“Raphael! Hey, man, glad I caught you.”
“Felipe. How are you? What are you up to?” Julio asked, his heart rate increasing twenty beats per minute and booming in his ears.
“You got a pen? Write this down. The guy we were talking about? He agreed to see you. His name’s Jaime Tortora. He’s got a pawn shop near the main cathedral downtown.” Felipe gave him the address. “He says he’ll see you at ten tomorrow morning, at his place.”
“Felipe. That’s great. I can’t thank you enough. I won’t forget this.”
“Be careful what you wish for, my friend. Like I said, from this point there’s no going back. You’re on your own,” Felipe reminded him.
“I know. No worry, be happy, right?” Julio said, alluding to a reggae song they had gotten drunk to on their first meeting years ago.
“Isn’t that right! Hey, you want to come down to the club and have a drink? May be the last time I see you…” Felipe teased.
“I don’t know. The last time I had a drink with you, your bartender almost sucked the life out of me,” Julio said.
“She’s here tonight. She’s been asking about you. Apparently, once you taste the God of Love, you’re ruined for all other men. You’re an animal, my friend. I’ve never seen her like this,” Felipe reported.
“Yeah. I’ll just bet. No, I think I’ll stay in tonight. I’m still trying to recover from our last little soiree.” Julio’s mind wandered to their spirited tryst. “Tell her I’ll call her.”
“I will. But will you really? If you don’t, you better not come around here until she quits, because she’ll be looking to even the score,” Felipe advised.
“I swear on a stack of bibles as tall as you are, I’ll call. But I can’t do it tonight. I’m beat,” Julio said, omitting that he would be on the phone with Cruz in a few minutes and likely have to meet him early in the morning to finalize a plan of attack and scope out Tortora’s shop.
“Sure, sure. Hey, I’m not sleeping with you no matter how sweet you talk, so save your breath for Monique,” Felipe concluded. Monique was the bartender’s name. As if Julio could ever forget.
The conversation degraded from there into jousting over each others’ claimed prowess, and before long Julio signed off, impatient to share the good news with Cruz.
The next morning at eight-thirty, Briones, Julio and Cruz were at the same Starbucks as the prior meeting, Briones with a laptop in tow. They ordered coffee while Briones got online, taking a few minutes to log onto the server at headquarters. They had run a full profile on Tortora, and he came back squeaky clean. No prior arrests, no suspicious bank filings, a model citizen with a modest but sustainable pawn shop, all licenses current, no violations or problems ever reported. Tortora hadn’t even had a parking ticket in the last five years, which was as far back as the system went. The man seemed the least likely agent for a contract killer imaginable, much less for El Rey. Julio had a momentary fear that maybe this was Felipe’s twisted kind of a joke, then dismissed it. He hadn’t seemed like he was making a funny when he’d agreed that he could put Julio in touch with the most infamous hit man in the world.
Briones tapped out a series of keystrokes and then brought up a window with satellite coverage of downtown Mexico City.
“All right. The red X is the shop. You can see there’s an alley running alongside of it, and it backs onto another building, so there’s only the back emergency entrance on the alley and the front doors to worry about. At street level are single story shops, with apartments above, but they’re accessed from a separate lobby next door to the shop. According to what information we could get, Tortora leases a one bedroom apartment there, and also owns a home in one of the suburbs. Drives a VW Golf, three years old, paid for,” Briones recited, pointing at the screen for emphasis.
“What else do we know about this guy?” Julio asked.
“He’s fifty-eight, been in the same location for twenty years,” Briones said.
“Where is he originally from? Here?” Cruz asked, his skin subtly darker from discreetly applied base, and his hair slicked straight back under a sheen of pomade. The transformation was subtle, but made him unrecognizable — a tribute to the skill of the theatrical makeup woman they’d hired to alter his appearance. A pair of round stainless steel spectacles completed the disguise, and Cruz had been truly surprised when he’d inspected his made-over profile in the mirror.
“Hmm, no. Sinaloa. Culiacan,” Briones said, switching screens to access the information.
“Drug capital of Mexico. Coincidence?” Julio wondered.
“Yeah, but population well over a million,” Cruz pointed out. “And fifty-eight years ago, the only thing that was going on in Culiacan was tomatoes and a little marijuana. So inconclusive at best if we’re looking to make him the handmaiden to the cartels.”
“Fair enough. I was just making an observation. It’s all just information,” Julio countered.
“Says he’s divorced, ten years. One daughter. Not exactly the profile I would expect for this line of work.” Briones was tapping away, and finished, sat back. “What do you think an agent for a hit man would make, per job?”
“Probably at least ten percent or more, if he’s getting the jobs. But in this case it would be the other way around. So maybe less. Why?” Cruz asked.
“And he’d probably deal with the payments for him, too, right?” Briones ignored the question, obviously driving at something.
“I’d imagine. Where are you going with this?” Cruz demanded.
“What’s he doing with all the money? Even if he passed most of it on to El Rey, if he’s dragging down, what, two to three million a pop, pardon the pun, Tortora should have millions lying around by now, or at least a couple of million, easy. But look at the neighborhood and the business. It’s a zero. And his house? Maybe worth a hundred thousand, maybe two. Very modest. Says here he has a grand total of eighteen thousand dollars in the bank across all his accounts, which is a lot by Mexican standards but nothing in the scale of what we’re looking at. So where’s he keeping the money?” Briones asked.
Cruz finished his coffee with a swallow. “I suppose if he’s sophisticated enough to be money laundering for El Rey, he probably has an offshore bank account, don’t you think? And that wouldn’t show up anywhere. So just treat this like a cartel financier, and you’ll be in the loop. All the money is underground, or in cash. So an absence of money proves nothing, unfortunately.”
They went round and round on Tortora, but in the end, the obvious course was just to meet him and see what he said. They wouldn’t wear a wire, because a pro would have detection equipment and they’d be instantly blown. So the plan, such as it was, involved meeting him, seeing how it played out, and then come down on him like a falling piano.
They finished their coffees and folded up shop, descending the escalators to the parking garage where Julio’s Humvee was parked. They’d agreed they would take two cars and drop Briones off to watch for anything suspicious while they found parking spots — probably one of the most difficult aspects of their foray into that neighborhood.
They drove across town and located Tortora’s street using the handheld GPS in the Humvee, and Cruz dropped Briones off a block away so he could meander over and keep an eye on the shop for the ten minutes it would probably take to park. Briones moved into position on the same side of the street as Tortora’s, and bought a churro from a sidewalk vendor, pretending to be engrossed in a text message conversation while eyeing the target. He felt a brief sensation of apprehension, given the stakes involved in this meeting, made worse by the double dose of caffeine over the morning’s briefing. He made a mental note never do that again before a field op.
Briones started, nearly jumping, when he felt a hand on his windbreaker. He spun around and found himself facing one of the city’s transient population — a filthy, disheveled woman, obviously high on something, grabbing at him while muttering a begging mantra incoherently. He shook her off and handed her a few pesos, eager to be rid of her. She didn’t even register the money as she continued down the sidewalk, hands outstretched to accost someone else.