“Guy named Bob Albanis.”
“And this Albanis character claims the debt to the Birds will be repaid?”
“That’s what he’s saying.”
“When?
“Soon.”
“And they believe him?”
“They don’t have a whole lot of options.”
“You’re in touch with them?”
“Yes.”
“You’re advising them?”
“I’m consulting with them.”
“And?”
“I don’t know, Buddy. I’m doing all I can to help avoid a gang war.”
“I appreciate you telling me this, Chanho. It is alarming. Gang warfare is bad business. Raises everyone’s temperature. I know you carry large mojo. I trust you can help defuse things.”
“I’m doing what I can. No guarantees.”
“I understand,” I said. “How about we keep each other informed?”
He nodded and stood. “Johnny knows how to reach me.”
He stared at us both for a moment, then slipped out of the coffee shop.
“What do you make of it?” Johnny said.
“It’s tricky.”
“Why do you think he told you about it?”
“So he could inform the Birds that I know what’s going on,” I answered.
“Why would he do that?”
“My guess is the Birds want to make certain the Sinaloans understand there will be consequences for any acts of violence. If they’re made aware of the fact that local law enforcement knows what’s going on and is prepared to intervene, perhaps they’ll be less likely to act impulsively.”
“You think Hickey will show with the money?”
“Yes.”
“Because?”
“Not for the reasons they think.”
“Why, then?”
“Because the dutiful son wants the heat taken off his old man.”
“You think that’s why he ex-ed Oliver Darien,” Johnny said.
“He’s fishing.”
“For?”
“Anything Darien may have stashed.”
“So, you think there’s a stash?”
“I don’t know how big, but I’d bet there’s something.”
Neither of us spoke for a while.
“One way or the other, I wouldn’t give a plugged nickel for Hickham Long’s chances of survival,” I said.
“The cartel?”
“The Birds. Once he shows up here, if he shows up, he’s toast. They’ll deliver his head to the cartel on a platter.”
“He shows up here, he’s likely to have a rather large jones on for you. You haven’t made his family’s life any kind of picnic. He may well want your head on a platter.”
“Life’s a bitch, isn’t it,” I said.
“You need to take this more seriously, Buddy.”
“I do, don’t I?”
Chapter Thirty-nine
Her Honor the Mayor phoned in the early afternoon. “He’s in Freedom General.”
“Why?”
“He was having trouble breathing and it scared him. The doctor admitted him for observation. They put him on oxygen and he’s feeling better.”
“I’m on my way.”
“Buddy…”
“Yes.”
“Don’t upset him.” With that she hung up.
“Don’t upset him.” She just can’t let it go. She has to keep jabbing the needle.
I was born in Freedom to near-normal parents. My father, who had yet to become Sheriff, was making his way as a local law enforcement officer and my mother was a stay-at-home mom who took loving care of my sister and me. We were a family.
All that changed when she got sick. Cancer. She didn’t smoke or drink. She lived a healthy lifestyle. She was the least likely candidate.
It revealed itself as a lump in her breast. At first she ignored it. Cancer detection then wasn’t the obsessive issue it is today. It was my father who insisted she visit the family physician. In short order, she was diagnosed, mastectomied, radiated, and the recipient of the news that she had metastasized into a stage four. She was gone in a matter of months.
Bereft and seeking something that would take his mind off of his anguish, my father buried himself in his work. Soon he began to explore the possibility of running for elected office. When the then-Sheriff chose to step down, Dad petitioned the County Board of Supervisors for their support in his bid for the office.
With his unrelenting energy and larger than life charisma, he was a shoo-in with the supervisors. Given their backing, he won the election handily.
It was when he took up offices in the County Courthouse that he met Regina Goodnow. She was serving as chief of staff for then-Mayor Edward Rissien, whose headquarters were housed in the same building. Their paths crossed randomly, in the corridors, in the parking lot, in the cafeteria, but soon, they started crossing by design.
Both had lost spouses to illness and both were wounded and lonely. They married less than a year after my mother’s death. The Sheriff and the Deputy Mayor. In a matter of months, I went from being a town nobody to the son of Freedom’s most prominent couple.
My newly found status arrived before I had come to grips emotionally with the loss of my mother. I had become withdrawn and reclusive. My stepmother and I didn’t see eye to eye on things. She grew to dislike me. And I her.
She doted on her twin sons, Dan and Don, who were three years older than me. I didn’t much care for them. They looked alike. They dressed alike. They were a pair of mindless, boring nitwits. I referred to them as Tweedle Dan and Tweedle Don. They never tired of teasing me.
It was when they were in tenth grade and I was in seventh that things changed. I had grown into my frame and over the course of a single summer, I gained twenty pounds and became bigger and stronger.
