Hers was a good story as far as it went, but there were issues with it—she couldn’t explain the men who cut off her toes. And the old problems at home festered. There was Oscar, her criminal informant, the OPR’s ongoing inquiry, text messages that proved an inappropriate relationship. His death still an open case in Michigan pending the DEA’s investigation. There was her general reputation around the office. People heard things, about Oscar, about Dufresne. She had a reputation for messing dudes up in the head. Her nickname was the Midwife, after all.
There were months of cascading consequences. Endless follow-up interviews with the OPR about Tampico and Monterrey. A tremendous lecture from Cromer. How the Mexicans wanted to interview her, but the DEA brass couldn’t permit such a precedent. How DC smoothed things over with new materiel and a promise to stick her in a cell up here.
She thought maybe she’d be able to skate, work with OPR and her union, but she was sacked for cause on a Tuesday, curbside with a box of her shit when the FBI rolled up.
Dufresne had dropped a dime on her.
It was classically trumped-up bullshit, but it happened that her jaunt to Mexico had flushed out an ongoing investigation into Dufresne’s schemes. A long career of planted evidence, forged signatures, forced confessions, wholesale falsified documents, bribes and payouts, stolen evidence. She was but one accomplice stretching back years.
She was suspended by the State Bar for Brady violations and suspect wiretap applications and indicted for the same. And of course, she was fired from her brand-new new job as a paralegal when Davis, Smiley & Wilkes found out the charges arrayed against her.
Her body had yet to fully heal. Her collarbone ached when she yawned, her ribs when she sneezed. And with her broken eye socket, she’d lost the perfect balance of her features and also certain daily permissions attending to beauty—store clerks clocked her, men ignored her, she was pitied by women on the sly. She looked shifty even to herself, couldn’t imagine what a jury would make of her countenance. Her toes hadn’t healed right, and after another surgery, her cane and convalescing gait situated her in another class of person so utterly that she became invisible.
She had nightmares of the Zetas, woke up in terror that someone was in the room, slept with the light on, didn’t sleep at all.
She couldn’t afford her Culver City apartment and moved into a studio in Glendale near the Kinko’s where she then worked. Her new lawyer was a guy she barely knew from law school who reached out on the premise that he was developing a specialty defending cops, convincing judges to deny Pitchess motions to view police files. When he offhandedly said that he expected her to be sued by some of the very guilty people she’d helped Dufresne put away, for days she did not leave her bed. She let her houseplants die.
She wondered where Carver was, if he’d really abandoned her with hardly a thought. Or had something happened to him? She hadn’t breathed a word to anyone about him or the tunnel or the Concern. She wondered what his game was. Nothing made sense. She knew where the tunnel was—he couldn’t give it back to the Golfos if that was his plan, not without silencing her. And the longer he didn’t reach out, the more likely it could be that she would tell.
She’d nearly died because of him.
“He’ll get you killed,” the CIA guy had said.
Every morning she entertained a wild range of anxieties and hopes. That he would come for her. That he’d been killed. That the CIA had caught him. That her killers were en route. But the tunnel was her leverage. Or was it just a contrivance? She had no way of knowing. Why hadn’t he reached out? She’d never felt so lonesome in her life.
Even good news was immediately ruined by fresh bullshit. The week she got a special insole so she might run again, she had a hearing where the prosecuting attorney reported that new information had come to light. She could be a flight risk. A redacted memorandum from the Central Intelligence Agency was submitted to the court as evidence that she’d not been fully forthcoming about her time in Tampico and Monterrey. The judge offered her the chance to speak to the document’s contents, her lawyer advised silence at this time, and the judge put her under house arrest and ordered a monitor clapped onto her right ankle.
Carlisle and Bowden sat in the rear of the otherwise empty courtroom. Afterward, they were waiting outside, Bowden eating a frozen yogurt, Carlisle with her eyes closed against the sun. She knew what they wanted. She’d spent the past several months thinking that very thing.
“You don’t know where he is,” Harbaugh said.
“We think he’s going to reach out,” Carlisle said.
“Why?”
“Reasons.”
Bowden tossed the yogurt cup into a trash bin and came over to her. “If you assist us, we can help with your sentencing.”
“You just put me under house arrest.”
“Do you love him?” Carlisle asked. “Is that it?”
She didn’t love him, she wasn’t in love with him. She had thought that through. She’d maybe never been in love her whole life. But she did want the Concern.
“There are things you’re not telling us.” Bowden handed her a card. “But you can.”
Every night after leaving Kinko’s, she ran home. Unevenly, like a jalopy. But it felt good, to bounce and use the muscles in her legs, to swing her arms. Even the pain in her knee, the burn in her lungs, those things felt good, too. As she ran, everything simplified. She treasured that.
Childs was waiting outside her apartment with a six-pack.
“Looking good,” he said. Of her, of her running, maybe both.
“The hell I do,” she said.
