The Reformed (27 page)
Authors: Tod Goldberg
Tags: #Mystery & Detective, #Fiction, #General, #Suspense, #Thrillers, #Crime
Sam closed his phone, pulled out the SIM card and replaced it with another, and then sat back, swallowed a Tums—thanks to Ozzie’s spice predilection—and waited for the sirens to begin wailing.
Four minutes later, a cruiser came screeching down the block but with no siren. Sam sat up and took notice. The car came to a halt in front of Ozzie’s, and Sam made note of the car number and plate, and then when Peter Prieto hopped out, he wasn’t all that surprised. Tall and lean, Prieto moved like a cat when he stepped from the car, all coiled energy and spring—he was looking for something, anything, but also seemed nervous. He didn’t pull out his gun and he didn’t even bother to go inside Ozzie’s. He just swept the area quickly, checked the ground a couple of times and, presumably, upon seeing nothing amiss, immediately got back into his car and pulled away from the curb.
Sam followed him around the block and watched as the cop parked his car beside a FedEx truck idling beside a CVS pharmacy, but with an easy view of Ozzie’s. Sam parked in the same lot and pretended to be very busy with the machinations of his phone, but really was just watching to see what Prieto was seeing.
It wasn’t until three more cop cars pulled up, sirens blaring, that Prieto finally backed up his cruiser and drove away. Sam had a pretty good idea what was going to happen next, so he kept his vigil in the parking lot. Sure enough, a few seconds later, Prieto’s cruiser came screeching around the corner, siren blaring.
You sneaky bastard, Sam thought. He opened his phone and called Michael. “Mikey,” he said, “we have ourselves a company cop.”
17
When you’re a spy, it’s bad business to put your faith in anything you can’t control. Everyone and everything becomes suspect.
Whom do you trust?
Yourself and maybe your gun, but even your gun can run out of bullets or jam.
When you’re a spy, a day might come when your government disowns you, your partners turn out to be your enemies and the world you once knew to be true ends up being a terrible, terrible lie.
Your only opportunity for survival then is what exists between your ears. That means tamping down impulsive behavior in favor of well-planned counteraction. Can’t shoot your gun? Then use it as a blunt-force weapon. Or trade it for money or shelter or food, because if there is one thing that is true, it’s that there’s always a market for a gun. And there’s no more lethal weapon than a man who is willing to wait for someone else to make a mistake.
This was wisdom I was well acquainted with and, as I explained to Father Eduardo Santiago, a strategy that would work well for us. All he had to do was wait, and Junior would trip up and we’d be ready to pounce. In the meantime, we’d put into place all of the nets that would ensnare his fall.
It took three days of waiting. Three days of watching Junior’s every movement in his office. Three days of listening to his every phone call. Three days of reading his e-mails.
And three days of me actually going into an office every day, which was far more taxing than I could have ever imagined. Each morning, I picked up Eduardo from my mother’s and drove him to his office, where he conducted his business as usual. This meant keeping all of his appointments, which typically started at eight A.M. (which automatically excluded Sam from duty).
Father Eduardo taped his part for the community news program on Thursday morning, spent Thursday afternoon having lunch with two city councilmen who wanted his opinion on a new land deal that would give jobs to inner-city kids and on Thursday night, it was a charity dinner where he served as the MC. And then there was the actual managing of the day-to-day business of Honrado and the business of being a priest: the café, the auto shop, the job placement services, the people who need not just a word with you, but a lifetime with you.
And then it was Friday.
For three days, Father Eduardo conducted this business with me standing very near to him.
“He is writing a story on me for a magazine in Nevada,” he told the news program people and the charity organizers who noticed my presence.
“He is here to oversee the architectural development of our new buildings,” he told the Honrado employees who noticed me in his office day and night.
“He is here to protect me,” he told himself and, when Leticia called Fiona, it’s what I told her to repeat. It was Saturday morning and Father Eduardo was at my loft, along with Sam and Fiona, while we piled through all our surveillance of Junior. Barry was busy upstairs snoring through the important discovery process, which was fine. There was plenty of incriminating evidence, none of which Barry needed to see or hear, since a lot of it mentioned how they were going to kill him as soon as they had the opportunity. My mother had been kind enough to offer him a few of her horse tranquilizers to help him calm his jitters, and now he was on hour number eleven of sleep. We’d wake him when we needed him, which would be soon, as we had to make our moves today.
Saturday was to be a big day: Barry and Sam would train Junior’s men on how to operate the printing press and utilize the money plate. Sam had no actual facility with this skill set, but sort of wanted to learn, and also happened to be pretty good about shooting people who needed to be shot ... even if he’d sworn to Father Eduardo that he’d only shoot them with a paintball gun. And that meant today would also be the day I had Junior’s men pull the job I wanted done at Harding Pharmaceutical, so that by Sunday, if everything worked according to plan, Father Eduardo might just have his day of worship.
But then Leticia called.
She’d been missing since Sam and I showed up to Honrado three days earlier, which meant she likely saw her boyfriend Killa and Junior arriving in one condition and leaving in a slightly different version, and knew that this might be her only opportunity to steal away with her son. But she could only go so far—a fact Fiona had predicted too well, so that when Leticia phoned her, she wasn’t all that surprised.
After she answered the call, Fi put her hand over the phone and whispered, “It’s Leticia.”
“She’ll want to talk to you,” I said to Father Eduardo. “You ready for that?”
“Yes,” he said.
“Let her know Father Eduardo wants to speak to her,” I said to Fiona. “And make sure she knows he’s not angry with her.”
