Making no effort to hide his reactions, Smith again scoffed. Louder than his previous one, he twisted his body to the side, seemingly to bite back some remark, before turning to stare our way.
“Sure you don’t,” he said, shifting back to face forward. “And I suppose all those inquiries you’ve been making lately are just...what? Looking to write a book? Maybe sign a documentary deal with Netflix?”
At most, I would peg the man at no more than five-ten. Maybe one-hundred-and-eighty-five pounds on a good day, in full clothes, after a big meal. Where he got off thinking he was the heavy in the room, that his brandishing a scowl and a little bit of attitude somehow made him the alpha, was beyond me.
Though again the urge to show him just how wrong that supposition was rose within me.
“We recently ran a sting on an operation in Baja with some of his former associates,” Diaz replied without missing a step. “I tried pulling his files to look into them and found I couldn’t gain access.
“Naturally, that made me a little curious.”
Lifting his eyebrows, Smith muttered, “Curious.”
Accompanying the word, he made a show of taking a step back away from the table.
The moment he did so, Jones leaned forward, resting his elbows on the edge of the table, a dance that had clearly been rehearsed between the two of them before.
“I believe you can understand and appreciate that we’re all on the same side here. We both want the same things, even if we’re going about getting them in different ways.”
Whatever goodwill Diaz had, any decorum that being in the conference room of the headquarters she oversaw demanded, evaporated. Unable to conjure the requisite propriety to banter back, she merely stood beside me, both of us silent.
“And right now, that means that we must ask this office to stand down with regards to Junior Ruiz.”
Falling quiet, he waited as his colleague stepped in behind him, taking the cue that it was again his part to speak in their little performance.
“And just to be clear,” Smith said, extending a hand our direction, “we’re not actually asking anything. Just go back to believing Junior Ruiz is in prison, and understand that if he were to get out, it would be for a damn good reason.”
Chapter Sixty-Seven
Tres Salinas’s request for a phone call was summarily dismissed. The deputy that first fielded the request had thrown back his head and laughed in a mocking tone, letting it be known how ridiculous he thought the entire thing.
In the name of adding extra insult to the situation, he had then walked to the far end of the building to fetch the sheriff. At that point, he’d shared the request that had been made, both of the men getting a good chuckle out of the ordeal.
A response that prompted Tres to do the only thing he could, making a move he really didn’t want to but had no other choice on, prompted by the deputy himself just moments before.
“Lawyer.”
Both still finishing off the laugh they’d had at his expense, the sheriff had managed, “Yeah, we’ll get right on that,” before the two had drifted away.
As they left, he could hear them continuing to banter back and forth, loud enough to be heard without being deciphered before erupting into laughter again.
In the time after their departure, Tres had been forced to stay in the holding cell, fighting against the combination of pain gripping his body and anxiety hurtling through his mind. Time after time he’d sat and repeated the single word over and over, well past the point where his broken nose had started to bleed from the pressure of yelling and his throat was raw.
Past moisture rising to his eyes from the sheer overload of everything being put upon his system.
So long he had repeated the process, saying it time and again, until at last his wait ended just after noon. A full three hours after making the formal request, the same deputy had arrived and ordered him to stick his hands through the open slot on the front of his cell.
Clamping his wrists in cuffs tight enough to break the skin, he had marched him down the hall into the interrogation room, right into the same seat where he had first encountered Luis Mendoza two days before.
With a second set of handcuffs, he tethered Tres to the ring rising from the middle of the table before stepping to the side and opening the door.
“Come on in,” he muttered, his graveled voice letting it be known he still wasn’t over what had happened at the clinic, hating every moment of what he was doing.
The young man that stepped into the room looked even younger than Tres. Clearly the lowest ranking attorney from the public defender’s office that could be found, he met Tres’s request for counsel, though only just barely.
Dressed in a pair of khakis and a sports coat, he had a thick shock of fawn-colored hair and oversized glasses with square frames that made his eyes look twice their natural size. Weighing no more than one-hundred-and-fifty pounds, his footfalls were silent on the floor as he stepped inside, pulling up halfway to the table. Mouth dropping open, he audibly gasped at the sight of Tres.
A move that, given the reflection staring back at Tres from the one-way glass on the wall, he couldn’t rightly disagree with. Especially with the fresh streaks of blood running from either nostril, mixing with the carnage still strewn across his features from two nights before.
“My god,” the young man said. A briefcase in one hand, he raised the other to his mouth, covering his gaping lips. “What happened? Did these men do this to you?”
“We apprehended the suspect after he was in a car accident while fleeing a scene,” the deputy replied. Extending his index finger, he jabbed it up at his own face, pointing to the bandage on his nose and his twin black eyes.
Injuries which were minor by comparison.
“A scene in which he did this and murdered another man in cold blood.”
