“Why are you offering me this deal?”
“I make more money this way.”
His response was blunt and easy, as if the answer were obvious, like cutting a better deal on a new SUV.
“And I'll be doing you a favor, too, won't I, ”Titus added, “by getting rid of that son of a bitch.”
Macias tilted his head to one side in a shrug. “That would be true, yes.”
“Let's say I'm able to do that, ”Titus proposed. “The money, get rid of Luquín. How do I know one of his people won't come after me and carry out Luquín's threats? How do I know you won't come after me later?”
Macias nodded. “First of all, no one is going to do anything for Tano Luquín after he's dead. He does not inspire that kind of loyalty. There will be many people who will be sorry that the cash flow has been stopped; but no one will be sorry that Tano is dead.
“Second, I can easily imagine how angry you are about what has happened to you. And I can easily imagine how much you have learned from this experience. With your money and with what you've learned, I can imagine, too, that you will create your own guarantee that this sort of thing will never happen to you again. There's no warranty that I could give you that would be more assuring to you than your own determination.”
“That's no comfort to me.”
“That's only because you don't understand the risks from my side of the enterprise.”
“And how will you ‘give’me Luquín? ”Titus asked.
“We can work out the details, ”he said. “But first, are you interested in the proposition?”
“It's possible. But I have to know the details first.”
“Why the details first?”
“I've never done business with a killer before, ”Titus said evenly. “I'm going to be very cautious.”
Macias's face was immobile. He didn't like Titus's choice of words. A dew of perspiration appeared in the creases on either side of his mouth.
“And how would you get the money to me? ”Macias asked in turn.
“I can do it with a phone call. The same way I did the other ten million.”
“When?”
“In the morning. You'll get confirmation from your bank within an hour of my call.”
Macias nodded again. “When I get the phone confirmation about the money, I'll tell you precisely step by step how to do it.”
“Not good enough.”
Macias studied him a moment. “I know you have someone working with you. I don't know what's going on there. I have to protect myself.”
“Well, we seem to be at an impasse, then.”
“What would you propose? ”Macias asked. “As a compromise?”
“Look, ”Titus said. “You've seen me give Luquín ten million already, like I said I would. And I'll put it in your account, too, just like I say I will. But the only thing I've seen from your side of this deal has been lies and death. Now you tell me you're willing to give up Luquín. Well, tell me how he's protected—exactly how. You don't do that it makes me think you're going to screw him—and me—and skip out on both of us. So my feeling right now is, fuck you.”
Macias studied Titus again. He was trying to reconcile this hard stance against what he'd heard over the bug. But, of course, the moment he'd contacted Cain with his proposal to sell out Luquín, Cain's situation had shifted radically. What Macias was seeing here was how quickly Cain's competitive mettle came to the forefront when he saw even the slightest opening. Macias might have more to deal with here than he had expected.
Macias drank quickly from his glass, weighing the upside, the downside. He was smelling the $10 million, and more important, he was thinking what life would be like without Cayetano Luquín breathing down his neck and not actually having to do anything about it himself. But Cain was right, of course; he needed something to believe.
“What does it matter to you how he's protected, ”Macias asked, “if you are only going to turn the information over to the police?”
“Did I say I was going to turn the information over to the police?”
“What is this, then? ”he asked cautiously and with an amused smile. “Your own personal vengeance? But this is such a Latin thing, Mr. Cain.”
Titus could feel himself trembling from the high-voltage energy produced by the adrenaline pumping through him.
“Did you really think I was going to watch that man kill my friends and steal my money, and then let him go? He told me that if I didn't do what he said, he'd haunt me the rest of my life by killing my friends, my family. Well, I did what he said, and he killed people anyway. ”He paused. “Or rather, you did it for him.”
The smirk stiffened on Macias's face.
Titus went on. “Did he really think … I was going to let that happen without any kind of response? Fifty-four million dollars. If he thinks that kind of money is going to enable him to get certain things done, to buy certain information, to have people killed, what makes him think it won't do the same things for me? Does he think I'm an idiot?”
Titus had no idea that he was going to say all of this, but suddenly as he looked at Macias several obvious ideas converged. The advantage that Macias had over everyone—first, with Luquín over Titus; and now, working only in self-interest, over Luquín as well—was based solely in his willingness to simply disregard the rules by which everyone else in society agreed to play. Even the trust that Luquín had put in Macias, twisted though it was, had its own rules of order. And now Macias was ignoring even those corrupt boundaries.
But what really infuriated Titus was that Macias apparently assumed that Titus would continue to obey the traditional rules of society, that Titus would not resort to Macias's own lawless tactics, even though not doing so would put him at every conceivable disadvantage. The condescension of that presumption suddenly struck Titus like a lightning bolt. What in the hell had Titus been thinking about?
He fixed his eyes on Macias and lowered his voice.
“Has Luquín ever stopped to think how much revenge that amount of money will buy … me?”
Macias said nothing. He waited. He was dealing with the unavoidable reality that everything Cain said about Luquín was directed at him as well.
“I'm not going to pay for more lies, ”Titus concluded. “Unless I can believe what you tell me, I'll just keep my ten million.”
