Gray Area (2 page)

He spit blood and sucked in snot.  Christ on a drunken ass, I’m a
damned fool.  He couldn’t help but force his mind to repeat this a dozen
times or so.

“
Uno mas, Conyo
,” Palomito growled in a strangely feminine
voice.  Palomito stood over six feet tall, and weighed close to three
hundred pounds on the hoof.  “One more time and you die quickly.  How
did you know about the shipments?”

Diamond tasted his own blood and it helped fight off the urge to sink
into unconsciousness.  He’d been in situations like this before (perhaps
not so dismal, so abysmally hopeless, he revised mentally), but it never seemed
to get easier.  Par for the course after five years on the L.A.P.D.
Special Response Team.  Shit happened.  Sometimes the bad guys catch
you and, as these things go, sometimes you find yourself tied to a metal
fold-out chair faced with a psychotic drug runner from the backwaters of Columbia, threatening to wipe you out of existence in any number of very sexy and
agonizing ways. 

Sure, it happened sometimes.  But not because of such an egregious
lack of judgment and sheer carelessness.  Through the pain, even amidst
this currently bleak scenario, Lieutenant Lou Diamond couldn’t help but
chastise himself for the slip.

Juanita stayed several feet behind Palomito.  Diamond focused on her
momentarily.  Juanita, the pleading child-woman who had convinced him that
she was but an abused pawn of the drug-king, Palomito.  Juanita, the
tearful supplicant, begging Diamond for a chance at a new life.  Juanita,
the vixen, the temptress and, at last, the lover.  She had fooled
him.  Fooled him good.  He had believed she was a victim, a helpless
innocent in this whole affair; he had allowed himself to be sucked in
emotionally to her plight. 

He had even slept with her.  There was the kicker.  Old
Self-Pitying Lonely Dick, he thought.  Dumb, he thought, stars swimming in
his head, blood oozing into his eyes.  Dumb, dumb, dumb. 

Before SRT, Diamond had chalked up a combined twelve years with the
Marines, then later with the LAPD SWAT Division.  Taking a break from the
craziness of that kind of violent duty, he had been a lawyer for five years—an
alleged expert at human duplicity, mendacity and moral
skullduggery.   A lot of combined experience, and yet he had not seen
that Juanita was one of Palomito’s people. 

Shit.

“I can’t hear you, Mr. Police Man,” Palomito said, leaning in to Diamond,
nose to nose.  Diamond remained silent, his mind a blur of options and
self-recrimination. 

Of all three men lashed before him, Palomito sensed that Lou Diamond, the
eldest and most experienced, would be the most intractable.  Thus, he
shifted gears.  He walked to the chair on Diamond’s right and leaned in to
Sergeant Peoples. 

“How about you, my friend.  Feel like talking to me?  Or have
you ever thought about how long it takes a man to die with a knife in his
belly?”

Peoples was twenty-eight, a good cop, three years in Homicide.  But
the punishment on his body and psyche in the past hour had taken its
toll.  Defiant tears streamed down his cheek.  Diamond knew the young
officer had a wife and kid, an unfortunate liability that would weigh unfavorably
on Peoples in terms of his ability to keep his mouth shut.  Not that
Diamond would blame the guy, but dispensing information to Palomito—a top
Cartel member to the Columbian C-149 (as that Cartel referred to itself)—would
not be a good thing at this point.  Not a good thing at all.

“Don’t tell him shit,” Diamond spat at Peoples. 

Palomito began to stroke Peoples’ cheek with the .357 Magnum he held in
his hand.  “Chico, chico.  Don’t make me hurt you.  Your friend
is crazy, I think.  He doesn’t not care about life.  He is
viejo
!”

Diamond scowled.  Viejo in Spanish meant old.  At forty six and
weighing in at  one hundred and eighty six, minus three feet of small
intestine lost in the line of duty, Diamond was comparatively more ancient than
his two other hapless companions.  But while guilt overwhelmed him at the
moment for his earlier indiscretion with Juanita, his desire to get out of this
nightmare alive, was huge.  He did not want to die like this and he, more
than the others, realized that their collective survival lay in silence.

“You should make your friend talk,” Palomito urged Diamond, all the while
casually stroking Peoples’ cheek with the gun.  “He is so young. 
Probably has a lovely woman at home, waiting for him.  Worrying about his
well-being.”

