Even after things had spiraled out of control five years ago, he was still around, living and breathing with a new name and a new face, free to come and go as he pleased, free to enjoy fine Cubans on a fine night such as this at the fine home that was his escape, an escape from the dangers of the past, an escape that had been forced upon him and that, as it turned out, was the best thing that ever happened to him.
He’d bought the dilapidated estate around two years after his supposed death, and it had then taken another two years and several million dollars to bring the seventeenth-century estate back to its former splendor. Not surprising, given how huge it was, spread out over close to fifteen thousand acres. It had originally been built as a cattle ranch, then in the eighteen hundreds it was converted into a henequén plantation, where its rich fields of agave cactus—the “green gold” that created immense fortunes—were farmed and turned into the sisal fiber that ropes were made of. Almost all the haciendas in the Yucatán had fallen into disrepair after the twin whammies of the land reforms of the Mexican Revolution and the invention of synthetic fibers, but after almost a century of neglect, the last few years had brought about a renewed interest in restoring these magnificent estates, with some converted into small luxury hotels, others into museums, and a select few into private domains.
The rebirth of the haciendas had coincided with his own.
Navarro loved the symmetry of it.
Standing there and basking in the serenity of his dominion, he knew he’d got it right. Given his situation and the savagery that was plaguing most of the country—a savagery in which he’d been not just a participant, but a highly innovative one at that—he’d thought about living abroad. He had the money and the squeaky-clean passport that would have allowed him to settle down anywhere, but he knew he wouldn’t be happy anywhere else. It had to be Mexico. And if he was going to live in Mexico, Merida was the place to be. Nestled in the Yucatán Peninsula on the southeastern tip of the country, the “City of Peace” was as far as one could get from the U.S. border, far from the orgies of blood the north of the country was drowning in. It was a place where the biggest concerns were aquifers that needed attention, overcrowded public schools, and a local cop who’d been bitten by a snake, and that suited the new, laundered version of him just fine.
It never failed to astound him how so many of his peers—ex-peers, really—just didn’t get it. The richer and more powerful they got, the lousier their lives became. Never sleeping in the same bed on consecutive nights, changing phones every day, constantly fearful of betrayal, surrounded by an army of bodyguards. Prisoners of their own success. Before them, the Colombian drug barons had all met bloody deaths. Pablo Escobar, the granddaddy of them all, had occupied the number seven spot on the Forbes rich list, but he’d still lived like a rat, scurrying from one grubby hideout to another before being gunned down in a shantytown at the ripe old age of forty-four. The Mexican narcos weren’t faring much better. It seemed like every week, the president’s damned federales were claiming another big scalp—although ironically, all it did was trigger more bloodshed and mayhem as violent succession struggles and territorial grabs played themselves out. The kingpins who hadn’t yet been killed or arrested were holed up in their fortresses, moving around like the fugitives they were, waiting for that unexpected bullet that would end their pointless lives.
Lesson learned.
He wasn’t going to end up like them, and his life certainly wasn’t going to be pointless. Not if everything went according to plan.
The plan that was currently in the thick of play.
He grinned inwardly at the thought of his fellow kingpins’ miserable, pathetic lives, and it gave him even more pleasure to think that it was them who had given him the way out, that the reason he’d bailed on the narco high life in the first place was that they had come after him guns blazing, all because of his trespass, because he’d dared go after what was rightly his, even if that involved some blood-soaked face time with the sacred and untouchable yanqui himself, the DEA’s head honcho in Mexico.
Well, El Brujo had shown them.
He’d managed to outsmart those two-faced maricóns and ride off into his palm-ringed sunset with three hundred million dollars of their money. In the meantime, the illiterate peasants were still busy amassing fortunes they’d never get to enjoy while slaughtering each other for the privilege. Then la providencia had smiled on him yet again. It had opened an unexpected door and presented him with an opportunity to finish what he’d started and claim his place in history.
It wasn’t something he was going to let slip.
