Spooker

by Dean Ing

  Guthrie was not an outgoing sort, and though he had a couple of sitdowns in the bar with Latino types during the following weeks, chiefly he kept to himself. Gary's intuition told him that his quarry must make the first overt move, but began to sense that it wasn't going to happen without some "accidental"

  arrangement. He arranged it by having two Fresno nighthawks wait for him near Guthrie's blue Luv, one with a bike chain and one with a lug wrench. The idea was to make it look good, but not so good that Gary would need stitches.

  When Ralph Guthrie left the bar one night and moved into the parking lot, two guys were whaling the shit out of somebody right next to his wheels, the chain hissing as it flailed across the victim's leather jacket, but the victim was doing okay with his fists. Guthrie wasn't about to get involved, but the two toughs couldn't know that.

  "We got company," one of them said.

  "That's enough for now," the other said and raised his voice to the dude with the mustache, who was now draped over the Luv's fender: "I catch you with her again, we'll be back, Romeo." And they walked away, straightening their jackets, stuffing hardware inside.

  Guthrie did not step nearer until the attackers were gone. When he saw his side window smashed, he took an angry step forward, but didn't deliver the kick because now the beaten bozo was more-or-less upright again. "You broke my fucking glass!" Guthrie snarled.

  The guy spat and ran his hands through his hair. "Them, not me."

  "They gonna pay?" Guthrie's pitiless bark of laughter doubted it. He unlocked the door, swore, fingered the broken pane.

  "Showin' up when you did, I guess I owe you. Don't have it now. Pay you back tomorrow. You know the bar around the corner?" The bozo was feeling himself over now to make sure his parts were still working.

  "Sure I know it," Guthrie said. "Now I see you in the light, I know you, too."

  "Chuck Lane," the bozo said, standing a bit unsteadily.

  Ignoring the offered hand, sliding into the Luv, Guthrie gave another mirthless bark. "Naw, you're not."

  When the poor hammered bastard looked up at him in surprise, Guthrie added, "You're Romeo." And with that, Ralph Guthrie drove away.

  "Chuck Lane" wasn't in the bar the next night as promised. But a week later, when legitimate bruises would have receded and with a smudge of eye shadow passing for a bruise on his cheek, he showed up.

  Guthrie hailed him as "Romeo" and bought him a beer to prime the pump, then reminded him about the window - $74.50 on the receipt.

  Chuck Lane cursed good-naturedly and paid from a flash roll, twenties on the outside, consistent with the kind of scuffler who's never as flush as he wants to look. Guthrie understood, or thought he did, and let Lane buy the next round. Lane quit drinking after four beers, saying another DWI was trouble he didn't need, showing a dollop of caution along with a willingness to open up. Guthrie opened up, too, when it turned out they both felt that off-road racing was the best thing going on TV and thought Candlestick Park was a wind tunnel designed to destroy organized sports. Night after night, nuance by nuance, Gary eased himself into Guthrie's life.

  Three weeks later, Gary could report that he was now a gofer paid by the Hermosillo cartel, but perhaps not trusted all that much yet. Someone made discreet inquiries into Chuck Lane's rap sheet, but not discreet enough to avoid being ID'd by one of Visconti's men. It was the first solid evidence to the DEA that Felix Gallardo's people were expanding so far north. At that point, Paul Visconti told Gary just how far they wanted him to crawl out on the limb. Gary would be an essential probe in a sting operation in which Los Hermanos Hermosillo would make connections to U.S. crime figures in Las Vegas.

  Gary's connection in Vegas was real, though the "criminals" were DEA men. The central plan was to lure Gallardo into a sitdown somewhere on U.S. soil. And because Gallardo was an exceedingly wary man, the DEA's game must be played without haste. That meant Gary Landis would be living out on that limb so long he'd grow feathers - if he lasted.

  When a man goes all the way undercover, his life changes profoundly. Gary's meetings with Visconti would be fewer; he would travel and drink and carouse in new ways; in short, as felons put it, he must live The Life. He would have an emergency number to call, but most of his calls to Visconti would be through a scrambler circuit using a special frequency built into a commercial cellular telephone. It was an old trick borrowed from the CIA: when the antenna was halfway out, the special circuit energized.

