No Way Back: A Novel (29 page)

I stared back at him. “He was selling illegal guns to the cartels?”

“I don’t know. But there’s more. There’s something else there . . . a seal. From the U.S. government. He’s an approved vendor to the United States of America.”

My pulse started to accelerate. “That’s what they were protecting. They’re selling arms illegally to the Mexican cartels . . .”

“Yes, but there’s got to be something more. This has all come out. You’ve heard of this program, on the news. What’s it called, Fast and Furious. The government was selling arms to cartels, hoping to be able to trace them back when they were used in crimes and then have them as evidence. That’s all public. They’ve testified before Congress. It has to be something deeper than that.”

“He could have been trafficking himself by bringing something back,” I said. “Receiving product in return for arms. What if he went around the cartels and they killed his daughter?”

“I don’t know,” Harold said. He took off his glasses and rubbed his forehead.

Lauritzia pulled away from me and dabbed her eyes.

“I can turn myself in,” I said to Harold. “You find someone to represent me. I can show them: Hruseff and Dokes are somehow both tied in. And maybe that woman you went to see, Sabrina Stein. We can show them how Ana Lasser was the actual target of the hit. This will all come out.”

“
What
will come out?” Harold shook his head cynically. “That this whole thing is just an elaborate scheme to cover up a secret government arms sale? And tell them what? That Dokes and Hruseff once worked together? Years ago? That Hruseff said to Curtis, ‘This is for Gillian,’ before he killed him? And that you traced it back to mean the victim’s hometown? Tell them how Curtis followed it all back to that ambush in Culiacán? Do you have any documentation? His notes?”

“His computer was taken from the hotel room. By Dokes. I’m sure.”

“You think any of this overrides the fact that you shot that agent? Or that it’s any stronger than the evidence that you killed your husband? Assuming we can even protect you from Dokes. Or that you even made it to trial. Are you planning on asking Lauritzia to testify in your behalf? And as to what? Hearsay, that her father may have told her? Which doesn’t actually prove a thing. Are you going to put
me
on the stand? That I thought Sabrina Stein might have been holding something back? Well, I can’t do it, Wendy. I’m already putting my family at risk as it is. I can’t go into hiding like Lauritzia’s father. What we need to know is what was behind this? Lauritzia, you say it was the guns.
What guns?
Guns to whom? How did it connect illicitly to the U.S. government? Do we have anything tying anything to this Lasser except the name of his hometown?
What
are they trying to hide, and who would have a motive to do so? And why?”

“There’s only one way to find those things out.” I let out a resolute breath. “Lauritzia said ask Cano—or ask the girl’s father. So that’s what I’ll do.”

Harold looked at me, incredulous.

“What choice do I have? You said yourself, if I turn myself in or if I’m caught, I’ll be convicted. I’ll be painted like some lunatic. I’m as good as Lauritzia. Put me back out on that street, and I’m dead.”

“You’re talking about the Zeta drug cartel, Wendy. These men are hardened killers. You don’t have a fucking clue what they have to hide. You think he’s just going to open up to you?”

“Then I’ll have to find a way.”

“How?”

“I don’t know. I’ll find one! He’s lost a daughter. We’ve both lost someone we loved to Eduardo Cano. Grief is just as strong a motive as survival. Lauritzia knows that. And so do you. You brought me here.”

“You can’t just go out there alone! If you’re wrong about any of this, you’ll never be heard from again.”

“She won’t go out there alone,” came Lauritzia’s voice, and we both turned, surprised.

She looked at us both with resolve. “She won’t be going alone. I will go too.”

“Lauritzia, that’s crazy. These people want to kill you . . .”

“Tell me what is my life worth here? Hiding . . . haunted by these ghosts.”

“I’m sorry.” Harold shook his head. “But not after what’s happened. I can’t allow that. Not now . . .”

She came across the table and placed her hand on his shoulder. “There is no person on this earth who has given more to me than you and your wife. You have given up everything because of me. And it is precisely because of that that I have to do this. I can’t live in hiding for the rest of my life. Not if there’s a chance that this can end. Even if it only ends for Wendy. Or for you.”

“Lauritzia, you’ll be risking everything we fought for.”

