Confidential Source Ninety-Six

by C. S. 96

  Miguel and Joaquin left the van without as much as a good-bye. I had a feeling I’d not be seeing them until we were all in handcuffs together on some daisy chain at the San Diego office of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

  Bait and Switch

  Mike and I shut the doors to the van then waited till they drove out of the lot and were at least five blocks away before we celebrated. God, did we feel lucky.

  “How’d you get those tattoos on so fast?” I asked him. “And where’d you get that fine-ass ride?”

  “C’mon, bro, this isn’t the grapefruit league. This is the United States government we’re dealing with!”

  We hugged each other. We were acting like two high school jocks that had, hitting three-pointers in a matter of seconds, just brought our team into the finals. We hadn’t won the championship yet—at any moment Miguel and Joaquin could get spooked or be killed by a Fuentes operative or find out about Tony—but man, did we feel close to winning it all.

  We need to be careful now not to tip these dealers off. Tim had asked me not to head back up to Ramona—to stand down completely until I got that call from them. They were likely keeping an eye on me.

  The feeling that knowledge inspired—that whatever you do to stop your work from ever crossing over into your family life, and you do everything you can—is perhaps the darkest one that I would learn you must learn to endure in CI work. You find yourself taking extraordinary measures—renting studio apartments with front and back entrances just to be able to quickly run through them to a car waiting in the rear, spending nights on the highway trying to shake the dark sedan behind you that you’re convinced is holding the drug smuggler’s grunt, rather than a tired parent on the way home from work. But no matter what you do, that fear always lingers.

  I reached into a plastic compartment that held the DVD player/recorder and popped out the disk, handing it to Mike. We knew where it went from here. Soon, we were going to nab these guys. In the long term, we were going to grab hold of the ladder, keep climbing, taking out the bad actors in the drug trade one by one until we were at the very top of the pyramid.

  I watched as Joey Bing left the van, morphing ever so slightly back into Mike Capella. Gone was the big swagger as he loped into his car. I suppose it was the adrenaline crash he was now dealing with. I could see now that undercover work is a series of extreme highs and really low lows. In a way, the work is an addiction, too—often incredibly stimulating, and sometimes better than sex.

  Slowly, I made my way to my house. I wondered if Inez and the kids would be there. Recently, she’d gotten understandably frustrated with how much this case had taken over my life.

  It was excruciating knowing that as hard as I was trying to turn my life around I might have waited too long. Yes, Inez had stayed with me through the thick and the thin of marriage, but were the dangers of my new work finally going too far? Was she unable to leave me while I was at my most vulnerable, adhering to those wedding vows, or grateful, understanding the pressure I was under all those years ago when I first agreed to smuggle a load for Tony to make money so that we weren’t evicted from our apartment? She knew that I was as vehemently opposed to drugs as she was, and that if I didn’t make that first mule run all of us—including two little children, one with special needs—had nowhere to go. Inez could never look for help from her mother, who could barely survive herself. I wondered if perhaps she felt complicit in my criminal activity, having allowed me to continue in the life after she found out about it. Turning a blind eye because I told her this was the last score, the last run. I could see the troubled look that took over her every time the phone rang, as if she were afraid to pick it up for fear of who or what terrible news was on the other end.

  When I pulled up to the house, all the cars were there. I dropped my head on the steering wheel, exhaling loudly and thanking the Lord. Please, Lord, let her not be waiting inside, bags already packed, to give me the consolation of saying good-bye to her and the children.

  The only light in the house emanated from the large stone fireplace in our family room. Inez’s back was to me when I entered the great room of the house. She was sitting in a rocking chair, staring into the crackling fire as she cradled and fed our infant son. I quietly moved to her, hoping not to disturb this most beautiful moment, a moment I wanted to remember forever. She gently rocked back and forth and I noticed his little throat moving up and down rhythmically. They were both at peace, floating harmoniously on a cloud of oneness that can only be shared between mother and child.

