Jerry Langton Three-Book Biker Bundle

by Jerry Langton

  “Most people would have run the other way,” said O'Malley.

  “My military training prevented that.”

  “I understand,” said Meloni. “You were in the special forces in Sweden?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that,” Andersson laughed. “Just an ordinary foot soldier.”

  Meloni chuckled. “Okay, and then what happened?”

  “People were screaming and running around . . . like idiots, if I may,” he looked embarrassed by the frankness of his own remark. “That's when I saw Sophia—she was just standing there, obviously in shock—I was scared she was going to be trampled with all those wild people in there . . .”

  “So you ran to her?”

  “Yes I did.”

  “And you grabbed her?”

  “No, I took her by the hand . . . I have children of my own, I did not want to panic her . . . If she were to run in that crowd . . . she was so small.”

  “You called her ‘Sophia.’ Didn't they tell you her name was Sopho?”

  “Yes, but we have been in touch a few times since . . . thanks to St. Nino's, she asked them to contact me,” he said. “She is an American girl now. She likes to be called Sophia like other American girls.”

  “And she went with you willingly?”

  “She was in shock.”

  “And you knew she was Georgian how?”

  “My company has been manufacturing components in various Eastern European countries for almost thirty years,” he said. “I go there all the time. I know some of the languages well, but I only know a few words of Georgian. It's almost unique. I recognized it right away.”

  “And where did you take her?”

  “Back to the display,” he said. “It seemed the safest place with all the mobs at the exits.”

  “And then what?”

  “After the SWAT team evacuated us all, I looked for a sergeant—they wear white shirts in New York City, all the other cops wear blue—and told him what had happened.”

  “Were you surprised to see Steadman there?” O'Malley asked.

  “He was there?” Andersson looked surprised. “As I told the previous investigators, I had not seen him since the day before the convention. Are you sure he was there?”

  “Yes,” said O'Malley, scanning Andersson's eyes. “We have an eyewitness.”

  “Who?”

  “You know we can't tell you that.”

  “Was he involved with Sophia? With the shooting? When he didn't come back to work and didn't call, I just assumed he had broken probation or something . . . you know, with the motorcycle.”

  “Right, the stolen motorcycle,” asked O'Malley. “What do you know?”

  “I didn't believe it at first, that Eric would steal his own bike,” he said. “I suspected that Matt had cooked up a plot to cash in on the insurance . . . after all, Eric did sell it to him for next to nothing. When Eric didn't come back to work, I assumed he was in on it.”

  “An eyewitness said that Steadman had a child with him.”

  “I had not heard that.”

  O'Malley sighed and looked at Meloni. They started in on Andersson, asking him basically the same questions over again, and he answered the same each time, not wavering even the tiniest bit from his story.

  After they finished with him, they used his office to question Matt, the warehouse worker who had bought the motorcycle from Ned, and Matt's wife, Katie, who had worked closely with him. Neither said they had noticed anything odd or suspicious about Ned, who they actually knew as Eric, until he sold them the motorcycle. Matt had inquired several times about buying the motorcycle—a painstakingly restored Indian—but Ned had turned him down every time. Then one night out of the blue, Ned called them and told them Matt could have the bike cheap if he just hauled it away. He had told them some story about not wanting it anymore. They didn't believe all of it, but Matt really wanted the bike, so he bought it.

  Some weeks later, Matt was working in the warehouse when Esteban, one of the other warehouse guys, came running in shouting that someone was stealing his bike. Matt hadn't been able to see who had taken it, but he was pretty sure it was Eric because he never saw him again after that. Eric was one of the few people who knew how to start the thing and, as its former owner, it made sense that he would have a spare set of keys.

  Meloni and O'Malley then interviewed Esteban, who was worried that he might be deported back to El Salvador. Meloni assured him repeatedly that he wouldn't be, that all they were interested in was what he saw on the day the motorcycle was stolen. It took a while, but Esteban eventually revealed that he saw a man and what could have been a little girl or a boy get on the Indian. He had seen them when he heard the man begin to kick-start the big machine.

