While Chiclet talked, Pescatore scoped him. Rolex, gold bracelet, a wad of cash swelling a pocket of the pale blue shirt. Smells came off the man in waves: sweat, cologne, hair gel, cheap rum, chewing gum.
La Rana walked past the counter to a bathroom in back. Chiclet finished the call. Pescatore explained his situation, his hopes of reaching Chicago. Chiclet listened, drank, fiddled with his phones, and avoided eye contact. Pescatore realized that the smuggler wasn’t capable of having a civil conversation with him. Chiclet saw him as human freight, merchandise, a commodity to be bought and sold, shipped from here to there after extracting maximum profit.
“Fucking Cubans,” Chiclet said. “Why don’t you take a boat to Miami instead of coming all the way here to break our balls?”
“The sharks, hermano. I’d rather take my chances on dry land.”
“The sharks.” Chiclet swigged from the bottle. “Not enough sharks to eat all the putos in Cuba. Mucho puto in Cuba, no?”
“Compared to where?” Pescatore heard himself retort. “Honduras?”
His accent had wavered. His mask had slipped. Not that he really cared. He’d had about enough of this humiliating little dance.
Chiclet’s jaws worked the gum harder. In his line of business, people didn’t talk back. They obeyed orders, kissed ass, begged and pleaded. The sudden impudence had put him on guard.
Pescatore planted his feet, ready to move.
He’s gonna curse me out and slap me around, he thought, or tell me I’ve got cojones and offer me a drink.
He never got a chance to find out. The door opened. Two men entered, silhouetted against the evening light. Pescatore gave thanks and praise. He felt a jolt of the confidence that had enabled him to stroll unarmed into Gangsterland. It came from having two of the baddest cops in Mexico as backup. Ex-cops, really, but he wouldn’t have traded them for Wyatt Earp and Wild Bill Hickok.
Porthos was the muscle. Serious wingspan, and an excess forty pounds that made him even more imposing. Athos was four inches shorter and pushing sixty, but his marksman’s stare emanated menace. Both men wore baseball caps and camouflage vests. They gripped the guns in their belts but did not draw.
“¿Que onda?” Chiclet growled. “Those cabrones are judiciales.”
Pescatore didn’t waste time. With all the command presence he could muster, he declared, “Absolutely correct. They are judiciales, and so am I. And you are under arrest, Héctor Talavera. Stand up, turn around, and put your hands behind your back. Right now.”
Frozen in disbelief, the smugglers and the mareros looked back and forth between Pescatore and the newcomers. Pescatore slid to his feet, producing a pair of handcuffs from a pocket. He grabbed Chiclet by the arm and pulled him up. To his surprise, the smuggler complied, rising like a sleepwalker.
This is gonna work, Pescatore thought. Smooth as silk. Easy as pie.
The first cuff had clicked onto the first wrist when he heard a toilet flush. In a kind of slow-motion delayed reaction, he turned to see La Rana emerge from the bathroom. La Rana took in the scene. His mouth and eyes opened wide. Before Pescatore could order him not to do anything stupid, he did something stupid.
La Rana charged, his legs pumping, his bald head lowering. Reluctant to release his captive, Pescatore managed at the last moment to duck and pivot, minimizing the impact. The tackle took him down and overturned a table. As they grappled on the floor, he heard a brawl break loose. Shouts, curses, bodies colliding, furniture crashing.
Pescatore was in better shape than La Rana. The urge to hit someone had been building in him for days. It didn’t take him long to roll on top of his assailant and punch him senseless. He gave La Rana an extra shot between the eyes. From his crouch, he saw Porthos doing damage with windmill arms, blows resonating, men dropping. He saw Chiclet contorted over a table, the handcuffs dangling from his wrist. The smuggler had the barrel of a pistol in his ear. Athos had pinned Chiclet’s head to the table with the pistol and appeared intent on driving the barrel into the ear and through the skull into the wood below.
Athos looked up. When he spoke, his voice was loud enough to cut through the racket but calm given the circumstances.
“Everyone settle down! Or I blow this monkey’s brains out.”
