“Thanks, I think. What’s a sleeper?”
“Yeah, a sleeper,” she said. “You cruise around in high school, not involved, not into anyone that I could tell. Totally good looking but totally shy. You were a sleeper. A late bloomer. You didn’t even know how good you were or how good you were going to become. But I knew.”
“Stop, I’m blushing,” I joked.
“See—that little comeback is something you’d have never said in high school. I guess it took the army to give you the confidence to really see your own strength. I think the army brought out the man in you.” She smiled. “And, from where I sit, it looks like they did a damn good job.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” I said. “Flattery will get you everywhere.”
“I certainly hope so,” she said coyly. “We’ll see.”
I felt like I was playing tennis. She’d fire a witty line to me. I’d return a witty line to her. Fun—at least for a while.
“I was always confident,” I said. “You were the only one that gave me butterflies.”
She smiled. “But you’re over that now.”
I looked into her eyes. “Not a hundred percent.”
There was silence for a second, like the tennis ball had been hit into a high lob and everyone was watching, waiting for it to come down. She broke the silence. “I missed you, Danny.”
She may have been manipulating me, I’ll never know. But I do know that right then, right there, I was hers.
“Me, too.”
“Let’s go on back,” she said, setting her drink on the table and pushing out her chair. “We’ve got a little office in the back where we can talk privately. I have a lot of things I want to share with you.”
I nodded. “Okay.”
We stood, and Frankie started to get up as well. “Frankie,” she said, “I’m alright. Stay out here.”
Frankie the Boot looked at her, and then he looked at me, and then he looked back and nodded one time.
~~~~
The inside of the bakery was busy, even at three thirty on a Sunday afternoon. I followed Gina as we passed through the seating area and then through a door marked Employees Only. If the workers noticed us, they pretended not to.
She opened a door marked Office, turned on the light, and went inside. I followed. Once I was in, I took off my baseball cap and slid my backpack off while Gina closed the door behind us. I put my pack on a chair and turned back around.
Gina threw her arms around my neck and kissed me. This time, it wasn’t on the cheek. It was a full-throttle lip-lock that went on and on and on. My head was spinning. I saw stars. I was just about to reach down and sweep all the shit off the top of the desk so I could throw her down and make a woman out of her when she broke it off—just in time.
She stepped back and said, nearly breathless, “Goddamn. I’ve wanted to do that since Robbie told me you were involved in the case. That surely brings back memories of our time together, doesn’t it?”
I nodded. I don’t think I was able to speak just yet.
“You’re a terrific kisser,” she said.
“You too,” I answered, nodding. “Want to do it again?”
So we did. A little less passion this time, a little more tenderness. A little less loss of control.
We broke it off, but I continued to hold her, my face tilted down to her, our lips inches apart.
“That was awesome,” she said.
I nodded. Then I kissed her on the forehead. I held her for a full two minutes, memories flooding back, lost in the moment. Gradually, I started to remember that I wasn’t here on vacation—I was actually working. I leaned back and looked into her eyes. “Why am I here, Gina? Why’ve I been summoned? You could have had this from me anytime in the last five years. Just for the asking. I’m helpless around you. Why now?”
She stared deep into my eyes. “I guess I should fill you in, shouldn’t I?”
I nodded.
“Okay.” she said. “Let’s sit down. This will probably take a while.”
We broke our embrace, and she walked to the chair at the desk in the tiny office. I sat on the other side.
“From the beginning,” I said.
“You sound like a detective.”
I smiled but didn’t say anything.
“Oooh, okay,” she said, mock seriously, “from the beginning.”
She gathered her thoughts, and then said, “First, let me say that I’m going to tell you some stuff you might not like to hear. You and I—we have a little history, but we don’t know each other all that well. Despite that, I need to bring you into my confidence.”
“Okay,” I said. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
“We’ll see,” she said. “What’s your feeling about marijuana?”
“Marijuana?” I asked. “I don’t inhale.” What a joker I am.
“No kidding,” she said, seriously.
“No kidding? I guess I don’t have any feelings about marijuana,” I said. “I don’t think about it. I don’t smoke pot. I don’t care if anyone else does. I’m not a cop.”
“Did you know that law enforcement spends over sixteen billion per year to stamp out the marijuana business in America, and in the process arrests eight hundred thousand Americans every year for simple marijuana possession?”
I thought about it for a second, and then said, “Big numbers. I suppose that bothers me on a couple of levels. I don’t see huge differences between pot use and alcohol use. Both get you stoned. As a cop in the army, we busted people for both. I saw a lot more functional problems with booze, though. Alcohol problems seem to have a much higher tendency to spill out onto the street. The idea that nearly a million people a year are put into jail for simple possession of pot is insane.”
“Good, I think so, too. It bothers me,” Gina said. “Next, did you know that in our state, marijuana growth is the number two cash crop, just behind apples?”
“I heard that somewhere.”
“And did you know that the vast majority of that crop is controlled by the Mexican drug cartels?”
“I heard that, too.”
“Does that bother you?”