Eyes somehow managing to grow even wider, the young man turned to regard Tres. Remaining in place, he made no effort to come closer, a look of marvel on his face, like a spectator at a zoo that had just witnessed a caged animal attack a handler.
Of the few things Tres knew about the American justice system, the requirement that they honor his request for an attorney was at the top. They could deny him certain comforts, could easily keep him away from a telephone, but if they didn’t put him in the presence of counsel, any chance they had at making charges stick would be nullified.
A fact he was reasonably certain they would want to protect more than anything else at this point.
Had he actually needed the young man’s services, if he’d been forced to rely on them in any way for his health or wellness, he would have known at a glance that he was in trouble. That any hope he had of ever walking free again would be in vain.
But he didn’t need such a thing. Not at this point.
All he needed was someone to do what he couldn’t. To help him finish the task that had been assigned and relay a message.
He had made a mistake. Not in getting caught, but in going off-script at the Martin house. Taken alone, it was no big deal. A little farewell gift to the team that had forever altered the lives of so many.
But given the way everything else had gone in the last couple of days, it had proven to be much, much more than that.
Making it all the more imperative he get word where it needed to be.
Shaping his thumb and forefinger as if gripping a pencil, Tres shook his right wrist, rattling the handcuffs against the rink holding him in place.
“Pencil and paper, please.”
Chapter Sixty-Eight
The inside of Diaz’s office was almost identical to the way I last remembered it. Which was almost identical to the way it had been five years prior, neither her nor Hutch being the sort to bother with decorations or personal touches of any kind.
Instead, the place was a collection of remainder government supplies, all somewhat battered, all still bearing the metallic bar codes from whenever they’d first been handed out.
Neither of us able to sit down, to possibly be motionless after the events in the conference room, we resided on either side of her desk. Jutting out from the wall, the piece served to bisect the room, giving us each enough space to pace back and forth.
Between us on the desk sat my cellphone, the item going off three different times in my pocket while we met with Jones and Smith. Unable to pull it out at the time – and not about to step away from the meeting and tip the numbers balance in their favor – I had chosen to wait.
Now back in the quiet of her office, the door pulled shut behind us, the phone buzzed just a single time before being snatched up.
“Where the hell have you been?” Pally snapped in greeting, his voice threaded with annoyance.
“You don’t want to know,” Diaz muttered in response, the angst in hers even higher.
Ignoring them both, knowing the only reason he would have answered in such a way, I asked, “What did you find?”
Pausing, it seemed he wanted to press us, to ask what had happened on our end in the brief window since we last spoke, though he let it go for the time being.
“Esmerelda Ruiz called her brother,” Diaz said, jumping ahead, putting together where Pally was taking things.
“Yes,” Pally said, “eleven minutes ago. She called from her cellphone to a prepaid number. They talked for six minutes and then the phone was turned off, hasn’t come back on since.”
Nor would it. The phone having served its purpose, it would now be destroyed, exchanged for another or relayed to someone else to serve as the in-between.
Flicking my gaze up to Diaz, she nodded slightly, an unspoken acknowledgement of what we both already knew.
“Were you able to get a location on it?” I asked.
“Also, yes,” Pally said, “but that’s not all. About the same time, the other number you gave me came to life. At exactly noon, it popped on for ten minutes and received an incoming call.”
Pulling to a stop behind the lone visitor chair opposite Diaz, I stared down at the phone. I could feel a cleft appear between my brows as I considered the statement, working through what I knew.
For the phone to have come to life right at noon denoted that it was an agreed-to time. Outside of those specific moments, the device stayed off, meant to protect whoever was holding it.
“A call from...?” I asked. Adding the information to what I knew, I forced my mind to make sense of what I was being told. To put the disparate information into something I could handle. “Surely they didn’t let Tres Salinas use a phone.”
Across from me, Diaz had pulled up close to the edge of the desk, pressing the front of her legs against it. Glancing from me to the phone, she leaned forward, balancing herself on her palms.
“Nope,” Pally replied, “but he found a way around it anyway. The number was from a landline at the Gallatin County Public Defender’s Office.”
For the second time in the last fifteen minutes, I felt like I’d been kicked in the shorts. Jerking my focus to Diaz, I raised my chin a few inches, letting her see the vitriol that was filling me.
Lifting a hand before me, I curled my fingers back into talons, squeezing so tight my hand quivered. My lips peeled back in equal kind, every inclination telling me to grab something and throw it against the wall.
Or even through it.
“An attorney wouldn’t be able to be a part of something illegal,” Diaz said.
“But if a client asked them to relay a message that seemed benign,” I continued.
“Something that was coded,” Diaz said.
Much like when I was standing outside the Snoqualmie Police Station, somebody listening may have thought we were the ones speaking in code.
