Day of the Dead (34 page)

‘Are you going to tell me anything?' she finally asked.

Daniel sighed. ‘Michelle, look … anything I tell you, you're not going to understand.'

‘You know what? I'm not stupid.'

Calming breaths, she told herself. She was so angry. She felt choked with rage. ‘Charlie told me some things. I didn't want to believe him. But I'm starting to.'

‘I know you're upset about Charlie,' he began.

Her hand made a fist and struck the door, without her even thinking about it. ‘Don't you say a fucking word about him!'

He didn't. He stared straight ahead and kept driving.

About ten minutes later, she saw orange cones, and then barrels, on the road. Ahead of those a couple of olive drab trucks – Humvees, maybe – with machine guns mounted on them. A half dozen men in fatigues, with weapons.

‘Don't worry,' Daniel said. ‘It's just an army checkpoint.'

They use the army, hadn't Charlie said that? One of the cartels. Or the army was helping one of them. She couldn't remember which.

Her heart started pounding.

‘Calm down,' Daniel said. ‘Don't act like you've got something to hide.'

He slowed and then stopped.

A soldier came up on either side of the Jeep.

‘¿Hablan español?'
the one on the driver's side asked.

Daniel nodded.

‘¿Tienen drogas o armas?'

‘No,' Daniel said, and then he rattled off something else that Michelle didn't understand, then gestured toward the backseat, and the soldier laughed.

She glanced over her shoulder. A golf bag filled with clubs.

The soldier on Michelle's side of the Jeep looked to be twenty years old, if that. He had thick eyebrows, a round face, and big, dark eyes, which he kept fixed on some point just above her head. She wanted to smile at him, but she didn't. He looked like a teenager, but he still carried a machine gun.

‘Okay,' the soldier on Daniel's side of the car said. He lifted his hand in a wave.

Daniel touched his hand to his forehead in a half salute, and they drove off.

‘Like I said, nothing to worry about. They're not after us.'

‘So who
are
they after?'

He gave her a look. She couldn't tell if he was irritated or embarrassed behind his sunglasses. ‘You heard him, didn't you? You understand that much.'

‘Drugs and guns. And you're telling me you don't have any of those.'

His hands gripped the wheel. ‘I told you it's complicated.'

‘In the car? Are there drugs in this car?'

‘No.'

‘On the planes you're flying, then?'

‘Let's talk about something else.'

‘What does Gary want, Danny? After all the things he's done – after what he did to me – you can at least tell me that.'

For a long moment, he said nothing, just gripped the wheel and stared straight ahead.

She waited for him to say more.

‘He wants me to keep doing my job,' he finally said.

‘Which is what? Are you a smuggler, Danny? Do you smuggle drugs? Or guns? Or … ?'

‘If you're not stupid, don't pretend like you don't know.'

She couldn't say anything at first. She hadn't wanted to be right.

‘So it's true, what Charlie said? You're a spook? Smuggling drugs?'

‘I'm an asset. Unofficial.' He sounded tired. ‘I manage a supply chain. One particular pipeline. Make sure the vendors connect with the shippers and the goods and payments get where they need to go. Sometimes I handle specific deliveries. It depends. Lately I've mostly been ferrying cash. It's easier to launder money here in Mexico than it is in the States.'

Daddy's little bagman.

She thought about the conversation she'd had with Charlie. About the communist threat that didn't exist anymore. About the Contras … what had even happened to them?

‘Why do you do it?'

‘What kind of question is that?' He gave her one of his sidelong grins. ‘It's a job. They pay me.'

‘You keep telling me you're not a bad guy. So tell me why. What's it all for? Tell me, I don't know, that it's to keep us all safe. You did it for your country. Whatever bullshit excuse you have. I want to hear it.'

‘I don't have one anymore.' He shrugged. ‘It used to be fun.'

‘Fun?'

The word hit like a punch in the gut.

