The Devil's Elixir (32 page)

Or kill him
, I thought.

“But you don’t know what its effects are?” Villaverde pressed.

“McKinnon wouldn’t say. I guess he thought it was too damn dangerous to say more. That’s why he called in his SOS. And that’s why he didn’t leave any record of it behind. At least, nothing we’ve found.”

Villaverde nodded, soaking it in. “So now we’ve got another player after it, whoever hired the bikers.” He turned to me. “Why you? What do they think you can give them?”

I said, “I have no idea. But they must know I was there”—I turned to Munro—“
we
were there, and maybe they think I found McKinnon’s notes and still have them.” I looked at Munro, curious about something. “You were there, too. Why is this about me and not you?”

He gave me a nonchalant shrug. “No fucking clue.”

Bottom line was, we needed to know who we were dealing with if Tess and Alex—and maybe I—weren’t going to spend the rest of our days boxed up in some kind of witness protection wonderland. And something was bothering me about that very question.

I turned back to Munro.

“What do you know about Navarro’s death?”

From the knowing half-grin on his face, it was clear he knew exactly where I was going with this.

“I can’t tell you for a fact that the bastard’s dead, if that’s what you’re asking.”

I felt a little charge go off inside me. “It is.”

Again with the shrug. “We went after him, as you know. DEA doesn’t take an attack on any of its agents lightly, least of all some coked-up
maricón
coming after someone like Hank Corliss.”

Any narco, Navarro included, had to be well aware of that. It was gospel, ever since Enrique Camarena was yanked out of his car and tortured to death in Mexico in the mid-eighties. The DEA had pulled no punches in bringing his killers to justice, even going so far as to kidnap suspects that were proving hard to extradite and smuggling them into the United States to face trial. And yet, Navarro had come after Corliss himself, brazenly and in plain sight.

A bad move.

A mad move, even.

“The narcos beat us to it,” Munro continued. “Navarro had brought down so much heat on them all that they decided it was in their best interest to end the witch hunt themselves. But they weren’t about to hand him over to us alive, not with everything he knew. So they invited him in for a chitchat. He wasn’t buying.”

“So they took him out with a car bomb,” I threw in. I remembered going over an interdepartmental report on that. “How solid was the coroner’s paperwork?”

“Come on. You know what we’re dealing with here. Mexico.” He pronounced it
may-hee-koh
, the sarcasm loud and clear. “But we did what we could. We had our own guys run DNA tests and ask the right questions. And their take was, it was him.”

“But you were basing that on, what?”

“Whatever we could get our hands on. Stuff we found at his house—his toothbrush, hair, spunk on his sheets. General height, weight.”

“Fingerprints?”

“Yes, on two fronts. They matched ones we found at his house. And they matched a file the
federales
had on him, one that had prints from an arrest early in his career.”

None of that was foolproof. If he had enough money and the right connections on whom to spend it—which someone in his position had to have—Navarro could have staged the whole thing.

Which is where my suspicions was converging.

There was no way of knowing for sure. Not yet, anyway.

Either way, it didn’t really matter. Whether it was Navarro or one of his ex-lieutenants, what mattered was that one of them was after something they thought I had. Because of a mistake, an error of judgment I made—a crime I committed, let’s not mince words here—five years ago. What goes around comes around, right? I’d heard that piece of twaddle all my life. I never gave it much thought—until now. But if that was the case, if my take on this was correct, it meant the bad guys’ game plan was to get hold of me. It meant I was their golden goose.

And that was something I could definitely use.

T
he safe house was a three-bedroom ranch-style house close to the top of the hill in El Cerrito. It was pretty much what I expected. Someone with a more generous predisposition might use the terms
minimalist
,
vintage
, or
functional
to describe it. I’m thinking it came out of the gulag section at Home Depot. I wasn’t exactly expecting Four Seasons–level comfort, but I felt bad for Tess and Alex, more so since I didn’t know how long we’d need to keep them holed up here. The place was just grim.