In reality, we weren’t really conversing at all, merely thinking out loud, both working this through to completion.
Even if we both already likely knew where it was going.
Anybody that had the foresight to set a predetermined time to talk would also put together a specific phrase or system of alerting each other when things went awry.
Already, we knew that Ruiz was aware that agents were snooping about. Our decision to visit Esmerelda that morning had expected as much.
But this took things a step further. It made it known not only that I had survived, but that Tres was being held in custody.
Two facts that would certainly alter their behavior moving forward.
“What happened with the line after that?” I asked.
“Cut out again,” Pally said. “Just like Ruiz. Turned off, SIM card destroyed, whatever else, but not until I got an address on it.”
Lifting just my eyes to Diaz, hands resting atop either hip, I asked, “Yeah? Where’s that?”
“Same exact spot as Ruiz.”
Under most circumstances, what was just shared would be good news. It would be the final string tying every assumption and piece of evidence we’d cobbled together into a single coherent bunch.
The person that had been calling the shots on the assassination attempts, the message left behind at Martin’s house, and the release of Junior Ruiz all came together, confirmed by the two men now standing side by side.
All facts thrown into complete disarray by the visit from Jones and Smith a moment before and the directive that had been handed down.
“Thank you, Pally,” I said. “That’s hellacious work.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he replied. “As we speak, I’m pulling up records on the property, tapping into zoning reports and satellite imagery.
“Within a half hour, we ought to know damn near everything there is about wherever they’re holed up.”
Across from me, Diaz smirked. Shaking her head slightly, she said, “All this, minutes after we’ve been told to stand down.”
For the first time since the call connected, the sound of activity on the other end ceased. The rolling desk chair stopped moving. All motion across a keyboard fell silent.
“You guys were told to stand down?” Pally asked.
“Yeah,” I replied.
“By who?”
I flicked my gaze up to Diaz, who responded with, “They didn’t say.”
Gleaning exactly what was meant, Pally hissed, “Bastards.” Pausing, he fell silent a moment, contemplating the information, before saying, “That’s a shame. Any minute now there’s a care package set to arrive that might have something different to say on the matter.”
Part Five
Chapter Sixty-Nine
“I’ll be a son of a bitch,” I whispered, pulling to a stop inside the threshold to the conference room. Just inches from where I’d stood earlier in the day and resisted the urge to fly across the table at Jones and Smith, I now stared in the same direction, barely believing the sight before me.
Feeling my heart rate tick up slightly, I took a step to the side, seeing the lone man standing along the opposite wall turn.
A long, slow movement, as if meant to draw out the drama of the moment.
“That’s no way to talk about your mama,” Carl Diggs said as a means of greeting.
The third on-the-ground member of our team, Carl Diggs was three years in by the time I showed up. Half a decade older than me in age, in a former life he had been a part of Delta Force, proficient at handling every firearm ever produced.
My first thought upon meeting the man had been that it looked like he was carved from solid obsidian. Always he prided himself on standing exactly six feet in height and weighing exactly two hundred pounds, nice round numbers that could be rattled off in an instant.
With each step around the table I took, it appeared that the figures still held true. At a glance, the only differe
nce I could see was that the buzzcut that had previously adorned his skull had now migrated south into a goatee.
The rest remained the same, right down to the thousand-yard stare currently fixed on me.
“Pally said you were deep in the muck.”
“I was.”
“Brown or green?” I asked.
Arching an eyebrow, the gesture was enough to let me know that was classified, not supposed to be shared.
“Green. And I still almost got here faster than you.”
Green meant that he had been in the jungle and not the sandbox. Either somewhere in eastern Asia or one of the hundreds of islands between here and there. Far enough that he would have had to call in some serious favors to get here for sure.
“Yeah, well, I’m sure Pally told you I got a visitor that night too.”
“Only one?” he shot back. No small amount of derision in his tone, he remained rooted in place, staring at me, holding it for almost a full thirty seconds before finally his head quivered just slightly.
An instant later, a thin smiled cracked his features, a sliver of white offset against his dark skin and the goatee encasing his mouth.
“Was a day when Hawk Tate didn’t get out of bed for less than three.”
The same smile found my face. “There was also a day when that chin hair sat up a little higher, so I guess time’s been rough on us all.”
Diggs’s expression grew into a grin as he finally took a step in my direction. Hands falling by his side, he replied, “Yeah, Father Time can be a real bastard, can’t he?”
“Yes, he can,” I agreed, meeting my friend along the side of the table filling the room. Sharing a quick hug, we clapped each other on the back, openly appraising one another before taking a step back.
“Good to see you, brother,” Diggs said.
“You too. Damned shame this is what it took to get us here.”
“Got that right,” he agreed. The smile faded a bit as he asked, “How’s Serra doing?”
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