“Wait, I’m not done with you. This is illegal,” the feisty, pocket-sized lawyer said, following us down the stairs, into the garage. “You can’t just go around assaulting people. What’s your badge number?”
“Oh, my badge number,” Diaz said, turning and giving him the finger. “LAPD Badge Number One. Got it? Super. Bye, now.”
“Well, that went well,” Emily said as we screeched out of the lot, hopefully before the lawyer could get the plates.
“It did go well, actually,” Diaz said, lazing in the backseat.
“What do you mean? What did Tomás say to you?”
“He said, ‘Please, man. Don’t do this. He’ll kill my family.’ ”
“So Tomás does know something,” Parker said.
Diaz nodded.
“Apparently,” he said.
CHAPTER 78
After we returned to HQ and relayed the info about Neves’s connection to Perrine, the reaction up the chain of command was impressive and immediate.
FBI Assistant Director Dressler personally got on the phone to a senior intelligence analyst at none other than the NSA for a full Homeland Security Total Information Awareness workup on the gangbanger.
TIA was an NSA supercomputer-fueled data-mining tool that apparently could de-encrypt and scour each and every data source on the planet to find out about an individual. There were no warrants involved, not even any formal requests to phone or credit card companies that could be turned down. The NSA hackers just went in wherever they needed to go and took what they wanted.
It was supposed to have been shut down after a hue and cry by the ACLU about privacy, but apparently it wasn’t as shut down as the ACLU thought. Which was fine by me. At least in this instance. Bending and even breaking rules was the least we could do in stopping the utter savagery that Perrine was waging on American citizens.
I admired the heck out of Dressler’s get-her-done attitude. He was even smart enough not to ask us how we came across our info. All he wanted was progress so he could nail Perrine’s ass to the floorboards. Perrine had made a bad mistake when he had killed Agent Mara. The FBI was very, very pissed.
I admired Diaz’s attitude just as much. The Charles Bronson look-alike had certainly stepped up and taken charge of Neves back at the garage. He was a throwback, one of those all-in all-the-time cops who knew the cold, brutal truth that sometimes the solution to a situation comes at the business end of a billy club.
“Tell me something, John,” I said as we put our feet up with a cup of coffee at the back of the command center. “This CRASH-unit scandal thing. You didn’t, perchance, have some personal experience concerning that situation, did you?”
Diaz squinted pensively at his coffee.
“You know, Mike, now that I think about it,” Diaz said with a wink, “perchance I did.”
CHAPTER 79
It was noon when he left San Francisco and going on three by the time the Tailor saw the first sign for Susanville on 395.
He passed a thin cow, a dilapidated barn, some rusting machinery. The land beyond the open window, the washed-out sand and scrub grass, had a lunar quality to it, the awesome mountains in the distance like something from the cover of a cheap sci-fi paperback. The wind whistled in through the window as the sun glinted off the gold wire of his aviator sunglasses. He drove at a steady five miles over the limit and left the radio off.
The Tailor was average-sized, average-looking, a non-descript bald white man in his early thirties wearing a dark polo shirt and sharply creased stone-colored khakis. He’d been an FBI agent once back east, an army Ranger before that. Now he did things that had bought him a town house in San Fran, a marina apartment in San Diego, and almost a dozen bank accounts stuffed, at his latest tally, with nearly six million dollars in cash.
No one knew his real name. Among those who hired him, he was referred to simply as the Tailor because he dressed nicely and he always sewed everything up.
He got off 395 and passed the Walmart and drove into the town. He cruised past gas stations, beat-up pickup trucks in dirt driveways, some equally beat-up-looking folks on the sidewalks. There was supposed to be a prison, but he didn’t see it. He checked his notes and parked on Main Street, across from a saloon. He dialed the number of the contact the cartel had set up.
“This Joe?” the Tailor said when the line was answered.
“Yep.”
“I’m across the street, the white Chevy Cruze.”
After a minute, a young bearded guy came out. He was broad shouldered and wearing cutoff denim shorts and a Nike T-shirt, the swoosh on it about as faded and washed out as the surrounding prison town. Not even noon, and beer on his breath, the Tailor noted as Joe climbed into the passenger seat.
“Could you put on your seat belt, please?” was the first thing the Tailor said.
“Come again?” Joe Six-Pack said.
“Your seat belt. Could you please put it on?”
The Tailor waited patiently for the contact to secure the belt before pulling out. California was click-it-or-ticket, and getting pulled over was not on the agenda. Not with what he had in the trunk.
“Where we headed?” Joe wanted to know.
“For a spin,” the Tailor said. “Do you know this town?”
“I should. I’ve lived here all my unfortunate life. Can I smoke?”
“No,” the Tailor said. “You work at the school?”
“Sorta. I’m the assistant football coach, and you can save the Sandusky jokes, thank you.”
The Tailor handed him the file with the photos in it.
“You recognize any of these kids? They would have arrived within the last eight or nine months.”
“Nope. Not even a little,” Joe said after flicking through them. “An Asian kid around here? That, I would have remembered.”
The Tailor nodded to himself. They were homeschooling them. Witness Protection 101. The Tailor had expected that.
“Go through the pictures again, Joe, and think again slowly. You might have bumped into them at the Walmart, the local pizza place, on the sidewalk, church?”
“Wait,” Joe said, holding up a finger. He fished through the folder again and took out the photo of the priest.
“This guy ain’t Irish, is he? Has, like, an Irish accent?”
The Tailor was pretty sure he did, but he glanced at his notes anyway.
“Yes,” he confirmed.
“My mom told me an Irish priest subbed for the local pastor a couple of weeks back.”
The Tailor felt it then. A primordial tingling down his spine as warmth spread in his belly. He always thought of the sensation as how a shark must feel on detecting the first traces of blood in the water. Fresh meat this way. The happy foreshadowing of victory.
The Bennett contract was a whale, all right. Three million. He knew what he was going to buy with it, too. A flat in Paris. Travel was one of his few passions.
“That right?” the Tailor said as he lawfully put on his clicker and made a perfect K-turn.
Joe nodded, pulling on his beard.
“The old biddies couldn’t get over it. Imagine, that’s what passes for news here in Susanville, USA.”
“Where’s the Catholic church?” the Tailor asked.
“Where’s my money?” Joe said.
“In the glove box.”
Joe took it out and gazed on it, smiling. The Great Recession really must be hurting these hicks out here, the Tailor thought. He’d never actually seen someone happy to be setting up a hit on a family for five hundred bucks in twenty-dollar bills.
“Make a left up ahead,” Joe said. “The church is there on your right.”
CHAPTER 80
Mary Catherine’s bedroom was on the third floor, in the quaint, rickety Victorian farmhouse’s converted attic. It was little bigger than a closet, but its dormer window, with its clear, unbroken view of the flat grasslands and the grand Sierra Nevada beyond, actually made it her favorite spot in the entire house.