winging it. Think about it. Why should a big-time Mexican drug lord care about Hollis Street? Don’t go into this lion’s den expecting definitive results, but remember every word González says.”

  “I think he knows who the Hollis Street killer is.”

  “Maybe, and maybe he has his own issue with the killer.”

  The conversation wound down. Henry flagged the corruption allegations against Boog DeKlerk as something he would like to explore further, after Wendover. Peter promised to be available to consult.

  “Thanks, Peter.”

  “Call me after,” Peter said blandly.

  Both men hung up in a charged mood. Peter could tell that Henry could hardly wait for
his great adventure to begin.

  But on the veranda in the silent evening, as Peter put down the phone and began idly to scratch Jasper’s old head, a worry began to creep into his mind. Instinct instructed him that somewhere in this adventure Henry was going to run right up against something evil. He wished that he had said more to his young friend. He promised himself that he would proactively call Henry after the meeting in the desert.

  CHAPTER 14

  Early the next morning, in the driveway on Coppermount, Theresa hugged Henry extra-hard. He hadn’t given her the details of the Wendover caper, but somehow she understood the potential danger. There was so much to say that finally she said almost nothing. In a grim echo of Peter Cammon, she whispered, “Stay safe, Henry.”

  Henry and Agent Rogers set out for Wendover in an unmarked black sedan, with no evident entourage. That seemed about right to Henry, to cross the moonscape desert surreptitiously to a meeting with a killer, everything rendered nameless. He was thrilled, optimistic.

  They didn’t exactly travel unarmed or without backup, but they wouldn’t win any gun battles. Phil Mohlman had the brainwave to persuade DeKlerk and Rogers to let Officer Jackson serve as driver, leaving the two detectives free to focus on negotiating. Young Jackson was equipped with two handguns and a short-barrelled shotgun slotted in the passenger-side seat well. No one had any illusions. If it all went wrong, he might get off a shot and a phone call before the Mexicans’ AR-15s and MAC-10s cut him down.

  Back somewhere towards Salt Lake City, three fast cruisers waited.

  Jackson wore his uniform while, coincidentally, Henry and Rogers both had on white shirts, black pants, and beige windbreakers. Henry felt the need to add a touch of formality to the encounter with González, hence a narrow black tie. He might have been a delegate heading for a day of peace talks on the thirty-eighth parallel.

  González had provided GPS coordinates that showed the meeting happening inside Utah’s boundaries, but the territory remained rugged and confusing. Jackson was told to proceed cautiously.

  Henry hadn’t driven Interstate 80 in a decade. The Great Salt Lake stretched off to the horizon on their right like some biblical wilderness, and indeed here was a world for ascetics, in which settlements were few and grudging. Sometimes the brine from the lake crossed the interstate, leaving it a floating causeway, and when the water retreated it left a rime of sodium chloride. The south side of the highway remained mostly parched desert, where the salt blew in and stunted all life.

  The Utah Test and Training Range occupied 2,645 square miles of restricted terrain flanking Interstate 80, both north and south. As a boy, Henry had been disappointed not to see jet fighters and Nike rockets by the hundreds overhead, or arrayed in the mysterious desert ready to be launched. Now, as then, the military had done little to the landscape — Henry still wanted to believe that a massive secret base lay out of sight only a few miles from the highway — and there were few road signs acknowledging the military’s presence. Henry hoped for at least a drone sailing overhead, but the best he could see was a lonely white weather blimp five miles off to the north. If González chose to make an escape, he would flee neither north nor south but west, into the Nevada hills.

  Henry guessed correctly that they wouldn’t rendezvous in Wendover itself. A few miles before the town, as the test range ended and the Bonneville Salt Flats took over the landscape on the right, Jackson made a left turn onto an arid tertiary road. The plumes of dust raised by the black sedan were entirely of salt. The desert here was featureless; mountains lined the distant western horizon like a palisade.

  Rogers muttered his discontent as barren scrub land opened before them on the sketchy path. After two miles, a cracked wooden sign appeared: “Portal, Utah.”

  “Ghost town,” Rogers stated accurately.

  It also confirms we’re still inside the state line, thought Henry, who remained watchful for hints to their destination.

  “You staying alert, Officer Jackson?” Rogers said.

  Jackson muttered and picked up speed, flinging up more salt-laden dust in his wake. In three more miles, they spotted a black SUV parked before a Quonset hut a hundred yards off to their right. The prudent approach would have been to slow down, but Jackson, perhaps reacting to Rogers’s condescending question, barrelled straight into the parking area and halted forty feet from the SUV. A huge Latino man in opaque shades stood unconcerned next to it. It took a full minute for the dust curtain to settle.

