Above the Law (13 page)

“Some restaurant. I don’t know. Whatever she chooses.” Riva assumed I was in my motel room, that Nora and I would be going to dinner in a public restaurant.

“I’m sure the choices are many and varied.”

“I’ve got a feeling not.” I was vamping. I didn’t want to tell my wife that I was eating Nora’s home-cooked meal, that it was only the two of us in Nora’s house, out in the countryside.

I didn’t know why I didn’t want to tell her, I wasn’t trying to hide anything, nothing was going on, or would. It just didn’t feel right to tell her; anyone who’s ever been on the road has had this feeling at some time or another. Nora was a part of my life Riva didn’t know about. That Nora and I had never in any way been romantic didn’t matter—she was a woman, she was out of my past. Any explanation, no matter how benign, might not be a satisfactory one.

Nothing was going to happen, so why build a nest of doubt in her head?

Nora’s bedroom door was opening. “We’re about to go have dinner,” I said into the phone. “I’ll call you tomorrow, around this time.”

“Is she there?” Not suspicious, but suddenly curious.

“I see her car pulling up, out the window.” An actual lie, now. Fuck me.

“We’ll be here.”

She’d believed me, of course. Which was the way it should be. I was clean as a whistle. Why give her a reason to feel there’s any mistrust when there is none? Why risk hurt, even if it’s only a paper cut? “Give Buck a kiss for me.”

“I will.”

Nora came into the kitchen. She’d exchanged her work clothes for a loose sweater and jeans. Wool socks, no shoes. I smiled at her, held up a finger. “And you, too,” I told the telephone.

“I love you, Luke,” Riva told me from six hundred miles away.

“Me, too,” I told her back. And hung up.

“Everything okay on the home front?” Nora asked, obviously not wanting to pry.

“Fine and dandy.” I handed her the other glass I’d poured. We clinked, each taking a sip. To twenty years: long time ago.

I sipped my wine in the living room and watched a few minutes of what passes for the news on television these days while Nora put the finishing touches on dinner, then joined her at the table in the kitchen alcove when she announced. it was ready: stew over rice, green salad, Pillsbury Doughboy biscuits thawed in the microwave—a working woman has to use some shortcuts, even my gourmet-chef wife rarely makes biscuits from scratch anymore. I was flattered that Nora had gone to the trouble to cook at all. Of course, I’d traveled several hundred miles to do her a favor, so I guess she thought she should try to please me, and here was a way.

I sat down, placed my napkin on my lap like the little gentleman my mother taught me to be, took a taste. Nora watched, waiting for me to pass judgment on her culinary talents.

The flavors exploded in my mouth. “This is…talk about finger-lickin’ good!” I didn’t have to pretend—it was delicious. A rich mélange of meat, potatoes, tomatoes, other vegetables, thick brown biscuit-sopping gravy. “Range-fed, the beef? Not from some grocery-store meat counter.” I’m a connoisseur of this shit. I can tell.

“It’s venison.” She smiled back. “Deer. Like, you know…?” She made antlers on her forehead with her ringers.

I looked at a square of meat on the prongs of my fork. “How outdoorsy. Did you hunt it?” Making a life up here, wearing lumberjack socks, why not?

She shook her head. “I can eat Bambi, but I can’t kill him. All the guys hunt. One of the sheriff’s deputies bagged this one. I bought half a side off him. Stew meat, steaks, hamburger. I’ve got a big freezer in the garage—de rigueur around here. Nice break from eating cow shot up with steroids, raised in some feedlot.”

“It’s very good,” I said, properly chastised. “My compliments to the chef.”

She smiled—the best smile I’d seen on her face. Even her eyes smiled with this smile.

“It’s nice to cook for someone who appreciates it. Unless I’m having a working dinner, I usually eat alone, a sandwich over the kitchen sink.” She brought the pot over from the stove, ladled me out another helping without asking if I wanted it.

When dinner was over and I was full-and-well-stuffed, we took the bottle and our glasses into the living room. We sat on the couch, discreetly apart, no body parts touching. “Can we talk some business?” she asked. “I didn’t wipe you out with that heavy meal?”

“I’m fine. All I’m doing is listening, right?”

“Okay. Get comfortable.”

