The Last Act

by Brad Parks

“But then Kris . . . Well, obviously, his zeal for justice made him a threat to New Colima,” Danny said. “And New Colima doesn’t like threats. So this is what they did to him.”

  Danny dropped another photo in between us. It was a close-up of a face that had been so thoroughly butchered it took me a moment to recognize it was the same person. The eye sockets were empty. There were bloody holes in the sides of the head where the ears should have been. The mouth hung down in horror, exposing gums covered in pockmarks, from where the teeth had been ripped out. The red hair had this bulge in it, and I realized it was because a large chunk of the skin underneath had been picked up and then put back down again.

  Scalped. In addition to everything else, he had been partially scalped.

  I turned away from the photo. Too late. It had already found its way to that part of my brain where things stick.

  Drayer rose unsteadily and staggered into the bathroom. The next thing I heard was him retching forcefully into the toilet. I was close to losing it myself.

  “This is what the victims look like in this so-called victimless crime,” Danny said quietly. “You want to know what keeps me going? This. You want to know why we need you to be successful? This. You want to know why we need to bring down this cartel? This.”

  His eyes were pure fire. His head bobbed lightly up and down, affirming the words as he spoke them. I was struck by how my onetime Little League teammate, the former class clown, had metamorphosed into a serious, focused young man.

  “Kris’ funeral was something else,” Danny said. “Closed casket, obviously. His wife, his children. They were devastated. Devastated. It’s something you never forget.”

  This FBI thing wasn’t just a job for Danny Ruiz. It was a calling. Now I understood why.

  I was also finally grasping the magnitude of the stakes for me. This wasn’t the movies. New Colima wasn’t a bunch of dashing Mexican guys in white linen suits, smoking cigars and drinking sangria at a picturesque seaside hacienda. They were brutal, soulless killers who placed zero value on human life. They tortured the soon-to-be dead for the sheer terror it created in the living. They respected no laws, no government, no sense of the desire felt by most decent people to live in peace.

  And I was about to dangle myself into their universe—near, if not in, their crosshairs.

  I could think of it as an acting job all I wanted to. I could invest myself in the role, like I always did. I could tell myself it was pretend.

  The potential consequences were not. They were as real, and as terrifying, as anything I could imagine.

  CHAPTER 11

  I didn’t tell Amanda about the photo. My pregnant fiancée already had enough extra burden.

  Since I needed to practice making up stories, I invented one about how Danny had showed us classified documents that related to money laundering, but how to me—and any non-accountant—they were basically impenetrable.

  She accepted my lie without question, and then we got on with our evening, which we passed quietly, watching movies and ordering room service. Danny had told us to put whatever we wanted to on our bill. The asset seizure fund could handle it.

  It would have felt like a vacation, except I had Kris Langetieg’s mauled face gaping at me in my mind all night. I kept having macabre thoughts about what order they had done things in. Had it been ears first, then teeth? Had they waited to do the eyes last so he could see everything that was happening to him? Or had they indiscriminately carved until he finally died of blood loss?

  At one point, when Amanda was in the bathroom, I googled “Kris Langetieg.” There were two stories in the Martinsburg Journal about the assistant US Attorney who had been murdered.

  So he was a prosecutor. Like Drayer. No wonder his stomach hadn’t been able to handle that photo.

  There was nothing in the story about the condition of Langetieg’s body. Those details had been withheld from the press. The Martinsburg Police Department professed to have no leads as to who was responsible. Most of the story was about what a beloved school-board member and dedicated father Langetieg was and how he was being mourned by the community. The paper did not speculate as to whether Langetieg’s death had anything to do with his profession.

  A few days later, there was coverage of the funeral, which was more of the same. After that, there was nothing. To the public, the whole thing looked like a strange, inexplicable, perhaps random homicide.

  I had a tough time falling asleep—and I was a guy who could ordinarily sleep anywhere, at any time, for pretty much any duration. My struggles continued in the morning, which was even stranger. Truly, one of the joys of my profession was dozing until noon.

  Instead, there I was at 6:23 A.M., listening to the Holiday Inn’s air-conditioning rattle, wondering if I should just pull the plug on this whole thing. I was an actor, not a slayer of international crime syndicates. Why was I making myself a combatant in a war that wasn’t really mine? What would the cartel do to me if they learned what I was after and whom I worked for?

  If my friend from Arkansas had called at that moment, I probably would have leapt into his waiting arms, then gone to Danny’s room, apologized profusely, and told him I was out.

  After tossing and turning on this for another hour or so, I finally rousted myself, before I woke Amanda, and went downstairs to the Holiday Inn’s workout room. For half an hour, I poured nervous energy into a rack full of free weights, working my shoulders, arms, back, and chest until they were trembling. Then I switched to the treadmill, cranked up the incline, and ran up an imaginary mountain for another half an hour. My lungs were searing. Perspiration fell off me in nickel-size drops.

  By the time I returned, Amanda was up and dressed. She wore leggings and one of my button-down shirts, a simple outfit that looked amazing on her. More than two years after our first date, and she still sometimes took my breath away more than any treadmill possibly could.

