the Pallbearers (2010) (33 page)

"Jack came back a minute ago. He slipped me a kitchen knife," Vargas said.

"We've gotta find Vicki and Diamond, then get out of here fast," Alexa said. "I counted ten security. God knows how many more he has."

We left the "Sledgehammer" unconscious on the floor next to the late Gary White and ran down the basement corridors, throwing open doors until we reached a utility room, where we found Vicki tied to a water heater. Using my Swiss Army knife, I cut her loose.

"Where's Diamond?" I asked.

Nobody knew.

We spent another five minutes searching until we heard cars pulling up outside. Doors were slamming and men were shouting orders.

"We gotta go now or we're not gonna get out at all," Alexa said.

We took off running up the basement stairs to the main floor.

The pool area seemed clear. After checking outside, we ran out of the house and across the deck.

Then I spotted Eugene Mesa standing with his back to us on the second-floor balcony, screaming instructions at someone over his cell phone.

I grabbed Vargas's arm and stopped him.

"I want this guy," I said, pointing up at Mesa, who still hadn't seen us.

"Then let's get him," he said.

We doubled back toward the main house and scrambled up the outside staircase to the second-floor balcony, taking the steps two at a time. As soon as we reached the top, Mesa spun to face us as two young security cops stepped out of an upstairs doorway, blocking our path.

I took the nearest one, hitting him with the flat side of the Beretta, which I was holding in my good hand. He sagged to his knees, dropping his gun. Sabas unleashed a devastating combination, dropping the second. Mesa was staring at us a foot away, holding his cell phone in front of him as if it could somehow protect him.

"Looks like you're gonna have to do your own fighting this time, Gene."

I moved into punching range. He took a step back and started digging for a small compact gun that was in a holster at the small of his back. It was an awkward slow draw and I fired the Beretta before he could get it out. Either I was jerking my shots or the little Bobcat was pulling up and to the right because I hit him in about the same place I'd hit O'Shea, high in the right shoulder. Mesa's gun flew from his hand and clattered onto the pool deck one story below.

"Let's go," Sabas said, as armed men swarmed onto the pool deck beneath us. I grabbed Mesa's good arm. Vargas got a grip on his wounded arm and we pulled him off the balcony into the house just as gunfire erupted from below. Glass shattered but nobody got hit.

"Lemme go! Lemme go!" Mesa screamed, his eyes wide with fear.

Sabas and I pulled him downstairs toward the pool doors, then I shoved the Bobcat up into his ear.

"Okay, Gene, real easy question. How bad do you want to stay alive?"

"Don't kill me," he stuttered.

"Then do exactly as I say."

I nodded to Vargas, who kicked open the glass door, and we dragged the billionaire out onto the pool deck, which now contained almost fifteen armed men.

"Don't shoot!" Mesa yelled at his guards. "He's got a gun on me!"

We dragged him across the deck with the complement of gunmen trailing us like a pack of feral animals, all of them with their weapons at the ready, not sure of how to attack us without killing Mesa.

"Don't shoot, that's an order!" Mesa screamed at them in panic.

We pulled him out the back gate, where the golf maintenance truck was sitting with the back door up and the electric engine running. Alexa was behind the wheel with Jack beside her. Vicki was in the back, motioning us to hurry. She held out her arms and helped pull us inside.

Just then the headlights from two vehicles swept around the side of the estate. As they neared, I could see that both were pickups. There were several Mexican men in the back with long rifles. As soon as they came into view, they began shooting over the truck cabs at us. I figured they must be the coyotes from the Mexican side of the res that Mesa had hired to kill us.

Bullets were pinging off the engine compartment and riddling the back of the maintenance truck. In a second we would be disabled or dead.

"Don't shoot!" Mesa screamed again. "I'm in here!" But this was already out of his control.

"Get going!" I yelled at Alexa. Bullets ripped into the truck. I feared it was already too late.

Then I picked up some movement off to my right side. I turned and saw Seriana Cotton. She had somehow followed us here and was running low in a shooters crouch, with an ugly-looking Austrian Stevr machine pistol cradled in both hands.

She yelled out to us. "Get out of here!" Then she threw herself down in the dirt and started shooting at the pursuing trucks. Her machine pistol ripped the night, shattering windshields and headlights.

Alexa floored it and we were away. Seriana was alone on the golf course, left to deal with God knows how many assailants. There was nothing I could do but watch as we pulled away, leaving her there, her machine pistol tearing into the night.

What happened next is hard to describe. We were all being thrown around in the back of the maintenance truck as Alexa bounced over greens and sand traps, cutting across the course toward the main gate of the Tohono reservation. I could see about five sets of headlights still behind us, trying to catch up, but the little maintenance vehicle was pretty quick on grass. Still, as we kept going, I could see that the pursuers were beginning to narrow the gap. It was going to be close.

"How much farther to the gate?" I shouted.

"Right up ahead," Alexa called back. "I see a bunch of unmarked cars. Gotta be the feds."

"Then this is where I get off," Jack said.

"Jack! You stay put!" I yelled. "You re under arrest!"

He ignored me and leapt out of the moving maintenance truck, rolled on the grass, and came up running. I could see him sprinting toward a line of trees. In seconds, we had left him behind.

We couldn't stop. The pursuing vehicles were getting closer. Occasional gunshots again hit our truck, the bullets rattling around inside. Miraculously, none of us were hit. Alexa bounced over the curb and headed toward the main gate.

It was quite a welcoming committee. The Indian cops were in some kind of major jurisdictional argument with Faskin, Westfall, and about half a dozen FBI agents in Windbreakers. We skidded in, threw our gun out, and pushed E. C. Mesa from the truck. All of us kept our hands in the air.