  He knew it was Matt's bike. It was all Matt had talked about for weeks. He wasn't sure if the man was Eric or not. Eric had worked upstairs and rarely came down to the warehouse. The thief had looked a bit like Eric, but Esteban had only seen him from behind and from a distance, so he wasn't sure.

  After they excused him, Meloni asked O'Malley if she thought Aiken was the man who had stolen the bike. “At the risk of jumping to conclusions,” she answered, “yes.”

  * * *

  Nina, a Russian model who had once befriended Ned, was grilling sturgeon and lobsters on their friend Viktor's yacht . . .

  “Wake up, sleeping beauty!”

  Ned's eyes sprung open. A short, stocky man wearing a red western shirt and jeans, and carrying an AK-47, was kicking his bed.

  “Come on, downstairs,” he ordered, and waited until Ned went in front of him before leaving the room.

  In the main room, he saw three men at the table. El Ratón, the obese man who had interrogated him; beside him was the guy he saw passed out the night before; and on the other side of the table sat a man Ned did not recognize. He was smaller and darker and dressed differently than the other Mexicans he had seen in Nogales. His clothes looked homemade and simple. They fell silent as they saw Ned enter the room.

  “Ah, El Espagueti! My best gringo friend,” El Ratón said in what seemed like a friendly way, but still sent chills. “Don't be sensitive, my friend. You are obviously a man of the world. You must know that we have to protect ourselves.”

  Ned understood the group's need to protect itself, but did not know who they were. Even though he had been in Mexico for a while, he had tried to lay low and his knowledge of organized crime in the country was limited. His first experience of criminal gangs was his involvement with and eventual membership in the Sons of Satan Motorcycle Club in the States. At first, he thought bikers were just guys who rode Harleys, smoked weed, and generally had a good time together. But he soon learned that the gang was a cutthroat corporation based on drug and human trafficking, and that the penalty for failure or disloyalty was death.

  He took a moment to piece together what had happened and how he had gotten there. The “Federales” who had originally stopped him were clearly working for one of the cartels. Realizing he was of little value, they were letting him go when he was attacked and caught in the crossfire. As far as the explosion was concerned, Ned attributed it to a car bomb or a rock-propelled grenade, both of which were in common use by the cartels.

  Ned also knew that the big cartels often increased their manpower by kidnapping people off the streets, but wondered why they wanted him in particular. Perhaps, he thought, somebody knew who he was. And it suddenly dawned on him that he had been working in association with the cartels for years.

  The bikers bought drugs, mainly cocaine, wholesale from the Italians and then sold them to street-level dealers to retail. He never really thought about where the drugs came from before the Italians had them, but he had guessed Colombia or Bolivia.

  Later, he had become mixed up with the Russian mafia and learned that they got drugs from terrible, war-torn places like Afghanistan and Chechnya and sold them around the world. The Russians were far more sinister, capable of far worse horrors than any biker gang.
<
br />   But Ned never really thought that much about Mexico. Like many Americans, he always considered Mexico just a slightly rougher version of his own country. He associated it with weed because of movies and TV and because all the Mexicans he knew were big pot smokers. But he also knew from experience that there's no real profit in pot. Sure, for a small operator it can make a few bucks, but because it sold so cheaply—everyone seemed to be growing the stuff—it was generally for small-timers.

  These guys were anything but small-time. They had expensive weapons and they used methods—like bombings and impersonating cops—that most bikers could only dream about and the Russians didn't have to bother with. It was a sophisticated operation, even if all the guys running it seemed a bit sloppy.

  All of that ran through his head in the second or so between what El Ratón said to him and his response. “I understand.”

  “Good—Jessica! Go get him breakfast—please sit down,” the big man said, motioning for him to take a chair beside the little guy in homemade clothes. As he got closer, Ned was shocked by how small the man was. “El Espagueti, this is El Chango,” he gestured to the little guy, whom he had just called “the Monkey.” Then he pointed to the other man. “And you know El Vaquero Loco from upstairs.” Ned didn't know which of the company El Ratón was referring to, but assumed he was the one who'd been passed out on the bed. Aside from El Ratón, who looked a little like a Mexican version of Biggie Smalls, he couldn't have picked any of these men out of a police line.

