Final Target

by John Gilstrap

  Gail’s shields went up hard and fast. She didn’t know what to say.

  “I don’t mean your name,” Hector clarified. “I don’t care about that. But clearly, you’re not FBI.”

  “Why would you say that?”

  “Not nearly enough swagger,” he said. “Plus, you’re alone, and you weren’t paranoid enough about my pistol. Please don’t take offense. So . . .” He drew the word out as a question.

  “I have colleagues who were on the other end of that airplane journey.”

  “I see. Are they all right?”

  “Your turn,” Gail said. “Start with why you spoke in the past tense when you told me you were a cop.”

  Hector took a pull on his can of tea and set it on the table. “To be honest, I’m a little surprised that whatever research you did to find out my name in the first place didn’t turn up that little nugget for you. Do you know what a CAT team is?” He pronounced it as if referring to a feline.

  “Counter Assault Team?”

  “Exactly.”

  “But you’re not on it anymore,” Gail concluded. “What happened?”

  He cocked his head, genuinely surprised, it seemed, that she had to ask. “Remember that guy who jumped the White House fence and was killed on the North Lawn about six months ago?”

  “Vaguely.” Gail had lost faith in news outlets a long time ago, ever since they became rumor factories instead of reporters of fact.

  “Well, I was the shooter. It was a righteous shoot, too. Dead-nuts straight with the standing orders.”

  The details were coming back to Gail. “You were fired over that, weren’t you?”

  Hector smirked. “Tourists were disturbed by the damage a three-oh-eight round does to a brainpan. Then the investigation uncovered that the guy was homeless, and he didn’t have a weapon. Within three news cycles, I was an abusive cop and a pauper killer.”

  “It’s a pleasure to serve, isn’t it?” Gail quipped. “Sorry it worked out against you.”

  Hector waved the comment away. “It’s best that they let me go,” he said. “I wouldn’t have been able to function anymore, anyway. I didn’t like having camera crews waiting for me when I left my apartment in the morning. My landlord didn’t like it, either. Not to mention the other tenants. Basically, it was a nightmare.”

  Gail felt for the guy, and she understood that he was answering the question she had asked, but she didn’t see a nexus between that and the reason she was here. “But that’s not what you wanted to talk about, is it?”

  He gave a wry chuckle. “I don’t want to talk about any of this,” he said. “But it needs to get aired. I don’t know what to do with the shit I’ve got in my head, and maybe you do.”

  Gail pulled out her pad. “Mind if I take notes?”

  “Sure. What the hell,” Hector said before another deep, settling breath and a pull on the tea. “I’ll get to the toughest part first. My father worked with Harry Dawkins, the captured DEA agent.”

  Gail’s head snapped up from her notes. “Wait. What? Your father is DEA?”

  “No. My father is a money launderer for a Mexican cartel.”

  A laugh escaped Gail’s throat before she could stop it. “Sorry,” she said. “Not what I was expecting.”

  Hector seemed to understand. “He was turned by Harry Dawkins. Apparently, Papa wasn’t a very good money launderer.”

  “You’re using that past tense again.”

  Hector gave a wince. “I don’t think he’s alive anymore.”

  “Killed by the cartel?”

  “Don’t know for a fact, but I think so, yes. I know that that’s what he was expecting would happen.”

  Gail waited for the explanation.

  “Papa owns or used to own—actually, a bit of both—a chain of convenience stores throughout the East. After the economy tanked, his interests took a big hit, and I guess he went to the dark side. I didn’t know he’d turned to money laundering until he’d already been tapped by the DEA dude.”

  “Why did he tell his secret to you?” Gail asked. She knew that convenience stores—like pawnshops, scrap yards, car washes, and other high-cash businesses—made excellent money-laundering sites, but she’d never encountered one up close.

  “Because I was the only cop Papa knew, and he trusted me. The feds offered him a deal in return for finking on his cartel contacts.”

  Gail gave a low whistle. “That’s a dangerous game.”

