Lathrop shrugged.
“Life gets confusing when people think they know things that they don’t,” he said.
Quiros looked at him. “What do you have for me?” he said, dropping the banter.
“Information more valuable than any dollar amount I can lay on it.”
Quiros’s eyes came alive with interest behind his lenses.
“If I can depend on its accuracy,” he said, “you can depend on being satisfied with my money.”
Lathrop took a moment to review the latest modification of his story line. It was becoming a little complicated, and he needed to stay on his toes.
“Four nights ago, your nephew Felix and his friends grabbed a shipment the Salazars were bringing up from Mexico,” he said, getting right to it. “I’m talking sixty kilos, maybe more, a major load. Took out a bunch of Salazar’s people and cut up a few of them to send him a message.”
Quiros had immediately begun shaking his head in denial.
“You’ve got to be mistaken,” he said. “Felix has been troublesome in the past, but doing something like that isn’t in him.”
Lathrop shrugged mildly.
“I’m telling you what happened. You don’t want the rest, fine.”
Quiros studied him a moment, then gave out a long exhalation.
“Let’s hear it,” he said.
Lathrop hadn’t expected any other answer.
“Since you started running with the top dog in South America, word from my sources is Felix has been acting like he’s untouchable,” he resumed. “When he got tipped off about the product that was being muled over, it hyped him up to where he couldn’t resist pissing in the Salazars’ front yard to mark territory.”
“What are you saying? That knowing I’d be opposed to an action that rash, Felix went ahead and moved without my consent?”
Lathrop nodded. “So you wouldn’t interfere.”
Quiros was still trying to push off acceptance. “Felix is impulsive and sometimes acts in ways that aren’t very smart, but he has enough sense to realize I’d find out about the theft. And I won’t question his loyalty. If you’re suggesting he didn’t tell me because he means to keep the profits to himself—”
“You didn’t hear me say that, Enrique. Maybe he figures to make a quick turnover on the product, impress you with a surprise jackpot. All I know is, he did this thing. I don’t know why he did it. And I’m not here to speculate on his motives or put myself in the middle of your family business.”
Quiros was frowning unhappily.
“Okay.” He produced a sigh that was even longer than the first. “What else can you give me?”
Lathrop prepared to cinch his knot of deception.
“Like I said before, Felix made a mess at the scene of the rip-off, but from what I hear, one of the Salazars’ men lived long enough afterward to tell who was responsible,” he said. The lie sounded good as it left his mouth. “Lucio holds you personally to blame. He can’t see Felix having the cajones to go ahead with something this heavy without you ordering it or at least giving it your blessing.”
Visibly agitated, Quiros didn’t say a word for perhaps a full minute. The fingers of both his hands were outspread on the desk in front of him, arched as if he were pounding chords on a piano, pressing down hard enough to make them white around the nails.
Lathrop waited. He was sure now that Enrique had bought his story, and could practically visualize the question forming in his mind. The trick was not to show he saw it coming.
“I’d like to find out how Felix learned about the shipment,” Enrique said at length. Clearly, he understood that there would be dire repercussions if Salazar was truly convinced the hijack had been done with his authorization and if he didn’t move quickly to correct that impression. “Do you have anything on that?”
Lathrop shook his head no. Convincingly. And thought about the meet he’d set with Felix to ensure Enrique never found out.
“You want me to do the research?” he said.
“It would be helpful.” Quiros abruptly checked his watch again and straightened. “We’d better put a wrap on this. I have to be going.”
Lathrop’s head tilted back a little, the hinges of his jaw relaxing, his lips parting as if to taste the air. Upset as Enrique had been a second ago, he’d managed to compose himself — outwardly anyway — and Lathrop gave him credit for that. But the way he’d almost jumped from his seat when he looked at his watch seemed very peculiar. If the appointment he’d remembered was pressing enough to cut their business short, given the significance of what they’d been talking about… well, it would have to be pretty important itself, wouldn’t it?
Damn important, in fact.
Careful not to appear the least bit curious, Lathrop stood, told Quiros he’d be in touch, then turned and walked past the two bodyguards in the conference area and left the office.
He was eager to find out what was in the wind.
SEVEN
For better or worse, Lathrop supposed it always had been his nature to look at the dark side of things. Probably, he’d been born with that disposition… an “insufferable gloom,” wasn’t that the phrase in the Poe story? Always, always, he’d been compelled to poke around under the rug or lift up the rock and see whether some secret nastiness might be exposed underneath.
As he moved between the joggers and strollers on the path leading around the carousel in Balboa Park, Lathrop remembered reading somewhere — in his downtime he would go through stacks of books, gobbling them the way some people did potato chips — that in French, carrousel meant “tournament,” while the Italian word carosello translated to “little war,” giving origin to the English carousel when one of the later crusading armies, composed of knights and mercenaries from throughout Europe, went marching off to relieve their boredom through a healthy dose of bloodshed and noticed that Ottoman Turk and Arab cavalrymen would practice their lancemanship by charging toward a tree on horseback and trying to jab the weapon’s tip through a ring hung from a branch. When the industrious European warriors brought the idea back home — those who hadn’t been slaughtered because they were too wasted from drinking and debauchery to put up any kind of fight — the tree became a rotating pole, and the real horses became wooden mounts that got cranked around by a chain-and-mule contraption, but the purpose of the whole rigmarole was still a martial exercise.
So the merry-go-round had started out as a drill for impaling your enemy with lethal accuracy, and Lathrop had known it since he was writing book reports in grade school. Other kids would reach for the brass ring to win a free ride; he’d imagined somebody sticking it to his tender young gut if he didn’t make the grab. It was the same with everything. When other kids saw their pet kitties flip their rubber squeak toys up and over their heads with their paws, they thought Puss, Tabby, or Spooky was just the smartest and the cutest, a regular cat-baseball major leaguer. Lathrop, meanwhile, went and got a book from the library and discovered that the up-and-over move was an aspect of the hunter-killer instinct, how felines in the wild tossed fish out of a stream prior to making them a dinner course.
The lesson in this for Lathrop was that whenever you played, you had to know you were playing for keeps… which, on second thought, had definitely been learned for the better, since minus that invaluable insight, he would not have come away from Operations META and Impunity with all his vital organs in their proper relative positions.