Chiclet shrieked at his men to obey. Gradually, the commotion came to a stop. Pescatore scrambled to finish handcuffing Chiclet and retrieve the phones. Pescatore, Athos, and Porthos rushed the prisoner outside and into a black Suburban. Their driver sped along unpaved lanes. The vehicle banged over potholes and rocks, raising dust in its wake.
Sitting on the prisoner’s right, Pescatore frisked him. He breathed through his mouth to ward off the smells. Porthos pulled a burlap sack over Chiclet’s head. The Suburban bounced onto a main road.
Pescatore gripped Chiclet’s arm. The pulse hammered against his fingertips, echoing his own heartbeat. Beneath the burlap, the captive made a kind of humming sound—between a moan and a sigh.
Fifteen minutes later, the two-lane road had brought them to the outskirts of town. Migrants hiked on the shoulder of the road. Pescatore stared through the orange glow of dusk in his window.
“Wait a minute!” He lunged forward and grabbed the driver. “Pull over! Pull over here, please.”
The driver hit the brakes. Pescatore reached into Chiclet’s breast pocket and removed the wad of bills. The prisoner remained inert. Pescatore lifted the shirt and rifled through the fanny pack he had found while frisking him. Another roll of cash, mostly U.S. dollars.
“What are you doing?” Athos demanded.
“Forgive me, Comandante, I’ll be right back.” Pescatore poked Chiclet. “Mr. Talavera, I’m confiscating these funds for official business.”
He got out and sprinted down the road. An evening breeze ruffled bushes and palm trees. His foot speed had been useful in the Patrol. When he thought back, he remembered the chases most of all. Night after night of running all out, full tilt, hell-bent.
A bus stop took shape in the dusk. Oscar stood in front of the hutlike wooden shelter. Nelvita sat inside. Oscar had a duffel bag over his shoulder, and he held his sister’s pink backpack as well. He gestured, apparently imploring her to get up. She huddled on the bench.
“Excuse me, Oscar.” Pescatore spoke his usual Spanish inflected by Buenos Aires, Tijuana, and Chicago. “I need to talk to you.”
The teenager whirled. He backed up, positioning himself in front of his sister, and confronted the latest specter in the horror movie that his life had become: a disheveled madman with a strange accent who had come tearing out of the shadows and addressed him by name.
“Who are you?” Oscar demanded. “What do you want?”
Hands on knees, Pescatore panted. After the hangover, the fight, and the sprint, he was winded. Oscar inserted his hand into the duffel bag. Maybe he carried a knife or a club, showing he had a little street sense after all.
“Sorry to startle you.” Pescatore straightened. “I was at the Honduran place today in Pakal-Na. That’s how I know your name.”
Oscar stared at him. A truck rumbled by. Pescatore glanced back at the lights of the Suburban waiting down the road.
“Where are you from?” Oscar asked. “Are you a, uh, guide?”
“No.”
Pescatore advanced cautiously into the bus shelter. He looked around before extending the pile of cash to Oscar. There was blood on Pescatore’s knuckles—a souvenir of the capture. He tried to avoid staining the bills.
“Take this,” he said.
Oscar didn’t move. Nelvita stood up, pushing her hair back. Her eyes were riveted on the money.
“Seriously, take it,” Pescatore said. “About six thousand dollars. If I were you, I’d go home to El Salvador. Use it for college. Start a business. What you’re planning to do is against American law, and I don’t like it. But if you really want to go north, call your parents. Tell them you’ve got cash. You could fly to Sonora, or take a bus. They could send someone for you. Y
ou have options now.”
He placed his free hand on Oscar’s shoulder and offered the cash again. The youth accepted it, head down.
“Whatever you do,” Pescatore whispered, “promise me you won’t let that girl near that goddamn train.”
Oscar called him “señor,” asked God to bless him, stammered his thanks.
“You’re welcome. Now get off the street quick.”
Pescatore ran back to the Suburban, propelled by pure exhilaration. He slid into his seat.
“All set.”
The vehicle swung onto the road. Athos turned. In a low voice, he asked, “What was all that, muchacho?”
Pescatore remembered a phrase he had heard Leo Méndez use.
“Redistribution of wealth.”
