Rosarito Beach (22 page)

She took a breath and called Mora.

Mora answered immediately, saying: “What's going on, Agent Hamilton? Why aren't you where you're supposed to be? Why didn't you meet up with the transport vehicle?”

“We've got a major problem,” Kay said. “I got Tito out of Pendleton without a hitch, just like he told you when he called. Then, a couple minutes later, we got in a wreck with two marines who were driving back to Pendleton. My car—”

“Agent Hamilton, you do not want to play games with me. I wasn't bluffing about what would happen to your daughter if you—”

“Listen to me!” Kay screamed. “I'm not lying. I'm not playing games. You can verify everything I'm trying to tell you.” When Mora didn't interrupt, Kay continued. “Like I said, we got in a wreck. My car turned over in a ditch on North River Road about five miles from where I was supposed to meet the minivan. Tell the minivan driver to go look; he'll see it. Anyway, I had the marines put Tito in their car and I took their car, but—”

“What do you mean, you had the marines
put
him in the car?”

“I'm getting to that. Quit interrupting me. I had the marines put him in their car because Tito was hurt in the accident. The idiot wasn't wearing his seat belt. His right shoulder is dislocated for sure, and he's got a concussion, a bad one. He really smacked his head, and I need to get him to a doctor.”

“I don't believe you.”

“I didn't think you would. I'm going to take a video with my cell phone. I'll send it to you in one minute.”

Kay put her cell phone in video mode, then she panned Tito's corpse sitting in the seat next to her. As she videoed, she started talking. “You can see him, Mora, he's just sitting here. Tito, say something. Tell Mora you're hurt. Tito! Tito! Say something!”

Kay gave a low groan, hoping Mora would think the sound came from Tito, then pulled on the dental floss and dead Tito slowly raised his left hand. Kay immediately stopped recording and sent the video to Mora's phone, waited thirty seconds, then called him back.

“You can verify the car wreck,” Kay said again, “and you can see that he's hurt. But pretty soon the marine is going to report that I stole his car, so I need to get a clean car.”

“You don't need another car. I'll call the transport driver and have him meet you. Give me your location.”

“No! I'm not going to give your guy a chance to kill me and take Tito. What I'm going to do is take Tito to a doctor right away so he doesn't die on me, and then I'll get a clean car.”

“You can't take him to a hospital,” Mora said.

“I know that. I'm taking him to a doc I know.”

“I'll give you the name of a doctor we use, one you can trust not to call the authorities.”

“No. I'm taking him to my doc, not yours. If I take him to yours, you'll just send in a bunch of your goons to take him from me. I don't trust you, Mora. We're going to do this my way.”

“I won't—”

“I'm not going to debate this with you. I know a doctor, a good one, and he's close to my current location. He got his ass in trouble selling OxyContin to addicts a couple years ago, and I did him a favor so he wouldn't lose his license. When Tito's stable, we'll make the exchange.”

“How? How will we make the exchange?”

“I don't know. I can't think about that right now. You figure something out. But things have changed. By the time I get Tito to the doctor, the marshals at Pendleton are going to be conscious. Not long after that, every cop in California is going to be looking for me, and they'll definitely be checking the border crossings. In other words, it's not going to be as simple as me just driving Tito across the border anymore. So you figure something out, genius. You come up with a way to make the exchange in California or Arizona. And it has to be like you said before: I have to be able to confirm that my daughter's free before I give you Tito.”

Mora didn't say anything for a long time, then he said, “I think you're lying to me, Agent Hamilton. Maybe I'll have a dozen of my men rape your daughter to give her a taste of her future.”

“You do anything to my daughter—
anything
—and I swear I'll cut the balls off this piece of shit sitting next to me. So you'll get him back, but he won't be happy about his condition.”

Again Mora went silent. “I want you to call me every hour.”

“I'll call you when I'm ready to call you. By the way, I'm also getting rid of my cell phone. I'll get a clean one from the doctor. If I don't ditch this phone, the marshals will be able to track me. Now, I'll talk to you later. I've got to get Tito to the doctor before he goes into a coma or something.”

Kay knew that Mora didn't necessarily believe everything she'd told him—but he had to
act
like he did. He had no choice.

