Short Straw

by Stuart Woods

  VITTORIO DUCKED AND WAITED for Cupie to drive away, then he followed. Cupie stopped at a side entrance to a hotel, and Barbara ran from the building and dived into the rear seat of the Toyota. Cupie was still being careful. Good.

  Vittorio followed at a distance as the Toyota made its way out of town, north toward Tijuana. He wasn't sure just how he was going to handle this yet, but what he really wanted was to kidnap her himself and sell her to a pimp in Tijuana. Maybe life as a sex slave in a Mexican whorehouse would be good for her.

  BOB MARTINEZ SAT IN his car with a detective, across the street from the Santa Fe County Corrections Center, and watched the day's crop of released inmates leave the building.

  "You know any of these guys, Pedro?" he asked the detective. "I'm looking for a man who might do a contract killing."

  Pedro Alvarez watched the men through small binoculars. "I know three of them," he said. "One is a burglar, one is a car thief and the third is what you might call a jack-of-all-trades."

  "What's the jack's name?"

  "Harold Fuentes," Pedro replied, as he watched Fuentes get into a pickup truck with a woman. "He's your best bet."

  "Then let's follow him."

  "What do you expect to learn by doing that? I could just brace the guy."

  "We don't have enough to charge him with anything yet. Let's just see where he goes and what he does."

  Pedro started the car and followed the pickup at a distance.

  "You know where he lives?" Martinez asked.

  "Off Agua Fria, in a little adobe," Pedro replied.

  Martinez watched as Fuentes passed Agua Fria without turning. "Harold appears to be going somewhere else," he said.

  Fuentes passed the road to the interstate without turning. "There's nothing out here but a water-treatment plant and the airport," Pedro said.

  "Let's see which one he chooses," Martinez replied.

  Fuentes turned left toward the airport.

  "You know who lives out here?" Pedro said.

  "Yeah, Joe Big Bear, or at least he did before Ed Eagle so kindly blew him away for us."

  Fuentes drove past the big junkyard, then turned into a road alongside it.

  "Bingo," Pedro said.

  "Stop here, and let's see what he does," Martinez ordered.

  Pedro pulled over and looked through his binoculars. "He's trying to get into Big Bear's trailer," he said. "The woman is keeping watch. He's fiddling with the lock." He watched as Fuentes gave up on the lock, returned to the pickup for a tire iron, then jimmied the door. The woman followed him inside.

  "Now we've got a charge," Martinez said. "Let's go get him."

  Pedro drove down the road and turned into the trailer's driveway, then coasted to a stop. "Are you carrying?" he said to the D.A.

  "You bet," Martinez said, producing a Walther.380. "Let's go."

  The two men got out of the car and walked to the trailer, its door ajar. They peeked inside and saw Fuentes and the woman ransacking the place.

  "Here!" the woman cried, opening the undersink cabinet. "He's got a safe."

  They watched as Fuentes knelt in front of the safe, took hold of it and tried to lift it. "It's bolted down," he said, taking the tire iron to the plywood floor.

  Martinez signaled Pedro to wait, and the two men watched through the door until Fuentes had the safe free of the floor. "Now," he said, stepping back and letting the detective precede him.

  Pedro pushed open the door, held out his gun and yelled, "Freeze, police!"

  Fuentes was lifting the safe from under the sink, and he dropped it as if it were red hot and turned around. "What?" he said. "What's going on?"

  "You're under arrest for burglary, both of you," Pedro said.

  "What are you talking about? My wife and me live here."

  "Come on, Harold, this is Joe Big Bear's trailer."

  "I rented it from him the day before yesterday," Fuentes protested. "I've got the agreement in my truck."

  "You talked to Joe the day before yesterday?"

  "Sure, I did. He came to see me in jail."

  "Is that when you hired him to kill Ed Eagle?"

  "Now, wait a minute Detective Alvarez," Harold said. "Maybe I better explain this a little better."

  "Okay, Harold," Pedro said, producing handcuffs. "Let's go down to the station, and you can explain it to me and the D.A."

  Thirty-eight

  EAGLE AND SUSANNAH HAD LUNCH AT THE TESUQUE Market, sitting on the front porch. The weather was gorgeous, as it usually was in Santa Fe.

