by Don Winslow
He now communicates with Gloria only over the Net. It is the only secure way, but it pains him that his daughter is now only a configuration of electronic dots on a screen. They e-chat almost every night, though, and she sends him pictures. But it is hard not seeing her, or hearing her voice—terrible, really—and he blames Keller for this as well.
In truth, there are other ghosts.
They come when he lies down and shuts his eyes.
He sees the faces of Güero’s children, sees them plunging down onto the rocks. He hears their voices in the wind. No one, he thinks, sings songs about that. No one puts that moment to music.
Nor do they sing of El Sauzal, but those ghosts come, too.
And Father Juan.
He comes most of all.
Gently chiding. But there’s nothing I can do about that ghost, he thinks. I have to focus on what I can do.
What I have to do.
Kill Art Keller.
He’s busy planning that and running his business when the world comes crashing down around him.
He sits down at the computer to get his message from Gloria. But it’s not his daughter online saying hi, it’s his wife, and if an instant message could scream this one would.
Adán—Gloria had a stroke. She’s at Scripps Mercy Hospital.
My God, what happened?
Uncommon but by no means rare for someone with her condition. The pressure on the carotid artery simply became too much. Lucía had gone into her bedroom and found Gloria unconscious. The e-techs were unable to revive her. She’s on life support, tests are being run, but the prognosis isn’t hopeful.
Absent a miracle, Lucía will soon have to make a very difficult decision.
Don’t take her off life support.
Adán—
Don’t.
There’s no hope. Even if she does make it, they say she’d be a—
Don’t say it.
You’re not here. I’ve talked to my priest, he says it’s morally acceptable to—
I don’t care what a priest says.
Adán.
I’ll be there tonight. Tomorrow morning at the latest.
She won’t know you, Adán. She wouldn’t know if you were here or not.
I’ll know.
All right, Adán. I’ll wait for you. We’ll make the decision together.
Twelve hours later Adán waits in the penthouse of the apartment building overlooking the border crossing at San Ysidro. He peers through a pair of nightscope binoculars, waiting for two things to come together—the bribed guard on the Mexican side has to come on duty at the same time as the bribed agent on the American side.
It’s supposed to happen at ten, but if it doesn’t, he’s going to make the run anyway.
He just hopes it happens.
It will make it easier.
Still, he’s not taking any chances he doesn’t have to; he has to get to that hospital, so he waits for the change of shifts at the border stations and then the phone rings. The single number 7 appears on the little screen.
“Go.”
Two minutes later he’s downstairs in the parking structure, standing outside a Lincoln Navigator stolen that morning in Rosarito and fitted out with clean plates. A nervous young man holds the back door open for him. He can’t be more than twenty-two or twenty-three, Adán thinks, and his hand is trembling and moist with sweat and for a second Adán wonders if it’s just because the kid is nervous or because this is a trap, and he says, “You realize that if you betray me, your whole family will die.”
“Yes.”
Adán gets in the back, where another young man, probably the driver’s brother, removes the cushion off the backseat to reveal a box. Adán gets in, lies down, fits the breathing apparatus over his nose and mouth and starts to take in oxygen as the seat is replaced over him. He lies in the dark and hears the whine of the electric screwdriver as it replaces the screws.
Adán is locked inside the box.
It’s too much like a coffin.
He fights off the initial panic of claustrophobia and forces himself to breathe slowly and steadily. You can’t waste air hyperventilating, he tells himself. The radio stations list the current wait at the border as forty-five minutes, but that estimate could be wrong, and they will still have to drive a few minutes beyond that to find a place isolated enough to stop and get him out.
And that’s if everything goes well.
That’s if this isn’t a trap.
All they’d have to do, he thinks, to collect a huge reward is to drive you straight to a police station: Guess what we have in the box. Or worse, they could be in the employ of one of your enemies, and then all they’d have to do is drive to an isolated desert canyon and leave the truck there. Leave you to suffocate or bake in tomorrow’s sun. Or just stick a rag in the gas tank, light it and . . .
Don’t think that way, he tells himself.
Just think that it will go as all-too-hastily planned, that these boys are loyal (really, there’s been too little time for them to plan a betrayal), that you’ll breeze through the bribed border checks and that in three hours or so you’ll be holding Gloria’s hand.
And maybe her eyes will flutter open, maybe there will be a miracle.
So he slows his breathing and waits.
Time passes slowly in a coffin.
Lots of time to think.
About a dying daughter.
Children plunging from a bridge.
Hell.
A lot of time to think.