He assessed her in the same way he had ever since he’d pulled the hood off her head in Mexico, like a doctor observing her progress, silently noting what was and what wasn’t permanent. She adored him for it as much as she despised being subject to it, neither of which she could put into words.
“Beer?” she said, panting. “You? Beer?”
He said his days of being a temple were over—his wife was pregnant, it was all about Baby Girl now. She let him inside and he looked around her apartment and the dead plants for a moment and then started straightening up. She coaxed him away from folding her blankets and onto the little patio that overlooked the worse apartments across the street.
“I’m surprised to see you,” she said.
He’d been barred from speaking to her during the OPR investigations. When she was fired, he’d called to condole, and a few times after that.
“I’m sorry I haven’t been over. Are you mad at me? You’re mad at me.”
“Of course I’m not mad,” she said. She wasn’t.
“I’m sorry anyway.”
“You saved my life, Childs. I could never be mad at you.”
She stood up and leaned out over the railing and scanned the street. They were like that for a minute, and then she asked how was work.
“I been checked out since we got back from Monterrey. Morale’s low.” He sighed. “Everyone bailing or fixing to.”
“You too?”
“Got an offer from this security start-up looking for guys who know some shit. I guess I know some shit. Moving up to the Bay Area soon.”
“Congratulations, Childs. That’s great.”
She made him pick up his abandoned beer and clink it and drink.
“You know some shit too.”
She took him to mean he’d put in a good word. “That’s sweet of you,” she said in a way that said for him to let the matter drop.
She caught him looking at her ankle monitor. She wondered if he was thinking of a prison watchtower now, like she was. Like she did a lot of the time.
“You shower with that?”
“The worst part is I can’t run at night.”
He set his beer down. She knew he wouldn’t drink any more.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Shoot, partner.”
“Who were those guys that hurt you?”
She fingered
the lip of her beer. Drank.
“Diane.”
“Why do you want to know?”
“They cut off your toes!”
“Maybe I don’t tell you things for your own good. Like Oscar. Like what I did for Dufresne in Sacramento.”
He crossed his arms, paid out a long gorilla sigh, a growl. “I should’ve been down there with you.”
“No, you shouldn’t have. You’re straight, and I’m as crooked as—”
“Fuck that, I don’t care. Every time I see you now . . . I haven’t been by because when I see you, I think of when I took that hood off your head.”
“Just imagine mirrors. Imagine every morning.”
“I can’t forgive myself for what happened.”
“I know, Russell.” She took his hand. “But I don’t blame you. You saved me.”
He took her face in his hands. “I told you it was hard to tell which way your luck was running, but you can see now, right?” he asked, wiping away her tears. She’d been crying the moment he took her face. “It’s a real bad streak you’re on.”
She looked away.
“Listen to me,” he said and held her face until her eyes locked with his. “Dufresne is gonna do federal time in protective custody for the rest of his life.”
She couldn’t bear his eyes, but he waited for her to look at him.
“If there’s a deal to make, make it.”
That last day Carver was in Monterrey. Going on about how long it should take, what all is in the fridge, making her promise not to go outside, not to use her phone. Promises she broke, broken promises that cost her two toes. They’ll let us slip away out of kindness, I suppose, but neverthefuckingless don’t go for a run and if you have to use that phone, use it on the move. In an emergency to call the States. But but but but if anything happens. And I mean this in all two thousand percent sincerity, I’ll come for you. I’ll break you out of Fort Knox.
She was calling the people who hadn’t picked up their orders. An English professor’s reading assignments in spiral bindings. Several screenwriters. A small series of brochures for a motel in Eagle Pass.
Eagle Pass.
She thumbed through them. Stock photos. E pluribus unums where text in English should be. A phone number.
She quaked. Expecting his voice, desperate to hear it again, she didn’t wait to call.
“Where you calling from?” asked a not-his voice on the other end.
“Kinko’s,” she said, knowing it was the wrong answer.
The line went dead.
She thought about this. She dialed again.
“Where you calling from?”
“Fort Knox,” she said.
A pause.
Then the voice gave an address in Silverlake. Five p.m., he said, be there two days from now.
At the end of her shift, she closed her till and left the Kinko’s and walked around the block, tingling. All the things she’d been wondering were at hand. Why oh why had it taken so long. Whether this was for real. Whether the tunnel was real. Whether the call was even from him, or some kind of setup from Carlisle. Some kind of setup from him. How he’d known where she worked. Who was watching her. Whether she should just run, whether she was a loose end.
She was up all night. She called Bowden the next morning.
She met them at the Chase building in Burbank, the top floor where the FBI had taken up residence just under a dozen satellite dishes and digital antennas to monitor the Armenian mob. She’d heard of the place, but was well astonished at all the millions of dollars in state-of-the-art surveillance gear.
The conference room was already populated with Carlisle and Bowden, several other men and women, FBI or intelligence. And Dufresne, pale as a paper target next to his rumpled lawyer.
Carlisle was holding a carafe and a cup.
“Coffee?”
“What the hell is this?”