  "I'm kind of drowsy," Susannah said. "Maybe I'd better have a cup of coffee."

  "No, you should have a nap. What you have is a mild case of altitude sickness; you have to remember that we're at seven thousand feet of elevation here, and it takes at least twenty-four hours to get over it. Let's go back to the house, and you can stretch out for a while."

  They drove back up the mountain, and on the front doorstep Eagle picked up a Federal Express envelope with a shipping label showing that it had been sent from Mexico. He put Susannah to bed, then went into his study, sat down and opened the envelope with a real sense of satisfaction. Inside were six blank sheets of paper.

  Furious, he called Vittorio's cell phone, but all he got was voice mail. He tried Cupie's, too, and the same thing happened. What the hell was going on down there? Then he noticed the light on his answering machine was flashing. He pressed the message button.

  "Ed, it's Cupie," a voice said. "I've got some bad news: Vittorio is dead. We were on a ferry across the Gulf of California yesterday, and he disappeared from the upper deck. The coast guard has conducted a thorough search, and they haven't been able to find him. Vittorio couldn't swim, it seems. Apparently, he borrowed my cell phone, so that's gone, too. I won't be able to get another one until I get back to the states. I'm calling from a hotel in La Paz, but Barbara and I are leaving for Tijuana right now. I'll call you again when we're across the border."

  Eagle was stunned. Vittorio dead? Cupie and Barbara on their way to Tijuana? She was coming back to the States? The phone rang, and he picked it up. "Hello?"

  "Ed, it's Bob Martinez. We've arrested the man we believe called you from the Santa Fe jail. You might want to come down to the police station and hear what he has to say about the attempt on your life."

  "I'll be there in twenty minutes," Eagle said. He hung up and looked in on Susannah, who was sound asleep, then he got into the Range Rover and started for town.

  CUPIE DROVE ALONG at a steady sixty miles an hour, glancing regularly in his rearview mirror. For a long time he saw nothing that worried him, then he did. He drove faster, then slower. "Barbara?"

  "What?" she said from the backseat.

  "You sure there's nothing you want to tell me about that might cause the Mexican police to be interested in you?"

  "Cupie, I already told you, there's nothing. Now leave me alone."

  "Reason I ask is, there's a red car following us, keeping well back. When I speed up, he speeds up; when I slow down, he slows down."

  "Oh, shit," she said.

  "My sentiments exactly. Now, maybe if you told me what's going on here, it might help me figure out what to do."

  "I'll tell you what to do," she said. "You give me my gun back, and get ready to use yours."

  EAGLE WAS LED to a small room separated from an interrogation room by a one-way mirror. Martinez and a detective were waiting for him.

  "You know Detective Pedro Alvarez?" Martinez asked.

  "We've met in court, I believe," Eagle said, shaking the man's hand.

  "The gentleman handcuffed to the table in the next room is Harold Fuentes," Martinez said. "He's a small-time offender who imagines himself capable of bigger things. He was released from the county jail this morning and, with his wife, went directly to Joe Big Bear's trailer, broke in and started ransacking it. Pedro and I followed him and watched as he forcibly removed a safe that was bolted to the floor. We arrested him on a burglary charge, and we've
got somebody working on the safe right now, to see what he was stealing."

  "Have you questioned him at all?" Eagle asked.

  "Not yet."

  The door opened, and a uniformed officer walked in carrying a basket containing a substantial sum of cash. "Here we are, Mr. Martinez," the officer said. "The safe had over thirty-six thousand dollars in it and a copy of a receipt from Western Union, showing that a Pepe Oso Grande received a wire transfer of twenty-five thousand dollars the day before yesterday."

  "Spanish for Joe Big Bear," Alvarez said.

  "The money was wired from a bank in Mazatlan, Mexico," the officer said. "There was no name listed in the space for the sender."

  "Thank you," Martinez said. The man set down the basket and left.

  "My wife is in Mexico," Eagle said.

  "Pedro," Martinez said, "I think it's time for you to wring out Mr. Fuentes for us. We'll watch."

