Curtis reached into his pocket and unfolded a sheet of paper. There was a color photo on it, blurry greens and tans and sandy here and there, surrounding an unmistakable monster of a red roofed house in the middle.
“That’s from a military satellite.”
“How did you get that?”
“I redirected it to look at the property.”
“It’s a good thing you’re not obsessed with this. You didn’t need an act of congress to get that done?”
“It’s on loan to us. We use it to monitor smuggling routes over the border.”
“Isn’t it going to come back to you?”
“No. It covers huge swaths of land. This house is only part of it. I’m well within my province to request satellite images.”
“How long have you been planning this?”
“A couple of weeks.”
“You can do all this research in just a couple weeks?”
“You can if you don’t sleep.”
Virgil smiled broadly. Curtis suddenly thought they were in agreement, until he followed Marc’s gaze and realized that he was smiling at a girl on the stool behind him. She was slim and wore a tank top. She was pretty with piercings and tattoos on her arms. She was with another girl who looked like she could kill any man in the bar.
“I want nothing to do with this,” said Virgil. “I have enough trouble already.”
“Where are you with that?”
“The story is finally out of the news, but that doesn’t mean it won’t come back. There’s still talk of an indictment. Find someone who wants to make a name for himself and I could be on trial for murder.”
“So the department is still backing away from you?”
“They are fucking running away from me as fast as they can. I tell you that the only good thing to come out of any of this mess is that you find out who your real friends are.”
He gave Curtis a rough pat on the shoulder.
“What do you think of my plan?” Curtis asked again.
“Well, my plan about robbing the Boston Beer Fest was a sick joke I told you when I was drunk. Your idea is even worse.”
With that, Virgil pushed away from the bar and began his stumble to the door. Curtis followed him out and caught him just as he was walking into traffic. The two of them fell into a cab, and as he sat down, Curtis felt as drunk as Virgil looked. Virgil dropped his head back against the seat and began to snore. Curtis laid his head against the cool glass of the window and felt himself unwind. Virgil wanted nothing to do with his plan, but that was fine for now. It was just another milestone of failure.
“Didn’t we drive here?” Virgil asked, awake again. Then he put his head down and went back to sleep. Curtis’s own eyes crept lower and lower to the sounds of snoring and the hum of the engine.
“What if?” Curtis said dreamily, “What if I told you that there was three million dollars buried in the desert?”
***
Eduardo remembered a time when he was seven and with his father. They watched a show about the Donner party, and Eduardo was shocked and disgusted to learn of cannibalism. His father showed only disappointment in him. “This is what you have to do to survive,” he said.
His bed shook again. It was time for another set of fifty pushups. Eduardo saw his cellmate’s head bobbing. It was lined with badly thinning blonde hair for such a young man. Eduardo didn’t know his name, but his cellmate was a hulk of silent meat and muscle. He wore tank tops or no shirt at all during these sessions. His skin was pale and his back was dotted with huge pimples. He never spoke, but he was always eating, whether beef jerky or uncooked stews from a can. Eduardo had watched him eat a jar of peanut butter with just his fingers.
Eduardo was not a patient man. His mother had not been patient, and his father had not been patient either. His father was impatient that a seven-year-old did not see the practicality of eating other human beings. Eduardo had grown impatient with Special Agent Walter Curtis and his promises of movement on his case.
He expected a call from Flan. None came. He expected Curtis himself to come back, begging for more than the flat clues. He hadn’t come either. He expected Odalys to be in the family room downstairs, dripping tears all over the glass and smiling. She’d tell him that she had found cash somewhere, somehow, and filled his account.
Flan had been dead serious on one point. If Odalys knew anything of his business, anything at all, if she had so much as served as eye candy at a meeting, then she should not and could not visit. Flan was not willing to take the chance of an offhand silly comment being played at trial and used against him.
During one of his calls, Eduardo had started to ask if part of the retainer he had given to Flan could be converted into a cash deposit for him in his prison account. He thought he heard Flan stifling a laugh.
On this day, when the bed stopped rocking, his cellmate looked up and caught his eye. He smiled broadly.
“Hi,” he said.
Hi. As if they had just met. As if they hadn’t been in this tiny cell together for weeks. As if he had just discovered Eduardo and thought he would like to make a good first impression.
“Hello,” Eduardo said. This was the first friendly greeting he had heard in prison. The last greeting had been a man with a shotgun screaming for him to get his hands in the air. Everything else he had heard since had been another order.
“My name is Luke,” he said. He was still smiling. He wrapped a towel around his neck and held it with both hands. His arms were massive.
“Brothers been giving you a hard time,” said Luke.
