24/7

by Yolanda Wallace

  “Overachiever.”

  “No, it was quality control. I had to make sure I liked it as much the second time as I did the first.”

  “Did you?”

  “It didn’t take me long to become a convert. Let’s put it that way.”

  Nancy had provided one of the few bright spots during that dark time in her life. Finn still remembered the feel of Nancy’s lips on hers. Soft. Gentle. Filled with promise. She had always thought it was the sweetest kiss she had ever received. Until she was kissed by Luisa Moreno.

  “Now you have five hundred willing practice partners,” Luisa said.

  “More like seventy-five. The rest are spoken for.”

  “Have you met anyone you’ve wanted to practice with?”

  Was that a hint of jealousy she heard in Luisa’s voice? She liked the sound of it.

  “Here? I haven’t been looking. I think you spoiled me.”

  “I would apologize, but if I did, it would be less than genuine.”

  Finn stared at the moon shining full and bright outside her window, feeling close to Luisa despite the many miles between them.

  “What are you doing tomorrow?” Luisa asked, her voice low and almost dreamlike.

  “Tomorrow’s a bit of a down day, but I’m going to Chichén Itzá on Thursday. Have you ever been?”

  “Once. When I was in high school. My history teacher took me and the rest of the class on a field trip.”

  “What did you think of it?”

  “Now, I think it’s an amazing architectural achievement. Back then, I was too immature to appreciate it. My friends and I called it Chicken Pizza. We were just happy to be out of school for the day. We didn’t care about the history lesson involved.”

  “I’ll try to pay closer attention to the tour guide than you did.”

  “It won’t take much effort on your part, believe me.”

  Finn liked Luisa’s self-deprecating sense of humor. She liked everything else about her, too. All this talk of the past had her feeling like a teenager hiding under the covers talking on the phone with her first crush. God, she could get used to this.

  “Do you plan on working late tomorrow, too?” she asked.

  Luisa’s answering laugh sounded equally amused and exhausted.

  “No, but I didn’t plan on working late today, either.”

  “Then why don’t you call me instead? If you’re up to it, that is.”

  “I will. And I promise not to wait until midnight to do it. By the way, thanks for being so concerned about me today. You didn’t sound stalkerish at all. Is that another word you picked up on the road? It’s not even a word at all, is it?”

  “It is now.” Finn giggled. Luisa quickly joined in. “I hope you have a better day tomorrow.”

  “I hope so, too.”

  “Are we going to do this, Luisa, or are we just having fun?”

  “I don’t know,” Luisa said after a moment’s pause. “Let’s just play it by ear. Good night, mariposa.”

  “Good night, super cop.” Finn ended the call, then spoke into the sudden silence. “And make sure to catch the bad guys before they catch you.”

  Day Four

  Luisa locked her apartment door and politely but firmly refused Mrs. Villalobos’s offer of a cup of coffee. There was no way she was going to be late for work two days in a row. Especially after the harsh treatment she had received last night. She clenched her teeth at the memory of the fake rat someone had placed on her computer monitor and wondered what her so-called “colleagues” would have in store for her today. Would they use live animals instead of rubber ones, or would they escalate to slashing her tires or smashing her windshield? No wonder Director Chavez was reluctant to put her on the street. With things the way they were now, she might end up getting gunned down by the people who were supposed to be on her side, not the ones she was trying to catch.

  If none of Director Chavez’s people were dirty, they should have welcomed her into their ranks instead of attempting to exclude her from them. She needed to find a way to win them over. Fast. Solving the mystery of Carlos Ramos’s disappearance could go a long way toward currying their favor.

  “Are you sure you don’t have time for one cup?” Mrs. Villalobos asked. “I’ll make sure not to give you the one with the tequila in it today.”

  “I can’t this morning.”

