Falling Down (13 page)

“V
iolence,” I said. “Drug smugglers and violence.”

Cup at face level, Kyle blew on his triple espresso, eyes on mine. Waiting.

“You said these people would do
any
thing for entertainment, for fun. Especially if it was violence.”

“That's not quite what I said.”

“Meaning?”

“Well,” he said. “At some level, they're just people. They've got all kinds of people enjoyment. Eat, screw, hang with the brothers, race their hundred-thousand-dollar Honda Civics. But you're not interested in that part of them. Do you love great food?”

“Excuse me?”

“Great food. Do you love great food?”

“Sure,” I said.

“Do you cook?”

“Not much.”

“So you eat out? Janos, Cuvee, Arizona Inn…places like that?”

“Sure,” I said. “And your point?”

“You ever think about what gets killed for your supper?”

“No.”

“Exactly,” Kyle said. “You get a good steak, you don't imagine the cow being slaughtered. Veal, forget about the baby lamb in the cage. Fish, I suppose if you're one
of those people who want the fish prepared with the eyes, it probably doesn't bother you.”

“I ask the kitchen to keep the heads,” I said.

“So you don't get attached to the animal. As something alive, the animal is just out there. You're not eating the animal, you're eating a steak.”

“Christopher,” I said. “I don't have much time here. Drug smugglers and violence, I've got questions about how they connect to each other.”

“Be more specific.”

“Drug mules,” I said. “I never thought drugs came into this country that way. People swallowing balloons filled with heroin.”

“Sometimes it's condoms. You know how thin they are, imagine a condom breaking inside some teenager's stomach, ten grams of pure heroin immediately entering the bloodstream through the intestine wall.”

“I saw this movie,” I said. “
Maria Full of Grace
. This young woman is trained to swallow up to fifty balloons without gagging.”

“And you want to know why people would do that?”

“Money, sure, I understand money. But the people who pay the smugglers, they don't really care, do they, if somebody dies?”

“Sure they care.”

“Excuse me?” I said.

“Five hundred grams of heroin lost? That's a lot of money flushing down a toilet. They do
not
care that the person dies.”

“What kind of people are they? These
maras
?”

“Cold. You remember Al Pacino?
Scarface?
He'd do anything to become king of Miami's cocaine business. Somebody didn't work out for him, bang, Pacino would walk away from him in an instant. De Niro in
Heat
. You've got to disassociate yourself from a problem, you've got to be able to walk away from it in thirty seconds. The
maras,
you know, they watch these movies. They idolize Pacino and De Niro and all the other gang
sters. And in real life, these
maras,
they use people like…like that chrome espresso machine behind the counter. It's a tool. A drug mule is only a tool. Sure, they've got to invest time in locating the people, in training them to fight their gag reflexes, whatever. But people are tools. Nothing more. So is this why you wanted to see me?”

“Cockfights,” I said.

“Cockfights?” Visibly startled. “Cockfights?”

“As entertainment.”

“Wow,” he said. “I need another espresso.” He started to lever himself up, one of the canes slipping on a wet spot on the floor.

“Let me,” I said. Ordered and paid for the espresso, the counterwoman saying she'd bring it to the table. I bought two almond biscottis.

“Sure,” Kyle said. “Cockfights? Why not? Birds, dogs, horses, bulls. It's not the sport, well, not that it's a sport, but it's not the actual contests, it's more gambling on them. You ever spend time in Mexico City?”

“No.”

“There's a movie,
Amores Perros.
Love's a Bitch. About the kind of people who raise killer dogs, or that's not quite it, they raise dogs to fight.”

“Cockfights,” I said. “Are there cockfights in Tucson?”

“Everywhere.”

“Are they legal?”

“Well. A slap on the wrist, a fine, if the promoters or handlers are caught and charged. You want me to ask around about this?”

“No,” I said. “Mostly, I just wanted to know if the
maras
were involved.”

“You mean, as gamblers?”

“Would they actually stage cockfights?”

“You're really out there,” Kyle said. “What's your interest in this?”

“I can't tell you that.”

“Part of why TPD wants to hire you?”

“Not directly.”

