by Mark Wheaton
“Like Charles Sittenfeld.”
“Who?” Munuera asked, seeming to be genuinely unsure. “That’s the banker’s name? No, he’s just a man. His bank makes the lion’s share of the money, not him. He enjoys taking the most risks. He has more to fear from his fellow bankers, who are afraid of being exposed, than us.”
A train whistle blew outside. The workers below accelerated their progress as the back door of the warehouse was slid open. Pallet jacks were shoved under the completed pallets, which were then wheeled into line behind the newly opened door. The last two pallets were finished and were wrapped with plastic sheeting, customs forms slapped on each announcing the boxes as having been inspected already.
Luis looked out a nearby window and spied a decelerating train coming down virtually unseen tracks that ran alongside the factory. Freight car doors slid open as the train slowed to a crawl. The workers, about two dozen in all, rolled the pallets from the loading dock onto the moving train, then hopped off, pulling the pallet jacks with them.
It was like watching a carefully choreographed ballet. A freight car opened, the boxes slid on board, the door closed, the next freight car door opened behind it. In a matter of seconds almost half the pallets were loaded, all the freight car doors were shut again, and the train sped back up, to disappear into the desert.
“Come on,” Munuera said from the steps above Luis. “Your father is finishing his shower.”
The second-floor room turned out to be an empty employee locker room. Against the rear wall were the showers, though water was running out of only one. His arms held high as to chain him to the shower head, Sebastian was slumped under the stream, barely able to stand. His clothes were soaked through with water, blood, and sweat. His face was heavily bruised, as was, Luis imagined, the rest of his body.
“Be happy he lives,” Munuera said, raising a long-barrel revolver. “But what happens next depends on you.”
Luis didn’t reply but instead went to his father’s side. Munuera made no move to stop him. Luis placed a hand on the older man’s chest and leaned down to his ear. “Dad, I’m here.”
Sebastian’s eyes rolled around without focus for a moment before finding Luis. When he saw his son, he reached for him, but his wrists merely clinked together on the shower pipe above.
“Why did you come?” Sebastian asked weakly, his voice ragged. “You should have run away or gone back to the States. I am all they can take away from you.”
“That’s too much,” Luis said, putting his arms around Sebastian. “We’re leaving here together.”
Sebastian nodded, though it looked like he was about to pass out. Munuera’s gun barrel tapped Luis’s shoulder.
“You need to follow me,” he said. “They’re waiting for you.”
“Who is?”
“The heads of the octopus.”
Luis left his father’s side and followed Munuera into a small office off the locker room. There was a desk inside with a single telephone on it. Munuera went to it, dialed a number, waited, then held the phone out to Luis. Luis took it.
“Who is this?” Luis asked into the phone.
“A planner,” a man’s voice said in an accent Luis took for Sinaloan. “You are clever.”
This wasn’t a compliment.
“But you choose your partners poorly,” the planner continued. “Michael Story told you he’d be handing all of this information over to the FBI, correct?”
Luis didn’t reply.
“We know he did, because we listened to the call. But right now he’s colluding with Miguel Higuera and Gennady Archipenko to stage his first victory as newly appointed interim district attorney of Los Angeles.”
This was news to Luis. He found the mention of Miguel particularly upsetting but knew he couldn’t show it. “So?”
“You sacrifice for others even as they use you to realize their own ambition?”
“That has been my relationship to Michael Story since the beginning,” Luis found himself saying.
“A deal with the devil?” the planner offered.
“He wishes he had such abilities,” Luis replied.
The planner laughed. “Then maybe this will be easy. We don’t like to kill priests or Americans but will do so if we have to. What’s done is done. Since Sittenfeld’s arrest, this outcome was inevitable, whether it came from his interrogation, an exploration of his contacts, or a rogue priest like you. Regardless, we have spent the preceding months preparing. What you found at the Mexico City archdiocese we allowed you to find.”