  “Good morning,” she said, in a way that was less a greeting and more of an appraisal of my sweat-soaked state.

  “Just wanted to get a workout in,” I said. “All we did yesterday was drive and eat. I was feeling gross.”

  “Oh,” she said.

  “How about I clean myself up and then let’s get some breakfast?”

  She patted her stomach and smiled faux sweetly. “I just threw up twice, darlin’. You’re on your own for breakfast.”

  “Threw up as in . . . morning sickness?”

  “I guess,” she said.

  There was this goofy grin on my face, which was probably not the appropriate reaction to the news that one’s partner had hurled. But there was something beautiful about it, this corroboration that life was indeed stirring inside her. I kissed her lightly on the forehead, so as not to get her wet.

  “I’m going for a walk,” she said. “I think some fresh air would help.”

  “Good idea,” I said.

  I ordered some breakfast, then jumped in the shower. I stood under the water for a while, marveling again at this turn in our lives.

  She really is pregnant. I really am going to be a father. It was still surreal to me. But it also reminded me why I needed to go through with this.

  It was like the workout had purged more toxic thoughts from my mind, and I was now thinking more rationally about the risks involved. As a prosecutor, Kris Langetieg had explicitly identified himself as an enemy of the cartel. His entire career, his very being, was a full frontal assault against New Colima.

  I was, at most, coming from the side. Even if I was successful, New Colima would never know Thomas Henry Jump had contributed to their downfall.

  They might not even know about Peter Lenfest Goodrich. I couldn’t imagine Mitchell Dupree was going to volunteer to his cartel bosses that he had unwittingly told a federal informant about the location of his document stash. Depending on how artful I was, he might not even know he tip
ped me off or that I was the one who tipped off the feds.

  Feeling more optimistic about my situation, I ended my shower. As I got dressed, I replied to a text from Danny, who was looking to come over with Rick.

  Before long, they were knocking on the door. Their first order of business was to rather unceremoniously hand me a briefcase filled with cash—seventy-five thousand dollars in bricks of crisp, clean, hundred-dollar bills—that had apparently been brought down from New York by another agent that morning.

  One brick of it was more money than I had ever seen in one place. And there were lots of bricks.

  Before I could get on with gawking at it, Danny moved onto the next order of business: the toll-free helpline, which I had seen mentioned in the contract. He pulled a slip of paper out of his pocket and handed it to me.

  “Your first call is always going to be my cell,” he said. “If you haven’t memorized that by now, you should. Call it anytime, day or night, and I’ll deal with whatever you have going on. However, in the event that I don’t answer or I’m unavailable for some reason, you should also memorize those two numbers.”

  I looked down at the slip of paper. Next to the toll-free number was “211-663.”

  “All you have to do is dial that number, then say that number,” he continued. “You’ll be connected to someone who can pull up your case file and dispatch an agent.”

  “Can I try it now?” I asked.

  “Absolutely,” Danny said.

  I walked over to the hotel phone and dialed. After one ring, a female voice answered with, “How may I help you?”

  Not Federal Bureau of Investigation, how may I help you? Which made sense. You never knew who was listening.

  “Two-one-one, six-six-three,” I said.

  “Hold please.”

  The line went silent, but not for more than ten seconds. Then there was an earnest-sounding male voice:

  “Hello, Mr. Goodrich. What can we do for you today?”

  “Uh, nothing,” I said. “Everything’s fine. Just testing.”

  “Very good, sir. Call back anytime. We’ll be here.”

  “Will do,” I said.

  Then I hung up.

  Danny was smiling again. “So, admit it—pretty cool, huh?”

  “Not the uncoolest thing ever,” I allowed.

  “I will tell you from experience, there are definitely worse things than being backstopped by the most powerful government in the world,” he said. “Now, there’s one more thing, as long as we’re dealing with communications.”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Once you’re on the inside, your phone calls are subject to monitoring by prison staff,” Danny said. “There may be things you want to tell us that you want to be absolutely sure they don’t know about. If that’s the case, ask me to buy some lottery tickets for your wife, your mom, whoever. The numbers you call out correspond to the letters of the alphabet, one through twenty-six. Use twenty-seven through thirty for a space between words. You should also toss in numbers higher than thirty, but that’s just to mislead anyone who might be listening. We ignore those and focus on the relevant ones. Make sense?”

  “Sure.”

  “It’s not exactly two-hundred-fifty-six-bit encryption, but it’ll do,” Danny said. “Since you’re going to have some time on your hands during the next month while you’re waiting to be sentenced, you should memorize what numbers correspond to what letters. I’ve already done the same thing, so I’ll be able to transcribe whatever you tell me quickly.”

  From the front of the room, there was a whirring noise as the lock on the door released. Amanda was returning from her walk. Danny and Rick went quiet as she entered.

  “Sorry,” she said. “Am I interrupting?”

  “Actually,” Rick said, then tapped his left wrist.

  “I know,” Danny said, nodding toward the bedside clock. “Ten forty-seven. You need to take off.”

