Redback (6 page)

Watching them switch the lead car again, Marquez guessed, ‘This part they’ve done before. We’ve been looking for a place they call the ranch. Maybe that’s where they’re headed.’

Marquez felt the change. He radioed Hidalgo and Green and gave them their position.

On the road to Palmdale the Mercedes and LeBaron were half a mile apart. The Mercedes turned off first and tracked down a dirt road running a straight half mile to a rundown ranch complex. A rooster tail of dust rose behind it, and the LeBaron came behind it a few minutes later. Marquez watched a man open sliding barn doors and both cars drive in. He brought the glasses back to the sagging ridgeline of the two-story house and told Steiner, ‘I’m going to call for more help in case we end up going in.’

For an hour nothing more happened and then a white refrigerated truck drove out of the barn and bumped down the dirt road to the highway. Marquez radioed Brian Hidalgo.

‘OK, now we’ve got a refrigerated truck with two Hispanic males leaving the ranch and turning south on to the highway. The name Campania Poultry is painted on the side. We’re going with it; stay with the ranch.’

An hour and a half later, south of LA, the refrigerated truck exited and drove past a new strip mall and subdivision and five miles out into dry hills. Marquez and Steiner hung back as it climbed into low hills and disappeared over a crest down into a valley. There, another vehicle, a black BMW four-door, waited on a dirt turnout. Beyond the vehicles the road dead-ended, so they’d have to come back out this way. The BMW driver got out and opened his trunk. The driver of the refrigerated truck and his companion were also out of their vehicles. One man relieved himself on the side of the road and Marquez didn’t see the suitcases. The men looked around and watched the road their direction, but he didn’t get the feeling this was a drug transfer.

‘If that poultry truck has the suitcases in it, he’s only going to be able to carry two of them,’ Steiner said. ‘He’ll have to put the other two in the backseat.’

‘Yeah, I don’t know what they’re doing here.’

‘They’re up to something.’

Marquez agreed. He just wasn’t sure what it was yet. When the BMW driver pulled two orange plastic gas containers from the trunk another thought hit him and he touched Steiner on the shoulder and said, ‘I’m going to radio for county backup.’ Now he hustled back to where they left the car and radioed for help. Then he pulled the car forward to where the men below could not see it and leaned on the horn. Sound carried out over the valley, but only briefly.

The low heavy
whumph
of the gas igniting drowned the horn. An orange-yellow ball of fire enveloped the poultry truck and the BMW was already accelerating their way.

‘Get in the car,’ Marquez yelled to Steiner, as the Beemer climbed toward them.

Now the BMW driver rode his horn and their bumper, and then tapped them hard as Marquez drove slowly and blocked them from passing. As the Beemer hit them, the car fishtailed and Marquez fought for control. He straightened it out. He swung over to the right and the Beemer roared up alongside with the front passenger window lowering. Marquez hammered the accelerator, turned into them and rode the BMW right off the road. It plowed down the embankment, making terrible metal ripping sounds as the rocks and brush tore its guts out. At the bottom it spun sideways. It slammed into a tree.

‘You’re fucking crazy, Marquez. We need to call an ambulance.’

‘Call it in.’

Marquez started down with his gun out, Steiner at the edge of the road on the radio. One man made it out a window before he got there, but that guy had a big bump on his forehead and a confused stare. Marquez walked them all back up the slope and with Steiner handcuffed the biggest and put restraints on the other. County backup arrived within minutes and the men went into county cars.

At the bottom of the hill the poultry truck still radiated heat, though a fire crew had sprayed foam and then cooled it with water. The stench was acrid, burned rubber and plastics. Part of the rear door had melted and after he got inside the county detective waved everybody back and then talked to Marquez.

‘I’m going to ask you to take a look and tell me what you can,’ he said. ‘There are four of them but it’s not pretty. You OK getting in there?’