“You mean there were real priests at some point?” Luis asked.
This time it was the planner who went silent. Then: “From you we want only one thing: information. Answer our question, and we will let you and your father go.”
“And what’s that?” Luis asked.
“You know something about Michael Story that no one else does. It weighs on you. We would like to share that burden.”
“How do I know you’ll free my father if I tell you?”
“There are no assurances I can give that would satisfy you.”
Luis thought about this. He knew what they wanted to know. But they were wrong. It wasn’t a burden. Luis knew Michael Story played both sides of many games and—
“What do you have on Michael Story?” the planner asked.
It was simple. Michael had taken money from a powerful entity who asked him to keep tabs on a young whistle-blower named Annie Whittaker. When she approached him about a case she was assembling, he reported back to them, took their money, and promised to keep them updated. Soon, however, he fell in love, or merely lust, with her and they embarked on an affair. At what point he stopped informing on her, Luis wasn’t sure. But it was clear that eventually the young woman was murdered for what she knew.
Luis had pieced it together and had confronted Michael, but only Michael knew how directly or indirectly responsible he was for her death.
“If I tell you, will you answer a question of mine?” Luis asked.
“You can ask,” the planner replied.
Luis told the planner everything he knew about Michael. It wasn’t much, but it was what the man wanted to hear. He asked Luis to repeat a few details and elaborate on a couple of points, but the entire back and forth took only five minutes.
“Now,” Luis said, “who arranged my brother’s murder?”
The planner said nothing for a long moment. Luis thought he might be conferring with someone else. When he finally came back on the line, Luis expected a brush-off or a no sé. Instead he was given a name.
“Thank you for your time, Father Chavez. May our paths never cross again.”
The phone call ended. Luis rose in a daze. He focused on the fact that his father hung by his wrists in the next room and pushed everything else from his mind. Munuera greeted him in the doorway, a set of keys, including one for handcuffs, in his palm.
“You can take the pickup you arrived in,” Munuera said. “I won’t make you walk.”
Luis took the keys without a word and went to unlock his father’s wrists. Sebastian fell forward, but Luis caught him and lowered him the rest of the way to the floor.
“We’re getting out of here, Father,” Luis said.
Sebastian nodded and fought his way to his feet. Arm around Luis’s shoulder, the older man slowly made his way to the stairs, where Munuera was waiting. As they descended, Luis glanced around the factory below and saw that all the workers were now gone. Even the guards had left.
“I’ve heard that priests believe the devil whispers to them,” Munuera said as they neared the front door. “Is that true?”
“We believe that, yes,” Luis said.
“But how do you tell the difference?” Munuera asked. “Between God and the devil, I mean. Are their voices so different?”
“That’s just it,” Luis admitted. “They sound exactly the same.”
Munuera smiled as they moved to the pickup truck. “Clever. So you could be speaking dir
ectly to Satan and think it’s God?”
Luis looked past Munuera and saw the two men who’d driven him to the mill building loading the dead bodies of the guards, the train loaders, and even the overwatch gunmen onto the two panel trucks. Their hands and wrists had been bound, their throats cut. Luis could hear one of the young men telling the other how easy it was to get one group to bind and kill the other when they didn’t know they’d be next.
“Somehow the devil always reveals himself,” Luis said. “He can’t help it.”
“A fatal flaw,” Munuera said. “But plenty give in to him, don’t they?”
“Every minute of every day,” Luis agreed.
Munuera waved him away as Luis helped Sebastian into the pickup and drove off.
XX
“Is this a joke?” Agent Lampman asked, though her voice betrayed a knowing sense that it was anything but. “Be careful how you answer, Michael. You only get one shot.”
“I was as surprised as you are, but it’s legit,” Michael said, tapping the stack of pages on the table between them with grim assurance. “I called the judge this morning. She said she signed the warrant for Naomi six weeks ago. I sent her a photo of the signature. She confirmed it was hers.”
