In Desperation (14 page)

Lago de Rosas, Mexico

T
he old woman was dying.

At her son's request, Father Francisco Ortero's weekly visits had become a daily ritual, now that she was so close to death.

She lived with her family at the hamlet's edge in a shack built of wood salvaged from pallets discarded by the fruit warehouse in the next town. The priest always declined the family's invitation to supper, not wanting to further strain their meager means.

He always arrived when the woman's daughter-in-law was washing her battered pots and pans, or taking dried linen down from the line. The little house was well kept and the corner of it where the old woman was confined to a narrow bed smelled of fresh flowers.

She always took Holy Communion from the priest, who would talk with her into the evening, telling her that she would be with her husband soon, for it was his job to prepare her to meet God. His words comforted her and she smiled.

When Father Ortero left, the moon was rising, washing the dirt road in blue as he walked back to the rectory. Finding peace in the evening, he looked back on his day. His foremost thought was the
sicario
who'd entered the confessional. While he had always expected
some repercussion for the outspoken stand he had taken in Juarez against the
narcotraficantes,
the encounter was unexpected.

A cartel assassin had come to him—not for blood, but to confess.

The priest wondered if he had done enough to guide the killer back to God. Should he somehow alert police investigating the double murder south of Juarez? Wouldn't that break the seal of the confession, violate his vow? Perhaps he should talk to his bishop. His questions fell into the silence that cracked with the long, wild cry of a coyote, reminding him that primitive forces were near.

No one else was on the road tonight.

It was a lonely walk, his only company being his thoughts and the mournful wail of the predator in the darkness. This one was likely hunting mice or lizards. While coyotes were common here, they did not attack humans. He was not concerned. He'd walked this road many times and was often serenaded by coyotes.

Thud!

A stone hit the ground and rolled behind him. Instinctively, the priest stopped and turned.

Nothing was there.

When he turned back, a figure was standing before him, a few feet away, blocking his path. He was slender, taller than the priest, who stood five feet eight inches. A young man, judging by his build and his posture.

A bandanna covered his face, allowing the priest to see only his eyes and short hair. He wore jeans, a T-shirt and a shoulder holster that cradled a semiautomatic handgun.

“Father Ortero.”

Immediately, he recognized the voice.

“Do you remember me?”

“Yes.”

“I asked for you in the town. They told me I would find you here tonight. Don't be afraid.”

“As I recall, you are the frightened one.”

“You insult me. I have killed men for less.”

The priest extended his arms, opened his palms.

“Go ahead. Guarantee your seat in hell.”

The moon was ablaze in the
sicario's
eyes.

“I have given more thought to my situation, my offer to the church and what you said.”

“You wish to confess here, now, and surrender to police?”

“I need to understand redemption and salvation. If I am truly repentant and I make my generous donation, will I receive absolution?”

“How old are you?”

“I am twenty.”

“You are naive to think you can manipulate favor with God.”

“I am sorry for my sins and I am willing to give the church more money than it will see in a thousand years.”

“You murder two hundred people and you expect to buy eternal salvation with blood money?” The
sicario
fell to his knees.

“My nightmares torment me and a rival gang wants to kill me. I must be absolved. I now know that Santa Muerte is a false saint. I leave my calling card now for effect only, to impress police. But I know she cannot protect me. I must make things right with God. I have given more thought to what you said.”

“You will confess and surrender?”

“In a few more days, I will finish my next job, the one that pays large. Then I want you to arrange for me to tell my story to a trusted journalist, so police cannot twist it. Then I will surrender if I can work a deal with police.”

“What sort of deal?”

“I want to go into witness protection in the U.S. or in Canada, in exchange for information I will give them
about cartels, very important information that could end a lot of bloodshed.”

“What is this next job?”

“I don't know. I will be told details later.”

“Why not surrender now, end the killing now?”

“I need the money from this last job for my new life and to give to the church. Can you help me do this?”

“I do not like your proposal.”

“It is not for liking. Can you help me?”

“Yes, I can help you surrender.”

“And can you assure me absolution and save me from eternal hell?”

“Determining the destination of your soul is for God. I can assure you that if you go back on your offer, if you fail to surrender and atone, your soul will remain outside of God's light forever.”

“I give you my word. I will surrender. I will be in contact.”

The priest's rectory had one of the few phones in Lago de Rosas and the
sicario
took the number from Father Ortero before vanishing.

The priest stood alone.

He cupped his hands over his face. His heart was still racing as he tried to comprehend what had transpired. Did it even happen? It was as if the
sicario
were never there.

As the priest resumed walking, a desert wind tumbled across the land carrying with it the long rising howl of the coyote. It turned into yapping that fell into a growl, triggering a sudden high-pitched scream of something dying out there in the night.

Phoenix, Arizona

I
t didn't add up.

