The Devil's Elixir (15 page)

I
t was around three in the afternoon by the time I left Villaverde in the parking lot outside his office on Aero Drive, got into my trusted LaCrosse, and headed downtown to look at some more tough-guy stares. Villaverde had called one of the SDPD homicide detectives from the car during our drive back from LA and given him the heads-up about what we were looking for so they’d have time to coordinate with ATF and have the database keyed in accordingly and ready for me by the time I got there.

The more I thought about it, the more I thought this could be a real opening. It felt right—these guys weren’t black or Latino, and if you were looking for a crew of white bruisers in Southern California, a biker gang was a good place to start. I was starting to feel pretty good about our chances, despite the face that SoCal was rampant with one-percenters, which was what members of OMGs, to stick to the hip abbreviations—outlaw motorcycle gangs, not the more popular OMG that’s usually followed by four exclamation marks or a smiley face—called themselves. Most even wore a “1%” patch on their colors. The term was supposed to refer to something some upstanding official from a national motorcycle association had once said, something about ninety-nine percent of motorcyclists being law-abiding citizens, but the association in question had long since denied anyone there ever having said that and it seemed to me that it was the outlaws themselves who had just plucked the number out of their own ass and were using it to talk up their mystique and their exclusivity. Given the swamp of mug shots I was about to trudge through, I thought that term had to be way off the mark, at least as far as Southern California is concerned.

The ride downtown looked pretty straightforward, as per Villaverde’s instructions—south on the 15, then west on Route 94. I didn’t even bother using the in-car GPS. The freeway was running smoothly, with sparse traffic in both lanes. Barring the unexpected, the drive didn’t look like it was going to take more than half an hour.

The unexpected, though, wasn’t about to give me a break on this trip.

Its latest incarnation came in the shape of a maroon sedan with two silhouettes inside that seemed to be maintaining too constant a gap behind me. Now I don’t usually abuse my badged status by storming down freeways at autobahn speeds just to pick up my dry cleaning, but on this occasion I was keen to get to the mug shot gallery and see how generous a mood it was in. I was probably running fifteen miles per hour or so above the speed limit, and the car—a decade-old Japanese model, possibly a Mitsubishi, though I couldn’t really tell—was keeping up with me, although holding back about five or six car lengths. The good thing about traveling at that speed is that if someone wants to follow you, they’re going to have a tough time putting a small buffer of cars in between them and you, and so it was with these guys. I’ve had cars innocently trail in my wake before, of course, their thinking being that if there were to be a speed trap, I’d be the sacrificial lamb that would hit it first and get stopped while they’d sail on, but this didn’t feel like one of those. I guess my inner goon-dar had been cranked up to eleven ever since Michelle and I walked out of that hotel room, and over the years, giving it the benefit of the doubt hadn’t served me too badly.

I slid into the slow lane and eased off the gas a little, and sure enough, my two groupies suddenly didn’t seem like they were in such a rush anymore and followed suit. Again, some of my harmless tailgaters tended to do the same, usually because they worried I knew something they didn’t and had slowed down for a good reason. In those circumstances, though, the cars usually crept up closer to me—basic wave theory, but let’s not go there right now—but in this case these guys hung back and kept the same big gap between us. Again, not conclusive, but something about these guys didn’t sit well with me.

I sped up again and changed lanes, and so did they.

The goon-dar was blaring away in my ears.

I felt a small kick of excitement. If anyone was following me, it had to be the same crew, although it didn’t make much sense to me why they’d be doing that. I did a quick run-through of what we knew about their actions so far. They’d grabbed a couple of scientists. They’d come after Michelle, twice. Why follow me? Michelle was dead. I wondered if they were after something she had, something they think I might be able to lead them to. They’d taken her laptop. Maybe they hadn’t been able to get past its password. But then something much more likely occurred to me. Maybe they didn’t know she was dead. Maybe they didn’t even know that she was hit. If so, then maybe they were still trying to find her to get whatever it is they want from her. And if that was the case, then that was one way to flush them out—although if these guys were part of the original gang, which seemed to make sense, flushing them out was no longer a problem. They were right there, within reach. I just had to make sure I didn’t screw up on the nabbing.

By now, I’d reached the ramp that banked off to the right and linked up to the Martin Luther King Jr. Freeway. I took it. The sedan did the same.

I stayed in the slow lane.

One guess as to what they did.

My mind raced ahead, sifting through my options. I was pretty sure they were tailing me, and if so, I wanted them. Badly. I could see two immediate problems I’d need to overcome. First off, I needed to find somewhere quiet to make my move. These guys had shown repeatedly that they didn’t mind spilling innocent blood, and there was no way I was going to risk doing anything where some bystanders could get hurt. This was exacerbated by my second problem, which was that I didn’t know San Diego at all, and this wasn’t something my GPS was going to solve for me. It would help, though, and I jabbed it on and hit the Map button before pulling out my phone and calling Villaverde.

I kept the phone low and out of sight and put it on speakerphone just as he picked up.

“I think I’ve got a tail,” I told him. “Two guys in a maroon sedan. I’m on 94.”

Signs for the airport loomed ahead, and only stoked my anger.

“Can you get a read on their plates?” he asked.

I glanced in the mirror. “No, they’re too far back.”

“Okay, um,” he stammered, “let me—how do you wanna play this? We can set up a roadblock and—”

“No, it’d take too long,” I interjected. “I don’t want to risk losing these guys or scaring them off.”

“I hear you, but you can’t face off with them on your own either.”

“Agreed, but right now we need to figure out where I’m going.”