—

T
he next thing Kay needed to do was dump her cell phone and the marines' cell phones. She dropped the marines' phones into a curbside waste container, but she placed hers on a bus stop bench. She was hoping someone would pick up the phone and then start moving around Del Mar—and the marshals would waste some time tracking that person. She hoped.

It was now time to go get her new car, after which she'd put Tito's body someplace where it wouldn't be found for a couple days. She looked at her watch. The marshals at Pendleton would be regaining consciousness very soon. She was running out of time. She wanted to be across the border by five a.m.

A
ringing cell phone lying on the coffee table next to his Heckler & Koch .45 woke Marshal Kevin Walker a little after two a.m. For the second night in a row, he'd passed out on the couch and never made it to bed. And for the second night in a row, he considered putting the .45 in his mouth and pulling the trigger. His head ached, his mouth was dry, and his back hurt from lying on the couch.

He knew he had to stop drinking. Either that or swallow the gun. He should go to his boss, tell him he was a drunk, and ask for time to go into rehab. Or maybe just resign and go into rehab. Or maybe just resign and forget rehab. Whatever he did, he couldn't continue doing what he was doing. He was either going to end up as a bum in a gutter, or worse yet, do something stupid that could end up killing more people who worked for him.

The heavy drinking really started after the fifth funeral. He'd made it through the first four about as well as anyone could, telling the survivors how sorry he was, how they'd get the animals responsible, handing the folded-up flag to the widows, their small hands trembling as they took it. But at the fifth funeral . . .

Walker barely knew the guy they were burying. He'd just been transferred out from Kansas City. He was young, in his twenties, and had a wife and twin daughters, beautiful little blond girls, only three years old. The little girls didn't know what was going on, just that there were a lot of people around and their mother was crying, but one of them saw Walker looking at her and she gave him a shy smile and a little wave. It was the smile that did it. Something shattered inside him.

He'd go to work during the day and do his job, but at night he'd come home and start sipping whiskey. It was like there was a video loop playing in his head. He'd sit there, seeing everything he'd done the day of the massacre, thinking he should have done this, he should have done that . . . He just couldn't stop thinking about it. And he could see, as clear as the day it happened, the burned-out SUV that contained four of his men. He could still smell their flesh burning.

The damn cell phone kept ringing. He finally answered it on the sixth ring, just before it went to voice mail. “Walker,” he croaked.

“Sir, this is Lincoln, up here at Pendleton.”

Walker didn't really know Lincoln either; he was one of the new guys he'd been given to replace the guys he'd lost. The guys he'd killed.

“Yeah, Lincoln, what's going on?”

Lincoln told him: Two DEA agents, Hamilton and Kirk, came to Pendleton about midnight with orders to interview Tito Olivera about some ongoing DEA operation. The next thing Lincoln and his partner knew, they were waking up two hours later.

“I don't understand,” Walker said. “Were you knocked out, drugged, what?”

“I don't know. All I know is one minute we were talking to Hamilton and, two hours later, we're waking up.”

“Have you checked on Tito?”

“Yeah. It's the first thing I did when I woke up. He's still in his cell.”

“This doesn't make any sense,” Walker said. “Did anyone else in the brig pass out? I mean, was there a carbon monoxide leak, a gas leak, something like that?”

“No. We checked with the marines. Everybody's fine. We were the only ones affected.”

“What about Tito?”

“He was sleeping when I looked in on him, so I don't know if he passed out like we did or not.”

“I'm going to call Hamilton's boss and see what he knows. I'll get back to you.”

—

W
alker woke up Jim Davis two minutes later and repeated the story. “What the hell was Hamilton doing up at Pendleton?” Walker asked.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Davis said. “I didn't send her there, and the only DEA agent I know named Kirk is stationed in Colombia.”

“Well, you need to contact Hamilton and see what's going on. If my guys are right about the timing, they passed out while she was with them. Why wouldn't she have called the medics or something?”

“I don't know. Maybe . . . I don't know. I'll call her right now and—”

“Oh, shit,” Walker said. “I'll call you back.” He disconnected the call with Davis and called Lincoln. “Lincoln, I want you to take Tito's fingerprints. Right away. Then call Daniels, You know Daniels? He's my admin guy. Anyway, tell Daniels to get his ass down to the office and you fax him the fingerprints. Move!”