He checked his watch. As if on cue, his untraceable, pay-as-you-go phone buzzed.
It was Eli Walker, his man in San Diego.
“Do you have what I want?” Navarro asked.
The brief hesitation told him all he needed to know. Then came a flat and far-from-contrite “No.”
Navarro said nothing.
“The woman,” Walker fed into the pause, “she—”
“Mamaguevo de mierda,” Navarro hissed. “The damn woman again? I told you about her. I told you she used to be a DEA agent. You knew she was trained.”
“Yeah, but—”
“What did I tell you, after you screwed up at the house? What did I say?”
“What is this, fucking kindergarten?” Walker shot back gruffly.
“What did I say?” Navarro insisted, low and slow.
Another pause, then his contact came back, sounding annoyed and impatient. “You said not to consider her a priority anymore. You said she was expendable.”
“I said kill the puta if you have to, but get me what I asked you for.”
“And your words were heeded, amigo,” Walker replied. “In fact, we’re pretty sure the bitch took a round in the chest.”
Navarro felt a slight ruffle at the American’s use of the Spanish word. It wasn’t so much the word itself as the way he said it, which had a condescending, racist tinge to it. “So what’s the problem?”
“She had someone helping her. Some guy she called after she got away from us at the house.”
“She called someone?”
“Yes. After we last spoke.”
Intriguing.
“Who?”
“I don’t know yet. All I know is, she called him Sean.”
Navarro’s pulse flared.
“It seems he’s the kid’s dad,” Walker added, his words bathed in mocking contempt. “Something that asshole didn’t know, not until now.”
The flare went red-hot, igniting every nerve ending in Navarro’s body.
Sean Reilly, he thought. He didn’t know.
He kept his tone measured. “What else? What else did they say?”
“He gave her some instructions, to avoid detection. I’m thinking he’s a cop, or maybe another DEA agent.”
Navarro didn’t bother correcting him. “And what else?”
“He said he was flying out here to meet her.”
Navarro felt light-headed.
Perfect.
He’d probably experienced a wider variety of highs and hallucinogenic trips than anyone on the planet, and yet, right now—this was right up there with the best of them.
“So he was with her? When you found her, he was with them?”
“Yep. It took us some time to track her down, and he was already with her by then. And this guy turned out to be a serious pain in the ass. I lost another one of my boys.”
Navarro didn’t bother inquiring about that. His mind was busy elsewhere, processing the update and strategizing his next move, doing what it did best when it wasn’t busy figuring out new ways of inflicting pain to put down any challenges to his little world.
“Well, I’m afraid your task just got significantly more . . . challenging, amigo,” he finally told his contact. “The man’s name is Sean Reilly. He’s an FBI agent. And I’d really like to meet him.”
“Whoa whoa whoa, back up there. The guy’s FBI?”
> “Yes.”
The man blew out a small whistle, then said, “That wasn’t part of our deal.”
Hijo de puta, Navarro thought. Here it comes. “You want more money, is that it?”
“No, I’m just not sure I want any of this,” Walker snapped testily. “Some broad and a kid, that’s one thing. This guy . . . you’re talking about a whole different ball game. FBI, ATF—last thing I need is those guys crawling up my ass. Especially when I don’t know what the whole story is.”
Navarro fumed inwardly. “I thought you were someone I could rely on to get the job done.”
“Yeah, well, what can I tell ya? There’s jobs and there’s jobs. Thing is, you start getting up close and personal with our federales, and things get real messy real quick.”
Something Navarro knew well, from personal experience.
He ruminated over it for a long second and realized he might have to get his hands dirtier than he’d expected.
“Where are they now?”
“I don’t know. We lost them after the hotel. We’ve got the scanners on and me and the boys were gonna recon some local ERs, but now I’m thinking maybe it’s time to pull the plug on this mother and call it a day. If she dies, this is gonna get red-hot. So maybe this is a good time for us to say vaya con dios, you know what I’m saying? And maybe we can do business some other time—like when it doesn’t involve a fucking fed and his family.”
