Ford stirs next to me. His eyes open. He starts to look around.
“I recognize this,” he whispers. “We’re not far away.”
I put the car in gear and pull onto the street. “Tell me where to turn.”
I’m not going back, not now. Whether it’s from the top down or the bottom up, whether it’s my genes or my destiny, I’m determined to take this path as far as it goes. The line was crossed long ago, and now that I’m on the other side of it, there’s nowhere to go but forward, no matter what awaits me there.
The place Ford takes me is a second-floor apartment behind a shop. I walk down the alley to a narrow set of metal stairs bolted into the brick, ascending to a landing that wraps around the building’s corner, hiding the apartment from the street, and onto a veranda shaded by a vine-wrapped pergola, the deck full of colored metal outdoor furniture. Across the veranda, the apartment’s front door is made of louvered glass-a jalousie window, I think it’s called. The apartment windows are louvered, too, the glass panels frosted for privacy.
Through the glass I can make out a table lamp inside, the shadowy outline of a chair back. The faint drum of music filters through the slitted windows. I pause to listen. It’s a crackly recording of some melancholy chanteuse, maybe Billie Holiday, I don’t know. That sort of thing, anyway. Maudlin stuff.
Ford volunteered to stay in the car, not wanting to climb the stairs, and put up only verbal resistance when I reached into my briefcase and produced a pair of handcuffs. He’s beat, as far as I can tell.
I rap a few times on the glass. I hear weight shifting in a chair, then footsteps approaching. A man’s silhouette against the fronted louvers. The handle turns and the door swings open.
Standing on the threshold, his shaved head silhouetted by the lamp inside, Reg Keller blinks twice and then smiles coldly. He holds a big-bore Smith amp; Wesson revolver at hip level, the hammer cocked back. When he glances down at my Browning, aimed at his gut, the smile broadens a hair.
“It would be funny if it wasn’t so serious,” he says. “A Mexican standoff.”
“Hello, Reg. I had a feeling it might be you.”
“Congratulations, then. You’re the last person I expected to come gunning for me. You’re supposed to be one of the good guys, March, not some cold-blooded assassin.”
“People change,” I say. “Mind if I come in?”
He steps back carefully, keeping the revolver between us. I enter the apartment, taking a moment to glance around. It’s a nicely appointed pad, with luxe furniture, a flat-screen television, and a gleaming wood-cased stereo. But there’s something sterile about the place, like a pre-furnished executive rental whose occupant changes every other week. Beside the chair near the stereo, there’s a cocktail pitcher beaded with condensation. As I circle around, the melting ice shifts inside. The highball next to it is packed with ice and topped with fresh mint. Reg goes to some trouble when it comes to his drinking.
The only thing in the living room that seems out of place is the standing birdcage in the corner behind him. My arrival must have agitated the sleek white bird inside. Its yellow Mohawk of feathers stands upright, and it flaps its wings helplessly.
“My companion in captivity,” Reg says.
“You’re the contact inside the cartel? That doesn’t seem possible.”
“I made the wrong kind of friends and this is what happened to me.”
“You went to work for Nesbitt.”
“It’s a long story, March, and if you’re going to pull that trigger, I’m in no mood to tell it. Why don’t we get this over with. It’s been a long time coming. I just don’t care anymore.”
“I didn’t come here to kill you. I didn’t know it would be you.”
“I’m supposed to believe that?”
“Believe what you want. Just put the gun down.”
“I don’t think I can do that.”
“I’m a cop,” I say, “not an executioner. Some of us still know the difference. Now put the gun down so we can talk. The next knock at your door won’t be so accommodating.”
He thinks this over, then points the revolver at the floor. When I don’t react, he lowers the hammer and waits to see what I’ll do.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll play.”
He walks to the built-in unit housing the TV and sets the revolver down, raising his hands in mock surrender.
“So tell me what you’re doing here,” I say.
This brings a bitter smile to his lips. He spreads his arms to encompass the room, the street, the city. “March, can’t you see? I’m in hell.”
He was always a lithe, muscular man. Even when he left the streets and donned a coat and tie, he retained that tough beat-cop vibe. Now he seems gaunt, the creases on his face have deepened, and his reptilian eyes are deeper sunk than before.
“Are you working for Englewood,” I ask, “or Nesbitt?”
“You know about Englewood, huh? It kind of surprised me that you never cottoned on back in the day. I’d known him a long time, so when I got the idea of putting my company together, he was a natural source to turn to. But then Macneil disappeared and I quickly discovered I’d made a bargain with Satan himself. These guys, when they get their hooks in you, they don’t let go. Englewood turned the thumbscrews and, little by little, I found myself turning with them. I couldn’t even recognize the man in the mirror. When things got too hot for me in H-Town, he whisked me away. But after that, he owned me.”
“And the only way to get free was to betray him to Nesbitt?”
“Very good,” he says. “That was the idea, anyway. I needed money more than anything, so I called Nesbitt and made a deal. If he’d find Macneil and shake him down, I could give him the blueprint to Englewood’s operations.”
“You could deliver on that promise?”
