Harbaugh spun some toilet paper into her hand and wiped her face and nose.
Get it together, woman.
“Yeah. Yes. Who’s asking?”
“I’m sorry, I saw you go in and was waiting, but well, after a little while I came in and . . .”
“Hon. Out with it.”
“There’s a call.”
“No. Not now.”
“It’s just that he keeps calling back over and over.”
“Hold on.”
She looked at the snotty paper in her hand and she shuddered out the last of her urgent angry lonesome tragic sadness—put that shit in a box!—and stood and straightened herself and stepped out. A woman in a long pencil skirt was just inside the doorway, halted mid-departure. Strawberry hair. An awkward sympathy, a sympathetic awkwardness, something, whatever.
“Get in here,” Harbaugh said.
“He’s on the landline, actually.”
“He keeps calling over and over, you said, get in here.”
The woman stepped inside, and Harbaugh went to the sinks. The woman stood behind her and watched Harbaugh in the mirror as she scrubbed her face, tied up her hair. Harbaugh looked her in the eye the whole time.
“What’s your name?”
“Cynthia.”
“Want some advice?”
The woman looked at the door and then back at Harbaugh. Kind of a rube, this one. Citizen of NorCal?
“I feel like I should?”
“Stay at the track,” Harbaugh said.
“I’m sorry?”
“It’s a nice day. The horses are ready to run. Get a beer and bet the ponies, Cindy.”
“Cynthia.”
Harbaugh nodded. “So who is it?” she asked.
“Huh?” Forget NorCal, probably Nevada. You could see tumbleweeds in the thought bubble over her head.
“On the phone, hon.”
“Oh! A Mr. Travis? From Mexico? Says he’ll only talk to Agent Diane Harbaugh.”
“Right. Mr. Travis,” Harbaugh said wryly, wiping her eyes again. She adjusted her T-shirt, which was bunched up on her shoulder. She had a look at herself. Her flushed face, her blue eyes gone puffy.
“You like this T-shirt?” she asked. Cynthia wore a cardigan against the air conditioning, small pearl earrings, and a nice thin watch. She looked relieved, even pleased, to have an answer to this question.
“Oh, I do,” she said. “I love Jane’s Addiction.”
Tumbleweeds, trailers, whiskey Cokes. Reno. A hundred dollars says she’s pure uncut Reno.
She didn’t want to see Dufresne again or anyone from the team, so she took the call at the duty desk. Two desks with a shitty view southeast of downtown. Helicopters hovering. News and PD both. She figured she’d take the call and then . . . well, what? Something. Could take your own advice and go bet the ponies. Could fly somewhere. Throw a dart at a map.
But—and the thought came suddenly—who would she go with?
Her father dust and ashes set loose by her one summer day five years ago on Mount Elbert. Her mother with maybe not even six months sobriety this time. Camping out in her guest room wouldn’t help her stave off the jones for vikes and vodka. Her stepfather, fuck that. It’d been at least a decade. Her exes, double-fuck that. Thinking about any of them made her want to laugh.
Meaning, you got nobody.
Which’s nothing new.
So pick up the phone. Do the thing, you bad bitch you—
“Hello,” she said. “Mr. Travis?”
“Is this Agent Harbaugh?”
“Yes.”
“Diane Harbaugh?”
“Yes.”
“You don’t know me,” he said.
No shit.
“No, I don’t.”
“I’m not calling at random. So I’d appreciate it if you didn’t hang up on me again.”
“This is the first we’ve spoken.”
“Yeah, but I’ve been disconnected more times—”
“Sir, I’m on the line. I’m here now.”
Christ.
“Right,” he said, clearing his throat. “So this gentleman came by my office, and he asked me to call you. Well, more like demanded.”
“What gentleman?”
“Now, that I don’t know exactly. He will not say his name. I’ve tried to get it over and over.”
“Okay, that’s a little strange.”
She took a pen from a cup of them and slid a notepad in front of her. Flipped to a blank page.