Macias was suddenly scrambling to reevaluate his position. This kind of talk from Cain was not what he had anticipated. Why was he suddenly so confident? How much more did Cain know than Macias had thought he knew? If Cain was after revenge, then maybe he was on his own after all. No legitimate law enforcement agency would be involved in that kind of operation. Was it possible that Cain had hired some very capable professionals? Maybe Macias had caught this just in time to prevent a debacle of his own tightly planned scheme.
“Maybe I can tell you a few things, ”Macias said, buying time to think.
“How's he protected? ”Titus asked again. “What will my people be facing if you ‘give’him to me? How many guards? Where are they located? Give me some details to believe. But I've got to have a hell of a lot more than a promise from a man like you before I'll fork over another dollar.”
Macias's handsome face was stiff with anger and more than a little suspicion.
“You are asking a lot for a man who has Cayetano Luquín hanging on to his balls with both hands. Maybe I should just let him go ahead and take your fifty-four million … and however many more lives he wants in the process.”
Titus put his elbows on the table and leaned forward, way forward, almost in Macias's face, to make his point. “Listen to me, you sick son of a bitch. Just sitting here with you makes me want to puke. Don't … threaten … me.”
Even as he spoke, it occurred to Titus that he had juiced himself up so much that maybe he had said too much. Maybe he had gone way too far, way past smart. But from the moment he'd walked into the courtyard and seen Macias, the idea of conversing with this man had been repugnant to him.
It was suddenly fantastical to him that he should be sitting down and talking calmly with the man who had orchestrated the deaths of Charlie and Carla.
But now maybe he had really screwed up. He could see from the look on Macias's face that he knew something was definitely wrong here. Why the hell couldn't Titus have contained his temper for another hour? And where the hell was Kal's phone call?
Chapter 50
Cope and Tito checked in with Calò just moments before they drove past the Pathfinder parked down the street from Luquín's house. They passed it only once, slowly, going in the opposite direction, with Cope driving and Tito slumped down out of sight in the seat beside him.
“Windows down, ”he said. “I think I heard a radio.”
Two blocks away they pulled to the curb in front of a darkened house.
“They're parked beside an embankment, ”he went on, “to the side of the house. The yard sits about four feet higher than the street. The garage opens up right at the rear of the Pathfinder. There's some kind of hedge, about six feet high, at the top of the embankment to give the house privacy from the street. There's a bush jammed up next to the rear of the Pathfinder, planted right at the curb to hide the trash cans.”
“What about the approach?”
“We could come at the house from the back of the garage through the street side of the neighbor's yard. From the corner of the garage we'd be protected from their rearview mirrors by the big bush. They can't see the rear right corner of the Pathfinder from inside the vehicle.”
Tito was silent.
“I don't like the high-speed drill and gas idea, ”Cope said. “This has to be bloody quick, and with the windows open we can't guarantee we'll get bloody quick.”
“Then it's got to be the CS grenade, ”Tito said. “We drive by and I'll toss it in, bam. They won't be able to get another breath for about thirty seconds. It's like getting slapped in the face with a board. But then it wears off quick, so we have to get in quick and do our thing.”
“What kind of noise does it make? ”Cope asked.
“None.”
“Flash?”
“None.”
Cope thought a moment. “We can't risk them getting a shot off, not even one.”
“Their throats and lungs are locked up, man, ”Tito assured him. “They can't even draw a breath … for thirty seconds. After that, they're going to start coming around.”
Silence. Cope looked at his watch. “Okay, then I'll just pull up and you toss the bomb. I'll jam on the brakes, and we bail out. The second you know it's okay, jump in and get behind the wheel, and I'll go into the back.”
That was it.
Cope pulled away from the curb and slow-rolled to the intersection. He eased out, looking right. Two blocks ahead they could see the Pathfinder up the slight rise in the street, looking like a sitting duck. He turned into the street and started up the hill.
Suddenly the taillights of the Pathfinder came on.
“Shit. ”Tito leaned forward over the dash, but then the taillights went out again. “Guy's just shifting in his seat.”
Cope was watching his rearview mirror for approaching traffic, but they were so far off Bull Creek Road that there was no through traffic, and at this hour the neighborhood was quiet.
He noodled along, not wanting to change pace when they pulled past the Pathfinder. Then they were there.
He looked to his right just as they were even with the Pathfinder driver, and Tito lobbed the CS grenade as if he were tossing back a wadded piece of paper into a trash can. The little canister sailed right past the surprised face of the driver.
Cope slammed on his brakes, stopping just past the front left fender of the Pathfinder so that Tito could fling open his door. Cope scrambled around the back of the car to find the Pathfinder's opened windows swirling with gas.
“Wait, ”Tito barked. They stood there three beats, and then: “Go!”
As Tito was opening the door, he reached in and shot the driver in the face twice with his suppressed USP, then shoved the dying man from under the steering wheel as he crawled in. At the same instant, Cope plunged into the backseat and shot the gagging guard in the mouth twice, crawled over his body, and shot the passenger-side guard three quick bursts in the left ear as he pushed him down into the floorboard out of sight. Then he was out and back into the idling car.