  Jackson stayed in the sedan and turned off the engine as the detectives emerged into the sun. There was no need to try to impress the Latino man, but Rogers took off his sunglasses anyway to demonstrate that he was unintimidated. The bodyguard-driver said nothing.

  Bypassing him, Rogers led Henry to a small door in the wall of the Quonset. Henry presumed that González waited somewhere inside the awkward structure, perhaps with a larger entourage of gunmen. He removed his shades, anticipating the dimness within, and suppressed his excitement.

  It took only a sentence from Rogers for Henry’s hopes to shatter on the desert hardpan. Just before entering the hut, the agent stage-whispered, “You’ve been allowed into the heart of a criminal enterprise, a unique and high-risk gamble, so let me do all the talking.”

  Henry Pastern realized, at the second he crossed from searing brightness to stygian gloom, that he had been set up. He was West Valley’s rep — DeKlerk’s proxy and Grady’s spokesman — but the DEA would happily blame him for any and all screw-ups. As he adjusted to the light, Henry further grasped the forces arrayed against him. Rogers intended to push the Mexican hard and Henry provided deniability for Rogers if it went south. That’s why DeKlerk hadn’t wanted to be present.

  Now fully inside, Henry absorbed the worst news. Rogers would try to manipulate González both ways. If the Mexican revealed the Hollis Street killer, the State Bureau would take him into custody on the spot for aiding, abetting, lying, obstructing, and whatever other adjective they could find. Rogers, it was now evident, saw an arrest as a distinct option. The choppers were probably already in the sky, damn the agreement. Henry wondered if González knew the danger he faced.

  The interior was a vast, hollow space with an office table and three chairs set up at the far end. A whirring fan stood on a tall pole near the middle; it would have been more useful closer to the table, but Henry understood that it would have drowned out conversation. Two dozen light bulbs shone from rafters that cross-hatched the dome, whose sections of corrugated steel pinged in the heat. González had chosen the venue well. The oversize enclosure signified neutral ground, unapproachable without warning, and shielded from drones and telescopes. No matter that it was an artificial, otherworldly place that no one would ever want to endure for long.

  At the table, a man in partial shadow looked up as the detectives entered. He stood and waited for them to approach.

  González was over sixty but appeared younger, and the difference was important. He was wiry, supple, muscled, disciplined. He wore chinos and a denim shirt, and new Johnston & Murphy loafers made him appear as relaxed as a Napa Valley vintner. But he was Mexican through and through, and his proud demeanour told them he would not be patronized as a supplicant or a guest or any kind of interloper to this desolate part of Utah.

  “Madre, it’s the Men in Black. Could they have sent me two whiter guys?”

  Rogers marched the length of the hut. Everything about him was tight, knotted, demanding — not, in Henry’s view, the way to hold yourself in a hollow space like this where, if you exhaled, your aggressive energy would puff away into the high dome. Most important, the Mexican entirely controlled the venue for this meeting. It occurred to Henry that González might keep track of government drug agents and would figure out that Rogers was DEA; if so, there could be hell to pay. Rogers seemed to expect González’s bodyguard to burst through the tiny door at the other end, in which case, Henry thought, first
they would hear him killing Jackson. Reasoning that Rogers carried a concealed weapon, Henry was ready to try to disarm the agent if he pulled it. González evidently had no weapon on his person, nor under the table. Henry was unarmed.

  “It’s your meeting,” Rogers shot back. “You are Avelino González?”

  González frowned at Rogers’s abrupt effort to seize the agenda, but recovered.“Most certainly.”

  Now Rogers frowned melodramatically. “We have you as Juan Chico González.”

  “I changed it to Avelino,” González answered.

  They sat down, Rogers first. Henry remained standing behind him. He understood that the DEA man would be on the attack the whole time. This was going to be dicey.

  “What possible reason would you have for changing your birth name? Insecure about something?”

  The pause was embarrassing. Henry was sure that a single insult, real or imagined, could scuttle this encounter. The drug dealer was a proud man. González stayed calm, almost Zen-like (if a killer can achieve such composure). Henry had absorbed the file. He knew that the drug chief smoked, and now would be the perfect time for him to light up the cheroots he favoured. Sure enough, González took out a pack of smokes but left them on the table.

  Henry had twigged to the name change. “Puerto Rico?” he muttered.

  González shifted his gaze and smiled at Henry, and back to Rogers: “Forget it, señor. Let’s get this done.”

  “Why are we meeting in this shithole?” Rogers said.

  Henry paid close attention. González wasn’t provoked. “I like the borderlands,” he answered mildly.

  “Borderlands? You think the state line will stop us from hunting you down?”

  “I wasn’t aware that you were here to arrest me.”

  “I repeat, you called the meeting.”

  “Your police forces have been pushing hard on everyone’s operations …”