The men in the pursuing vehicles didn't know what was in store and came boiling in behind us, their gun barrels still hot. The feds and Indian police swarmed.

Ten minutes later, everybody was in handcuffs.

"So where the fuck is he?" Leo Faskin demanded of me. He was standing near a tan sedan with government plates, glowering.

"Let's not worry about Jack," I said. "I've got people tied up and bleeding all over this resort. We need to start collecting the bodies."

"You're really something, Scully," Westfall said. "You played us. Jack was never here at all, was he? You just needed our badges so you'd have some clout with these tribal cops."

"It's still a great bust, guys. I'm seeing gold shields and federal merit citations all around."

Again, Westfall proved to be the wiser of the two as he asked, "So where's this Mesa guy's house again?"

Chapter
61

Captain Ironwood handpicked four deputies and went with the six feds to collect what was left of Team Ultima. O'Shea was alive and transported by ambulance to the jail hospital in Tucson, where he was hooked to a machine and intubated. Kimbo Sledge and Chris Calabro tried to run but were arrested.

They found Seriana Cotton playing the slots in the Talking Stick Casino. She was scraped and bleeding but claimed she didn't have a clue what had happened out on the tenth fairway.

Mesa made no statement and hired Gerry Spence as his defense attorney, dispelling the myth that cowboys and Indians can't get along.

Everybody lawyered up and within hours it became obvious to me that Rick O'Shea wasn't going to be talking.

I had multiple kidnapping charges against Eugene Mesa, but with good lawyering, that might only be worth ten or fifteen years. No
t n
early enough. Even worse, I still didn't have a murder case on Eugene Mesa for ordering Pop's death.

Diamond Peterson was among the missing. I had a very bad feeling about that. I didn't think we'd ever see her alive again.

Alexa and I got stuck in Tucson dealing with tribal law, the Arizona courts, state-to-state extradition papers, and a mile of related red tape. We didn't get back to Los Angeles until a few days later.

We arrived home the same day our two-week vacation to Hawaii was scheduled to end. We went out into the backyard, sat on our worn metal chairs, and sipped rum and Cokes with a dash of pineapple juice. It was the closest we had in our bar to the ingredients for a Mai Tai.

"Aloha," Alexa said as we clinked our glasses.

We talked about Hawaii, about Walter Dix, and about how disappointed I was that O'Shea hadn't flipped. It had been a long, painful journey, and in the end, despite everything, I still felt that I had failed Walt.

"Seriana reports for deployment back to Iraq tomorrow night," I told Alexa. "At least she got to see how it ended."

Alexa said, "Without her, we wouldn't have made it."

There was certainly no lack of truth in that statement. The pallbearers had been an unlikely team, but except for Diamond, in the end they had all earned my friendship and respect.

"Vicki's picking up Walt's ashes from the crematorium tonight," I said. "We're all going to say good-bye in the morning."

"Can I come?"

"Got a surfboard?"

She smiled. "No, but somebody has to make sandwiches and kiss your bruises."

"Then you're invited."

An hour later, I got a call from Kurt Westfall. He sounded angry.

"Still no sign of Straw," I told him.

"Fuck Straw. You hear about this shit from Gerry Spence's office?"

"No, what?"

"The Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation is claiming jurisdiction on Mesa's four kidnapping cases."

"So we try him there. What's the problem? He's not gonna beat it. You got five witnesses, two of whom are L
. A
. cops."

"Indian law ain't exactly like American law, Scully. They got all these tribal loopholes from some treaty that was signed in the eighteen hundreds. Add to that the fact that the Indian prosecutor went to law school on a Eugene Mesa tribal scholarship and Mesa is gonna pretty much skate on this whole thing. They're charging him with four counts of false imprisonment. A fucking misdemeanor."

"Come on," I said. I couldn't believe this was happening.

Westfall kept rolling out the bad news. "They're claiming no guns were used in the abduction and the statement you and your wife made confirms that fact, so it's not a kidnapping."

"False imprisonment? Isn't that like when a store security cop holds some guy for stealing clothes he didn't steal? We were tied up, dragged out of our room, transported. . . . They threatened to kill us!"

"The transportation clause isn't valid on the reservation either, and they say nobody threatened your life."

I was holding the phone, feeling a deep sense of frustration.

Westfall heaved a deep sigh. "The Indian prosecutor has already accepted the false-imprisonment charges. It's a misdemeanor, so the fine will be around ten grand. If I'm ever arrested for killing my wife, hire Gerry Spence to represent me," he groaned.

After I hung up, I went to our bedroom and sat down heavily on the bed. I told Alexa what had just happened, and she came over to sit beside me. She took me into her arms and held me close. But there was very little she could do to comfort me.

An hour later, I was in bed, but couldn't sleep. I was looking at the ceiling, thinking about Eugene C. Mesa and how much alike we were. Neither of us knew who our parents were. I'd found out that
Mesa wasn't his real name either. He'd picked it because he needed an identity and was a Mesa Indian.

A nurse at the hospital where I was left as an infant had picked my name for me. She chose it because she was a Dodger fan and loved Vin Scully.

Mesa and I had walked the same hallways at Huntington House as nine-year-olds. We'd both kneeled in the sand with Pop waiting for the sun to rise so we could "go catch some, bruddah."

Half my life, like E. C. Mesa, I'd also been feeding the wrong wolf, and that wolf had almost beaten me. But then Alexa and Chooch had entered my life and everything changed.

As I lay there, I remembered that I'd seen Walt at our wedding and spoken to him briefly that day. Something quick and meaningless. "How you doing, man? I'm stoked you came." I'd not bothered to thank him for keeping me alive so I could make it from Huntington House to my wedding dav.

Walt had never known Alexa. Not really. But he could see how
-
she had made the difference for me and it made him happy.