  Alvarez got up and left the room, and a moment later, appeared on the other side of the glass. Martinez turned up the volume on a speaker.

  "I've read you your rights," Alvarez said. "Do you understand them?"

  "Sure," Fuentes replied.

  "Sign this," Alvarez said, placing a sheet of paper before him. Fuentes signed.

  "Well, Harold," Alvarez said, "it's more than simple burglary, now; it's grand theft. There was thirty-six thousand dollars in that safe."

  Fuentes didn't looked surprised. "That money belongs to me," he said. "I didn't steal nothing."

  "So, the day before yesterday you were in Mexico, instead of in jail?"

  "Huh?"

  "Twenty-five thousand dollars of that money was wired from a bank in Mexico on that day. How'd you manage that, Harold?"

  "It was the woman wired it, then," Harold said. "The other twelve thousand, five hundred was mine, what I gave Joe Big Bear."

  "Let's start at the beginning of all this, Harold, and while you're telling me the story, don't leave out the part about the woman."

  "Okay, a couple of weeks ago, right before I got arrested and sent to jail, I'm sitting at a traffic light on Paseo de Peralta, and this woman in a big SUV pulls up next to me and waves. She says, 'Follow me; there's money in it for you,' and drives off. I'm curious, so I follow her. We go up Canyon Road, and we make a few turns and she parks, waves me over, gets out of her car and gets into my truck. She says she's heard that I'm a man who can get things done, and she has a job for me. Am I interested?

  "I say, maybe, and she says she wants somebody killed. I ask who, and she says her lawyer, name of Ed Eagle. I heard of him, and I ask why she wants him dead. She says, none of my business, and she says how much? I say fifty grand, and we bargain some. We settle on twenty-five grand, all of it up front, because after that moment, we won't meet again."

  "Wait a minute, Harold," Alvarez said. "You're telling me she gave you twenty-five grand up front? What's to keep you from just walking away with the money and doing nothing?"

  "That's what I figured to do," Fuentes said, "but after she counts out the cash from her pocketbook, she says there's another guy who's going to be watching me, and if the job doesn't get done, he's going to kill me."

  "And you believed her?"

  "Sort of, yeah."

  "Did she tell you her name?"

  "No, and I didn't ask. I just figured she was a dissatisfied client of Eagle's."

  "And when did you hear from her next?"

  "I didn't hear from her again; I got busted on an old warrant the next day, and the judge gave me thirty days, half of it suspended."

  "Did you make any attempt to kill Ed Eagle?"

  "No."

  "So how did Joe Big Bear get involved in this?"

  "He was in at the same time I was, but I didn't have no truck with him. Then, a few days ago, he turns up in the visitor's room at the jail and asks for me. I sit down with him, and he says he's going to do the job on Eagle, and he wants twelve, five for it. He says he knows I was paid twenty-five, and he wants half. In fact, he insists.

  He says if I don't give him the money, he's going to visit my wife, kill her and steal it, so I call her, and she gives him the money. She'll tell you."

  "And that's it?"

  "Oh, yeah, he wants the cell phone number of the woman who hired me."

  "You had her cell phone number? You didn't mention that before."

  "Yeah, she gave me the number and told me to call her when Eagle was dead."

  "What was the number?"

  Fuentes gave it to him.

  "So did Joe Big Bear contact her?"

  "I guess so, because there was all that money in his safe. I mean, I just went there to get my twelve, five back, see? I wasn't stealing it."

  EAGLE, WATCHING AND LISTENING with Martinez in the next room turned to the D.A. "Bob, I got a message this morning: she's driving from La Paz up the Baja to Tijuana, with a private detective I hired, and she'll cross into San Diego, probably tonight. Can you get the cops there to pick her up?"

  Martinez got up. "I'll go see Judge O'Hara for a warrant; I know what golf course he's playing on."

  Thirty-nine

  CUPIE WAITED UNTIL HE WENT AROUND A SHARP CURVE, separating him from the red car, then he floored the Toyota. It didn't exactly give him whiplash, but the V-6 began to put on speed, while Cupie watched the rearview mirror. The red car was a good half mile behind him, so he had a thirty-or forty-second edge.

