I gently, hesitantly, put my hands on her shoulders. “She fooled me,” I said, but not as an excuse. “She fooled all of us.” I could see Gunnar nod slowly. “Including Sal.”
“Including me,” Eva said thickly. She pulled away and walked from the room.
No one spoke for a while.
“Now what?” Meche asked.
“We wait until Eva comes back,” Gunnar said.
“And if she doesn’t?” she asked.
Gunnar shook his head, denying the possibility.
As it was, we only had to wait a few minutes before Eva returned. She seemed a little different. Tired, or maybe empty, but no longer angry. She walked up to me again and asked, “Where did this all happen?”
“Hector has this… meadow… outside of town.”
Eva nodded. “We know about it.”
“There’s something else,” I said. I took the ticket out of my pocket and held it out to Eva. “That belonged to Sal.”
Eva sighed as if nothing could surprise her any more. She took the ticket from me.
“That’s impossible!” Gunnar exclaimed.
“Is it?” Eva asked sharply.
“Who knows,” another agent said. “Maybe Salvador was Hector’s first victim. Maybe he stole his ticket and made him a reaper for revenge, hitting back at the system that stranded him here.”
“And then his success at that gave him other ideas?” another suggested.
“Does it matter?” I asked. “Hector’s gone. We have the tickets. So let’s just stop playing guessing games and get Meche on that damned train!”
There were nods from Gunnar and a few others.
“Where is he?” Eva asked.
“What?” I asked, startled. The question seemed to have come out of nowhere.
“Salvador,” she said. “Do you know where he is?”
“He’s in the greenhouse,” I answered, “on a table near the door. But only his head. I don’t know where the rest of him is. I’m sorry.”
Eva shook her head. “Don’t. Don’t blame yourself. I don’t, or I won’t… later. We have to recover him. He has a ticket. When I get out of this world, I’m taking him with me.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Sure, Eva.”
The news about Hector broke the next morning. Well before that happened, while it was still night, a band of LSA agents led by Gunnar went out to the meadow to collect Salvador and Hector. Hector’s remains were dumped in the alley behind his casino. The LSA issued a statement to all news agencies saying Hector had been sprouted, where he could be found, and that the LSA took full responsibility. The authorities confirmed Hector’s sprouting by midday, and then the news was everywhere. There was a faint hint of tough talk about Hector’s rackets by the end of the day from various quarters: some journalistic, some political, some DOD. That was the end of Hector, but it was only the beginning of the end for his organization.
With Hector now gone, the LSA’s struggle against corruption gained inside help, of a sort, in the form of contenders for his replacement. That was to be expected in any criminal organization, but in this case the competition was intensified by the fact that the outfit was made up of several parts which Hector had kept more or less separate. The gambling racket wasn’t tied to the DOD operations at all, so its big boy tried to go completely independent, and might have done OK, except that the DOD element didn’t like that at all. But the DOD operation wasn’t unified. One part was tied to Hector’s official position in the DOD, and that element naturally saw itself as the obvious heir to Hector’s empire. But the setup in the Bureau of Acquisitions—basically the successors to Don and Domino—felt they were the real heart of the operation (which they sort of were, but only so far as Hector personally had been concerned). And, finally, there was the city government. Hector had been ‘elected’ mayor the previous year by an over-enthusiastic ballot-stuffing effort that produced more votes than voters. His deputy, who naturally took over the city government, also wanted to take over the criminal enterprises as well, which all had their own plans for the city. Nothing like a divided enemy to help the cause. The outcome of all this was a power struggle that looked a lot like an old-time Chicago mob war, as imagined by tabloid writers, except it was all real. The downside was that the streets became far too dangerous for Meche to make another try for the Number Nine.
Helping events along were some smart moves Eva was making, the first of which had been arranging Hector’s removal from the meadow. She wanted the meadow’s existence kept secret from those who didn’t already know about the site until she was ready with her own plans for it. As the gang war got going, a small group from the Bureau of Acquisitions installed itself in the greenhouse, probably intending to make use of it in the same way Hector had. The meadow had been kept under observation, so when the gangsters moved in, Eva had agents armed with the fast-acting sproutella take the meadow away from them. With enough agents to hold the area secure, she then had reporters brought out to see the meadow and greenhouse for themselves. That stirred up public opinion plenty, and having cleared the gangsters out ourselves helped correct the LSA’s lingering terrorist rep.
Some time after that, when the gambling interest hit the mayor’s residence and city hall particularly hard, the LSA immediately followed up with a strike of our own before the mayor’s boys could regroup. The LSA occupied both public buildings, issued a call for a new mayor and city council, and vowed to remain in possession until free elections were held. After the revelation of Hector’s meadow and greenhouse, the press not only supported those demands, but screamed for a purge of DOD management as well. That, of course, had been the LSA’s main objective all along, but now it was becoming mainstream. Now that Hector’s gang was weakened, and their atrocities exposed, it was becoming safer for editorial boards and crusading journalists to trumpet an anti-corruption platform. Public opinion got increasingly angry, and the police and the prosecutor’s office began to rediscover their duties. All this was still just a beginning, but my part in the struggle was about to come to an unexpected and premature end.
Judgment Day
One day I was in the chamber where the Bone Wagon was parked, reading the papers and talking with Glottis about the stuff that was going on, when Gunnar came up to me with a message. “Hey, Manny,” he said, “we just got word from our DOD mole… about you.”
“Me?” I said, surprised. “What about me?”
“Well, it was a little vague. Apparently there’s this cat named Yehuda who wants to talk to you at his home. You know him?”
“Hey,” Glottis exclaimed, “isn’t that the one who—”
“Just drop it!” I said, a little more harshly than I intended.
“OK,” Glottis said.
“Yeah, I know him,” I said to Gunnar. “He was my first boss at the DOD. Do you know what he wants to talk about?”
Gunnar shook his head. “All the message said is that Yehuda wishes to speak with Agent Calavera.”
“Well,” I sighed, “I guess I’ll just have to get it from him.”
Gunnar grabbed my arm when I started to move away. “You’re not really going, are you?”
“Sure I am. Haven’t you been hearing the news? Hector’s not the flavor of the month any more.”
“So far that’s mostly opportunism, man, propped up by LSA mojo,” Gunnar argued, then shrugged. “Anyway, you know the streets still aren’t all that safe.”