Rosarito Beach (4 page)

“You want me to pat her down, too?” Tyrell said, looking over at María. Tyrell smiled when he said this; it was obvious María couldn't conceal a dime under the dress she was wearing.

“No,” Cadillac said to Tyrell, but to Tito he said, “What's the bitch doing here?”

To Cadillac, every woman was a bitch.

“She needs to use the restroom,” Tito said.

“No. She stays here where I can see her.”

“What the hell do you think she's going to do?” Tito said.

And Kay thought:
Godfather I.
She'll go into the bathroom and come out with a gun like Michael Corleone.

“She stays here,” Cadillac repeated.

“Hey, suit yourself,” Tito said. To María he said, “You can hold it a minute, can't you, baby? This isn't going to take long.”

Tyrell Miller had gone back behind the bar, and playing the host, he said, “Anybody wanna drink?”

Before Tito or any of his people could answer, Cadillac said, “Nobody needs a fuckin' drink. Let's get this over with.”

Tito nodded to Jesús Rodríguez, and Jesús took the laptop out of its case and set it on the table in front of Cadillac. Tito sat down across from Cadillac and powered up the computer, saying, “This will take a minute, all the security programs on this thing.”

When Tito turned on the laptop, Kay thought, Goddamnit. Tito must have changed his mind.

If Tito had changed his mind, he was going to use the laptop to transfer $20 million to one of Cadillac's offshore accounts, and after the transfer was complete, Cadillac would make a phone call to verify the deposit. But that wasn't supposed to happen—not according to María.

And it didn't.

Kay saw Leon James, Cadillac's second-in-command, take out his gun, a long-barreled Colt .45. Leon was standing behind Cadillac, so Cadillac didn't see the weapon, and neither Tito nor his two men reacted to the gun in Leon's hand—but Tyrell Miller, still standing behind the bar, did.

“Hey, man, what—”

Leon James shot his friend Tyrell—a man he'd worked with for more than a decade—twice in the chest, and Tyrell collapsed behind the bar.

From the microphone in the bar, Kay heard María scream, then immediately heard in her earpiece, “Shots fired inside the bar!”

“Everybody stay in position,” Kay said. “Take no action. That's an order.”

When Tyrell was shot, Cadillac jumped to his feet. Tito didn't move; he remained seated and smiled. He crossed his legs to show how relaxed he was. Cadillac looked behind him and said to Leon James: “What do you think you're doing?”

Leon pointed his gun at Cadillac and said, “Sorry, boss. Got a better offer from Tito.”

“You ungrateful motherfucker,” Cadillac muttered. Kay could tell by the expression on his face that Cadillac knew he was a dead man.

Tito rose and said to Leon, “Give me the gun.” Leon handed the weapon to him and Tito pointed it at Cadillac's face. “Did you really think I was going to give you the money?”

“Does your brother know you're doing this?” Cadillac said. Before Tito could answer, he added, “Your brother gave me his
word
, and your brother's word means something to him, if not to you.”

“Well, I guess I'm not my brother,” Tito said.

Cadillac stood there for a moment, deflated and defeated, then he straightened. He wasn't going to beg a young punk like Tito Olivera. He'd die like a man—and he did. Tito pulled the trigger and the bullet entered through the right lens of Cadillac's glasses and exited out the back of his skull. The only one in the bar who reacted was María, who screamed again.

In Kay's earpiece, she heard, “Third shot fired!”

Then Wilson chimed in. “What the hell's going on inside the bar?” he said.

Kay ignored the question and said, “Wilson, use the bullhorn. Tell Tito and his guys to come out. Jackson, activate the wireless signal jammer and start monitoring the bar's landline.” No way was Kay going to allow Tito to call in the cavalry. “I want no calls or e-mails going out of that place, Jackson. Do you hear me?” She didn't trust Jackson.

“Copy that,” Jackson said.

“After the phones are taken care of, tell the hostage negotiator to move into position, then radio SDPD and tell them we need crowd control. I want every street around this bar blocked off.”

Wilson said, “What were the shots?”

“Never mind the damn shots, Wilson,” Kay said. “Make the announcement.”

She heard Wilson curse in her earpiece, then heard his voice over the bullhorn: “Inside the bar. This is the DEA. You are surrounded by federal agents. Put down your weapons and come out with your hands on your heads.”

Kay looked at the video monitor and heard Tito say, “What the hell?”