“Uh-huh,” Kyle said. Clearly not accepting my answer, clearly interested. “Can I give you some personal advice?”

“That's why I called you tonight.”

“Walk away from all these things.”

“Say again?”

“The drug smuggling. Cockfights. Whatever TPD is hiring you to do. It's a bottomless pit, Laura. You can't possibly make a difference. Just walk away.”

“I can't do that.”

“Why not?”

“Christopher,” I said. “Right now, my life is shit. My lover dumped me, he walked away from me. I don't even really know why. But I'm too angry with people who walk away from things.”

“Doesn't sound like a great reason to get involved with drug smugglers.”

“I may need your help, Christopher.”

“Anytime. Just don't ask me to do anything with one of your computers. I'm really dumb about them. You'd think, given I don't get around much, given that I live alone and I watch a lot of TV and movies on DVD, you'd think I'd get interested in computers and the Internet and email.”

“You live alone?”

“Married four times. Two died, one just disappeared, the last one divorced me after I lost all that weight, but then, I already told you this story.”

“Thanks, Christopher.”

“I've got a lot of friends in TPD. You go to work for them, I can push a lot of buttons to bring home favors. A lot of people owe me.”

“Thanks. If I need your help, I'll call.”

“Bottom line? Walk away from this, Laura.”

The waitress moved around us, wiping down tables, adjusting napkin holders. Behind the counter, her partner poured several pounds of coffee into a grinder, the
sudden
whirrr
of the grind startling me and I thought of Nathan. I could see Kyle's eyes on me, but I gazed through them, I had the thousand-yard stare, looking at my past with Nathan and I realized he was gone from my life, that wasn't the biggest shock, I realized that I didn't want to follow him, that my goals
were
important to me. I no longer had a lover, a partner, a true best friend.

“You've just seen a ghost,” Kyle said.

“Just said goodbye to him.”

“Oh,” Kyle said. “Ah. Yeah. Been there. I'm sorry.”

“So am I. But I'm here. I'm not walking away from this.”

Kyle's cheeks blew out, he expelled the breath and his face sagged.

“Well, all right,” he said. “All right. That's the way it will be.”

“I
thought I'd seen it all,” Alex said.

Only weeks past the legal drinking age, Alex Emerine hardly looked old enough to have seen much of anything. Slim, dishwater blond hair currently cut within half an inch of her scalp, pierced ears but no earrings, usually wearing whatever clothes were handiest when she rolled out of bed to her laptop. Or no clothes at all, depending. Buying expensive flip-flops, her only financial weakness.

The toilet flushed in the nearest bathroom and a short woman came out, rubbing her hands on paper towels.

“I'm Kelle,” she said. “Spelled with an
e,
but an Irish Kelly.” Without hesitation she came over, thrust out her hand. “I'm the video person, we've never met before.”

“Laura,” I said.

“Yeah. I know.” A true strawberry blonde, ringlets in front, her face a cross between the beauty of Cate Blanchett and the perkiness of a teenage Shirley Temple.

“You've seen something new?” I said.

“New and unusual,” Alex said. “At first I thought it was just another online video game. But Kelle—”

“From the top,” I said. “Just start with what I know. The log-in screen for the online casino.”

“Right.”

She popped from her desk chair without hesitation, al
ready prepped, led Kelle and me to the big display room. Thirty-inch Apple display monitors set on a U-shaped ergonomically accessible desk, wireless keyboards and mice, the center workstation facing a huge composite display screen built from twenty individual units, four feet high by seven wide, with software to take any digital input.

“Here's what you last saw,” Alex said. Calling up the ChupaLuck Casino special log-in screen. “Pretty simple to crack, took only an hour or so to work through basic password combinations until we got lucky. Most of these places have pretty generic passwords. Once you know the user ID, it's easy.”

“And who was the user?”

“Oh, yeah. Cañas. Carlos Cañas. A part-time gardener.”

“On the park staff?”

“Yeah. That ex-cop, uh, Charvoz. Said he barely knew the guy. So. I tried different combinations, saw that he'd taken a user ID of CarlosC.”

“So we logged in,” Kelle said.

“Taking us to…” Alex said. “I'd give you a hundred guesses, you wouldn't get it right.”