She opened her briefcase, pulled out a thick stack of papers. “Tonight’s homework assignment.” She smiled at me. “I’ll tell you what’s in it later. For now I’ll fill you in on what’s happened, what I think.” She plunked the papers on the coffee table, swung around on the couch so that her back was against one edge, drew her legs up. I did the same, so that we were both comfy and facing each other.

It was all very domestic. You wouldn’t have known, looking at us, that we hadn’t laid eyes on each other for almost two decades. You’d probably think we were an old married couple, settled in for the duration, sharing each other’s end-of-the-workday trials and tribulations, the way Riva and I do.

“What do you know about this case?” she began.

“Not much. Big government bust that went south and got some people killed on both sides.”

She nodded. “It falls under the category of ‘you can’t teach an old dog new tricks,’ which they own the patent on. But in this case it was particularly pathetic because they violated a direct order from the top of their own food chain.”

She had my attention. “How?”

“The prisoner who escaped, if you want to dignify what happened, wasn’t supposed to be killed. He was supposed to be brought in alive. That was the entire point of the stupid operation, which was ill-conceived from the get-go. Catch him and bring him back alive. If you can’t, abort. This from her ladyship Reno, no less.”

“So maybe someone wanted him dead, bad enough to incur the wrath of the A.G. herself?” That followed logically, anyone could see where that was going. “Because it’s a tar brush that has to splatter everyone who comes anywhere near contact with it.”

“Which is happening, although the DEA’s been doing their best to paint a happy face on it.”

Now she really had my attention. “How the hell could they do that? The guy was their prisoner, wasn’t he? In their custody?”

“Yes.”

“So…?” If the government was spin-doctoring this, they were really desperate to cover something up. But what? “Hasn’t the DEA been investigating this? This was a federal bust.”

“Oh, yeah.” She was pissed, I could hear it, see it in the wrinkles in her face. “They’ve been investigating the crap out of it for almost six months. You couldn’t walk down a street in this town without encountering a federal agent. Charming men, the locals were in tears when the last stage rolled out of town. They only pulled out a couple of weeks ago. There’s a token unit down in Reno still, but they’re done. Signed, sealed, and delivered.”

“So what did they find out? They do a good enough job with that stuff.”

“Yes. Unless it’s their own people who might be in play, which doesn’t only mean their agency, it can be any alphabet agency, as long as they’re federal. Then maybe they don’t find out what they should.”

“Are you saying there’s been a cover-up?”

I needed to slow this down—she’d had six months to build up a head of steam, and now, with a captive and friendly audience, the lid was blowing.

“Let’s put it this way. If you go into an investigation with a particular theory, you can find facts that support that theory, to the exclusion of others that might be the right ones.”

“Which is what, in this case?”

“It could be a couple of things. Or more. One is that one of the agents shot the prisoner and won’t admit it.”

“On purpose or accidentally?”

“Not exactly accidentally. More in the heat of the moment. Your blood’s up, you’ve been in this incredible firefight which was a horrible miscalculation, some of your friends have been killed, you finally catch your target and then he manages to escape, which is a story unto itself, maybe part of the killing, maybe not. You’re running through the woods like a blind pig, it’s unfamiliar terrain, you’re wired and scared, you aren’t wearing your Kevlar vest anymore because the chase was over, the quarry was taken down, you were relaxing your guard. And you’re the first one to stumble across him and the fear kicks in, you’re not thinking straight, you can’t, you’re scared you’re going to shit your pants your adrenaline’s running so high. You see him and he sees you and you know for sure he’s armed—if he could escape from the heavy custody you had him in, he has to have a gun, too, right? So you take him down. And immediately realize you made a big boo-boo, and you fade away with the rest of the troops and pray they can’t connect you.”

She paused. She was almost out of breath, reliving this plot-line.

I stared at her, trying to catch up. “That’s a lot of coincidences that have to come together,”

She nodded in agreement.

“Tantamount to a whitewash, almost.”

“Yes,” Nora agreed. “It is.”

My stomach felt queasy.

“However, that’s not their main theory, fortunately. It’s a backup.” She pivoted and swung her feet onto the floor. “Do you want coffee?”

“If it’s no trouble.”

“It’s already made. How do you take it?”