Seeing the charred bodies of the Fab Four left Marquez quiet and he was only able to ID two of them. They’d need dental records for the other two. When he left there with Steiner they drove back toward Palmdale. A SWAT team moved in before they got there and Hidalgo radioed, ‘We’re in the barn with four suitcases packed with coke and we’ve made one arrest, a Jose Pinza, but I don’t think he knows much more than he’s supposed to guard these suitcases. Someone else took off on a dirt bike as we were coming in. We’re trying to find him, but he may have gotten away. Why did they kill those guys?’

‘That’s what we need to figure out and we’re not coming to you anymore, we’re heading back to the harbor.’

Marquez and Steiner put on tactical vests and DEA jackets in preparation for boarding and literally ran into a man leaving the boat with a duffel bag. The man dropped the bag and took off running. They lost him but got the duffel bag and as Harbor Police searched for him, Marquez and Steiner went through the bag. It held business records. Five minutes more and the man he’d chased would have gotten away with it.

Marquez locked the bag in their trunk and then boarded the boat with Steiner and two local officers. In the main cabin were benches with red cushions and a vending machine for coffee drinks and cocoa. There was a bar. You could whale watch from the bar. Below were sleeping quarters, a bathroom, and a tiny galley. They ran crime tape but they didn’t find anything.

When they got back to the Field Office the green duffel bag was checked in as evidence and inventoried. Marquez checked it out again immediately and took it upstairs. He spread everything out on a table and started going through it as he waited for Hidalgo and Green to make it back from the ranch. With Steiner he made one pass through all the documents in the duffel bag, and in the early evening after Steiner went home, he worked his way slowly back through the leather bound account books. Accounting wasn’t his deal. He wasn’t any good at it and it took him hours to figure out how they were coding things.

Hidalgo and Green picked up some food on their way in and brought him a burger and fries. When they walked in he said, ‘Look at this. There’s a plane in San Diego and this almond grower out in the valley. This could be how the Salazars move much bigger loads.’

They looked over his shoulder but they were done for the day. For Hidalgo and Green it could wait until tomorrow.

‘Try the burger,’ Green said. ‘It was good.’

But Marquez was just getting to his point. He looked at Hidalgo, and then Green.

‘The Salazars knew we were going after the tour boat. These guys died because they knew too much and we had them targeted. They lured them out to that ranch house and then sent someone to clean documents off the boat.’

‘Osiers,’ Green said, and Marquez didn’t answer because that didn’t explain it. He looked at Green, then Hidalgo, and said, ‘Let’s find this almond orchard and the pilot in San Diego.’

ELEVEN

B
efore dawn Marquez retrieved his copy of the
LA Times
. When he slipped the rubber band off he found a sealed envelope with his name on it taped to the front page. In the envelope was a sheet of paper with typed excerpts of an autopsy report that could only have come from the LAPD detective, Ed Broward, though Broward didn’t sign it.

He read and then laid the sheet of paper on the newspaper. The skin of his face felt as if he had just walked into a very hot wind. When he picked up the autopsy report again, his hand trembled with anger and visions of revenge surged in him.

‘Severe skull fracture as a result of cranialencephalic trauma . . . No contrecoup-type injuries were found but severe contusions occurred most likely a result of bone fragmentation and subsequent impact of brain surface . . . Injuries indicate the victim’s head was in a fixed position . . . hemorrhaging and contusions indicate victim was alive . . .’

He reread the paragraph. Osiers was alive for hours as his skull was mechanically crushed. They drew it out. Marquez stared at the words and then made a decision that he tried to tell himself wasn’t impulsive and fueled by anger. He refilled his coffee, gassed up the car at the corner Chevron and rolled south with the dawn traffic, running in a stream of lights toward San Diego.

From the San Diego Airport he phoned Sheryl and left the message that he was checking out the pilot of the Sherpa aircraft whose name they found in the tour boat documents. When she called back he didn’t take the call. He let it go to voice mail, as he did with all calls he received that morning. He located the Sherpa, a boxy former Coast Guard transport plane, sitting on a runway, gray and cool in the early light. He copied down the tail numbers and took photos, and then drove south toward the border, toward the San Ysidro Gate and Mexico, and crossed to Tijuana, fully aware of what he was doing.

