Make Them Sorry

by Sam Hawken

  She counted off numbers until she found the right one. The key fit. Camaro twisted it. The catch released. The door swung wide. She saw the messenger bag. She stopped long enough to unzip the bag and see the laptop. She closed the bag, put the strap over her shoulder, and let the locker’s spring close the door.

  It was twenty feet to the doors. Camaro walked directly toward them, not looking left or right. She pushed the bar when she reached the doors and passed outside. Humidity and heat crashed into Camaro’s face.

  It was ten feet to the car.

  Tires screeched, shattering the quietude of the parking lot. Camaro looked past Ignacio’s car, saw vehicles streaming in, black sedans and SUVs, from two sides. She swept the bag backward with her right hand to clear her weapon. She drew. Ignacio was already out of the car with his gun.

  Black vehicles skidded to a halt, forming a solid wall. Men and women in tactical gear leaped out with carbines, shotguns, and pistols. The letters FBI were emblazoned on their body armor.

  A white man in a suit stepped out of one of the cars. A smartly dressed black woman was with him. Camaro didn’t lower her weapon. Ignacio stood where he was. “Stand down,” the man said. “We’re in charge here now.”

  Chapter Sixty-Eight

  CAMARO WAITED IN the small interrogation room. The four walls were bare. The little table, especially designed to force questioner and questioned together, was cheap, the plastic coating of the tabletop peeling at the edges. She hadn’t replaced her watch, shattered by the blast wave from the boat. She had no idea of the time.

  The door opened. The black woman entered. “I don’t know if you know who I am,” she said. “My name is Trina Pope, and I’m a special agent with the Drug Enforcement Administration.”

  Camaro watched Pope sit down. Pope had a small leather binder that she unfolded on the table. Inside was a slim pad of notepaper. She had a fountain pen in her jacket. Up close it was possible to see the perfect cut of Pope’s outfit, the richness of the fabric. She smelled faintly of perfume.

  “I know who you are, of course,” Pope said. “Your name is Camaro Espinoza, and until recently you were a fishing boat captain.”

  Camaro made no reply.

  Pope frowned. “Look, if you want to do the hard-ass routine, that’s your business, but I can tell you right now no one does hard-ass better than me.”

  “Okay,” Camaro said. “I want a lawyer.”

  “You don’t need one. You’re not under arrest. Brandishing a firearm at a federal officer is something we can charge you with, and it would stick, but we’re not going to bother. Everything you say here is completely voluntary, and if at any time you want to stop talking and leave…there’s the door. Of course, then I do have to charge you with something, and it starts all over again.”

  Camaro didn’t move.

  “I’m glad we understand each other.”

  “When I get out of here, I want my gun back, and I want whoever’s watching me to back off. In that order.”

  “Who says anyone’s watching you?”

  “You’re either watching me or you’re watching the detective. Somebody had to tell you we were on the move with Faith.”

  Pope leaned back in her chair. She regarded Camaro with hooded eyes, her expression studied. “We were keeping an eye on your house in case someone wanted to take another shot at you. People willing to blow up a custom boat like yours, right out there in public…they’re the kind of people who don’t take failure lying down.”

  Camaro looked at Pope’s hands. The woman had the pen in her left hand, but she hadn’t written anything yet. The notepad was unmarred by so much as a pencil mark. “What exactly do you do?” she asked Pope.

  “I handle major international cases. My area of expertise is South America. Colombia, specifically.”

  “So you know all about these Black Eagle guys.”

  “I do.”

  “Then tell me: If you knew how dangerous they were, why didn’t you try to help Faith before it got ugly? Why would you let her dangle?”

  Pope made a small, squiggly line in the upper left-hand corner of the notepad. “Sometimes you have to leave out bait to catch the big fish.”

  “Are you?”

  “Am I what?”

  “Are you going to catch the big fish?”

  A slow smile spread over Pope’s face. She had strong-looking and prominent teeth. “I think you have other things to worry about.”

  “Like what? You said I’m not under arrest.”

  “You willfully withheld information from a federal investigation and interfered with the protection of a material witness to an ongoing crime. And you killed two people. Let’s not forget that part.”

  “I’ve never killed anyone who didn’t need to be dead.”

  “I see. Is that how it went down in California? Oh, yeah, we know all about it. You went out to California to see your sister because she was mixed up with some bad people. Next thing you know you’re running around shooting up the place. The only thing that kept your behind out of jail was a federal marshal who claimed you were officially deputized at the time you gunned down…how many?”

  “I lose count.”

  Now Pope laughed. “You lose count. Now that’s funny. Well, honey, Uncle Sam keeps records, and he accounts for every time someone loses their life, whether it was self-defense or plain old murder. So when I looked through your file, I saw someone who’s been very busy, going all the way back to her service days. Got yourself a Silver Star, too.”

  “I didn’t kill anybody for that.”

  “First time for everything.”

  “Do you have any actual questions, or are we gonna shoot the shit all day?”

  Pope laughed again. “Oh, my, my. Okay, if you want to get started, we can get started. Why don’t you tell me how you got involved in Faith Glazer’s business in the first place?”