  “It was play or pay,” Hector explained. “If he didn’t cooperate, Uncle Sam was going to send him away and bury the key.”

  “What was your advice to him?”

  Hector shrugged. “There was only one play, as I saw it,” he said. “He had to go along.”

  “And now he’s dead,” Gail said.

  For the first time, Hector’s face showed sadness at the loss. He kept control, but he struggled. “I think so,” he said. “No body, no proof, but no Papa, either. But that’s the end of the story. There’s quite a bit more in the middle.”

  “Let me guess,” Gail said. “The cartel found out about his involvement with DEA.”

  “Exactly.”

  “And that’s why you think they killed him,” Gail guessed.

  “No,” Hector said. “They turned him, too. Made him rat out the feds.”

  “Uh-oh,” Gail said. “And what did they want from him?”

  “Information,” Hector said. “Names.”

  “Of whom?”

  “Everybody. Mostly agents, but anyone else in the loop, too. Again, he didn’t know what to do, so he called me.”

  “Holy shit,” Gail said. “Were you active duty then?”

  Hector broke eye contact. “He was my father.”

  And that was no excuse. “Did you advise him to go to the FBI?”

  “I should have, I know.”

  “So, what did you do?” Gail pressed.

  “I told him to play both sides against the middle.”

  “Jesus, Hector. You know that’s a felony, right?”

  “Oh, it’s a felony, all right, but it’s the only thing that made sense until he figured out a way to escape.”

  Gail leaned in closer, trying to make Hector’s decision make sense. “Any idea what information he gave up?”

  Hector talked to the table. “I’m almost certain he gave up the name of Agent Dawkins, if that’s even his real name. Papa wore a wire to their meetings. God’s honest truth, I don’t know what he told them, but I don’t think it went on very long. Maybe a few weeks.”

  “I’ve done some business with the cartel runners,” Gail said. “They’re not known for being patient. I sense there’s more to your story.”

  Hector sat up straighter in his chair. “About a week ago, Papa called me, and he was very upset. He told me that if he was killed, somebody needed to go looking for Agent Dawkins. And he said he was sorry.”

  “What was he sorry for?”

  “He didn’t say,” Hector replied. “There was a tone to his voice, though. It was like nothing I’d ever heard from him. It was like he was resigned to dying.”

  “What does that have to do with the DEA guy?” Gail asked. She was having difficulty mining much sympathy for Hector’s father.

  “He wouldn’t tell me,” Hector said. “He just said that there was going to be a meeting, and that he was scared for Dawkins. And for his family, if he has one.”

  “That’s what happens when you turn a guy over to a pack of wild dogs. Tell me you finally decided to get the police involved.”

  Hector looked away again.

  “You didn’t even try to reach out and give this Agent Dawkins a heads-up?”

  “He was headquartered in Texas,” Hector said. “I pressed the Houston field office pretty hard for a way to contact him, but they wouldn’t give it to me.”

  “Did you tell them that their guy was in trouble?”

  “I did,” Hector said. “I mean, I tried, but then they kept asking for details.”

 
; “Did they know you were a cop?”

  “I wasn’t by then,” Hector said. “But no, I didn’t tell them. I didn’t give my name, and I called from a pay phone. Try finding one of those these days. I think—”

  Gail raised her hand to silence him as she caught up with her notes. Then she took the better part of a minute to digest them again. “Where do you live currently?” she asked, looking up.

  The question seemed to confuse him. “I have a place out in Remington. Why?”

  “Why are you here now? I mean, in this place, at this time?”

  Hector seemed to shrink in his chair. “I was here to rescue Papa,” he said. “I thought this whole thing had spun too far out of control, and when I couldn’t get the Dallas PD to listen to me, I just saw it all going to shit. I came to get him, take him to my place, and then we could figure it out from there.”

  Gail’s inner bullshit detector pinged. “But you said you knew about the airplane. What was that?”

  He put his head in his hands. “Oh, God,” he said.

  Gail had done a lot of witness interviews during her day, and she’d learned how to sense opportunities. One lay in front of her right now. “Does this have anything to do with Nicole Alvarez?”