  The night Visconti handed over the cellular unit, Gary felt as if he were about to step into a moon rocket alone, and said so.

  "You've still got me at Mission Control," Visconti joked, because Gary seemed more keyed up than usual. "I can't know who's next to you if I need to call, so it'll come in from a young lady, for Chuckie. If you can take my call, say so and deploy your antenna. If you can't, fob her off. If you're blown and you need help when she calls, cuss her. Any old curse will do. By the way: when your antenna's on the scrambler circuit, on or off it works like a tracer bug. Saves time looking for you. Simple enough."

  Gary may have been thinking about Camarena. "So how likely do you think I'll need that feature?"

  "Not very. You're positioned just right," Visconti told him truthfully, looking him in the eye. Then he added, "And we don't have a better man for it." This was only half a lie. Though more experienced agents could have been put in place, Gary had one special qualification: unlike Kiki Camarena, he had no family to mourn him.

  5

  1993 TO MAY 1994

  No one told Gary this time that he was involved in another interagency sting because, Paul Visconti's chief warned, this street guy Landis not only lacked the need to know, if he were blown, he needed not to. But twice, at brief meetings with other agents on Visconti's orders, Gary sensed that the guys weren't DEA. They used the right jargon, but as if they weren't quite comfortable with it.

  In fact, they were CIA, part of the task force. One of them was the nervous type, admitting to Gary that he "had a feeling" about this case. What kind of feeling? Just a feeling, he repeated, making clear that it wasn't a good feeling. What he would not tell Gary was that occasionally he felt a spectral presence hovering nearby, not necessarily a player, just - watching, like some alien anthropologist. Perhaps curious about his life-style, or perhaps about his contacts. They could have exchanged premonitions on that, though Gary chalked it up as the curiosity of La Familia.

  Meanwhile, the fortunes of Chuck Lane were looking up. Flush from gofer services rendered, he took a better apartment in Merced, upgraded his stereo, bought a better grade of Scotch. He didn't bother with tricks that would tell him if and when his place got a toss, half-hoping they would, because he kept nothing there that Chuck Lane shouldn't have. He drove a little two-door BMW now with rallye tires; he took Ralph Guthrie and a Latino contact to Vegas where they enjoyed freebies offered by a pair of tanned, sleek, pinky-ringed, big-city-talking gents in buttery soft loafers and pastel shirts who were in on the sting. He was entrusted briefly by La Familia to hold sizable chunks of cash which he never, ever skimmed, because he figured somebody was keeping tabs on that just to test him.

  "Call it a basic course in staying alive," he told Visconti on the scrambler circuit one day. "Scumbag 101; you never know when you'll get the pop quiz that could get you popped."

  "From all we can tell, you're running clean," Visconti said.

  "Paul, you have no idea how dirty I'm running," Gary sighed. "But I know what you mean. It's nice to know; I feel a lot better."

  But Gary quit feeling good the evening he returned from a gofer job in Bakersfield. He had two pieces of junk mail in his box, but that wasn't where he found the letter. He found that shoved under his door - no return address - in a cheap white envelope marked "DESTROY." He turned on the living-room TV and sat down, swinging his Nikes up on his new ottoman, holding the envelope up to a 250-watt bulb before opening it. He'd seen photos of guys who had opened the wrong letter without checking for a tiny spring
detonator.

  It was typed on plain paper, not from a word processor. Somebody didn't trust his own computer terminal, he thought, before the brief full-caps message really struck home: PAUL IS TRADING YOU FOR BIGGER FISH. TRUST NONE OF US, THIS IS ALL I CAN DO. WE

  CAN WRAP HIM UP IN A FEW MONTHS BUT FOR NOW YOU ARE ON YOUR OWN. FIND A HOLE.

  Unsigned, of course. No key phrase that would narrow it down, beyond the reference to "us." His first suspicion was another test by La Familia; but if they knew Visconti's name, he had already flunked. One of the other street guys? Possible; and if the note was actually sent by one of his fellow agents, then the cartel would know Paul, anyhow; in which case it was too late to think about testing.