Since Tito couldn't see through the glass brick windows of the bar, he told Ángel Gomez to crack the front door open and look outside, and Jesús Rodríguez to look out the back. A moment later, both men came back and reported that cops were outside pointing assault rifles at the building.

Ángel Gomez went behind the bar and took a weapon off Tyrell Miller's corpse. Leon James disappeared from the picture for a moment, and Kay figured he must have gone into the office at the back of the bar, because when he returned he was holding a shotgun and a revolver. He tossed the shotgun to Jesús Rodríguez. Now everybody was armed but María; Tito was still holding the Colt he'd used to kill Cadillac.

“What are we going to do?” Ángel said to Tito.

Before Tito could answer, Leon James said, “I can't believe you led the fuckin' cops here. How did they know this thing was going down?”

“I don't know. Shut up so I can think,” Tito said.

“No way am I going back inside,” Leon said.

“Shut up!” Tito screamed. He stood there for a moment with his eyes closed, then pulled out his cell phone. Kay didn't know who he was planning to call, maybe his big brother, but when he saw he didn't have a signal, he yelled, “Son of a bitch!” and flung the phone at the bottles behind the bar.

Kay laughed.

“Inside the bar,” Wilson repeated, using the bullhorn. “You are surrounded. Come out with your hands on top of your heads.”

Tito turned to his men and said, “You guys do what you want, but I'm getting out of here.” Then he grabbed María Delgato by the arm and walked her toward the door.

“Tito, what are you doing?” she said.

“Shut up,” Tito said. “You'll be all right.”

He opened the bar's front door, and with María in front of him and his gun held against her head, he shouted, “I'm getting in my car and I'm leaving. If anyone tries to stop me, I'll kill this bitch.”

Kay was thinking,
What an idiot,
when she heard in her earpiece, “I have a clear head shot on Olivera.”

Kay screamed, “Stand down! Stand down! Do not shoot!” She pulled her Glock from its holster and stepped out of the van. She didn't bother to put on her helmet.

Tito saw Kay standing across the street, the gun in her hand, and said, “Did you hear what I said? I'll shoot her if you try to stop me.” He began crab-walking toward his SUV with María, still using her as a shield, still holding the gun to her head.

Kay started walking toward him. “You're not going anywhere and you're not going to kill her. I have men pointing rifles at you. If you kill her, they'll kill you.”

As she said this she continued to walk toward him, her gun pointed down at the ground.

“Back off, bitch,” Tito said. “I'm not bluffing.”

“I'm not bluffing, either,” Kay said. “You kill her, we kill you.”

She continued to walk toward Tito.

Then María Delgato sealed her own fate. She screamed, “Kay, what are you doing? He's going to kill me!” Kay heard Tito say, “What? You know this bitch?” Then to Kay he said, “Stay back. I'm telling you, I'm going to kill her.”

Kay kept moving forward. When she was three feet from him, she raised her gun and pointed it at his head. Tito just stood there, not knowing what to do, then Kay took one more stride and placed the muzzle of her gun against the center of his forehead.

“Drop the gun, you moron.”

T
ito and María were both handcuffed. Tito was placed in the hostage negotiator's car and María in the front passenger seat of the surveillance van.

From this point forward, Kay didn't really care what happened to the three men inside the bar. They couldn't shoot through the glass brick windows, so if they wanted a fight, they'd have to come outside and her guys would kill them. She didn't think that would happen, however. She figured that after a couple of hours, Tito's men would give up—but whether they did or not didn't matter to her.

Kay already had what she wanted: She had Tito Olivera and a witness who'd seen him kill Cadillac Washington.

Kay had to do two things right away. First, she had to get Tito to a jail as fast as possible. The San Diego cops would arrive on the scene in a few minutes to provide crowd control, and Kay figured the TV guys would show up five minutes later. When the cameras arrived, it wouldn't be long before Caesar Olivera found out that his little brother had been arrested, and when he did, he just might order a hundred gangbangers into the area to try to free Tito. So Kay wanted Tito out of Logan Heights immediately, and she was personally going to make sure that he made it to jail.

The second thing she had to do was get María Delgato out of San Diego.

She told Jackson to turn off the cell phone jammer for exactly thirty seconds and made a call to one of the agents who would be transporting María. She then used her throat mic to call Conroy, the agent in charge of the team guarding the back of the bar, and told him he was coming with her to transport Tito to the Metropolitan Correctional Center. “Bring your M16,” she said. Unlike Wilson, Conroy was a guy who followed her orders without questioning every decision she made.