Still, its living room faced west and afforded a pretty decent view of the city’s skyline and the ocean beyond, especially now, with the sun melting into the horizon. Tenants who weren’t here for the reasons we were would probably find it inspiring or uplifting. I didn’t. I was just standing there, alone, somberly taking in the passing of another day, thinking about Mexico, about Michelle, and about how pulling that trigger had somehow created some kind of cosmic ripple that, five years later, had sent a similar bullet ripping into her.

“Nice view.”

Tess sidled up next to me, looking out, her hand brushing up against my back before snaking around my waist.

“Only the best is good enough for my gal, you know that.”

She smirked. “You spoil me, kind sir.”

I glanced back toward the bedrooms. I could hear Jules and the new guy, Cal Matsuoka, chatting quietly in the kitchen.

“How’s Alex?”

“Not great. He’s still shaken up about what happened,” she told me, her tone dejected. “Moving here wasn’t great for him either.” She cast her eyes across the room. “I don’t know what to tell him anymore.”

I nodded. “We’ll figure some way out of this.”

She shrugged and looked out, her eyes lackluster and failing to mask the frustration and unease that were engulfing her.

“What happens after you get these guys—the ones who got the bikers and the deputy? What happens then? How do we know whoever sent them won’t just send others after us?” She turned to face me, and she really looked spooked. “How do we know it’s ever going to end?”

This was the moment to look squarely into her eyes and say something heroically reassuring and supremely confident like,
Don’t worry, we’ll get them
. But Tess knew me better than that, and she knew the world didn’t really work like that. The thing is, standing there beside her, I couldn’t imagine not getting these guys. I was going to see to it that they were out of our lives for good. So I actually did say, “We’ll get them. Them, and whoever’s behind them.” And to her credit, she didn’t scoff or even show any hint of doubting it. She just nodded, and her face tightened up with resolve.

She looked out at the sunset again.

“Tell me what happened,” she said. “The guy you shot. The scientist. Tell me about it.”

I’d given her a quick summary of the Eagles’ ties to Navarro and—in broad, intentionally vague strokes—told her how it all linked back to the mission in Mexico. I’d never told her about it, just like I hadn’t told Michelle at the time. And this time around, I hadn’t gone into detail because I didn’t want her to know the whole story.

“Talk to me, Sean,” she pressed, reading my hesitation. “Tell me what happened.”

And something shifted inside me, and I decided I didn’t want to make the same mistake I’d made with Michelle. I should have told her, just like I should have told Tess about this, too, ages ago.

I looked out, the sun no more than a golden sliver getting swallowed up by a ravenous sea, and I could still see those events unfurling in my mind’s eye, like it was yesterday, although you never know, do you? The mind plays tricks. I’ve found that some memories people remember so vividly, the ones we’re sure we know so precisely, are sometimes not as accurate as we think. Over time, the mind massages the truth. It distorts and adjusts and adds in small increments, making it hard to tell what actually happened from what didn’t. But in this case, I think my memory was razor sharp.

I’d have been happier if it wasn’t.

 

The plan was for us to be choppered in, but the landscape around our target wasn’t doing us any favors. The compound sat on a high mesa, and the terrain around it was too hostile and inhospitable for a ground infiltration. Given its high altitude setting and its commanding allaround views, chopper approaches were also highly vulnerable to detection. The best we could do was land about three miles away and cover the rest of the journey on foot over rough terrain that, we knew, was home to scorpions, rattlesnakes, mountain lions, bears, and weird, mythical mutant cougar-like beasts called
onzas
to boot.

He told McKinnon there was no way the woman and the kid would be able to make the trip. Not without seriously slowing us down or unwittingly giving up our presence, which would blow the mission and possibly get us all killed. There was a small army of coke-fueled, trigger-happy
pistoleros
out there, and the last thing Munro wanted was for them to know we were around.