by Steven Gore
Donnally looked again at White Sands. He could see a man dressed in a white shirt and slacks standing on a third-story balcony looking down into his walled courtyard: Sherwyn.
“No idea.”
D onnally disconnected. He watched Sherwyn take a sip from a glass in his hand, then wave to someone below. He realized that the man wasn’t holed up. He wasn’t at all afraid of being seen. Didn’t seem to care.
Only now did Donnally’s gaze widen enough to take in the scope of White Sands. A nineteenth-century hacienda consuming half a block, three stories of stucco and stone and glazed ceramic tiles centered in courtyards and gardens, and framed with vine-covered walls.
A five-million-dollar velvet fortress.
Was it arrogance? Donnally asked himself. Or just the fact of government protection?
Immunity, Donnally answered. That’s what Sherwyn had. Immunity.
But not in the States.
The question was what would scare him enough to make him run back, thinking the U.S. was safer? And make the Mexican police think it was wiser to send him packing, and wait for another foreigner to take his place?
Donnally knew it wouldn’t be the Mexican press that would force Sherwyn to flee. Corazon had made that clear. And Donnally knew that no American newspaper or television network would take him seriously, not after he’d made a fool of himself in the courtroom just before Brown pleaded no contest. And, even worse, not after he acted like a lunatic when he pushed his way through the reporters on his way out of the courthouse. Cameras sure as hell wouldn’t arrive at his request. It would take something more.
“W e’re going to need new interviews,” Donnally said to Corazon, striding back into her office. “Pick three boys, the most articulate and sympathetic, and with no arrest history. And I want not only the facts of what happened, I want to hear how it affected each kid and their families.” He looked at Corazon, but pointed at Janie. “She can formulate the questions in a way that can’t be attacked for being suggestive.”
Corazon propped her elbows on the desk and rested her chin on her folded hands. She thought for a few moments, then said, “What happens to these children later, in the months or years it takes for your Justice Department to extradite and convict Sherwyn? If their parents had enough money to care for them in the first place, they wouldn’t have ended up on the street. I don’t doubt your intentions, Mr. Donnally, but you’ll leave here in a few days and this will remain a children’s prison.”
“Isn’t there someplace that will take them in?” Donnally asked. “Some kind of children’s shelter.”
“It’s more complicated than that. These are teenage boys who have become accustomed to abuse. Not only do they need to be protected, but other children need to be protected from some of them.”
Donnally realized that she was right. There was a tomorrow he hadn’t thought about. He spread his arms and glanced around.
“How much does it cost to run a place like this?” he asked.
“Forty thousand pesos a month. About thirty-five hundred dollars.”
He nodded. “I know somebody who’ll cover it.”
“That’s over forty thousand a year,” Janie said. “In ten years that’s almost half a million dollars. I can contribute some and I know you will, but who’s got the rest of the money?”
Donnally smiled to himself as he watched the circle close.
“Mauricio.”
Chapter 55
“H arlan, this is Will.” The voice coming through Donnally’s cell phone was just a whisper. “A Mexican guy just came into the cafe looking for you.”
His employees didn’t know he was in Mexico. He’d led them to believe that he was steelhead fishing on the Trinity.
Donnally set down his just-purchased video camera on the hotel room table. Janie and Corazon would use it to tape the kids’ statements about Sherwyn.
“What did he look like?”
“A pit bull. Heavyset. Dark skin. Strong accent.”
Gregorio Cruz’s brother, Jago.
“What did you tell him?”
“I didn’t have a chance to say anything. Deputy Asshole was sitting at the counter waiting for his father. He told the guy that you weren’t around. Then it was like a lightbulb went off in Pipkins’s head. First the news article about the Hispanic guy you shot in San Francisco and then a Mexican shows up. I had some ham about to burn on the grill and by the time I looked again they were sitting in a booth, talking. Real friendly.”
“Where are you now?”
“Still in the kitchen.”
Janie interrupted her unpacking of the camera and cast Donnally a questioning look.
He mouthed the words “Will” and “Jago Cruz.”
Her lips went tight.
“What should I tell him if he asks me again?” Will asked.
Donnally’s cell phone beeped with an incoming call. He looked at the screen. A Mount Shasta telephone number.
“Is Pipkins making a call?” Donnally asked.
“Let me take a peek,” Will said, followed a few moments later by “Yeah. He’s got his phone to his ear.”
Donnally let it go to voice mail.
“He just disconnected,” Will said, “and now they’re walking toward the door.”
“The Mexican is probably the brother of the guy I killed.” Donnally thought for a moment. “But Pipkins is so single-minded that he must think he showed up in Mount Shasta because of something to do with Mauricio.”
“Hold on,” Will said. “Let me get to the front window.”
Donnally heard the whoosh of the swinging kitchen doors, then footsteps.
“Be careful,” Donnally said. “If they see you on the telephone, they’ll guess that you’re talking to me.”
“They’re over looking at Mauricio’s house. Got their backs to me.” Will chuckled. “Deputy Asshole looks like a hog sniffing around a sty for a piece of corn. He seems to be trying to pry information out of the Mexican, but the guy is just standing there, real stiff.”
