The Tailor was average-sized, average-looking, a non-descript bald white man in his early thirties wearing a dark polo shirt and sharply creased stone-colored khakis. He’d been an FBI agent once back east, an army Ranger before that. Now he did things that had bought him a town house in San Fran, a marina apartment in San Diego, and almost a dozen bank accounts stuffed, at his latest tally, with nearly six million dollars in cash.
No one knew his real name. Among those who hired him, he was referred to simply as the Tailor because he dressed nicely and he always sewed everything up.
He got off 395 and passed the Walmart and drove into the town. He cruised past gas stations, beat-up pickup trucks in dirt driveways, some equally beat-up-looking folks on the sidewalks. There was supposed to be a prison, but he didn’t see it. He checked his notes and parked on Main Street, across from a saloon. He dialed the number of the contact the cartel had set up.
“This Joe?” the Tailor said when the line was answered.
“Yep.”
“I’m across the street, the white Chevy Cruze.”
After a minute, a young bearded guy came out. He was broad shouldered and wearing cutoff denim shorts and a Nike T-shirt, the swoosh on it about as faded and washed out as the surrounding prison town. Not even noon, and beer on his breath, the Tailor noted as Joe climbed into the passenger seat.
“Could you put on your seat belt, please?” was the first thing the Tailor said.
“Come again?” Joe Six-Pack said.
“Your seat belt. Could you please put it on?”
The Tailor waited patiently for the contact to secure the belt before pulling out. California was click-it-or-ticket, and getting pulled over was not on the agenda. Not with what he had in the trunk.
“Where we headed?” Joe wanted to know.
“For a spin,” the Tailor said. “Do you know this town?”
“I should. I’ve lived here all my unfortunate life. Can I smoke?”
“No,” the Tailor said. “You work at the school?”
“Sorta. I’m the assistant football coach, and you can save the Sandusky jokes, thank you.”
The Tailor handed him the file with the photos in it.
“You recognize any of these kids? They would have arrived within the last eight or nine months.”
“Nope. Not even a little,” Joe said after flicking through them. “An Asian kid around here? That, I would have remembered.”
The Tailor nodded to himself. They were homeschooling them. Witness Protection 101. The Tailor had expected that.
“Go through the pictures again, Joe, and think again slowly. You might have bumped into them at the Walmart, the local pizza place, on the sidewalk, church?”
“Wait,” Joe said, holding up a finger. He fished through the folder again and took out the photo of the priest.
“This guy ain’t Irish, is he? Has, like, an Irish accent?”
The Tailor was pretty sure he did, but he glanced at his notes anyway.
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“My mom told me an Irish priest subbed for the local pastor a couple of weeks back.”
The Tailor felt it then. A primordial tingling down his spine as warmth spread in his belly. He always thought of the sensation as how a shark must feel on detecting the first traces of blood in the water. Fresh meat this way. The happy foreshadowing of victory.
The Bennett contract was a whale, all right. Three million. He knew what he was going to buy with it, too. A flat in Paris. Travel was one of his few passions.
“That right?” the Tailor said as he lawfully put on his clicker and made a perfect K-turn.
Joe nodded, pulling on his beard.
“The old biddies couldn’t get over it. Imagine, that’s what passes for news here in Susanville, USA.”
“Where’s the Catholic church?” the Tailor asked.
“Where’s my money?” Joe said.
“In the glove box.”
Joe took it out and gazed on it, smiling. The Great Recession really must be hurting these hicks out here, the Tailor thought. He’d never actually seen someone happy to be setting up a hit on a family for five hundred bucks in twenty-dollar bills.
“Make a left up ahead,” Joe said. “The church is there on your right.”
CHAPTER 80
Mary Catherine’s bedroom was on the third floor, in the quaint, rickety Victorian farmhouse’s converted attic. It was little bigger than a closet, but its dormer window, with its clear, unbroken view of the flat grasslands and the grand Sierra Nevada beyond, actually made it her favorite spot in the entire house.
A bright moon was hanging just above the awe-inspiring peaks when Mary Catherine suddenly came awake a little after one a.m. She flipped her pillow over and lay there staring out the window, listening intently, wondering what had woken her.
After another minute, she decided that it was nothing, probably just the two glasses of the wine that Leo had brought over for dinner. She hardly drank at all these days, but Leo had seemed concerned about whether the wine he’d brought matched up properly with the roast chicken she’d served. Indulging in a couple of glasses of pinot grigio seemed the least she could do to assuage his fears.
Dinner with Leo is swiftly becoming part of the regular routine now, isn’t it? she thought, smiling. Even the boys who had given her so much trouble had decided to stop the silent treatment when Leo quietly started talking baseball with them. Leo had that effect on people. There was something still inside him, an openness, a … gentleness. You couldn’t help but like him.
She didn’t know how Leo would fit into the picture once Mike came back, but she’d decided to cross that bridge when she came to it. She wasn’t one for making people jealous, but she was actually looking forward to Mike’s reaction. At least a little. It would be quite interesting to see how much Mike liked watching another man pay her some attention for a change.
