“Don’t let these people fool you, Leo,” Seamus suddenly called out in the dead silence. “This fine bunch of formal young lads and lasses is usually quite lively come mealtime. You’re having quite an effect on them.”
“A positive one, I hope, Father Seamus,” Leo said with a polite grin.
“Aye, without a doubt,” Seamus said, chewing as he looked around the table. “Now tell me, Leo. I couldn’t help but notice, that’s quite some firepower you bring with you every evening. What kind of rifle is it?”
“Now, Seamus,” Mary Catherine said, “is that polite dinner conversation?”
“Perhaps not,” Seamus said with a shrug. “But I figure, even somewhat impolite dinner conversation is a tad better than none at all.”
“It’s an M-four,” Leo said.
“An M-four?” Seamus said, nodding. “Is it not an M-sixteen?”
“Well, the M-four is sort of the latest version of the M-sixteen,” Leo said. “The main difference is that it’s smaller and lighter and has a shorter barrel, for close-quarter combat.”
“Hmm,” Seamus said, chewing. “What round does it shoot? A .223?”
The kids started to smile and giggle as they saw Mary Catherine roll her eyes. At least the little ones. The older crew of boys looked like they were silently praying to disappear.
“No, a new 5.56 round, actually,” Leo said.
“To account for the shorter barrel?” Seamus said.
“Exactly,” Leo said, exchanging a smile with Mary Catherine. “Do you shoot, Father?”
Seamus’s shoulders sagged as he sighed.
“Oh, no,” he said. “They won’t let me.”
CHAPTER 72
IN THE SHADOWS, CATTY-CORNER from the farmhouse, laughter echoed in the earbud of a man dressed head to toe in black, crouching there, motionless.
The earbud was attached to a shotgun microphone he’d purchased in San Fran the day before, along with a zoom-lens camera. He would have gone in closer to get some shots through a window with the camera, but he’d spotted motion detectors along the property’s perimeter coming in, so he didn’t want to risk it. There seemed to be only one US marshal who was currently in the house, eating with the family, but you never knew.
He’d ridden in on horseback, careful to skirt the herds of cattle as well as Cody’s farmhouse dogs. He’d tied up about a mile to the north and hoofed it the rest of the way. Care was required here, considering the marshal would probably shoot him on sight.
It’s them, the man thought, listening to the tinny dinner chatter. They were everything his cartel contact had said to keep an eye out for: all those kids, the old man and the young woman with the Irish accents. It had to be the cop’s family. Who else on the face of the earth could it be?
And to think that he had his drug-addict brother-in-law, Cristiano, to thank for this mother lode. He had gone by the house for his monthly sponge off his sister when Cristiano idly mentioned that a new Irish priest had been handing out cans at the food bank with three kids, one of them an Asian girl.
Right away, he put it together with the cartel APB. The Mexicans were looking for a large, strange family with adopted kids and an old Irish priest, hiding in or around Susanville. A half-million-dollar purse was being offered for information. Might even be some negotiating room there, too, he was told. The Mexicans wanted these people bad.
It didn’t take too much asking around to hear that the priest had also been spotted filling in for Father Walter, and that the family had driven to church in one of Aaron Cody’s beaters. Now here they were. Thirty feet away. All five hundred Gs’ worth of them.
He’d been one of the first to understand the wisdom of partnering up with the cartels when they started moving into the Central Valley, four years before. He was no brain surgeon, but he was smart enough to know what men who truly didn’t give a shit about killing people looked like. Smart enough to know that getting on the wrong side of folks that serious was not an option if you didn’t have a second set of eyeballs in the back of your head and liked waking up alive every day.
He’d become involved in the marijuana-growing business about a year after getting back to his hometown, Susanville, from an ’05 stint in Iraq with the army. He’d traded in the M1 Abrams tank he’d been driving for a beer truck and had applied to the huge state prison nearby, like every other sucker in town, when he bumped into some old buddies who had a grow house going. He’d helped them expand and organize it, ramp up production and sales until they were the biggest outfit around. Heck, he hadn’t even had to kill anyone. Just put a few guns to a few people’s heads.
