Exit Strategy

by Steve Hamilton

  • • •

  A THOUSAND MILES TO THE SOUTH, as Bruce Harper looked into the face of the man who’d once been second-in-command in one of the biggest criminal enterprises in the country, he saw one thing and one thing only:

  Raw animal fear.

  He was sitting at the man’s tiny dining room table in a one-bedroom apartment in the small town called Liberty, just outside Houston, Texas. Rachel Greenwood was sitting next to him. Across the table sat Isaiah Wallace, who’d aged the same way an NFL lineman would: once tall and powerful, now reduced to walking with a cane after a hard life first protecting his corner, then as the one man most responsible for watching Darius Cole’s back on his rise to power, finally as a man in hiding, always wondering if a knock on his door or a turn of his car key would be the last sound he would ever hear. He went by the name Harold Douglas now. Most WITSEC clients kept either their first name or their initials, but Isaiah Wallace wasn’t like most clients.

  “I always knew this day would come,” Wallace said. He gripped the edge of the table, holding on like a man already slipping into the abyss, even as his residence was surrounded by six heavily armed deputy marshals—not to mention a USMS Assistant Director and an Assistant U.S. Attorney.

  “I know I should be trying to hide it,” Wallace said, sounding just as tired as he looked, “trying to act all cold about it, but I’m too old to lie about this shit anymore. I spent too many nights waiting.”

  “Mr. Wallace,” Greenwood said. “You might be the safest man in America right now. Next to the president.”

  On the way over there, Harper and Greenwood had actually discussed the pros and cons of telling Wallace that Ken McLaren had been gunned down in Chicago—weighing the risk of spooking the man against what would happen if he found out they were trying to keep it from him.

  “You don’t think he’s going to read about it in the newspaper?” she’d said.

  “The last time I saw him, he didn’t strike me as a newspaper kind of guy.”

  “Doesn’t matter if he reads the papers or not. If he’s got access to the Internet, he already knows about McLaren.”

  Harper knew she was right. The Internet was one of his biggest ongoing headaches and a danger his old friend Director Shur never could have imagined when he founded WITSEC. It made isolating witnesses a hundred times harder.

  “And besides,” she continued, “he’s going to know something’s going on when he sees six deputy marshals parked outside.”

  Which is exactly what had happened. Harper could see it on Wallace’s face the moment he opened his door. The first break he’d seen in the man after twelve years into his new life.

  Harper hadn’t been part of that original trial—Wallace was just one more CW out of the hundreds that went into the Program every year—but Greenwood’s story made him wish that he’d been in the Chicago office the day Wallace flipped. They’d already had McLaren and were holding that over Wallace’s head. You and Cole can both go down, Mr. Wallace. Or just Cole. It’s up to you, and we honestly don’t care.

  Standard U.S. Attorney line of attack, which worked on most men. But not Isaiah Wallace. Not the man who’d been Cole’s most trusted confidant going all the way back to their days as fifteen-year-old boys on the corner in Englewood. Cole had the mind, the vision, to see something much bigger. Wallace had the muscle—back when he was a younger man, anyway—the willingness to do anything necessary to protect his corner. And the belief in his friend Darius Cole, to stick with him no matter where he went.

  That belief was rewarded more than he ever could have imagined. He had as much power, as much money, as any Mafia capo bastone ever had in any of the Five Families.

  After arresting him and reading him a list of enough charges to send him away for life—in a prison that, just as a little extra fuck-you, would be on the other side of the country from Cole’s—they started playing a Greatest Hits compilation from all of the wiretaps they’d collected. These were all conversations that Cole and Wallace believed to be encrypted, conversations with specific details about drug shipments, about money transfers, about hits on key members of rival organizations.

  Wallace remained unmoved until somebody accidentally played him ten seconds of a conversation that hadn’t even been identified as evidence. It was just Darius Cole talking to some woman he called Shortcake about getting together with her on an upcoming Friday night and some unsubtle hints about what he had planned for her.