‘Yeah. I did all kinds of stuff before this. Flew in and out of some interesting situations. Dropped in extraction teams and picked up people who needed saving, like a big fucking hero. Helped take out bad actors who were better off dead. No bullshit bureaucracy, we just did stuff. Good stuff. It was fun.'

He laughed. ‘Problem is, you do this one thing that's not right so you can do the bigger thing that is. And all of a sudden, you're flying some poor asshole to a black-ops jail in fucking Morocco so they can paste electrodes on his balls.'

Hearing this, she rolled her eyes.

‘Okay, so you're a good guy and they steered you wrong, is that what you're saying? You're a victim here? Jesus, Danny. People are getting killed over this.'

‘Most of them are in the game.'

She thought about all those stories she'd read, about the tens of thousands of people who had died here, in Mexico, casualties of the drug war.

People in the game. Drug lords and dealers and assassins.

Politicians. Reporters. Policemen. Kids.

People who weren't in the game at all.

‘Like Charlie?'

He swallowed hard. Almost shuddered.

‘That kind of thing … it's why I don't want to do it anymore,' he mumbled.

She let her head fall back against the car seat, winced from the pain the impact caused. She didn't know what to say. But there was something she still needed to ask.

‘What about Gary?'

‘He's a step up the chain from me. Not exactly an asset. Not exactly official. They keep it vague on purpose. It's not like everyone in the Company's involved. It's always been a little group, running their own game.'

‘Well, that's a relief,' she said with a snort. ‘So you're a … a supply-chain manager. What's
his
job? Human resources?'

‘He handles problems. Guess he thought I might be turning into one.'

‘What did you do?'

‘Nothing. But he knew I wasn't happy. I made some noise about it. He thought maybe I was going bad.'

She thought about that, about what that could possibly mean in this situation, and gave up. ‘Going bad?'

‘Talking,' he said simply. ‘Telling the truth. Naming names.'

‘Why not just kill you?'

He gave her a look. ‘That's pretty cold.'

‘Well, shit, Danny, isn't that what these people do?'

‘Not us. I mean, not like that. We're not—'

‘You're not what? You're not criminals? You just take out bad actors?'

His hands gripped the wheel until his knuckles turned white. ‘If I got to be a big enough problem, yeah, that could happen,' he said eventually. ‘But he'd rather keep me working. I know the players. Know the ropes. I'm not that easy to replace. Some no-load like Bagger'd goon it up in no time.'

Clouds had started coming in from the coast. A few heavy drops of rain spit on the windshield, and then the sun came through again. She squinted against it, thinking that her head hurt, thinking that maybe he was right, that she couldn't understand. Or that she didn't want to.

‘So are you?' she asked anyway. ‘Going bad?'

He hesitated a long time. ‘No. I don't think so. I thought about it. Tell the press, tell Congress, tell
somebody .
… Then I thought, who'd listen? Who'd care? A lot of them already know, and what could they even do about it? The people with the power to fix it mostly like things the way they are.'

‘You still have plenty of excuses,' she said angrily. ‘Not everyone's corrupt. There are people who try to do the right thing.'

‘Yeah,' he said without heat. ‘Hey, if you're looking for a hero, I'm not that guy. I'm too much of a chickenshit, I guess.'

She wasn't going to fill in the silence that followed. What could she say to that? Then she thought, When did I ever not just go along? When have I ever been brave?

‘Me too,' she said.

She stared out the window, at the foothills shrouded in low-hanging clouds.'Mostly I thought about quitting,' Daniel said after a while. ‘But there's consequences to that too, you know? So I told myself I was getting my ducks in a row. Making sure I had insurance. Waiting for … I don't know what I was waiting for.'

‘I don't understand,' Michelle said. ‘I don't understand what Gary thought … what was the point of having me there? What did he think I could tell him, when I didn't understand what I was even looking for?'

‘You were there, that was enough. Maybe you could tell him something useful. Maybe not. But you were there. And he could listen to us. Just to let me know that I can't trust anybody, that he's got his eye on me no matter what I do. He'd get a good laugh out of it later, you know? Come back to me, brag about how he set us up, make a few pussy jokes . … I mean, why do dogs lick themselves, right?'

