Bennett 06 - Gone (6 page)

“Coffee’s ready,” she finally called through the screen door.

Parker went into the powder room to freshen up as Mike came into the kitchen.

“Hey, something smells good,” he said.

“Scones,” Mary Catherine said as she split one with a butcher knife. “Fresh from the oven. So, what’s the story with your FBI friend? Is something up?”

“I’m not sure yet. She said she needs to talk to me about a case,” Mike said, taking a bite of a scone.

“Are the phones down or something?” Mary Catherine said.

Mike shrugged as he chewed, a puzzled look on his face like he actually wasn’t sure what was going on. But Mary Catherine knew Mike. He was a bad liar. Playing dumb was definitely not his forte. Something was going on. Something bad. As if they needed that now. As if they needed more turmoil.

“Well, I’ve put on coffee for you two,” Mary Catherine said, heading for the back door. “The kids are all outside, so you’ll have the place to yourselves.”

“Oh. Thanks for going to all the trouble, Mary Catherine,” Mike said. “This looks great. I appreciate it.”

“No trouble at all,” Mary Catherine said quietly as she turned her back on him and went out through the shrieking back door.

EMILY AND I BROUGHT
the coffee and the scones into the dining room.

I stole a sidelong look at Parker as she reached into her bag. She was as attractive as I remembered. Besides being smart and quite pretty, even north of thirty-five, there was this delightful, hard-to-describe, brave, and bright-eyed girlish quality to her that made people—men especially—sit up quite straight when she entered a room.

Actually, she was more attractive than I remembered, I thought, as the light caught the copper in her hair. Had she lost weight? No, I realized. She had actually put on a little. Wow. It really suited her. I realized now that she had been too thin when we’d worked together, sort of bony. She was curvier now, more voluptuous.

She was also more chic than I recalled. Her looser, fuller hair was salon cut, her cream-colored blouse made of silk. My breath caught a little when I got a whiff of her perfume. Oranges? Flowers? It smelled expensive. Delightful indeed.

“This has to be about Perrine,” I said quickly as she straightened up and placed a laptop on the table. “Something bad, or why would you come in person? Let me guess. He killed someone I know. One of my neighbors. The super of my building?”

She shook her head.

“No, Mike. It’s almost worse than that,” Parker said, slipping on a slim pair of red-rimmed reading glasses. “We’re getting crushed. The massive federal and local task force put together to capture Perrine is in shambles after all these Mob murders. Each strike was carried out by highly trained professional mercenaries with an almost surgical precision. We have no forensics and absolutely no leads. That’s why the assistant director himself sent me out here to talk to you. My mission is to, quote, ‘pick your brain.’ ”

“Pick my brain?” I said. “At least this won’t take too long. How long have you been on the task force?”

“Oh, about two days. There I was, happily reading in my Behavioral Science cubicle at Quantico. Then somebody told the director that you and I had worked closely together on some other cases, and now here I am.”

I stared at her.

“The FBI director told you to talk to me?”

“I guess they didn’t know if you would want to cooperate. Apparently, you were dismissed pretty harshly by the bureau after Perrine broke out of the courthouse. I guess I’m what you would call an official Department of Justice I’m Sorry card.”

“Well, I must say, the director has good taste in stationery, but ‘pick my brain’? That’s the new plan? That does sound pretty desperate.”

Parker moved her glasses down to the end of her pert, upturned nose.

“Is it? You’re the most tenacious investigator I’ve ever worked with, period. You’re also the only one who’s ever actually caught Perrine, Mike.”

“Sure, I caught Perrine, but then I lost him,” I said.

Something flashed in Parker’s intelligent blue eyes.

“Bite your tongue.
You
did not lose him, Mike. He wasn’t in your custody when he escaped. You and I both know that he bought off a whole bunch of people in order to get out of that courthouse. You weren’t the one who was paid to drop the ball.”

“If you say so.”

“I say so,” Emily said. “Anyway, since I’m here, do you think you could take a look at what we have?”

I squinted up at the ceiling, a fist under my chin.

“Sorry, can’t do it. Impossible,” I finally said, shaking my head vehemently.