“No, we fought for the end of Eduardo Cano, and that did not come. I am risking nothing now. What do I have?” She took Harold’s hands and cupped them in her own. “There is a saying where I am from.” She spoke in Spanish, then translated: “ ‘In life you have many keys, but only one opens the lock to your own story.’ ” Lauritzia turned to me. “You are right. You and me, we are the same. It is clear, your key is out there. But I have run and hid and cried and mourned, let myself feel anger and without hope, and what do I have? I need the truth too. I think it was fate that you came to find me. I think my key is out there too.”

“Your
key . . .” Harold pushed back his chair, like a helpless father no longer able to control his rebelling child. “What do you think you’re going to find there?”

Whatever tears had burned in Lauritzia’s eyes a moment earlier had dried, and in their place now there seemed to glisten a new understanding. A new resolve. “Eduardo Cano.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT

O
utside, the beat-up Toyota Corolla pulled to a stop about thirty feet behind the white Mercedes and cut the engine on the other side of the street.

Inside, a man with dark eyes and a narrow, pockmarked face watched as Harold went into the building. It took everything he had not to do it then. But he waited. A few minutes later Harold came back out and waved in the direction of his car. Then the woman went in too.

The man in the Toyota turned off the car lights.

He knew why the two were here and where they had gone. It made him feel good that he had finally found her. He would wait. He realized he’d learned nothing in his line of work if not patience. Ahead of him, a couple were walking their dog and crossed to his side of the street. There would be the right time to strike, and this wasn’t it. But that time was almost upon them.

La cuota—
it had to be paid. His. Hers. It was all of their fates. No one escaped it. It was all he knew.

He shifted the Spanish newspaper next to him on the passenger seat and checked on his gun. If he needed it, this was where the answer was.

The streetlights lit up with the blowing snowflakes. The couple who were walking their dog came back, this time on his side of the street. The man in the car placed his hand over his face as they passed by. Another car drove by, the tires crunching on the freshly spread sand. He hated the cold here. It was time to go back home. To the mountains and the endless stretching blue sky. The friendly jacaranda trees. Maybe when this was all done.

He had long covered over the line between virtue and wrong. It was a footprint washed away in the sand, the tide of his deeds making it invisible. His face and hands bore the marks of his trade—knife scars and fingers broken many times. Swollen like grotesque, disfigured things. He was a
sicario
, a killer. He had killed so many men—women, children too—he could no longer remember the faces or even bring them back in his dreams. He knew on the Day of the Dead they would all come back to him. Wearing their masks of life, they would dance around him, drag him off to hell, for there was no doubt that that’s what his fate would be. He wondered, in that moment, when it was his time—when he saw the spark from the barrel aimed at him, because he knew that’s how it would end for him—would it matter, that he knew he had wronged so many? That he attempted to right it?

This once.

To pay down his
cuota.

The people with their dog were well past now, and he removed his hand from his face. The lamplight shone on him, exposing his pain for all to see, revealing one of the many tattoos etched on his neck.

The numbers 12 and 26 with a flower separating them. As if they were numbers from a death camp. But in this case they simply stood for letters of the alphabet.

Letters that had made him who he was. That had brought the dance of masks that haunted him in his sleep. Both his penance and his curse.

12. 26. The twelfth letter and the last.

L
and
Z.

Los Zetas.

GILLIAN

CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE

J
oe Esterhaus waved to the man with the wiry dark hair as he came into the bar. With his broad shoulders and slick gray suit, the man might have fit the image of a mobster more than a senior agent with the FBI.

“Been a while, huh, Joe?” Bruce Paul smiled broadly and stepped up to him. His gaze landed on Esterhaus’s wounded shoulder.

“Shower accident,” Esterhaus said, and shrugged.

“Teach you not to do your showering at Grand Central,” Paul said with a chuckle. “Club soda and lime,” he said to the bartender.

Esterhaus shot him a look of surprise.

“Three years. Clean and sober.” The FBI man shrugged. “Don’t know what the hell took me so long.”

“Arnold Palmer.” Esterhaus raised his own glass. Iced tea and lemonade. “Guess it’s been a while, huh?”

Bruce took his drink and they clinked glasses. “Yeah, guess it has.”