  Camaro glanced toward the door. “Maybe I ought to make you arrest me.”

  “Do you want me to? I’ll read you your rights now.”

  “What’s going to happen to Detective Montellano?”

  “He’s in with Special Agent Mansfield. They’re having a little chat like we are. You ought to be glad you’re not a part of his situation, because if you’re in trouble, Detective Montellano is in a whole world of hurt. It’s one thing when you’re a private citizen and you make some mistakes along the way. It’s something else if you’re an officer of the law. Judges and juries don’t look kindly on misconduct.”

  Camaro looked at Pope’s hands again. Pope wrote MONTELLANO on her notepad.

  “You ready to start for real now?” Pope asked.

  “Go ahead.”

  Chapter Sixty-Nine

  “I LIKE YOU,” Mansfield told Ignacio.

  “I like you, too,” Ignacio lied.

  “No, I mean it. You have a great record, you’re popular with your peers. Sure, you pissed me off the other night, but in the end you brought us Faith Glazer, so it all works out.”

  They were in a conference room to one side of the bullpen. At one point the room was half filled with filing boxes, but in the past year it was cleaned out. Though the carpet was still marked with dirt and flecked with random bits of paper confetti, it was as squared away as anywhere else in Homicide Unit.

  Ignacio sat at one end of the conference table, and Mansfield sat on the edge of the table itself, his arms crossed casually. The positioning made Mansfield seem much taller than Ignacio, and Ignacio was forced to look up. This was not accidental.

  “I’d like to take you back to something we touched on before,” Mansfield continued. “And that’s this Espinoza woman. I understand you have a lot of respect for her, and she’s a friend, but she doesn’t seem like the best match for a cop with your background.”

  “I don’t follow,” Ignacio said.

  “Okay, let me put it to you this way: she’s a murderer and you put her type away. Those two things don’t seem compatible.”

  “
I put bad guys away. She doesn’t qualify.”

  Mansfield bobbed his head. “Right, right. But here’s a thought, and hear me out: What if she isn’t everything she says she is? What if there’s more to her involvement in all of this than she’s saying?”

  “That’s bullshit, pardon my language. You saw her boat. You know what happened before.”

  “Of course it’s bullshit. I don’t know what I’m talking about. But how well do you really know her? And how do you know when she came out of the train station she wasn’t going to kill you and Faith Glazer right there on the spot?”

  Ignacio sat back sharply. “What the hell are you talking about? She’s helped me and you every step of the way!”

  “She kept Glazer’s location a secret from everyone, even knowing there was a federal investigation underway. You already told us she allowed Glazer to cut a deal with a major South American drug connection, and now she hands the woman over to you with the only remaining evidence that could aid the governments of the United States and Colombia in the prosecution of a terrorist army? Whose side is she on? Really. Whose side is she on?”

  Ignacio fumed. He looked away from Mansfield. When the silence grew too great, Ignacio said, “She’s on Camaro’s side.”

  “Right. Whatever works for her. If it’s good for her to help Glazer, she helps Glazer. If it’s good for her to help you, she helps you. And if she had the fear of God put into her by the Colombians who nuked her boat, what makes you think she wouldn’t turn on you in a heartbeat?”

  “You’re not going to get me to say something to incriminate her,” Ignacio said.

  “No?”

  “No. She’s a victim in all of this, as much as Faith is. Now maybe she’s not all touchy-feely the way you’d like her to be, but that doesn’t mean she’d kill me. I know she’s a little out there, but she has reasons. She doesn’t do anything without a good reason. I know her well enough to know that for sure.”

  “Okay,” Mansfield said, and he put up his hands. He moved from the table and pulled out a chair. He sat and looked at Ignacio over the scratched wood of the tabletop. “So let’s talk about you. Let’s talk about how you’re going to avoid charges of obstruction, aiding and abetting a fugitive, and criminally negligent behavior.”

  “No jury in the world is ever going to believe that.”

  “My jury will. And the U.S. Attorney knows how to work the system. We can get any kind of conviction we want. This is a post-9/11 world, Detective. That’s how the game is played now. Make America great again.”

  “Look, you got everything you wanted. You have Faith Glazer, you have a way to recover all the information from the bank, and pretty soon you’ll have the guy responsible for laundering all the cash. You’ll go after your Colombian connection, and everybody’s happy. Why do you need to come down on me?”

  Mansfield’s eyes hardened. “Because I don’t like being played, Ignacio. And neither does Special Agent Pope. That’s why. You worked this fast and loose with your friend Camaro Espinoza and your ideas about who gets to know what and when. I don’t like it.”

  “I’m sorry. I did the best I could.”

  “I’m sorry, too. Because I really do think you’re all right. Confused, but all right.”

  “So that’s it?”

  “Is what it?”

  “The scolding is over? I can get back to work?”

  “No, you don’t get to skate after something like this. Sure, you’ll both probably get out from under it eventually, and the police department might even keep you on after all the money you cost them, but it’ll take some time.”

  “Jesus, you really are a prick,” Ignacio said.

  Mansfield chuckled. “That’s what my ex-wife always says. But this has nothing to do with me. This has to do with respecting the institutions of government. No one makes their own rules. Not even you.”