“What I think, too. But he is sitting right here across from me, still shaking his head no.”
“Okay, fine. Can I talk to him then?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am, but he won’t take the phone.”
She scoffed. What the hell am I supposed to do, dude?
“Okay, well, what are we doing here?”
“I’m calling from Tampico, Tamaulipas, Mexico. He says . . .” She could hear him muffling the phone, then bringing it back. “Says, ‘El Capataz necesita su ayuda. Está listo.’ That make sense, or you need me to translate?”
El Capataz. The Foreman. She didn’t need a translator. But it didn’t make sense either.
“No, I got it.”
“Ma’am? What he’s asking is, do you remember him?”
“Hold on, Mr. Travis,” she said.
She pressed the space bar on the woman’s computer and the LCD display lit up, but of course she wasn’t logged in.
“I’ve been on hold for a good while already—”
“I’ll stay on the line. I just need a second. All right?”
“Okay, but hurry.”
Rather than risk disconnecting him with the hold button, she set the phone down on the desk. She got up and looked down the hall. She found Cynthia standing in front of the open refrigerator, sniffing and discarding old takeout.
“Cindy? Cynthia. Do you have access to TILLER?”
“I don’t even know what that is.”
“Come here.”
They were a few moments logging Cynthia out of her machine, logging Harbaugh in, opening the TILLER database. Cynthia bent over the keyboard, Harbaugh sitting on the desk, her hand over the receiver.
“Type in ‘El Capataz.’”
“In the Known Aliases field?”
“Yep.”
“Didn’t sound like a given name.”
“Nope,” Harbaugh said, and then picked up the phone. “Mr. Travis?”
“I’m here.”
“Just another second, okay?”
She watched the database load. Several names. Nothing familiar.
“He wants you to come down here,” Travis said.
“I’m sorry?”
“He wants to meet face-to-face.”
“In Tampa— Where again?”
“Tampico. Tamaulipas, Mexico.”
She covered the receiver.
“Cross-reference Tampico, Mexico,” she said to Cynthia, then into the receiver, “Tamaulipas?”
“Yes. Tomorrow.”
At that she laughed outright. No way she was going to fly down to Mexico off of some random call. She couldn’t.
“Call me back at this number with your flight information, and I’ll get a car,” Travis said.
Or could you?
“Hold on now. There’s a protocol for this sort of thing.” Loads of protocol. Approvals. Dufresne would have to—
Cynthia turned the monitor around for her to see. No names.
“And I’m not empowered to simply meet with, well, who? And I don’t even know what this is regarding.”
“Hang on,” Travis said. He was holding the phone away. She heard some muffled talk. “He says you gave him your card. He says you should remember him.”
“What’s his actual name, Mr. Travis?”
Cynthia looked at her, hands over the keys, ready to type in whatever Harbaugh heard.
“He says to come alone. Tomorrow. I have to go.”
“I need to know who he is.”
“Please just call me back with that flight info,” Travis said, “and I’ll take care of the rest. I’m being told to hang up now.”
“Wait!”
The line went dead.
“Hung up?” Cynthia asked.
Harbaugh looked out the window at the helicopters at their stationary positions in the sky, motionless save for their blurred rotors. At the end of the chase.
“What do you want to do?” Cynthia asked.
She thought about going to the airport, the idea of it, of getting on a plane, of leaving for Tampico, of leaving for anywhere. The traffic. How long things take.
She couldn’t remember meeting the guy. But meet, they did. She set the phone back in its cradle and stood.
“Let’s pull some files,” she said, setting the phone back in the cradle. “I’m feeling lucky.”
Chapter Six
No Rider
Harbaugh was back at Santa Anita in time for the penultimate race. All that remained of the crowd was a smattering of old Mexican cowboys in faded jeans and Chinese men and women perched over stat sheets in front of the bank of televisions. She got a tallboy of Budweiser (Bud Heavy, full flavor, no lite shit today) from the enormous bar on the club level. The California sun glowed pink on the mountains, and she plopped down across from Childs right where she’d left him. She chugged the beer. He looked at her with a little alarm.
