The Last Act: A Novel

by Brad Parks

  There was no need to ponder that last question. I already knew I couldn’t.

  It went to something I had slowly figured out sometime during my early twenties: that for as hard as we have searched for them throughout the ages, there are no all-encompassing epistemologies, no metanarratives that elucidate the real truth, no Rosetta stone that translates our baffling existence into a more readily understood tongue. Human beings are basically bumbling along, each of us constructing these self-contained dramas so we can offer ourselves some reasonable explanation of what would otherwise be a bunch of random, chaotic interactions.

  In short, we’re telling ourselves stories in which we conveniently happen to be the protagonists. And while that is true, so is this seemingly paradoxical fact: People who put other people at the middle of their stories lead the most rewarding lives. If all you live for is yourself, it’s pretty damn lonely out there.

  So what would I be without Amanda and my mother?

  That was a story I didn’t want to contemplate, a door behind which lay only the most unimaginable pain.

  * * *

  • • •

  I made myself stay in bed with my terrible thoughts until 12:25 A.M., at which point I shucked off my prison khakis and donned the unicorn, rolling and cinching as needed.

  Then I strolled out of my room, down the hall, and past the empty CO’s office, not caring whether anyone was in there.

  Once outside, I powered up my burner phone and called the customer service line for the bank. After I recited the proper numbers and the soon-to-be-changed pass code, a young woman with a friendly Caribbean cadence informed me five million dollars had been wired to the account earlier that evening. I repeated the same procedure for the second account and got the same answer.

  We were a go. This was happening.

  Since a 12:40 launch had worked for me the last time I ran the hill, I decided to make that the appointed minute again. I would be a little faster, since I didn’t need to bother with as much stealth. However, I would also be a little slower, with Mitch in tow. It averaged out.

  I loitered outside until 12:38, then went to fetch Mitch. He was dressed and waiting for me at his door. We made brief eye contact. Under his arm, he carried a shoebox and 951 of what I hoped were the most exquisite counterfeits ever created.

  We exchanged no words. I simply turned back toward the front entrance, and he followed. Back outside, I let him take the lead. We had decided to do it that way in case any of El Vio’s goons were watching from afar. It would look more like a CO escorting a prisoner, which was the general effect we were going for.

  “Thanks for doing this,” I said as we marched through the rec area. “I know this is going to be pretty disruptive for your family.”

  “It’s better this way. You were right about the cartel. They were never going to stop coming after me. Hopefully this makes them happy.”

  “What happens to you after this?”

  “They haven’t told me exactly. I just hope we go somewhere warm. Arizona, maybe. You know I’ve never seen the Grand Canyon?”

  “Good luck with that,” I said.

  “Yeah, we’ll see.”

  We walked a few more feet before he added, “Sorry about, uh, your family. Hines told me.”

  “Let’s just get this over with,” I said. “I’ll fall apart if I think about it too much.”

  We reached the tree line quickly enough, then started the serious part of the climb. As I suspected, it was slower with Mitch.

  I remained vigilant for signs that Hines hadn’t kept her word to keep herself and her people scarce. I could still abort at any time. The FBI wouldn’t have probable cause to make an arrest until El Vio actually took possession of the evidence. I had watched enough cop shows to know an unrighteous arrest could screw up everything that followed. If I saw anything that made me nervous, I was going to tackle Mitch and beat him until he was either senseless or surrendered the box voluntarily.

  But there was nothing in the forest except forest. Every indication was that the FBI had left Dorsey’s Knob Park to the criminals.

  We reached the ridge, then, a short time later, the clearing. I had charted a better course this time, such that we came out closer to the picnic area, near the parking lot.

  There were three vehicles, all black SUVs. A group of men was milling around the tables. I counted eight of them. One of them was theoretically El Vio. Ruiz and Gilmartin were surely there as well. That left five men who were there as extras—lookouts, muscle, bodyguards, whatever you wanted to call them.

  “Okay, there they are,” I said to Mitch, as if he somehow couldn’t see them.

  As soon as the men became aware of our presence, they shined flashlights in our direction, trying to get the beams to land on our faces.

  “That’s close enough,” Danny called out. “One at a time now. With your hands up.”

  I went first. With the flashlights having now found my eyes, it was difficult to make out who or what was coming my way. All I knew was there were a lot of paws all over me. It was like being groped by an octopus. One of them pulled up my shirt. Another yanked down my pants. A third passed a wand over my front and back. It didn’t squelch at my belt or my steel-toe boots, so it must have been looking for radio waves, not metal. A bug detector. There were flashlights scanning up and down my body the entire time.

  “Hurry up,” I said. “Both of us have to be back at one thirty or all hell is going to break loose.”

  “Sorry, Slugbomb,” said Danny, and at that point I realized he had been the guy with the wand. “We do things a certain way here.”

  I subjected myself to their prodding until one of my octopi muttered something in Spanish and it stopped.

  “Okay, Mitchell, you’re next,” Danny said.

  As I put my clothes back in order, Mitch received the same treatment. He kept the shoebox clutched in both hands over his head. Again, the inspection ended with a gruff half sentence of Spanish. Mitch put himself hastily back together, tucking the shoebox under his arm as he did so.