But now, squatting there in the dark like some Peeping Tom, he actually felt a little bad. He had a few rug rats of his own, and it was doubtful that the cartel wanted to find these people in order to deliver a Publishers Clearing House prize. But the problem was, half his crop had been seized by the state park rangers a month before. He owed a lot of dangerous people a lot of money he didn’t have.
Here’s an opportunity to make everybody happy and then some, the man in black thought. Expand or, even better, quit altogether. Get out while he was young and rich, with his head still connected to his neck.
It wasn’t his idea, the man in black finally decided with a sigh as he sat there, listening and recording the family’s laughter on his iPhone.
It wasn’t his fault that God made the world so dog-eat-dog.
CHAPTER 73
SIX HUNDRED MILES TO the south, Vida Gomez was lighting a bath candle in the guest powder room when her cell rang.
She stepped out and opened a sliding door to take it on the balcony. They were in the Hollywood Hills now, the lights of Los Angeles spread out below in the huge bowl of the valley, white on black, like cocaine on black velvet. The new safe house was pretty much bereft of furniture, but it actually suited the place. It was nothing but sterile stone and glass, clean and cold, just the way she liked it.
“Vida, I have news,” Estefan said excitedly. “I just received a call. We have a lead.”
Vida blinked. She had sent Estefan up to Susanville to see what he could see immediately after they’d dumped the agent at Venice Beach two days before. Already he had made progress. This was good news.
“OK, slow down,” she said. “Is it credible?”
“It can’t be confirmed, but I’ve been speaking to our people up here, getting them to put out the word about the reward, just like you said. One of the locals just called me directly. He claims to know the exact location of the Bennetts. There’s a problem, though.”
“What is it?”
“The informant wants more money. He wants a million, and he wants half up front. What should I do?”
“Sit by the phone. I’ll call you back,” she said, hanging up.
She went back inside as Manuel came out of the bedroom in a short silk robe. Most crime lords got fat when they got rich, but not the Sun King. He worked out like a madman with weights for an hour every day and ran for another on the treadmill. He was a health-food nut. Though he was in his mid-forties, he could easily pass for thirty-five.
She couldn’t help but stare at his broad shoulders as he went into the kitchen and took some pomegranate juice out of the fridge. Not for the first time, she felt herself get aroused. When he’d asked her to be his special personal assistant for the duration of his stay in Los Angeles, she thought he might make a move, but so far, unfortunately, he’d been the perfect gentleman.
He’d even informed her that he was having a guest over a little bit later. She knew what that meant. The two whores he’d had over the night before hadn’t left until three a.m.
Then she remembered herself.
“I have news, Manuel. The FBI agent was right. The Bennetts seem to be in Susanville. We just heard from an informant who claims to know their exact location. But he wants a million, and he wants half up front.”
“A million?” Perrine said, affronted. “That’s thievery.”
“Perha
ps we could set up the informant? Force him to tell us?” Vida said, lifting her phone.
“No,” said Manuel as he poured himself some juice. “I have another idea. Send that other one up there. The one who found the last two stinking rats for us. What’s his name?”
“The Tailor?” Vida said.
“Yes, yes. The Tailor. He can easily find the Bennetts and eliminate them, especially now that we know we’re in the ballpark.”
Perrine drank some juice and smiled, raising an eyebrow.
“And you know what happens when we get in the ballpark, Vida.”
She had just forwarded Manuel’s wishes when the front doorbell rang. She looked at the security camera. There was a tall, blond woman wearing a tube top and leather miniskirt and a raincoat. Just one hooker tonight.
Terrific, Vida thought, rolling her eyes. Perhaps I’ll get to sleep before two.