The motel was outside of town. Pescatore had rented three rooms and the presidential suite, whose only conceivable qualification for that designation was its size. Porthos installed Chiclet in an upright chair. Athos and Pescatore pored through the prisoner’s wallet, cell phones, and pocket litter.
Porthos removed the sack from Chiclet’s head. The smuggler blinked. His pompadour was a mess. Shudders racked him. His lips moved without sound. The sneer had evaporated. His eyes darted among his captors.
Chiclet surely imagined that a roster of time-honored torments awaited him. Beatings. Cigarette burns. Head-dunking in the bathtub. Carbonated liquid sprayed up the nose. Electric shocks to strategic anatomical areas.
In reality, Pescatore had never tortured a suspect and wasn’t about to start. As deputy chiefs of the Diogenes Group of Tijuana, Athos and Porthos had embraced a gospel of humane policing.
But Chiclet didn’t know any of that.
“All right, guey,” Pescatore snapped. “We don’t have time to fuck around. Nobody’s hurt you yet. You still have full use of your limbs and organs. That’ll change fast if you don’t talk. I want to skip the part where you whine and bitch and lie and tell us we’ve got the wrong guy, you don’t know what we’re talking about, all that shit. We know who you are and what you did. It’s time to get with the program. Otherwise you’ll wish you were never born. Understood?”
Chiclet made the humming-moaning sound. His eyes teared up.
“What do you want?” he croaked.
“I want to know what happened with those African women in Tecate.”
Part I
Chapter 1
On the day Pescatore returned from Paris, Isabel sent an intriguing invitation.
The e-mail appeared on his phone when his flight landed at Dulles. He had spent a week visiting Fatima Belhaj. It had not been restful.
Isabel proposed Saturday lunch at the Argentine restaurant he liked. She wanted to discuss a “business matter.”
The words bounced around in his head overnight. His move from Buenos Aires to DC in the spring had been a business decision. His Argentine boss, Facundo Hyman Bassat, had decided that the private investigations firm needed its American employee, Pescatore, based in Washington to handle international clients. Meanwhile, Isabel had been promoted again at Homeland Security, where she now oversaw operations related to the Mexican border and Latin America. If she wanted to, she could open doors for the new U.S. branch of Villa Crespo International Investigations and Security. After all, Facundo had worked for her before. Pescatore had worked with her and almost married her. After teaming up again on a terrorism case, Pescatore and Isabel had established a cautious friendship. She worked nonstop, though, and he was reluctant to hit her up for business opportunities on the rare occasions when he saw her.
But maybe, he told himself in the morning, she had decided to steer something his way: a lead, a client, a contract. He wasn’t sure what to wear. He put on a cotton pullover shirt and jeans, then changed his mind—too casual. The dress slacks and blazer he tried next looked stiff and goofy. He settled on jeans, a button-down white shirt, and a lightweight gray sports jacket.
Pescatore had found an apartment near Western Avenue, the boundary between the District of Columbia and the state of Maryland. An Israeli friend of Facundo’s was subletting him a furnished one-bedroom in a 1970s-era complex. The imposing lobby and red-carpeted hallways recalled an aging hotel. The residents were young professionals, senior citizens, foreign diplomats. One way or another, they were passing through. Like him.
At 1:00 p.m., he steered his black Impala past empty sunbaked sidewalks. After the tumult and swagger of Buenos Aires, this upscale frontier of the U.S. capital seemed desolate, as if the government had ordered an evacuation and forgotten to tell him.
Wisconsin Avenue became Rockville Pike and carved north through a prairie of malls, chain stores, and fast-food outlets. The CD player cranked Springsteen. “Death to My Hometown.”
The restaurant was tucked between a martial arts school and a discount clothing store in a shopping plaza. Isabel Puente was already at the table. Ever since San Diego, when she ran him as a reluctant Internal Affairs source in the Border Patrol, she had arrived early for meets to do recon, scan the clientele, check the exits. He knew from experience that the purse hooked on the right side of her chair held her Glock.
“Back to the wall, packing heat,” he said, kissing her on the cheek. “Taking no chances in Rockville, huh?”