“Just tell me it doesn't involve killing somebody.”

“Yeah,” Alex said shortly. “I wasn't so eager to answer that question, either. But no. Killing, yes. Humans, no. Would you believe roosters?”

The next web page was startlingly simple. Centered, both vertically and horizontally, a single word.

 

COCKFIGHTS

 

Below this, three choices:

 

SAMPLE GAME, NO BETTING

HOUSE PICKS THE BIRDS

YOU PICK THE BIRDS

 

“Which do you want, Laura?”

“We've tried them all,” Kelle said. “But just because we wanted to puke, you don't have to. I'm not going to tell you what I think this is, but it's best…imagined, if that's the word, by choosing the birds.”

Alex looked up at me. I nodded, Alex clicked on the third menu option.

A triple column of graphics appeared, each column containing thumbnail images of a different fighting rooster. A blinking red sign at the top.

 

PICK THE CHAMPION

 

“To keep this as short as possible,” Alex said. She clicked on a picture labeled
El Vuello.
The picture appeared in larger format, with a summary description of the rooster's fighting data. Weight, color, heritage, wins, losses. El Vuello had dark feathered plumage on all of his body, with a white neck and a rooster-arrogant red comb on top of his head.

“Next, we have…”

 

PICK THE CHALLENGER

 

“There's roughly forty combinations between champion and challenger birds,” Alex said. “The betting is really simple, at first. You pick two birds and some computer program gives you gambling odds. Usually favoring the champion, occasionally, though, for the challenger. Gotta give the possibility of upset, otherwise the odds aren't as tantalizing. So I'm just going to pick this guy.”

Padron,
the data said. Odds, seventeen to one.

“A long shot,” Kelle said. “We've run most of the combinations, usual odds are in single figures.”

“And that's all there is? To the betting?”

“Not really. Things change. You may go in with fifty
dollars on the challenger at seventeen-to-one odds. But, uh, first, this is what they fight with. The promoters want to make all birds at least equal in terms of weapons. So. Don't ask how we found this out, but roosters have these natural bone spurs that extend perpendicular to their ankles. Yeah, they are called ankles. But not all spurs are created equal. So the handlers shave off the natural bone spur and attach this.”

She squinted at her menu choices, called up a picture of a steel spur, about two inches long, ending in a needle-sharp spike.

“They're called gaffs. The birds kick and slash each other until one is dead. And even that isn't absolutely certain. I know you've heard of chickens with their heads chopped off, but running across the barnyard. Sometimes a bird that looks totally immobile will strike and kill. That's enhanced in this online version, I'm sure, to get gamblers to go for the long shots.”

She clicked the button declaring

 

BILL UP THE BIRDS

 

In strikingly detailed animation, both birds appeared side by side, cradled in human arms, but nothing else much shown of the handlers themselves. The birds were thrust together until they rubbed beaks and their hackles rose.

“So. You ready?”

“For what?” I said.

“You know what,” she said.

She clicked on the pulsing red button.

 

FIGHT!!!

 

In animation, the birds pulled away from each other to opposite corners of a ring boarded all around, and then brought back to the center, but at ground level.

The handlers let go of their birds, who flew at each
other amid a flurry of wings, feathers, feet moving in blurs. Crowd noise rose higher and higher with each definite strike, highlighted with glowing red gashes, striking and leaping at each other until both birds drooped wearily and another menu button flashed.

 

TIME OUT—NEW BETS, NEW ODDS

 

“Best we can figure,” Kelle said, “this is part motivation to wager more money, also based on what really happens in a cockfight. One match we worked out earlier had three time-out periods and the odds dropped each time.”

“Just start it again,” I said. “Just…get this graphic violence over with.”

“We'll just stop right now,” Alex said. The huge screen went to black. “Each fight doesn't take very long. After the face-off, after the billing and cooing, the fight could be over in fifteen seconds or it could go on for two minutes. We haven't found anything that goes beyond two minutes. In real life, who knows how long they last. Most fights have at least one time-out, maybe three or four rounds. Enough to get the maximum money wagered without losing the bettor. It's a lot like any online gambling site. In a real casino, maybe fifteen hands of, say, Texas Hold 'Em per hour. Online, as many as thirty or more.”