The twins were what I considered to be soft boys, fleshy and inert. When they were larger and weightier than I, they took great pleasure in making my life miserable. When I filled out, it somehow escaped their notice.
One memorable fall afternoon they were following me home from school, keeping a distance between us, but close enough to toss stones at me and giggle riotously as they did so. I asked them to stop but that only egged them on.
Finally, after they had managed to toss a handful of pebbles down the back of my shirt, I’d had enough. I singled out Tweedle Dan and punched him in the stomach, causing him to drop to his knees and hurl whatever remained of his lunch.
Tweedle Don ran away and I chased him. He wasn’t very fit and the run taxed him. He collapsed in the front hallway of our house and passed out.
The housekeeper, finding Tweedle Don lying on the floor, began screaming that he was dead. She called the then Deputy Mayor and proceeded to inform her of that fact. Then she sat down on the kitchen floor and wept, moaning that Tweedle Don’s death would surely cost her her job.
She was still wailing when Her Honor arrived to find Tweedle Don alive, both he and his brother in their room on their beds, playing video games.
Angry that her afternoon had been so egregiously interrupted, she fulfilled the housekeeper’s prophesy by firing her on the spot. She went out of her way to find me and to wordlessly indict me with an angry glower. Then she went back to work.
Although they never physically accosted me again, the twins made it their business to poison the well for me with their mother whenever possible. There was always tension between Her Honor and me. She got along well enough with my sister, Sandra. But as for me, we shared a testy detente that continues to this day.
“Don’t upset him.”
She couldn’t resist.
Chapter Forty
When I entered his room at Freedom General, my father removed the mask that was covering his nose
and mouth and smiled weakly at me. The mask was attached to a noninvasive respirator that served to assist his breathing.
“I’m sorry, Buddy,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make everyone crazy. When I had trouble breathing, I panicked. I thought I was going to choke to death. I didn’t mean to upset anyone.”
“It’s okay, Dad. I’m happy you’re all right.”
“It sucks, you know.”
“I know.”
“I’ve never been sick a day in my life. I can’t for the life of me figure out how this happened.”
“I understand.”
“Not being able to breathe is brutal.”
“At least you’re all right now.”
“For the moment.”
He lay back, exhausted. We sat silently for a while. The hospital reeked of disinfectant. It had started to rain, and the sounds of heavy drops hitting the window, along with the low grade mechanical groaning of the non-invasive ventilator, seemed deafening.
The nurse’s station was just across the hall, and through the open door I could make out the comings and goings of the world of medical professionals, serious, determined, and focused.
My father looked at me. “You were right.”
“About?”
“The Longs. There’s a discrepancy between their declared income and the size of their loss.”
“Go on.”
“I’m not supposed to have this information.”
“Okay.”
“It was given to me in confidence.”
“Okay.”
“Their declared net earnings for 2014 totaled somewhere in the neighborhood of eleven million. The amount of their losses with The Darien Group exceeded seventy.”
“Seventy million dollars?”
“According to Darien’s records.”
“How could they have amassed that large a fortune in so short a time?”
“Pretty amazing.”
“Pretty impossible, I’d say. Do the math. The Ministry was founded in 2008. They didn’t even go on the air until 2010. Admittedly they captured people’s attention and became an overnight phenomenon, but you don’t clear that kind of dough that fast. Even if Oliver Darien inflated the value of their investments as part of his Ponzi scheme, it would have been impossible for them to have leapt that high.”
“Could they have just blindly swallowed his line?”
“The Longs are con men. They couldn’t be that gullible. They would have smelled a rat if their declared earnings with Darien were so inflated as to appear questionable.”
“Maybe they were too greedy to notice. Just like the other victims. Like the Madoff crowd.”
“There’s another explanation.”
“Go on.”
“What if they were laundering drug money?”
“What makes you say that?”
“Hickey’s run afoul of the Blackbirds. He owes them big time. They’re looking for him and they’re threatening retribution.”
“How do you know?”
“Don’t ask. The Longs saw a golden opportunity with Oliver Darien. Clearly Darien didn’t care where the money invested with him came from. Although nobody knew it at the time, he was using it to finance his scam. He was as happy as a pig in shit when the Longs slipped more money into the pot because he knew it was going to further fuel his perfidy.
“And conversely, I submit the Longs believed they were pulling one over on him. They came to believe they could use the Darien Fund as a way to launder their drug money and at the same time, earn huge profits on it. They deluded themselves when they received Darien’s phony statements. All they saw were dollar signs that kept growing larger.”
“Except for the fact they weren’t,” my father said.
“When the Madoff scandal erupted, somebody commented, ‘If it looks too good to be true, it most likely is.’”
“Darien convinced himself he could remain undetected endlessly. Certainly the Longs had no idea what was going on. They placed everything they had with him.”