Fi spoke with Leticia for just a few moments and explained to her what had probably grown to be obvious: it wasn’t an accident that they’d met up that afternoon earlier in the week, and that it was all part of a larger plan to disrupt a conspiracy she’d been unwittingly pressed into, one best explained by Father Eduardo. Fiona handed him the phone and he spoke with the girl as calmly as possible.
“They are here to protect me,” he said to Leticia. “They are here to protect you and your son. Whatever you might have heard that is the contrary is rumor and innuendo. They will protect my brother, too, if it comes to it.”
Father Eduardo looked at me when he said that. It wasn’t something I was entirely certain was possible, not because it was physically impossible, but because it might be morally and ethically impossible. I’d already hobbled him, which would likely preclude him from taking part in anything involving standing for a few weeks, effectively keeping off the production line for the money and out of the heist, too. The rest? That would have to be up to him.
But, in that particular moment, there wasn’t a lot of space for nuanced thought. I just nodded my assent.
“Pardon me,” Father Eduardo said to us, “but I need some privacy to continue this conversation. I’m going to continue this call outside.”
We waited for Father Eduardo to step outside before we continued our previous conversation—which was just how we were going to position Junior to fail.
“You think he’ll be able to keep it together?” Sam asked.
“Right now? Yes,” I said. “If we keep him out of the lines of fire, he’ll be fine. But when we turn this information over to the authorities, and they call Father Eduardo as a witness? Well, that will be up to him. But my feeling is that he’s led a dual life before. A little white lie here and there to the police will be fine.”
The bugging of Junior’s office, just over the course of three days, had provided all the information needed to get Junior put back in prison and people like Peter Prieto into prison for the first time. There were phone calls, all recorded, between Junior and Peter. There were e-mails between Junior and “clients” in other countries ensuring delivery of product as soon as production was resecured. There was video of all of this, too.
And Sam had gone back to the Ace after our first meeting with Junior and managed to pick up the two missing fingers, too. Physical evidence is always a bonus.
“What’s our move?” Fiona asked.
“Our first one is to get Junior’s people positioned,” I said. I put my cell phone on speaker and called Junior at his office. Just like every other office drone, he answered on the third ring.
“What do you want?” he said.
“Is that how you greet a business partner?”
“We are not partners,” he said. “You wouldn’t happen to know where Killa’s son is, would you?”
“Why would you ask me that?”
“Because he and his mother disappeared on the same day you showed up,” he said.
“Let’s just say,” I said, “that maybe I’m more careful than you are.”
There was silence on the other end of the line, but I could tell that Junior was trying to contain his anger. He wasn’t the kind of guy prone to long, contemplative silences.
“What do you want?” he said again.
“I need your guys,” I said. “And your cop.”
“When?”
“Tonight,” I said. “There’s a shipment leaving Harding Pharmaceutical at six P.M. that I’d like to own.”
This got Junior’s attention. “What is it?”
I decided being honest was the best policy. “About a thousand stop-smoking patches.”
“There a market for that?”
“There is in Bolivia,” I said, thinking that a quarter century in prison might have made Junior a little dim on the black markets and geography. Or where people still smoked.
“What’s my cut?”
“You don’t get a cut,” I said. “It’s the price of doing business at Honrado. We discussed this right before my friend choked you out with her whip.”
“Change of rules,” Junior said.
“You don’t make the rules,” I said.
“You think I’m stupid? I spent some time looking into you, Mr. Solo,” he said. “You don’t exist.”
“And yet here I am, talking to you on the phone.”
“You think you’re the only person who can run a license plate?”
I looked at Sam. He was the man in charge of making sure I had plates on the Charger that couldn’t be traced back to anything prudent. It had been so long since we’d changed them that I had no idea whom or what they belonged to. I gave Sam a look that I hope conveyed this. He just shrugged.
“I trust that Officer Prieto can do all sorts of services for you,” I said. “But do you think I’m the type of person who just rolls up into the DMV and registers my ride? You better have your man dig deeper.”
Junior sighed. It was an odd sound. You never want to think of terribly menacing people feeling resigned. It ruins your idea of ultimate evil on all levels.
“We either start understanding each other on a better business level or one of us is going to die,” Junior said.
“Are you speaking euphemistically?”
“I’m speaking bullets to heads,” he said.
I laughed. It wasn’t a funny thing to be hearing, but it’s always nice to give psychopaths reason to believe you’re just as crazy as they are. “I like how you think, Junior,” I said. “Look, we can only both bleed this whale for so long and then we’ll have to fight for his oil and blubber once he’s dead; that’s what I’m hearing. So why don’t we do this. You send your guys and your cop over to Harding Pharmaceutical this evening, grab the truck, don’t kill anyone in the process, and in good faith, I’ll give you forty percent of my take.”
“Fifty percent.”
“What are you willing to give me to get fifty percent of a score you wouldn’t even know about without me?”
“You can keep the girl. What’s her name? Leticia. She’s yours. But my man wants his kid. That’s Latin Emperor property.”
Fiona was already angry, but this last demand got her ready to blow. So I did the only thing I could do. “Deal,” I said. “Why don’t you and me go to the job tonight, too. Make it a real gentlemen’s agreement, and that way I can make sure none of your boys goes crazy and caps someone and then we both lose.”
“When do we get the kid?”
“Sunday morning,” I said. “I’ve got buyers ready tonight. They’ll inspect the truck, see if it’s all kosher, we’ll get paid and we’ll make the trade in the morning at Honrado—that way no one goes gun crazy. No one gets cut. Father and son are together. We all go get some Jesus together, maybe. Make it real easy. And I’ve got one less crying kid to worry about. You ever listen to a kid cry for an entire night? And then there was the food he ate. You can have him, Junior. You can have him.”
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