She was looking out at the dark land, the mountains glowing in the starlight, and groggily thinking about Leo and Mike when she thought she heard something downstairs. Then she heard it again. A soft thumping, followed by the creak of weight on wood.
How now, brown cow? she thought, frowning, as she put her bare feet to the rough floorboards and found her slippers. Out her door and down the stairs, she stopped and looked over the banister of the second-floor landing. A suspicious, flickering glow of blue light was coming from what seemed to be the main level’s family room.
She padded down the stairs and quietly around the corner of the kitchen. Just as she suspected, here they were. The things that go bump in the night, in the living flesh.
In the family room, with their backs to her, Eddie and Ricky were splayed out on the couch, thumbs and fingers clicking madly as they played the NBA Street Homecourt PlayStation game that Leo had brought them that evening.
“And one! Woop, woop! That’s right. I’m good,” Eddie said, raising his controller over his head as he did a little dance. “I’m gonna dunk on you like that all day long.”
“Don’t you mean all night long, you little sneak thieves?” Mary Catherine said, and watched the kids jump.
Eddie dropped his controller and lay facedown in front of the TV, pretending to sleep, as Ricky turned around, smiling bravely.
“Mary Catherine. Hi. Um, you want to play winner?” he tried.
“Don’t get cheeky with me. It’s almost two in the God-loving morning. Heads on your pillows this instant, or I’ll dunk the both of you in your rooms for a week. I’ve half a mind to talk to Mr. Cody and get you two night owls some milking work tomorrow. Maybe a week of watching the world go by from the underside of a cow will help you learn the meaning of a good night’s sleep.”
“Cow punishment? No! You can’t! The horror!” Eddie yelled, jumping up and racing his brother out of the room, heading for the stairs.
She’d turned off the set and was going back through the kitchen when she saw the full coffeepot. Leo, on duty now out on the porch, must have
just made himself some. She primped in the mirror of the powder room and put her barn jacket over her pj’s before she poured a cup.
She was going to kiss him, she decided with a smile as she went down the front hall with the mug. She’d been waiting for the right time for them to get closer, and tonight was the night.
“Hark, I go here,” Mary Catherine said, smiling as she pushed through the screen door.
It took several long seconds for Mary Catherine to piece together what the lump down on the opposite side of the porch was. Then she suddenly understood. The coffee cup fell from her shaking hand and exploded between her feet.
Leo was down on the ground, on his back beside the toppled camp chair. Above him and above the porch’s hand railing, there was a large, ink blot-like splatter on the clapboards. Mary Catherine covered her mouth as she scanned Leo’s face. There was a hole over Leo’s open left eye and a dark pool beneath his head!
Mary Catherine felt a shiver of cold shoot up her back as her breath left her. Leo was shot?! He was dead! No! How? What?
The first thought that came to her racing mind was that it was an accident. Had he dropped his gun?
But then she heard something. It came from somewhere off to the right, in the darkness by the main road. It was a whistle, the low double whistle of someone getting someone else’s attention. It was followed after a moment by the distinct and brief, jagged crackle of a radio.
Mary Catherine stood there in the darkness and silence, not moving, not breathing, the spilled coffee staining her slippers.
They found us, she thought as she felt a sudden presence in the hallway behind her. As she turned toward it, she was grabbed in a bear hug and violently yanked back into the house, a callused hand pressing hard over her mouth before she could scream.
PART FOUR
FACE TIME
CHAPTER 81
The NSA’S intelligence package on Tomás Neves and the members of his MS-13 set came in around eleven that night.
It was extensive. At the top were all ingoing and outgoing calls and texts to and from everyone’s home and cell phones. Next came e-mails and Google searches. There were tax returns from the IRS, license plate numbers from the DMV.
“Big Brother’s been working overtime, I see,” Detective Diaz said, licking his thumb as he went through one of the stacks.
Diaz was right. There was almost too much info, if that were possible. Emily and Diaz and I ran out of desk space and had to actually lay out all the papers on the floor to try to get a handle on it.
Since our breakthrough the day before, three more people had been added to our team to give us a hand. There was a hulking, fresh-out-of-the-academy FBI agent from Brooklyn named Ed Kelly and a couple of veteran LA-office Immigration and Customs Enforcement people, Agents Joe Irizarry and Steve Talerico.
The ICE agents were born-and-bred Angelenos and were especially helpful on logistics. Bonding over some Chinese takeout, we pored over street and Google maps of Neves’s place in Reseda, trying to work out the angles, where best to place our vehicles for surveillance.
With our players picked out and our surveillance plan finalized, we geared up with night-vision and video cameras around two a.m. We’d only made it as far as the Olympic Station’s garage when Emily’s phone rang.
“OK,” she said into it, then slammed the door of the G-car she’d just opened.
“That was the LA SAIC John Downey,” she said as she pointed toward the elevator. “We need to go back up. Apparently something from Perrine just came in upstairs.”
Rushing back up into the third-floor office space, I thought I was going to see the big smart screen pulled down again, with a crowd of agents and cops standing around it. There were a lot of cops standing around, but this time, the screen was still up and everyone seemed to be looking at me.