‘Because they can?' She could hear the edge of hysteria in her voice, the rage again; she was shaking with it.

‘Yeah. He could fuck with us, so he did. That's the kind of guy he is.'

‘And what he did to me …'

‘A warning. Like the pig's head. This is what happens when you don't play along.'

‘You think you can keep it together?'

She nodded. There wasn't much choice.

‘You got mugged,' he reminded her. ‘You're feeling better now. You wanted to go someplace where you could relax. Somewhere quiet.'

‘Okay,' she said.

They had driven off the main highway, on a series of local roads. She'd seen a little bit of the town, a combination of an old village with men in white straw hats riding horses on the streets and art galleries that looked transplanted from someplace like Santa Fe.

Now they were on a tiny lane that had been carved out of the jungle, narrow enough and so shaded by trees that it resembled a tunnel of green.

Ahead was a wrought-iron gate with a guard box, and a guard. No uniform, but built like a weightlifter.

‘You don't have anything to worry about here,' Daniel said. ‘It's just a party.'

The guard took in Daniel's face and nodded.

The gate rolled open.

‘Whose party?'

He hesitated. ‘His name is Curt Dellinger. He's a client.'

Dellinger. That sounded familiar, but she couldn't say why. ‘A client?'

‘I handle transportation for him sometimes,' Daniel said, voice tight. ‘That's all you need to know. Just stick to the story. Don't go off script. Okay?'

Great, Michelle thought. A client.

‘No, it's not,' she said. ‘You need to tell me why we're here. If you're doing some kind of business—'

‘I just need to run something by him,' Daniel muttered. He turned to her now. ‘The main thing you need to do is be cool. Show you can handle yourself. Can you do that?'

He was nervous, she realized, and in a way she hadn't seen before.

Maybe even scared.

‘Yeah,' she said.

‘Just stick to the story. Don't go off script. Okay?'

‘I won't.'

They drove down a cobblestoned drive, then over to the left where several other cars were parked. There were a couple of valets there, or were they guards as well?

‘Can you walk that far?' Daniel asked. ‘I can pull up to the entrance and let you off.'

‘I'm fine.' She wasn't really, but walking seemed like a good idea, testing herself, making sure she could move.

Daniel came around to the passenger side and opened the door.

‘Let me help.' He offered her his arm. She grasped it with her good right hand, stepped out awkwardly, and he circled his arm beneath hers, around her back, to help her up.

She gasped, not wanting to, but it hurt and she couldn't help it. ‘I'm okay,' she said, to cut him off. She wasn't in the mood for his sympathy. ‘Getting up and down's just a little hard.'

She leaned against the Jeep while he retrieved her cane.

They walked up the drive, toward the main house. It looked like a Malibu villa, Michelle thought, two stories, with white arches and a red-tiled roof. There were several outbuildings off to one side. One was obviously a garage. She couldn't tell about the others.

A Mexican woman in a white embroidered dress greeted them at the door. Smiling, she led them through a living room with a red-tiled floor. Leather couches and chairs, heavy wood polished to a warm glow, hand-woven rugs. Paintings on the wall, modern and some nineteenth century, she thought, of seascapes mostly.

Tasteful – and reeking of money.

The party guests were out on the terrace in the back, thirty or so people by Michelle's reckoning.

It was a large terrace, with descending layers, overlooking a garden and a pool, and beyond that the beach, the sand in striations of white, tan, and goldenbrown as it met the lapping waves. The beach was practically deserted, the water so clear, the sky so deeply blue that it hurt her eyes.

‘Nice, huh?' Daniel said.

She nodded.

‘Hang in there,' he said. ‘Try to relax. That's all you have to do.'

They made their way to the terrace. As they approached, a tall, gray-haired man wearing khakis and an untucked Polo shirt excused himself from the conversation he was having and turned in their direction.

‘Danny,' he said. ‘Good to see you.' He had a long, lined face, a surprisingly soft voice with a certain clipped authority.