“Kiss my ass,” Diamond muttered again.  He looked at Peoples. 
“It won’t make a difference, Terry.  He’ll still kill us.”

Palomito suddenly stood straight up, and cocked the Magnum.  “My
patience is almost up.”

Diamond closed his eyes, expecting the inevitable blast of the gun that
would send him and his companions into the void.  The .357 pointed at
Diamond.  Diamond opened his eyes at last, eyeballing Palomito with
crystalline hate and contempt. 

Without warning, Palomito put the gun to Peoples’ temple and pulled the
trigger.

Diamond screamed as he watched most of what made Terry Peoples think and
feel and laugh smash against the far wall in a wet, pathetic lump.

“Oh, you son of a bitch,” Diamond choked.

On the other side of Diamond, DEA Agent Matthews, ten years Diamond’s
junior, began to cry.  Matthews was no coward but, like Peoples, he had
family and the beating of the past sixty minutes had worn him down.

“Listen—” Matthews began softly, catching Palomito’s attention. 

Palomito smiled, then looked at his three henchman, all in their
twenties, armed with Uzi submachine guns.

“Me, listen?” Palomito asked as he walked over to Matthews.  “No,
you
listen!  You blow up my boat today.  You burn two million dollars of
my merchandise.  This is very un-American what you do.  I am feeling
very harassed!”

“I got a wife, two kids—” Matthews pleaded. 

Things were going down hill quickly, and Diamond knew that time was
running out.  If something wasn’t done soon, they would all be dead.

“Matthews, shut up,” Diamond urged.  He realized that time was the
only ally any of them possessed with Palomito.  If they resisted giving
him information there was at least some leverage, some opportunity for
delay.  Diamond quickly assessed the three henchman, their location in the
room, their approximate distance from where he was tied, the nearest
exits.  If he could get to one of them, somehow—

“We—we tracked your operation for six months,” Matthews suddenly said,
snapping Diamond’s attention back to the more immediate danger of his associate
telling all.

“Matthews, goddamn it—” Diamond said.

“Shut up, Lou!” Matthews spit back at him, then turned desperately to
Palomito.  “Listen, we knew your freight was heroin, cocaine,
mescaline.  You’re finished.”

Palomito seemed pleased.  “Keep talking, amigo.”

“Your partner, Rodriguez, hired us.  We all speak Spanish.  We
were ... convincing.  Told him we were ex-cons and needed work.  He
believed it.”

Palomito nodded, then turned to Juanita behind him.  “Remind me to
kill Rodriguez, bonita.”

Juanita remained expressionless, but her gaze rested on Diamond.  In
that one look, Diamond was able to sum up the sequence of events that had lead
to this deplorable and foolish outcome.

Delajandro Pedro Guyano, aka Palomito, was the second in command to the
largest drug cartel in Columbia.  His personal net worth was over a
billion dollars, acquired through shrewd dealings worldwide of his primary
export, industrialized cocaine and heroin.  Rarely did he leave his mother
country, and when he did, his comings and goings were historically shrouded in
mystery, to the great consternation of American law enforcement and
Interpol. 

Of late, however, some fortuitous leaks in Palomito’s network had
afforded the DEA and the FBI some maneuverability in apprehending him. 
The bureau mole known as Rodriguez, a Machiavellian character who was willing
to sell out either side for the right price, had ensconced himself close to
Palomito’s inner circle.  The DEA trusted Rodriguez only because he had a
personal vendetta against Palomito for the murder of his wife some years
earlier.  For the past six months, Rodriguez had been regularly reporting
Palomito’s approximate shipping destinations for the importation of coke and
crack.

Thirty days earlier, an insertion team was created.  By virtue of
his work as an operative in Nicaragua and Panama, as well as some pretty
sophisticated reconnaissance and Clean and Sweep experience in Iraq during
Desert Storm, Lou Diamond was perceived by the vast majority to be the logical
team leader for the first strike against Palomito on American soil.  Plans
were formulated.  The tugs that Palomito was able to sneak into South Bay
harbors were targeted and confirmed.  But empty tugs would do no one any
good.  So the bait was set to not only nail substantial illegal cargo—but
the top-gun, drug pushing shit-eater himself—Palomito. 