  Chapter Seventy

  A STORM LAY flat and black against the line of the sea, darkening the water as it rolled ahead. Lightning popped inside the roiling mass of clouds, illuminating swirling pools of onyx. Kaur sat on his bed in the hotel room, drank the very last of the alcohol from the bar, and watched the approaching front through bleary eyes.

  He thought he might have slept for a little while, but he wasn’t certain. There was so much drink in his system that he couldn’t stand without supporting himself. Sometimes he couldn’t sit up under his own power. All the while the storm advanced, until it covered the horizon from end to end, and even the bright sunny beach was reduced to shadows.

  Kaur cried. He tried not to, but it was impossible to stop. He thought of Brandon Roche, and his imagining of Roche’s last moments was enough to get the tears flowing. And when he didn’t cry for Brandon, he cried for himself because there was no alternative.

  He blinked. Heavy raindrops whipped against the tall windows. He’d slipped away again. The storm had leaped ahead, encompassing the whole of the sky. Now when lightning crackled, it was immediately followed by a profound boom of thunder. The hotel was lit inside and out. The beach chairs were all abandoned, umbrellas scattered by the wind.

  The rain began to beat against the glass. Kaur turned toward the phone by the bed. He reached for it and swayed before he got his hand around the receiver. He dialed for an outside line. He called 911.

  “This is 911 emergency,” said a female voice. “Do you need police, fire, or ambulance?”

  “I need to talk to someone in the police department,” Kaur slurred.

  “I’m sorry, sir. What did you say?”

  “My name is Lawrence Kaur and I need to speak to a detective. Can you contact him for me?”

  “Sir, this is a line for emergencies only. Do you need emergency assistance?”

  “His name is Montellano! I’m not sure what his first name is. Get him on the line for me.”

  The dispatcher didn’t speak right away. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Sure.”

  She put him on hold. Kaur did not know 911 put people on hold. He waited and watched the storm intensify. This had been coming for days, even weeks. A cleansing storm. This was his moment.

  A different woman came on the line. “Who is this?” she asked.

  “My name is Lawrence Kaur. I want to speak to—” Kaur stopped as his throat spasmed. He bent over and vomited on the carpeting. His feet were splattered.

  The woman didn’t hang up. “Lawrence Kaur,” she said.

  Kaur spat out the last vile mouthful. “I want to speak to Detective Montellano.”

  “Detective Montellano is on administrative leave. My name is Special Agent Pope. If you really are Lawrence Kaur, I need to speak with you. Your life is in danger.”

  Kaur fell back onto the bed. He looked up at the spinning ceiling. “I know, I know. They killed Brandon. They’ll kill me.”

  “Where are you? I can send someone to get you.”

  “I’m in a hotel. In Miami Beach.”

  “Which one? What room?”

  Kaur told her. It felt like expelling something awful, like vomiting, but with a sudden peace at the end. “Come and get me. You have to save me.”

  “We can get someone to you soon. Whatever you do, do not leave your room. Don’t call anyone else. Stay where you are and stay safe.”

  “I can,” Kaur said tiredly. Consciousness began to fade again. “I can.”

  She said more, but Kaur was gone, the receiver in a slack hand. He slept despite the thunder and the blasts of lightning. He drifted in dreams filled with half-understood words and malformed shapes. A dream like the storm clouds, full of hidden depths that were only illuminated by intermittent flashes.

  He heard waves in the dream. Strident, continuous waves, rolling over and over and crushing him. His eyes flickered. He was back in the room. The storm still punished the hotel. Crashing waves became knocking. Kaur convulsed and smelled his regurgitation. He’d thrown up again, in his sleep.

  Knocking came at the door once more. Kaur levered
himself off the mattress, his robe wet and reeking. The spaces between his toes were caked. He made it to his feet and got his balance against the window.

  “I’m coming,” Kaur said. “I’m here.”

  He put one foot in front of the other, but still weaved on his way across the room to the door. He fell against it, pressed his forehead to the smooth, cool wood. His stomach rebelled, but nothing else came up.

  Kaur unlocked the dead bolt. He turned the handle and opened the door.

  The dark-faced man on the other side shoved the door against him, and Kaur reeled. He toppled onto his back. The man entered, followed by others. They fanned into the room, leaving only the first to stand over Kaur as he moved himself on heels and palms away from the door, which closed itself silently.

  “Please. Don’t,” Kaur said. He raised a hand.

  The man took a pistol from inside his jacket and shot Kaur. The bullet passed through Kaur’s palm, but he felt only an instant of pain before the impact smashed him against the floor. His vision swelled with blackness. His head lolled. He saw some of the other men watching him. He tried to look back toward the man with the gun, but his neck muscles wouldn’t obey.

  He did not feel the second bullet.

  Chapter Seventy-One

  CAMARO DIDN’T KNOW the name of the FBI agent driving the car. No one had introduced him, and he hadn’t bothered to introduce himself. They went in silence through the driving storm, Camaro in the backseat. They were headed directly into the front. The windshield was almost impossible to see through, even with the wipers at full tilt. Other cars along the way looked as though they were drowning.