  I stared at the two of them for what could’ve been a minute or could’ve been ten, I was so transfixed. Then Inez breathed in deeply and exhaled gently as if she’d received the same nourishment and love as our baby had. She stood and carefully moved past me without saying a word. I heard her pad quietly upstairs.

  Later, that night, we had the conversation by the flickering fire.

  “Roman, I’ve loved you from the moment I first saw you,” she said. Her voice was soft, warm, but what she was saying made me cringe at what I could feel coming. “I knew I wanted to spend the rest of my life with you. I knew the moment I laid eyes on you that this is the boy who will turn into the man that I will be with for the rest of my life. This is the boy who will become a man and be the father of my children. He’s going to take care of our family and do whatever it takes to keep us all happy and loved. I’ve loved you for almost half of my life.” She cleared her throat. “Right now, I fear for you. And I fear for myself, knowing what it would be like to lose you. If something did happen to you it would destroy me, and I’m not sure I could go on. We have a family that needs not only me but you, too.”

  I had a lump in my throat. I knew if I spoke I’d start blubbering, and Inez needed me to be as strong for her as she had been for me. I moved to her, sat next to her on the couch, and I pulled her into my arms. I looked into her eyes and I nodded.

  We kissed each other gently. She said, “You know I can’t live here any longer knowing that those people know where we live. Every time I hear a noise, I think someone is in the house. And I’m alone here, Roman, with the kids.”

  I nodded my head. “We’ll start packing up tomorrow. We’ll put the house on the market tomorrow as well. No signs outside, we’ll do it quietly with a real estate agent. In the meantime we’ll put whatever we don’t need in storage and rent a place far from here where you’ll be safe.”

  She nodded in agreement and smiled; we kissed again.

  There could be no surprises like yesterday ever again. I was going to make sure of it.

  My cell phone buzzed underneath the pillow where I always kept it. This wasn’t the company phone but my personal cell phone, the number that Miguel and friends had. I was woken from a dead sleep as soon as I heard the voice on the other end: “Roman, c’mon, man, you can’t make any money in bed. If you’re serious about our last conversation you have exactly forty-five minutes to meet me at the 7-Eleven on National Boulevard—you know the one I’m talking about?“ He sounded like he’d already run six miles, had his Wheaties, finished reading all the newspapers, and was ready to take on the world.

  I nodded, even though he couldn’t see me, still not fully awake.

  “Roman, are you there? You’ve got forty-four minutes and thirty seconds. You’re not there, then I’ll assume you’re not serious about doing business with us and we’re moving on.”

  “Yeah, um, yes, yes, I know the 7-Eleven, but, guy, you literally woke me from a sound sleep—can I get a little cushion on that time?”

  “No.”

  And the line went dead.

  The 7-Eleven he was talking about was in National City not far from their home. I’d made sales there in the past on a number of occasions with some old solid clients, but I tried to steer clear of this neighborhood because it was as gnarly a place as you’d want to find yourself stranded without a gun or backup. To get there it would take me at least thirty minutes and that’s assuming traffic was light.

/>   I called Tim Dowling, who didn’t answer, and left a voice mail telling him where I was headed. I had no choice but to do this on my own.

  What the purpose of this meeting was eluded me. I laid my burner down on my bathroom counter and for whatever reason placed the company phone in the pocket of my pajamas as I began moving my ass into gear.

  No time to shower, I cleaned up the best I could, picked up the phone that was on the counter, and was out of the house with exactly thirty minutes left to get there.

  As I was driving, bending every traffic law as much as I could possibly justify, I realized that in my haste to leave my home I forgot to pull the company phone from the pocket of my pajamas and that was a big problem because it was a new burner the team did not have the number for. So once Tim got word of this early morning meet via my voice mail, he’d have no way to contact me or me to contact him just in case shit went sideways. I had lost my only chance of having backup.

  As I swung my high-riding Range Rover off the interstate cloverleaf, the all-terrain vehicle lifted on two wheels, and I had to pull the wheel hard to the left, trying to displace the weight of the vehicle against the sharp right turn. The car slammed back onto all four tires, and I lost control, spinning into an intersection where—thank God—there was no oncoming traffic in either lane.