Half an hour later, Kevin Walker had showered and tried to disguise the smell of booze on his breath with mints and toothpaste. He'd also received two phone calls. One was from Jim Davis saying that Hamilton wasn't answering her cell phone, that there was no DEA agent named Kirk in California, and there was no operation under way that would have required Hamilton to interview Tito Olivera. The second call was from Daniels, who'd checked the fingerprints Lincoln had sent him; he told Walker that the man in Tito Olivera's cell was not Tito and, whoever he was, he had no fingerprints on file in the United States.

By four a.m., the head of virtually every law-enforcement agency in Southern California and a dozen people in Washington, D.C., had been notified that Tito Olivera had escaped from Camp Pendleton aided by DEA Agent Kay Hamilton. FBI agents, DEA agents, U.S. marshals, the California Highway Patrol, and cops in every town between Pendleton and the Mexican border were looking for Hamilton and her car. Border patrol agents were looking for her and Tito at the California and Arizona border crossings. Hamilton's cell phone provider was also cooperating, trying to locate her via her phone. In the morning, Hamilton's and Tito's photographs would be plastered all over the news.

And Kevin Walker knew that everything they were doing was futile. Hamilton had left Camp Pendleton at twelve-thirty a.m. She was already in Mexico.

At five a.m., Walker was informed that Hamilton's cell phone had been found on a bus stop bench in Del Mar. Ten minutes later, he was informed that Hamilton's car had been found lying on its roof in a drainage ditch. Did that mean Hamilton was on foot somewhere in the Camp Pendleton area? No. If that was the case, her phone wouldn't have been found in Del Mar. She'd found another car, and they had no idea what she was driving.

Since Walker started boozing, he never drank in the morning or during the day while he was working. Now he was wondering where he could buy a bottle at five a.m.

A
bout the time Kevin Walker found out that the marshals at Camp Pendleton had lost two hours of their lives, Raphael Mora was wondering if he should wake up his boss and tell him the news about Tito, or if he should wait until morning. There wasn't anything Caesar would be able to do at two a.m.—Mora was already doing what needed to be done—but Caesar always said that he wanted to receive bad news right away. According to Caesar, good news delivered late was just a pleasure delayed,
but he needed bad news immediately so he could make decisions to quickly address whatever the problem might be. That bit about good news being a
“
pleasure delayed” was something Caesar had read in a management book.

Mora decided to wake up his boss.

“Do you think she's lying?” Caesar asked after Mora told him Kay's story.

“I don't think so,” Mora said. “She didn't lie about the accident. Her car was in a ditch, just like she said. I had the transport van driver verify that. And Tito certainly looked hurt in the video she sent me, and I believe she's doing everything she can to make sure he stays alive. She knows she can't exchange a dead man for her daughter.

“I have my people trying to find the doctor. She said he got in trouble selling meds illegally a couple years ago, so I have them looking at arrest records, court appearances, anything that might give us a lead tying Hamilton to a doctor. She told me she was going to dump her cell phone, so I can't track her that way.” Mora paused before he added, “And we have another problem. Hamilton wants to make the exchange in the U.S.”

“What do you mean? I thought you were going to have her drive Tito across the border in one of the transport vehicles.”

“Sir, by now the marshals most likely know that Tito has escaped from the brig. They probably think he's already across the border, but for the next several hours they're going to be looking for him and Hamilton at the border crossings. So Hamilton is afraid she'll be caught crossing into Mexico and wants to make the exchange in the U.S.”

“You
can't
make the exchange in the U.S.,” Caesar said. “As soon as she has her daughter, she'll call someone and they'll arrest Tito again when he tries to cross.”

“I realize that,” Mora said, making no attempt to hide his exasperation. “I'll have to convince Hamilton that if she wants her daughter back, the exchange must be made on this side of the border, and she'll have no choice but to do it my way. What I'm trying to tell you is that I can't finalize the details of the exchange until I hear back from the damn woman.”

“Son of a bitch,” Caesar muttered.

“Sir, don't worry. I'll get Tito back. I promise.”

Caesar went silent, apparently pondering everything Mora had told him, and Mora could imagine him trying to contain his rage. He did.

“Very well,” Caesar finally said. Then he added, “And I won't forget the promise you just made.”