Vida opened the door. The woman who stepped inside was even taller than she looked on the video screen, and very heavily made-up. Like a TSA agent, Vida put on blue rubber gloves before she went through the prostitute’s bag. All cell phones and recording devices would be left in the living room, of course. The already-agreed-upon procedure was that the sex workers would be blindfolded throughout, so as to hide Manuel’s identity. A detail the whores had no problem with, LA being a town where discretion was valued almost as much as debauchery.
As Vida was frisking the whore, she suddenly stopped and excused herself.
“Um, Manuel? A word, sir?” Vida said, knocking and entering his bedroom.
“Yes, Vida? Has my guest arrived?” Perrine said from where he lay back on the bed, smoking a cigar as he channel-surfed the seventy-inch flat screen.
“It’s about your guest, sir,” Vida said delicately. “I … I think she’s an impostor.”
“What do you mean? An impostor?”
“They sent a transvestite, Manuel,” she said. “I just frisked her, him, whatever. She is a definite he.”
The cartel king laughed as he shut off the TV. He shook his head at Vida affectionately as he stood and squeezed her cheek.
“Thank you, Vida, my innocent little country girl, but everything is completely in order,” he said as he spanked her playfully on the rump. “Now, be a love and go blindfold that vision of loveliness and send her in with the champagne.”
CHAPTER 74
IN THE AFTERMATH OF the horrific attack on Agent Mara, the entire task force began to work fourteen-hour days.
We interviewed every witness at the pool where she’d been grabbed that morning—the lifeguards, the parents of the other kids. We had spoken to her soul-broken husband, who simply told us that he had been talking to his wife when there was a loud machine sound and the screen blurred. Emily even interviewed her poor little son Ian, who was overwrought with grief.
But there was nothing. We hadn’t even found her stolen truck yet. One second, the agent had been watching her kid in the SUV, and the next, the SUV was gone, with only a pile of broken glass in its place.
The following day, another two dozen new FBI agents were flown in to bolster our ranks. Also, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s LA office, John Downey, was put at the helm of the task force.
It was obvious that the female agent’s mutilation and murder had rung every bell and whistle at FBI HQ. As well it should have. Some were saying that the stakes for the bureau hadn’t been this enormous since the unparalleled spree of bank robberies that had plagued the country during the Great Depression.
Put simply, Perrine was calling into question law enforcement’s ability to deal with him. That could not be allowed to stand, especially on our own soil.
If I had any last doubts about the feds’ commitment, they were thoroughly extinguished when FBI Director Joseph J. Rohr himself attended the task force’s morning briefing via Skype. Instead of micromanaging the meeting, Rohr surprised me by listening intently and asking pointed but intelligent questions about logistics and manpower.
He seemed determined that we have every resource we needed. Moreover, instead of harping on ass-covering attention to protocol, the surprisingly witty former marine fighter pilot practically begged us to think as creatively as we could in tracking down Perrine.
After a few false starts, it was decided that the task force’s new prime directive would be to laser-focus on the gangs in LA who were known to be closest to Perrine’s Los Salvajes organization. That meant going with both barrels after MS-13.
So on the second morning after the murder, Emily and I were teamed up with a short, extremely intense bullnecked cop named John Diaz, who was a ten-year-veteran detective of the LAPD’s Gangs and Narcotics Division. After the briefing, Diaz took us immediately from Olympic Station to a place called Langer’s Deli, in the MacArthur Park area of Westlake. Though it was a pretty gritty inner-city neighborhood, as we sat at a window booth above the palm trees, I spotted a grand, white prewar building.
“Why does that look familiar?” I said to Diaz, pointing at it.
“That’s the Bryson Apartment Hotel,” Diaz said with a nod. “It’s the building Fred MacMurray drives past in the beginning of Double Indemnity.”
“Right,” I said excitedly. “With a couple of slugs in his belly.”
“Exactly,” Diaz said, nodding again. “Actually, MacArthur Park has a long history of gunshot wounds in real life, too. A lot of drugs, a lot of gangs. They drained the lake back in the seventies, and you wouldn’t believe the number of guns they found. They say this is where MS-Thirteen was started in the eighties by Salvadoran immigrants.