  The road whipped back in the other direction, putting two curves between the Toyota and the red car, and then Cupie saw exactly what he wanted: a dirt road to the left, climbing a hill into a grove of pinons. He jerked the wheel and left the main road. The dirt road was little more than a track, and the Toyota did some dancing.

  "What the hell is going on?" Barbara shouted from the rear seat.

  "Shut up," Cupie explained. He whipped the car to the left behind some trees and quickly got out, peering through the branches at the road below him. The red car shot by, having picked up speed.

  For a moment, Cupie had thought he saw Vittorio at the wheel, but he guessed his mind must be playing tricks. He turned to Barbara, who was leaning out the rear window. "Break out the sandwiches," he said. "We're having lunch here."

  VITTORIO CAME OUT of the first curve and saw an empty road ahead. He stood on the accelerator and by the time he got around the second curve, he was doing eighty. He went around several more curves before he realized he had been snookered. He had underestimated Cupie.

  He slowed to make a U-turn, but before he could execute it he saw blue lights flashing in his rearview mirror. A police car came up quickly and sat on his bumper. Behind that was the black Suburban. He pulled over, rolled down his window and placed his hands on the steering wheel.

  The police car pulled in front of him and stopped, and from the passenger side emerged an officer wearing a captain's insignia, the same cop he had seen in the rear seat of the Suburban the last time he had been stopped.

  The captain strolled toward him in a leisurely fashion, then stopped, looking astonished. "Dios mio!" he said. "Are you a dead man?"

  "Not quite," Vittorio replied.

  "But there was a search of the Gulf for you."

  "I slipped and fell overboard from the ferry, but a fishing boat picked me up and took me to Cabo San Lucas."

  "You are a very lucky man, senor…"

  "Vittorio."

  "Yes, I remember the name."

  "What can I do for you?"

  "You were driving very fast, Senor Vittorio. The speed limit on this road is one hundred kilometers per hour; that's sixty-two miles per hour."

  "I'm very sorry," Vittorio said. "It's a mostly empty road, and I wasn't paying attention."

  "Would you step out of the car, please, senor?"

  Vittorio reached outside and opened the car door, so that his hands would remain in view. He wasn't going to give this man an excuse to shoot him. "How can I help you?" he asked the cop.

  "You can tell me where is the woman you an
d the other gringo had with you."

  Vittorio shrugged. "I expect she is in New York City," he said. "We put her aboard an airplane in Puerto Vallarta."

  "Senor," the captain said, "nothing happens in Puerto Vallarta that I don't know about. No charter airplane took off from the airport that morning."

  "Well, she said she had arranged a charter, and we left her there. Perhaps…"

  "Senor, you are beginning to try my patience. Open the trunk immediately."

  Vittorio got the keys from the ignition, walked to the rear of the car and opened the trunk. He kept his hand ready to draw the.45 in the holster on his belt. The captain leaned forward to peer inside, but there was only a spare tire and Vittorio's single piece of luggage.

  The cop spun around, anger on his face and his hand on his gun. "Where is she?"

  "Captain, I give you my word, I don't know where she is. As you can see, I am traveling alone, and I only wish to drive to Tijuana and return to my country."

  "Where is your partner, Senor Cupie?"

  "I don't know. After I fell off the ferry, I never saw him again. I expect that, since he must think I'm dead, too, he went home to Los Angeles."

  The captain seemed to cool off a bit. "Perhaps you are right, senor," he said.

  "Captain, may I ask, why are you so interested in this woman?"

  "Because she is a murderer," he replied.

  Vittorio was not shocked to hear this. "And who did she murder?"

  "My nephew."

  "Please accept my condolences, captain. When did this happen?"

  "Some years ago. She came to Puerto Vallarta with another woman on a vacation-she used a different name, then. She met my nephew at the bar of her hotel, and they spent the remainder of the evening… entertaining each other. The following morning she checked out of the hotel, and the maid found my nephew's body. He had been killed by a knife in his heart. Then, earlier this week, she checked into another hotel in Puerto Vallarta, and an employee there, who had formerly worked at the hotel where the murder took place, recognized her, even though she had changed her appearance."