“A little milk. Black’s fine if you don’t have any milk.”

“I’ve got milk.” She padded off into the kitchen.

I sat back; digesting what she’d told me so far. It wasn’t much. I didn’t think the DEA would run with that theory, unless they were truly desperate. Not after all the other calamities that have gone down this past decade and a half. But you never can tell—arrogance, of which they are not in short supply, can bring forth great strangeness in men and institutions.

“Want a toot in your coffee?” Nora called out from the kitchen.

“Are you?”

“On the side. It’s domestic brandy; a sophisticate like you might prefer it masqueraded in Java.”

“I’ll go with the flow.”

She came back in from the kitchen carrying a tray with two thick coffee mugs, a small pitcher of milk, sugar, spoons, two Hennessy promotional snifters, a bottle of brandy. I know the brand. It’s fine for cooking. She placed the tray on the coffee table.

“I’ll take mine in my coffee after all,” I told her.

She smiled as she handed me the bottle. Again with her eyes as well. My presence was having a salubrious effect on her. She was hungry for a connection, that was obvious—a touchstone from her earlier life, when times were good and horizons were limitless.

I laced my coffee, handed her the bottle. She poured a couple of fingers into a snifter. I wondered if she was a solitary drinker, imbibing her evening wine—or stronger stuff—in the company of one, a middle-aged woman alone in a world she could not have, in her wildest dreams, expected to live in.

She swung her legs up, coffee mug in her lap, the snifter on the. table, an easy arm’s reach. “Okay.” She squiggled herself comfortable. “Here comes the theory they’re selling. Ready?”

I tasted my coffee. It was good—the brandy gave it the right combination of oomph and smoothness. “I’m …”

Our toes were touching. The tippies, socks to socks. Unconscious on her part. Her toes were warm. I guess mine were, too. I’m sure she didn’t notice. She had nothing to feel guilty about.

If I moved my feet away, though, she might notice. And then she might be embarrassed that I was thinking something she wasn’t intending, which could lead to further embarrassment, which could lead to …so I didn’t move them.

“I’m ready,” I told her.

“One of Juarez’s own people greased him.” She reached for her brandy and knocked down half, eyeballing me over the rim of the snifter.

Evidently I’d missed something. “I don’t get it. The baddies were either under arrest by then, or dead.” I paused. “Weren’t they?”

“Well, yes. Then again, maybe not.” She leaned forward, elbows on knees. The toe-pressure increased a tad, but she was too deep into her recitation to notice.

“Juarez almost wasn’t found. If they hadn’t had dogs, he wouldn’t have been. And this was with the troops knowing he was there. Their snitch put him there. But they didn’t know who all the other players were, who they were, how many there were.”

I took a hit off my coffee. I was glad there was brandy in it, listening to this. “Okay. I’m with you so far. And therefore, the conclusion is …”

“One or more of Juarez’s people didn’t get caught or killed,” Nora continued, “even though the house was a killing field. Wait’ll you see the pictures and the video. It was a fire-fight like you see in footage on Vietnam or Cambodia. They survived the attack and …”

I made a
T
with my hands—time-out. “So these survivors managed to sneak into a heavily guarded area, let him loose—then kill him. His compadres. That’s where this is going?” Shit, man, the world is getting way too surreal if anyone can spin a yarn like this, much less think anyone’s ever going to believe it. Or even worse, believe it themselves.

“Give that man a panda.” She finished her brandy, helped herself to more. I could’ve used something straight and strong myself; if I came back for dinner again, I thought, I’d bring a decent bottle. Not that I had plans to spend another evening with Nora in her house.

“Aside from the difficulty of the logistics,” I asked, “why would they do that? What’s the brilliant DEA theory there?”

“There’s two.”

“Which are?”

“One is that his own people were afraid that if Juarez were captured, he’d blow the entire operation out of the water. We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars, thousands of arrests worldwide. So they had an internal understanding—an agreement, really, like an old Mafia blood oath—that if he or any big cheese got taken down like this, they’d have to be eliminated.”

“I have a hard time with that theory,” I said, “Mainly because it’s full of shit.”

“It’s happened before,” Nora informed me, “so there’s precedent.”

“In this case, given what I know, it’s still full of shit. That would mean the security that night was shit. Was it?”