John Sanford - Prey 13 - Mortal Prey.txt

by Mortal Prey(lit)

  “She said she just needed an extra squirt of money to supplement her disability pension,” the manager told them. “She was very good. The arrangement was convenient for everybody.”

  “Is there any possibility that she took the job because she knew she would meet Paulo Mejia?” Lucas asked.

  The manager shook his head. “Mr. Mejia never came here—only the once, to look at the parking for an appraisal he was doing. I introduced them when he needed some numbers.”

  “Purely by chance.”

  He nodded. “By chance.” He explained that he didn’t know Mejia was coming that day, and that she’d come in at the last minute to deal with a money problem involving a group of Americans who had asked to extend their vacation stay. “She could not have planned it.”

  He also characterized her as cheerful and hardworking, and said that her hours were increasing each month. “I would have liked to employ her full-time, if she had not been a foreigner,” he said. “She worked very well.”

  Mallard asked about pictures, and the manager shrugged. “How often do you take pictures of people in your office? We’re not tourists—we work here.”

  ON THE WAY back to the hotel, all four of them were quiet, thinking their own thoughts, until Lucas asked Martin, “Why is it that everybody speaks English? Everybody we’ve seen. . . .”

  Martin sighed. “Gringo imperialism. Cancún business is Americans and Canadians. And English people, and now some Germans. Always Israelis. There’s a story—not a story, you would call it a line— about Cancún,” Martin said. “It’s that Cancún is just like Miami—except in Miami, they speak Spanish.”

  AT THE HOTEL ,Martin got out of the truck, shook hands with the three Americans, and asked Lucas to get the name of the San Francisco store where he’d bought the jacket. Lucas said he would find it and call back.

  “Not much here,” Lucas said, as he watched Martin drive away. Then he, Mallard, and Malone crossed into the cool of the hotel.

  “But we got a deal with old man Mejia, which is the main thing,” Mallard said. “If he decides to put a price on her head, Rinker’s gonna have a hard time getting any help from the underground. Word’ll get around.”

  “You have more faith than I do,” Lucas said. “Most of the fuckin’ underground can’t read a TV Guide.”

  “I’m not talking about the assholes on the corner,” Mallard said. “I’m talking about the gun dealers and the moneymen and the document people. They’ll hear. She’ll have trouble moving.”

  Lucas shook his head; he disagreed. The disagreement was fundamental, and generally divided all cops everywhere: Some believed in underlying social order, in which messages got relayed and people kept an eye out, and bosses reigned and buttonmen were ready to take orders, and a network connected them. And some cops believed in social chaos, in which most events occurred through accident, coincidence, stupidity, cupidity, and luck, both good and bad. Lucas fell into the chaos camp, while Mallard and Malone believed in the underlying order.

  WHEN WORKING OUT the trip to Mexico, Mallard had allowed extra time for a certain inefficiency; but Martin had been so ruthlessly efficient that they were done at two o’clock, mission more or less accomplished.

  “Swim?” Malone asked.

  “Too hot,” Lucas said. “I’m gonna get a beer at the bar, then a couple of papers, and lay up in my room with the air-conditioning on. Maybe swim before dinner?”

  “Not bad,” Mallard said. “I’m for a beer or two.”

  “I’ll join you,” Malone said. “But I gotta run up to my room for a minute.”

  Lucas and Mallard stopped at the hotel gift shop and bought copies of the Times and the Wall Street Journal, carried the papers into the cool of the bar, got a booth, and ordered Dos Equis.

  “You read the editorials?” Mallard asked.

  “Yeah, though I know it’s wrong,” Lucas said.

  “You want the Fascists or the Commies?”

  Lucas considered for a moment, then said, “Fascists,” and Mallard passed him the Journal. They both opened to the editorial pages, looked over the offerings, and then Lucas asked, casually, “How bad you got it for Malone?”

  Mallard’s newspaper folded down. He looked at Lucas for a long moment, then sighed and said, “Is it that obvious?”

  “Yup,” Lucas said.

  “The goddamn woman drives me crazy. I know you guys . . .” He didn’t say it—that Lucas and Malone once spent a happy weekend together. “That’s not a big deal. I just . . . hunger after her. I thought I was hiding it pretty well.”

  “I’m a trained investigator,” Lucas said. He looked at an editorial headline that said, “ ‘Sweatshops’ Often Build Sustaining Family Businesses.” After a moment of silence from Mallard, he added, “I suspect nobody else knows, except any trained investigators you might have at the FBI. And Malone, of course.”

  Mallard’s eyebrows went up. “You think she knows?”

  “Jesus Christ, Louis, she knew before you did,” Lucas said. “Women always know that shit first. And she’s not backing away. If I were you, I’d set up a moment somewhere. Have a few drinks around the pool tonight, tell her a few stories, give her a chance to tell you a few, and you know, going up stairs, put a hand on her.”

  “What about the drywall guy? The Sheetrocker?”

  “Fuck the drywall guy. You’re not playing tennis.”

  “Have to be more than a few drinks,” Mallard said gloomily. He looked scared to death.