Then he hears muffled voices—the Border Patrol agent asking questions. How long have you been in Mexico? Why did you go down? Are you bringing anything back? Do you mind if I look in the back?
Adán hears the car door open and then close.
They’re moving again.
Adán can tell by the subtle shift inside the box. Maybe it’s his imagination, or maybe the air actually is suddenly a little cooler inside the fetid container, and he literally breathes a bit easier as the car speeds up.
Then it slows again and he’s getting knocked around inside the box on the apparently bumpy road and then the car comes to a stop. Adán clutches the pistola in the waistband of his pants and waits. If they’ve betrayed him, this might be the moment when the box lid will come open and men with pistols or machine guns will be standing over him, waiting to blast away.
Or, he thinks with a shudder, they might just never open the box.
Or they might light a match.
Then he hears the electric whine of the screwdriver, the lid is lifted off and the young driver stands there, smiling at him. Adán rips the breathing apparatus off his nose and takes the proffered hand as the kid helps him out of the box.
He stands stiffly in the dust of the dirt road and sees a white Lexus parked to the side. Another smiling kid, his neck festooned with gang tattoos, hands him a set of keys.
“You start it,” Adán says.
You go turn the key, you go up in a ball of flame and jagged metal when the bomb goes off beneath you.
The kid turns pale, but nods, gets into the Lexus and starts it up.
The motor purrs.
The gangbanger gets out of the car and giggles.
Adán gets in. “Where are we?”
They tell him. Give him directions to get off this dirt road and onto the freeway. Fifty minutes later, he pulls into the hospital’s parking lot.
Adán crosses the parking lot, imagining dozens of eyes on him.
No one appears from a car, no men in blue Windbreakers with DEA on them come yelling and screaming and telling him to hit the ground. There is only the sad, eerie quiet of a hospital parking lot. He crosses to the entrance, goes inside and finds that his daughter’s room is on the eighth floor.
The elevator doors slide open.
Lucía sits on a bench in the hallway, hunched over, tears streaming down her face. He puts his arms around her. “Am I too late?”
Unable to speak, she shakes her head.
> “I want to see her,” Adán says.
He opens the door to his daughter’s room and goes inside.
Art Keller sticks a gun in his face.
“Hello, Adán.”
“My daughter—”
“She’s fine.”
Adán feels something sharp stick through his shirt and sting him in the back.
Then the world goes black.
Art and Shag put Adán’s unconscious body on a gurney and take him down to the morgue. Put him in a body bag, strap him back on the gurney and roll him out to a van painted with HIDALGO FUNERAL HOME. Forty-five minutes later they’re at a secure location.
It was relatively easy to force Lucía to betray her husband, and maybe the lousiest thing Art had ever done in his life.
They’d been on her for months, keeping the house under surveillance, the land line tapped, the cell phone monitored, trying to break the cybercode that sent messages back and forth between Adán Barrera and his daughter.
Art had to appreciate the irony that it was numbers that eventually gave them the key.
Lucía’s bank accounts.
No matter how they laundered their money, Lucía couldn’t account for her assets. End of story. She didn’t work, but had a lifestyle that showed considerable income.
Art had approached her and pointed this out when she came out of a gourmet deli near their home in an expensive part of Rancho Bernardo. She’s still an attractive woman, Art thought when he watched her come out, rolling a grocery cart in front of her. Her body trim from her three-times-a-week Pilates class, her hair coiffed and skillfully tinted in shades of amber at José Eber up at La Costa.
“Mrs. Barrera?”
She looked startled, then almost tired.
“I use my maiden name,” she said, looking at the badge he proffered. “I know nothing about my husband’s business or his whereabouts. Now please excuse me, I have to pick up my daughter from—”
“She’s an honor-roll student, right?” Art asked, smiling despite feeling like a piece of shit. “Glee club? Honors English and math? Let me ask you a question: How’s she going to fare with you in prison?”
He laid it out for her right there in the strip-mall parking lot: At the very least, she goes for income-tax evasion, but the worst-case scenario—and I think I can make it stick, Art added—is that she gets nailed with receiving narcotics money, which puts her in the thirty-to-life ballpark.
“I’ll take your house, your cars, your bank accounts,” Art said. “You’ll be in a federal lockup and Gloria will be on welfare. You think Medicaid will take care of her health needs? She can stand in line at the walk-in clinic, see the very best doctors . . .”
Attaboy, Art, he thought. Use a terminally ill kid as leverage. He made himself remember the baby’s corpse at El Sauzal, gripped in his dead mother’s arms.
She reaches into her purse for her phone. “I’m calling my lawyer.”