It hadn’t sounded like a question. It was more of an observation or a statement of fact. Eduardo didn’t have a response. He shrugged.
“Happens to a lot of new guys,” said Luke.
“I’m just minding my own business,” said Eduardo. That seemed like the right thing to say. He’d been listening to people talk. Minding one’s own business was a common refrain.
“Yeah, I like that. Doesn’t always work though,” said Luke.
Luke sat down on his bed and began to put on his boots. He even managed to flex while doing it.
“There was a guy here a few months ago, he tried to mind his own business. Brothers did some terrible things to him.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Eduardo asked. It came out too quick, too sharp, and with too much emotion. There was a lot of emotion bottled up in Eduardo right now. He stood there in front of this hulk with no shirt on and nothing more to defend himself than a damp toothbrush. He put it away, lest even that seem too defiant. Luke didn’t seem to notice.
“You seem like a good dude. I don’t want to see you have any unnecessary trouble. Especially not with them.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t mention it. In fact, if there is ever anything I can do for you, let me know.”
“Can I ask you one question?”
Luke’s eyebrows raised, and his smile broadened more. “Anything,” he said.
“The phones here are tapped, correct?”
“Yeah, they listen in. I wouldn’t use one if you need to talk, you know, privately.”
“What if you do need to talk privately?”
“There are other ways.”
“Such as?”
“You could use a cell phone.”
“Who has a cell phone?”
“Guys.”
“What guys?”
“That’s their business. I might be able to ask around for you.”
“What would it take to use one of those cell phones?”
“Money. Usually money. They don’t even pay you for all that kitchen work until the end of the month, do they?”
Eduardo shook his head.
“Could you introduce me to one of these guys who has a phone?” he asked.
Luke thought about it.
“Yeah. I suppose I could. You still don’t have any money though.”
He didn’t. Two weeks ago, he drove a two hundred thousand
dollar car and wore handmade clothes. He had enjoyed the best of the best. He was currently the poorest man in this prison.
“Toughest thing about prison isn’t not having money,” said Luke.
“No?”
“It’s not having friends.”
He thought about cannibalism and his father and what he was willing to do to survive.
“I need to use one of those phones,” said Eduardo. Luke shrugged his enormous shoulders.
“Why don’t you sit down and talk about it?”
***
Curtis stumbled out of his room in search of water. His head felt as if he had been sucker punched. His mouth felt like he had eaten dirt. On his way to the sink, he saw Virgil hunched over the Colon files.
“Who is this Chinese guy?” Virgil asked.
Virgil was holding a photograph. Curtis didn’t even have to look to know who he was talking about.
“He’s not Chinese. He’s Japanese. And he’s actually from Peru.”
It was a grainy, dated black and white picture of a man in motion. It had been blown up from a surveillance camera. It wasn’t the best photo, but it showed an intense man in a foul mood.
“What the hell is a Japanese guy doing in Peru?”
“Many Japanese people immigrated there.”
“Why wouldn’t they just come to America like everybody else?”
“I have no idea.”
“Their loss. Who is he?”
“His name is Toshiro Matsumoto, and he is a very dangerous man.”
“Dangerous how?”
“He was a captain in the Peruvian special forces. He ran a death squad.”
Virgil looked at the picture, impressed.
“Tell me why you’re collecting pictures of him. And you really don’t spend any time here, do you?”
Curtis opened his freezer and removed a bottle of vodka.
“How can you tell?”
“The orange juice is the only healthy thing in that fridge.”
Curtis began pouring the vodka. “It’s about to get a lot less healthy,” he said. It hurt to sit down. He could see that Virgil had been up for a while. His files had been carefully arranged.
“Toshiro Matsumoto,” Curtis began, “was a very feared and respected man in their army. Then he suddenly resigned. A month later, he was implicated in the murder of a member of Shining Path. Back then, Shining Path was a real terrorist organization in Peru. The guy he killed was a professor from a prominent family. The professor was protected politically, so Matsumoto took matters into his own hands. After the murder, no one knew where he went for over ten years, when he popped up again in Hong Kong. Take out the other picture in that file. The wide shot.”
The original showed Matsumoto as he walked through airport security. It was old technology and poorly copied. Curtis leaned forward and pointed to the first passenger in line.
“That’s Colon,” he said.
He was a small man with more weight than he needed. Colon was in his late forties and wore a suit with no tie and wore tinted glasses. In this one shot, he was exceptionally mild-mannered.
“He looks more like a teacher than a drug dealer,” observed Virgil.
“It’s not an accident. Toshiro Matsumoto left Peru and ended up in Monterrey, Mexico, where he was employed for many years as the bodyguard of an unassuming landowner and businessman by the name of Aureliano Colon, who was secretly a prolific producer and exporter of crystal methamphetamine.”