“And neither the Longs or Darien ever saw disaster lurking.”
“Not until it bit them in the ass.”
My father laughed, which quickly turned into a coughing fit. When the spasms eased, he lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes. After several moments, he felt well enough to sit up and comment, “The pits.”
“Maybe you should try and get some rest, Dad. I wouldn’t want to wear you out.”
Undeterred, he glared at me. “Don’t think for one minute I’m worn out. I’m fine. Okay?”
He held his stare for several more moments, then offered, “I had a look at Darien’s calendar.”
“And?”
“It was as you suspected. He met with Hickey Long both on the day before and on the day he died.”
“And on the night he died, too, no doubt.”
“You think it was Hickey who tortured and killed him?”
“Hickey was desperate. I think he believed that despite Darien’s financial collapse, he still had a stash hidden somewhere. Hickey tortured him in an effort to learn where it was and how he could access it.”
“You think Darien told him?”
“I don’t believe Darien could have withstood torture for very long. If there was a stash, I think he gave it up fairly quickly, believing that by so doing, he’d save his life.”
“But Hickey killed him anyway.”
“Big surprise. One of the Long family accountants is telling the Blackbirds that there’s money enough to settle with them and that it’s on its way.”
“What do you think?”
“Beats me,” I said. “But I do have an idea.”
Chapter Forty-one
Assistant District Attorney Skip Wilder met me in the reception area and we walked together through the labyrinthian complex of the San Remo County District Attorney’s offices.
The accommodations were spartan, small cubicles for the legal staff with even smaller ones for their assistants, all jammed together in the center of a warehouse-sized space whose walls were comprised of floor-to-ceiling green-tinted windows.
We made our way through the bullpen toward the back end of the warehouse where elegantly appointed, individually designed offices served to separate the executive staff from the grunts.
“He’s none too happy today,” Wilder said.
“I’m deeply saddened to learn that.”
“Don’t wise-mouth him, Buddy. He’s in no mood.”
We were met at his door by Michael Lytell’s trusted assistant and, parenthetically, his wife, Nancy, both of whom I had known since boyhood. Small town.
Nancy Lytell came out from behind her desk and gave me a hug. “Don’t pay any attention to him,” she said. “He’s on one of his tears.”
“Easy for you to say. You get to sit out here.”
“How’s Burton?”
“Good days and bad days.”
“Will you send him our love?”
“Of course.”
Michael Lytell emerged from the inner sanctum. He looked at me. “What, no uniform?”
“I don’t believe in them.”
“Figures.”
He shook my hand weakly and led us inside.
“No calls,” he said to Nancy, closing the door behind him.
He ushered us to the sitting area of his oversized office, a kind of conversation pit, with four armchairs and a sofa, all of them facing a wall of windows that presented a tinted overview of the Freedom foothills.
When we were seated, the District Attorney turned to me. “Your dime.”
“And worth every penny,” I answered.
He turned to Skip Wilder and said, “You see, already it starts.”
“It’s not my intention to aggravate you, Mike,” I s
aid. “But I’m preparing to take an action that will definitely upset you.”
Lytell again turned to Skip Wilder.
“I told you,” he said.
“Hear him out, Mike,” Wilder said. “Give him a chance.”
To me, Lytell said, “Go on.”
“How much do you know about the Long family’s connections to Oliver Darien?”
“You tell me.”
“Are you aware of the size of their loss?”
“Not specifically.”
“It’s considerable.”
“How considerable?”
“In confidence?”
Again he looked at Skip Wilder.
“He hasn’t said one fucking thing and now he wants to swear me to confidence.”
“Do it,” Wilder said.
Lytell looked at me. “This better be good.”
“Confidence?”
He sighed. “Yes.”
“How does seventy million sound to you?”
“Like a goddamned lie.”
“That’s what I would have thought, too. But it’s not.”
“The Longs lost seventy million dollars with Oliver Darien?”
“It would appear so.”
“Jesus. Where did they get that kind of money?”
“Good question.”
“Do you know the answer?”
“Hickey Long was running drugs.”
“Oh, please.”
“He was. In fact, were you to go looking for him, you wouldn’t find him because he’s currently on the run from both the Blackbirds and the Sinaloan cartel.”
Lytell was silent.
“Does Barry, Senior, know?” Wilder asked.
“Of course he knows. He masterminded the whole thing.”
“These are some stiff allegations, Buddy,” Lytell said. “I’m assuming you can back them up.”
“That’s why I’m here.”
“To offer proof?”
“To make a proposal.”
To Skip Wilder he said, “He’s got no proof.”
“Will you just shut up and listen to him?” Wilder shook his head.
“I need your cooperation,” I said.
“In what?”
I told him.
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