The Reformed (29 page)
Authors: Tod Goldberg
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction, #General, #Suspense, #Thrillers, #Crime
“You got anything to hide?” Officer Prieto said.
“I’m a criminal mastermind,” I said, “but that’s probably pretty apparent. Other than that, you now have all the clues you need to my existence.”
“I find out you’re not who you say you are, I’ll bring your whole world down,” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Good luck with that. I can tell you right now, I’m not really Cy Rosencrantz.”
The three of us stood there for a moment without saying anything. It was a nice form of posturing, one usually only seen in the wild. I decided to wait it out a few moments longer and then said, “You done?”
“A real joker here,” Prieto said.
“I’m just concerned that we have a job about to jump off, and you’re trying to stare me down. Either you’re a crooked cop or you’re not. If you’re not, just go on and run my prints. If you are, you need to decide how you’re going to get everyone out of that warehouse in the next twenty minutes or so.”
Prieto reached into his pocket and pulled out a cell phone and a phone number. “You want some diversion? You make the call,” he said, and gave me the cell. “My voice isn’t appearing on anything. I’ll do my job, but you do yours.”
I examined the phone. It looked like a burner, but I wasn’t taking any chances. I went into the Charger and took out one of my own disposables from the glove box. “I come prepared,” I said, and then dialed the number.
“Harding Pharma, this is Dan.”
Huh. Dan was a good choice.
“Dan,” I said, “this is Kirk Peterson from Diagnostic Partners. You in the warehouse?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We’ve got a report here that the cooling systems are going nuts there. What do you have?”
“Uh, well, I’m just on duty for the loading dock, sir. You got the loading dock on the line.”
“Then I need someone in the lab,” I said.
“No one like that here. It’s a Saturday.”
“Son,” I said, “I’m going to make your life real simple for you. You’re about fifteen minutes from a stage-three collapse in the CDH units. Who’s on call?”
“Uh, uh,” he said. Panic. It makes you sputter.
“Settle down, son,” I said. “Just calmly get everyone out of the dock. I got a call in to the police. They’re on their way.”
“We’ve got a truck leaving in the hour,” he said.
“Leave it,” I said. “And get your ass out of there, son. Police will be on-site in a few minutes. God help you all if this gets into the water.”
I clicked the phone off, took out the SIM card, and then crushed it on the pavement.
Junior and Prieto just stared at me.
“I told you,” I said, “you’re dealing with a criminal mastermind. So, why don’t you get moving there, Officer Friendly, before someone gets smart and starts actually thinking over there at the warehouse?”
Officer Prieto got into his car without saying a word and drove off. Within a few seconds, we could hear his siren.
“Nice work,” Junior said. He extended his hand.
Old friends. That’s what we were. I took his hand and said, “You ever try to corner me like that again, and I’ll torture you to death in a way that will make your ancestors hurt. We got a deal, hoss?” Junior said nothing. “Great.” I patted his hand lightly. “Good talk.”
I waved Fiona over. She sashayed across the parking lot, and when she got close to Junior, she gave him one of those smiles she normally reserves for men she’s about to hurt. “Always a pleasure,” she said, and then she got into the car.
I looked at my watch. “If that truck isn’t at Honrado within the hour, I’ll assume you want that ancestor thing early.”
When we drove off, Junior was still standing in the middle of the parking lot, looking for all the world like a man without a country.
18
The final execution of a counterinsurgency plan is to not just defeat the insurgency, but cripple the will of anyone who might want to follow in the insurgents’ footsteps.
For a man like Eduardo Santiago, there would always be people gunning to bring him down.
He was too powerful now. He’d forgotten where he came from. He was no more than a crook with a collar.
And then people really gunning for him: The Latin Emperors were not going to disappear. As long as there were prisons, as long as there was poverty and drugs and violence, there would be the Latin Emperors. And as long as Father Eduardo was alive, there would be a Latin Emperor who would think that the way to earn his stripes would be to get the man who snitched out Junior Gonzalez.
