by M. A. Lawson
“I don’t understand,” Walker said. “Were you knocked out, drugged, what?”
“I don’t know. All I know is one minute we were talking to Hamilton and, two hours later, we’re waking up.”
“Have you checked on Tito?”
“Yeah. It’s the first thing I did when I woke up. He’s still in his cell.”
“This doesn’t make any sense,” Walker said. “Did anyone else in the brig pass out? I mean, was there a carbon monoxide leak, a gas leak, something like that?”
“No. We checked with the marines. Everybody’s fine. We were the only ones affected.”
“What about Tito?”
“He was sleeping when I looked in on him, so I don’t know if he passed out like we did or not.”
“I’m going to call Hamilton’s boss and see what he knows. I’ll get back to you.”
—
Walker woke up Jim Davis two minutes later and repeated the story. “What the hell was Hamilton doing up at Pendleton?” Walker asked.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Davis said. “I didn’t send her there, and the only DEA agent I know named Kirk is stationed in Colombia.”
“Well, you need to contact Hamilton and see what’s going on. If my guys are right about the timing, they passed out while she was with them. Why wouldn’t she have called the medics or something?”
“I don’t know. Maybe . . . I don’t know. I’ll call her right now and—”
“Oh, shit,” Walker said. “I’ll call you back.” He disconnected the call with Davis and called Lincoln. “Lincoln, I want you to take Tito’s fingerprints. Right away. Then call Daniels, You know Daniels? He’s my admin guy. Anyway, tell Daniels to get his ass down to the office and you fax him the fingerprints. Move!”
Half an hour later, Kevin Walker had showered and tried to disguise the smell of booze on his breath with mints and toothpaste. He’d also received two phone calls. One was from Jim Davis saying that Hamilton wasn’t answering her cell phone, that there was no DEA agent named Kirk in California, and there was no operation under way that would have required Hamilton to interview Tito Olivera. The second call was from Daniels, who’d checked the fingerprints Lincoln had sent him; he told Walker that the man in Tito Olivera’s cell was not Tito and, whoever he was, he had no fingerprints on file in the United States.
By four a.m., the head of virtually every law-enforcement agency in Southern California and a dozen people in Washington, D.C., had been notified that Tito Olivera had escaped from Camp Pendleton aided by DEA Agent Kay Hamilton. FBI agents, DEA agents, U.S. marshals, the California Highway Patrol, and cops in every town between Pendleton and the Mexican border were looking for Hamilton and her car. Border patrol agents were looking for her and Tito at the California and Arizona border crossings. Hamilton’s cell phone provider was also cooperating, trying to locate her via her phone. In the morning, Hamilton’s and Tito’s photographs would be plastered all over the news.
And Kevin Walker knew that everything they were doing was futile. Hamilton had left Camp Pendleton at twelve-thirty a.m. She was already in Mexico.
At five a.m., Walker was informed that Hamilton’s cell phone had been found on a bus stop bench in Del Mar. Ten minutes later, he was informed that Hamilton’s car had been found lying on its roof in a drainage ditch. Did that mean Hamilton was on foot somewhere in the Camp Pendleton area? No. If that was the case, her phone wouldn’t have been found in Del Mar. She’d found another car, and they had no idea what she was driving.
Since Walker started boozing, he never drank in the morning or during the day while he was working. Now he was wondering where he could buy a bottle at five a.m.
35
About the time Kevin Walker found out that the marshals at Camp Pendleton had lost two hours of their lives, Raphael Mora was wondering if he should wake up his boss and tell him the news about Tito, or if he should wait until morning. There wasn’t anything Caesar would be able to do at two a.m.—Mora was already doing what needed to be done—but Caesar always said that he wanted to receive bad news right away. According to Caesar, good news delivered late was just a pleasure delayed, but he needed bad news immediately so he could make decisions to quickly address whatever the problem might be. That bit about good news being a “pleasure delayed” was something Caesar had read in a management book.