  Once Ned was seated, Jessica, a teenager like Maria, put a plate of scrambled eggs, dark-red sausages, and some pickled peppers in front of him, along with a cup of hot, black coffee. “El Vaquero Loco is your teacher now,” El Ratón instructed, his jowls vibrating wildly as he spoke. “Do everything he says.”

  El Chango said something very quickly in thick, accented Spanish; Ned could hardly make it out. “Fucking mara! Sometimes I think everyone from Guatemala is fucking retarded!” El Ratón shouted. “You never ask who the boss is! El Vaquero Loco is your teacher; you do what he says, that is all you need to know.” El Chango flinched visibly.

  El Ratón reached for a knapsack that was on the table. From it, he pulled out three pairs of cell phones and handed one of each pair to both El Chango and Ned. “The smart phone, the LG, is a bluff,” he instructed. “If anyone demands your phone, like a soldier or a Federale, you give him this. Save some numbers on it to make it look real.” Then he grabbed another, bigger phone with a small keyboard from Ned's pile. “This, the BlackBerry, you hide,” he said. “It is also a bluff, it is in case you get searched—it is full of fake numbers. The cop will think the first was a decoy and this is your real phone.” Then he picked up an older-looking phone, one that folds in half. “This one, the Nokia, is your real phone,” he said with a smile. “It has only one number on it and will only ever have one number on it. That number is El Vaquero Loco's—he is the only person you will ever call on this phone. Heaven help you if I ever see another number on this phone.” Ned thought that the idea of using the newer, more sophisticated phones to mislead police was pretty astute.

  El Ratón then put his huge paw back in the knapsack. “These are the SIM cards,” he said, handing them little plastic rectangles. “The phones won't work without them. Put them in the phones when you use them, and take them out of the phone when you are finished. Do not leave the SIM card in the phone. Heaven help you if I find a SIM card in your phone. Nobody will ever call you, so you don't need it.”

  He put his hands back in the knapsack and withdrew two handguns. They were cheap looking, obvious copies of better-known guns, and clearly made to poor standards. The colors of their components didn't quite match and there was even a small metal burr clinging to the cocking mechanism of one of them. El Ratón handed them each one. “These are for now,” he said. “You won't need them, but just in case. Now, like I told you, El Vaquero Loco is your teacher; do what he says and everything will be fine. Don't do what he says and you will be in trouble. Simple, even for you, mara.”

  El Ratón got up and waddled his way out of the house. El Vaquero Loco, who had been quiet up to this point, spoke to the two new surprised recruits. “You heard the big man, you do what I say now,” he smiled. The look of utter delight on his face made Ned's stomach turn. He'd seen it before. Experience had taught him that the more someone wants power, the more likely they are to want to put it into action. El Vaquero Loco looked very much like he was going to be a pain in the ass, at the very least.

  El Chango asked him something Ned could just barely understand. El Vaquero Loco replied, “Not now, El Chango. Eat your breakfast, have a beer, play some poker. I'll tell you when I need you. Until then, you are free to just hang around.”

  Chapter Three

  Ned was not sure what to do. After El Vaquero Loco left, he sat at the table with El Chango while about a dozen or so armed men milled around the house, both inside and out. He knew that he was not quite free to go, but he also knew that the men had no interest in harming him—at least for now. They clearly had plans for him. He hadn't been kidnapped—there was nobody to ask to pay a ransom for him—but he was being held. The feeling he had was very much like that he had after he was arrested—a mixture of dread, anticipation, and uncertainty.

  He wondered about El Chango, why they had held him as well. Ned knew he had some value to these guys—even if he didn't know exactly what it was—but he couldn't see any reason to hold this little guy who looked like he just walked off a documentary about Third-World farming. As Ned caught his eye, the smaller man started talking so quickly that Ned could hardly tell if he was speaking Spanish. Ned smiled, and asked El Chango to slow down so that he could understand him, explaining that Spanish was not his first language.