  Then: Bullshit, he decided. If there's anything in this world I can trust, it's Paul Visconti. His cellular phone was in the BMW and he needed to contact Visconti ASAP. He snapped off the lamp next to his chair and, in the dim illumination of the TV, headed for the door. That was when the big pane in his living room window disintegrated - a dozen slugs fanning through the room, two of them into the chair he'd vacated, others impacting the kitchen partition and its wooden trim. He did not think about the precise timing of it all. He was thinking that the muzzle blasts from outside came from the direction of the street, but weren't all that loud; an Ingram with a suppressor, maybe?

  By the time Gary hit the carpet it was all over but he couldn't know it yet, scrambling in a fast crawl for the Beretta he kept between the cushions of his couch. Weapon in hand, he snapped off the TV, made it to the shadowed bedroom, risked a glance outside, along the path between apartment buildings. This wasn't L.A., where folks knew to keep their heads down, and some potbellied citizen in an undershirt was already leaning out into the dusk from an upstairs window next door, calling over his shoulder, "Shit, how would I know? Firecrackers, maybe."

  Gary hurried back to the living room and, using the kitchen cleaver, chopped away the wooden trim where one of the slugs had impacted. It had mushroomed a bit but was still slender, its boattail longer than some, roughly .30 caliber. Maybe one of the 7.62-mm rounds from a Kalashnikov, certainly not one of the fat little slugs from an Ingram. And ever since the Cubans had fed Russian weapons into Mexico, La Familia had favored the lightweight AKM version of a Kalashnikov, an assault rifle with a folding stock so you could hide it under a coat, some with suppressors. That slug wasn't exactly a signature, but it was as strong a suggestion as Gary needed.

  There was another number he could call - right from the phone in his apartment - and this was just the sort of occasion for it. And yet, Gary hesitated; could he really trust his life to Visconti's honesty, when somebody with inside information had just warned him about it? Old Swede Halvorsen had sworn that the suits didn't always play the same game you were playing. And there was the Irish saying: Trust everybody, but cut the cards. Gary decided against making that call until he was on fast wheels.

  Give the Merced police five minutes - you know damn well somebody called them. Do I want to be here? Maybe not. Chuck Lane would disappear in the Beemer, probably call Ralph Guthrie to ask what the hell was going on. Yeah, and that BMW could be bugged by now, but I haven't been out of it long enough for a booby trap. Well, I can check it for bugs later. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the question: practical joke? Agents had been known to pull some pretty raw stunts on guys they didn't like. But they'd been canned for less than this. . .

  While he thought it out, he was cramming his best pair of loafers, dark socks, dark pullover, and gray slacks into a flight bag, leaving room for his laptop and - damn right, why not? - the packet of hundreds and the one of fifties he was holding for those sweethearts in La Familia.

  Roughly once a week, he rode his Kawasaki, but it was loud and gave no protection. The Beemer it was, then. As Gary Landis, he was one-third owner of a little Cessna, but it was hangared in a suburban Fresno airpark, an hour's drive away. He would decide during the drive whether to use it tonight. He went out the back way toward the tenant carports, cradling his Nike bag in his arms with one hand in the bag holding his Beretta, safety off.

  He had one instant of adrenaline rush when he saw the old four-door Plymouth stopped in the parking driveway because it was blocking two cars and one of them was his Beemer. But the Plymouth's hood was up and he could hear a starter grinding, and its driver-side door was open, the interior light revealing a middle-aged woman at the wheel, lipstick bright as it outlined her imploring smile tossed in his direction. "I don't know what else to do, dear," she called as Gary swept past, safetying his Beretta, thrusting it inside his jacket against the small of his back.

  Now he could see the younger woman, maybe a daughter, peering under the vast hood of the Plymouth in the gloom. He unlocked the Beemer, tossed the flight bag inside, shut the door and sighed.

  "I'm awfully sorry," said the older woman as Gary appeared at her side. "It just died on me. Do you know anything about motors?"

  "I can't see anything," said the younger one, coming around from Gary's left. "Are we out of gas?" At his quick glance, she smiled for him, too, smoothing long blonde hair with a casual hand, then added softly to him, "Her eyes aren't very good. What does the gauge say?"

  And as he leaned in, his head brushing the older woman's cheek, he felt something like a dull bee sting in his left hip. Both women were talking at the time, and he saw that the gauge showed half a tank. And then he realized that the driver's right hand held a silenced handgun, and that its muzzle was under his chin, and that the bee sting was still stinging.

