The Arraignment (48 page)

Adam approaches. He keeps one eye on me, along with the pistol, while he looks over the edge, surveying to see if the fall is going to be enough. Then he looks back and smiles at me. Apparently he’s satisfied.

“Now if you’ll just step over this way.”

“You don’t expect me to just jump off?”

“Don’t worry, I’ll help you.”

As the words clear his lips, there is a tinny sound of metal clattering somewhere below us. Adam takes a quick step around to put me between himself and the sound.

I see a bicycle rattling over the uneven ground as it enters the clearing from the path. The figure riding it appears to have his knees hitting him in the chin with each pump of the pedals.

He stops in the middle of the clearing, puts his feet down on both sides, sitting on the seat, the bicycle dwarfed beneath him, and looks up at the top of the pyramid.

“Dat you, Adam Tolt?” Herman shades his eyes with one hand. “You know I figured you for a son of a bitch. But you outdid yourself. And so you know, Julio didn’t think much a ya either. And I’m certain his opinion ain’t come up none since you shot him in the back of the head.”

“You try and come here, and I’ll kill him.” Adam puts the pistol up to my head.

“You know,” says Herman. His hands now on his hips, still sitting on the bike. “That thing’s not gonna do you a god damn bit a good against me down here. You see, I know Julio’s Glock don’t shoot for shit. You’d been more than a
foot away from him, youda missed the back a his head. Kept tellin’ him to get the sights fixed.”

“Well I’m not likely to miss Mr. Madriani here.”

“Yeah but I got a question for you. After you shoot him, how you gonna get down here without coming through me? My forty-five shoots a little better than that piece a shit, and the bullet’s bigger to boot.”

“He doesn’t seem to put much value on your life,” says Adam.

“Well, I warned you that he was pissed about Julio.”

“So what are we going to do about this problem?”

“It’s not my problem,” I say.

“It won’t be if you’re dead. Tell him to go or I’ll kill you.”

“He says to go or he’s gonna kill me,” I say.

“Don’t change his situation none. Few minutes Ibarra’s people gonna be here with rifles. Then they gonna start bouncing bullets off the rocks up there. And it’s gonna get mighty hot. Don’t suspect you brought any water witcha?”

“No, we didn’t think about it.”

Adam presses the gun against my head. “Shut up.”

“It sounds like it’s your move.”

“Let me think.”

“You could let me go.”

“That son of a bitch is just crazy enough to try to kill me anyway. You said it. He’s angry over Julio. I shoulda shot him instead.”

“Well we all make our mistakes. And I should warn you. Herman’s confidence in the Mexican justice system is just a little higher than his respect for the modern American version.”

“Meaning what?”

“He’s probably gonna shoot you.”

“I’m getting tired waitin’ down here. You want I shoot a couple a rounds your way? Maybe I get lucky,” says Herman. “And the noise is gonna bring Ibarra that much faster. Or maybe I just come up there and kick your ass, throw you off that fuckin’ thing.” Herman gets off the bike, drops it on the ground, and starts marching this way.

“What’s he doing?” says Adam.

“I don’t know.”

“You tell him to stop, or so help me I will shoot you here and now.”

“Herman. Stay there. Don’t come up.”

Herman doesn’t listen. He just keeps coming, talking to himself, muttering under his breath. I can hear him all the way down at the bottom of the steps. He starts climbing, taking the two-foot steps in stride like they were built for him.

“Herman,
stay there.
”

He keeps coming.

“Crazy son of a bitch,” says Adam. He points the gun at him, takes aim.

I hit his arm with my shoulder just as he pulls the trigger. The snap of the round, the explosion next to my ear, sends a ringing vibration through my head.

A thousand birds lift out of the jungle. Flitting black specks like bugs on a windshield, they fill the sky.

Herman stops on the stairs and looks up. “Now you fuckin’ did it.” Herman unholsters his automatic, the sun glinting off the polished stainless steel.

Adam tries to push me over the edge. I push back, the rubber soles of my shoes gripping the stone, my toes right at the edge. He tries to twist for leverage, one arm around my neck. We struggle at the edge of the stone precipice.