  Then a hooded figure walked toward us from the gloom. From the way the other men reacted to his presence—with large shows of respect and smaller shows of fear—I could deduce this was El Vio.

  He was smaller than I thought he’d be, perhaps only a few inches taller than me. It was too dark to see him all that well, but I could make out the basics: He was brown-skinned; he had a full head of hair, also dark, peeking out from under his hood; he was certainly from somewhere in Latin America. He was wearing mirrored sunglasses. I didn’t know how he could see a thing through them.

  Apparently, neither did he. Because as he got closer to us, he removed them. His white eye, the one Danny had told me about in that long-ago diner meeting, blazed in the darkness.

  But the sense I really got, and it radiated from him powerfully, was this aura of evil. Just looking at him gave me the feeling you might get when an ominous cloud passes over just after sunset, blotting out what little light remains; and the wind chooses that moment to pick up; and all you’re wearing is a thin T-shirt and flip-flops, so the cold instantly soaks you even though you swear you’re not wet.

  He had walked up to Mitch and stopped.

  “I am El Vio,” he said in accented English. “What is it you feel you need to say to me?”

  Mitch had obviously been rehearsing this, because his response came without hesitation. “I just wanted to meet with you, man to man, and hear directly from you that we have no more beef with each other. You’re getting what you want. So I want to make sure I get what I want, which is to be left alone. I want you to promise you won’t come after me, my wife, or my kids.”

  “I’m a peaceful businessman,” El Vio said smoothly. “I have never ‘gone after’ anyone. I wish you and your family a long and prosperous life.”

  “I’d like to shake on
that,” Mitch said.

  He held out a hand. El Vio let it hang there for a moment, like maybe he was expecting fire to burst from it.

  “Where I’m from, a man shakes another man’s hand when he makes a promise,” Mitch said.

  His hand was still outstretched. When nothing happened after another beat or two, El Vio said, “Okay.”

  They shook hands. It lasted maybe a second.

  “Good,” Mitch said, then looked in my direction, like it was now my turn.

  “And you’ll release my family once you’re back to Mexico,” I said, the nerves rocketing around in my stomach.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” El Vio said smugly.

  His nonchalance infuriated me. Instinct took hold, and I rushed forward, grabbing him by the sweatshirt and pulling him toward me. The men near El Vio were momentarily caught flat-footed. They hadn’t expected me—a small man with no weapons—to make this kind of move.

  “The hell you don’t,” I growled, getting so close to his face I could see him flinch as my spittle landed on his cheeks. “If you hurt them, I swear I will make it my life’s work to put you in the ground.”

  I managed to get the sentence out. Then one of the bodyguards reached me. With one hand, he ripped me off El Vio, throwing me toward another bodyguard—the biggest one, probably a foot taller than me—who put me in a chokehold. I grasped his forearm and attempted to pry it off, but his free hand had already grasped the other one, adding more strength to the hold. He lifted me off the ground, using my own bodyweight to further constrict my windpipe.

  El Vio calmly straightened his clothes. Just as pinpricks of light started popping in my vision, he said, “Let him go.”

  The bodyguard dropped me. I fell on all fours. Another bodyguard kicked me in the ribs. Maybe not as hard as he could have. But he made his point. Whatever wind was left in my lungs was knocked out.

  Still gasping for breath, determined to show I was tougher than any of them thought, I got back to my feet. Mitch was looking at me, wondering if I was going to give it another go. But I had made my point too.

  “Go ahead,” I said to Mitch, my voice coming out in a ragged wheeze. “Give the man what he came for.”

  Mitch extended the box. El Vio took it with both hands.

  All that maneuvering, all those machinations, all that money, and in the end it was that simple. A Mexican drug lord had just paid ten million dollars for 951 meaningless scraps of paper.

  “Thank you, Mr. Dupree,” El Vio said.

  “Right, then,” Mitch said.

  El Vio said something in Spanish. The group formed a shell around him and moved as one toward the parking lot.

  I wasn’t waiting around for anyone to engrave invitations for us to make our own departure. Neither was Mitch. He pivoted toward the trees. I was right behind him. The forest meant safety.

  We had taken perhaps ten or fifteen steps. We still had roughly another fifty yards to cover. My wind was coming back to me. I never thought I could be so eager to get back to prison.

  And then, quite suddenly, the silent night was torn open by three explosions.

  * * *

  • • •

  At first, I couldn’t hear. The detonations had rendered my ears worthless.

  But I could see. At least a little. And it was like the air was spontaneously producing people in gas masks and black tactical gear.

  They were pouring in from all angles. They even seemed to be coming up from the ground itself. They were holding AR-15s and running fast toward the clump of men that had formed around El Vio, though I could no longer make them out. They had disappeared in a cloud of white smoke.

  The first sound to penetrate my concussed skull was the popping of gunfire. It was impossible to tell whether it was coming from the Mexicans or from the people in the gas masks. I suppose I should have thrown myself on the ground, but I couldn’t make myself move.