  Luisa’s heart melted when Mrs. Villalobos’s face fell. The woman was obviously lonely and probably desperate for company. Just like she was. As much as she liked talking on the phone with Finn every night, the long-distance exchanges weren’t nearly as satisfying as they could be if they took place face-to-face. For her, a conversation wasn’t complete unless she could look the other person in the eye or lay her hand on them and feel the warmth of their skin. She preferred doing it with a lover, but it was almost as much fun to do it with a friend. Almost.

  “Perhaps I can come see you this weekend when I have more time to talk,” she said. “We can split a bag of churros while we get to know each other better.”

  Mrs. Villalobos’s expression brightened. “It will be nice to have a little girl talk with someone other than myself for a change. Are you free Saturday night as well?”

  “What happens then?” Luisa asked warily.

  “I have a surprise for you.” Based on the twinkle in Mrs. Villalobos’s eyes, Luisa had a pretty good idea what the surprise might be. Mrs. Villalobos didn’t disappoint her. “I spoke with Javier last night and he’s coming to see me this weekend. If you don’t have any plans for Saturday night, why don’t you join us for dinner? As skinny as you are, you could use more than a bag of churros.” She pinched Luisa’s side like she was trying to find the perfect cut of meat at the local butcher shop. “You need a home-cooked meal or two. Do you like tamales?”

  Luisa’s first instinct was to decline Mrs. Villalobos’s invitation because she didn’t want to deal with the resulting awkwardness when she revealed the reason why any relationship she might have with Javier would never be anything other than platonic, but she had never been able to resist a big plate of tamales smothered in salsa and Oaxaca cheese. “Pork or beef?”

  “Both,” Mrs. Villalobos said with a wink. “And if I have time, I might bake a tres leches cake for dessert.”

  Luisa could feel her mouth watering already. “It’s a date.”

  “Excellent. I’ll call Javier right now. He’ll be so pleased to hear you’re joining us. I texted him your picture last night. He thinks you’re cute.”

  Luisa resisted asking how Mrs. Villalobos had gotten her picture or obtained the technological know-how to text it to her grandson. The explanation could not only eat into her drive time but also result in an arrest. She didn’t want to start her day by handcuffing an eighty-year-old woman and dragging her in for invasion of privacy. She longed for the days when snooping on your neighbor meant peeking at them through the blinds or listening to their arguments through the walls, not snapping unauthorized pictures with a smartphone.

  “I’ll see you this weekend, Mrs. Villalobos.”

  “Have a good day, dear. And be careful. Mexico City is a dangerous place. Even for people carrying guns.”

  “Especially them.”

  She had lost track of the scores of state, local, and federal authority figures that had been murdered by narcos’ hired thugs over the years simply for doing their jobs. Now she might be the next addition to the steadily growing list. The thought frightened her, but inspired her, too. If the narcos wanted her dead, that meant she was getting closer to rooting them out. It remained to be seen who would accomplish their goal first—her or them.

  In the parking garage, she performed a quick security sweep of her car to make sure it hadn’t been tampered with overnight. Some might call her overly cautious. Some might call her paranoid. They could call her anything they wanted as long as her actions kept her and her loved ones safe.

  Once she was satisfied she hadn’t become a hit man’s target, she drov
e to the Federal Police Building and let herself inside. After she passed through the security checkpoints, she nodded at Maribel Rodriguez, the receptionist who had given her such a hard time yesterday, and took the elevator upstairs. She expected her reception to be a cool one, so she wasn’t surprised by the hostile silence that fell over the room the instant she walked in.

  She let out a cheery “Good morning” and sat at her desk when what she really wanted to do was stand on top of it and remind them that the bad guys were supposed to be outside, not in this room. But she couldn’t do that with complete confidence until she discovered how many, if any, of her peers were on the cartels’ payrolls. As far as she knew, the bad guys could be sitting right next to her.