He shrugs. “Maybe I exaggerated the extent of my knowledge. He failed with Macneil. The kid he sent to do the job is some kind of psycho. He got nothing, and left a body behind that people naturally assumed was my handiwork. To make it up to me, Nesbitt offered this job, and I was stupid enough to take it. Between the two of them, they sucked me in.”
As he talks, he makes a cautious move toward the chair, easing himself down and pouring a cocktail. I circle away, keeping him at gunpoint.
“Mojitos,” he says. “I don’t suppose you want one? No, you’ve sworn off the sauce on account of your little girl. Good for you. In my case, it’s the least of my worries. Englewood. Nesbitt. Two years off the grid. All the brutality. They’ve hollowed me out, March.”
“How did you penetrate the cartel?”
“That was simple. The new Jefe was a protégé of Nesbitt’s from the old days. César Soto-Andrade, that’s his name. If you can believe it, this guy used to be high up in the Mexican military establishment, and now he’s a drug lord. Go figure. That’s how it works down here. So what happened was, he reached out to Nesbitt. He knew what the American intelligence capability looked like and what he wanted was a countermeasure. Somebody who knew the way the DEA and the FBI operate and could help him outwit them.”
“And that was you?”
“That was me. The secret weapon, Nesbitt said. I coached him through the process of getting the old boss arrested, then helped make sure that when the new leader was chosen, it was César. While I was advising the Jefe, I’d be funneling back information to Nesbitt, who’d make a killing selling all that intel back to the Feds.”
“But César was finished with Nesbitt by then.”
“The crazy thing is, it all made sense to me at the time. Nesbitt held this out like it was a path to redemption. Once they were hooked on the intel, the government would be all too obliging when it came to making my legal problems back home disappear. Instead of a pariah, a wanted man, a cop-killer. Anyway, I went along with it. And for a while it was working. César set me up with this place, I had a chauffeur to drive me around, and whenever I wanted anything-money, women, booze-all I had to do was ask. Nesbitt�
��s man Ford would come around every so often, and I’d give him something new. Life was good.”
“So what changed?”
“What didn’t? First of all, Ford got ambitious. He shows up one day and says all these reports of mine aren’t earning me any credit back home. The people getting them don’t even know it’s me doing the work. And Nesbitt has no intention of letting me leave. He’s gonna use me until I’m all used up. But Ford would help me out, he said, if I was willing to help him, too.”
“And you believed him.”
“I didn’t have to trust Ford to know I could count on his ambition to serve my purpose. If I could raise the scare back in Houston, make Nesbitt think he was in real danger, then he’d have an incentive to get himself clear and hand the business over to the FBI. Then I could deal with them direct. I explained to Ford how the hook would need to be baited, and he did the rest.”
“You had Nesbitt killed? César put you up to it.”
The question surprises him as he’s taking a sip. He spits his drink back into the glass. “Is that what you think? Then you really have drunk the Kool-Aid, March. Nesbitt got himself shellacked because the fear got to him. If I had people back home willing to assassinate on my orders, you really think you’d be walking around today? But I’ll admit,” he says with a mirthless laugh, “things couldn’t have worked out any better for me. César was happy being a drug lord and wasn’t interested in helping Nesbitt dismantle the cartel. He wanted Nesbitt out, and Nesbitt got out. So what if I took the credit? Then the Bureau stepped in and Ford tells me all they want is one last favor.”
“The arms trade?”
“You got it. Are you familiar with Operation Gunrunner, the ATF’s attempt at stopping the flow of guns to Mexico? Huge failure. They didn’t bag any of the big fish, for all their posturing. This would be different, though, because César is a hands-on kind of guy. He’d want to do the deal himself. I knew him well enough at that point to make it happen.”
“And that was supposed to go down tonight?”
“Well,” he says, throwing his hands up in frustration. “Things started going crazy after Nesbitt’s little psycho got into the picture. He killed one of Ford’s men, thinking he was Ford himself, only the guy didn’t know anything. If Ford had come to me, I would have walked him through the situation, but he got this lunatic idea of passing the dead man off as himself-and to do that, he needed major assistance. He went to Englewood. The thing you have to know about this Ford guy is, he thinks he’s a player. I can sympathize. I thought I was, too. But these guys are snakes; you can’t handle them without getting bit. Englewood turned him out just like Nesbitt did to me, and since then it’s been a roller coaster.”
“The deal was tonight,” I tell him, “and it all went wrong. Which means the Jefe knows you’re not on his side, and he’ll be coming for you.”
“Consider this, March. If the deal was tonight, then Ford would have had backup waiting to swoop in. Where are they? I don’t see any flashing lights.”
“Don’t let that fool you,” I say, hoping he won’t call my bluff.
He doesn’t. “What do you want from me, March? I can sense an offer coming.”
“I want César. And I want Englewood, too. Can you deliver them or not?”
“Are you asking, will I testify against them?” He shakes his head dismissively, but then a strange look comes over him. Realization dawning. “You’re offering me a lifeline, is that it?”
“I’m not offering you anything. But if you can help me bring those men down, then I’ll get you out of here somehow. Otherwise, I’ll just walk you into the nearest police station. You make the call.”
