The Devil's Elixir (28 page)

Munro couldn’t let his dig go by unchallenged. “We’ve seen action. Plenty of it. Just not in BDUs.”

Pennebaker cast a more analytical eye across the pair of us. I could see him revising his opinion, deciding whether he could take both of us if he were so inclined.

Munro took a couple of steps toward the door in case Pennebaker decided to charge for the exit.

The agent who had driven us out there would already be covering the rear. And the local FBI car was parked a couple of hundred yards down the street.

For a moment, Pennebaker rocked back onto the balls of both feet and tensed his limbs—the instinctive reaction of a soldier—then he relaxed his entire body and cocked his head to one side.

“You know who I am. Good for you.”

I walked toward the common room and sat down, and gestured for Pennebaker to join me. “Come on. Sit. We need to talk. It’s about the club.”

He took a deep, annoyed breath, then followed suit and grabbed a chair facing me. Munro joined us but stayed on his feet.

“I’ve got nothing to say about that. I’m out. Been out for years. End of story.”

There was no guilt or paranoia or rage on display. His words were calm and assured. Whatever path Pennebaker was on had turned potentially self-destructive feelings into confidence and what appeared to be a strong sense of self-worth.

“In fact, why should I talk to you guys at all?”

I thought of mentioning that the last time I looked, identity fraud was a criminal offense and we could make his life miserable because of it. Instead, I took out my phone and showed him a photo of his mutilated ex-brother-in-arms.

“I don’t think Walker’s gonna mind you talking to us.”

Pennebaker gazed at it, unblinking. His stomach had got stronger, too.

“In fact, given what they did to him,” I added, “I’m pretty sure he’d want you to talk to us.”

L
ina Dawetta came through for Perrini, as he knew she would. wiz She told him that the target was using a new Verizon iPhone, which had helped. Her contact at that carrier was über-efficient, highly pliable, and far from insensitive to the appeal of a small batch of crisp hundred-dollar bills and the charms of her dark Sicilian skin. Also helpful was the fact that Chaykin had her GPS location service switched on. Most people did, without realizing it. In Chaykin’s case, it showed, as Perrini had suspected, that she was currently in San Diego.

Perrini chuckled to himself as he wondered if there had been any domestic fireworks following her undoubted discovery that her boyfriend had a kid he didn’t know about.

Ah, the wicked web we weave.

“I just emailed you the tracking app,” Lina told him. “Your client’s Android-based, right?”

“Correct,” he told her. “You done good, darling. I’ll be in touch.”

He hung up, checked his email to see that he’d received what she sent him, then he dialed Octavio Guerra’s number.

 

An hour later, Tess still hadn’t found any Deans in her online search.

She quit her browser and tossed her iPad onto the bed, then sat up. The day was wasting away, and she wasn’t getting anywhere.

Her thoughts turned to Alex, and she felt they could all use a change of scenery. Balboa Park, with its open spaces and its museums, was a short hop away. The zoo had been great in terms of keeping him occupied and giving him a distraction from the reality checks that, she knew, were hounding him at all hours. There were plenty of other attractions there to provide him with more of that.

She peered into the adjacent room, where her suggestion was greeted with enthusiasm by both Alex and Jules.

A few minutes later, they were all in Jules’s car and on their way there.

 

Twenty miles north of their position, the black Chevy Tahoe emerged from the gates of a beachfront villa and breezed down the quiet residential street, headed for the freeway.

In it were three well-groomed, casually dressed men in combinations of chinos or cargo pants, sports shirts or polos, and Timberlands or Merrells. They also all sported sunglasses that masked the resolve in their eyes and light Windbreakers that hid the silenced handguns in their upside-down underarm holsters.

One of them, the one riding shotgun, had his eyes trained on the Android-powered HTC phone that he held in his hand.

He’d just downloaded a custom app that had been emailed to him, one that worked off the phone’s embedded Google Maps feature. The phone’s browser was open on a live map of San Diego, and the map had two live markers blinking on it: a standard one that used the phone’s built-in GPS function to display its current position, and a second marker—a white, blinking one that the app had overlaid onto the map.

The marker, they’d been told, was accurate to within ten feet of the target’s true position.

The three men were about to put that claim to the test.

P
ennebaker waved away the duty nurse—who was wearing a look of genuine concern now that she knew we were there to talk to her boyfriend—and handed me back my phone. He closed his eyes and took a breath, clearly still of two minds about whether he wanted to go back to the part of his life that Walker’s death evoked. After a moment he opened his eyes again and looked straight at me.

“What happened?”

I told him about how we found Walker and the Eagles. How the two bikers had tailed me. How they kidnapped scientists from the Schultes Institute. And how Torres had been taken, most likely by whoever killed Walker.

When I was done, he said nothing for a long moment. Then a look of righteous anger took hold of his face and his calm demeanor evaporated in an instant.

“You don’t care about what happened to them. No one gives a shit about any of us. You fight an unwinnable war and kill innocent civilians for your country, then you come home and people are either terrified of you or they hate you for what you were ordered to do.”

I shot Munro a look. He kept his mouth shut, though I could tell it was a struggle. Last thing we needed was a pissing contest. However vehement Pennebaker turned, it was crucial I kept things even. We couldn’t afford to alienate him any further or risk him clamming up completely.

