by James Raven
It rammed into me with the force of an express train. I crashed against the door. The dog’s jaws clamped over my arm, but I whipped it back before its teeth sank into the flesh. The gun fell from my hand and clattered onto the hardwood floor, but I somehow stayed on my feet.
As the dog tried to take a bite out of my thigh, I delivered a savage punch to its nose. It yelped like a human and one of its front legs gave way. It staggered sideways and I took the opportunity to jump clear and hurl myself across the room.
I wouldn’t have made it if the door hadn’t swung open at that point. The animal was momentarily distracted by the sudden appearance of its owner. It gave me the precious seconds I needed to reach the sink. Next to it I had spotted a knife rack.
I managed to pull a knife out just as the dog came charging at me. I heard Garcia cry out, but I wasn’t sure if he was telling the dog to go for me or hold back.
I stood firm as the Rottweiler leapt at me. But in aiming for my face it left its broad, heavy chest exposed. And that’s where I plunged the blade. Right up to the hilt.
It didn’t stop the solid, grunting mass of fur and muscle from smashing into me. Its weight sent me sprawling backwards onto the floor and its teeth came to within an inch or so of my face. But thankfully death was instantaneous and it stifled even a final, pathetic whimper as the dog went limp and rolled onto its side.
A wave of relief and exhaustion washed over me. But there was no time to appreciate the fact that I hadn’t been seriously hurt. I needed to brace myself for a new threat.
In the form of Raymond Garcia.
As I struggled to sit up he came into the room and stood over me, holding my gun. I couldn’t tell from his expression if he was upset about the dog because he looked totally stunned. We shared a long moment of silence.
Then he mouthed a single word: ‘Jordan?’
I didn’t answer, just continued to stare up at him as my heart went wild in my chest.
‘My God,’ he said. ‘You could almost be my twin brother.’
He was right. It was almost like looking in a mirror.
42
HE WASN’T EXACTLY my double. His eyes were blue and mine were brown. His lips were slightly thinner and his nose just a little wider.
There was also a bit more flesh below his chin. And his hairline had receded further back on his forehead. He was carrying a few more pounds than me and was at least two inches shorter.
But from a distance it would have been difficult to tell us apart. Especially given the fact that our hair matched and we both had a tan.
‘You must be Garcia,’ I said.
He studied me through squinting eyes, assessing something – maybe my level of desperation. Or maybe whether or not I was real.
I shook my head in bewilderment. My thoughts were coming too fast to articulate.
What did it mean? Was this guy my doppelganger? They say everyone has one – a man or woman who looks almost exactly like them. But if so, then what were the odds on me meeting mine in these circumstances? A trillion to one maybe.
His eyes shifted from me to the dead dog and I felt a cold panic tighten in my throat. Had he been attached to the beast? Had it been a treasured pet as well as a guard dog? I hoped not.
His eyes moved back to me and I noticed them focus on the dog’s blood that stained my T-shirt.
‘I’m sorry about the dog,’ I said.
His mouth tightened a little.
‘No great loss,’ he said. ‘He stank and kept shitting. It means I won’t have to pay a vet to put him down.’
I sat up straighter with my back against the cool surface of the fridge door. Garcia seemed unsure of himself. The hand that held the gun was trembling. His heavy breathing seemed to crackle in his throat.
‘What are you doing here?’ he said.
‘Looking for answers,’ I told him.
A knot appeared in his brow. ‘How did you find out where I lived?’
‘Your partner. I called in at your office at the same time he did. He took some persuading, but he eventually opened up.’
‘What else did he tell you?’
‘That you’re probably stealing from the Texas Syndicate.’
He parted his lips in surprise.
‘I don’t give a damn if you’re ripping off a good-for-nothing crime lord,’ I said. ‘That’s not what I want.’
‘Then what do you want?’
I held his gaze. ‘I want to know why I’m not dead. Why the FBI took me to a restaurant to meet Martinez, but then set me up to be shot outside. Why your business card was in the pocket of the suit that Aaron Vance gave me to wear. And why my sister had to die.’
He took a deep breath through his nose.
‘Your sister and the two agents should not have been killed,’ he said. ‘They would still be alive if the Feds had put a bullet in you outside the restaurant.’
‘That much is obvious,’ I said. ‘It’s the rest I’m interested in.’
I could see him turning it over in his mind, running through his options.
‘On your feet,’ he said.
I did as I was told. He motioned with the gun and stepped to one side.
‘Into the hall. And then onto the living room. I have to call Vance. Let him handle this.’
I shuffled forward and canned the urge to turn around to try to wrest the gun from him. Any sudden movement was bound to spook him and cause him to squeeze the trigger even though he probably didn’t want to.
In the living room he told me to stand with my back to a set of French windows. Beyond them was a large garden with a flat lawn and some trees. The room was L-shaped and sparsely furnished. Two sofas, a coffee table, a flat screen TV and a drinks cabinet. There was a house phone lying on the table. Garcia picked it up with his free hand.
‘Look, before you call him will you tell me what’s going on?’ I said. ‘I don’t want to go to my grave not knowing.’