“Have him meet you at the federal jail downtown,” Art said, “because that’s where we’re going. Listen, I can send someone over to school to pick up Gloria, explain that Mom’s in jail. They’ll take her to the Polaski Center. She’ll make a lot of nice new friends there.”
“You are the lowest form of human life.”
“No,” Art said. “I’m the second lowest. You married the lowest. You still take his money, you don’t care where it comes from. Would you like to see some photos of how Adán makes his child-support payments? I have some in my car.”
Lucía starts to cry. “My daughter is very ill. She has many health issues that . . . She couldn’t stand . . .”
“To be without her mother,” Art said. “I understand.”
He let her think about it for a minute or so, knowing the decision she had to make.
She dried her eyes.
“What,” she asked, “do you want me to do?”
Now Art finishes typing something into his laptop computer and looks down at Adán, who is handcuffed to a bed. Adán opens his eyes, comes to and realizes that he’s not going to wake up from this nightmare.
When Adán recognizes Art, he says, “I’m surprised I’m still alive.”
“Me, too.”
“Why didn’t you kill me?”
Because I’m tired of all the killing, Art says to himself. I am sick to my soul of all the blood. But he answers, “I have better plans for you. Let me tell you about the federal prison in Marion, Illinois: You’ll spend twenty-three hours a day alone in an eight-by-seven cell that you can’t even see out of. You’ll get one hour a day to walk back and forth, alone, between two cinder-block walls topped with razor wire and a tantalizing slice of blue sky. You’ll get two ten-minute showers a week. You’ll get your crappy meals pushed to you through a slot. You’ll lie on a metal rack with a thin blanket, and the lights will be on twenty-four/seven. You’ll squat like an animal over an open toilet with no seat and smell your own shit and piss, and I won’t push for the death penalty, I’ll push for life without parole. You’re what, mid-forties? I hope you have a long life.”
Adán starts to laugh. “Now you’re going to play by the rules, Art? You’re going to take me into court? Good luck, viejo. You don’t have any witnesses.”
He laughs and laughs and laughs, feeling only a little disconcerted when Art starts to laugh with him. Then Art sets the computer in front of Adán, flips the screen open and presses a couple of keys.
“Surprise, motherfucker.”
Adán looks into the screen and sees a ghost.
Nora sits in a chair, looking impatiently at a magazine. Then she looks at her watch, frowns and then looks back at the magazine.
“Live feed,” Art says, then shuts the screen.
“You think she won’t flip on you?” Art asks Adán. “You think she won’t testify against you because she loves you so much? You think she’s going to spend the rest of her life in the hole so that you can walk?”
“I’d trade my life for hers.”
“Yeah, you’re so fucking noble.”
Art can feel Adán thinking, that little computer inside his head whirring, reconfiguring the new situation, coming up with a solution.
“We can make a deal,” Adán says.
“You have nothing to deal with,” Art says. “That’s the problem with being at the top, Adán—you can’t trade up. You got nothing to trade.”
“Red Mist.”
“What?”
“Red Mist?” Adán says. “You don’t know? No, Americans never do. It’s not just the drugs you buy that are soaked in blood. It’s your oil, your coffee, your security. The only difference between you and me is that I acknowledge what I do.”
Adán had made copies of the contents of Parada’s briefcase. Of course he did; only an idiot wouldn’t have. The information is in a safe-deposit box in Grand Cayman, and contains evidence that could bring down two governments. It details Operation Cerberus and the Federación’s cooperation with the Americans in the Contra drugs-for-arms operation; it talks about Operation Red Mist, about how Mexico City, Washington and the drug cartels sponsored assassinations of left-wing figures in Latin America. There’s evidence of the assassinations of two officials to fix the Mexican presidential elections, and proof of Mexico City’s active partnership with the Federación.
That’s in the briefcase. He has more inside his head—specifically, knowledge of the Colosio assassination, as well as Keller’s perjury to the congressional committee investigating Cerberus. So maybe Keller will have him put away for life, and maybe he won’t.
Adán lays out the deal: If they don’t reach a satisfactory arrangement within thirty-six hours, he’ll have a package of tapes and documents delivered to the Senate Subcommittee.
“I may wind up in a federal prison,” Adán says, “but we might be cell mates.”
Nothing to trade up? Adán thinks.
How about the government of the United States?
“What do you want?” Art asks.
“A new life
.”
For me.
And for Nora.
Art looks at him for a long time. Adán smiles like the proverbial cat.
Then Art says, “Go fuck yourself.”
He’s glad that Adán has the evidence. He’s glad it will come out. It’s time to eat truth like bitter dirt.