  “It’s no big deal, Louis,” Lucas said. “People do it all the time.”

  “Not me,” Mallard said. “I’m not exactly your romantic hero.”

  “Yes, you are, Louis. You’re a big wheel in the FBI. You’re involved in international intrigue. You carry a great big gun. You spend the taxpayers’ money like it was water.”

  “I’m paying for the beer personally.”

  “Louis, what the fuck are you talking about?”

  “Yeah, yeah.” The phone in his pocket rang and he slipped it out, answered, listened for a moment, then said, “Oh, boy. When? We’ll be out front.” He clicked it shut and said, “Martin’s coming back. They found that guy who might have been the driver.”

  “Dead?”

  “Not yet. But he’s in terrible shape. Martin says he was tortured.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Here. Cancún. He was dumped at a hospital. Martin’ll be here in five minutes.”

  MALONE CAME OUT of the elevator as Mallard was ringing her room. Mallard explained about the phone call on the way to the door. Martin roared in three minutes later, parting the clouds of Volkswagen Beetles like a wolf going through a flock of sheep. “He’s at the hospital now,” he said, as they scrambled aboard.

  “How bad?” Lucas asked.

  “He could die before we get there,” Martin said. His face had gone grim as a crocodile’s, and the easy charm had vanished. They bounced over a curb going out of the parking lot, onto the strip. Lucas had no idea of where they were going. The GMC was rigged with a siren to go with the flasher lights above the bumper, and Martin punched the truck through the traffic.

  An unknown person had driven an old Toyota Corolla over a curb at the hospital emergency entrance, Martin said, had left the motor running and the passenger door open, and walked away. When a cop inside the emergency room noticed the car, he’d gone out to order the owner to move it—and found the tortured man sitting in a blood-soaked passenger seat. Nobody saw where the Corolla’s driver went. Nobody remembered what he looked like.

  Then: “Here it is.” Martin did a U-turn and dropped down a slanting concrete ramp to the emergency entrance at the hospital. A cop at the entrance tried to wave them away, but Martin put the truck astride the main door’s entrance ramp, hopped out, and showed the cop a card. The cop stepped back, and Mejia said something that Lucas thought might mean, “Park the truck,” and they all went inside.

  Three doctors were standing in a hallway, smoking. They saw M
artin coming, the Americans trailing behind, and the tallest of the three stepped toward them, shaking his head.

  “Muerto,”he said.

  “Shit,” Martin said. They spoke for a minute in Spanish, then Martin turned to Mallard, Malone, and Lucas. “He’s dead. He died five minutes after they got here. We will do an autopsy, because the doctors aren’t quite sure why he died—possibly shock. Possibly a stroke. Possibly something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “They don’t know.”

  “Can we see him?”

  “I’m going to. You may if you wish, but you may not want to.”

  The three Americans all looked at each other, and Malone said, “Let’s go.”

  • • •

  THE MAN CALLED Octavio Diaz was lying faceup, nude, on a stainless-steel medical cart. His face was covered with blood—his eyes had been poked out—and his arms and legs were black. Lucas took a look and said, “Jesus Christ, what happened to his mouth? And he’s black . . .”

  “Snipped his tongue off, looks like with a pair of wire cutters,” the tall doctor said. “Put his eyes out with a knife, and it appears they did something to burn his ears. . . . So he couldn’t see, hear, or speak. He was dying when he arrived. You can’t see it so much, but when we tried to get him out of his car . . . Look.” He picked up one of Diaz’s feet and lifted it above the cart. The leg hung in an almost perfect catenary arch down to his hip. “The bones have been minutely crushed in both legs and both arms. That must have taken a while, and they were very thorough. Picking him up, getting him out of the car, was like trying to pick up an oyster.”

  Malone made a sour face at the comparison and said, “Why didn’t they just dump him out in the jungle?”

  “Sending a message,” Lucas said.

  Martin nodded. “To anyone else who thinks the Mejias have gone soft. They wanted people to see this—to see him alive. The nurses and the doctors. There will be stories everywhere in Cancún in an hour.”

  “Wonder if they got anything out of him?” Mallard asked, looking down at the body.

  “What do you think?” Malone asked. She still had the sour face. “Don’t you think you might have answered the questions if they were doing . . . that?”

  “So if they’re looking for Rinker, or the assholes behind the shooting, they’ve probably got a jump on us,” Lucas said. He turned to the doctor. “Can you tell from the wounds when this was all done?”

  “The autopsy will give a good approximation.”

  “How about between, say, eleven o’clock and noon, today?”

  The doctor nodded. “From the way the blood is crusted around the eyes, from the extent of the bruising and discoloration . . . I’m no pathologist, but that might be a reasonable guess.”

  “Nice old man for a ganglord,” Lucas said to Malone. To Martin: “He may also have been sending a message to us. With the timing, I mean.”

  Martin nodded. “Not too much curiosity about this particular killing or the Mejias will be forced to prove their innocence by naming two high FBI officials and an American police officer as their alibis. And perhaps provide some details of what could be portrayed as an exceedingly cynical deal.”

  “Your English is really good,” Lucas said.

