An Inconsequential Murder (31 page)

The Director looked at Lombardo as if he was deliberating between signing the damned authorization or shooting him on the spot.

“
OK, so he gives you the three guys. What the hell are we going to do with them? It would be just as bad for them to have the media say that DEA people are going around the country committing murder.”

“
You know and I know that there are a lot of ways to handle this. They can be just three gringos, dealing in drugs, caught in a sting operation. There’s no need to say that they are DEA. Their asses wind up in jail; justice will have been done.”

“
OK,” agreed the Director, “but give me a couple of hours. I have to make some phone calls.”

“
Thank you, Director. You are a very reasonable man. You have a bright future ahead of you—if you survive.”

Lombardo left the Director’s office thinking, “Little people don’t win big victories, they win small victories, but small victories can add up to become big ones.”

Chapter
36: Off to See the Wizard

John Wayne hesitated before calling Washington.

He
’d thought of calling Robert Miller but he knew what Miller would say: “Call Washington; ask
their
advice.”

He also thought of writing a situation report and sending it in with a high priority status, but then a back and forth would ensue. They’d want substantiating evidence, original authorization for the team being down in Mexico, and all that bullshit.

No, he’d have to find a way to handle this unofficially. He mistrusted most of his superiors, but he knew that his boss had spent a lot of time on the field before being tied down to a desk. He’d probably gone through situations like this one and probably knew which was the best way to handle it.

He picked up the secure phone and dialed.

“
How ya doin’ Big John?” said the deep, raspy voice.

“
Awright, Boss; how ‘bout you?”

“
Fuckin’ bored—up to my ass in paperwork.”

“
Well, you wanted the life of Riley. I bet your wife is thrilled to have you home by seven every day.”

“
Except on Thursdays when all the other hags come over for tea ‘n’ bridge, ‘n’ crap like that.”

“
Ooh, the other hags—I gotta tell her you said that next time I see her.”

“
I’ll kick your ass upside your brain; God knows there’s enough space up there to put it.”

John Wayne laughed.

His boss said, “What’s up, Big John? I know you don’t call just t’ shoot the breeze.”

“
Boss, I gotta situation down here.”

“
Yeah?”

John Wayne told him he
’d had a call from the Director of the Investigations Department in Nuevo León. He’d told him that one of his men, a guy called Lombardo had a copy of a bunch of documents, emails and such, which would do a lot of damage to their project if that information got into the wrong hands or if it was given to the media, especially the American media.

“
How did he get hold of stuff that belongs to us?” his Boss asked.

“
The thing is, it didn’t belong to us. The email and documents belonged to the people that are pushing the legalization thing. Let me explain where this thing is coming from and how it got like this.”

He took a sip of whiskey and said, “Remember that I asked for an interrogation team to be sent down?”

“
Yeah?”

“
Well, if you remember, the reason was that those documents we were trying to get had been locked up.”

“
Locked up where?”

“
In a computer—not in a safe or anything.”

“
Yeah, so what happened?”

“
Well, they fucked it up. They snatched the guy who could help us unlock the files where the documents were stored but they got too rough and killed him, accidentally by their account, and yet they got nothing out of the guy.”

“
Oh, shit. OK, so they’re finding dozens of bodies a day down there; I’m sure they could find a way to ‘overlook’…”

“
Yeah, well, they tried but, you see, this guy Lombardo from the State Investigations Department started sniffing around and somehow got hold of the stuff before we did.”

“
Geez, what are you guys doin’ down there? How could this Mexican cop get the stuff and you couldn’t?”

“
It’s a long story,” said John Wayne and he downed the rest of the whiskey.

“
I bet it is,” said his boss. “Tell me more about this stuff we’re trying to get; why is it so important, anyway?”

John Wayne said, “As I said before, the stuff includes a bunch of emails and other documents. And, there are conversations our, uh, opponents were having about how they were going to advance
their
legalization agenda, but they also talk about who is opposing them. The problem is that they name a lot of the people we’ve been helping out and a lot of the people we’ve got on the payroll.”

“
Geez! Is the stuff credible? I mean, can’t it be discredited or say it was falsified or something?”

“
The stuff is pretty credible, all right. There are emails from Governors, federal representatives, senators, you name it. And, I understand, there are scanned documents with signatures and what not. It’s all pretty lethal.”

“
OK, so we’re in a pretty big tub of shit here. What can I do about it? What do you want from me?”

“
The guy on the case, this guy Lombardo, is coming to see me.”

“
To see you? How in the Hell did he know…”

“
I’ll explain that later. The thing is, he wants to cut a deal, from what I was told. He wants the three guys, our guys, the ones who interrogated and killed this Mexican. He wants them put in jail.”

“
He’s fuckin’ crazy!”

“
I know boss but he has the goods on us, and he has evidence, according to my source, which proves that our guys did the deed. So, he wants us to give up our three guys or he will turn the documents over to the media, press charges, and so on.”