  In the California Highway Patrol car that I spotted sitting in the nearby 7-Eleven parking lot, precariously close to the BMW that I knew the drug pushers were parked in, I saw the two uniformed officers shaking their heads.

  I decided to go to them rather than have them come to me. I drove into the 7-Eleven holding up my hand to them completely embarrassed and then swung into one of the parking spots.

  Over the cruiser’s loudspeaker the wannabe comedian cop said, “Driver, you been out all night partying, or are you just waking up still half asleep? Put the vehicle in park, stay in your vehicle, open the driver-side window, turn the ignition off, and place both your hands outside the window where we can see them. If you need me to repeat that slower or in any other languages, just wave your hand up and down like a bird, don’t worry, we’ll see.” I heard his partner giggle before the car mic was clicked off.

  Not this again, I thought as memories of Sevier County, Utah, washed over me.

  I wasn’t worried about getting in trouble with the cops. I was worried that I’d spooked my associates in the BMW. I was waiting for them to pull out, leaving me stranded with this uniformed comedy duo, thus taking with them the sale and the deal of the century—this was going to be impossible to explain to the team. However, the BMW did not leave. I suppose they wanted to watch the comedy show that was about to unfold. I could hear a dance song emanating from the BMW’s high-fidelity speakers.

  I imagined they were having a ball watching me get pulled from my car, performing all sorts of sobriety tests for this ball-breaking team of cops. They had me counting backward from one hundred, finger to nose while standing on one leg, reciting the alphabet backward from Z, which I couldn’t do stone-cold sober on my best day.

  The cops, after having their civil servant fun for the day, took pity on me after I explained I was heading up north to try and get to my sister before she had her first baby; I, of course, being the godfather. And I desperately needed coffee for the long trip. They gave me a spirited warning telling me to drive safe unless I wanted to be referred to as “Uncle Jell-O legs” for the rest of my life. They actually patted me on the back, congratulating me, and were on their way.

  A good legend and the power of persuasion have never let me down. And I still rely on them for my life every day.

  As the cops left the lot, I had to make a play of going into the 7-Eleven for one of their Big Gulps of the day just in case they were still watching me. As I passed the BMW I winked at the driver, indicating I’d be right out.

  I was expecting all three stooges again, and man, was I surprised. It was Robbie without Miguel or Joaquin.

  Robbie was with a young, handsome, well-dressed man about twenty years old who bore a striking resemblance to him—his son. Robbie was the true connect to the Fuentes. He had been in control the whole time and we would later learn that he was here in the United States to solve the mess that Miguel had apparently fallen into.

  I entered the rear of the BMW. Robbie wasn’t even trying to suppress his laughter at the scene that had just played out in front of him. He looked at his son and said, “Hey, Junior, that was like a real-life episode of Cops. Man, I was waiting for them to toss your car; they found a gun in there we wouldn’t be having this conversation.” He jerked his thumb toward the young man next to him. “This is my son, Junior.”

  “Yeah, that was fucking hilarious,” I said sarcastically. I looked at the kid in the front seat, stuck my hand out, and said, “I’m Roman Caribe. Nice to meet you. I hope you didn’t find that as funny as your father did.”

  The kid just stared at my hand then looked to his father, who nodded his head in approval. Only then did the obedient mini kingpin shake my hand.

  This case just kept getting darker and darker. First I’d been confronted with the reality of Lourdes, the young mother present during the first meeting which in any court of law could be construed into some conspiracy charge, her little son likely entering the system as mommy and daddy were probably undocumented. It was a never-ending hamster wheel of despair that I was so glad to be off, though I couldn’t help but be saddened over the oppressive bureaucracy and foster home hell that that boy was going to have to go through because of this operation.

  Robbie got right down to business. “Okay, I like the way you handled yourself with those pincha imbeciles. I trust you so our deal stays the same, but I don’t want that familia idiota to know the extent of our business.” Robbie reached around and shook my hand. “First of all, welcome to the family. My family.”