I waited until her jaw finished dropping.

“Only kidding,” I said. “Just a little tenacious-investigator humor. Let’s see what you’ve got, Agent Parker.”

SHE HIT SOME BUTTONS
that brought up a screen and then clicked on a video. It was black-and-white footage. Maybe military. It was an aerial shot of cars and trucks moving along an abandoned desert road.

“This footage is from exactly one week ago. It was taken from a high-altitude drone above Creel, Mexico, a tiny resort town near the Copper Canyon section of Chihuahua,” she said.

“The FBI flies high-altitude drones now?” I said. “In foreign countries?”

“No, but the air force does,” Emily said. “Is it that much of a shock that the military is involved in this, Mike? This is Homeland Security priority one. Just about everybody is involved.”

I absorbed that with a nod.

“Who’s in the cars?”

“We got intel that a high-level cartel meeting was taking place, so we had a plaza boss out of Río Bravo followed.”

“A plaza boss?” I said.

“A plaza boss controls the centers of the border towns where the drugs and the drug mules congregate. After the drugs make it up from the south, they use these plazas as staging areas where they can organize, distribute, and prepare the product for smuggling across the US border.”

The phalanx of cars pulled to a stop in front of a large, compoundlike building. What looked like tents were set up in the backyard. There were a large number of vehicles already there. There must have been fifty or sixty cars parked in a field beside the structure.

“It looks like a wedding,” I said.

“Almost,” Emily said. “It’s the
quinceañera
of the daughter of cartel leader Teodoro Salinas.”

I knew who Salinas was from the web news. He was the leader of the only cartel left that wasn’t under Perrine’s control.

Parker suddenly hit Fast-Forward on the video.

“Watch what happens.”

She hit Play again, and suddenly people were pouring out of the building, some of them running. There was a traffic jam in the parking lot as cars and trucks peeled out.

“A Mexican fire drill?” I said.

“It’s something. We don’t know exactly what. All we know is, our guy never came back for his car. Two of the other cars that were also left behind belonged to rivals of Perrine’s Los Salvajes organization. And Teodoro Salinas is missing. There’s been no word.”

“That is a mystery. You think Perrine had something to do with it? You think he was there?” I said.

“We’re not sure,” Emily said.

I stared at the screen.

“Well, let’s see. Three dirtbags enter, no dirtbags leave,” I said. “Then a bunch of people suddenly flee in panic. Sounds a lot like the Manuel Perrine that I’ve come to know and love.”

“HOW LONG DO YOU
think we have to stay out here?” Ricky said, watching as the beat-up Wilson football Brian tossed to him flew over his head.

“Agent Parker’s car is still there, right? So at least until it leaves, dummy,” Brian said, gesturing for the ball.

Ricky searched for the ball in the tall grass. It had been almost an hour, and here they still were, out in the back “yard.” It was no yard. It was a field you couldn’t see the end of. It was the size of Central Park—Manhattan, maybe. It had been cool at first, but now it was just like everything else out here in nowhere land. Extremely boring.

“What do you think they’re talking about in there?” Ricky said.

“Probably how this place is too visible for us, and they need to send us somewhere really remote,” Brian said.

“This sucks,” Ricky said as he finally found the ball. “Even with the delay, you know Mary Catherine is going to want us to do our schoolwork anyway. I wanted to catch
Matlock.
Now it’ll be over by the time we’re done.”

“No,” Brian said. “What really sucks is that you actually care if you miss a stupid, crappy eighties show about an old guy.”

Jane, sitting with her back to the car shed, dropped her book and jumped up and intercepted Ricky’s return pass right before Brian could catch it.

“It could be worse,” she said.

“Give me the ball,” Brian said.

“How the hell could it be worse, Jane?” Ricky continued. “New York had its downsides, but I had, like, friends, you know? Things I liked to do. Now I’m a hick. We don’t even go to school! I mean, if we had a washboard and a jug to blow into, we could start a band.”

“Give me the ball,” Brian insisted again.

Jane finally flicked it to him.