  His head shot up. Instant recognition. “Jesus, you know all of it.”

  It was like tapping a well you thought had been sealed off. She had no idea where this was going to go. So, rather than screwing it up by talking, she waited for the rest.

  “That means you know about the senator, too,” Hector said.

  “I do know about the senator,” Gail lied. “But I want to hear it from you.” It was one of the oldest plays in the cops’ interview playbook, and as hackneyed as it was, it almost always worked on those with a heavy conscience.

  “That son of a bitch is going to do what politicians always do and hang my father out to dry. And probably Marlin Bills, too, but if you’ve been around Washington at all, you know that a senator’s chief of staff doesn’t wipe his own ass without strict orders.”

  Gail jotted, Marlin Bills, CoS. If nothing else, she had a vector into which senator she was pretending to be aware of.

  “It feels good to talk about this shit,” Hector said. “I don’t know everything, but I’ll be happy to fill in whatever holes I can.”

  Gail constructed her bluff on the fly. “I don’t have the connective tissue,” she said. “I know about the senator, and I know about Raúl—your father—and I know about Nicole Alvarez, but I don’t know each of their roles.”

  “Okay,” Hector said. “Remember I told you that Papa was discovered as a spy against the Jungle Tigers—that was the name of the cartel—and that he survived by giving information to them about DEA operations. Now this is the part where Papa’s smarts met stupid. He saw an opportunity to work both sides, just as I told him to do.”

  “Uh-oh,” Gail said aloud without thinking.

  “Exactly. You see, he was a huge fund-raiser for Senator Clark of Nevada. He—”

  Gail held up her hand again. She’d found over the years that she needed to seek clarification of confusing points as they arose, or she wouldn’t be able to listen to anything that followed. “Why Nevada?”

  “That’s where he was from.”

  “Your father?”

  “No, the senator.”

  The absurdity of it hit them both at the same instant, and they shared a laugh.

  “Okay, sorry,” Hector explained. “Why was my father raising funds for the senator from Nevada?”

  “Right.” As she spoke, Gail wrote, sen Clark, nev.

  “They were roommates in college,” Hector said. “Best friends, apparently, and as Papa’s business flourished, so did Clark’s political career, and Papa was committed to helping him. You know that Papa was the president of the American Association of Convenience Stores for two years.”

  “Of course.” Pres, amer ass conv strs.

  “Papa was what they called an aggregator.”

  Gail cocked her head and scowled. She needed more than that.

  “Here’s how trade associations work,” Hector said. “It’s illegal for any individual to give more than x amount of money to a candidate. I think it’s two thousand dollars, but I could be wrong. Something like that. It is perfectly legal, however, for a representative of a trade association to gather countless two-thousand-dollar checks from its members and hand them to a senator’s chief of staff at a ‘coffee’”—he used finger quotes—“at an off-site location. Say at a local bar. The people who can deliver thick envelopes are called aggregators.”

  Gail pretended not to be surprised. She’d tried very hard not to be drawn into the depths of Jonathan’s level of cynicism, but moments like this made it difficult.

  “So, Papa was a big deal to the senator. When he got his ass caught in the cartel crack, he saw his opportunity. When I told him to work both ends against the middle, I didn’t anticipate that he would go all scorched earth. You know, of course, that Senator Clark is the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee.”

  “Of course.”

  “When Papa found out that that’s the committee with oversight of DEA, he saw a way to keep the information he passed on to the cartels current.”

  “And by so doing, keep himself alive,” Gail offered.

  “Yeah, and that, too.”

  “Don’t tell me he bought the information from the senator.”

  Hector’s smirk returned. “Not from the senator, no. From his chief of staff.”

  Gail glanced at her notes. “Marlin Bills.”

  “Exactly. I don’t know how much he paid, but it was a lot. How much is it worth to stay alive, right? It all went well for a while, apparently, but then Papa heard about an agent who kept making inquiries into why certain investigations went worse than others. Agent Dawkins was able to see that the Jungle Tigers were getting a break that the other cartels were not.”