As night fell, Percy Smoot wet the tips of his nicotine-stained fingers with his tongue and counted the cash at the Sweet Times Motel register.

Worn and torn fives, tens and twenties piled on the front desk. When he finished counting, the total was four hundred and eighty dollars.

Percy pushed aside the long strands of greasy hair that curtained over his face. His bloodshot gaze traveled over his bifocals to the heap of bills as if waiting for the total to change.

It should be five hundred and forty.

He shifted the toothpick clamped in his mouth and scratched his gut, which stretched the mustard stains on his Cardinals T-shirt. He then flipped through his registration cards. Nine units rented at sixty a pop, which meant he should have freakin' five hundred and forty in cash.

So why did he only have four eighty?

Somebody didn't pay.

If Percy came up short, that peckerwood owner, Lester, would accuse him of dipping into the till again and take the difference out of his paycheck.

Percy would be damned if he'd let that happen.

Fact was, somebody didn't pay. Question was, who?

He was certain he'd collected from everybody.

He rubbed the three-day growth on his chin, thinking, then drank from his mug of bourbon-flavored coffee. He looked at the nine empty key pegs on the wall. He definitely had rented nine units.
So, let's take a look at them cards again.
One by one, he snapped through the registration cards, trying to recall the face that went with each unit. Names meant nothing; no one ever used their real name here. Percy didn't give a rat's A, as long as they paid cash up front.

Every now and then, he'd cut some slack with his regulars.

But this time, someone must've got by him.
Here we go, the guilty party: Unit 28. It was those two shifty guys.
He tapped the card and it started coming back to him in pieces. They'd come in when Percy was half-asleep. They said something about paying later. He wasn't sure. All he knew was that they freakin' owed him.

All right
. Percy sniffed, took another shot of his “coffee,” reached for the motel phone.
Unit 28's going to cough up sixty bucks fast, before Lester shows up to collect today's cash.

As he extended his forefinger to dial, he released a volcanic belch and blinked. Whoa, that was a bad one, Percy thought, assuring himself that he had pressed the right buttons for Unit 28.

The line rang twice before it was answered.

“What?”

“This is the front desk, sir.”

“So?”

“It appears your account is open and we request that you settle it now.”

“What?”

“Sir, you have an outstanding payment of sixty dollars cash.”

“I paid you, you drunken asshole.”

“That's not what our records show, sir.”

“Fuck you.” The line went dead.

Percy cursed and steadied himself on the desk.
All right, if that's the way we're going to play it.
He reached under the desk for his bottle and added more bourbon to his coffee. He took a big gulp, gritted his green teeth, then grabbed his baseball bat from behind the door.

Nobody rips off this old dog, Percy told himself, tapping the bat to his palm, ready to settle matters. Walking by the shit hole pool was a hazy reminder that he was a far cry from his old job at the Biltmore, before his wife died and he hit the juice.

Yeah, well, those days are gone.

His current problem crystallized when he got to Unit 28. He remembered. It was a deluxe suite with adjoining rooms but he'd only charged the two guests sixty bucks. He should've charged one-twenty. He hammered the bat on the scarred door. Nothing happened for a long moment until he felt a slight vibration, indicating movement inside.

He pounded again.

“Open up, hotel management!”

The lock and handle clicked. The door opened a crack and a man's unshaven face appeared behind the security chain. Percy brought the tip of his bat to within inches of it.

“You owe this establishment sixty dollars cash.”

Questions surfaced in the man's dark eyes as he assessed Percy.

“I think you have made a mistake.”

For a second, Percy thought the man's voice differed from the guy he'd just called but he dismissed it, hawked, spat and fixed his grip on the bat.

“Pay me now, or I call the cops to kick your ass out.”

Unfazed, the man contemplated Percy as if he were an insect that had crawled under his boot. A moment passed before the man came to a decision.

“It's possible my friend did forget to pay. Sixty dollars, is it?”

“Damn straight.”

“Wait.”

Remaining at the door, the man shifted his weight as if searching for his jean pockets. Percy's ears pricked up at the jingle of a long chain coming from the adjoining room.

“Do you have a dog in there?”

The man shook his head.

“Because we have a no-pets policy. I might have to charge you extra for any damage.”

“No dog.”

“I don't give a rat's A what you two do to each other in there.” Percy scanned what he could see through the sliver the opened door made. It was very dark but he glimpsed the wall mirror, reflecting the adjoining room. The inside partition door swung open ever so slightly and there was a diffusion of light, as if someone had moved inside.

Then everything became still.

Too still.

What was going on there in the other room?

In that instant Percy sensed something was not right. The man at the door, reading the first stage of alarm rising on Percy's face, tightened his grip on the Glock he was holding behind his back. The moment was telegraphed to the door man's partner, sitting on the edge of the bed with one hand over Tilly's mouth, the other holding a knife to her throat.