He drove the main drag past the discount everything stores, the instant auto-body repair shops, the massage parlors, the few remaining
floristas
, and then left La Revo and worked north until he found the restaurant Takado showed him, a place where the narco-juniors, the wannabes, gathered and hung with Miguel Salazar.

He parked, went in, asked for a table in a corner just inside the back patio, knowing that he was going to do something he might later regret. He told himself he’d already known Osiers’ skull had been crushed, but that didn’t change him. Morning sunlight fell through the leaves of a jacaranda tree and the shadows of the leaves flickered over his wrists and hands as he rested them on the table. The waiter came and he ordered
huevas a la Mexicana
, eggs scrambled with chili, onion, and tomato, and drank coffee and watched the iron gate at the back of the patio garden.

Just before 9:00 a.m. a white Porsche parked across the street near his car and two young and well-dressed men entered the restaurant. They walked toward the patio, shoes clicking on the tile, hard stares searching for anything and finding Marquez, as he knew they would, as he willed them to. He lifted his coffee cup in a mocking salute as they passed by, his eyes answering their promise of violence.

Out on the patio an old waiter took their orders, but they were agitated. Marquez had violated their morning, their sense of themselves, and he continued to stare at them as one lit a cigarette and cocked his head toward him. It wouldn’t be long now and for Marquez time slowed. He saw it all as one scene, a painting with the doors to the patio garden, the waiter in black, the soul-poisoned sadism of Miguel Salazar, the fountain bubbling in the shade of a loquat tree and the young disciples of cartel money and power gathering themselves at the table, readying for their ascendancy. Hibiscus and calla and blue tile of the patio and sunlight reflected off the white tablecloth, all of it bright, vivid, and inevitable.

It’s a new world, he thought. Instead of dealing in millions of dollars, the larger cartels dealt in billions. They buy banks and bankers. They buy the fastest boats, the best planes. They buy judges, prosecutors, police, and politicians, and the kid who got up from the table now, who held his eye and came toward him, swaggered with certainty. The patio door swung open. The young man stepped in and stopped at Marquez’s table. He slid his coat back to show a gun and spoke in English.

‘This place is not for gringos.’

‘Who is it for?’

‘Get up.’

Marquez picked up his coffee cup and turned toward the garden. He was aware but not watching directly as the boy who would be a man brought his gun across in a hard sweeping motion and shattered the cup, drenching Marquez’s clothes and splattering the tablecloth and floor. The blow left three fingers on Marquez’s left hand stinging and numb, but before the kid could bring his arm back, Marquez swept his legs out from under him and his rage at everything that had happened fed the next minutes.

Now he was outside, his shirt torn, lower lip leaking blood. Inside, the old waiter helped one of the men to a sitting position. The other lay curled on his side and would need an ambulance. Marquez had left money for the damage, but the trip here was a bad mistake. He was leaving when Miguel Salazar drove around the corner.

Even then he should have walked away. Instead, he waited and when the chance came closed the gap before Miguel reached the back patio gate.

‘Miguel, I’m here to see you.
Que tal
?’

Salazar went for his gun, but Marquez gripped his collar and jerked him so hard he could barely get the gun free before it was knocked from his hand. Then it was all he could do not to fall as he stutter-stepped backwards, Marquez dragging him at almost a run and turning him as he reached Miguel’s car, then slamming his face down hard. Marquez heard Miguel’s nose give, the cartilage grinding like a footstep in gravel, and lifted his head and slammed it again. He threw him down on the sidewalk, drove the air out of him with a knee, ground the side of his face into the concrete and put his full weight onto Miguel’s skull as Miguel fought back.

‘You’re going to have to watch everywhere all of the time and we’re going to lean on them to take you down, so you’re going to have to pay more. Eventually, you’ll become too much of a problem, then what do you think will happen?’