He ignored me and punched a number into the phone.
A moment later he cursed under his breath and I figured he’d got Vance’s voice message.
‘It’s me,’ he said into the phone. ‘Call me straight back.’
Then he switched it off and licked his lips.
‘Come on, Garcia,’ I said. ‘What does it matter if you come clean? I won’t be telling anyone. Just start at the beginning. Tell me why they faked the execution.’
He thought about it some more, then shrugged.
‘They did it because a few weeks earlier your picture was shown on the news,’ he said. ‘Aaron Vance saw it and realized that there was a striking resemblance between you and me. So he came up with a plan to fake the execution and make the world think you were dead. They knew it was possible because they’d done it before apparently. So guys like you could be experimented on.’
I felt the blood rush to my head. Could it be true that I’d been allowed to live because I looked like some crooked lawyer?
‘They wanted to keep you alive so that they could kill you all over again,’ he said. ‘But the second time it had to be in front of Julio Martinez. That’s why I arranged to meet him at the restaurant.’
I felt my heart rate spike as the penny dropped.
‘They wanted Martinez to think it was me who was shot,’ he said. ‘That was the only way to convince the bastard I was really dead.’
43
‘ABOUT TWO MONTHS ago I contacted Vance with a proposal,’ Garcia explained. ‘I told him I had a dossier full of incriminating information on the Texas Syndicate that would blow the organization apart.’
‘Such as?’ I asked.
‘Bank records, offshore accounts, articles of association, the names of paid contacts within the state legislature, the police, the prison system and the media. Plus, details of their links with the Mexican drug cartels. Distribution routes, storage facilities, safe houses. Enough to put a lot of top people away for a long time.’
‘What was the FBI’s reaction?’
; ‘They were keen. And why wouldn’t they be? The Syndicate has become a major embarrassment to law enforcement agencies. It wields enormous power and influence, especially here in Texas. Nobody in my position has ever turned against it and so the Feds realized they couldn’t pass it up.’
‘So why have you decided to rat on them?’
‘I want out and I need to do it before they realize I’ve been taking money that wasn’t mine to pay off gambling debts.’
‘Money that belonged to the Syndicate?’
He nodded. ‘They trust me because we go back a long way. There are family connections down the line. So I have access to funds both here and abroad. About two months ago Martinez ordered the murders of four gang members who’d been feeding information to the cops. They were slaughtered and dumped in an alleyway not far from here. It was part of a crackdown on leaks and betrayal. It scared the hell out of me. So I moved a sizeable pile of cash into my own accounts and started planning for a new life far away.’
‘But why fake your own death if you’ll have to give evidence against the Syndicate eventually?’
‘Because testifying in court was never part of the deal. I told Vance I wasn’t prepared to do that. Or go into the witness protection programme. I know what would happen if I did. One day I’d be pulling out of my driveway and the car would explode. That’s how it works. They’d eventually find me.’
‘So the Feds went along with it?’
‘They knew that what I had to give them made it worth their while. Everything is either documented on paper or on disc. It’s all in a briefcase that’s hidden upstairs. A briefcase full of dynamite. There’s no need for me to testify against anyone.’
‘So you told Vance that he had to convince the Syndicate you were dead so Martinez wouldn’t look for you.’
‘That’s right. And Vance was tasked with coming up with a way to do it. He told me he was in his office when your photo appeared on the TV. He said he was struck by the likeness. He spent a week looking into it before outlining his proposal to the guys in Washington. They gave the go-ahead and then he told me how it would go down.’
‘So these pants I’m wearing are part of a suit that belonged to you?’
He looked at them and nodded. ‘Vance convinced me it would work. He said they had every angle covered. So I arranged to meet Martinez to go through some financial matters. While you were being taken to the restaurant in my place, I went to a safe house in Houston. But I had to come back here after you got away. I told Martinez I spent the night with a friend after the attempt on my life. He’s been trying to find out who tried to kill me and why. But of course he’s getting nowhere.’
I had to admit it was an ingenious plan. And it would have worked like a dream if the hooded guy hadn’t missed me. But I felt the anger welling up inside me. My sister, two FBI agents and a San Antonio detective had died because of what this no good shyster had done.
I looked at the gun in his hand and tried to figure out if I could get it from him before he pulled the trigger.
And that’s when I saw something that almost made me smile.
At that very moment the phone started ringing. He had placed it back on the coffee table, but as he reached for it I rushed him.
He jumped back and squeezed the trigger.
Click.
Before he could work out for himself why it hadn’t fired I was on him. He tried to hit me with the pistol, but I grabbed his wrist with one hand and drove the other one into his stomach. As he doubled over I seized the gun from his grip and then brought it down hard on the back of his neck.
He collapsed in a heap, but remained conscious. I stepped away from him and said, ‘You should never play with guns unless you know how to use them.’
He rolled on his side, clutching his stomach with one hand and the back of his head with the other.
‘The safety catch,’ I said, making a show of flicking it off. ‘You left it on.’
The phone stopped ringing, and Garcia said, ‘That was Vance. He’ll think there’s a problem and come over.’