  Picking up where she had left off the night before, she booted up her computer and began poring through Carlos Ramos’s case files. Ramos’s notes were both prolific and thorough. As she read through them, she could see their author devolve from an idealistic rookie determined to eliminate crime to a jaded veteran officer frustrated by his inability to accomplish his goals. She was tempted to skip to the end of the last file to see what he was thinking right before he disappeared, but she forced herself to read the notes in chronological order so she would be able to make an educated guess about his whereabouts—and an informed decision regarding the conclusions he had drawn about the three main cartels running roughshod over Mexico.

  At one time, the Sinaloa cartel, based primarily in Culiacán, was widely considered the world’s most powerful money laundering, drug trafficking, and organized crime syndicate. The group had a presence in seventeen Mexican states, twelve American states, and nine Latin American countries, as well as parts of Europe, Asia, and West Africa, allowing them to ship marijuana, opium, heroin, and methamphetamines around the world.

  Until the Jaguars came along, the Sinaloas’ only real rivals appeared to be Los Zetas. The Zs were bigger than the Sinaloa cartel in terms of geographic presence—assassinating, kidnapping, and extorting their way to the top of the food chain from their base of operations across the border from Laredo, Texas. They were the violent criminal syndicate US officials once considered the most dangerous, sophisticated, and technologically advanced cartel operating in Mexico. They were well armed and their tactics were brutal. They preferred to torture, behead, and indiscriminately slaughter their enemies, using violence instead of bribery to get what they wanted. They had set up covert camps to train new recruits, which included current and former federal, state, and local police officers from both sides of the border, and their reach was so vast they had been able to entice former US soldiers to traffic drugs, smuggle weapons, or act as hit men on their behalf.

  Until they were both overrun by the Jaguars, the Sinaloas and the Zs had fought for supremacy for years, leaving a swath of violence in their wake. Luisa examined the gory evidence of their rise to power. She sifted through glossy photos of mass graves filled with victims both culpable and innocent. Rival gang members who had stood in the cartels’ way and ordinary citizens who had dared to resist their growing influence.

  She couldn’t reconcile herself with the wondrous beauty of her country and the horrible violence that threatened to tear it apart. In Guerrero, the state south of where she now sat, tourists were drawn to the glitz and glamour of Acapulco, while farmers and villagers in the countryside were forced to take up arms and form their own ad hoc police forces in order to combat the cartels that operated openly despite the presence of the military.

  The troops, like her former commanding officer, had been paid handsomely to let the cartels do as they pleased. They even warned their benefactors when opposing forces were closing in, allowing the flood of cash and illegal drugs to continue unabated.

  Luisa and her friends had grown up cowering in fear from tales about the Sinaloas and the Zs, but—although heinous—the cartels’ exploits paled in comparison to the Jaguars’. She referred to Ramos’s case notes to bolster what she already knew.

  The Jaguars seemed to have eyes everywhere. They were suspected of placing lookouts at airports and bus stations and along main roads so they could keep tabs on people entering and leaving the country. Their main base of operations was along the Gulf of Mexico, a former Los Zetas stronghold, but they had quickly moved south and west, usurping other cartels’ territory along the way. They were active in several states north of the border, but they had not managed to invade Europe or Asia. Yet. With the amount of money they were raking in by focusing on local markets, they obviously felt no need to expand.

  Luisa remembered a recent raid on a Jaguar safe house in Tabasco that had resulted in the arrest of low-level Jaguars cartel member Hernan Cisneros and the seizure of cash and assets valued at well over five million dollars. Though the amount appeared to be exorbitant, it was thought to represent only a small fraction of the Jaguars’ wealth. The raid had created headlines, but it hadn’t resulted in a significant hit to the Jaguars’ cash flow. And to make matters worse, Cisneros had been killed in prison before he could be persuaded to testify against his fellow cartel members or reveal the identity of the Jaguars’ leader.

  A prison guard had been arrested and charged for Cisneros’s murder. Despite the large cash deposit he had made a few days before the killing, he claimed not to have ties to the Jaguars, though it was widely assumed he had been contracted to ensure the Jaguars’ secrets remained intact and their leader’s identity remained a mystery. A mystery Luisa—and Carlos Ramos before her—was determined to solve.