Navarro kept his fury bottled. He tried to remind himself that Walker wasn’t a useless worm. Navarro had hired him and his men on a handful of previous occasions, years back when he was still Navarro as well as more recently, in his new guise as Nacho, one of Navarro’s lieutenants “from the old days.” The American had always come through. Navarro needed to keep him on track just a little longer—at least, until he could take over himself, which he now realized he’d need to do.
“All right, you want to pull out, I understand. But I still have the second half of your payment, which I’m sure you’d like to collect.”
“And I have a package here I’m sure you’d also like to collect, amigo. Am I right?”
Navarro bristled at the man’s insolence, but Walker was right. He had something Navarro wanted, something he wanted badly. “Agreed. How about this then? Do one last little thing for me, and you’ll get paid in full.”
The man didn’t take too long ruminating over it. “What?”
“Just find them. Find out what happened to the woman, and find Reilly. I don’t need you to do anything more than that. Just find them and tell me where they are. I’ll take care of the rest. Do we have a deal?”
Walker demurred for a moment, then said, “Fine. I’ll have a lock on their location by tomorrow night.”
SUNDAY
13
The pickup was, well, awkward.
Tess’s plane landed pretty much on time, and I was there waiting for her after leaving Alex with Jules, who turned out to have the gentlest of manners with him, no doubt aided by a smile that should be designated as a global warming hazard, and spending most of the morning at SDPD’s shiny headquarters on Broadway, going through their mug shot database and working with a police sketch artist to come up some visual cues to put out there. Tess was one of the first off the plane, walking briskly and trailing a small roll-on, and although she looked like a summer breeze on legs in her light linen dress and with her bouncy hair, it only took our eyes to meet for me to see the tense undercurrent that was bubbling underneath.
We hugged and kissed quite perfunctorily, like a couple whose marriage had passed its sell-by date. We limited ourselves to some superficial chit-chat about Nevada and the flight as we made our way out of the terminal, where I got hit by a combo of the furnace-blast midday heat and the memory punch of, yet again, treading the same sidewalk Michelle had died on less than twenty-four hours earlier.
It was all still too raw for me. I’m pretty sure Tess caught the look on my face as I glanced at the pavement, but she didn’t ask about it and just stayed with me as I led her to the parking lot. The bureau had arranged a loaner for me to drive around in, a Buick LaCrosse that, if you could overlook its unfortunate name with its oh-so-idiosyncratic capital C, was a pretty decent car.
I was stowing Tess’s bag into its trunk when I felt her hand on my arm.
“I’m really sorry for your loss, Sean.”
Her hand slid up my arm and guided me around to face her. I pulled her close and kissed her, a sudden, deep, starved kiss that just as quickly felt a bit weird to me. I found myself pulling away gently and hugged her instead, avoiding her eyes and cradling her head against my shoulder. We stood there like that for a long moment, without saying anything, then I finally said, “I’m really glad you’re here.”
“Wouldn’t have it any other way,” she half-smiled.
I gave her another kiss, still too brief, and we were on our way.
She asked me about Alex, about how he was doing. The kid was in bad shape. He’d spent the night next to Jules, waking up intermittently with night terrors every couple of hours, one of which had caused him to wet himself. Much as I was desperate to be with him and help him through this, I could still see his discomfort every time I tried to get close to him, and I’d decided to pull back and let Jules comfort him as best she could.
The Hilton was easy to get to, perched conveniently at the crossroads of the Cabrillo and Mission Valley freeways. We walked past families with excited kids running around with SeaWorld caps and T-shirts and small huddles of conventioneers trying to look like they were happy to be there and made our way to the one-bedroom top-floor suite and the additional connecting bedroom that Villaverde’s people had booked us into.