I didn’t think that Vance or any of his agents would press the panic button because Garcia hadn’t answered the phone. So there was no rush to get going. Besides, I needed to consider my next move. An idea was taking shape in my mind, but it was risky and it might not work.
‘What are you going to do?’ Garcia asked.
There was a look of sheer terror in his eyes now that the tables had turned. He’d started to sweat and his face was devoid of colour. He started mumbling so I told him to be quiet. I wanted to think. My head was starting to ache. It felt like a giant bruise that was gently pulsating.
My mind dialled through what Garcia had told me. It was hard to believe that the most outrageous part of Vance’s plan – the faked execution – had been so easy to pull off.
They knew it was possible because they’d done it before apparently. So guys like you could be experimented on.
Jesus.
Just how often had a death row inmate survived his own execution? And how many of them were still alive and hidden away in some grim government research facility? It was incredible and yet strangely plausible because lethal injection had become the accepted method of committing legalised murder. As Vance had pointed out to me, drugs could be used to make a person appear dead.
And it was easy to see why the government would want to do it. Why not make use of all those human guinea pigs? Far better to experiment with new drugs and dangerous chemical agents on real people than on rats or dogs or monkeys – especially people who are believed to be dead.
It means there are no concerned relatives, no financial liabilities in the event of death, no outcry over human rights issues, no worries about high mortality rates.
The debate over whether to use ‘live’ death row inmates for non-consensual clinical trials had been raging for years. Opposition to it was strong and I could see why the government had decided to start faking executions. Call me heartless, but I didn’t actually have a problem with it. It was a way at least to make sure all those murderers and rapists paid their debts to society.
I wondered how many executions were faked each year and how inmates were selected. Maybe it depended on what drugs were being tested at any given time. Or perhaps, as in my case, one of the law enforcement agencies needed a corpse or someone to take a fall.
‘You should go,’ Garcia said. ‘Just get as far away from here as you can. If you don’t you’ll end up dead. There can be no happy ending to this.’
‘Tell me why I shouldn’t kill you,’ I said. ‘It was you who sparked off the chain of events that led to my sister getting shot.’
‘Don’t lay that one on me,’ he said. ‘The only person who was supposed to die was you. But then you were going to die anyway. That’s why I didn’t feel bad. At least you got to live a while longer.’
In a perverse kind of way he had a point. In his place, given the circumstances, I might have done the same thing.
‘How often have you been meeting with Vance?’ I asked him.
‘When we need to,’ he said.
‘Where?’
He swallowed. ‘There’s a small lake south of here close to the municipal airport. It’s called Parson’s Hollow. There’s a parking area which hardly anyone uses.’
‘How long would it take to get there?’
‘Fifteen minutes or so.’
I pointed to the phone. ‘Then I want you to call Vance back. Tell him to meet you there in an hour. If he asks what it’s about tell him you want to talk over what’s happened.’
‘He’ll smell a rat.’
‘Not if you don’t give him a reason to. If you do I’ll blow your fucking head off.’
To make sure he got the message I waited for him to sit up and then pressed the muzzle of the gun against his forehead.
This time Vance answered and the lawyer told him he wanted to meet up.
‘I just want a face to face conversation,’ Garcia said. �
��No it can’t fucking wait. An hour at the lake. Be there.’
He severed the connection and handed me the phone. But in doing so he made a mistake that cost him his life.
He tried to grab the pistol from me. As I pulled my arm back his hand closed around mine and put pressure on my trigger finger.
The gun went off. The blast was muffled somewhat because it was pressed against his chest. He fell back, blood gushing from the wound. He started writhing in agony but I could tell from the damage that he would soon be dead. I knelt beside him, feeling a knife of guilt twist in my gut.
‘Help me – please.’ As he murmured these words bubbles of blood formed in his mouth. His face was scrunched up in pain.
For a fleeting moment I thought of doing as he asked, but instead, I said, ‘The dossier. Tell me where it is and I’ll get an ambulance for you.’
If I’d thought he had a chance I wouldn’t have said it, but he didn’t so I reckoned it was worth trying to salvage what I could from the situation.
He mumbled something that I didn’t catch so I asked him again about the dossier, not really expecting him to give me a coherent answer. But then he opened his eyes, looked up at me, and mouthed a single word:
‘Bath.’
Before I went in search of the bathroom I hurried into the kitchen to have a look out front. I wanted to know if the gunshot had attracted any attention. But the street was quiet and I saw no one out there. I reckoned if a neighbour had called 911 I would have soon heard the whoop of sirens.
The bathroom was upstairs, a large airy room with a corner tub. There was only one place to conceal a briefcase and that was behind the side panel which was made of plastic and easy to remove.
Sure enough, it was there. An ordinary black leather case. I took it out and thumbed it open, surprised that it wasn’t locked. Inside were dozens of documents and three or four CDs.
I glanced at some of the paperwork and saw mention of several banks, including two in the Cayman Islands and one in Panama. There was also a list of names, among them a Judge Roy Sanders and a police detective named Dennis Cross. Next to the names a sum of money and what looked like a bank account number.