by C. S. 96
“We wait for them to contact me. They’re what we call in the business motivated sellers.”
Inez came outside. She stood in front of me, blocking the sun, and when I opened my eyes there she was—in full clown regalia—makeup and all. It was hard to decipher her face behind all that white makeup, the overaccentuated red smiley mouth and arched red eyebrows, the big, curly red wig, and, of course, the rubber red nose. Had I bumped into her in the street, I might smile, apologize, and be on my way.
Her long red shoes and enormous sequined blue pantsuit hung impossibly from her limbs.
Inez twirled like a little girl showing off her first communion dress. “So, how do I look?”
I laughed. “Like a sexually confused clown.”
“What are you talking about? It took me a week to find this outfit and the makeup. Two hundred fifty bucks at a theatrical store.”
“The kids are gonna love it,” I conceded. “So what time does this extravaganza take place and what time does your performance begin?”
She looked at her fake watch that was the size of a saucer, “Half past the cow and a quarter to his cajones. Otherwise known as now.”
She stood up and started to back away. “I’m going across the street now and you’re coming over, yes? They’re expecting you.”
I was not looking forward to flipping burgers with my overly curious neighbors—telling them how “the construction business” was going. Owing to my Jaguar, I had to say I was making a killing. I needed the neighbors to buy into the life I’d first convinced them of years ago: that I owned a construction company that built homes from San Diego to San Francisco. That I’d also recently divested into moving frozen food to the East Coast with refrigerated trucks I’d purchased, which technically wasn’t a lie, though it wasn’t exactly meat and potatoes that I was moving. On occasion I’d bring home one of the trucks to keep up appearances, telling them I was slowly phasing out of the construction business
“Yes, Bozo. I’ll be there for your first set.”
“Earlier,” she said, “You’re not going to make me hang out there alone all night in this outfit.” Again she looked at the fake watch, which was actually a pretty funny gesture to slip into conversation. “I’ll give you exactly thirty minutes and then I’m coming over. And you don’t want an angry clown after you.”
After she left, I dozed off in my chaise; I woke after only twenty minutes, but when I did, I felt groggy, my eyes red and dry. I blinked them open, expecting to see Inez, arms folded, tapping that gigantic shoe waiting to escort me across the street.
But the shadow cast was larger than that of one person; in fact, there were three people standing in front of me.
I sat up quickly, and when my eyes were finally accustomed to the light, Miguel, Robbie, and Joaquin were standing in front of my chair. They weren’t smiling, just staring. My chest felt like my heart was seizing. Had my tradecraft gotten this sloppy or was I just trying to beat someone who was out of my league? I wondered if they’d followed me up the hill to the Ramona base, too.
Were they here because they found out Tony was locked up? The situation had spun fully out of control. I had no idea what they knew about me and what they didn’t.
I swallowed. “I was expecting you guys yesterday,” I said, as if unfazed, “maybe even sooner.”
“Nice neighborhood.” Miguel looked at the pool and the spectacular vineyards trailing down deep into the wine valley beyond my property, the gardens and rose trellises, the bougainvillea that covered the roof of the pool house. He studied the pool house, then me again.
My throat felt like it was closing up. I could only think about Inez and the children. I had to get these men out of here before she came home. Even though I put my family unfairly at risk for every day of the ten long years that I was in the drug trade, I’d never before—aside from the neighborhood pop-in from Raul that launched this case—had my work darken our doorstep.
I needed to get near a gun in case this was the worst-case scenario, but my gun was in the pool house.
“Do we have a place where we might be able to speak quietly?” Miguel asked. “Undisturbed?”
I looked at my watch. “There’s a birthday party for our neighbor’s kids across the street, so I don’t have much time. Had I known you guys were coming tonight, I’d have changed my plans. Can we meet, say, in an hour? I only need to make an appearance there.”
Miguel wasn’t listening. Instead, he walked confidently to the pool house.
“Business takes precedence over pleasure, no?” Miguel said in his wispy, ominous voice. At least he had picked the room where my weapon was stashed.
I couldn’t believe that after all Inez and I had poured into our family, after I’d finally had the chance to work to disavow my sins and make our streets safer, our lives could end with a tug on Miguel’s gun.
I did my best to retain my composure. I gestured to the couches that were in front of the glass doors to the pool house. Inez would see their backs, hopefully she’d see me standing in front of them talking. I could signal her not to come in. Years ago we’d devised a method of nonverbal and verbal communication. If I said anything that seemed out of the ordinary she would know to make up an excuse that she had to leave, take the kids, and go. But we’d never imagined what she would do if that happened in our home.
They took a seat on the couches, and I maneuvered to the side of the couch that had a secret flap in which I’d put my gun.
Miguel didn’t waste any time. “We want to work with you, but we need to know a few things.”
Though I’d keep myself on point around these dangerous and cagey men until I understood the situation, I started to relax.
“First of all,” Miguel said, “what did your partners say—did they agree to this? Second, can you guarantee us fifty plus a week? Third, we’ll need to know how and where the material is going, and four, who your couriers are. They need to be checked out.”