  Those accidental ten seconds turned Isaiah Wallace. Because Shortcake was Cheryl Wallace. Isaiah’s wife.

  Wallace testified at the trial, staring down Cole from the witness stand. Cole drew double life at Terre Haute, and Wallace, after some initial hesitation, agreed to enter WITSEC. That’s when Bruce Harper had first met him, as a high-priority client, and the first thing Harper did was ask Wallace for a top-five list of where he’d like to relocate. Harper listened to all five choices and then immediately crossed them off the list. Las Vegas, the Monterey Peninsula … If you want to live in any of these places so badly, chances are you’ve told that to someone along the way. Harper wanted to make sure Wallace went somewhere nobody would ever think to look for him.

  That’s how Wallace had come to spend the last twelve years here in this little shitbox of an apartment in the sweltering oil slick that was southern Texas. Long divorced from his Shortcake, with no kids, he was a man leading a solitary existence, working as a night-shift stocker at the local Walmart. Not much of a life, but it was a lot better than federal prison, and at least marginally better than being dead. And he’d just been promoted to supervisor, for an extra fifty cents an hour.

  “Doesn’t matter how many men you put outside this place,” Wallace said to them. “Outside, inside. You can have two marshals sleeping in my bed at night. If he wants me dead—”

  “If he wanted that,” Harper said, “don’t you think it would have happened already?”

  Wallace let out a breath. “He didn’t need me dead before. Now he does.”

  “You’re going to be moved to the most secure location we have,” Harper said. “You’ll be untouchable.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “We’re not going to say where,” Harper said. “Or even when we’ll be moving. We don’t want any leaks.”

  “I still need to show up for the trial.”

  “I’ll be filing a request to have you give your testimony remotely,” Greenwood said. “You’ll be on a live video feed. Miles away from Chicago.”

  “You realize you won’t be coming back here,” Harper added. “For your own security, we’ll be relocating you after the retrial.”

  “And now if you don’t mind,” Greenwood said, taking a legal pad out of her briefcase, “I’d like to go over some things that might come up in the courtroom …”

  Wallace gave them a wry, tired smile as he shook his head.

  “Look,” Harper said, “I know you’ve made a life here—”

  “I stack boxes in the fucking Walmart at two o’clock in the fucking morning,” Wallace said, “then I come home to an empty bed. That’s not a life.”

  “Maybe this is what you need,” Greenwood said. “Wherever you go next, you can—”

  “You people still don’t get it,” Wallace said, cutting her off. “There ain’t gonna be no after the trial. And nothing’s going to come up in the courtroom because I won’t be there. Not even on a video screen.”

  “Mr. Wallace, I assure you—”

  “I’ve known Darius Cole for forty years,” Wallace said. He stopped and closed his eyes as if bringing it all back. Every one of those years. Greenwood put her pad down, and she and Harper both waited for the rest.

  “You know what he told me once? He’d just got off the phone with this crazy little Irishman he had working for him back then and he said to me, ‘I don’t have to be the Angel of Death, Isaiah. I just have to have him on my payroll.’”

  He opened his eyes.

  “Which means God Hi
mself won’t be able to save me.”

  • • •

  AS THE SHADOWS grew longer in La Villita, Marcos Quintero sat on the front porch of his house holding his daughter, Gabriela. She was dressed in a brightly colored flower dress, red and yellow and orange. She had just turned eighteen months old.

  As Quintero watched his daughter falling asleep, he knew his wife wouldn’t be happy. She sleeps now, she won’t sleep at bedtime. But this was what Quintero lived for, every single day, this simple act of holding his daughter, feeling her tiny weight in his arms. All of his hermanos from La Raza, how many of them were gone now? How did he alone survive and find a way out of that life and end up sitting here on this porch and given this last chance to have a family as a forty-three-year-old father?

  El milagro. The miracle.