  Rick Gilmartin emerged from the cloud of smoke. He was just a contractor. He wanted no part of defending El Vio to the death. He was running low, angling toward the woods, except he was holding a pistol and sprinting straight toward a phalanx of soldiers. They had no choice but to take him down. His arms flew in the air as he fell.

  Danny Ruiz was also trying to flee, also armed. He didn’t make it far. A short burst of fire spun him, then a few more rounds buried themselves in his back. He arched, then crumpled, facedown. It hardly seemed real. This was something we might have done back on the playground in Hackensack, where we shot each other with sticks we pretended were Star Wars blasters. Except Danny Danger wasn’t wearing his camo pants. And he wasn’t getting back up to keep playing.

  Then, finally, beneath the booming report of all that weaponry, I heard the words being shouted:

  “FBI! FBI! Get down! Get down!”

  What came out of me next was a primal scream that surged up from my diaphragm.

  “No!” I roared. “No! No! No!”

  Heedless of the bullets whizzing through the air around me, I ran toward the first gas-masked person I could catch up to, a man who was advancing slowly in a low crouch, with his AR-15 swiveling, waiting to take aim at whoever materialized from the smoke cloud next. I seized him by his body armor, like stopping him would somehow stop this whole horrible scene.

  “You idiots,” I bellowed. “You’re killing them. Don’t you know you’re killing them?”

  But of course he didn’t care. None of them did. Lia Hines’ talk about bureau policy and wrongful death suits had been a total con, a deception designed to gain the cooperation she would have otherwise never gotten from me. And I had been fooled by her elementary school teacher act enough to believe her.

  She had even made a show of pulling out. And that’s all it had been. A show. For my benefit. She probably never even considered canceling the operation.

  Repugnant Chris Hall had been the one telling the ugly truth: The bureau wasn’t going to pass up a chance to collar El Vio. Maybe it believed it could rescue the civilians in time. Maybe it really had made the icy calculation that a pregnant woman and some guy’s mom were just collateral damage. To some suit in Washington, their lives didn’t mean much.

  The agent I had grabbed was trying to twist himself free of my grasp. In a rage, I reached for his gun. I was going to rip it out of his hands, then shoot every damn last one of those agents. Maybe if El Vio saw me fighting for him, he would know I hadn’t been the one who betrayed him. Maybe he would spare my family.

  That plan lasted for exactly two seconds before another agent tackled me. Then two more agents leapt on me. As I thrashed and swore and spit and howled and fought with everything I had, they kept me pinned to the ground, easily subdued.

  I wished they had just shot me. It would be far less painful than what was coming next.

  Because with sickening certainty, I knew:

  If Amanda and my mother weren’t already dead, they would be soon.

  CHAPTER 56

  The women were bound, gagged, and blindfolded, quite nearly as incapacitated as a human being could be. Still, Herrera had not left the room for hours. He had barely even taken his eyes off them. He was leaving nothing to chance.

  They were on the second floor of New Colima’s Newark safe house, in a room whose windows had been covered over with cardboard. The panel van they had been transported in—another Hector Jacinto rental—was parked outside.

  The older woman was dressed for work, as she had been earlier in the day when Herrera had entered her house through the sliding glass door that he had left open for himself. The younger woman was still in her nightgown. She used what little freedom she had with her hands to continually tug it down.

  Herrera had made the older one call into work and tell them she would be out a few more days. She had already taken off the first three days of the week, so this was not unexpec
ted. The other woman, the blonde, was simpler. She didn’t have a job to call into.

  There would be no one looking for them. And, even if there were, they wouldn’t know where to start.

  Herrera was joined in the room by the associates who ran the safe house, the two men who had helped arm him two days earlier. They were locals, ordinarily far down in the cartel pecking order. Their lives otherwise consisted of counting inventory and helping to settle the occasional turf dispute. This was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them.

  Every hour or two, Herrera removed the women’s gags and poured water down their throats. It was important to keep the hostages alive for now, in case the actor demanded proof of life.

  The older woman swore profusely and spat the liquid back at him. The blonde, likely mindful of her baby, accepted the hydration without resistance.

  Herrera’s orders from El Vio were . . . Well, actually El Vio didn’t need to bother, since it was Herrera’s plan all along. Herrera knew exactly what he was doing. He had prepared a long time for this. He just had to wait until the time was right, until he got the call.

  Other than the swearing of the older woman and the occasional grunt from one of the associates, the room remained quiet.

  Then, finally, Herrera’s phone rang.

  It was someone in West Virginia.

  “Yes?” he said in Spanish.

  He walked into the hallway and listened for a while. Then he said, “I understand. Thank you. I’ll take care of everything.”

  Herrera reentered the room.

  “Is it time?” one of the associates asked.

  “Yes. Stand over there,” Herrera ordered, pointing toward the corner to his right, the one opposite where the women were crumpled. “Unless you want to get blood all over you.”

  Herrera pulled the pistol from his waistband. Its fifteen-round clip was fully loaded. He had cleaned the gun, dry-fired it, made sure it was in perfect working order. He didn’t want any mistakes.

  “We should have some fun with the little blonde first,” the other associate said.