It seemed like a strong close. I wanted to make this deal as big as I possibly could. “This is good news,” I said, but I sighed audibly. “It’s not a great week for us, actually, but it’s a very good time for this deal. One of our shipments, a very big one, was confiscated. The courier has been taken care of financially and his family is being paid, and he’s got the best representation money can buy, so we’re not at risk.” He looked down, either pensive or disgusted. “I’m telling you this,” I said, “to be as transparent as I’d hope you would be with me. That’s how I want us to begin working, no bullshit.”
Miguel contemplated a bit. “And why is that, what did you say, really good timing?”
Joaquin, without asking if he could smoke, pulled out a torpedo cigar, bit off the tip, and spat it onto the tiled floor. My blood boiled, and I focused every ounce of my energy on breathing deeply. Then I saw, on the floor to the right side of my couch, an ashtray. I casually reached down, quickly pulling on the Velcro of the secret flap until it was open, came up with the ashtray, and walked it over to Joaquin. Before handing it to him, I made a big gesture of picking up the wet gob of the cigar tip and dropping it into the ashtray.
He took it from me without looking at me or saying a word.
I sat back down, crossed my legs casually, and after a silent count to five answered Miguel. “Now is good timing because Tony and Hector, my partners, want to lay low for a while. I don’t. This hit was a lucky car stop by some bumfuck townie, no organized takedown. Even better, Tony relayed to the brothers we were shutting business down for a while just to make sure we weren’t hot.”
All three men looked at one another, nodding their heads in agreement. First hurdle complete.
“And the movement of the material, the weight?” Miguel asked.
“We can easily do fifty a week, that’s not a problem; in fact we’ll probably double that after you get comfortable with how things are run…”
He quickly asked, “And how are these packages run?”
I smiled, not gl
ibly because that would reveal cockiness. No, I had to exude confidence in a way to evoke pride in the work I’d until recently been doing and getting away with for the past decade, save for my little excursion through America’s most fortified state, friggin’ Utah.
“I move my material through a cut-out company I own. Refrigerated trucks. We have legitimate contracts on the East Coast that buy frozen food from me. Half these trucks are filled with the legitimate food, the other half is our material that is boxed up in the same packages and boxes the frozen food is. We’ve never been hit using this method of transportation.”
I was pleased at how the conversation was going but still terrified for my family. I needed to wrap this up before they returned. “Listen,” I told Miguel. “I’m a money maker.” I moved my hand in a grand gesture around the room and property. “I like what I have, and I live a very comfortable life under the radar and free of suspicion. I want to make money with you. And I don’t like to stay still; I always expand.”
For the first time I saw the slightest positive reaction from Miguel: He actually smiled. It was only an inkling, perhaps more of a grin, but it was there.
Miguel slapped his hands gently across his knees and said, “Okay, let’s meet this courier. If he turns out as good and as clean as you say he is, then we have a deal. Let’s say tomorrow. You know the IHOP near my home?”
I needed to speed this up. “Know it well. Say 10:30, that good for you guys?”
For the first time Joaquin opened his mouth. “In the morning, yes? We want to move on this quickly.”
Miguel slowly turned to the dandy and gave him a look that could stop a clock. It reminded me of the scene in the classic 1972 gangster film The Godfather, when Sonny talked out of turn during a meeting.
“Yes, tomorrow 10:30 A.M. Let’s meet in the parking lot.”
Miguel agreed, he stood up, and that’s when it happened. It was like a fiery asteroid shot out of the sky and crashed through the roof of the pool house: my beautiful wife “Bozo” was happily skipping toward us; her eyes were not on mine but on the backs of the three men now standing and blocking my eye line with hers. She stopped skipping, but continued walking toward the pool house.
It was a horror I’d dreamed so many times, acted out in real life.
In a whisper, I told the men that she didn’t know the business I was in, to follow my lead.
Inez cautiously slid open the glass doors, and in unison the men turned to see who was walking in and what in the hell I was talking about. Regardless of the face paint, I could see the immediate terror in her eyes once she saw the faces and outfits of these men.
I needed to undo this situation at all costs, to go back in time and unravel the knot of choices that had led here.
“Guys, this is my wife, Inez. Honey, I know I’m late to the party but these gentlemen are in the frozen food business and we’re discussing the possibility of taking on their trucking needs.” I moved to her and hugged her.
She joked about her attire. “I’m usually only this dressed up on special occasions, wherever I can get the work. Kids are big tippers.”
Inez laughed and I noticed Miguel smiling at her.
Each man shook her hand, tentatively, as if startled by the clown ensemble.
Miguel seemed to be the most taken by the surprise visit. “A pleasure to meet you,” he said. “You must forgive us for the intrusion. We were all together today, which is unusual as we’re all traveling so much, so we decided to stop by unannounced. Obviously terrible manners. Please let me make it up to you; I must invite you and Roman to my home for dinner.”
Inez accepted the offer as gracefully as she could given the circumstances.
Miguel laughed again. “So, Roman, see you tomorrow at 10:30.”
“Ten thirty it is.”
The three turned and walked out as quietly as they’d come in.
We watched them leave through the side, and once that gate was closed Inez gave me a hard-eyed glare I’d never seen before.