  "Not a sound," the woman said, six inches from his ear.

  As Gary moved back, he heard the younger one say, "It's all in him," but now in a huskier voice, and he lifted his hands hoping that someone would see this tableau, that the police would come, that he could slump convincingly enough to reach the Beretta in the small of his back. But after a long frozen moment, his eyelids began to flutter and his facial muscles seemed to dissolve, though he was still conscious.

  Then his legs began to buckle, and he knew whatever he did he'd better do it instantly, because that sting at his hip was from an injection and he was losing it.

  If the woman had been willing to shoot, she probably would have already. He recalled the old cliché that if you wanted folks to come running, you didn't scream, "Rape." "Fire! Pol - ," he began, but the young one was a hell of a lot stronger than he could have imagined, clapping a wadded scarf over his mouth from behind with one hand, the other arm holding his own against his side. Now the Beretta might as well have been miles away, and suddenly so was everything else as the two of them fell onto macadam and his arms would not obey his orders.

  A moment later, he knew he was being lifted by both women, but something was very, very wrong with his entire body as they tumbled him in the backseat footwell.

  The last thing he saw was a blanket the young one spread over him.

  "Don't forget the client's bag. It's in his car," said the older one, and then a confusion of sounds that became muffled, and when the Plymouth's engine rumbled to life, Gary Landis's own life was ebbing.

  6

  MAY 1994

  Romana drove the Plymouth calmly, expertly, with one eye on the rearview, breaking no rules of traffic. She had driven that route a dozen times alone while Andy was at work during the past week, turning at West Avenue and then the few blocks to Grogan, where she had rented the old frame house for its double garage and the fact that it was two minutes from Chuck Lane's apartment. You learned to use your advantages as you found them, and one advantage in a town of Merced's size was that modern apartment complexes stood aloof, their skirts of lawn gathered around them, isolated from onetime farm homes by two minutes - and forty years. "Check his pulse again," she ordered, and Andy paused at his labor, leaning back between the seats, to fumble for the wrist of the dying spy.

  "I still get one. Thready, but - no, wait. Stopped." Andy's words were hushed, as though the presence of death invested the corpse with a k
ind of purity. He set to work again, his upper body twisted back and down while she drove. She could hear the snick of his razor-edged little shears as Andy worked, filling a plastic bag with the raw material of his specialty. He was sealing the bag as Romana turned in at the old concrete tiles that denned their driveway. Andy peered at his tricky little illuminated Timex and depressed a stud. "One hundred forty-odd seconds since injection. And look what we have here," he added, pulling a 9-mm Beretta from the foot-well. "Do we keep it?"

  "You know better. We drop it with him, after you wipe it down. If the client is ever found, that makes it look more like an accidental fall. Put it away," she commanded.

  He hopped from the car and raised the big overhead garage door to let Romana drive in, hauling it down again before she was out of the car. Romana noted that, where he had performed his jobs so quickly as to attract notice during their earliest commissions together, he had developed the proper casual appearance with practice. We will make a professional of you yet, she thought, in a profession I created.

  Andy's Pinto had been left with its nose against the front wall to gain more room behind it and he had its little trunk lid open in seconds, his slender flashlight still in his teeth. The luggage space had been lined with a ten-mil polyethylene drop cloth, a cheap disposable protection against body fluids. Romana opened the right rear door of the big sedan and, using her own flashlight, flipped the blanket away from the client, donning gloves to check the pockets, replacing the coins and the pocket-knife after swift, expert examination. She pulled the wire stocked Kalashnikov from under the client and left it in the backseat under the blanket.

  "Let's go, Mom," said Andy, standing behind her, betraying the impatience of his youth as she removed one of her gloves and rechecked for a pulse.

  Nothing. A tug on the mustache produced no result. She lifted one of the eyelids with her thumb and saw the pupil already fixed in its dead stare, unresponsive to light. The fingernails were turning blue, the cyanotic hue of death. "A good drug," she admitted, tugging the glove on again, grabbing for the shoulders, letting Andy worm his way past her to help drag the body out. Because Andy seemed to handle the remains with something like reverence, she made a special effort to show the opposite; letting the head drop a few inches to the floor, giving the chest a swift kick for good measure. How many times must she show him that these corpses deserved no respect!