Wilson immediately came running over to Kay. “Are you leaving the scene with those guys still in there?”

“Yeah, and until I get back you're in charge. That should make you happy. The San Diego cops will be here pretty soon, and they'll give you a hand if you need it.”

“You shouldn't be leaving the scene,” Wilson said.

“I don't have time to argue with you, Wilson. Just do what I tell you.”

Kay walked over to the hostage negotiator. He was a tall man in his forties with narrow shoulders and thinning blond hair. He looked like a nice, easygoing, laid-back guy—probably a prerequisite to being a hostage negotiator. He'd made no attempt to contact the men inside the bar yet; he wanted to give them a little more time to think things over before he did.

“I'm taking your car,” Kay told him. “I'm taking Tito to jail.”

“Okay,” the negotiator said.

Kay went to the surveillance van next, where María Delgato was waiting.

As soon as Kay opened the door, María began to curse at her in Spanish. Kay, who was completely fluent in Spanish, didn't think there was a Spanish swearword María didn't use. The gist of María's diatribe was:
You insane bitch, you could have gotten me killed. He was holding a gun to my head.

“Aw, he wasn't going to kill you,” Kay said. “He knew if he killed you, I would have killed him. You were never in any danger.”

“Bullshit, you . . .” More swearwords.

“Oh, shut the hell up,” Kay said. “You're alive.”

“And why did you let them handcuff me?”

“I was trying to make it look like you were a prisoner and not my informant, but when you shot your mouth off and told Tito you knew me, that plan probably went out the window. Turn around and I'll take the cuffs off. Some of my guys are going to be here in a couple of minutes, and they're going to take you and your mother to see Miguel.”

“Where is he?”

“A long way from here, María.”

—

K
ay figured she broke some sort of land-speed record getting from Logan Heights to the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Union Street in downtown San Diego. MCC is the federal lockup where prisoners are often incarcerated until their trials; it's a towering, twenty-three-story monolith the color of wet sand, with windows so narrow it's surprising they allow light to enter. She and Conroy marched a handcuffed Tito Olivera into the building, and Kay told Conroy not to leave Tito's side until he was in a cell.

She walked over to a doughy-faced correctional officer and told him she needed to speak to the MCC warden. The officer informed her that as it was Sunday, the warden wasn't there. “Then get him on the phone,” Kay said.

“This is Kay Hamilton. DEA,” Kay said when Warden Clyde Taylor came to the phone.

“Why are you calling me at my home, Agent? You should be talking to the weekend duty supervisor.”

“I'm calling because I just delivered Tito Olivera to your jail.”

“So what?”

“So what is that you need to take special precautions with him. He should be placed in an isolation cell on one of the upper floors, and you need to make sure the people who come into contact with him—including your guards—don't give him a phone so he can call his big brother in Mexico.”

“I resent you implying that my people would do something like that.”

“You can resent it all you want, but I know that half your damn guards are on the take.”

Half
was an exaggeration, but Kay was correct in principle. In the last year, five MCC correctional officers had been arrested or fired for passing contraband to inmates—drugs, cell phones, cash, and weapons.

“What did you say your name was?” Taylor shouted.

“Hamilton.”

“Yeah, well, you listen to me, Hamilton. I'll decide how my prisoners should be guarded, and I'm going to be talking to your boss about your goddamn disrespectful attitude.”

“Warden, you need to understand something. Tito Olivera is not your average prisoner. His big brother is richer than God, and he's going to do everything he can to get Tito out of your jail.”

“I'll be talking to your boss,” Taylor said again, and hung up.

Asshole.

—

K
ay and Conroy drove back to Cadillac Washington's bar. Nothing had changed while they had been gone: Leon James, Ángel Gomez, and Jesús Rodríguez were still inside the bar, refusing to come out. They didn't realize there was a camera in the bar, and they sat there drinking, Ángel occasionally snorting a line of cocaine, cursing their luck and cursing Tito Olivera. They talked about trying to fight their way to one of the vehicles outside, knowing they didn't stand a chance. When the hostage negotiator got them on the landline in the bar, they taunted him, telling him to send the cops in after them. By this time, the SDPD had brought in banks of lights to illuminate the area around the bar, and there were TV cameras everywhere—on the street and in the sky in choppers—filming everything.

Kay sort of wished the cameras had been there when she arrested Tito.

