Blond Cargo (8 page)

“What with three ambulances, five arrests, and leaks from the hotel staff about the stacks of hundred-dollar bills papering the suite.”

Chris didn’t seem to be listening. He tried to adjust the heavy plaster cast on his arm, looking clearly uncomfortable. “I read about it. You made the paper,” he said.

“Today was just the arraignment,” Jack continued. “It turns out the gunmen were tipped to the scam by a junior from Stanford. A kid in a coffee shop on a phishing expedition. He got greedy and his life’s in the crapper now.”

“Yeah, I know.”

Chris’s bored tone of voice was wearing thin, but Jack pressed on.

“With two separate trials, I’ll be making more trips up north. Means more time we can spend together.”

Chris’s silence was thunderous, only equaled by Jack’s guilt.

Arturo Delgado, the man who piloted the Cadillac Escalade like a heat-seeking missile, had tried to kill Chris, knowing it would destroy Jack. A reasonable expectation. It would have worked. Delgado was dead, but the pain lingered on.

“Can I borrow your key? Gotta take a whiz,” Chris said as they approached the Garden Court Hotel, where Jack was staying.

Jack handed off the key and Chris disappeared inside. Jack had taken a room for the night and was headed back to Los Angeles in the morning to continue the search for Angelica Cardona. The sooner he found his missing person, the sooner he could get back to his life.

He took in the local scene while he waited. The street was lined with upscale boutiques, restaurants, and coffee shops under a thick canopy of sycamore trees. Their mottled bark—patches of tan, gray, and green—looked like Desert Storm camo. The diverse ethnicity of the students, faculty, and locals walking with purpose gave Stanford a cosmopolitan feel. Not a bad place to spend four years, Jack thought.

Then he spotted the only body at rest, sitting at a small table outside a coffee shop, with a newspaper conspicuously covering his face. But his peg-legged black pants, black socks, and pointed black boots screamed Peter Maniacci.

Jack blended with a group of students crossing the street until he was standing at Peter’s side. The anxious man lowered his paper and frantically scanned the front entrance of the Garden Court Hotel. He did a near-comic double take when he sensed Jack at his shoulder.

“Yo, Mr. B.” Sheepish.

“How’d you find me?” Pissed.

“You made the news, going into court, and then I just figured . . . You look good on camera,” he said, deflecting. “I think maybe you missed your calling.”

“What the fuck, Peter?”

“I’m what you call in my business between a rock and a Mr. Vincent Cardona. If I don’t report on your whereabouts, he’ll shoot me. If he knows that you know, and I knew, and withheld said information, he’d also shoot me.”

“Do the right thing, Peter: disappear. Now. I’ve got no time for this.”

“Whatever you say, Mr. B. Uh, can we keep this, uh, between . . . ?”

“Now.”

Jack crossed the street just as his son pushed through the door of the hotel. When he looked back, Peter was in the wind. Father and son headed up University Avenue toward the baseball stadium.

“You okay? You didn’t eat much,” Jack said.

“Not hungry.”

“You look tired.”

“Not sleeping,” he said, slipping on his Oakley sunglasses.

“Want to talk about it?” Jack said, knowing the answer. Had to ask.

“Not really.”

Jack wasn’t crazy about the attitude, but he was too worried to push it. “I need some caffeine. You want an iced Americano?” he offered, knowing it was Chris’s favorite.

“Sounds good.”

Was that a thaw in the ice floe? Jack hoped. He’d take anything he could get because his son was obviously in turmoil, and it was killing him.

At a break in the traffic, Jack and Chris did a New York dash across the street. A large truck sped up and then leaned on the air horn and brakes at the same time. Chris blanched. He froze in the middle of the road at the sound of the squealing tires. And then he recovered, flipped off the driver with his good hand, and finished crossing. Head down.

Jack pretended he hadn’t seen, but they both knew. He threw a protective arm around his son. He couldn’t help it. Chris spun, disengaged, and power-walked up the street away from his father.

Jack exited the tunnel that led to the Sunken Diamond playing field. Old-growth eucalyptus trees surrounded the well-appointed stadium. The sky was blue and the sun hidden behind huge, white, billowing cumulus clouds.