He was too powerful now. He’d forgotten where he came from. He was no more than a crook with a collar.
And then people really gunning for him: The Latin Emperors were not going to disappear. As long as there were prisons, as long as there was poverty and drugs and violence, there would be the Latin Emperors. And as long as Father Eduardo was alive, there would be a Latin Emperor who would think that the way to earn his stripes would be to get the man who snitched out Junior Gonzalez.
Unless they were too damn scared of the power Father Eduardo still had from his perch in the church. That meant creating a mystique of fear. And the only way you scared hard knocks like the Latin Emperors was to attack them in a way they could not quantify.
Like through the air.
Fiona and I sat idling in the Charger across the street from Honrado when we saw an eighteen-wheeler roll tentatively down the street. I couldn’t make out the face of the driver in the cab, but thought that the tattooed arm draped out the window was a pretty good sign that the driver wasn’t under the employ of Harding. It was seven P.M. and the Honrado campus was clear of people ... except for the ones Barry and Sam were training in the art of counterfeiting this fine evening.
I called Sam. “Delivery is here,” I said.
“That’s great,” Sam said.
“You sound a little distracted,” I said.
“Mikey, we’re printing money in here.”
“I’d like to remind you that you’re a federal employee,” I said.
“You know that pension I was worried about?”
“Sam.”
“I just saw it roll off a press and get cut into exact replicas of twenty-dollar bills. And that was just on a practice run.”
“Where’s Barry?”
“He’s holding forth with the gangsters,” Sam said. “You know, in another life, he might have made a pretty good professor. The kids really respond to him.”
“Don’t let him leave with anything in his pockets tonight,” I said.
“Mikey, I’m not going to frisk him.”
“Sam, I will have Fiona frisk both of you,” I said.
“Fine, Mikey, fine. Just know that I have seen temptation and I have walked away from it a better man. Or I will. I will. Yes, I will.”
“Where’s Father Eduardo?”
“He finished up the bake sale at three, and I brought him back to your mother’s. He’s far away from here.”
“No one followed you?”
“There was a car that picked us up leaving here,” Sam said. “And then another that picked us up at the corner. So I had Father Eduardo call the mayor and see if he could pop into the mayor’s quarters for a quick talk about something pressing. But the mayor wasn’t in.”
“So what did you do?”
“Drove over there, anyway, and sat around for twenty minutes while Father Eduardo chatted up the security detail and mentioned that it looked like some gangsters were loitering around out front. So the security detail went out and arrested them. Turns out they were bad guys. I gotta tell you, Mikey, it’s hard to be a covert operative and a hard-core gangster at the same time. Tough to be inconspicuous while you’re thumping your bass.”
“Occupational hazard,” I said.
“I got the truck in my sights here,” Sam said.
“Let it back into the loading dock and then get rid of the driver. Don’t open the container until the driver is gone. Got it?”
“On it,” Sam said, and hung up.
Outside, a young woman pushed a baby in a stroller. A man sat on the porch of his apartment and read the newspaper. Two boys rode by on matching low-rider bicycles.
“What’s the point of that?” Fiona said.
“The bikes?”
“Yes, the bikes.”
“Look cool, I guess,” I said.
“Father Eduardo needs to start talking to these kids from the moment of conception.”
In the backseat of the Charger was the residue from fifty cakes of portosyt. We’d stopped off at Lowe’s on the way over and purchased enough of the chemical to either stave off an entire football field of wild grass or render unconscious, with the help of fentanyl, an entire generation of gangsters. It was now stacked innocuously inside a garbage can just beside the loading dock where Sam was.
“You sure we have the right combination of chemicals?” I asked.
“If not,” Fiona said, “what’s the worst that could happen?”
“Fiona, I’d prefer not to deal with those kinds of scenarios. It’s the grounds of a church.”