  El Chango smiled. “Not mine, either,” he said.

  “I thought El Ratón said you were from Guatemala. Don't they speak Spanish there?”

  “Lots of people do, but I'm from way out in the country,” El Chango told him. “I speak Q'eqchi'—you know, Mayan.”

  “Mayan? Like those guys from hundreds of years ago?” Ned had vague memories from history class, of temples and human sacrifices, running through his head.

  “We're still here.”

  Ned looked to see if El Chango was offended by what he'd said, but he didn't seem to be. He had a broad, innocent-looking face that looked like it had no choice but to telegraph his emotions. El Chango did not look like the Mexicans Ned had seen. He was smaller, darker, and had an altogether different—almost Asian—look about him. Right now, though, he looked frightened; the pained expression on his face indicated he was in a stressful, but somehow familiar, situation.

  “What about you, canche?” he asked. “What are you doing here?”

  “Canche?”

  “You know, ‘blondie,’ like how the Mexicans say guero,” El Chango smiled sardonically. “It's what we call white people back home.”

  Ned had been lying about his identity and his past for so long, he didn't have an immediate answer. He wondered what he should tell El Chango. Then he let his mind run wild with paranoid thoughts. Was this little man being paid by the FBI? The bikers? The Russians? Years of running had taught Ned that the less people knew about him, the safer he was. As innocent as this little man looked, Ned knew better than to trust him. All he said was: “Same as you.”

  El Chango laughed childishly. “I doubt that,” he said. Then he told Ned his own story, about how he had a cousin who was one of a large group of Guatemalans who had made it to the United States a year earlier. Ned could not make out every detail as El Chango would sometimes speak too quickly or in dialect, but he was able to follow the overall plot. El Chango's cousin and some other Guatemalans had gotten jobs at a pork slaughterhouse and meat-packing plant in Wapello County, Iowa. He couldn't believe it when he heard that the Americans didn't want to work, that they would refuse to do an honest day's work for the kind of money very few Guatemalans had a chance to make. The
place was strange to him at first—he experienced things like constant electricity and indoor plumbing at home for the first time—but he soon grew to love the place. He had money and friends. The winters were cold, terribly cold, but the rest of the time, it was really a wonderful place to live.

  El Chango—who said his real name was Maguin Avi Menchú—decided he would go to Iowa, meet up with his cousin, work at the plant, save up a lot of money, and return to Guatemala and buy a house and a car. He and about a dozen other people from his hometown, La Reinita in Sayaxché province, sold everything they had and took buses to the Mexican border. The Mexican border guards, he said, hated when Guatemalans snuck over the border, and could even be dangerous sometimes, but a couple of bribes lubricated their passage. Once inside Mexico, the group traveled north, either walking, hitchhiking, or taking buses when they could. Sometimes they would work on farms for a little extra cash or just for food and a safe place to sleep.

  The trip was a revelation to El Chango. He had no idea Mexico was so big or so diverse. In the south, it was a lot like Guatemala with jungles, farms, and friendly people. But then it gets dry and mountainous and the people are busy, arrogant, and rude. There are cities everywhere with unbelievable traffic and so many huge buildings. Smoke is everywhere and the Guatemalans often found themselves coughing and wheezing. After that, it becomes a terrible desert with no water, no trees. And the people are different, bigger, and they dress funny, in jeans and boots. They almost never speak and are very aggressive, almost like they are angry all the time. The Guatemalans found them strange and even a little bit frightening.

  The little group made it to Nogales and, as soon as they were within an hour's walk of the border, they met the “coyotes.” Ned was familiar with coyotes, professional border crossers, from his own experience sneaking into Mexico. But things were different for El Chango. While Ned's coyotes worked in total secrecy, meeting with go-betweens in dark bars north of the border, they are very open in Mexico. As El Chango and the other Guatemalans walked through the city, men in pickup trucks and vans would shout at them, telling them they would get them over the border, quoting prices, and with each claiming their service was the best in town.