“It can’t have been easy. Adjusting to civilian life after Iraq.”

He ignored me and plowed on, his tone growing more bitter with each sentence.

“We had to rely on each other. But we couldn’t do that either, because the pain and the violence ran so deep we just didn’t know how to leave it behind. If anything, putting together the Eagles just magnified it. Turned it inward. Each one of us ended up fighting himself. And losing. And you want to drag me back to all that? Drag me back to the shit that killed Marty and almost got me killed? Screw you.”

He sat there, with a look of total defiance in his eyes. The kind that could be backed up by physical force if required. In that moment, I saw how Pennebaker and Walker had become the go-to guys when they worked together. The pairing of Walker’s blunt force with Pennebaker’s more coherent rage must have been a formidable combination.

“But you got out, and by the looks of things”—I couldn’t resist turning my head back to the space that Pennebaker’s girlfriend had recently vacated—“you’re doing okay, right? Look, we have no interest in messing with what you’ve built here.”

“But we will if we have to,” chipped in Munro, having designated himself bad cop whether I liked it or not.

“We need to catch these bastards; that’s all we care about,” I countered. “Whoever they are, they’re out of control. And you know what that’s like. You know how destructive that can be.”

Pennebaker’s eyes narrowed as he studied me for a moment, but said nothing.

I held up my phone to him. “You like having these guys running around out there? Killing others? Maybe someone else’s kid brother?”

I caught a twitch in his expression as my words dug in, and waited for them to settle in deeper. After a couple of seconds, he let out a rueful breath and his shoulders sagged, then his expression softened a touch.

“Marty wasn’t cut out for the three-patch life. But I couldn’t talk him out of it. I saved Wook’s life in Iraq, that’s why he let me walk away, but I couldn’t save Marty. I could hardly live with myself the first few months. If I hadn’t done time, if I hadn’t been forced into that structure, hell, I’d probably be dead by now.”

“But you found a purpose.”

“I’ve been through some shit. And I know there’s a way to get past it. But you need to be strong. And you need people to care. And to keep caring. A lot of these guys come back from Afghanistan or Iraq and the first thing they do is stick a meth pipe in their mouths. No better friend, no worse enemy.”

He chortled at the irony.

I knew where that haunted grin was coming from.
No better friend, no worse enemy
was the motto of the Marine division Pennebaker and Walker served with in Iraq.

“Anything to dull the pain,” he resumed with a slow shake of his head. “But it just makes the problem worse. Covers up what’s broken so you don’t have to face it. So we get them off the drug and then we try to deal with why they’re on it in the first place. It’s a long road, and there’s no quick solution.”

“And now that the Eagles have been wiped out you can never go back. Even if you want to.”

“It was only a matter of time. That’s why I turned my back on them when I got out.”

“I can see the why. Just can’t see the how. Matthew Frye is watertight. How did you manage that?”

“When I got out of prison, I needed a fresh start. Wanted to leave the past behind. A new name will do that for you. Someone owed me a favor is all. He even arranged to get me vouched for. Hired someone to play the part of Frye’s sister. Frye’s sister—the real one—is a crack whore. She doesn’t even know what day it is, let alone whether her brother’s alive or dead. If I could force her here, I would, but she doesn’t want to get clean. That’s the killer. You have to
want
to get clean, even if you don’t think you’ll make it. Some of our patients go back, but most of them make it. Eight out of ten, in fact. Better than any government program.”

“Looks like you’re winning your own little war on drugs, huh?” This time Munro made no attempt to hide his sarcasm.

Pennebaker cocked his head. He could do sarcasm, too.

“Walker and me, we were part of a total bullshit war. And this War on Drugs is no less bullshit than the war for oil. Criminalization and incarceration don’t work, but no one has the guts to change anything. A quarter of our prison population is doing time for minor drug offenses, but no one gives a damn, do they?”

I’d heard all these arguments before, but I didn’t have an answer for him. It was the kind of moral conundrum that could really make your head hurt. All I knew, all I was convinced of more and more each year, was that the system we had in place wasn’t working and that the so-called War on Drugs was unwinnable. There was way too much demand and too many people making easy money by supplying the stuff, and no matter how many of them we put away, there were always going to be plenty of others ready to step into their shoes. It was an undefeatable, omnipotent beast. I knew this as someone who’d been a foot soldier in that war. It was as if we didn’t learn any lessons from Prohibition. More money than ever was being spent on fighting this war, and yet the production, distribution, and consumption of drugs like coke, heroin, and particularly meth were increasing every year. I knew the statistics—the real ones—and the sad irony was that the global War on Drugs—God, I hated that expression—was now causing more harm than drug abuse. All we’d done was create a massive international black market, empowered armies of organized criminals, stimulated violence at home, wrecked a few foreign countries, and destroyed countless harmless users’ lives. Which isn’t to say that I wanted everyone to be out there shooting up and ruining their lives with crack and meth. Then again, I didn’t much like the pain and suffering that alcohol or oxycodone were causing either. Someone needed to step up and acknowledge that this prohibition wasn’t working. Someone needed to break that taboo and put it firmly on the table and lead an open-minded, clear-headed, unprejudiced discussion about alternative approaches. But I wasn’t holding my breath on that one. History didn’t look kindly on those who acknowledged losing a war, even when it was already long lost.