I slip his grip and end up landing on my butt on the hard stone platform behind him.

Adam points the pistol at me, and then out of the corner of his eye he sees Herman still coming, charging up the stairs. Adam turns and aims, both hands this time on the Glock, taking a careful bead on Herman’s bulk now only ten or twelve steps from the top. He fires, and I hear the bullet as it hits flesh.

Herman stops, looks down, puts his hand to his chest, and staggers. Then he looks at Adam and starts coming again.

I reach for the pistol in my pocket, and it snags on my jacket.

Adam aims and fires again. I hear the same thud as the bullet hits home. This time Herman goes down on one knee. He drops his pistol and it clatters down several steps. I can see Herman’s face pumped with blood, the veins bulging on his neck. He’s holding his side with one hand.

The small Walther is out of my pocket. I pull the slide and cycle a round into the chamber, aim at Adam, and squeeze. Nothing.

The safety is on. I bring it back, fumble with the tiny lever, click, and it shows red.

Adam has the Glock up, taking careful aim at Herman’s back as he struggles to reach for his pistol on the stairs.

I squeeze off a round. The little Walther torques in my hand and the bullet catches Adam in the arm, jerking his body just as he pulls the trigger. His shot goes wide.

He turns and looks at me, his eyes like two eggs sunny-side up in a platter, wondering where I got the gun. Adam missed it when he frisked me. The small pistol was underneath, inside the pocket of my zippered jacket as I lay on the ground. He failed to check the front when I got up.

He has the Glock lowered at his side, the muzzle pointed down at the stone as he stares in disbelief at the gun in my hand.

If he raises the Glock, Adam knows I will shoot him again. Instead he looks at me, smiles, then shakes his head as if he is daring me to do it. He turns toward the motion on the stairs.

Herman is reaching for the automatic.

Adam takes aim.

This time, with the crack of the Walther, it barely moves in my hand. Tolt’s head snaps sideways as a tiny red dot appears on his temple, followed by blood like someone tapped a barrel. His knees buckle. His ass hits the stone. For an instant his torso sits upright. Then gravity takes it sideways. When I blink he is gone, over the edge of the platform.

H
arry is out of the hospital, his memory and faculties intact, and Herman is in.

Surgeons removed one bullet that lodged in the muscle of Herman’s chest, up high near his clavicle. The other passed through his side, piercing what Herman called one of his love handles. He is talking about decorating it with a diamond stud, a conversation piece for the ladies that he can flash above his trunks whenever he struts the beach.

As for Adam, a Mexican medical examiner picked up pieces of him with a sponge from a rock outcropping five stories below the top of the Noche Mul. I suppose you could say that Adam was a victim of his own management style.

Adam had wounded Nick’s ego in ways he probably never understood. Some lawyers, unhappy in their position at a firm, might take a client or two, like candy from a dish, on their way out the door. But not Nick. He wanted it all, right down to the gold ashtrays and Persian carpets.

Nick was making a run, trying to peel off partners like a monkey stripping fruit from a tree. His plan was not only to
take the best part of Rocker, Dusha’s talent, but as many of the firm’s major clients as he could scoop up in a single pass, swinging from the branches. A new firm with his own name on the letterhead’s top line.

Like every palace coup in the making, this one could ruin careers if those on the move were caught in the act. The other players, some of the partners upstairs, key people in the other offices, stayed in the shadows while Nick set the munitions at Rocker, Dusha for self-destruct.

Adam’s obsession with empire, his constant expansion onto turf for more offices, was cutting into his partners’ take-home. These were fertile grounds of discontent for Nick. He planted the age-old seed of every revolution: Nick offered them a better deal.

When he was killed in what looked like an accident, a drive-by aimed at a client, there must have been some damp carpets in the firm’s executive suites—and it wasn’t from crying. The people involved in his coup had to wonder what careless notes Nick might have left behind.

He was the one taking all the chances. Of course, he had nothing to lose and the most to gain, the kind of odds Nick would like—managing partner, overnight, in one of the largest firms in the state. It was the kind of edgy action that would give a normal person peptic ulcers. To Nick it was the etching acid of independence, the stuff of which new beginnings are made. Revolution in a banana republic.