“Which, that it’s number two behind apples, or that the Mexicans are making all the money from it? I’m starting to see a pattern to your questions. I think it might bother me for a different reason than it bothers you.”
“Explain,” she said.
“It bothers me because it’s against the law—it’s an illegal crop.”
“Legally, that’s true. Morally, what’s the difference between that and a vineyard? Both grow drugs that get you high. You already said that the concept of marijuana use didn’t bother you. If the use doesn’t bother you, why do you object to the cultivation?”
“I don’t know. I suppose I just haven’t thought it through and worked it out in my mind.”
“Well, I have. And I’ve come to the conclusion that pretty soon, the federal government is going to wake up and say, ‘Hey, we can kill not two, not three, but five birds with one stone. If we make pot legal and tax it, we can stop spending sixteen billion a year to prevent it, we can stop arresting a million people a year trying to prevent it, we can start earning a truckload of tax revenue, we can shut down the Mexican cartels on our side of the fence, and we can start a whole new legal agricultural business right here in America.’”
I thought about it for a moment. “Interesting theory. But people have been trying to legalize pot for forty years or more. No luck so far.”
“The country’s never been broke like we are now,” Gina said. “Look around. Every statistic I gave you is true. I know the clowns in Washington, D.C., are brain-dead, but I don’t think that they’re that brain-dead. Eventually, they’ll choose to take this issue on as opposed to cutting money and services from their constituents. They’ll do this because the path is a lot easier and besides—they don’t have a choice. They need the money. What this means to me is that the window of opportunity to make some real money on a ven
ture that’s technically illegal, yet morally correct, is open. But only for so long.”
“You sound convinced,” I said. “Knowing you, you must have some sort of plan.”
She smiled. “Of course. My plan is to create a team using my family ties in Chicago and a Mexican drug cartel. They grow. We distribute nationwide. We split profits. This works until the Feds pull the plug and change the laws. There’s a bucket-load of money to be made in the meantime.”
I paused to digest what I’d just heard. “I have to say that you even considering this is pretty mind-boggling. And telling me about it is like way over the top.”
“I figured you’d need some convincing,” she said.
“Fire away,” I said. “Frankly, I’m having a little trouble with this—even conceptually.”
“Okay. Sometime—end of April, start of May—I started seeing in my mind how this could work. I did my research and put together a business plan. I went to Chicago and met with my uncles. I laid out all my numbers. They were impressed. They should be. I think we can split more than three hundred million dollars a year with a single cartel. When I drove home the fact that the Mexicans were making all this money right now, coming to our country, illegally, and using our land to grow marijuana to turn around and sell to Americans, I got their patriotic juices sizzling. They may be crime bosses, but they’re Americans, and they don’t like the idea of someone sneaking over and stealing what they consider to be their profit. If anyone’s going to sell drugs to Americans, it’s going to be them. Based on this, I signed them on to my plan.”
“My problem, though,” she continued, “is that I didn’t know anyone with contacts with a Mexican drug cartel that was already in the marijuana business here. I didn’t know how to contact them, or why they’d even listen to me.”
“Speaking of which,” I said, “what’s in it for them? If they’re making all that money now, why would they agree to split it?”
“Two reasons,” she said. “First, my uncles can put together a wide distribution network, particularly through the East Coast, where retail prices are double West Coast prices. This will increase gross profits significantly. The second reason was left unspoken. It’s basically if they don’t agree to cooperate, they should no longer expect the U.S. organized crime families to sit on their hands while they take hundreds of millions of our customers’ dollars out of the country. With the cocaine and the heroin business, they provide the product—we distribute it. We’re comfortable with that arrangement. Ultimately, this business will be no different.”
“In other words, you use the carrot if you can, the stick if you can’t,” I said.
“Exactly.”
“So how’d you go about finding a contact in a Mexican drug cartel? Let me guess—that would be the lately deceased Mr. Eduardo Salazar.”
“Poor Eddie. That’s right. I met Eddie in June. I figured that if I wanted to meet someone connected with the Mexican drug cartel, then I should start hanging out at places where they hang out. I started going to Mexican lounges and bars. Sometimes I went by myself, but usually I went with a friend. I know a girl named Kara Giordano from work. She runs the finance department for a customer of ours.”
“I’ve met Kara,” I said. “Eddie beat her up trying to find you.”
“Robbie told me. I’m very sorry she got hurt.” I assumed she was being truthful, but she barely slowed down before continuing. “Anyway, one night Kara and I go to this crappy dive of a bar called Ramon’s Cantina.”
“We spent a very lovely evening there ourselves,” I said.
“I’ll bet. We hadn’t been there an hour when I get hit on by this skinny little Mexican guy who thinks he’s god’s gift to women. He was so completely full of shit that it was laughable—corny lines and little innuendos—he’d have been blown off instantly in any respectable place. It was pathetic. But the thing was, I noticed that everyone in the place acted like they were afraid of him. They treated him with respect, were almost subservient. Naturally, I was intrigued. I worked him a little. He wanted in my pants so bad that I soon had him bragging that he was a lieutenant in the Tijuana-Mendez drug cartel. Bingo! Actually, I’d have never believed him, but judging from the way other people treated him, I thought maybe he was telling the truth.”