“You got Harlan on the line, Will?” It was the voice of his waitress, Marian, in the background.
“Let me talk to her,” Donnally said.
“You still up at the river chilling out?” Marian asked.
“Chill is right.” Donnally forced a laugh. “The steelhead are coming up frozen right out of the river.”
“What do you want us tell those guys about where you are?”
“The truth. I’ve got nothing to fear. But tell them that they won’t be able to reach me by cell phone because there isn’t service in some of the canyons I’ve been fishing.”
Marian laughed. “It could take them a week to find you.”
“That’s what I’m thinking.”
Chapter 56
B efore breakfast the next morning, Donnally transferred to Corazon’s office computer the video files of Corazon and Janie’s new set of interviews with Sherwyn’s victims. He cut out the names of the boys and dates that would allow Sherwyn to identify them, then copied the audio portion of the interviews onto a CD.
Donnally’s cell phone rang as he pulled the disk out of the drive.
“Nothing happens in this place that I don’t find out about,” Sherwyn said, his words slurred, sounding like he had a hangover. “And not only will those kids recant, but their parents will say that you paid them to lie… in fact-”
Donnally heard muffled conversation in the background.
“In fact… the first ones have just come in.” Sherwyn laughed. “You’ve been a bad, bad boy, Donnally. They’re claiming you threatened them, and their children.”
Sherwyn’s voice hardened, like caffeine was kicking against the weight of last night’s alcohol.
“You still don’t have a clue about how things work around here, do you? This won’t be any more successful than your gimmick to link me with Gregorio Cruz. The U.S. Attorney will have no use for recanting witnesses and the Mexican police will dismiss your little tapes as frauds.
They may even charge you with witness tampering.”
Sherwyn laughed again, but this time in a jittery way, as if he was an adolescent boy watching a horror movie and not comfortable in his desire to witness a horde of ax-wielding zombies disemboweling a victim.
“That’s assuming, of course, that Gregorio’s brother doesn’t get to you first, and that could get quite messy.”
Donnally sensed, underneath Sherwyn’s arrogance, a racket of thoughts suppressed by techniques perfected while living a double, triple, and in the murder of Anna Keenan, a quadruple life.
He looked at his watch. Janie and Corazon were driving to Merida, the inland state capital, to hide the boys in a hotel.
“It doesn’t make any difference what the parents claim,” Donnally said, “you can’t get to the kids.”
“Eventually they’ll come to me. They always do. They’re part of my world now. They don’t fit into yours anymore, and there’s no going back.”
For a moment Donnally thought Sherwyn had gone delusional, but then realized that Sherwyn’s fantasy was just the distorted reflection of Corazon’s prison analogy.
“It’s out of their hands,” Donnally said.
“Only if you intend to hold them as prisoners.”
“If I have to, but it won’t come to that.”
Donnally decided to bring at least one of Sherwyn’s fears to the surface.
“Aren’t you wondering how I figured out you were down here?” Donnally asked.
Sherwyn didn’t answer right away, almost as if the question hadn’t crossed his mind because the answer would be too obvious. Donnally suspected that it was because Sherwyn had spent so many years expecting to be caught that he was no longer capable of surprise.
“And aren’t you also wondering why SFPD hasn’t released Cruz’s name to the press? You think maybe it’s to give the Justice Department time to negotiate a deal with the Mexican attorney general to cut out the local police and bring in the federales to haul your ass to jail?”
Donnally hoped he was applying pressure, but Sherwyn’s “Get off it, Donnally” told him he’d pushed too hard.
“It’s because you haven’t told them,” Sherwyn said. “You’re not going to risk me getting caught up in the judicial system down here. This is the goddamn briar patch.” Sherwyn laughed again, this time a rough, solid laugh. “Hey, I know what I’ll do. You’ll just love this. I’ll surrender to the Mexicans and plead no contest. Get it? No contest. You know, Donnally, no harm, no foul.”
“That’s not going to happen.”
“What are you going to do? Cut me up in little pieces and feed me to the barracudas out in the mangroves?”
“You’re going back to the States. Alive and in one piece, and voluntarily.”
“And why, exactly, would I want to spend the rest of my life in a U.S. prison?”
“Because it will be the lesser evil.”
Sherwyn clucked. “Poor Donnally. How naive. Eventually you’ll learn that all of life is the lesser evil.”
The line went dead, but seconds later it rang again. Donnally picked it up.
“I forgot something,” Sherwyn said. “Slick move with the gone-fishing angle, Donnally, but you’re the one who’s not getting away. Even better was using that cop to convince Gregorio’s brother that you were still in California. That is until Jago got pissed off. He wasn’t so much interested in a two-day tour of the dirt roads along the Trinity River as in leaving you in a shallow grave next to it.”
The line went dead again.
A shallow grave. A dark current flowed through Donnally as he repeated the words to himself.
He called the cafe. Marian answered.
“Have you seen Deputy Pipkins in the last twenty-four hours?” Donnally asked.
“No. And he didn’t show up for his shift today. His father was in here looking for you, wanting to know what you did with him. Real angry. I’m not sure whether it was at you or his son. He wouldn’t tell me what he thinks the kid did, but he’s convinced that you’ve got him chained up somewhere.”