The tears followed, cascading from her eyes, smearing the makeup she’d applied for hours with such joy. I rushed to her, grabbing her up in my arms; she was now sobbing and shaking uncontrollably. I sat her down on the couch.
“How could you bring them to our home? How could you do this to us? They know where we live!” she said while trying to catch her breath. “That old man—his eyes, his eyes…” She sobbed louder and louder. “I should have never let myself—my family—get caught up in this business.”
For years I’d wondered how Inez controlled her anger over the line of work I’d gone into, no matter what financial benefits it brought my family. She expressed disapproval at times, whenever drug-related violence was in the news, for instance, but she never lost her temper over it in front of me. Now, I saw that the emotions had been lying within her, dormant for all the years the situation had seemed out of her control.
We sat there, me holding onto her, her indifferent to my touch, immovable. She wasn’t looking for solace or comfort from me but rather trying to come to terms with what just happened. Her sobbing stopped and she suddenly went quiet, again hiding from me the feelings she’d buried for so long. Had I lost my one chance to prove to Inez that my new line of work would be better for us, freer of the shadows of men like Tony and Hector?
What could I say to her? I had no excuse for what I’d let happen. Beyond my irresponsibility in slipping up in my countersurveillance procedures, I had also ignored this inner storm gathering because I was in my own self-absorbed world of money, money, and more money. Inez’s apparent self-loathing was all predicated behind my horrendous life choices. She had worked years of night school to become a brilliant physician’s assistant, and in spite of me was close to realizing her dream. And still I had dragged her into this murky abyss where her safety was severely in danger.
I watched her as she walked mechanically into our house. I knew I was running out of time. She was alone—in dealing with her own demons and in dealing with this reckless man she somehow loved. Only now did I realize how low I’d brought her, how devalued she must’ve felt, all of the wealth she was surrounded in taken off the backs of the poor and destitute, the very people she counseled and treated as an inner-city physician’s assistant. She wanted to end the treadmill of despair she saw every day, and when she looked at her husband she must have for so many years seen a man turning that treadmill forever up.
I sat there in the dark pool house, and the same feeling that I’d felt while sitting in the giant quad in Sevier County jail came over me.
I had to focus on the first challenge before me. Right now, I had to make this one big score to finish working my case off and get away from this life. Once I showed Inez the good I could do, I hoped that I could begin earning her trust back. If I lost her, I’d simply die. But more important, I wanted her to take her rightful place in life. To be proud of what she’d accomplished, to understand that I was no longer the problem but possibly a solution to this chaos I’d been a part of for so long.
I ran to one of my other “hides” in the pool house, a safe built into a false wall next to the fireplace, keyed it open, pulled up the tile, and grabbed the company phone. I dialed Tim Dowling; he picked up on the first ring.
I fed in my code to alert him. I went on a ten-minute tirade about what had happened.
“Roman, you need to calm down,” he said. “Of course they were going to find out where you lived. I’m sure they had five different teams stationed on different blocks, all with radios to communicate in order to follow you back home that night.” This was the first time I’d realized that being a source was not going to be a walk in the park. There were serious ramifications to doing the job I had so easily thrown myself into.
“Roman, let me ask you a question. Had these been two new business partners looking to buy from you, wouldn’t you do the exact same thing?”
He was right. I’d follow them for weeks, and if they seemed clean I’d send out some of ou
r people to ask about them.
I told Tim about the meet tomorrow, and he patched a three-way call in with Mike Capella to discuss it. Mike seemed jacked up and ready to play. We agreed on one safety rule: While I was alone with Sylvia’s family, if anything seemed out of the ordinary, I’d slip away, telling them I needed to use the restroom. When I had privacy, I’d call in the cavalry. Davis, Tim, and Al Harding would be close by in case anything went wrong.
Tim said, “Roman, you’ve got to get them inside your van to make you the offer. Once we have that offer on tape we’ll at least have the first charge of conspiracy to sell a controlled substance, which will enable us to get a trap up on their phones and covert communications up in that house of horrors.” Tim cleared his throat. “The most important thing is that you tell them that you bought the van from Boningo. Work it in somehow.”
I didn’t get it. “What does it matter who I got the van from?”
I was happy to learn that it mattered because my colleagues were thinking about my future as an undercover. We needed them to think it was Joey’s van because if the operation succeeded, all of us would appear to get collared except Joey Bing. If they were caught talking on camera in my van, they’d assume I’d filmed them. But if I bought it from Bing, well then, that’s plausible enough for them to believe I got caught up in this sting as well. He installed all the listening devices and cameras pre-sale to trap me and whomever I was dealing with.
“Any questions?” Tim said. “Roman, you okay? Any reservations or nerves about this at all, now’s the time to speak.”
I answered no.
But the truth was my nerves were fraying, and I did have one big reservation. Not about the operation, but about my family. The question of how exactly—and how much—the feds were going to protect us had begun to weigh on me.
When I got back home after the meeting with Tim and Mike, I noticed that the bedroom door was closed, which meant off limits—Inez needed space. I was not about to step into her only sanctuary after what had happened tonight. I went across the street, apologizing to my neighbors for missing so much of the party.