  He didn’t look up at the car rolling down the street, but it registered on his radar. Just one of many reasons for that miraculous survival, animal instincts, always being aware of what was happening around him. He glanced up from his daughter’s face to see a large panel truck rumbling by. He waited for it to pass, and when it did there was a figure standing on the other side of the street. Watching him.

  Nick Mason.

  Quintero stood up quickly, went inside, and handed Gabriela to his wife, Rosa. He grabbed his Nighthawk Custom 1911 from beside the door, a no-fucking-around semiautomatic he had taken off a member of the Latin Kings, how many goddamned years ago, but it was still the only gun he trusted. He tucked it into the small of his back.

  “¿Lo que está mal?” she asked him, but he didn’t answer. Instead, he pushed the door open, went down the front steps, and stood in the driveway. Mason was still on the other side of the street.

  The two men faced each other for a full minute. Neither man moved. Another truck passed between them. Then Mason finally crossed the street.

  Quintero met him at the end of the driveway. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing here?”

  “Holding a mirror of my life up for you to look at,” Mason said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I want you to know how I feel every time you go near my family.”

  “You’re gone. Now. And if you ever come near this house again—”

  “I’m coming back tomorrow. And the day after that.”

  “I’ll kill you, I swear to God—”

  “Not the first time you’ve said that. I’m still waiting.”

  Quintero stepped closer, so that his face was just inches away from Mason.

  “Turn around and walk away now.”

  Mason stood his ground, his eyes locked on Quintero’s.

  “I do everything I’m asked to,” Mason said. “Now I need something in return. The same thing you have. Time with my family. Alone. Without you or anyone else watching me.”

  “You don’t get to change the rules,” Quintero said, taking the Nighthawk from his belt. “Nobody does.”

  “Your wife and your daughter are watching us,” Mason said, nodding toward the front window of the house. “But if you really want to kill me right now, go ahead.”

  “Yo mierda en la leche de tu puta madre,” Quintero said under his breath.

  “It’s not an insult if I don’t know what the fuck you’re saying.”

  Quintero put the gun back in his belt.

  “We got a new deal now,” Mason said. “You understand that, right?”

  Quintero shook his head, almost smiling. “You think I don’t know what it’s like, Mason? You think Cole doesn’t know where to find us? What do you think happens to my family if I don’t do what I’m told?”

  “So maybe we both need to get out,” Mason said. A seriously bad idea to even say it out loud, but maybe it was worth a shot.

  “You think it’s that easy?”

  “I’m just talking here.”

  “It’s a bad habit.”

  “You walked away from La Raza, didn’t you?”

  Quintero laughed. It was a laugh without joy. “Nobody walks away from La Raza. Cole bought me. He owns me like he owns you.”

  “He doesn’t own me tomorrow afternoon,” Mason said. “I’m seeing my daughter. And you won’t be there. We got a deal?”

  Quintero looked back at his house, made a gesture to his wife as if telling her to step away from the window, to stop worrying about this stranger in the driveway.

  “You can have one day with your daughter,” Quintero said as he turned back to Mason. “One. That’s it.”

  Mason looked Quintero in the eye, saw that he was giving him his word. Mason nodded, turned, and walked back to his Jag.

  When Mason drove away, Rosa came down the driveway, carrying Gabriela, who was still asleep with her head on her mother’s shoulder.

  “¿Quién era ese?” Rosa asked him. Who was that?

  “Nadie,” he said. Nobody.

  But in his mind, he was thinking something else. El Ángel de la Muerte.

  The Angel of Death.

  11

  When Mason woke up that Saturday morning, he knew it would be a day like no other day he’d had since walking out of that prison. It was the kind of day he’d think about constantly while staring at the gray walls of his cell every waking hour for five and a half years. The kind of day he never thought he’d have again.