“Can I take a moment to think it over?”
“Go ahead.”
He pours himself another drink, the tinkle of ice against glass. My mind fills with the logistical impossibility of smuggling an injured man like Ford and a wanted felon like Keller back into the country. I don’t trust the local police, who’d have too many questions about my presence, and there’s no one I can call to part the waters on my behalf. Even Bea couldn’t do all that-and if she could, I doubt she would. Bringing all this into the light was never part of her plan.
I could always gun the engine past the Mexican side of the bridge and then turn myself in at the other end, like Cold War asylum seekers jumping the Berlin Wall.
What am I even doing here? Cutting a deal with Reg Keller? Risking anything for this man is insane. Maybe I’m the one who’s been sucked too far down, my moral compass spinning. How do you reckon which is the lesser of all available evils? Nothing makes sense but to flush them all down, and myself along with them.
Prosecutors cut deals like this all the time, I tell myself. But that’s the reason I could never stomach working as a prosecutor. I don’t want to cut the deals. It’s not in me.
Big Reg gets up out of the chair, the ice sloshing in his glass. He crosses the room, giving the revolver a wide berth. His pet bird starts flapping as he approaches. Downing the dregs of the mojito, he flips the cage door open. “Fly free, little man.”
“You’ve made your decision?”
He turns to face me. “Get me out of here, March, and I’ll do it.”
I hate myself for saying the words: “It’s a deal.”
Under my watchful eye, Keller takes two minutes to pack a bag and then leads the way out. Despite the open cage, the bird still twitches on its perch inside, afraid to come out. Reg pauses, shaking his head.
“Goes to show,” he says, walking through the door.
From the top of the stairwell I can see down the alley to my car parked on the street. It’s lit from behind by a pair of headlights, though the other vehicle is out of view. My passenger door hangs open, but there’s no sign of Ford.
I reach my hand out to keep Keller from descending. He stops just as two men step into the mouth of the alley. One of them raises a hand in greeting, and I recall him from the crowd of heavies outside the cantina.
“These guys with you?” Keller asks, turning on the step.
I’m already raising my pistol as the first man fires.
CHAPTER 29
The only thing that saves us is that our sudden appearance at the top of the stairs is as much a surprise to them as their entry into the alleyway is to us. They loose the first shot, but it’s fired in haste and zings past my left ear. My answer comes in a wild, unaimed volley, spraying and praying, the flash of the muzzle in the darkness temporarily blinding me.
Somehow I grab a handful of Keller’s shirt with my free hand, dragging him back up the stairs. The other end of the alley explodes, bullets tearing past us.
As I pull him off the landing and onto the veranda where we’re shielded from view, Keller flinches and slaps his hand to his neck, as if he’s swatting a mosquito.
“Are you-?”
My voice chokes off as the first pulse of blood drains through his clenched fingers.
I stick my gun around the corner and fire down the stairs. The bricks near my wrist burst open, showering me with dust. I pull my hand back before they shoot it off, hustling Keller back into the apartment.
The lights are still on, so I waste precious seconds flipping the switches and kicking the lamp’s power cord free from the wall socket. Moonlight pours in through the glass louvers, making the blood down the side of Keller’s neck and down his shirt look black as oil. With both hands on the wound he lumbers down a short hallway into the lavatory.
Alone in the living room, I crouch at the corner of the window farthest from the door, which affords the best view of the top of the stairs. I push the louvers open, wide enough for the muzzle of my gun. From here I can see them before they spot me, and when they return fire, the apartment wall should afford some protection. My hand goes instinctively to my belt, searching for the spare magazine loaded with 9mm hollow points. I switch mags again, just as I did at the gate on the highway, so no matter how one-sided the fight is, at least I’ll be going into it with a
fully loaded weapon.
Footsteps on the stairs. It’s hard to tell, but in my imagination it sounds like more than two men ascending. From my vantage point, the veranda runs parallel to the apartment wall, dead-ending at an L-shaped turn that leads to the landing at the top of the stairs. When they come up, they’ll be silhouetted against the building across the alley, having to cross my field of fire to reach the veranda. The numbers are on their side, but the ground is mine.
The first of them reaches the landing in a low crouch, gun extended. I let him come. He creeps over to the veranda, bending lower to inspect something on the ground. Probably Keller’s blood. A second one appears, and then a third. There are more footsteps on the stairs behind him. The Tritium inserts on my gunsights shine bright in the dark. I line them up over the first man, let out my breath, and fire.
I don’t know whether I’ve hit him, or anything else for that matter. Once the shooting starts, there’s nothing but the flash of the muzzle and a barrage of earsplitting concussions. All I can do is try and match my shots to the map of targets locked in my memory. How many rounds I let off, I don’t know-the shooting goes on forever, uninterrupted, like a stage of fire on the range.
And then the louvers shatter down on top of me, raining glass everywhere, and I have to crouch to the floor, hands over my head, to keep from being hit. Something burns against the side of my neck. I panic, thinking of Keller’s wound. When I cover the spot with my hand, though, I find one of my own spent cartridges. It must have kicked back from the ejection port and landed inside my collar.
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