I caught a glimpse of the road signs flying past and they confirmed what Villaverde had told me at the onset, about the freeway ending and morphing into F Street. The SDPD’s headquarters was now only a few blocks away. I thought about sticking to the plan and pulling into the department’s parking lot and sneaking around to surprise my guys while they waited for me to leave again, but the thought of making my move with armed backup on a crowded downtown street wasn’t working for me, not with these trigger-happy cyborgs. It didn’t look like I was going to have much of a choice in the matter anyway as I was about to run out of freeway. I was desperate to avoid getting into slower city streets and traffic lights—too many pedestrians and fewer options—but the only off-ramp was onto the San Diego Freeway, heading north.

I glanced at my GPS screen. The freeway ran north for a mile or so, then banked left and went west briefly, toward the airport, before turning north again. I couldn’t risk taking it, not after having driven all that way south from Villaverde’s office. It would make me look like I was doing a weird big loop, which might tip off my guys and make them bail. So I just sailed by the off-ramp and motored ahead.

The maroon sedan stayed with me.

“I’m about to hit F Street,” I informed Villaverde, still playing out the notion of somehow faking them out and doubling back to ambush them while they waited for me to resurface. It was taking root nicely. I quickly explained my idea to him and asked him to think of somewhere away from the crowds where I could face off with them without worrying about collateral damage.

I was now on F, a wide, one-way street that cut across the downtown area east to west, and I could almost hear Villaverde’s mind whirring away as he processed my request.

“There’s the Coast Guard facility on Harbor Drive,” he finally said. “I can call ahead and make sure the guard at the gate lets you through and get some of the guys ready to back you up.”

“No. No Coast Guard or Navy, nothing like that. It might spook them.” I was worried my stalkers might not want to lie in wait for me outside a military base, not in these terror-alert-heightened times, and I really didn’t want to lose them. “Come on, David,” I pressed him. “I’m running out of road.”

“Hang on.” He went silent for another moment, then said, “Okay, how about the Tenth Avenue Terminal area, down at the harbor? There’s container yards and warehouses and storage tanks, that kind of thing. What do you think?”

It seemed like a decent option. “Does it make sense that I would have left the freeway where I did if I was originally going there?”

Villaverde thought about it for a second, then said, “I wouldn’t have necessarily come off the fifteen, but yeah, why not? You’re not way off base. Besides, you’re a visitor here, you’re not expected to know the ideal route to take.”

I didn’t like hearing that. Plus, I wasn’t sure what they were thinking, or expecting. But the downtown area didn’t look like it was going to offer me what I was looking for, and the harbor sounded better.

Also, Villaverde’s suggestion of the gate at the Coast Guard facility gave me an idea.

“Is there a bonded warehouse facility there with a security gate?”

“Yep, I know where it is.”

I glanced at the street signs on the next corner. “Okay, I’m just crossing Thirteenth. I need you to guide me to the terminal. And see if you can call the gate and let them know I’m heading their way.”

Villaverde got to it and told me to take the next left. I tensed up with expectation and turned the wheel while eyeing my rearview mirror.

Sure enough, the maroon sedan turned in behind me.

A
s he sat on a tattered and cracked leather couch across a stained coffee table from Eli Walker, El Brujo felt the rumbling of an oncoming storm echoing through his veins.

He tried to stay positive as his eyes wandered around the spartan interior of the gang’s clubhouse and the five other bike brothers who were sitting around the room while his ears and his mind remained locked on the phone conversation their leader, the club’s president, was having. The man had, Navarro reminded himself, come through for him before. Several times, in fact. They’d done good business together years earlier—back in the days when Walker and the rest of the narco world knew him as Raoul Navarro, back when he was scheming and scything his way up the kingpin ladder of power and notoriety—and they’d done business of a different kind, also without a hitch, in the last few months. There was no reason to expect Walker to fail—again—this time, but somehow, Navarro couldn’t help but feel the man was going to let him down.

The clubhouse was next door to the club’s business front, the shop where Walker and his boys built, sold, and serviced motorcycles of all kinds. Navarro knew these guys had a nice little business going, what with the garage out front gleaming with rich lacquer and expensive chrome. He knew how passionate bikers felt about their rides, especially out here in California, and he knew how much some people were prepared to pay for the outrageous custom bikes people like Walker created for them. Only last week, he’d read about a Hollywood screenwriter whose stolen bike had just been recovered in the Philippines, of all places. It was worth close to a hundred thousand dollars. Navarro knew that a lot of what he saw out front were also worth big bucks, and given that the bikes’ main cost component was labor and that the markups on what went into them were huge, it was an ideal setup through which Walker and his gang could launder the money the gang made from trafficking and selling drugs and guns and the rest of their illegal enterprises.

The clubhouse itself was not to Navarro’s liking. It reeked of cheapness, what with all the mismatched furniture and tattered walls, to say nothing of the overflowing ashtrays and the stink of stale beer. It was the first time he’d actually been there—Navarro had steered clear of the United States until his rebirth—and he found it odd that for people who were clearly generating a serious amount of cash, Walker and his gang were living like slobs. Navarro understood that it was part of who these guys were, part of their ethos, of the only life they knew, but it was the opposite of what he was used to, the
banditos
back home who sought to surround themselves with luxury and project wealth and status as soon as they could afford it—wealth that they inevitably lost, wealth that possibly contributed to their downfall. Maybe these guys had it right, living less ostentatiously. Maybe it kept them off the ATF’s radar. Either way, it didn’t matter, he thought. Not if they can deliver what he needed from them.