  Mason didn’t notice anyone following him as he pulled up in front of the house in Elmhurst. Not only had Gina kept her promise but so, too, had Quintero. He tried not to let himself believe it, that the thing he had sold his soul to the devil for was actually going to happen: a day alone with his daughter.

  He was a few minutes early, but he went up the driveway to the porch, rang the bell, and waited. Gina answered the door, and then she stood there and stared at him for a long moment, looking like a woman who was already trying to find a way to change her mind.

  But Mason tried looking past her ambivalence and back in time to see the long, lean girl he’d fallen deeply, stupidly in love with. The woman he had planned to be with forever.

  Was “his” Gina still alive inside this pretty suburban housewife? Could she have survived what he put her through? Or had life in the land of big houses and minivans swallowed her up forever?

  “Adriana will be safe with me,” Mason said. “I’ll have her back here by three o’clock.”

  “One o’clock.”

  He knew that voice, knew it would be useless to argue with his ex-wife. If he even tried, he’d be bringing her back at noon instead.

  “Where’s Brad?”

  “He’s back in Denver already. We’ll fly out in a couple days.”

  “You’re really moving there?”

  “We are.”

  “She’s still my daughter,” he said, knowing this was a bad idea but saying it anyway. “Legally, I’m not even an ex-felon.”

  That’s when the Canaryville girl he’d been looking for reappeared.

  “You won’t fight it,” she said, her voice transformed.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Because this is the best thing for your daughter,” she said. She reached out to him and brushed her hand through his hair. “And because I know you’re still a good man.”

  It was an intimate gesture, making Mason forget about everything else in the world for that one moment. It was something beyond sexual, a brief reconnection between two people who knew each other better than anyone else in the world.

  Another voice from behind her: “Is that him?”

  Adriana appeared, dressed in blue jeans and an orange T-shirt. Her hair was out of the ponytail Mason always saw on the soccer field and down on her shoulders. She looked impossibly grown up for a nine-year-old. For Mason’s little girl.

  “Hello,” she said to Mason, the little pistol who had clocked the cop in her playground suddenly turning awkward and shy.

  Gina bent down and gave her a big hug, told her to behave, told her that she’d see her at one o’clock.

  “Can I please stay
longer?”

  “Next time,” Gina said, “okay?”

  “If there even is a next time!”

  “Just go,” Gina said. She stood up and faced Mason with one more painful look of doubt and regret.

  “We’ll be back soon,” he said to Gina. “Thank you.”

  She nodded and watched them walk down to the driveway to Mason’s car. Even as he drove away, he looked in the rearview mirror and saw her standing in the open doorway, watching until they had completely left her sight.

  • • •

  EVEN IN THE MIDST of realizing his dream—time alone with the daughter he thought he’d lost forever—the doubts crept in.

  Will she really be safe with me?

  Who am I fooling?

  Nothing about me is safe.

  It won’t last. It can’t.

  “This is a nice car!” Adriana said, bringing him back into the moment. “When did you get it?”

  “That day I saw you at the school, that was my first drive.”

  “Really? What happened to that other car you had? The old one?”

  Mason wasn’t even sure which car she had seen. But it didn’t matter because the answer was the same: Quintero had his men obliterate it, like it never existed.

  “I just liked this one better,” he said as he revved the engine and pulled away from the stop sign.

  His daughter laughed.

  That’s all I need out of life right there, he said to himself. That sound.

  “Where do you want to go?” Mason asked her. “You want to get some ice cream?”

  “I can’t eat ice cream before lunch.”

  “Well, how about lunch and then ice cream?”

  “I want to see where you live,” she said. “Let’s have lunch there.”

  Mason pictured her in the town house. She’d love the place, of course, especially the pool. But then he thought about the security cameras, imagined someone sitting in a room on the other side of the city, just as Eddie had described, only now that person would be watching Adriana on the screen.

  Mason couldn’t bear it.

  “It’s such a nice car,” Mason said. “How about we just drive around for a while? I can take you to the beach.”