“But… that’s obviously ridiculous.” Danny shook his head.
It took all the composure he could muster to keep up the façade. Inwardly he was racked with guilt. Danny knew that he was the DEA informant whose existence must have somehow leaked, setting off alarm bells at the top of the Sinaloa cartel. And while Galvin was spilling his guts, revealing the deepest, darkest secret he could possibly have, Danny wasn’t saying a word.
While putting Galvin and his entire family in peril.
Tom Galvin, who was a friend. Was that an exaggeration? Maybe they hadn’t been before, but they’d become friends, sort of, as much as men their age were capable of making new friends. Danny needed to sit down. Somewhere, anywhere. His heart was knocking wildly.
He argued with himself. He told himself he’d had no choice about cooperating with the DEA. He’d been cornered, blackmailed into it. He hadn’t even given Galvin a thought at the time. He’d barely known Galvin.
But that didn’t make it feel any better.
“Is it so ridiculous?” Galvin said. “I’ve been at this a long time. Long enough for the DEA to dig down deep into what I’ve been doing. And trap me. Force me to flip. That doesn’t seem crazy, does it?”
“No,” Danny admitted. “But it’s not true.”
“Of course not. But that was why we were meeting in Aspen. They demanded it. They almost never meet with me in person-way too risky. That was who I was meeting with on the mountain, when you followed me. Their North American chief of security.”
“He’s able to enter the country?”
“He’s a naturalized US citizen.”
“Well, they didn’t kill you. They just talked. That must mean something, right?”
“It means either they’re not sure I’m the source-too much contradictory information-or they need me alive a little while longer. My bet’s on the second theory. They want me to transfer assets and provide financial records. Until I do that, I’m too valuable to them. Then the wood chipper.”
“Jesus, Tom, I…” Danny found himself agonizing, arguing with himself. He couldn’t keep up this lie. He couldn’t do this to his friend.
“So while we were meeting, Alejandro was patrolling the north sector, and that was when he-well, he obviously didn’t recognize you. I assume you remember that.”
Danny nodded. Galvin thought he’d seen Alejandro’s face. No sense in pretending otherwise.
“I’m sorry about that,” Galvin said. “It was a stupid mistake. As soon as I saw your face, I told them you’d innocently followed me down the back of the mountain. Which happens to be true.”
He paused. Danny nodded.
“Basically, I was vouching for you, and they took me at my word. For the time being, anyway. But we had to abandon the meeting and call for help.”
“I guess I was in the wrong place at the wrong time,” Danny said.
“It could have ended a lot differently. Fortunately, it didn’t.”
Danny nodded uneasily. “Fortunately.”
“Danny… I gotta ask you something. This-this is really important to me.”
Danny turned and saw that something-was it agony?-had come over Galvin’s face. He didn’t recognize it at first, because he hadn’t seen it before, but Galvin was overcome by emotion. “Of course-what is it?”
“Listen, if anything happens-to me, to me and Celina…” He fell silent.
Danny nodded, encouraging him to go on.
“Will you promise me?-promise you’ll take care of my kids. Especially Jenna.”
“Well, I mean-um, of course-”
“Danny, I need this. I need to know. I’ve got nowhere else to turn.”
52
As they wound their way back along the cliffside road to the car, Danny felt light-headed, woozy.
He glanced to his left, at the chasm below. Here and there the jagged rock face was dusted with patches of ice and powdered-sugar snowdrifts. The sight made his head swim with vertigo.
“Okay,” Danny said, because he didn’t know what else to say. He nodded. Galvin was trapped just like Danny was trapped.
“Brother?”
Danny turned. Galvin was looking down.
“Danny, I’m trusting you like I’ve never trusted anyone in my life. It’s a relief just to be able to talk about it. You know, to know I can trust you.”
Galvin’s words sliced into him. Danny was almost overcome with guilt. All he could manage to say was, “Of course.”
The Suburban was parked in the same place it had been. But Alejandro the driver wasn’t behind the wheel. Galvin stopped ten feet or so away and peered warily around.
“What the hell?” he muttered.
The car was there, but not the driver.
“Maybe he went to take a piss?”
Galvin, who had a stricken look on his face, shook his head.
Danny took a couple of steps and looked. The ground in front of the Suburban was stained dark, in a large irregular oval, like an oil slick. The snowdrifts and ice-crusted ruts were stained with red. Strewn here and there were gobbets and streamers of wine red and greasy tangled cords of sickly yellow.
It looked like the kill floor of an industrial slaughterhouse.
Danny whispered “No” and came closer and saw a carcass on the ground, too small to be human. The body of a horribly slaughtered animal. A dog or a fox, maybe?
Galvin followed Danny around to the front of the Suburban-Alejandro must have moved it while waiting for them-looking perplexed. “What the hell is this?”
Even stranger, the carcass appeared to be fastened to the front of the truck. A stainless steel winch cable had been tied around the hump, which was in turn looped into a galvanized hook fastened to the trailer hitch behind the front bumper.
The hump moved. It was still alive.
Danny looked at Galvin, who suddenly pitched forward and vomited, the splash audible.
“Jesus,” Danny said and took another step closer.
Once out of the shadow, the carcass began to take on a recognizable contour. It was too small, indeed, to be a human body; it was maybe half the length of a body, and now it became clear why.
A chuff and a ragged breath and then a keening, an animal whimper.
What he saw he knew at once he’d never forget.
Something scrabbled in the blood-soaked earth, something attached to the hump, and he saw fingers, human fingers, twitching and wriggling.
“Oh, dear God in heaven,” Galvin whispered. He lunged for the door handle on the driver’s side, doubling over, then struggling up to grab the handle, steadying himself.
Danny, too, vomited, and the keening filled his ears and he stared dully at the crab-scuttling fingers.
Galvin yanked the car door open. All the while he was gasping and gagging and moaning. “My God, my God,” he said, again and again.
Galvin now came around the front of the car, a black pistol in one hand. He thumbed the safety, racked the slide like a seasoned hunter, and then he pulled the trigger and shot his chauffeur in the head. Finally, thank God, the desperate clawing fingers were still.
53
Danny knew now what had happened.
His understanding came in waves. Isolated details aligned and then realigned themselves into new patterns like a kaleidoscope turning.
Ten feet from the Suburban’s grille the tire tracks of a much larger truck rutted deeply in the ground. It was where the other truck must have parked and spun forward, Alejandro’s legs yoked to its rear bumper. He must have been gagged so that neither Danny nor Galvin could hear his screams.
He knew from his web searches that what had just happened there was a type of execution favored by the Mexican drug cartels in certain instances.
He wondered whether the cartels knew they were reenacting one of the most macabre executions of the medieval era, reserved for those found guilty of high treason. He’d read once about a Frenchman named François Ravaillac, who assassinated King Henry IV of France, for which he was punished in a particularly gruesome manner. Each of his arms and legs was roped to a different horse in the Place de Grève. The horses were then whipped to run in four different directions, tearing the man apart, literally limb from limb. Drawn and quartered.