“Here, this should cover it.”

The door man gave Percy several crumpled bills before closing and locking the door, leaving Percy to count off one hundred dollars.

He lowered his bat and shrugged.

As he returned to the office in his alcoholic stupor, he threw a parting look over his shoulder.

Something was not right in Unit 28, not right at all.

Mesa Mirage, Phoenix, Arizona

T
wenty-five thousand feet over Nevada, Gannon gazed out his window, contemplated the sun setting over the desert and his close call with Vic Lomax.

After weighing the downside of murdering a reporter who was investigating a high-profile case, Lomax had instructed his goons to return Gannon intact to Las Vegas.

The ordeal resurrected other threats Gannon had faced in Texas, Brazil and Africa. That his job could be dangerous was a given, but this time it was his niece's life on the line and he had to do everything he could to save her. He was unearthing pieces of Cora's past, but those pieces spawned questions that might, or might not, be crucial to finding Tilly.

Who is Donnie Cargo?

What did he and Cora do in San Francisco? Was Cargo tied to Salazar and Johnson?

Those questions had troubled Gannon when he'd arrived at the Las Vegas airport, where he'd first considered flying to San Francisco. Before buying a ticket he'd launched a quick online search on Donnie Cargo but had found nothing.

Was Donnie Cargo even a real name?

He'd asked the WPA library to help and he'd contacted
Adell Clark and Isabel Luna, requesting they check for anything on “Donnie Cargo.” It was not looking good and Gannon feared his luck at finding people fast may have run out. With little more than Lomax's accusation, he decided to return to Phoenix and confront Cora, again.

She had texted him minutes before he'd departed.

 

Jack, what's happening? Did you find Lomax?

 

Yes. We have to talk.

 

Call me.

 

No time. We'll talk when I get back.

 

Now, as the lights of Phoenix wheeled below and Gannon's plane began its descent, he returned to Lomax's allegation.

“Your bitch sister got into trouble with a cartel a long time ago…the worst kind…you ask her what she and Donnie Cargo did in San Francisco.”

 

In the time Gannon was gone, Cora had remained lost in her pain.

She had not slept or eaten. The deeper Jack dug among the ruins of her old life, the more dangerous it got.

In finding Peck and Lomax, he'd exhumed demons that would drag her back into the pit of her past.

What did Lomax tell Jack?

It could guarantee that I never see Tilly again.

Forces continued mounting against Cora. Images of the gruesome delivery of eyeballs and those of the headless corpses of the two ex-officers found in the Mexican desert, tortured her. The FBI still had nothing on Lyle or the money. They had no leads on the kidnappers, or any trace of Tilly.

Was she still alive?

Cora prayed but hope seemed as distant as a dying star.

Now she heard the sound of rising voices in her living room. Recognizing one as Jack's, she went to her bedroom door, stopping when she saw him arguing with Hackett about where he'd been.

“I'm warning you, Gannon, if you're withholding information or interfering with this investigation—“

“You want to spend time violating my First Amendment rights instead of finding my niece? Want me to alert the WPA's lawyers in New York?”

“I want you to think about what you're doing. If you—”

“I have a right to talk privately with my sister.”

Gannon entered Cora's bedroom, closing the door behind them.

“What did you find out?” Cora asked.

He struggled to keep his voice low as he spat back with a question.

“Are you involved in any way?”

“No!”

“Do you have, or have you ever had, a connection to any cartel that could be linked to this?”

Cora couldn't answer him.

“All right, so far this is what I've got,” Gannon said. “You ran away with a drug addict, destroyed our family, became a prostitute, got pregnant, left the life and cleaned up. Then your daughter is kidnapped by a drug gang because your boyfriend owes them five million dollars and you want everyone to believe that you and your past have nothing to do with this?”

Her face crumpled and she covered it with her hands.

“What are you keeping from me, Cora?”

Could she tell him? Could she spell out every devastating mistake she'd ever made? Several anguished moments came and went.

“Cora?”

She didn't respond.

“You called me, remember? I'm putting everything on the line for you.”

“It's not about me, Jack. It's about finding Tilly. I called you to help find who took her, help me bring her home.”

“Then tell me everything! For Christ's sake, Cora! I get more help from the scum in your past than I do from you!”

“I have to protect Tilly!”

“From what? What could be worse than this? I don't understand you!” Gannon saw that she was contending with a whirlwind. He softened his approach. “You were my hero, Cora. My big sister. I worshipped you. It's because of you I became a reporter.”

“Jack, you have to trust me. It's not what you or Hackett think. I am a good person, a good mother. I did terrible things to survive a long time ago. I'm not perfect…I made mistakes. I was a seventeen-year-old addict when I ran away. It was stupid but I had my reasons.”