“Goddamn,” he said. She grinned. He called the waiter over for a club soda. A father of two, Childs had a gorgeous, witty wife who was awfully grateful he wasn’t a soldier anymore, yet he remained too vain to let a beer calorie pass his lips.
“I’m in the penalty box,” she said, burping and grinning. “OPR got me by the dick.”
“The hell for?”
A twentysome-minute monologue explaining the whole thing to Childs. From the very beginning. At times she felt like a fool explaining it all, circling back into background, like some idiot who didn’t know how to tell a story, how to start a story, but screw it, she told it anyway, there was no way to understand if she didn’t give every detail.
Every detail except the shady stuff, the Brady violations, the end-around-the-federal-court wiretap applications. She did tell about her coming over to DEA at Dufresne’s urging. And about the buttonhole moment in the coat check, the work crush of it all, the double standard of it all. Then onto the things he already knew: Michigan, Bronwyn, that suicidal piece of shit Oscar. And finally telling how she ended up crying in the stall alone, foolish and panicked that she’d never be able to work again.
Childs sipped his drink the whole time, listening sincerely, as far as she could tell.
“I’m not perfect in this,” she said, burping like a codger, “but what the actual fuck?”
“The actual fuck?” He waited for Teetering Bridges to beat Beekeeper at Play by a half-length, the horses urging one another forward, oblivious to anything but each other. “The actual-actual fuck is that when superiors and subordinates have any kind of thing, the subordinates are the ones get screwed over. Just like the army.”
“Dufresne, though?”
“Dude is cool. But a boss is a boss, covers his own ass. Don’t forget that.”
She drank her beer and looked over the track, the shadows of the infield stands lengthening, the San Gabriels as dry and angled as folded butcher paper.
“You didn’t bet, did you?”
“I should’ve. You were more right than wrong.”
“Told you. Let me see your program,” she said. “Gotta get in on the last one.”
He looked at her beer, the cash she already had in hand, and shook his head. “Girl, you pretty much a hot mess. Go home, get some sleep.”
She grinned and took the program. “Oh, but we haven’t even talk-talked yet.”
At the upstairs bar she scanned the names and odds. A guy on the phone next to her was doing a pill deal, loudly announcing to some bro that he had five Percocets “not fifteen minutes from there.” She slapped her badge on the bar for him to see. He looked annoyed, and then his expression slackened in sudden understanding. He edged away, the idiot.
She ended up choosing the two odds-on favorites, Cheshire’s Smile and Scarlet Street, both at 3 to 1. And an Irish long shot by the name of Molly’s Revenge. Not one a mudder, from what she could divine from their past races, all clean and fast horses.
When she returned with her slip, she inquired after Lima.
“Only seen a couple white boys in fedoras getting manhandled out of the Champagne Room. He’s got a suite at the Langham. We’ll put eyes on him tomorrow. So what’s this other thing?”
She sipped her new beer.
“Remember when I was just starting out, how I’d give my card to everyone got pinched?”
“Yeah, seed the room.”
“Right, give ’em all the same line: ‘Look, man, one day you’re gonna want to talk to someone. It should be me.’”
“Heard you with that bullshit a billion and one times.”
“Well, that bullshit worked.” She took the binoculars out of their case and watched for numbers 3, 5, and 8. Her ponies. “One of those dudes called me.”
“Really.”
“Remember that raid in La Palma, like, five, six years ago?”
“Those Mara motherfuckers.”
“Right. But there were a bunch of dudes we picked up that day, non-Mara, had nothing on them. Weren’t on the list, no priors, no cause, we couldn’t keep them without calling ICE.”
“Yeah.”
“Do you remember that proud motherfucker would only give his name as El Capataz? The Foreman?”
She slid a printout of the file from the deconfliction database. Set up by Homeland Security shortly after 9/11, TILLER cross-referenced data from every federal agency.
“Fuuuuuck. He’s basically a number two now? In the CDG? Is this for real?”