What he needed to pull it off was a source of ready cash. Partners in an established firm don’t jump ship en masse, unless somebody with a healthy line of credit is standing ready to bankroll the new venture. It was one thing to move to a new office. It was another to give up your Lexus.

Where was Nick going to get that kind of money? Actually, he told me, that morning over coffee, but I wasn’t listening. It was one of Nick’s character flaws, unfortunately not his worst: the irresistible compulsion, if not to crow, at least to hint of victories, before they were won.

The money would come from the old Capri Hotel itself,
Nick’s watering hole with its coffee shop in the dismal basement where he and I had our last conversation.

The hastily formed limited partnership, the seemingly defunct Jamaile Enterprises had only one asset. It owned the property on which the hotel sat.

All the pieces snapped together like a puzzle. Nick had leveraged the purchase of the hotel with a multimillion-dollar mortgage. He would have amortized this over a short term. He didn’t plan on holding the property for long. It was where all of Nick’s money went, the hefty fees he was taking home from the firm, the money Dana was no longer seeing to pay for the house and the car, to support her in the style to which she had become accustomed. Nick was busy plowing all of it into servicing the debt on the mortgage for the rundown hotel, meeting the payments each month like a miser, while he plotted revolution.

How do you maximize an investment like that? Nick revealed that as well. But again, I was tuned out.

It was easy. First you buy the land. Then you get a variance to build above the current height restrictions. Suddenly the land was worth three or four times what you paid for it. Nick had it all figured. There was nothing to prevent him from going higher, except the whim of local government.

And who had the power to grant such a variance? The joint powers of authority, the same authority that controlled most commercial property downtown: the super-zoning kingdom chaired by Zane Tresler.

It was why Nick’s name showed up so prominently on Tresler’s list of campaign donors. Not because Nick thought he could buy the man. Tresler wasn’t for sale, at least not for money. Adam was right about that. Nick gave generously for one reason only, to get Tresler’s attention, to buy access. The closer on this deal would come later, after the Mexicans, the two Ibarra brothers, delivered on their part.

That was where Metz came in. His name on the limited partnership documents, coupled with the mortgage on the hotel property in the name of Jamaile, was a critical part of
Nick’s plan, one that he couldn’t have been comfortable with, but over which he had no control.

I could never figure how a streetwise lawyer like Nick could be so slow as to do business on paper with a client who turned up a player in a criminal probe. What I didn’t realize is this: Metz’s name on the partnership was the required security the Mexicans demanded before they performed their part.

The Ibarra brothers had done business with Metz before. They trusted him. For a decade, they had been looting archeological sites in the Yucatán, southern Mexico and Guatemala, selling their finds to rich gringos and posh galleries in Europe and the U.S.

It was why they needed the stolen visas found by the feds in Espinoza’s closet when they searched his apartment. These would be valuable in bringing carloads of artifacts across the border.

Metz provided a convenient cover with his construction company. He also offered an outlet for laundering money. This is what the feds turned up, thinking they had drugs. Looting ancient sites was beginning to pay better than narcotics—and with less risk. Even if you got caught, you generally didn’t do life in a penitentiary for stealing someone else’s cultural heritage.

Under Nick’s scheme, Metz would take a chunk from the profits of the Capri property once the variance was granted and the land was sold to some got-rocks corporation. Metz would then pay off the Ibarra brothers.

It was why Nick tried to palm Metz off on me, to handle the arraignment. Since he was doing business with the man, an appearance next to him in court would only serve to heighten Nick’s profile. Figuring the feds were checking Metz for drugs, as soon as they realized this was a dry hole, Nick knew they would settle for a fine to cover the cost of their time, this on the illegal transfers of cash into the country by Metz. They would slap his hand. A deal like that would be a cakewalk, even for Nick’s buddy Paul who shied away from drug cases.

By then everybody would be happy. Metz would have more cash than he’d ever seen in one place before. And Nick would have the money to finish the law firm coup, Rush and Company, no doubt with a flashy new corner office for himself overlooking the bay and the blue Pacific.