She went to sit in the surveillance van with the hostage negotiator and was soon going out of her mind with boredom. There was nothing for her to do but twiddle her thumbs while the negotiator tried to talk the knuckleheads into surrendering. She finally found a piece of paper in the van's glove compartment—a flyer advertising a pizza place—and she turned it over and made a sketch of her backyard. She was thinking about building a deck off the back door and maybe sticking in a hot tub, so she started fiddling around with the shape of the deck and where the hot tub would go.

When Kay was in Miami, she bought a place there—a real fixer-upper, in real estate lingo—and was able to flip the place for a decent profit when she moved to San Diego. She was hoping to do the same thing with the house she'd bought in California, a three-bedroom ranch-style home in Point Loma, about six miles from the submarine base. The houses in her neighborhood didn't have a view and went for about three hundred to six hundred grand, but she'd gotten hers for two-fifty because it had been foreclosed on and the owner was desperate to sell.

She didn't really have any hobbies—other than sports like surfing and skiing—so when she was at home she worked on the house, doing some of the work herself and using a Mexican illegal, who was a master carpenter, to do the hard stuff. She also didn't spend much on furnishings or pictures or anything else to make the place homey. She didn't care about homey; homey didn't increase the value of the house. She painted all the interior walls in neutral colors, because she'd been told that was best for selling. She installed the most energy-efficient heating and cooling system she could find, and got a tax break on that. The kitchen had been in pretty good shape when she bought the place—lots of cabinets and counter space, the appliances fairly new—so all she did in the kitchen was have the Mexican put in granite countertops because everybody went all gaga over granite.

Right now Kay didn't really care what sort of house she lived in; at this stage of her life, a house was only an investment and a place to sleep. But one of these days, after she retired—which was a long way off—she was going to own waterfront property in Southern California. She had this hazy vision of herself in her sixties: tanned, in good shape, playing eighteen holes every day, then going home to sit on the deck of her fabulous home to sip piña coladas and watch the sun set on the Pacific. There was a man in this hazy picture, too, but she didn't have anyone specific in mind, just that he had to have a little money, a sense of humor, and couldn't be a total slob.

The hostage negotiator interrupted her reverie. “Rodríguez and Gomez are coming out.”

“What about James?” Kay asked.

The negotiator shook his head. “Just the two of them,” he said.

Kay folded up the sketch, put it in her back pocket, and stepped outside the van. She didn't bother to pull her weapon.

Four hours after they had locked themselves inside the bar, Ángel and Jesús came out with their hands in the air and were immediately taken to the ground, handcuffed, and placed in a transport van. Both men were very drunk.

Leon James was a different matter. After Ángel and Jesús left the bar, he sat there, sipping whiskey slowly, then pulled out his cell phone and checked, for maybe the twentieth time, to see if he had a signal yet. When he saw he didn't, he disappeared from view for a couple of minutes, then returned to the table with some paper and spent fifteen minutes writing two short notes. Leon was faster with a pistol than he was with a pen.

Kay found out later that one of the notes was to his daughter and the other to his mother. In the note to his mother, he told her to go to their special place and pick up a package he'd left for her. Kay assumed it was cash he'd stashed away for a rainy day. Even men like Leon James loved their mothers.

Then Leon committed suicide by cop.

Kay watched on the monitor as he took out his gun and headed for the door of the bar, and she knew what was going to happen next: Leon came out and started shooting, even before he had acquired a target. After he'd fired no more than three shots, DEA agents and SDPD cops opened up with automatic weapons and put—according to the coroner's report delivered two days later—twenty-one bullets into him. The TV cameras captured his execution, and the talking heads wondered aloud on the news the next day if it had really been necessary to shoot the man so many times.

After Leon shuffled off this mortal coil, Kay got into a screaming match with a patrol lieutenant from SDPD. The cameras recorded all the angry gestures and waving arms, but fortunately weren't close enough to pick up the dialogue, which consisted mostly of four-letter words. The SDPD lieutenant wanted to know why the San Diego police hadn't been notified in advance about the DEA raid; the screaming and swearing started when Kay said, “Telling you guys about the raid in advance would be like the SEALs telling the Pakistanis they were flying in to kill bin Laden.” She clarified this statement by adding that SDPD leaked like a sieve, and if the San Diego cops had known what was going to happen, the television crews would have gotten there ahead of Kay's people. She didn't tell him that three SDPD narcotics detectives were on Olivera's payroll and her biggest fear had been a San Diego cop warning Tito. The lieutenant ended the discussion by calling her an arrogant bitch and saying that he would be talking to her boss.

“Well, you're gonna have to get in line,” Kay said.