“It’s not just physical threats,” she said. “I can’t afford to sit near some nosy bureaucrat. Or a foreign government official. Or a sneaky journalist. Washington is a small town. You can commit career suicide by opening your mouth in the wrong place.”
“Your secrets are safe at El Patio.”
The restaurant was like a hidden outpost in the suburban moonscape. The narrow deep interior was painted in warm gold tones. The sound system played the gravelly baritone of Alberto Marino singing a tango. On the walls were amateur paintings of Carlos Gardel, the waterfront in La Boca, the Obelisk on Nueve de Julio Avenue. A grocery area in back offered dulce de leche, mate tea, pastries, wine. The clientele were mostly families, Argentine and Central American, immigrants and expats. Many had their eyes lifted to a Spanish-league soccer game on the overhead screens. A large family, probably Salvadoran, occupied a nearby table. The mother used one hand to push a stroller back and forth, quieting a baby girl who wore an elaborate pink ribbon around her head like a gypsy princess. Two small boys dueled in the aisle with sword-shaped balloons, making a racket that nobody minded.
“This is like my little hangout,” Pescatore said. “A bona fide neighborhood joint. Except there’s no neighborhood.”
“You miss Buenos Aires.”
“In BA, I missed San Diego.”
“In San Diego, you wouldn’t stop talking about Chicago. Mr. Nostalgia.” She studied him. “You look tired.”
He could have said the same about her. But Isabel always looked good. Her black hair had grown long and hung down her back. Diagonal zippers adorned her black dress, which narrowed at the waist to accentuate her curves and showed the right amount of thigh and cleavage. She wore the usual high heels that pushed her above five five.
“I’m jet-lagged,” he said. “I got back from Paris yesterday.”
“Oh. How’s Fatima?”
“Good. How’s Hasselhoff?”
“Good.” Her smile was playful. “And his name, my friend, is Howard.”
“Right. Sorry.”
Isabel was dating a high-powered lawyer. Pescatore had run into them strolling arm in arm in Georgetown and endured introductions and sidewalk small talk. Howard was tall, tanned, and toothy, reminding Pescatore of a young East Coast version of the former Baywatch star.
“Are you still taking college courses?” Isabel asked.
“University of Maryland. If I bear down, I’ll have my degree in a year.”
They ordered empanadas and a grilled-meat platter for two. To his surprise, Isabel hit the wine pretty hard. Toward the end of the meal, she asked about work. He told her that Facundo Hyman’s U.S. expansion had produced its first case. Pescatore had spent time guarding an executive in Venezuela
and overseeing his move to Florida.
“I was going back and forth to Caracas,” he said. “It got rowdy—threats, anti-Semitic graffiti, a kidnap attempt. Thugs on motorcycles chased us one night. These cabrones wear red berets, call themselves revolutionaries. Buncha criminals.”
“Are you busy now?”
“Not really.”
“Lots of competition.”
“Yep. Seems like every ex-spook, ex-agent, ex-anybody in town has something going: investigations, consulting.”
Isabel surveyed the surrounding tables. She sipped cappuccino, her oval wide-set eyes hovering above the cup. In Washington, her beauty had acquired an air of solitude.
Here comes the business matter, he thought.
“Do you have time for a case?”
“Of course. You bet. Absolutely.” He sat up straight. “For who? ICE? Homeland Security Investigations?”
“You’d report to me.” She leaned forward. “It requires travel. The border, Mexico. Maybe Central America.”
He nodded, restraining the impulse to ask questions.
Her hands tore at discarded sugar packets on the table, reducing them to tiny squares.
“I need someone I can trust,” she said. “Someone who knows the Line. And Latin America.”
“Para servirle.”
“Are you familiar with the case of the off-duty Customs and Border Protection officer who disappeared in Tijuana a couple of weeks ago?”
“Little bit.”
“And the massacre in Tecate? The female aliens in the motel.”
“Yeah. Awful.”
“The cases are related.”
“Jeez. I didn’t hear that.”
As was her habit when angry or pensive, she put her thumb to her teeth.
“It’s unconfirmed intel.” She signaled the waitress for the check. “Why don’t you come to my office, take a look at some material?”
“Now?”
“You should start ASAP.”
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