They chatted for a while about some old buddies Esterhaus had lost touch with. He and Bruce had said hi a couple of times, at weddings and a funeral or two since Esterhaus left the force, but they hadn’t really sat down together in more than six years.

At a lull, the FBI man turned to him. “So what’s the occasion, Joe?”

Esterhaus put down his glass. “I need some help, Brucie. I need to get something passed to someone on the inside. Someone who isn’t in anyone’s lap.”

“You mean someone completely marginalized.” Bruce laughed. “It’s not like the old days, Joseph. Shuffling paperwork in Nassau County is pretty much the end of the line for me. I got, what, maybe another year? Tommy Mara is already asking if I’d be interested in joining up with his security outfit.”

“Someone
independent
is more what I was thinking.” Esterhaus swiveled around and faced him.

“Okay, I’m listening.” Bruce placed his drink down on the counter. “I’m the only one here.”

“I went through her house.” Esterhaus leveled his gaze on his old friend’s eyes. He didn’t need to spell out whose.

“That house is still a federal crime scene, isn’t it, Joe? Considering that shoulder, I thought you would have learned your lesson by now.”

“She’s innocent, Bruce. She’s being set up.”

“For God’s sakes, Joe, the woman killed a government agent. One of us. She shot her own husband. And fled the scene . . . Look, I know you were tight with her dad—”

“She didn’t kill her husband, Bruce.”

“She shot him! In their own kitchen, for Christ’s sake! With a gun that matched the one that killed that Homeland Security guy back at the hotel. The same hotel, I’m sure I don’t have to remind you, from which she took off and ran.”

“So if he was killed in the kitchen, as everyone says”—Esterhaus opened the envelope he had with him and took out a plastic baggie—“be a genius, Brucie, and tell me just what the guy’s blood was doing out on the street, thirty yards away?”

Bruce Paul wrinkled his mouth without answering.

Esterhaus handed him the baggie containing the several clumps of dried blood he had taken from Wendy Gould’s driveway. “I already got them checked out. I ran them against traces of the husband’s blood I took out of the kitchen.”

“You took out of the kitchen?
What the hell is going on here, Joe?”

“We can talk about that later, Brucie. All that matters now is that David Gould wasn’t shot in his kitchen like the investigators have said. He was shot on the street. Someone moved that body.”

Esterhaus took out a pen and sketched on the manila envelope. “Look, they have this U-shaped driveway . . . The kitchen’s here . . . Wendy claims she and her husband were in the garage, in their car about to leave, when lights flashed on behind them.”

“About to leave
? Jesus, Joe, it was in the middle of the fucking night!”

“I know it was in the middle of the night. She said she realized she’d left something behind at the hotel, some conference program or something. But something that could lead back to her. And she was right. So she freaked out and convinced him they had to get out of there. They were in the process of backing out of the garage when the authorities showed up. Not the police, Bruce. And this is important. The same Homeland Security guy from the hotel. She hit the gas and slammed into his car and started to drive away.”

“Call me crazy, Joe, but doesn’t that kind of thing usually fall under the heading of
escaping
?”

“The woman had just witnessed a man being killed! And it was the shooter’s partner who was there for her at her house.” Esterhaus circled a spot at the top of the driveway. “She said she stopped the car and her husband’s body fell out about
here . . .
not in the kitchen. On the street.” Esterhaus jabbed at the spot. “Which is where I found
this
.” He tapped his finger on the dried blood.

Bruce wiped his hand across his face, starting to take in what Esterhaus was suggesting.

“They moved that body, Bruce. The very same people who tried to kill her at that hotel . . .”

“Where she had no right being, Joe. Unless she was up to no good.”

“Where she had no right being, Bruce, I totally agree. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen just like she said. That doesn’t mean she didn’t stumble into some kind of a government kill squad with something important they wanted to keep quiet. This Curtis dude, the one who was killed in there, he was a journalist. Maybe he stumbled onto something he shouldn’t have. Wouldn’t be the first time. We go back over twenty years, Brucie. Why would the husband’s blood be out on that street? She wasn’t trying to run away, at Grand Central. She was turning herself in.” He lifted his arm. “You honestly think this friggin’ hole in my shoulder was actually intended for
me
?”