  Cisneros’s death was the latest murder attributed to the Jaguars. The first had not required a similar leap of faith. Their first victim was of one of the Sinaloas’ eight plaza bosses, regional leaders who managed the cartel’s operations along the Sonora-Arizona corridor and directed the flow of narcotics into the United States. The other seven plaza bosses soon fell. The Zs were initially thought to be to blame until the Jaguars claimed responsibility via a series of letters sent to the largest newspapers in all thirty-one Mexican states.

  Investigative journalists had attempted to track the source of the letters, but neither the writer nor the senders had ever been found. Not even after Jaguars hit men began going after the Zs and their allies.

  The inner circles of the main cartels were quickly decimated, leaving a sizable hole the Jaguars soon filled. Now their grip on Mexico’s lucrative drug trade was as firm as a vise. Their hold on Mexico’s citizens was just as tight. Most feared them. Some idolized them. But no one dared to cross them. Not if they wanted to live.

  Luisa closed her eyes, but was unable to block out the images of the Jaguars’ victims. Images of men, women, and children with their throats slit, their bodies riddled with bullets, and identifying features such as their hands, feet, and teeth removed danced in her mind’s eye. One detail nagged at her. In a handful of the photos, some of the victims had had a small rectangular flap of skin removed from their forearms. Ramos’s notes revealed he thought it was a particular hit man’s calling card, but perhaps it was something else. Perhaps the action was not meant to identify the person who had pulled the trigger, but to obscure the identities of the victims. Were they connected in some way? If so, what did they have in common?

  Had they been targeted by hit men working for the Jaguars, or were they Jaguars trigger men who had been killed by the opposition? If a rival cartel had committed the murders, they had yet to claim responsibility for them, an unprecedented move in a war fueled by hubris and testosterone.

  The first thing Luisa needed to do was identify the four unnamed victims. One had “The World is My Barrio” tattooed in elaborate scripted letters across his stomach. Ramos’s notes indicated he had run an image of the tattoo through a database that tracked prisoners’ ink after they passed through intake, but Luisa couldn’t find a record of the result. She accessed the database she needed, pasted a copy of the image into the program, and ran the test again. The tattoo quickly came back as a match to Salvador Perez, who was currently serving five years in Sa
nta Martha, notorious for both its overcrowding and its violence. His tattoo was an exact match to the dead man’s, but the corpse was estimated to belong to someone between thirty and forty years of age. Salvador Perez was only nineteen. Too young to be a contemporary of the dead man, but old enough to pay tribute to his dubious legacy.

  Perez’s mother, Silvia, was listed as his primary contact. No phone number was provided, and her address was in the tiny village of Agua Dulce, some four hundred miles away. Perhaps a road trip was in order. Luisa would start with Salvador and, if necessary, drive to Agua Dulce to pay his mother a visit. She called the warden at Santa Martha to set up an appointment for later that afternoon.

  “You look like you could use a break.”

  Luisa looked up to find Ruben Huerta from Records Management standing in front of her desk. Slight, bespectacled, and prematurely balding, he was in charge of cataloguing and storing current and former case files. He gave her the third degree every time she asked for access to something from the archives, though she couldn’t decide if he was being thorough, possessive, territorial, or all three.

  “May I buy you a burrito?” he asked.

  After a day and a half of being iced out by most of her coworkers, Luisa was surprised to see one make a concerted—and very public—effort to invite her into the fold. Or was Ruben attempting to lure her into a trap? She was too hungry to care, and if it came down to it, she thought she could take him in a fight. He didn’t look strong enough to stay upright during a stiff breeze, let alone withstand an assault from someone trained in hand-to-hand combat.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  She locked her computer, pushed her chair away from her desk, and followed Ruben to Salon Corona. The restaurant was founded in the 1920s, but the dining area resembled a cocktail lounge from the 1970s. Despite the garish decorations, the food was good and the spot was a lunchtime favorite with the people who worked in or near the center of town.