“Oh, Michael, always so pious,” she said. “We’ll need at least five hundred fentanyl patches’ worth of gel to dissolve with the portosyt.”
“We should be fine,” I said.
In an optimum situation, we’d pump the gas into the ventilation system of the printing-press room, but the entire facility was enjoined by the same system, which meant that we’d need to dissolve the chemicals in the same space as the gangsters in order to control it.
Our plan was extraordinarily high-tech: We’d combine the two chemicals, along with the appropriate amount of distilled water, in this case two jugs, which we’d already poured inside the garbage can, and place it in the facility while they worked. It would take about five minutes for the chemicals to become a strong enough gas to knock them out. The sustained propagation of the gas, combined with the oxygen in the room, would keep them under like an anesthetic for the duration of the dissolve time. Which in this case would be about three hours.
Or enough time to alert the proper authorities to a bunch of gangsters who’d broken into the plant and started making counterfeit money.
Provided nothing went wrong, which seemed to be the case until Junior Gonzalez and Killa pulled up in front of us in the parking lot, hood to hood. Except that Junior and Killa were in a lowered Honda Accord and we were in the Charger.
“Act natural,” I said through my smile to Fiona. “And by that I mean don’t shoot them until it seems like the last resort.”
“Always with the rules,” she said.
I got out of the car and walked to the driver’s-side window and peered in. “Something I can do for you, Junior?”
“Just wondering what you were doing sitting here on point,” Junior said.
“Wanted to make sure the truck arrived,” I said. “How’s your knee, Killa?” Killa kept staring forward. His eyes were hidden behind a pair of black wraparound sunglasses.
“Where’s the boy?” Junior asked.
“Safe,” I said. “You’ll get him tomorrow. As we previously determined.”
“You see, that’s funny,” Junior said, “because Leticia doesn’t know anything about that.”
Shit.
“Why would she?” I said.
“You separate a mother from her child, maybe you think you’d let her know,” Junior said. “You think I’m stupid? You think I can’t get to her? You think her home-girls will keep her secrets? You’ve never had her or him, have you?”
“Junior,” I said, “you really want to play this game? You’re an old man working in a young man’s game now.” I looked over my shoulder at Fiona. Her focus was unwavering. I didn’t know how to tell her with simple body language that she needed to let Sam know that he needed to rush the chemicals
right this very instant
.
right this very instant
.
“And something else,” Junior said. “Julia Pistell? She’s on a cruise right now. Yeah. Summer at Sea, her mother called it. You wanna know how I found out? I picked up the phone and called her. Four-one-one. Still works.”
Shit again. I looked back at Fiona, and this time she had her head down for just a brief second. When I looked back into Junior’s car, Killa had a nine pointed at my chest.
“Why don’t you get in the backseat,” Junior said. “And you and I can have the conversation we should have had a week ago.”
“And if I say no?”
“I got five guys in the printing press with your two friends,” he said. “They don’t hear from me, your friends are going headfirst into the pulper.”
I looked back at Fiona again, but this time more deliberately.
“Don’t worry,” Killa said, speaking for the first time, “we’ll come back for her later.”
I had a couple choices. I could run and get shot in the back. I could reach into the car, attempt to break Junior’s neck and disarm Killa, but there was a high likelihood that Killa would get off a shot in the process, since the angles of attack were difficult because the Honda was at about hip level for me.
Or I could trust that Fiona would do the right thing.
“Fine,” I said, “let’s have that talk.”
I reached for the door handle at the same moment the Charger slammed headfirst into the Honda Accord, the airbags exploding immediately into Junior and Killa’s faces. Fiona, from the passenger’s seat, floored the Charger into the Accord, shoving it across the street like a toy, spinning it around back to front as it careened toward the grassy area in front of Honrado. Fiona kept ramming the Accord, finally spinning it into a tree, where she then pinned it with the front of the Charger.
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