Mora decided to wake up his boss.
“Do you think she’s lying?” Caesar asked after Mora told him Kay’s story.
“I don’t think so,” Mora said. “She didn’t lie about the accident. Her car was in a ditch, just like she said. I had the transport van driver verify that. And Tito certainly looked hurt in the video she sent me, and I believe she’s doing everything she can to make sure he stays alive. She knows she can’t exchange a dead man for her daughter.
“I have my people trying to find the doctor. She said he got in trouble selling meds illegally a couple years ago, so I have them looking at arrest records, court appearances, anything that might give us a lead tying Hamilton to a doctor. She told me she was going to dump her cell phone, so I can’t track her that way.” Mora paused before he added, “And we have another problem. Hamilton wants to make the exchange in the U.S.”
“What do you mean? I thought you were going to have her drive Tito across the border in one of the transport vehicles.”
“Sir, by now the marshals most likely know that Tito has escaped from the brig. They probably think he’s already across the border, but for the next several hours they’re going to be looking for him and Hamilton at the border crossings. So Hamilton is afraid she’ll be caught crossing into Mexico and wants to make the exchange in the U.S.”
“You can’t make the exchange in the U.S.,” Caesar said. “As soon as she has her daughter, she’ll call someone and they’ll arrest Tito again when he tries to cross.”
“I realize that,” Mora said, making no attempt to hide his exasperation. “I’ll have to convince Hamilton that if she wants her daughter back, the exchange must be made on this side of the border, and she’ll have no choice but to do it my way. What I’m trying to tell you is that I can’t finalize the details of the exchange until I hear back from the damn woman.”
“Son of a bitch,” Caesar muttered.
“Sir, don’t worry. I’ll get Tito back. I promise.”
Caesar went silent, apparently pondering everything Mora had told him, and Mora could imagine him trying to contain his rage. He did.
“Very well,” Caesar finally said. Then he added, “And I won’t forget the promise you just made.”
36
Getting a new car would be simple. Hiding Tito’s corpse, not so simple.
Kay drove to a run-down apartment building in Del Mar. Inside one of the units lived a surfer—at least a guy who used to surf before he decided he liked dope better than the perfect wave. He was a minor snitch, and Kay had used him a couple of times; the main thing was, she could put him in jail anytime she wanted and the surfer knew this.
She parked her car in the small lot behind the apartment building. Tito would be okay sitting in the front seat; in this neighborhood, a guy sleeping off a binge in a car wasn’t a novel sight. At one time, the apartment building’s front door was always locked and you had to buzz a tenant to get in, but the lock had been broken and no longer functioned. Kay walked right up to a unit on the second floor and started pounding on the door.
Two long minutes later, the ex-surfer yelled from the other side of the door: “Who the hell is it? What do you want?”
“It’s Kay Hamilton, Rodney. Open the door or I’ll kick it down.”
Rodney, who liked to be called Rod-Man, opened the door wearing only dirty white boxer shorts. He had long blond hair, touching his shoulders, and a tanned but booze and drug-ravaged face. His once finely toned body was wasting away, and his toenails looked like talons.
“Jesus, Hamilton,” he said, “it’s almost three in the morning. What the hell do you want?”
Kay pushed past him and into his filthy apartment. The place smelled like rotting garbage and spilled beer. “I want your car and your cell phone. I don’t have a lot of time, we’ve got something big going on, and I need a clean car and a clean cell. You give me any shit, I’ll have your skinny ass hauled off to jail.”
“My car and my cell?”
“Rodney! Wake up! I’m telling you, I don’t have time to screw around here.”
“Yeah, sure, I’ll get the keys. But when will I get my car back? I need my car.”
“Later today, I’ll call you and tell you where it is. The phone will be in it.”
“But how can you call me if you have my phone?”
Good question, and one that Kay should have been ready for. She wondered how many other things she was failing to think about.