“
Shit, what an understatement when you say you got a situation down there.”

“
Yeah, this is a bad one. We could get kicked out of the country all together if the leftists get hold of this.”

“
Give me some details. If I am going to go to somebody with this, I need some more details. Who else is involved?”

John Wayne told him that they had managed to neutralize the head of the opposition, the President’s cousin, who had ordered the assassination of the man walking point for them, Senator Juan Alberto Romero. He told him that the Governor of Nuevo León, who had been doing all sorts of jobs for the President’s cousin, had handed in his resignation, and had gone into the FBI’s witness protection program. What the FBI wanted him for, John Wayne was not too sure because Robert Miller wasn’t saying anything.

The
Dean of the University, where the incriminating documents were held, had fled the country for parts unknown, and all of the other government officials and members in the opponents’ team were heading for cover, so that whole thing was pretty well taken care of.

The only problem was this damned investigator, this Captain Lombardo who was out for blood. He had to be taken care of because everything else was going so well for them.

“
Well, look, John; we can’t have a big stink about this just now. Here in Washington everything is about the damned Bilateral Trade Agreement and they’ll cut our balls off and feed them to us for breakfast if we do anything to fuck it up. So, here is my advice to you: cut a deal with this guy. You decide how far you have to go on that and don’t tell me anything about it. I want credible deniability if this thing blows up. You got me? I am going to go to my boss and some other people and tell them we got a situation down there but that you’re taking care of it and that you are going to report back to me.”

“
I got you, Boss.”

“
Handle it, John. I trust you to do whatever is necessary. Understand?”

“
I understand, Boss.”

“
I’ll cover your ass as much as I can up here.”

“
Thanks, Boss.”

“
Awright, good-bye then and let me know when it’s taken care of; no more details, just the outcome.”

“
Right, Boss.”

They both hung up at the same time. John Wayne looked at his watch. That damned Mexican was due to be in his office in about two hours. Just enough time to have another drink and then a shower.

Chapter
37: A Dance with the Devil

The flight from Monterrey to Guadalajara took less than an hour.

As the airplane circled the city to get into the queue of aircraft lining up for landing, Lombardo remembered the days he had spent here as a young man. Having recently left the Army, he had collected a nice sum of back pay, that supplemented by the combat pay, and the 12.50 exchange rate, made a decent sum of pesos.

After traveling around most of southern Mexico, drinking and getting into trouble—like the time he had ended up in jail and met the cartel’s underboss in Pátzcuaro—he wound up in Guadalajara.

He had spent two weeks at the Hilton—hardly ever leaving the hotel, waking up near noon, having lunch in his room before showering and going down to the lobby bar for his first drink of the day. It had been very easy to pick up girls in the penthouse bar at night.

He had
left the hotel, albeit reluctantly, because he had met Olga—the widow of a gambler who had been found shot to death, probably due to his unpaid gambling debts in Las Vegas, or so she said. He had lived with her the better part of a year. She was 15 years older than Lombardo and had grown very demanding and jealous so he had left her and got a small apartment near the Minerva, the large roundabout in the middle of the city with the fountains and a sculpture of the Roman goddess of peace and wisdom, but also of the art of war.

During the months he had lived with Olga, Lombardo had come to know and like the city. He liked the cool mornings and pleasant afternoons that were so crisp and filled with the aroma of wet earth during the rainy season. Unlike the hot, dry, dusty towns of his native northeastern Mexico, the streets of Guadalajara were lined with trees and the dividers of the avenues planted with roses and bougainvilleas. He had liked the civil, provincial manner of its people and the stately dignity of its old residential sectors like Chapalita. He had then decided that this was where he wanted to live and that he would not go back to either northeastern Mexico or the U.S.  

Having run out of money, Lombardo looked for a job and found that with his Army background, he would be welcomed in any police force. He joined the State Judicial Police.

Like a charming beautiful woman you meet at a bar who turns out to be quite a bitch once you live with her,
within months of having joined the force, Guadalajara had shown him its other side—the one that was rotten with rampant corruption in every branch of government and public service. During the years he worked here, Lombardo had seen the gangs and cartel slowly grow into powerful organizations that flooded every sector of society with drug money, corroding not only the “fabric of society,” but the very functioning of the state and city governments.

When one of the young drug capos eloped with the Governor’s daughter, Lombardo had been part of the team sent to investigate the “kidnapping.” The Director of Investigations had told them that the capo and his new wife were in Argentina, which had no extradition treaty with Mexico at the time because the generals who had staged a right-wing coup did not like the fact that Mexico had given political asylum to so many Argentinean leftists.

Lombardo
’s team had also been told that although the Governor was pressuring the State Police to get the girl back, the capo had sent word that if the team came to Argentina, he would be glad to see that they were well treated and well rewarded if they went back home and said that they could not find the girl.

All the members of the team had agreed that this was a good proposition—all that is, except Lombardo. He had asked the
Director of Investigations to be assigned to another case; he did not want to go to Argentina.