“He’s telling the truth, you know, Jane. Last week, I even busted Dad listening to country music. I’m starting to think there is no threat from that cartel guy. Maybe Dad’s just gone crazy and turned the whole lot of us into a bunch of crazy backwoods hicks.”

“But I thought you liked the animals, Ricky,” Jane said, ignoring Brian.

“For about five minutes,” Ricky said. “I’m going to be thirteen, Jane. Old MacDonald sitting on his stupid fence has lost his charm.”

“Exactly,” Brian said, overthrowing Ricky again by twenty yards. “It’s bad enough we’re living out here like doomsday preppers. Do we have to actually become farmers? In fact, I say we end this right now. If the peewees want to follow Mr. Cody around, more power to them. My days of waking at the crack of dawn and working for free are done.”

“You said it,” Ricky agreed, throwing the ball back to his brother. “Don’t they have child-labor laws in this state? Only problem is, how are we going to get out of it?”

“He’s right, Brian,” Jane said, intercepting the ball again. “Mary Catherine won’t sit still for that. You know how much she likes Mr. Cody.”

All three of them turned as they heard the rental car start. Agent Parker waved to them before getting in and pulling out. They stood in the field, waving back until they couldn’t see the car anymore.

“No! Come back! Take us with you!” Ricky said.

“Don’t worry, little brother. I have a plan,” Brian said, spinning the ball up in the air. “You just leave it to me.”

I WAITED ON THE
porch until Emily Parker’s sedan disappeared in the distance, and then I went back into the house and took the dishes into the kitchen.

In the corner, I saw that, despite her obvious annoyance at the federal intrusion, Mary Catherine had put on another pot of coffee. When I looked out the window, I could see her sitting on the fence behind the house, showing something green and fuzzy in her palm to Shawna and Fiona. Probably seamlessly weaving in some lesson about the life cycle while she was at it, I thought, teachable moments being yet another specialty of the ever-upbeat and unstoppable Bennett nanny.

Mary Catherine was handing the caterpillar off to Shawna when she looked up and saw me watching. She stuck her tongue out at me, but then she smiled and waved. I smiled myself as I waved back vigorously.

Friends again
, I thought. Good. Lord knew I needed all the friends I could find.

I decided to pitch in and wash the dishes at the big porcelain sink. I’d washed a dish or two in my time working in restaurants when I was in college, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d actually washed any by hand. Then I did remember. It was when my mom went back to work when I was a kid.

She got a job cleaning offices downtown, and my dad and I had to fend for ourselves. My dad, no Bobby Flay, would char some pork chops in a big, black cast-iron pan and boil some potatoes, while I got cleanup detail. It was a grim time, to be sure, but I do remember how proud my mom was of my meticulous dish cleaning.

Remember, Michael Sean
, she’d always say,
it’s never the job you do but how hard you do it.

I liked to think I’d taken her words to heart in the four-odd decades I’d lived on this planet. I had worked hard as a father, as a cop.

And now where am I?
I thought, drying my hands.
Hiding out from a violent drug lord with my family in the wilds of Northern California.
I’d worked hard, all right. I’d damned near worked myself out of a job.

After I dried the plates and cups and put everything back in its proper place, I opened the tap and poured myself a glass of cold water. I took a long drink and then opened the tap again and cupped some water in my hands and splashed it over my face.

Only then did I go over the full significance of everything Emily Parker had told me.

I had hoped I was just being cynical about law enforcement’s lack of information. I hadn’t been. They really didn’t know anything about the attacks on the Mafia. There were no witnesses, no DNA traces, and no leads.

That wasn’t the only problem, unfortunately. Emily had told me some new, disturbing information that actually hadn’t made the papers.

Throughout the Mexican border towns where the cartels were most active—Ciudad Juárez, Tijuana, Puerto Palomas, Reynosa, Nogales, and Nuevo Laredo—all the informants for both the DEA and Mexican
federales
were being systematically wiped out.

It was a veritable purge. In the middle of the night, three or four pickup trucks would show up, and people would be dragged out of their houses by what seemed like army troops dressed in black. The informants’ headless torsos would be found a few days later, dumped in front of police stations, the words
ESTO SUCEDE A RATAS
spray-painted across their chests.