The Stanford baseball team had been broken into small groups, going through the rigors of batting, fielding, and pitching practice. Five players were running laps and Jack could see one of Chris’s teammates give a thumbs-up to a solitary figure sitting in the nosebleed seats in right field.

Jack sat down next to his son and they watched the action in uncomfortable silence. A leggy freshman at the plate went after a fastball and swung from his heels. The crack of the bat and the hustle of the outfielder were usually enough to put a smile on Jack’s face. Today, they fell short.

“If it’s any help, that truck scared the hell out of me too.”

“Doesn’t help.” And then, “Dad, don’t take this the wrong way, but I need to go through this alone. You can’t do it for me.”

Jack understood with his brain, but not with his heart. He got that after being run down by a seven-thousand-pound vehicle, no warning—one minute you’re fine, the next you wake up in an ICU—he got that his son would never really be the same. And he understood painfully well that he was to blame.

He and his ex-wife had set Chris up with a psychologist. Their boy shrugged it off. They couldn’t force him to go. His head was as thick as Jack’s. He was willful, stubborn, and Jack found himself at a total loss.

“Team looks sharp.”

It was all Jack could think to say.

“It’s hard to watch. Really,” Chris said. “I get rid of this thing in three months and two days,” he said, referring to his cast, “and then I can start strength training. They want me to build the muscles in my arm again before they’ll let me throw. If I can still throw.”

Jack felt the fear, honesty, and anger in that statement and it shut him down.

“Makes sense.”

Chris stood up and looked down at his father. Jack met his gaze.

“I don’t blame you,” Chris said.

“Good to know.”

“Mom does, but I don’t.”

Chris eased out of the aisle and started walking down the steep cement stairs. He turned and looked back up at Jack. “I’ll call you next week. Don’t worry about me. And tell Mommy I’m fine. I don’t need the pressure.”

Jack fought the impulse to follow. He watched his son walk down the stairs, past his team, and out of the stadium. It felt like a knife through the heart.

The Boeing jet looped over the San Francisco skyline. The lights illuminated the Golden Gate Bridge as a thick cloud bank swallowed the stream of incoming traffic.

Jack had checked out of his hotel and caught the first flight back to L.A. No reason to stay. He dug under the seat in front of him, retrieved his small carry-on, and pulled out his dopp kit. His back was spasming from the emotion of the day. The Excedrin wasn’t cutting the pain by half. He pulled out his prescription for Vicodin.

Jack shook the plastic bottle and let out a distressed breath. He knew before he pried off the cap—his emotions twisting in the wind—that the pills were light. His son was the only one who had been in his room, and at least four Vicodin tabs were missing.

Jack Bertolino had spent his career working narcotics, and his son, the love of his life, his reason for being, had just stolen prescription drugs from him.

Jack never heard the flight attendant offer him a glass of water.

13

Hassan, a lean, swarthy man with military-cut copper-red hair, a close-trimmed full red beard, and chiseled features, stepped off the multicolored cigarette boat and expertly tied it to the wooden dock.

He wore green cargo pants, black leather boots, and an army-green T-shirt that accentuated his ropy muscles. A lit Camel hung lazily from his lips. He took a last deep drag and flicked the cigarette into the ocean. Then he grabbed two canvas rucksacks filled with provisions out of the boat and started the steep climb up the weather-beaten wooden stairs built into the side of the cliff.

Twenty-five feet up, he stepped easily off the first landing onto a small, flat grassy outcropping and set down his parcels. The stairs continued up the rock face to the top of the cliff and the wall that surrounded Malic al-Yasiri’s compound. He eyed the metal door that was set at an angle into the rock and painted a muted camo-brown so that it blended with the cliff face and all but disappeared when viewed from the water. He rifled through his pockets, looking for the key. He caught sight of the sun threatening the horizon and decided to get a move on before he lost all light.

Angelica stiffened and then moved quickly from the bed to the small kitchen table as she heard her jailer’s turn of the key. The rusted hinges made a grating sound as the heavy door was opened and then slammed shut. She steeled herself seconds before he appeared on the other side of the Plexiglas wall. It was the same routine every day. His was the only face she saw.

“Did you bring me the cranberry juice I asked for? A bottle of wine?” Angelica asked, her voice dripping with attitude.