Colon had been dead for years, but Curtis still loved telling his story, and all of its little branches.
“Did he get killed with the boss?”
“No. He disappeared six months before the hit. The Mexicans recorded him crossing the southern border into Guatemala. No one knows why. One theory is that he had cancer and went home to die. Another is that he quit due to his distaste with Colon’s lifestyle.”
“Was he touching kids or something?”
“God no. Colon wouldn’t do that.”
“I didn’t mean to offend you. I know you guys were tight.”
“It’s not that. You spend this much time researching a man like him, studying his operation, trying to see how he thinks, you respect some of the things he’s able to do. He went years without so much as an arrest. In all his time, there was no bloodshed traced back to his organization. They still don’t know where he was making the stuff. Before I found the money trail, no one even knew he existed.”
“A ghost,” said Virgil.
“You’ve been reading my notes,” Curtis said proudly. “Did you get to Colon’s history?”
“No. Normal people sleep at night. And they have more food in the house than just orange juice. Tell me about it over breakfast.”
They arrived at the Franklin Barbecue at ten thirty. They were seated at noon. By twelve thirty, they had been served, and by one Virgil was claiming that he was never going to eat again. He looked at what remained of his lunch and pushed his plate away.
“What really happened that night?” Curtis asked him.
He had wanted to ask him that since he arrived. He had wanted to ask the moment he had heard about it. Virgil had explained that he was fine but had a lawyer now who advised him not to speak about it with anyone, and certainly not on a telephone. There was a time when Curtis would have hopped on a plane back to Boston. That was before he had heard of Eduardo Mendes.
“That’s the million dollar question, isn’t it?” Virgil said. He took a long sip of cold water before he began.
“We had a case hanging over this guy’s head. To work it off, he had to give up someone with a gun.”
“Just like that? We can’t work informants so easily.”
“Neither can we. It was off the books. The guy was terrified of being labeled a snitch, so we did it unofficially. We’ve done it before. It always worked out fine.”
“Until there’s a bad shooting.”
“Right up until the very second that there’s a bad shooting. So, no matter what happens with the criminal case, at the end of the day, they’ll hang me over the informant. One way or another, I am finished as a police officer.”
Curtis suggested a little hole in the wall. Virgil said that he could sit in a dive back home. “I want some place big and bright, with Texas written all over it,” he said. They found a bar that looked over the river.
“I want to talk about your man Colon,” said Virgil.
“What can I tell you about him?”
“Start with who killed him.”
“Who pulled the trigger? No one knows for sure. I think Eduardo Mendes had a hand in it.”
“Why?”
“His account ledger. It was steady for a long time. You could set your watch to the transfers. Right after Colon, it went up. Then up again. This is just the revenue stream we know about.”
“How big are we talking?”
“Not big at all. Tens of thousands dollars per transfer. But it adds up. That’s the thing about Colon and his disciples.”
“He has disciples?”
“Another theory I have. Colon sought out people who would adopt his mindset. Slow and low. No bodies.”
“How does a guy run meth in Mexico with no bodies?”
“That’s the secret. That’s what none of these thug crews can understand. Blood brings attention. Especially from us. How he did it? No one knows.”
“You guys couldn’t break into his distribution network?”
“We couldn’t get past the money.”
“Who was running this operation?”
“I was.”
Virgil slowed down some. He refocused.
“Who are his other disciples?”
“His son-in-law, Augustus Villareal.”
“What’s he do?”
“He’s an actor.”
“Would I have seen him in anything?”
“By all accounts, he’s a complete failure. Bad stage actor. He worked some circuit for tourists who wanted culture or some shit. N
o one comes to Mexico for culture.”
“And this guy married the boss’s daughter?”
“No one knows much about her either. Didn’t have much to do with her father when he was alive, and nothing to do with his business. Supposedly, they spend their time in Oaxaca, which is quiet and poor and a nice place to live.”
“I think she likes me,” said Virgil.
“Colon’s daughter? I doubt she likes cops.”
He had meant the girl at the bar. She was cute, but had some late nights in her. Virgil crossed the room to start a conversation. Curtis followed.
“You talk funny,” said the girl with a smile.
“I think you talk funny.”
“Where are you from?” she asked.
“I bet you think you know.”
“Only people from Boston talk as funny as you.”
“You know, Boston was founded in the year fourteen-ninety-two. So by my math, this is how Americans talk, and as one of the new states, Texans should talk just like us, or we might have to ask you all to leave this great country.”
“The rest of you wouldn’t know what to do without Texas. We have lots of oil and the prettiest girls. And we’re tons of fun.”
“I can’t argue with that,” said Virgil.
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