“So what have we got?” I said.

“To start, we know what the part-time gardener was doing at the computer.”

“But,” Kelle said, “we also know this isn't some small-time thing. I've worked in computer animation for over ten years, mostly designing arcade games but lately doing bits of coded segments for things on PlayStations. The quality of graphic rendering here is extremely good.”

“Graphic rendering,” I said. “Wait a minute. Are these just animations?”

“What we see? Sure. But we estimate that over a month, there probably will be over a hundred different combinations available. Maybe two hundred or more different birds. The only way this could be done at speed would be to base the animations on live digital video.”

“Real cockfights?” I said.

“No surprise, really. That last Tom Hanks movie.
The Polar Express.
It's pretty much all animation. Hanks wore clothing with all kinds of embedded sensors. He'd prance around in front of a blank screen, the sensors would record his movements, the digital animators would, and could, create just about anything from that. Same here. There are all kinds of cockfights in this state. Illegal, but culture is culture. The season starts at New Year's Day, ends just about now with championship fights. Somewhere, this week, tonight, somebody is out videotaping cockfights and turning the digital masters over to an animator.”

“Wow!” I said.

“Yeah, like wow,” Alex said. “But Laura, what are we doing here? We're not looking at animated cockfights for fun or education. Who's the client? What does the client want, even if it is pro bono?”

“I don't know.”

“You don't go out on limbs anymore, Laura. What's up here?”

“Don't really know. But I have to make a decision tonight.”

“Why tonight?”

“I have to decide if I'm leaving tomorrow. Or staying.”

“Leaving?” Alex said. “Is it Nathan again? It
is
Nathan.”

“Um,” Kelle said. “I'm going out to get some Mountain Dew. You guys want anything?” We both shook our heads and Kelle closed the door behind her.

“Nathan's…well, he's left for the rez. He wants me to join him.”

Alex sagged against the desk, head in hands. She knew
everything there was to know about me and Nathan. Young in body, Alex had grown up with a mother dying of cancer and, as they say, she was older than her years. She waited for me to say something. I called up the video image again, logged in to the screens, and worked halfway through another match.

“I don't really know what to do,” I said finally. “But I can't leave yet.”

“There's one more surprise in this. Are you, uh, well, no easy way to ask this, are you romantically involved with the client?”

“No,” I said.

“But the client is somehow involved with these cockfights?”

“Somehow, yes.” Thinking of the diary, the pink teenager's diary that Mary gave me. “I've got to review something tonight. Talk to the client tomorrow, then maybe I'll know who's involved with what.”

“'Cause if you, or the client, are directly involved, here's the kicker. I traced down the website to its origin, you know how easily we can do that.”

“Mexico? Some island, Costa Rica?”

“Tucson,” she said. “I've already probed the online casino's web server. Back door, a quick in and out. But I left it at that, I don't know, like, what
is
this about, Laura?”

“I thought it was money laundering.”

“Easy to find out where deposits are made to the casino. You know, work back from the credit card numbers, although I'm not sure they're all legit. Bank deposits, I can easily work back from them.”

“Follow the money,” I said. “That's all we can do for now.”

“You want to really think about this one, Laura. I don't know where you are with Nathan, I don't know what's up with that possible job for us with TPD, but take care, Laura. There are really some sick people out there. Don't get personally involved.”

“You're the second person in the last hour who's told me to walk away.”

“It's good advice, Laura. I don't mean give up, I don't mean that we shouldn't work this job. But…you've got this stubbornness, a lot of times you put yourself way out there. Personally, you go beyond computers. This isn't about some white-collar crime, where we find the embezzled money or discover the truth behind fake identities. These are vicious people.”

“I'll be careful,” I said, “but I'm not walking out.”

“Out?”

“Not walking out.”

“You just said ‘out' not ‘away,'” Alex said. “So Nathan's walked out on you? Is
that
what this stubbornness is all about?”

“Out, away, whatever,” I said. “But I'm not leaving this alone.”

“Don't let personal anger at some guy dictate the job,” Alex said. “When we first started working together, when my mom had cancer, you said don't let personal anger get in the way of the job.”

“That was then,” I said. “This is now.”