Donnally thought back to the spot along the river where the deputy had intercepted him to serve him with the DA’s subpoena for Charles Brown’s hearing. He guessed that Pipkins would’ve started his search there, and then worked downstream toward the ocean.
But at some point during their search, Jago would have concluded that Pipkins’s aim had been to divert him from Donnally or to cover Donnally’s escape.
Jago would then either torture Pipkins for information that he didn’t possess or kill him.
Or both.
“Describe the Mexican to the sheriff,” Donnally said. “Tell him that he should start looking at Brush Creek Road along the Trinity and search the north side of the river down toward Salt Flat.”
“Will you meet him there?”
“I’m too far away.”
“Where’s that?”
“It’s better that you don’t know.”
Chapter 57
L alo was flailing his arms at the hotel doorman when Donnally drove up in the rental car after mailing copies of the CDs to himself in Mount Shasta. Lalo’s high-pitched voice pierced through the early morning traffic and Donnally’s closed windows.
“ Dejeme adentro,” Lalo yelled. “ Dejeme adentro.” Let me in, let me in.
Donnally jumped out and pulled Lalo away. The boy fell into his arms, crying.
“The police kidnapped Janie. It was Jago Cruz.”
“Where? Where’d they take her?”
Lalo pointed not in the direction of the Policia Municipal Building, but toward White Sands.
“Is she okay?”
Lalo nodded. “They didn’t hurt her.”
“How did it happen?”
Lalo pointed down the block. “They stopped her van right when she got back from Merida and they pulled her out.”
Donnally led Lalo inside, and he called Corazon at the hotel where Janie had left her and the boys.
“Sherwyn and Jago have Janie,” he said. He could hear the sounds of cartoons coming from the television in the background.
Corazon gasped, then made a shushing sound and everything went quiet.
Donnally’s cell phone beeped with an incoming call. He recognized the number that showed on the screen.
“Sherwyn is calling,” Donnally told Corazon. “I want you to listen, but don’t say anything.”
Donnally connected the call and conferenced her in.
“ Usted tiene hasta el amanecer de manana,” the voice said. You have until sunrise tomorrow.
It wasn’t Sherwyn.
The man said the words with the calm inevitability of a train conductor in a country in which the trains always run on time.
“What do you want?” Donnally asked.
“Recantations. All three boys. And at the end, each will…”
The man’s voice grew distant, as if he was talking to someone else. “ Como se dice, gratitud? ”
Sherwyn answered in the background, his tone tense and strained. “It’s the same. Gratitude.”
The Mexican spoke into the phone again.
“Each will express gratitude to the police for protecting him from the American predators.”
“Let me speak to Janie.”
“Then be at White Sands at first light tomorrow.” The Mexican laughed. “Unless you’re busy fishing.”
“Let’s make a trade right now. Me for her. And she’ll return with the recordings.”
There was a pause as the man on the other side seemed to consider the proposal, then he said:
“ No es una negociacion.” This is not a negotiation.
The phone went dead.
“I think it was Jago,” Corazon said, after Donnally disconnected. “But I don’t understand why he didn’t want to make the trade. He wants revenge and that would’ve put you in his hands right away.”
“Maybe he needs the tapes as much as Sherwyn does.” Donnally accepted the inevitable, but didn�
��t know whether that would include the release of Janie. “Tell the boys what we need them to do.”
“Why don’t I make two tapes,” Corazon said. “One on which the boys say that they are recanting only because Sherwyn has kidnapped Janie. And then the other will contain the recant-”
“We can’t take a chance. Sherwyn may want to talk to the boys before he releases her, and they’ll be afraid to lie to him.”
“How do you know he’ll let her go?”
“I don’t. But we have no choice but to act as if he will.”
Donnally disconnected, then turned toward the hotel room door and signaled for Lalo to follow. He couldn’t take a chance that the police had snuck in when he was at Corazon’s office and bugged the room.
They took the elevator down to the lobby, then walked through the restaurant and out of the service entrance into the trash-littered alley. Donnally caught his breath when he was hit with the stench of rotting garbage and overused lard. He pointed at an open back door. They worked their way through the semidarkness of a locals’ bar, then across the next street and down the sidewalk. They slipped between two fruit carts and into the recessed entry of an empty storefront.
“ Necesito una pistola,” Donnally whispered to Lalo.
Lalo rolled his eyes upward and rocked his head side to side as if imagining a route from where they were to where they needed to be.
“Nobody will sell to you.”
“How about a go-between?”
Lalo frowned in puzzlement at the idiom.
“ Un intermediario.”
Lalo thought for a moment then smiled and said. “ Mi tio. ” My uncle. He extended his hand, but shook his head when Donnally reached for his wallet, and said, “Telephone.”
Chapter 58
U ncle Beto’s hands rested on the mound of his belly as he inspected Donnally’s face. They were sitting at the rough-hewn kitchen table in his adobe bungalow at the western edge of Cancun.
Lalo had just told him that Sherwyn had orchestrated Janie’s kidnapping in order to prevent the release of the recordings.