  “Which idiot family are you referring to?”

  “Who do you think? How do you say…” He turned to Junior and asked in Spanish, “What’s that cartoon character you called him, the one with the big…?” Robbie used both his hands cupping them around his eyes indicating eyeglasses.

  Junior said, “Mister Magoo.”

  “And let’s not forget that other one, Joaquin. Him I have no description for. That one makes my blood boil, odd piece a work that one.”

  Junior gave the description for his dad, “Puta,”

  “Ahhh, yes, no doubt, son.” Robbie laughed.

  This was a very different man than the one I’d observed these past few days. He was much more confident, with a grotesque sense of humor. I didn’t want to look confused but rather allow him to believe I knew who was who all along.

  “I was waiting for you to reach out,” I said.

  “Yes, I figured you knew, but I had to let those busted valises play their little games. They’re trying to make connects here and they can’t put two pesos together. Though Sylvia is a lovely woman, she is not going to save that bumfuck husband of hers or that puta Joaquin from running our business into the ground. That’s why I came at you and not your partner Tony—or no, his fat pig of a partner Hector.”

  I smiled.

  “No offense,” he said. “You know…” He sighed a deep, long sigh. “How do I put this?” he said. “We know all about his little escapade with the brothers. It was nice of Tony to cover the debt, but I’m not so forgiving. So you’re the one I’m going to deal with. Not Tony, and definitely not Hector.” He lost his smile, mood darkening, “You have a problem with that?”

  I wondered if perhaps he’d heard about the takedown of Tony, and that was why he’d called me tonight in a panic—if this was possibly his way of trapping me in a lie.

  I said I didn’t have a problem. I had no choice but to play along.

  He continued, “Tony is a loose cannon who’s going to get you arrested or killed. And Hector, that fucking greedy fool, he’s going to get you arrested or killed if he’s not killed first. Do you want to sit on the deck of this sinking ship
waiting for the band to drown around you, or are you going to move out on your own and instead of taking a cut of the profit keep all the profit for yourself?” He nodded his head thoughtfully, while lowering his voice, capping off his sales pitch. “I think you have been waiting for me to come along and help you make these decisions for a very long time.”

  He stared at me, an all-knowing ear-to-ear grin revealing a row of blindingly white teeth.

  Robbie was aggressive, smart, and one hell of a pitchman. But if I agreed too easily I’d come off as suspiciously unafraid of Tony, who I was now convinced Robbie still believed was in business and who was a ferocious killing machine.

  “What you’re asking is problematic,” I said. “But I agree with you that it may be the best course. We’ve been having issues, Tony and me. It’s time I moved on.” I was trying to give myself a bit of an opening in case it was revealed that Tony was locked up and Hector was underground.

  Robbie and I negotiated the deal: He wouldn’t ever have to deal with anyone but me, and the same losses policy applied—if we lost anything distributing the product, it was still on us to pay it back.

  “I plan on giving you a lot of weight,” Robbie said. “After this 220 there are tons I can get you. The question is, are you solvent enough to cover a lost ton of coca?”

  I smiled. “Robbie,” I said. “You’ve seen my house.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Now that whole business with sixty here, sixty there is all bullshit. I’m going to give you the whole 220 consignment. Pretty fucking trusting gesture, yes?”

  “Absolutely,” I said.

  “Good.” He clapped his hands excitedly. “Why not jump in your car and follow me? I want to show you something I think you’re going to like, a surprise. No, no, no, I know you’re going to like this. Right, Junior?” Junior nodded unenthusiastically.

  I stared at Robbie. Where else could this conversation and meeting take us? All he had to do was give me a day, time, and location to pick up the cocaine and we’d be done. But I couldn’t say no. Was it possible he found out and this was all one big act and was now lulling me into a kill box? Wherever he was taking me, at least I would be able to call Tim from my personal phone in the car and let him know where I was heading. I’d leave the phone on speaker and give him my direct coordinates so he could get someone close to me.