“When you say you worked him, what do you mean?” I asked.
“Worked him? You know, I flirted with him. I chatted him up. I made him think I was impressed by his bullshit while I tried to figure out if he was connected.”
“Okay,” I said, “you dangled the bait.”She smiled. “Exactly.”
“Then what happened?”
“We went back to the bar several times in June, maybe once a week or so. Eddie apparently practically lived there, so each time he’d come at me with his crazy stupid pickup routine. Each time I let him think I was a little more interested and that he was a little closer to payday. Then, one night in late June, I’d ground up a Quaalude and poured it into a pen container, just like the spies. When he went to the bathroom, I dumped it into his drink and stirred it up. He drank it when he got back. As soon as he was done, I told him to take me to his place.”
“I barely got him inside before he basically passed out. I’d seen him with a little notebook he’d use when he’d get phone calls. He kept it in his shirt pocket, and it seemed pretty sensitive to him. While he was sleeping, I found it and saw that it contained hand-drawn maps of each of his grow sites—there were about twenty of them that he was in charge of—along with phone numbers of the guys who worked for him. I used my cell phone to take pictures of each page. Then I put the notebook back in his pocket. I wrote him a sexy note that told him I had a great time and that he was a wonderful lover. Then I left and took a cab home.”
“You’re bad,” I said.
“I know,” she smiled.
“The very next time I went to Ramon’s, I got Eddie by himself. I told him that I was connected to the Calabria family and that we wanted to meet to talk about a business proposition. I gave him a card with my name and an e-mail address. He laughed and said forget it. So I turned over one of his grows to the DEA. I left an anonymous message from a pay phone and three days later, the Feds busted it.”
“You didn’t tell Eddie, did you?”
“Hell no, he’d have killed me. Instead, I just bugged him again the next week. Left another card. This happened three more times. Same result—another field turned in. I turned in a total of four of his fields.”
“I saw the busts in the paper. You made the DEA very happy. You were playing with fire. Weren’t you worried that he’d eventually catch on?”
“Oh, yeah. But poor Eddie wasn’t the sharpest pencil in the box. Even so, after the fourth time, I finally got an e-mail, but it wasn’t from the cartel—it was from Eddie. He said that he needed to see me about something urgent. I figured my luck must have run out, and he’d finally put two and two together. So I decided to disappear and keep working on him.”
“And that’s when we got called in.”
“Right. That was a bit of a surprise. I never thought the police would actually suggest that my parents hire a private investigator. I just expected them to do nothing because I’d read that they won’t look very hard for a missing adult. I figured my deal would be concluded by the time anybody actually did anything to try and find me.”
“Oops.”
“Damn right, oops. You guys got started and almost immediately picked up my trail.”
“That’s what we do,” I said.
“I can see that now,” she said.
“So what happened to Eddie?” I asked. “Who shot him?”
“We didn’t do that,” she said quickly. “I think Eddie finally told his bosses what was happening because two things happened right about that time.”
“Go ahead.”
“First, I got an e-mail. Eddie finally gave my card to someone who mattered. The e-mail said that they wanted to talk to me.”
“What was the s
econd thing?”
“The second thing was that Eddie got killed. I didn’t see that coming, either.”
“Bad news for Eddie.”
“True, but I’m sure you know that Eddie was a sadistic little prick. I didn’t expect him to be killed, but there’s no doubt in my mind that he would have killed me once he figured out what I was doing if he’d found me.”
“I agree. However he got there, we’re probably all better off without Mr. Salazar. So did you meet with the cartel?”
“Yes. They sent a man named Francisco Miranda. He’s a high-level guy in the cartel. We met this past Thursday. I ran him through the whole proposition, and he relayed it to his bosses.”
“And? What next?”
“And there’s going to be a meeting tomorrow morning between the bosses of the cartel and my uncles to close the deal.”
“They’re meeting here?”
“At the Jefferson County airport, in a hangar. They both fly their planes in, taxi to the hangar, park, meet, agree, shake hands, and then leave. The airport is uncontrolled. No tower, no FAA. I think the cartel is flying in from Vancouver.”
“Holy shit,” I said. “So you’ve pulled it off.”
“I think so,” she said, smiling broadly. “All that has to happen is the principals need to meet each other and shake hands. Then, the lieutenants will work out the details, and we’ll have a deal.”
“Damn,” I said. I thought for a minute and suddenly wondered what my role in all of this was. “Back to my original question,” I said. “Why am I here? Why did you summon me to Port Townsend, sandwiched in between high-level meetings with the Tijuana-Mendez cartel and the Calabria family?”
“Simple. You were getting too close to be left alone,” Gina said. “My genius brother told a lie after I specifically gave him instructions not to, and you caught him on it. You were closing in. My deal happens tomorrow morning. I’ve been working on it for four months. I couldn’t risk you doing something to blow it up at the last minute. So I brought you in.”
“Where you can control me,” I said.
She smiled but didn’t disagree.
“How did you plan on controlling the rest of my team?” I asked.
Angel Dance (Danny Logan Mystery #1) Page 27