“Speaking of which, I called a guy who might be able to help us on an MS-Thirteen lead. He’s a friend, so I’ve been reluctant to ask him for any info. The worst insult you can make to these guys is to ask them to be a snitch. But after what happened to that lady agent, this shit is obviously not business as usual. He’s on his way here now.”
We were ordering pastrami sandwiches when a UPS truck pulled up outside. The brown-uniformed Hispanic driver who stepped out and lit a cigarette had a goatee and more than a few tats.
“And here he is now,” Diaz said, standing.
“That’s your source? The UPS guy?”
“Oh, yeah. Me and Pepe go way back to my old neighborhood. My uncle’s a district manager at UPS, and I actually pulled some strings to get him the job when he got out of jail a few years ago.”
“Is he MS-Thirteen?” I said.
“No, Pepe’s Eighteenth Street, MS-Thirteen’s rival. But don’t let the uniform fool you. Pepe’s in the game up to his tattooed neck. He knows everybody. You guys sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
Diaz went out and hopped into the truck, and we watched as it pulled out. The sandwiches had just hit the table when the truck hit the curb again. Diaz came back in, smiling. He clapped his hands and rubbed them as he sat back down.
“OK, the suspense is killing me,” I said. “What can Brown do for us?”
Diaz spread a napkin on his lap.
“We need to speak to a guy named Tomás Neves. He’s an MS-Thirteen shot caller who’s done quite well for himself, apparently. In addition to moving a lot of weight, he’s a partner in one of those custom car shops down in Manhattan Beach where the rich people live. Pepe said something this big would have to go through Neves. He usually rolls into his fancy car joint late in the afternoon.”
“Excellent,” I said, lifting my massive sandwich. “First lunch, then it’s time for an episode of Pimp My G-Car.”
CHAPTER 75
BEACH CITY CUSTOMS WAS south of LAX on the Pacific Coast Highway, in a commercial section of Manhattan Beach known as the Sepulveda Strip.
Diaz quickly tapped me on the shoulder as we were about to pull into its parking lot.
“What’s up, John?” I said.
“Wait a sec. Drive around the block, would you?”
“OK,” I said, continuing on and taking the corner past the body shop.
“How much do you want t
o find this guy Perrine?” Diaz said. “I mean, how much, really?”
“He put out a hit on my family, John,” I said, looking at the LAPD cop in the rearview. “I want him as badly as humanly possible.”
“I figured,” Diaz said. “See, this guy Tomás is going to be hard-core and definitely not stupid. If he’s helping out Perrine, there’s no way he’s going to voluntarily come with us to be questioned. There’s no way he’s going to cooperate.”
“I take it you have another idea?” Emily said.
Diaz nodded.
“Back in the late nineties, we had a scandal out here with a gang unit called CRASH. These CRASH cops went off the rails. They framed gang members, beat up on them. The sergeants used to give out awards if a gang member was shot.”
“Your point being?”
“These gang guys remember CRASH. In fact, more often than not, during an arrest they and their defense lawyers claim we’re up to our old tricks. I’m just thinking we might be able to use the rep of these crazy CRASH guys to put a little pressure on our friend Tomás.”
“What do you mean? You want to frame him or something?” Emily said.
“No, of course not,” Diaz said. “But what if we … I don’t know … pretended to?”
“Yeah?” I said.
“I don’t know,” Emily said.
I smiled.
“I don’t know, either, Emily. But the director did tell us to get creative, to think outside the box. Besides, we need information, not evidence. It would never make it into court.”
“Exactly,” Diaz said. “It would be a bluff all the way, but at this point, that’s all we got. We need to do something.”
“Fine,” Emily said. “You’re right. This is beyond everything at this point. Count me in. I think.”
“What do we have to do, Diaz?” I said.
Diaz pointed at a CVS pharmacy on the corner to our left.
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