Mary Catherine decided to keep her questions to herself.
“You sit that horse well, ma’am,” Kevin said as they walked through the forest of cannabis. “Are you working for Mr. Cody?”
“No, just, um, visiting,” Mary Catherine said as calmly as she could.
“From where? Scotland?”
“Ireland, actually.”
“Oh,” Kevin said with a nod, blushing a little. “I love the accent.”
“Thanks,” Mary Catherine said brightly.
“How you liking your stay so far?”
“It’s a beautiful country,” Mary Catherine said.
“You like country,” the kid said, “you’ve hit the jackpot.”
They came upon a greenhouse. It was swathed in white plastic and had a table inside, covered with Styrofoam cups. Each cup had a little pot plant in it, like it was part of show-and-tell at a hippie kindergarten.
On the other side of the building, in the distance, there was a white-haired woman in a gardener’s smock, squatting in a ditch. She was attaching some PVC pipes together in the middle of an elaborate irrigation system. She waved, and Kevin waved back.
“That’s my mom,” Kevin said.
Mom was also armed, Mary Catherine couldn’t help but note. In a holster on her hip was one humongous, long-barreled silver revolver. It was a.44 Magnum, Mary Catherine realized. She’d never actually seen one outside of a Clint Eastwood movie.
This really was the Wild West, she thought, feeling a little dizzy.
After another hundred yards, Kevin let her out through a cattle gate and pointed down the red dirt road.
“You follow this till you get to the creek, and then you’ll see Mr. Cody’s silo down the hill.”
“Thanks, Kevin,” Mary Catherine said, riding Spike through the gate. “It was nice meeting you.”
“You, too, ma’am,” the polite young dope farmer said, with a tip of his hat, as Mary Catherine rode away.
CHAPTER 40
White light flashed in the pitch black and began fluttering. After a moment, a low and insistent electronic buzzing began sounding off, the measured pulses synched with the flutter of the light.
Vida Gomez woke in the back upstairs bedroom of the safe house on South Alta Vista Boulevard in La Brea. She sat up and unplugged the charger from the encrypted cartel cell phone as she lifted it from the nightstand.
For a fraction of a second, she stared at the green Accept and red Reject buttons on the smartphone’s screen. The more accurate choice would be Live or Die, she thought, finally accepting the call with a callused thumb.
She didn’t say hello. In fact, she didn’t speak once. She just sat in the dark, automatically listening and memorizing the new orders she was being given.
A half hour later, they were rolling backward down the suburban safe house’s cobblestone driveway in the team’s only legitimate vehicle, a black Honda Odyssey, Touring edition. Like Vida, the men were wearing shorts and T-shirts and sneakers. Instead of sporting their usual Kevlar vests and long guns, they were armed with small conceal-carry pistols, Glock 26 and Taurus PT 24/7 subcompacts in 9 mm. The orders were explicit that they keep a low profile.
Avoiding the freeways, they headed south and then west along side streets, Venice Boulevard to Lincoln to Washington Boulevard. Vida, behind the wheel, had to consult the onboard GPS only minimally in order to find the way. She’d been utterly lost in the confusing city the first week she had been here, but now she was getting the hang of it.
With the lack of traffic, they arrived at Marina del Rey in under thirty minutes. Vida had never been to the up-scale seaside area before. The pastel-colored high-rises and palm trees reminded her of a trip to Miami she had taken as a child.
They left the van in a parking lot and went out along one of the docks. It was an enormous marina, the berths containing at least a thousand vessels. The forty-two-foot sportfishing boat they were looking for was the third one down on the left of Dock 29. In the predawn murk, Vida could just make out its name on the stern, Aces and Eights.
The middle-aged American loading the bait bins on the deck was scruffy and blond and had a beer belly and enormous, scarred hands.
“Help you?” he said, dropping his bucket to the deck with a hollow bong.
“Are you Captain Scanlon? Thomas Scanlon?”
“I am,” the big blond man said.
“We’re the Raphael party,” Vida said.
Captain Scanlon looked at Vida, then at the six hard-faced killers behind her.
“Permission to board granted,” he said, waving them on.
Everything was all set up, the rods and reels, the charts. Even fishing licenses for all of them had been provided in case there was some kind of problem.
Vida stayed with Scanlon up in the flying bridge as they cast off. The American completely ignored her as he piloted the boat, humming to himself as he checked his charts and the compass on the computer in front of him. She wondered how many runs like this he had done for the cartel. This wasn’t his first. She was sure of that.
They met other sportfishers as they headed for the mouth of the marina. One of them, carrying a party of what looked like female college-volleyball players, hailed Scanlon with a horn blast. Scanlon honked back twice, laughing merrily.
“Enjoying yourself?” Vida said coldly.
“Siempre,” Scanlon told her with a wink. “Always.”
That makes one of us, Vida thought, grasping the cool railing of the bobbing ship and trying to keep down the churning contents of her stomach.
CHAPTER 41
Scanlon cut the engines when they were eleven miles out. He went down and started setting the baits on the sea rods and parceling them out to the men.
“That won’t be necessary,” Vida told him, still up on the flying bridge.
“No?” Scanlon said skeptically, looking up at her. “Coast Guard has drones now, sweetie. Attached to them are cameras that can see through your pants and count the dimples on your ass from five miles up. What do you imagine the Coasties are going to think if they see your buddies here, out on this fishing boat, standing around?”
“Fine,” Vida said, checking her watch. She went back to scanning the horizon with her binoculars.
“You’re sure we’re in the right place?” she said.
“As if my life depended on it,” the captain said as he showed Eduardo how to cast.
The ship came into view from the south a little over an hour later. It was huge, a Handymax-class oil tanker, its rust-streaked black hull two football fields long from stem to stern. There wasn’t anyone visible on its deck. It was flying a Guatemalan flag.
This is it, Vida thought. It has to be.
She thought the ship would stop, but it didn’t even slow as it passed, about a hundred yards from the starboard side of the fishing boat. She craned her neck up at the deck.
Shouldn’t there be someone up there? Or is this the right ship?
The ship passed on. As the fishing boat bobbed in the tanker’s swell, Vida scanned the choppy surface to see if something had been tossed from the opposite side. But there was nothing.
Scanlon was opening the cooler on the deck below when she placed the barrel of the Walther to the leathery back of his red, sun-beaten neck.
“What is this?” she said. “Where is it? You brought us to the wrong place.”
Scanlon, unfazed by the gun, cracked his can of Bud as he slowly turned around. “Why would I bring you to the wrong place?”
“To double-cross us,” Vida said. “We weren’t given the coordinates. Only you were. You bring us here, to some bullshit point, then send another boat to the correct spot to grab the shipment for yourself.”
Scanlon laughed and swigged his beer.