“Yeah? And what were they?”

Fear, horror and shame.

Two life-changing incidents were buried in Cora's past; events she never spoke of, or dared to revisit. She'd kept them secret for decades. That's how she'd survived, if you could call it that. But now, in order to help save Tilly, she would have to exhume one of them for Jack. Only one.

The other must never be revealed.

Cora swallowed hard, hesitated. The pain was unbearable, the shame overwhelming. It hurt so much to even form a thought around the right words. But she had to do it. She'd have to tell him about the night that changed her forever.

The night that made her less human.

“When I was sixteen, I went to a party. Somebody put something in my drink and I was gang-raped.”

Gannon stared at her for the longest time.

His big sister.

Memory carried him back and he no longer saw Cora, the damaged woman before him. Suddenly he saw his sister at the kitchen table of their Buffalo home, blowing out candles for her fourteenth birthday party.

She glows in that pretty yellow dress Mom had made
.

Glows like an angel.

Looking upon her now, in the wake of her painful revelation, his heart broke for her. His eyes stung and slowly, his shock gave way to rage. He wanted to drive his fist through something, wanted to attack the violation of his sister.

“Who were the assholes? Do we know?”

She shook her head.

“Jesus, Cora, I'm so sorry. I…I never…realized.”

“This is the first time I ever told anyone. I never told Mom, Dad, anyone. That was a mistake. I turned to drugs. That's how it all happened. The night I ran off, after my biggest blowup with Mom and Dad, Dad told me to never come back. It was like a knife through my heart. I was garbage to them.”

“That was never true, Cora. They did everything they could to find you, to bring you home. Mom told me how Dad regretted saying what he said to you every day of his life after you left. They loved you.”

“I know. I don't blame them. I was horrible to live with. I was stupid, so messed up. And after I left, I made one mistake after another for over a decade. I was a failure and nearly destroyed myself. But it all changed when I had Tilly. She was my salvation. When I had her, I turned my life around. Then this happens. I don't have anything to do with cartels, or any of this.”

“Is that the whole truth? Are you telling me everything?”

“You want the whole truth? Okay. Deep down, I am out of my mind with fear that maybe somehow, in some way, this could be connected to my past. But it's not about me. My past is behind me. I'm a single mom, a secretary at a courier company. I never knew what Lyle was up to. I loved him, trusted him with my heart and he betrayed us. That's the absolute truth, Jack.”

He rubbed his haggard face, then his eyes.

“Not all of it.”

“What do you mean?”

“Who is Donnie Cargo?”

The name tore her wide open. Jack was getting too close to her last secret. Lomax must've told him about Donnie. Cora looked at him. Or rather, she looked right through him, as though he wasn't there, trepidation clouding her gaze. The name pierced her the way lightning pierces the darkness, hurling her back to that night in San Francisco and…

Rain.

A downpour. She's maybe nineteen and her life's a blur, like the city with its twinkling lights drowning at night. Donnie's driving, Vic is with her in the back and she's tripping, totally wired on crack. It's a pretty city, cable cars climb halfway to the stars. Donnie and Vic picked her up. You're coming with us. Donnie Cargo brags that his nickname means shipment because he moves the supplies. He doesn't have a real name. She doesn't care. He's always jittery, always sweaty. You're coming with us on an errand. That's right, Vic says. Got to take care of business, then we'll have a little party. Vic throws good parties, has good drugs. She owes Vic. She works for drugs. A little of this and a little of that. Anything for drugs. Vic owns her because she owes him. Vic's the boss. Vic the prick, Vic the psycho. Vic has more enemies than friends. What does she know? She's a
tripped-out street ho from Buffalo. What does she care? All she wants to do is party. Kick ass, die young. You're coming with us on a little errand before Vic's party. They float through Golden Gate Park, the Haight. I was born late, she says. I should have been a hippie…flowers in my hair…rain fallin' on my head… Where are they now? Eight miles high. Where we going, boys? Where is this place? I'm a stranger here. Projects, blighted row houses and gloomy alleys. Vic says I got to send a message to a guy. A streetlamp hits on the chrome of the gun tucked in Vic's waist. A gun? Cora's upright like a shot. What the fuck? A gun? Donnie, let me out! He smiles. Be cool. Let me out now, you crazy mothers! Vic says be cool. Cora, baby, dial it down. Cora…Cora…Cora…

“Cora, did you hear me?” Jack squeezed her shoulders hard. “I said, something's going on.”

“What is it?”

He opened her bedroom door to a surge of activity among the investigators in her living room. The air sparked with tension, as an agent, cell phone pressed to his head, passed on information to Hackett,

“Phoenix P.D. emergency dispatcher's got a caller now in real time who says he's got a location on our suspects!”

“Can she patch us in to listen to the call?”

The agent spoke into the phone, then gave a big nod.