“Give me a phone number for somebody who lives around here,” Kay said, “and I’ll call that person. But if for some reason I need the car and the phone longer, you just sit and wait for my call, no matter how long it takes. If you don’t, if you call anybody and tell them I have your car, I swear to Christ, Rodney, I’ll ship your ass off to Victorville.”
Rodney came back with his keys and the phone, then seemed to take forever to write down a phone number on the back of an envelope. “Call Trixie. She lives downstairs and she has a thing for me.”
Kay was thinking that Trixie must be one desperate woman to have a thing for Rodney, but didn’t say so. Instead, she decided to give Rodney a little carrot to compensate for all the stick. “If everything works out okay, I’ll mail you five hundred bucks for helping me out.”
“Seriously, Kay?”
“Yeah, seriously, Rodney.”
Rodney was most likely never going to see his car or his phone again.
Or Kay, for that matter.
—
Now for Tito’s body.
Kay found Rodney’s dusty, dented Ford Focus in the parking lot, started it up—and noticed the gas gauge was almost on empty. Great. She backed up Rodney’s car directly behind the marine’s car and, after sweeping all the shit off Rodney’s backseat onto the floor—fast-food wrappers, a dozen empty beer cans, a couple of baseball caps, a beach towel, and some nasty-looking swimming trunks that were as stiff as cardboard—she transferred Tito’s corpse to Rodney’s car. She was really getting tired of moving Tito around, and when rigor mortis set in, it was going to be even harder to move. She tossed the beach towel over the body, then wasted fifteen minutes driving around Del Mar, praying she wouldn’t run out of gas before she found an open gas station. She filled up the tank, paid with cash, and then headed toward La Mesa.
It was now three a.m.
Kay didn’t have a garage at her San Diego house—just a carport—and when she moved from Miami she rented a unit at a public storage place. She kept a mountain bike there she rarely used, skis she would use again one day if she ever found time to go skiing, some camping equipment—a tent and sleeping bag and a little propane stove—and a couple of old surfboards. It was all stuff she didn’t want cluttering up her house but didn’t want to throw away.
The good thing about public storage places was that customers had access twenty-four hours a day. There was a chain-link fence surrounding it and a gate, but the gate opened by punching a code number into a keypad, and all the customers were given the number. The bad news was that it was located in La Mesa, half an hour northeast of San Diego, which was out of her way since she wanted to go south, across the border. The other thing was, she paid for the storage unit with an automatic withdrawal against her checking account, and if somebody, like the marshals, decided to look at her financial records—and she knew they would—they might go check out her unit.
So she was going to stash Tito’s body at the storage place—just not in her unit.
On the way to La Mesa, she stopped at an all-night Vons and ran inside, praying they’d have what she needed. They did. A padlock. Ten minutes later, she arrived at the storage place, punched in the security code, and drove through the gate.
The storage units were made of sheet metal, had roll-up doors, and varied in size. Some were as big as one-car garages. The small units, like the one she had, were six-foot cubes. Some were heated; the last thing she wanted was one with heat. A lot of the storage units were empty—maybe more than normal since the economy had tanked in 2008—and the units closest to the office and the main gate were usually rented first. The farther back you went there were more empty units, and what Kay wanted was a row where at least half the units already had locks on the doors.
Six rows in from the gate, she found a row that had several unlocked, unrented units and some that were padlocked. She opened one of the unlocked units, dragged Tito’s body inside, and put her new padlock on the door. She didn’t bother to memorize the combination.
If she got lucky—it seemed like too much of what she was doing relied on luck—nobody would rent this particular unit and the guys who managed the place wouldn’t even notice a lock on an unrented unit. In a few days, of course, Tito’s corpse was going to start to stink, but that didn’t matter. Jessica had to be rescued long before Tito started to rot.
Now, finally, it was time to cross the border.