In less than fifteen seconds it was over. Inside the Pathfinder, three men were in various stages of dying as Tito slowly pulled the SUV away from the curb and eased out into the street. Cope followed him at a distance.
The man had crouched in the pocket of deep shade among the cedars and settled in to endure the stifling heat of the afternoon. The sun beat down on the thick canopy of the woods above him, sucking all the air out of the underbrush. Forty meters away, the lake water lapped against the rocks. Cicadas throbbed in the hot trees, and their drone blended with the occasional drone of ski and pleasure boats plying the long, narrow lake. Peering through a break in the brush, he had found a spot across the lake halfway up the sloping hillside, a terracotta tile roof, and he concentrated on it, using it as his gateway out of time.
Everything else that happened for the next four and a half hours happened in his parallax view and in his head. He was fully aware of the changing light, but not in the gradual way that an observant person might be aware of it. For long periods of time his eyes took in nothing—that is, nothing of which he was aware. He was gone, traveling in his mind.
Then, as if playing catch-up, his eyes registered the changing light of the past hour or so all in the space of just a few moments, like a timelapse film. The clouds skimmed northward across the valley, and the sunlight flickered rapidly as the clouds flitted past, and then underlying it all was the changing light resulting from the angle of the falling sun.
And then again everything held still while he passed through terra-cotta into other worlds.
He got up once to remove his clothes, jamming them into the small canvas duffel bag. He turned aside and urinated into the grass, then squatted on his haunches and returned to the tile roof.
Another hour or so passed and the mosquitoes had gotten so bad that he turned to the duffel bag again and took out two round, plastic containers holding charcoal and olive body paint. Methodically, without any attention to time at all, he began to smear his body with the camouflage paint. He didn't pay much attention to what he was doing, as if it didn't matter much how it was done. But he was thorough, head to toe, inside his ears and nostrils, between the crevice of his buttocks, and even his genitals.
Dusk.
Now he squatted among the weeds, invisible. With the dying light, the swarms of mosquitoes grew exponentially. Frustrated by the repellent in the paint, they formed a cloud around him. He heard them, a high-pitched whining sound enveloping him in its harmonics, exactly like the dusk in Espíritu Santo when he was waiting to kill the man from Andradína and was astonished to hear the sound of time passing. It was an aural sensation precisely the same as the cloud of mosquitoes. It was so odd to discover that.
Time passed. A long time … in a darkness blacker than old blood.
When the telephone vibrated in his hand—he had held it throughout, laying it down only to put on the body paint, and even then carefully resting his toes on it so that he would feel the vibrating if it should happen—he answered it by saying only, “Yes.”
“Macias has left, ”Burden said. “I believe that only a guard, Roque, and Luquín remain. That's the best we can figure it.”
“Macias won't return?”
“No.”
“I have the rest of the night, then?”
“No. You have to leave by two o'clock, at least. You have the directions to the airstrip.”
“Yes. But nothing has changed?”
“No.”
Silence. He wasn't sure how long it lasted, but he was aware of it, which meant it might have been a long time. But Burden didn't hang up. He was there.
“You
want to know something, García?”
“Yes. What is it?”
“I didn't think this would ever happen. I thought I would die and this would never have happened.”
Silence.
“I won't thank you, ”the man said. “I will spare you having to have that on your conscience.”
Silence.
“But if I could thank you, I would do it. And if I believed in God, I would thank him for it, too, but he wouldn't want my gratitude, either. Gracias a Dios, but he would stop it from reaching him. Such gratitude.”
Silence.
“Do you hear the insects?”
“Yes, ”Burden said.
“I am engulfed by mosquitoes, ”he said. “A cloud of them. They are singing time at me.”
Silence.
“I don't ever want to see you again, García. You understand that.”
“I understand. Yes.”
Silence.
“I look like an insect, ”the man said.
Again there was silence, and after waiting a moment or two, he turned off the phone.
Chapter 51
After Burden's phone call, the man's heart began to fibrillate. He was used to that and recognized the onset of his familiar disturbance. Something happened to you when you took off all your clothes and covered your body with the colors of earth and vegetation. You began to slough off your human-ness. And that was good.
Wearing only tennis shoes that he'd also smeared with camouflage paint, he began moving up through the lake-level woods to the hillside. The mosquitoes formed a whirring aura around him, and he felt as though he were suspended in the sound of time but not touched by it. He moved through the darkness in a cocoon of timelessness.
The move up the cliff was slow, but not especially difficult. This was simply a steep climb, with a couple of spots where the placement of feet and fingers was important but not critical. He was careful not to dislodge any rocks and send them crashing noisily into the brush.
The pool was set solidly into the stone face of the bluff, but the deck that surrounded it was supported by thick, stolid concrete pilings sunk into the rock face below. When he reached the pilings he stopped to rest a moment before climbing the last twenty feet by crawling over the boulders that had been pushed over the bluff when the pool was built. Then he reached a cinder-block room that housed the pool's plumbing underneath the deck. From there stone steps led up to a tall louvered gate that opened onto the deck and pool area.
The Rules of Silence Page 24