  “Right,” I said, looking across the room at my half-eaten breakfast with regret. “Let’s go.”

  “Not us. Just you,” Danny said.

  “Aren’t you guys coming with me?” I said, feeling a spurt of nerves. After just two days of being shepherded around by them, I had grown accustomed to the comfort of the flock.

  “Sorry. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we look just a little bit like FBI agents,” Danny said, jerking a thumb toward Rick. “Especially the stiff white guy over there. If one of your fellow convicts at the courthouse were to see you getting out of our Caprice or walking the hallways with us, and then you showed up at FCI Morgantown a month from now, this game would be over before it even started.”

  Rick, as usual, reinforced this with a more official-sounding version: “From here on out, it’s important you preserve the facade that you are Pete Goodrich. You are guilty. You are contrite. You should not expect special treatment, because you won’t be receiving any. Remember: Unless you are deciding to give up on the operation, you don’t know us. You don’t know any FBI agents. Why would you? You’re just a history teacher who robbed a bank.”

  “Got it,” I said, then turned to Amanda, who was now next to me. “Well, I guess I’m taking off. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

  Her smile was nervous and lacking in conviction. She gave my hand a squeeze.

  “Okay,” she said. “Be careful in there.”

  “There’s nothing to worry about,” Danny said. “All he has to do is make like a good little boy and admit to being a criminal.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The W. Craig Broadwater Federal Building and United States Courthouse was a solid four-story rectangle located in the heart of downtown Martinsburg. The ground floor was faced in smooth concrete. The upper floors had been covered in a wan, yellowish tile that looked like it belonged in a 1960s bathroom.

  On the front of the building, the official United States seal—that famous eagle clutching the arrows—looked sadly faded.

  I couldn’t quite summon the nerve to enter right away, so I strolled around the neighborhood a bit. There wasn’t much to see: the local paper, the Journal, had offices next door. Next to the newspaper was a beauty school. Across the street was a Jamaican restaurant.

  Finally, having stalled long enough, I walked in through a pair of glass doors and was confronted by three court security officers, all of them in blue blazers and gray pants.

  “Hi,” I said. “I’m a self-surrender.”

  “What’s your name?” one of them asked.

  “Pete Goodrich,” I said smoothly, having rehearsed both the name and the accent during the short drive to the courthouse.

  He brought a walkie-talkie to his lips, and I was soon under official escort. As the next hour unfolded, I was shuffled from station to station and called “sir” more times than any actor ever had been or should be. I was fingerprinted, photographed, and, in a turn of events that Danny Ruiz definitely did not mention ahead of time, relieved of my clothes and strip-searched.

  I quietly bore the whole process without complaint, because that was the reaction most likely from Pete Goodrich, a beaten man who was ready to accept whatever humiliations awaited him.

  When they were through processing me and I had redressed in a faded orange jumpsuit that was too long for me, they led me to the holding area—a cell with a narrow ledge to sit on and not much else. After roughly an hour, one of the marshals returned and shackled me at the ankles and wrists, with the wrists attached to a loop around my waist. Then he led me back up to the first floor. He undid the wrists before we entered the courtroom. My ankles stayed bound.

  Pete Goodrich humbly accepted this. Tommy Jump thought it was ridiculous overkill.

  As I shuffled into the courtroom, taking small steps, David Drayer was waiting at the prosecution table.

  At the defense table, there was a m
an in a suit who couldn’t have been much older than me. He looked up at me blankly as the marshal shunted me to his side, then shook my hand before gesturing for me to sit.

  There were no people in the gallery. As Drayer suggested, this was another routine day at the justice mill. No one really cared what happened to one more soon-to-be felon.

  The magistrate was a man with a shiny face, a nearly hairless head, and a gray-brown beard.

  “Is your name Peter Lenfest Goodrich?” he said.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-three.”

  “How far did you go in school?”

  “I have a college degree, Your Honor.”

  “Have you ever been treated for any mental illness or addiction to narcotic drugs?”

  He said it quickly, and it took a moment for my brain to catch up. So there was a dumb pause before I said, “No, Your Honor.”

  “Is there anything in your condition today that would affect your ability to understand and respond to my questions?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Have you received a copy of your indictment?”

  “Yes, sir,” I said, even though I hadn’t.

  “You are charged with bank robbery. This is a violation of US Code 18, section 2113(a). Do you understand the charges against you?”

  “Yes, Your Honor.”

  “Do you need any further reading of the indictment?”

  “No, Your Honor.”

  “I see you have an attorney present. Have you had the opportunity to discuss your case with him?”

  I looked toward him and said, “Yes.”

  “And how do you wish to plead, guilty or not guilty?”

  Somehow, I thought there would be more questions before we got to this one, the only one that mattered. I wasn’t truly in—past the point of no return—until I answered.

  I gave it perhaps five more seconds’ thought. A hundred and fifty thousand dollars. Maybe more. Enough to get my fiancée over her cold feet. Enough to feed, house, and clothe my child until her mother and I figured things out. Enough to start a new life.