“Stolen from the military base up north.”
“I couldn’t tell you for sure, but I know he’s got contacts there. Hey, the sandwiches are ready, I’ll get them. Remember, it’s my treat today.”
It was the day after the gunrunning expedition. For security reasons, Puente had decided to choose a new meeting place to replace the café in La Jolla. Pescatore had insisted on picking it. She vetoed Little Italy because it was too close to the Federal Building. They settled on an Italian deli in Encinitas, a placid beach town on an idyllic stretch of coast. There were just a few tables in a side room half-hidden behind grocery shelves, an appropriately discreet setup.
“Now, let me tell you something,” Pescatore said, returning to the table with a well-stocked tray. “This is a bona fide old-school sandwich.”
Puente, who had her hair pulled back and sunglasses propped on her head, rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, here we go.”
“No, really, you might know about fried bananas and everything, but I’m the expert on ginzo food. This joint and Little Italy are the only places in San Diego County where you can get a decent sandwich. See how fresh the bread is? You don’t need no mayonnaise or junk on good Italian bread like that. And the mortadella: It’s the real thing, not some nasty plastic Oscar Mayer mutant lunchmeat. What’s so funny?”
“You never stop eating, Valentine. I don’t understand why you aren’t fat as a house. I guess it’s because you’re young.”
“What are you, Granma Isabel?”
“Young-er, I meant.”
“You’re what, a couple years older than me.”
“There’s a difference between twenty-five and around thirty. Hey Valentine, this is pretty good.”
“Told you. Stick with me, baby, I promise you won’t starve.”
They grinned at each other. He looked forward to every debriefing as if it were a date. The relationship felt like an affair: laughing furtively, whispering, watching over their shoulders. She appeared to enjoy herself, but no doubt that was the way a female handler was supposed to treat a male informant.
“I’m still getting used to the idea that you pulled a thorn out of Omar Mendoza’s paw,” she said. “His cousin’s paw, anyway.”
“Garrison didn’t say much ’cause he likes to be the big boss, but you could tell he was happy about that.”
“It works out well for us,” she said. “You’re really doing good.”
“I feel good. You were right, it’s easier dealing with Garrison now that I’m spying on him.”
“You have a knack for undercover work.”
“Yeah? I guess I always felt like I was impersonating a Border Patrol agent in the first place.”
Isabel laughed. Pescatore felt a charge of exhilaration.
“When Buffalo and Rufino were whispering and everything, I thought I was history,” he said. “I thought that humongous throwdown jailbird was gonna march over and crush my skull. But he totally changed when we got to talking. At the ranch he let me shoot this laser-sight pistol. The Buffalo seems pretty cool to me.”
“Uh-huh. Remind me to show you his sheet. He started killing people in middle school. He was in a gang in the worst housing project in the San Fernando Valley. The Gardens. Hasn’t stopped since. Be really, really careful, Valentine.”
Pescatore spent the rest of the lunch telling Puente about the evening’s activities in detail. He watched her fill her notebook with careful ornate scribbles, her mouth half-open in concentration. Her legs were tucked up under her, smooth muscles bunched in a short crimson skirt.
“If this was Taylor Street in the summer, now we could walk over to Mario’s Italian Ice, sit on a stoop and have a couple of lemonades,” Pescatore sighed, digging caffeinated granules of sugar out of his espresso cup. “But around here they never heard of Italian ice. And you’d probably have to drive fifty miles for it.”
“You’ve got a serious case of homesickness,” Puente said, pointing the pen at him like a teacher.
“I guess home always seems better when you’re far away,” Pescatore said, running a hand through his curls.
“I get the idea your neighborhood wasn’t that great.”
“Yeah. The Italians and the Mexicans and the blacks were always brawling. A three-way hatefest. For me, not hanging with any one group was good sometimes. But other times it sucked. I had to stay in the house or run like hell. I got good at running.”
“And boxing?”
“You know about the boxing?”
Puente responded with a look that said “Silly Question.”
“I boxed a little. I wasn’t exactly great. What about you, Isabel? You never get homesick? You don’t go someplace reminds you of Miami?”
Puente smiled. “This is classified, Valentine. I go to a Cuban restaurant on Morena Boulevard. A family place. They treat me like a queen. I don’t order, they just give me whatever they think I’ll like.”
“Sounds great. When we going there?”
“I never take anybody there.”
“So I guess when you take me, that’d be a big step, huh?” He said it fast and breezy, caught up in the moment.
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning I hope we go there, that’s all.” He had decided it was ridiculous not to give it a shot. What was she going to do, fire him? He said: “We could even not talk about work, for once. We could spend the whole night not talking about work.”
“Valentine.” They stared at each other, both leaning on their elbows. “You’re not getting distracted from your assignment, are you?”
“No way. But I’m not gonna hide my feelings, Isabel.”
She tilted her head warily.
“Really,” she said.
“Can’t help it.” He grinned apologetically. “That’s the way it is.”
“I’m not going to hide the way I feel either,” she said, her smile disappearing. “Mainly I feel worried. You’re my best informant and you’re infiltrating this organization better than I thought you would. The last thing we want is distractions. Understand? The better you do, the more dangerous it gets.”
At roll call at the Imperial Beach station the following Sunday afternoon, the field operations supervisor and the assistant station chief went through a typical litany: a new overtime policy, more sniper threats, a tip about backpackers who were paying their coyotes by carrying marijuana. The bosses outlined procedures for using on-call interpreters of exotic languages-Mandarin, Arabic-who had been hired to handle all the OTMs. Intel reports said the smugglers had warehouses in Tijuana full of hundreds of aliens from far-off places waiting to cross. And keep the agents in report-writing hell.
Pescatore half listened as they ended the briefing with an alert for three inmates who had escaped hours earlier from the penitentiary in Tijuana during a shoot-out that left five dead. One of the fugitives was the former chief of the state police in Tijuana, the supervisor said: Regino Astorga. Aka the Colonel.
By the time Pescatore registered the name, the agents were getting up from the tables and heading out into the warm and rainy evening. Pescatore knew that Isabel Puente was interested in the Colonel. She was helping her secretive Mexican cop friends on an investigation related to him. But that was all she had told him.
Garrison met Pescatore, Dillard and Macías for a dinner break at Adalberto’s, a hole-in-the-wall taco place in San Ysidro. Usually, Garrison high-fived, bullshitted and cheerfully terrorized every Mexican in the place, employee or customer, Americanized or border brother. But tonight he slumped, silent and ornery, next to Dillard in the scarred wooden booth.
“We got an urgent thing tonight,” Garrison said. “I need all three of you. Full operational mode.”
Garrison ordered them to meet at the parking lot overlooking the beach in Border Field State Park. As the appointed time approached, Pescatore heard Garrison on the radio deploying agents to the east and north. Pescatore assumed he was clearing the way for whatever he had cooking at the beach.