“In here, Mike,” Downey said, waving to me from the door of the space’s only private office. There were three techs in there with him, two of them tapping rapidly on laptops.
“What is this?” I said.
“It’s Perrine. The maniac’s just contacted the LAPD website. He says he wants a sit-down, to communicate with you face-to-face on Skype.”
“Talk to me?” I said, squinting. “But I’m supposed to be in hiding. How does he even know I’m here in LA?”
Downey shrugged.
“I don’t know. All I know is that it’s an encrypted signal and we have NSA trying to trace it.”
I have to admit, I got spooked then. Though I’d been at a few crime scenes, I’d kept a pretty low profile. Were the rumors right? Did Perrine really have a source in the task force? And what did it mean?
I passed a hand through my hair.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’m not sure about this.”
“I wouldn’t even ask you, Mike, but he has a hostage. He says he’s going to kill him in another five minutes if we don’t get you.”
“Of course he does,” I said. “OK. I guess.”
Downey took me over to the desk and sat me in front of a computer monitor. I took a deep breath when I saw the minimized Skype tab. I still didn’t like this. I had a sick feeling that there was something seriously wrong. Something we’d overlooked.
A tech hit a button, and then Perrine was there. He was sitting in a beanbag chair next to a small, wide-eyed Mexican man who had tape over his wrists and ankles and mouth.
There was some kind of metal wall behind them. They were in a van, I realized. Perrine lifted a tennis ball and bounced it off the floor and wall of the van beside the camera and then caught it again.
When the hostage looked up, I saw his Roman collar. He was a priest! Perrine was holding a young priest hostage!
“Detective!” Perrine bellowed as he glanced at the screen. “Detective, there you are, at long last. I was wondering if you’d ever show up. You’re looking tired. Having trouble sleeping, are we? Seriously, how have you been? How are the kids?”
I wanted to tell the arrogant scumbag to go screw himself, but I couldn’t stop looking at the priest. The terror and pleading in his eyes. He was slight, in his early thirties. My heart went out to him. I needed to save this man’s life.
“I’m here, Manuel,” I said. “So you can let that poor man go now, OK?”
“Let him go? Good idea, Detective,” Perrine said, standing.
The drug lord stepped offscreen. There was a sliding sound as the metal wall behind the priest moved sideways to reveal a blurring guardrail, the shoulder of a road, passing trees.
“No!” I yelled as Perrine, coming back into the frame, reared up his heel and booted the priest in the chest.
The man flew backward immediately out the van door, into the darkness. Without a cry. Without a sound. The man was just gone.
CHAPTER 82
Dear God, I thought, feeling dizzy in the cramped, suddenly too-hot office. Dear God.
I watched as Perrine slid the door shut with a bang. He dusted off his hands as he plopped himself back down in the beanbag chair. He lifted the tennis ball and bounced it off the floor and wall of the van again.
“Now, where were we?” he said, catching the ball. “Oh, yes. Your kids. How is the law-enforcement version of the Duggar familia?”
“You bastard,” I said.
“Mike, Mike. Please,” Perrine said. “Do not mourn. That priest is in a better place now. He has gone to his God. You know, like your friend. What was his name? Hughie?”
He was taunting me now. Trying to get to me. He was. I wanted to smash the screen with my fist, but I couldn’t. I took a breath and refused to give him what he wanted.
“That’s true,” I said calmly. “Good point, Manuel. Hughie’s gone to God.”
I paused as I leaned in closer to the computer’s camera.
“Just like your wife, Manuel. No, wait. I made a mistake. How could she be with God? I sent that bitch directly to hell.”
Perrine hurled the ball against the wall and didn’t bother catching it this
time. He stood up and walked over to the camera until his face filled the screen.
“I have one more thing to show you, Bennett. My men are sending it to you right now. If you have any popcorn available, I advise you to get it popping and pull up a seat. You’re going to like this, Mike. I know I will. We can talk after. Maybe when it’s over, we’ll trade notes. But if you don’t feel like talking, that’s OK, too. I’ll understand. You probably won’t be in the mood. Au revoir.”
The screen went blank.
“Wait,” I said to Agent Downey. “What in the hell is he talking about? He’s sending something else? What is it? Where is it?”
“Something’s coming in now. It’s another Skype request,” a tech said, clicking a button.
The first thing I noticed about the footage on the screen that opened up was that it was from a night-vision camera. It was showing an empty field. The grainy image reminded me of a black-and-white TV image, only with dark green instead of black, and light green instead of white.
And it wasn’t footage, I realized suddenly. Since this was Skype, it meant what I was looking at was something that was being filmed in real time.
The camera swung shakily to the left. A kneeling figure appeared. It was a soldier of some kind, wearing a dark hazmat suit with a full gas mask.
The fentanyl, I thought. Perrine was ordering another fentanyl attack and making me watch. Two more hazmat-suited soldiers appeared beside the first, and the camera started moving, shaking a little as the group moved across a field.
There was some kind of fence at the far end, which they climbed, and then they were standing in a dirt road. The soldiers started moving up the slightly curving, uphill road, covering each other. Then they went around a bend, and suddenly, there was a house.
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