  “They didn’t have to do this,” Mallard said, moving his hand toward the ruins of Octavio Diaz.

  “The killing wasn’t done for you,” Martin said. “The timing of the killing, possibly—but that would be a minor aspect of it. Perhaps we are even reading too much into that. Mejia needed to send a message to the . . . population. I knew that. I knew that Diaz was a walking dead man. But I hoped to find him before he died.” He looked at the body again, reluctantly. “I was late.”

  5

  TOM AND MICHELLE LAWTON LIVED IN a stucco house surrounded by rubber trees, with one overhanging tangerine, in Atwater Village off Los Feliz, behind a concrete ditch that everyone in Los Angeles called a river.

  Down the river, if there’d been water in it, and you’d been allowed to boat it, and if you’d followed it far enough, you’d come to the Port of Long Beach—which is where the Lawtons berthed their sailboat. They got to the boat in a red ’96 Jeep Cherokee with a surfboard rack on top, down I-5 and the 710, rather than down the river.

  The Lawtons grew a little weed under lights, kept a couple of red-striped cats, and Michelle read mystery stories and made tangerine marmalade and worked part-time in a chain bookstore, while Tom took meetings on his screenplay. The screenplay involved the shadowy world of flesh smugglers, who ran human cargo into the States against the best efforts of outmanned and outgunned American law-enforcement officers, played by one or both of the Sheen brothers, although Tom’d take Jean-Claude Van Damme and a chick named Heather if he had to.

  The few people who’d read the screenplay suggested that it wasn’t realistic enough. Not enough violence, they said. Not enough brutality. A mailroom guy from ICM told Tom around a Garden Veggie sandwich in a bagel joint that it could use a little sexual and racial schtick. Maybe the human cargoes should be Chinese sex slaves, and he could try to sell the product to Jackie Chan.

  What pissed Tom off was that he and Michelle were smugglers of human flesh. Neither one had ever owned a gun or had more than the briefest encounters with officers of the law, for the good reason that they smuggled only one person at a time, never anything but Americans, and those persons always had good documents, which they brought themselves or Tom supplied through a Persian guy from Pasadena who made really good Texas driver’s licenses.

  The Lawtons weren’t overwhelmingly busy as smugglers, but their rates were high and a body a month pretty much covered their nut.

  THIS PARTICULAR BODY was a woman, who would come across on Wednesday evening. She had her own ID, and it was good, Tom’s man-in-Mexico said.

  At Wednesday noon, the Lawtons took their boat, the Star of Omaha, out the Long Beach channel. A six- or eight-knot breeze was blowing across the Islands, and they cut the diesel, put up the sails and headed south, taking their time. They weren’t going to Mexico. They were going to a spot fifteen miles off San Diego. Crossing the border was the job of their Mexican contact, a guy named Juan Duarte.

  Duarte owned a twenty-two-foot Boston Whaler Guardian, with a haze-gray hull, just like the American Coast Guard, but without the Coast Guard’s bow-mounted fifty-caliber machine gun. The hull color, which was standard, was the closest thing on earth to the Romulans’ cloaking device—from twenty feet, on a dark night, it was invisible. Juan put the body in the boat, waited for dark, then idled up the coast to a spot distinguished only by its GPS coordinates. He found the Lawtons with their sails backed, quietly waiting, a couple of cigarette coals glowing in the dark. Though the Star of Omaha ’s hull was white, they were very nearly as invisible as the Whaler.

  “Dude,” Duarte called, using the international sailboat hailing sign.

  “Juan, how are you?”

  Juan tossed a bowline over the sailboat’s foredeck and Tom used it to pull the two boats together; the Lawtons had dropped foam fenders over the side to keep them from knocking too hard. The body threw a bag into the sailboat, then clambered up and over the side into the sailboat’s cockpit.

  “Nice to see you,” Tom said, nodding at her in the dark. The body nodded back; she could smell tobacco on him, a pleasant odor. Michelle passed a small package to Juan: “It’s an olive-wood rosary from Jerusalem, for your mom. It was blessed in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Mt. Calvary is. Jimmy brought it back,” she said.

  “Thank him for me,” Juan said.

  “You good?” Tom called down to Juan.

  Juan held up a hand, meaning that he’d been paid, and said, “Cast me off, there.” Tom tossed the bowline back in the Whaler, and they drifted apart again. “See you,” Juan called. “Maybe got something week after next.”

  “Call me,” Tom said.

  That was pretty much all there was to it. The Lawtons gave the body a peanut-bu
tter-and-tangerine-marmalade sandwich, which she’d ordered in advance, through Duarte. They talked in a desultory way, as they loafed through the night. The body had a nice husky whiskey voice, and Tom thought if she kept talking he might get a little wood on the sound alone, though he’d never tell Michelle that. Tom turned on the running lights a few miles north of the rendezvous. They saw boats coming and going; nothing came close.

  By morning, they were off Long Beach again, and they took their time going in. There was always a chance that they’d be stopped by the Coasties, but the passenger’s documents were good and the boat was clean. Tom had no idea who the body was—his one really salient criminal characteristic was a determined lack of curiosity about his cargoes.