Alex was huddled in front of the TV in the living room, with Jules sitting next to him and being as attentive as ever. I wasn’t sure how Alex would take to Tess—yet another new face butting into his life at a time when the only one he wanted to see was his mother’s, but it all went down better than I expected. For her, anyway. Me, I was still on his boogeyman list.
Tess spotted it instantly.
After a moment, she turned to me and, out of Alex’s earshot, whispered, “He really does seem scared of you.”
I nodded ruefully. “I told you. It’s really frustrating. I don’t know how to get him past it.”
She reached out for my forearm. “He just needs time. You were there when she died. He associates you with what happened to her.”
“Yeah, but this is something else . . . it started before.”
Tess’s face scrunched up with confusion, then she turned to look at Alex.
“Why don’t we get him out of this room? Take him out somewhere nice, give him something to smile about.” She didn’t wait for an answer and went up to Alex. She kneeled down so her face was level with his.
“How about that, Alex?” she asked him. “Would you like to go out and get some pizza or something? What’s your favorite food? Anywhere you like, just say the word.”
It didn’t take long for Alex to succumb to her charms, and she coaxed the first quasi-smile I’d seen out of him when she said the Cheesecake Factory was her favorite, too. I watched from a distance as they debated the relative awesomeness of Key lime versus Oreo, but then the glowing kindling in my stomach got snuffed out when Alex asked the killer question he’d asked so many times before.
“What about my mama? Is she going to come with us?”
Tess glanced at me, then turned to Alex, reached out and held his hand, and said, “No, sweetheart, I’m afraid your mommy won’t be coming with us.”
“Why not?” Alex asked. “Where is she?”
Tess hesitated, then I saw her take in a deep breath and she said the words. “She’s in heaven, sweetheart.”
I felt my chest wall cave in.
The three of us ended up taking Alex to SeaWorld after that heart-wrenching chat, and throughout it all, Tess was nothing less than remarkable. She’d even managed to get him to eat something, which was more t
han Jules or I had managed. Alex was still clearly wary of me, avoiding eye contact and using Tess as a buffer between me and him. I decided the best I could do was to give him some space and let Tess keep on working her magic. We had a whole life ahead of us to work things out.
We got back to the hotel at about six, and Tess went off to try to put Alex to bed. Our setup was a one-bedroom suite, which had a separate living room, and an additional bedroom connecting to it. I went down to the bar and got myself a beer. I was feeling real antsy. A whole day had passed and I’d done nothing to try to get to the bottom of what happened to Michelle beyond streaming through a few hundred cold, troubled, or just plain vacant stares. I wasn’t used to being this passive, and it was killing me. Problem was, it was now Sunday evening, and I was kind of helpless, waiting for Villaverde to come back with news from the tech guys or from the homicide detectives who were investigating the shootings. I was also aware of the need to make sure Alex was being looked after, and having Tess around had certainly helped make him feel better.
Still, I needed to do something. But I was drawing a blank at what I actually could do.
I was debating whether or not to order another beer when Tess showed up and slid onto the stool next to mine.
“You come here often?” she asked, a tired smile struggling to break out.
I managed a brief smile back. “My girlfriend’s in our room. We’ll have to use yours.”
She raised an eyebrow and said, “You know what? That line came to you way too easily.” Her eyes lingered on me for a mock-scrutinizing couple of seconds, then she turned to the barman and used her fingers to indicate we needed two more bottles.
“Is he asleep?”
Tess nodded. “Jules is with him. She’s great, by the way. A real find. You were lucky to have her here.”
I shrugged and stared away into nothing. “Yeah, it’s been a lucky weekend all around.”
She moved in closer and ran her hand through the hair at the back of my head. “You okay, baby?”
I wasn’t sure what I was feeling. I stayed silent for a moment, just staring at the monster collection of bottles behind the bar. “It’s weird,” I finally said. “I haven’t thought about her for years. I mean, literally. And then she calls up and . . .” I turned to face Tess. “She’s gone, and I have a son. Just like that.”
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