“Well, you take a day or two to think about it. Examine your situation, and decide what your priorities are. I’ll be in touch.” He smiled. “You got a number you prefer for me to call?”
“There’s no reason for you to come out,” Derek had said, on that first phone call.
“I need to talk to him.”
“Look, we’ll have the arraignment Friday, we’ll hear the complaint, and we’ll find out what the bail conditions are. Best-case scenario, he’s back in Arcata in a couple days.”
“Worst case?”
“Well, there’s a whole range of possibilities with bail, home detention, electronic monitoring, surrender of passport…”
He hadn’t said anything about the court not granting bail at all.
“On what grounds?”
“They consider Jeff… a flight risk, apparently.”
“A flight risk.”
Michelle laughed. It wasn’t a bad call.
She sat on a stool in her kitchen at home. Derek had scheduled the phone call for 9 p.m., after his flight home to San Francisco, and she’d left Evergreen to take it. No way she wanted to deal with this at work, not even in her office.
“Look, I know this is all pretty scary. And it is serious, but it could be worse.”
“How so?”
“They’re charging him with trafficking under a thousand kilograms. If it had been a thousand or above, he’d be facing a ten-year mandatory minimum. As it is, it’s his first offense, so he’s looking at five.”
“Five years?” She could hear the edge of hysteria in her voice. But why was she so surprised by this? So flattened? She’d known the kinds of risks he was taking.
“At a minimum. On the high end, as much as forty.”
“Jesus.”
“Now, I don’t think that’s a likely scenario. My goal is to have Jeff spend as little time in jail as possible and to walk out of there with a clean record. But I’d be remiss if I didn’t inform you of all the potential outcomes.”
Michelle tilted back the bottle of Napa meritage she’d brought home to sample and poured another glass.
“There’s another thing we need to discuss. Odds are they’ll get a warrant to search your house. And at some point, they’re going to want to talk to you. I strongly advise you to not have any conversations without having an attorney present. A case like this, they’re looking to find evidence of a conspiracy. And they love rolling up a girlfriend because she’s holding cash or drugs.”
“I’m not holding anything,” she snapped.
“I know, I know,” he said quickly. “I just want you to be prepared.”
Was there anything in the house? Anything that could incriminate her, or Danny? She didn’t think so. The gun she carried was legal. The cash they had on hand, well, there was about $5,000 in the safe, but that wasn’t illegal, was it?
“Because of that, I’m going to ask you for an additional retainer up front,” Derek was saying, “in case your asset situation gets… complicated.”
“How much?”
“Ten thousand if you can. That should be more than enough, assuming this doesn’t go to trial.”
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll take care of it.
“Try not to worry. I’ll call you as soon as I have news.”
“I’m coming out,” she said. “I need you to arrange the visit. To the jail.”
“Emily, look…” There was a considered silence on the other end of the line. “Jeff feels… it might be uncomfortable for you to… present yourself to the authorities. It’s… not a nice situation.”
Which probably meant, Danny was worried about their fake identities being exposed to too much scrutiny.
Too fucking bad.
“Just tell me what I need to do to see him,” she said. “And I’ll be there.”
She found a late afternoon flight from San Francisco that would get her into Houston just before 11:30 p.m. on Saturday, with an unavoidable layover in Phoenix. The flight from Arcata to SFO wasn’t much cheaper than the flight to Houston.
She had a few hours to kill at SFO. She sat in the Mission Bar and Grill, had a quesadilla, and drank a glass of wine. Watched the jets pull up to the gates, through the smoked Plexiglas windows.
She didn’t know what Derek knew. How much he knew about Danny and his background. He knew about some of it, obviously. That Danny was involved in the drug trade, certainly.
Who Danny had really worked for before, who he was working for in Mexico?
Michelle didn’t know if Derek knew that much.
When they’d set themselves up in Humboldt, Derek had been there. He’d arranged the payments to her father’s nursing home. To Ben’s college fund. “Untraceable,” he’d assured her. “I know that you have some privacy issues.”
Did he know enough to have sold them out to Gary?
The moment she stepped off the plane and onto the jetway in Houston, she could feel the heat. Even at 11:30 p.m., it clung to her: thick steam perfumed with burnt jet fuel. Puerto Vallarta wasn’t this bad, she thought. There was an ocean there, at least. This, this was some kind of malarial fever dream. Endless freeways looping around a flat plain, strings of Christmas tree lights marking the way. Houston was a drained sw & she thought she’d read that once. No physical landmarks. No hills. No valleys. No ocean.
Strip malls. Condos. Warehouses and big-box stores. High-rises, clustered here and there like outbreaks, transplants from some other city.
She’d been the last stop on the Super Shuttle. She’d picked an inexpensive hotel that wasn’t too far from the jail, but far enough away to get some distance from whoever might be watching Danny’s visitors. Far enough away for her to relax, or try to, at least.
The hotel was nice enough. The room had a view of the freeway, and of a water tank on the other side of it. She thought it was a water tank, anyway. Shaped like a mushroom, painted a sea-foam green and surrounded by a spiderweb grid of wire.
Maybe it was a gas tank, she thought. This was Texas, after all.
“You can’t bring anything with you,” Derek had said. “No purse, no cell phone, no notebook, no pens, nothing. You have to put it all in a locker at the jail. The only thing you can bring in is the locker key. Be careful how you dress. No tank tops. No short skirts. Nothing see-through. And if you wear an underwire bra? Switch it out. You only get a couple tries through the metal detector. Oh, and don’t forget your driver’s license. They won’t let you in without a valid state or federal ID, with photo.”
She’d nodded, even though he couldn’t see that. Taken notes. Sipped her meritage.
“What happens next?”
“We’ll petition for another bail hearing. Line up witnesses and documents showing that Jeff isn’t a flight risk.”
Good luck with that, she’d thought.
“You’ll do that from San Francisco?”
“There’s no point in my staying in Houston. You don’t want to get billed for all those hours, and I’m limited in what I can do for you right now. I’m not licensed to practice in Texas. But I’m working with a local firm and petitioning the judge for pro hac vice-that’s representation ‘for this occasion.’ They usually will grant motions like this, and I should be able to act as Jeff’s official counsel going forward. In the meantime, my counterpart in Houston, Marisol Acosta, is on the case and a very sharp gal who specializes in federal drug trafficking. If you have any questions or concerns, call her.”
Michelle lay on the queen bed in her hotel room and listened to the fan blowing cool air through the room. She’d closed the blinds and the curtains so no light leaked in, but she could still hear the rush of cars from the freeway, like a low ocean wave that never stopped hitting the shore.
Christ, she thought. How are we going to pay for all this? She’d paid Derek the ten thousand, but in a case like this… the bills would add up.
Plus, asset seizures. Derek had warned her about that. Things you owned that might be funded by drug money, police departments and federal agencies, they seized those. All the time. People in Arcata complained about that, how the federal authorities would confiscate property if they could reasonably claim it was connected to drug profits.