Hassan would have been happy to kill her. It wouldn’t have been the first time. But it wasn’t his call.

The Americans had taught him how to follow orders when they were rebuilding Baghdad after bombing sections of his neighborhood back to the Stone Age. Malic had given him a way out of Iraq before the Shia majority took power, and paid him handsomely for his loyalty.

His brother was now driving a cab in Detroit, attending to gang business, and two of his cousins had been smuggled directly to Los Angeles. They were all Sunnis, all members of the same tribe, all fiercely loyal to Malic, to whom they owed their lives and their livelihoods. The Iraqi gang had been conceived in the slums of Baghdad and migrated to the city of Detroit.

Malic had been raised in an upper-crust Iraqi family, but he was a thug. He negotiated with the gang’s leader when he first emigrated, and a deal was struck to form a splinter group in Southern California. Malic’s group would serve as the conduit for the drugs that fueled the gang’s business, smuggled from south of the border by operatives of the Sinaloa cartel.

Ultimately, it wasn’t in Malic’s DNA to be anyone’s second. He killed the Detroit boss and successfully merged the two cities together into one Iraqi gang, operating for all intents and purposes under the radar.

Until now, Hassan thought, worried. Dumping those women’s bodies was risky business. The first had just been bad luck. The woman was one of their Eastern European imports. Smuggled into the states through Mexico City and on up to Tijuana, where she made the last leg of her journey by panga boat into San Diego County along with a shipment of cocaine.

The woman had gotten greedy, or desperate; broken into one of their parcels; and died with her face buried in a mountain of coke before she could be delivered to Malic’s client.

She might well have committed suicide. Stupid woman, he thought dispassionately. A natural blonde. She would have been treated like a queen in Iraq. It was too bad about the tides, though. She should have been shark bait. Instead she’d floated back to Orange County, surprised a wedding party, and made the front page of the
Orange County Register
.

The second woman, Malic had assured him, would be a most persuasive message. Help maintain the balance of power in Malic’s new job with Vargas Development Group. It was too dramatic for Hassan’s taste. He would have been happy putting a bullet in the back of her head.

And now this demon. He bridled at Angelica’s sour disposition and wanted to slap the petulant look off her face. She was the last-minute replacement for the floater. All three women were interchangeable, cut from the same cloth. She would be made available to fill the order for an important Iraqi sheik, one of Malic’s oldest friends and wealthiest accounts.

Who was Hassan to argue? He would follow orders and live the American dream. At least he wasn’t driving a cab.

He answered Angelica in Arabic. It gave him pleasure that she was ignorant and spoke only the infidel’s language. He explained as to a child that she must remain sober and healthy. That alcohol was forbidden in the Koran. Besides, he said with a sneer, drinking would bring down her sale price.

Hassan picked up one of the rucksacks filled with her food and set it on the table.

Angelica attacked with the speed of a viper.

She wielded her breakfast fork like a dagger. It arced down with one hundred and twenty pounds of blind fury and impaled Hassan in the back. Red blossomed on his upper shoulder as he roared with pain and dropped the sack of food, spilling salad, fruit, and cold cuts onto the rugged floor.

Angelica bolted.

Hassan spun wildly and grabbed for her, missed, and then caught her by the hair. She was already out of the door and into the hallway by the time she shrieked with the pain of her hair being yanked.

Hassan grappled with her and then pulled her back against his body, wrapped his right arm around her while flailing with his left hand to pull the protruding utensil out of his shoulder.

Angelica bit down on his wrist, breaking the skin, and pulled free again.

Maddened by pain, Hassan dove for her and dragged her back into the room. He raised a fist—he wanted to kill her, wanted to strangle her, but knew he couldn’t damage the goods. And so he threw her down onto the dinette chair, oblivious to his own pain. He efficiently bound her hands behind her and her legs to the chair’s legs with the plastic ties he always carried when doing this kind of security work for Malic.

Then he walked into the bathroom and carefully pulled out the fork, growling. Stupid, he chided himself. Never turn your back on an enemy. Had he learned nothing in the Iraqi army?

Malic would have him killed if he damaged the prisoner, but Hassan had learned certain techniques, skills, and he would have his revenge.