Diamond’s plan was technically perfect.  He was assisted by two top
men, Matthews and Peoples, both experienced field agents and, like himself,
both spoke Spanish like fucking natives.  Deep undercover, Diamond and his
men were perceived by the community as local longshoreman with felonious pasts,
none of which were ever specified.  They made the necessary bribes to the
local officials involved with Palomito’s shipments and blended in with the dock
folk.  Cut off from any chain of command or contact with their Department
heads they were, in essence, rogue operatives under the nominal guidance of
Diamond himself. 

Juanita Consuela had been the random element of bad luck thrown into a
mix that was technically proceeding without a proverbial hitch.

 Diamond found himself in the middle of a brawl one night at El
Gallo down in the shadier section of San Pedro.  Juanita Consuela was the
damsel in distress, under considerable attention and duress courtesy of a few
drunk dockhands.  Diamond, in short order, dispensed with the drunkards
and whisked Juanita out of the bar to safe climes.  A relationship, of
sorts, developed.  An unexpected and, as it would turn out, tragic wrench
in the works that caught Diamond off guard.  Since the death of Maria five
years earlier, his emotional life took a very distant back seat to his
professional one, and the two had never shared an easy marriage.  He
became careless with Juanita, accepting her at face value.

Oh, yeah … it had seemed so simple …

Except that Juanita was not what she portrayed.  She was, like
himself, an operative.  Only in her case, a deep cover operative for
Palomito.  Her function was to ferret out the locals near the shipping
drop-off points and more or less determine the level of police activity,
locally and federally.  She was good at what she did and she gave herself
freely to that single task of discovery.

Weeks passed—Diamond trusted—and then tonight, within one hour,
everything had gone to hell in a turd-roll.  Palomito’s primary cargo boat
was apprehended by the harbor patrol, per Diamond’s target information. 
The boat was boarded and then destroyed, by unfortunate virtue of a violent
firefight between the crew and SWAT personnel.  All in all, over two
million dollars in shit was lost or confiscated as a result of the
seizure.  Palomito himself had been privy to the loss from a small private
vessel that had sneaked past the police barricade in the South Bay of San
Pedro.  Everything was going according to plan.

And now this. 

Diamond, Matthews and Peoples had been summoned to the docks by the
shipping supervisor, ostensibly to assist with offloading.  The three men
had no reason to suspect that they were already targeted by Palomito; no reason
for Diamond to have ever imagined that Juanita Consuela had been tailing him
exhaustively since they had first met. 

“You,” Palomito pointed his weapon at Diamond again.  “You are, as
they say, the leader of the gang.  Fine.  I want to know where your
people will hit me next.  Locations and times.”

“Go fuck yourself,” Diamond said easily.  A more conciliatory manner
was called for, his professional mind chastised, but he wasn’t in the best of
moods.  Something about being pistol-whipped for the past hour. 
Something about being screwed over by the bitch-kitty Latina chick you’ve been
putting the Old Tamale to, and a bad day all around.  Just something.

Palomito shrugged, then looked at Matthews.

“Fine, we do it the hard way.  I will kill your partner next.”

Juanita stepped forward, touching Palomito on the arm.  A slavish
touch versus that of a lover.  A goddamned
employee
. 

“I will make him talk,” she said, then turned to Diamond and raised one
eyebrow.  “You remember how it was between us, no?  Like nothing I’ve
had before.  Like nothing, I think, that you have had before either.”

She was good, Diamond had to admit.  The tease, the talk, the
moves.  He’d fallen for it all, hook, line, and fuck-shit-sinker, and
without even a second thought.  He tried to understand his weakness. 
Perhaps it was Maria, now dead and gone for five years.  Perhaps it was
because he was alone too often.  Perhaps ... perhaps ... so many reasons
why he’d been careless, foolish, reckless ...

“I want him,” he heard Juanita say to Palomito.  “And you owe
me!”  

Palomito considered Juanita, as if she was some kind of insect, ripe for
the squashing.  Palomito put two fingers on Juanita’s mouth.  She did
not hesitate to take them and suck.  At the same time, she hiked up her
skirts and went down on her knees.  Her head then turned toward Diamond,
as she knee-crawled the two feet to where Diamond was sitting and
strapped.  She reached for his pants and then, more specifically, the
zipper to his fly.  Her eyes never seemed to leave his.  Boring,
insistent, brutally frank, even when they were lying.