Agent Lampman scrutinized Michael as if preparing to devour him. “It only now came to your attention?”
“In my defense, I was fired,” Michael said. “I haven’t been able to access my own office, much less evidence pertinent to ongoing investigations, in weeks. That goes for Naomi’s case, too. I knew she had a warrant for Sittenfeld’s e-mail accounts and bank records relating to the murder-for-hire case. I didn’t know she’d surreptitiously gotten a secondary search warrant relating to money laundering.”
“Shouldn’t this have come out in subsequent findings?” Lampman asked, seething. “The case was reassigned within days.”
“Probably,” Michael admitted. “But all of these documents—the warrant, Sittenfeld’s records, and the ones she managed to pull from the Mexico City archdiocese—”
“Let me stop you there. How did she get them from the archdiocese?”
Michael shrugged. “They must’ve been among Sittenfeld’s records. I don’t know. He was likely stockpiling evidence in case they ever turned on him. Regardless, it was on her home laptop, which had been sitting in a box of personal items, waiting to be picked up from the courthouse, ever since her death. I guess her parents never went to claim it.”
“Not at your shared residence, where you have constant access to it, though, right?” Lampman asked with a sneer.
“What’re you implying?”
“First off, you forged the warrant,” Lampman said, sinking back on her heels. “Next, you received these records through illegal methods. Finally, that you loaded it all into Okpewho’s computer and somehow managed to convincingly backdate it, a near-impossible feat in this day and age, in order to take the case back to the district attorney’s office now that you’re interim DA.”
Michael whistled. “You think I’m capable of all that?”
“I think I’m still learning what you’re capable of, Mr. Story,” Lampman shot back. “Is this about the girl? You’ll finally get your revenge when this all comes to light?”
“It’s not revenge when it’s justice,” Michael said. “Or have you forgotten that somewhere along the way?”
Lampman leaned over the table, until her teeth were inches from Michael’s throat. “Is it justice if you have to break every law on the books to get it?”
Michael didn’t have an answer for this.
“Look, we’ve proven over the past few weeks that we work exceptionally well together,” Michael said. “I would like to suggest that, going forward, the FBI, Justice, and my own office collaborate on the indictment. Everyone’s worked hard. I don’t mind sharing some of the glory.”
“You’re serious?” Agent Lampman asked, barking out a laugh.
“I am,” Michael said.
“This is going to backfire on you,” Agent Lampman said. “A lot.”
“Is that a no?” Michael asked. “When we line this up in front of the bank’s lawyers, you’re going to want to be there to see their faces.”
He held up the copy of the records he’d made for Lampman. She stared at them like a fox sighting down on a hare. When Michael thought she was going to lay into him all over again, she snatched the pages from his hand and stormed out of the room without a word.
As soon as he was alone, Michael let himself celebrate the victory internally. It was true that he’d probably broken more laws and statutes than he’d even be able to recite, but so had the bad guys, hadn’t they? What mattered now was that those who had killed Naomi would pay.
All that mattered.
Sebastian was conscious when Luis reached the construction worker’s pickup but asleep by the time he finished changing the tire. He transferred his father with difficulty to the new vehicle, then started out again. Bypassing El Tule, he drove up to Uruapan and the university hospital, bringing Sebastian directly into the emergency room.
The admitting nurse took one look at Sebastian and shook her head. “What happened to him?”
“Car accident,” Luis said.
“Lot of car accidents around here,” she said knowingly. “Not a lot of survivors.”
Half an hour later Sebastian was wheeled into surgery. In the waiting room, Luis stared idly at a television broadcasting telenovelas before falling asleep himself. When he was awoken a few hours later, the same nurse was kneeling beside him.
“Your father has three broken ribs, compound fractures in his right arm, a broken scapula, and a broken left foot. That’s the good news.”
Luis inhaled sharply as the nurse waited to see if he could handle the bad.