She nodded, and Childs whistled at the image of a very high-up man in the Cartel del Golfo—El Capataz, Gustavo Acuña Cárdenas.
“I don’t know exactly where he sits on the org chart, but Acuña is El Capataz. It was a bitch to find him, though. I had to get deep in the manila, but I remembered seeing ‘El Capataz’ in some wire transcript. I finally found it—he was ID’d there as Acuña.”
“But there’s no mention of Acuña as El Capataz in TILLER?”
“That’s the weird part. He doesn’t have a jacket here or in Mexico.”
“A guy that senior?”
“So he’s managed to stay out of trouble, he’s connected, whatever. But then I saw that no one has searched his file. Not once. I mean, isn’t the whole point of TILLER deconfliction? So we can know who else has been watching a guy like this?”
“Right, there should be a dozen DEA agents listed here, at least. ATF, FBI . . . even the Coast Guard could’ve pinged his file at least once.”
“But look here.” She pointed to the Date Created field.
“His file was created two days ago? Well, that explains why no one’s searched it.”
“But it doesn’t say who created it. He calls me out of the blue two days after he mysteriously appears in TILLER? Something’s going on.”
“It’s weird,” he said, sliding the printout to her. “But there could be a lot of explanations.”
She watched the horses being led out through the binoculars. Scarlet Street was a feisty bay taking lunging steps. A promising sign.
“So what’d he want?”
She watched Cheshire’s Smile surge sideward like he might sunfish like a rodeo bronc. “Me,” she said.
“What do you mean, you?”
She pulled down the binoculars and gave him a get this look. “To meet him in Tampico,” she said. “Alone.”
Childs blew out a considerable breath and laced his hands behind his head. “Alone?”
“By tomorrow.”
“That’s—”
“Impossible. I’d have to get Dufresne’s okay, just for starters.”
�
�That ain’t happening. Not after today.”
“Right.”
“Besides, Dufresne’d have to clear it with the ASAC,” she said. “Who would then go to the SAC.”
“And the SAC in Mexico City would have to get the State Department’s okay.”
“And Mexico City would have to notify our ‘Mexicans partners.’ Federales. Local policía.”
She looked through the binoculars again. Spotted her other horse, Molly’s Revenge, an angry filly tossing her piebald head, skittish. Good girl.
“I have a feeling El Capataz doesn’t want this done the normal way,” she said. “He doesn’t trust the Mexican cops, so he’s going way back to an old connection with our side.”
“I buy that,” Childs said.
“But why’s his TILLER file brand-new? And why can’t we see who created it? Something’s up.”
She resumed watching through the binoculars, the horses entering the starting gates, the jockey struggling to get settled on Molly’s Revenge. She had a feeling these were the right horses. When she put the binoculars down, she saw that Childs had slid the printout back to her. Like he didn’t want to touch it.
“So, what? You want to go?”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Even if Dufresne didn’t hate me now, there’s no way we could set this up inside a week, let alone a day. And if I just popped down there on my own? On top of all this trouble I’m already in?”
Bettors filed down to the fence along the track to watch the last race. The air had cooled some. Beer in hand, she shivered in the shade.
“Oh, don’t play,” he said as the race started.
“What?” she asked.
“We both know what you’re gonna do!” he said over the staccato barks of the race announcer.
She looked at him to say more, but the magnetic valence of the race pulled their attention back to the track. She took up the binoculars, the horses vibrating in her shaking hands. Cheshire’s Smile and Scarlet Street dashed out to a competitive lead in the first three furlongs. Molly’s Revenge was stuck somewhere in the back third, and Harbaugh found herself losing heart as she fell farther after the turn. Maybe she was wrong about the filly.
“I’ll just call Mexico City myself and let them handle it!” she shouted.
Molly’s Revenge was dead last, but surging around the second turn. C’mon girl, Harbaugh urged. The horse sped into the middle of the pack, finding her rhythm as Cheshire Smile and Scarlet Street traded the lead.
Make Them Cry Page 5