Spiral (48 page)

Lucas Negrete sat in the backseat of the new rental car as it traveled inbound on the Southwest Freeway. He was angry, frustrated, and running out of time. The three men had parked the car registered in Ramon Sosa Real's name in a Greenway Plaza parking lot, taken a cab to a nearby car rental agency, and rented a Lincoln, using a false ID. Now they were heading downtown to rent two motel rooms. Negrete knew the exact motel he wanted, on South Main, so close to the freeway that the rooms on its south-side third floor sounded as if they were
on
the overpass, a stationary vehicle in a never-ending roar of never-ending traffic. The noisiest rooms in the city.

As the driver, a muscular young man named Siseno with ringlets and oriental eyes, tended to the traffic, Negrete pored over a maze of papers. He held a clipboard in his lap as he recorded a list of numbers, some of which he occasionally called out to Luis, whose bespectacled face and phlegmatic manner disguised a brutish personality. Luis answered yes or no, and sometimes called out a number of his own.

When they arrived at the motel, Siseno got out and went inside to register for the two rooms. Negrete and Luis continued to work. They didn't even look up. When the driver returned, he got into the car without speaking and pulled through the entrance into the motel compound.

The L-shaped motel was six floors high, and was situated so that the blunt end of the bottom arm almost butted up against the expressway. The bottom rooms looked out onto the street underneath the expressway, the ever-shadowy stomach of the elevated highway with its grimy ribs of cement columns and diesel-stained girders, derelict chain-link fence, winos, garbage, and scavenging pigeons.

The second floor looked into the silver-painted freeway railings, and the third floor was on the level with the cars. This was the room that was rarely rented. The management actually used to try, but so many people returned the key and asked for a new room or their money back that they gave it out now only when it was absolutely the last room left in the motel. Still, most people passed it up.

The men had only small bags, which they carried through a breezeway from the parking area, past the Coke and 7-Up machines and the out-of-order elevator, and up the metal stairs near the gate to the swimming pool in the courtyard. In the suffocating heat of midday, there were only two people in the pool, or rather, in the pool chairs: a large young Mexican woman whose dark flesh lolled out of the openings of her lavender bikini in glistening, sealion proportions, and her smaller, Anglo male companion, whose fair skin had broiled to the startling color of brilliant flamingo. They held hands, their arms draped between the two pool chairs.

The three men entered the first of the two rooms they had checked into. They put down their briefcases and bags and went next door to the last room on the third-floor landing. The roar of traffic booming by thirty feet away at seventy miles an hour was accompanied by gusts of stinging grit whipped off the asphalt in hot blasts that stank of superheated oil and rubber. Inside, Negrete liked what he saw, and liked even better what he heard . .. and couldn't hear.

They locked the door behind them and walked back to the first room. Negrete and Luis sat down at a small round table, pulled out their papers, and resumed working. Siseno took the keys and went back down the stairs to the car. He had seen a liquor store several blocks away.

The same examination of the license-plate numbers continued. For the past week, the plate of every car that had entered Inverness within two blocks of Benigo Gamboa's house had been recorded by Negrete's stakeouts. It was a tedious job checking each day's entries against the others, but Negrete hoped it would pay off. Anyone wanting to kill Gamboa would have to monitor his comings and goings, and to do that would have to approach the house. Somewhere in that pile of numbers were recurrences, and one of those recurring license numbers belonged to the car of an assassin.

By midafternoon they had found nine cars that had appeared on the street more than twice on each of the given days. Five of those cars had "R" written beside them, which meant they had been identified as belonging to street residents. The other four had to be checked out. Negrete moved over and sat on the edge of the bed. From his wallet he took a piece of paper with several numbers on it, and dialed the one for the state office of motor vehicle registrations. Within minutes, he had learned what he had suspected, that all four cars were registered in the name of four different car-leasing agencies. The mild-faced Luis, equipped with one of the dozens of Mexican police identification cards and badges with which Negrete was supplied, left to call on the agencies. If Negrete's hunch was right again, Luis would be able to obtain not only the name—and possibly the description—of the person who rented the car, but also the car's color, make, and model. They would rent two more cars for themselves, and the three of them would begin stalking the stalker, a delicate and dangerous maneuver, but one that Negrete had negotiated successfully many times before.XX

Chapter 49

AFTER
he had finished talking to Dystal, Haydon paced around the library for twenty minutes, going over and over the events of the past several days. Finally, unable to stay in one place any longer, he walked outside and went down to the bathhouse to check on Cinco. The old collie was asleep, of course, and Haydon, too restless to sit down with him, didn't walk over and pet him for fear of waking him. He continued along the walkway through the cherry laurels to the greenhouse and went inside. Walking aimlessly along its paths, his vision registered only the most brilliant colors among the hundreds of bromeliads. The more subtle shades and tints, which he normally enjoyed seeking out, went unappreciated now. His mind wasn't able to slow down for them. He returned to the house, his hands in his pockets as he climbed the terrace steps and went through the French doors into the library.

He had never felt more useless. Lapierre and the task force had their hands full with the paperwork and evidence gathering in constructing the case against Negrete in the killings of Ireno Lopez, the Waites, Donny Ferrell, and Daniel Ferretis. Bob Dystal was trying to do end runs around the political obstacles that kept cropping up in his effort to get the DEA and the FBI to cooperate with each other to the extent that they could provide the HPD with useful information on Bias Medrano, whose name, now that it was known, was being fed into the computers and distributed to the field agents of both agencies. Renata Islas and Mitchell Garner were now about half an hour out from Guadalajara's Miguel Hidalgo International Airport.