“He received several blows to the head, resulting in a swelling of his brain,” the nurse continued. “They needed to remove a piece of his skull to reduce the swelling.”
Luis closed his eyes, said a short prayer, and nodded. “Okay.”
“I’d say he was lucky to be alive, but it’s obvious his attacker knew what they were doing,” the nurse continued. “He was struck in ways to maximize pain but keep him alive. He went through hell.”
Luis thanked the woman, asked when he could see him, and was told that Sebastian was awake then, but that there was no telling how lucid he’d be. When Luis arrived in the post-op room, he didn’t recognize his father at first, so swollen were his features. What was visible of his face was gray, almost white, as if he’d been drained of blood.
“We are a pair,” Sebastian whispered in a throaty voice. “One gets out of a hospital bed, and the other goes right in.”
“How do you feel?”
“Like a man yanked back from death’s door,” Sebastian said. “I was asleep when someone beat on the doors of the rectory, shouting about a fire at the church. I ran over with Fathers Feliz and Barriga. By the time we got there, it was beyond rescue. It was terrible. Some of the women were crying. I felt like crying. Somebody told me there was a second fire, and I foolishly went around the corner to see. That’s when they got me.”
“You couldn’t have known they’d target you.”
“Maybe, but I didn’t have to make it so easy for them,” Sebastian said, grimacing at a new ache in his skull. “How is Father Arturo?”
“I don’t know. I dropped him off before I went to find you.”
“If he is well, will you pass along a message to him?” Sebastian asked. Luis nodded. “Tell him that when he is ready to rebuild, I’ll be right there with him, hammer and nail in my hand.”
It was a statement full of bravado, but Luis knew he meant it.
“You can’t stay in Mexico,” Luis protested. “You’ll wind up right back in this hospital, or worse, in a coffin.”
“You were right to tell Father Arturo what you did about his responsibility to his congregation. I worry that he needs help to make that happen, you know?”
Luis was about
to challenge his father again when Sebastian took his hand, gently tightening his grip around his fingers.
“I’ll give him the message.”
Luis drove back to El Tule. He was exhausted despite his nap in the waiting room. He parked at the apartment building that served as San Nieves’s rectory and jogged up the steps to Sebastian’s room. He didn’t have a key, but Father Ponce was home and let him in.
“He was so quiet, half the time we didn’t know he was home,” Father Ponce said. “Some nights he’d make dinner for us, then disappear into his room. He only put his hammer down to sleep or attend Mass.”
Luis nodded and stepped inside. The single room was so bare that he wondered if he’d happened into the wrong one. It could’ve passed for an empty store room if not for the bedroll on the floor and the three threadbare work shirts hanging in the closet. His father lived like an ascetic.
There was one last artifact in the room, a familiar one at that, in the form of a small metal box by the window. Unadorned, with a lid that never closed properly, the box was one Luis’s mother had used to keep recipes in when he was a child. He didn’t remember it ever going missing but seeing it now realized it must’ve fallen into his father’s care at some point. He walked over and opened it, unsure what he’d find. He gasped when he saw the contents.
Inside were about fifty to sixty old photographs, all long-forgotten images of Luis and Nicolas as children. There they were at Echo Park Lake; with their mother at a Los Posados procession at Christmastime; at a birthday party for someone—a relative?—Luis couldn’t place; at the zoo; at the Santa Monica pier. Memories Luis hadn’t accessed in decades reappeared. He remembered his clothes, a different aspect of his mother’s smile, the way his brother’s face looked at a certain angle. He’d let go of so much over the years, but here they were, his family returned to him.
As he sifted through the photographs a second time, he came to a couple that had been attached to the refrigerator with magnets, favorites of his mother. He wondered if they’d ever sat down and divided them up. What was most striking to him was that Sebastian wasn’t in a single one, most likely occupying the space behind the lens. If he chose these himself, perhaps it was not to remind him of the family of four that had been but of the trio that had been left behind.