37
Jessica didn’t know how long she’d been in the room. She knew she’d been kidnapped at three p.m. and talked to Kay about six, but hours had passed since she’d spoken to Kay. Without a watch and in a windowless room, she had no idea just how many hours; she was guessing ten or twelve, but she was anything but certain.
She’d slept for a while, but not much, and she was tired. She couldn’t sleep thinking that if Kay couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do what these drug people wanted, she might not be alive tomorrow. She was also thirsty. Really thirsty. A few hours before, Carlos had given her two pork-filled tacos and two bottles of water. She didn’t know if it was the salt in the pork or the drug she’d been given when she was kidnapped, but she couldn’t seem to get enough to drink and she finished both bottles. Which meant she needed to pee again, but the thought of Carlos leering at her—staring at her thighs, hoping to get a glimpse of her crotch—had made her put off peeing as long as possible. But she couldn’t wait any more.
She pounded on the door, and when no one came after three or four minutes, she pounded on it again.
—
Carlos Núñez felt his wife prodding him with her elbow. “Get up,” she said, “the girl is hitting the door.”
“She can wait,” Carlos muttered, and burrowed under the covers.
His wife poked him again. “Get up. She’s going to wake the baby,” his wife said—and at that moment the baby in the crib next to the wall began to wail.
Carlos cursed and threw back the covers. If it wasn’t for Mora’s man, Perez, he would have lashed the little gringa bitch with his belt until she bled. His wife was now out of bed with the baby, and he said, “Go make breakfast.” If he couldn’t sleep, neither would she.
Mora had told Perez to take the girl to Carlos’s house because it had rooms in the basement where the cartel stored marijuana and heroin before shipping the drugs north. The surrounding houses in the neighborhood were occupied by more cartel men—men like Carlos who barely made any money and who were treated like pack animals. So Perez came to Carlos’s house—his house—and ordered Carlos and his wife to move down to the basement and take care of the girl like they were zookeepers, while Perez and his girlfriend settled in Carlos’s bedroom. All this when the house was already crowded with Carlos’s two other children and his oaf of a cousin, a man who bathed only if his wife screamed at him.
Carlos Núñez wasn’t the only one suffering, either. Perez had garrisoned two dozen men in nearby houses, men he could call on if someone tried to get the girl back
; Carlos’s wife and the neighbors’ wives had to cook for all of them.
But what else could they do?
—
The door finally opened, and Jessica stepped back as Carlos entered the room. It looked as if he’d been sleeping, and he was angry that she’d woken him. He was wearing a sleeveless T-shirt, exposing his scrawny arms, and lightweight sweatpants.
“What time is it?” she asked.
“You woke me up to ask the time?”
“No. I . . . I need to pee. And I’m thirsty. But what time is it?”
“Never mind what time it is.” He yawned, then unconsciously scratched his butt. Gross. “Well, come on,” he said. “I want to get back to bed.”
Jessica stepped past him, this time smelling not his cheap cologne but the stale beer on his breath. He walked behind her to the small bathroom and, as she had done before, she lowered her shorts as little as possible and peed. And, as he had done before, Carlos stared at her thighs. He made her sick. She got off the toilet, pulling her shorts up simultaneously.
“Can I have some water?” she asked. She was still in the bathroom, and he was still standing in the doorway.
“Yeah, yeah. I’ll bring you some in a minute. Now back to your room.”
He moved aside so she could leave the bathroom, and as she stepped past him, he pinched her butt—really hard, hard enough to leave a bruise—and Jessica shrieked. His intent hadn’t seemed sexual; he just wanted to hurt her. Impulsively, she placed her hand on his chest and pushed him away from her. Carlos staggered backward, then raised his hand to slap her, but as he was about to strike, a door opened down the hall and Carlos’s head spun in that direction.
Jessica saw Perez and another man step out of the room where Jessica had been taken to Skype with Kay. The man with Perez was older than Perez but looked cut from the same mold: slim, neat, dark-haired, something vaguely military about him.