Haydon walked to his desk, opened the rosewood humidor, and took out an Allones corona maduro. He clipped the end, struck a match, and lighted it. The walk had made him perspire. He loosened his tie, removed his cufflinks and laid them on his desk, and turned back his sleeves. Taking the cigar out of his mouth, he stepped over to the bookshelves and looked at the titles. He was tempted to take one down, perhaps a collection of essays, or poetry—nothing protracted—but he couldn't even settle between the two, his mind already trying to see the face of Bias Medrano Banda.

He sensed someone behind him, and turned toward Nina standing in the doorway looking at him.

"What's on your mind, Stuart?" she asked. Her arms were folded and she was leaning against the doorframe.

"Where's Celia?" he asked.

"We were in the living room talking. She's exhausted. She went to sleep on the divan."

Haydon nodded, and went around to one of the wing chairs and sat down. Nina came over and sat on the small sofa.

"What do you think about her now?" Haydon asked.

"What do you mean, 'now'?"

"Now that you've been around her a little more."

Nina looked at him a moment. He thought he saw a touch of wariness in her eyes, a little skepticism.

"I guess I understand her better than I did before," Nina said, going ahead despite her reservations. "What she did doesn't seem so outrageous now, so improbable. I can see how it might have happened, how it might have come about."

Haydon nodded, looking at her.

"She's young, Stuart. Have you lost the ability to know when you ought to be giving someone the benefit of the doubt?"

He didn't know what he had expected from her, but he hadn't expected that. Yes, he thought, he guessed he had forgotten how to do that. "I don't know," he said.

But with Celia Moreno he did know. It wasn't that he didn't realize she deserved the benefit of the doubt, it was rather that he was too inclined to give it. In fact, he was too inclined toward her altogether, and realizing that had made him wary of every judgment he made regarding her. Recognizing the attraction, he had kept a greater distance than he otherwise would have. He felt a little foolish about it. That, in addition to everything else that had happened during the last four days, had made him guarded and analytic about every nuance of his emotions.

Nina didn't say anything for a moment, and then, "You didn't answer my question."

"I said I didn't know."

"No, the other one."

"What was I thinking?"

She smiled.

"I was thinking about Bias Medrano." Haydon pulled on the cigar a couple of times, tasting the aroma of the dark tobacco. "Re-nata said he was well read, intelligent, had a Jesuit education. A young widower. A traveler. Compliant son of a bullying father. Handsome. Wealthy. Polite." He looked at the cigar as he rolled it in his fingers. "I would like to talk with him," he said.

"Talk with him?"

"He sounds like an interesting man."

"Good Lord, Stuart. His politics are despicable."

"So are the politics of the man he wants to kill, and I can assure you, if you were to meet him you would find him charming. Besides, we don't really know about Medrano's politics. We know only the politics of the
tecos."

"Don't you think he might agree with them?" Nina asked dryly. "And whose father was it that was one of the organization's founders?"

"The bullying father," Haydon reminded her. "All right. But I would wager that the man who fits the profile we got from Renata would have a difficult time living the politics of a
teco.
It can't be easy for him. Not inside, I mean."

"It can't be easy being an assassin, either," Nina said pointedly. Then, "What are you getting at?"

"I'm not getting at anything. I was only thinking about this man we're going after. Wondering about him."

"You spend a lot of time wondering about people," Nina said. The expression on her face clearly said that it was a suspect preoccupation.

He smiled. "I do, don't I." He looked at his watch. "They should be at the airport now. Renata will be talking to her friend, Consuelo. They were supposed to call me when they were ready to start back."

"Do you think the pictures will work?"

"They're the only thing that will work in time." He crossed his legs the other way and touched the end of his cigar in the ashtray. A cylindrical ash remained in the crystal dish. Haydon sighed. "Jesus," he said, gazing at the ash. "What an incredible chain of events. You get caught up in something like this and you can't believe it, and the moment you finally realize it's really happening to you your perspective changes instantly. It's as if there were a slight shift in the magnetic poles. Bewildering, mildly disorienting, but you recover, you adjust. And then suddenly, you're aware that nothing will ever be quite the same again."

Bias stepped out of the telephone booth and got into the car Rubio was right in thinking it was a crucial time for Gamboa. Bla doubted that the Houston Police Department would actually leav Gamboa unprotected, but they would surely use a more subtle mean of guarding him than did Negrete. It was Negrete's style, the Mexica way, to show your arms, to strut back and forth across your barr yard. Not only did he want to win, he wanted to look good doing i But not the Anglos. They would hide. They would win first and stri later. Bias trusted Rubio to know this, too.

He went straight back to La Colombe d'Or and began packir his things. If it was going to happen, it would happen within the ne twenty-four hours. He could live that long out of a car. It was an a quired occupational talent.

It would take him a while to pack. Not only did he want to avo leaving behind even a single strand of copper wire, but his wrist w acutely painful now, rendering his left hand practically useless. 1 poured himself another glass of the brandy and got busy. After pac ing all his clothes in the suitcases, he emptied the bathroom of 1 toilet articles, taking all the complimentary soaps and colognes. 1 small packages would come in handy the way he was going to traveling. He took a washcloth, soaked it in alcohol, and begai meticulous room-by-room cleaning of fingerprints. He always ■ this. If you were careful and aware, it was amazing how few pla you could leave fingerprints, and how thoroughly you could clean the ones you did leave. It was tedious, but it was necessary. He di( like to make it easy for them.

He kept a close watch on the time. Rubio made an all-clear when Bias was almost through cleaning. He would have to hurry finish so that he would not be in the process of checking out when next call came half an hour later.