Carlisle poured herself a coffee and sat. Dufresne wouldn’t meet her gaze. The coward.
“What’s he doing here?”
Bowden closed a folder. “These are agents Kelly, Garland, and Yates of the FBI. You know Mr. Dufresne. That’s his attorney, Mr. Riley. And over there is Ms. Hennessey on behalf of the district attorney’s office. The DA couldn’t make it, but she can speak for their office.”
She stood in stunned silence at what was arrayed against her.
“Please sit.”
“I’m out of here.”
“Unlike you, we don’t go off half-cocked to Mexico,” Carlisle said. “We like to get all the parties together and gain consensus.”
“What about my lawyer?”
Bowden stood, followed her out to the elevator.
“Okay, you’re feeling ambushed. But this is just to set the ground rules. The FBI has been building a case against Mr. Dufresne for some time. They accelerated their investigation after your dustup in Mexico, seeing as it was connected to Mr. Dufresne’s numerous illegal activities. We’ve assured them that that is not the case. That you were not on some mission to Tampico at your supervisor’s behest. Mr. Dufresne has agreed to testify to such, and moreover that you were coerced by him, provided you help us with the sensitive matter you called about. This was my idea.”
Bowden had turned around, was gesturing at the agents and lawyers watching them. When he turned back around and looked at Harbaugh with surprisingly candid and soulful eyes and beckoned her to head back in with him, she almost did.
She pressed the button for the elevator.
“We can wait for your lawyer,” he said. “I thought you’d appreciate this. I mean, we could’ve made no gesture whatsoever.”
The elevator took forever. He moved around in front of her, not blocking the doors, but almost.
“You don’t deserve this,” he said. “You really didn’t do anything wrong. Some crafty omissions as a DA. Getting close to an informant—”
“I don’t need you to tell me that I did nothing wrong.”
The elevator arrived, and she climbed on. He held the door.
“What I’m saying is that you have a sympathetic audience, despite Agent Carlisle’s two cents. Everyone in that room, every lawyer and agent sitting at that conference table, has bent the rules to get where they are.”
“You ever wonder if maybe the system is the problem?” she asked. “And that’s why we game it?”
“He really got under your lid, didn’t he?”
She only just then realized that she’d been parroting Carver’s words.
“You called me,” he said, standing aside for her to come out. “Tell us what you know.”
She ate her lunch and didn’t go back to work, just walked into a hardware store like a regular citizen. She freed a bolt cutter from its packaging and cut the monitor off and left it and the bolt cutter on the floor and marched outside and called a cab and threw her cell phone away and rode to the address on Silverlake Boulevard.
It was a cute little house up off the street level. Stairs cut into the hill. Fresh sod, landscaping. She wondered if Carver was in there. She climbed the stairs, knocked on the door. A pair of familiar eyes looking out from behind the little gate, and then the door swung open. The sicario. Tomás.
“Oh god,” she said, waiting to be shot or struck or in any way killed.
But she was not.
He stood in the doorway with a cane, looking at her curiously.
She instinctively turned and made her body a smaller target.
“You’re early,” he said.
“For what?” she asked warily, trying to begin to understand what exactly the fuck was going on.
“I thought we’d eat.”
“Eat?”
“Pollo,” he said. He looked out at the street. “And then we leave town. Come inside.”
She remained where she stood, how she stood.
“Fuck that. What are you doing here?”
“This is my house. Come in, please.”
“Where is it you think we are going?
”
“Eagle Pass, of course.”
They stood there regarding one another.
“Okay,” he said, heading back inside. “Then stay there.”
He returned with two plates of food. Chicken steaming and shredded. Beans, tortillas, limes, sliced peppers and radishes. He gave them to her, went inside, and returned with two bottles of beer. He nodded for her to sit and he stood next to the steps and they traded a plate for a beer and ate on the stoop. It began to seem oddly apt that they would meet again. Like all their previous encounters were missed connections of a kind, and now they could catch up.
“Carver and Goran visited me in the hospital.”
“Goran?”
“The Serbian. You will meet him. And the others.”
“What?”
“I’m going to bring you to Carver. That’s what you want, correct?”
She wondered if she believed him or just wanted to believe him. Then she thought it didn’t really matter.
“I’m with the Concern now,” Tomás said.
“I see.”
“Eat.”
She nodded at his cane and hip. “I’m sorry about that,” she said.
“A misunderstanding,” he said, waving at the air. “You almost died, too. No one has ever escaped El Motown.”
“El Motown?”
“The man who hurt you.”
“He cut off my toes.”
“I didn’t know that.”
“I had them reattached. I can walk, I can run,” she said.
“Good.”
“I want to kill him,” she said, without compunction.
“You need to work on your aim,” he said, grinning. “Eat, please. We must go soon.”
They swapped cars in several parking garages on the way out of Los Angeles. She had only the clothes on her back. He searched and discarded her wallet. He searched her. She realized as they bore east that this was precisely the kind of thing a person might do—a person skilled in killing people—before killing someone.
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