  “So, Marlin Bills clammed up,” Gail said.

  “He tried to, but my father threatened to go public with their little arrangement if things got too hot. Staying alive was very important to Papa. Alejandro Azul was fully aware of Papa’s arrangement with Bills, and apparently, being a man of business, he understood that information couldn’t just be a one-way street. So, he started offering good intel back upstream that would make DEA look less incompetent.”

  Gail had stopped trying to take notes. The details were streaming too quickly for her to keep up with them and still understand what she was being told. “You’re telling me Alejandro Azul sold out his competition.”

  Hector rolled his eyes. “Well, yeah, of course. Azul protected his own operations for the most part, but he went a step further, and I think that’s when the game changed.” Hector leaned in closer to Gail, and he lowered his voice, as if subliminally worried that he might be overheard. “He told my father of a gunrunning operation out of a school that was located in the jungle.”

  The hairs on the back of Gail’s neck all jumped to attention. “La Casa de Santa Inés,” she said.

  Hector’s jaw dropped open. “Yes,” he said. “How did you know?”

  “Never mind,” Gail said. “I shouldn’t have interrupted. Why would he do that? Why would he reveal his own gunrunning operation?”

  Hector took a few seconds to reorient his thoughts. “Papa wondered the same thing, but by then survival meant doing what he was told. So, he passed the word along to Marlin Bills, and he told me that right away, everything changed in his relationships with Washington.”

  “Changed how?”

  “I didn’t see any of these conversations, so I can only relay what Papa told me. Instead of being pleased with the political coup of exposing a gun ring, Bills got angry. Everybody got angry, and the tone of everything changed. He said it went from being an uncomfortable business arrangement to feeling very, very dangerous. Bills started asking pointed questions about Agent Dawkins. All of that last part—from the report of the weapons operation all th
e way to today—happened within the past week-plus. Maybe seven, eight days. That’s when Papa called me and told me that he expected to die.”

  “Why would he think that?” Gail pressed.

  “I don’t know!” He said it too loudly, an expression of raw frustration, and he shot to his feet. He gripped his head with both hands and paced over to the window. “I just don’t know. I asked, but he said it was too dangerous to tell me. He told me I needed to stay away, but that if something happened to him, I should go to the police and tell them the whole story.”

  Gail wanted to stand with him, if only to eliminate the height advantage, but she thought it would seem too confrontational. “How many people know that you know?”

  He kept his gaze on whatever he saw through the window as he said, “I don’t know. No one, I would imagine. I don’t see Papa selling me out, but you never know, right?”

  Gail lowered her voice to a level that would sound calm and utterly rational. “So, why are you here if your father told you to stay away?”

  He turned, and when he looked at her, his eyes were red. “Because he’s my papa,” he said.

  “And the airplane?” Gail prompted.

  “I don’t know for sure,” Hector said, turning away from her again. “Papa said that he paid a lot of money to someone to arrange for a rescue mission for Harry Dawkins. Somehow, he knew that Dawkins had been kidnapped, he knew that it was his fault, and he wanted to make it right.”

  Hector faced her again. This time he was more composed. “Are you here to tell me that the rescue mission failed?”

  Gail took her time reassessing what she knew. Assuming that Randy Goodman was telling the truth, there were at least two American teams in play on the ground in Mexico. There was Digger’s team, and there was the one that had taken off from Raúl’s field. Goodman had assumed that they were all together, but that clearly was not the case, and Goodman was murdered because of it.

  “Who was in the plane that took off from here?” Gail asked.

  “I don’t know for sure. I wasn’t here, but I know that Papa shared his concerns with Marlin Bills, who, I can only assume, shared it with DEA. I guess I assumed they would be the rescuers.”

  “But why fly out of a field in the middle of nowhere?” Gail asked. “Why not take off from Andrews? And why take multiple flights in prop planes instead of using a good government jet?” Gail answered her own question. “Because Bills couldn’t afford to get caught. He had to use mercenaries who would remain off the record.”