The Devil's Elixir (29 page)

Pennebaker scoffed and threw up his hands in resignation.

“We had a woman in here who spent six years in prison for selling thirty bucks worth of weed. Her kids were taken away from her and she fell into crank as soon as she got out. Her way to drop out. Chalk one up for the system, right? Even the UN’s Global Commission on Drug Policy is now admitting the ban has been a failure and calling for legalization. That’s the same UN that sent us out to the Gulf. You think anyone in Washington’s got the balls to listen? The only way to deal with it is to confront why we do it and educate people about their options. Then maybe they can make better choices. I’m happy with my choices now. First time ever I can say that.”

I figured now was a good time to prompt Pennebaker to tell us what we’d come here to learn.

“Help us with one thing and we’ll leave you in peace. We know you and the boys ran security for some Mexican narco back in the day. Who was it?”

Pennebaker’s expression clouded. “Why?”

“Might be the same person that hired the Eagles to do the grabs—then burned them.”

Pennebaker grimaced. As though this memory was somehow worse than all the others put together.

“Guy was a real whackjob. You could see it in his eyes. I know that look. He always hired ex-soldiers. American and Mexican. Thought it gave him an edge. And I guess it did. We did what he asked and he paid us well. Our government may be deluded, confused, incompetent, badly advised, and sometimes just plain stupid, but this guy was just pure evil.”

“What was his name?”

“Navarro. Raoul Navarro.”

T
hey were back in Balboa Park—Tess, Alex, and Jules, wandering across the plaza, hordes of people all around them, out making the most of another gorgeous Californian scorcher and taking in the wealth of attractions the park had to offer.

Tess hadn’t found any psychologists in the area called Dean. So she’d given up and decided Alex could use another excursion, this time to the Air and Space Museum.

They left Jules’s Ford Explorer in the lot behind the Starlight Theatre, and as they walked alongside a bank of colorful flowers that bordered the walkway, Tess’s mind drifted back to her chat with Alex’s teacher and the flower that kills. Her first thought when she’d heard it was that it had to come out of some cartoon Alex watched, maybe something some dastardly alien with a Dr. Evil laugh was trying to unleash on an unsuspecting world, only to be thwarted right in the nick of time by Ben and his wondrous Omnitrix. But here she was, still thinking about it and wondering why her earlier easy dismissal of it wasn’t staying down for the count.

“Alex, do you remember that flower you drew for your teacher, in the park? The white one?”

He nodded, not really interested. “Uh-huh.”

“Where did you see it? Was it in the park?”

“No.”

“Where then?”

He slid her a curious sideways glance. “I don’t know . . . I just . . . I know it.”

“But you said something about it. Do you remember?”

He nodded.

She stopped and crouched down so her face was level with his, and put her arm softly on his shoulder. “Tell me why it’s special.”

He stared at her like he was sussing her out, then said, “It can fix people. But it kills them. So it’s not good.” He paused, then he added, “I told them that.”

“Who, Alex? Who’d you tell that to?”

“People. Brooks, and the others. But they didn’t like it.” Tess felt completely lost by his words—then something behind her seemed to catch his eye and his face lit up like a bank of stadium floodlights. “Look!”

Tess followed the direction his little finger was pointing in. Up ahead was the Air and Space Museum, with two sleek fighter planes flanking its entrance. Alex slipped out of Tess’s grasp and scampered off.

She couldn’t compete with that.

She glanced at Jules, shrugged, and they both trotted off behind him.

The murderous flowers would have to wait.

N
avarro
.

The name hit me like an arctic wave.

Pennebaker and Walker ran drugs for Navarro?

I was swept up by a storm of colliding thoughts, associations, theories—and unease, and I was only half-listening as Pennebaker went into more detail about the bikers’ work for the Mexican.

It was pretty much as Karen Walker had told us. They used to ride shotgun on drug shipments—Navarro’s shipments—once the goods had crossed the border. It was easy money until the day they got wind of a rival cartel that was plotting to move in on the Mexican narco’s territory via a mole within his inner circle.

“Navarro, he sets up a meet with us all to talk about a new shipment, so’s not to tip the guy off,” Pennebaker was telling us. “So we head south of the border and all meet up in this quiet bar down in Playas. And it was just weird, man. One minute they’re talking and it’s all cool, then the guy just falls to the ground like he just got the Spock nerve pinch, only he’s still wide awake. He’s just, like, paralyzed. Navarro’s
pistoleros
use the surprise to whip out their guns and take out the guy’s two bodyguards. Then Navarro brings out this knife and just calmly goes to work on the guy. He cuts his belly open, he starts pulling out intestines and shit and cutting them up in front of him, telling him in detail how he’s going to die while chucking the pieces he was cutting out to a couple of dogs. It was insane.”

Munro smirked. “And you threw up.”

Pennebaker shook his head with a combination of discomfort, embarrassment, and awe. “Yeah, I puked my guts out. The guy was gutting him like a fish. I mean, that was some weird shit, right? They didn’t call him El Brujo for nothing.”

“The wizard,” Munro added.

“Wizard, sorcerer, whatever,” Pennebaker shot back. “El Loco would have been more appropriate. The guy was a total freak. I could see the writing on the wall and started to think we needed to end our little arrangement with him and seek greener pastures, but then I didn’t have to ’cause Marty got killed and that was that.”

I wasn’t really focusing and was just getting bits and pieces of it. My mind was elsewhere, hurtling down some dark trenches.

I had to interrupt.

I told Pennebaker, “Just give us a second, all right?” and motioned for Munro to join me. Pennebaker looked at me with a mix of disinterest and confusion as I led Munro out of the room.

“This is about what happened in Mexico,” I told him once we were out of earshot.

Munro frowned, thinking about it. “I agree, but—how? And why now?”

It didn’t help having the bastard here with me. I never really liked him anyway, and it only got worse after the bloodbath in Mexico. Looking at him now, I could feel a sting in my finger from pulling that trigger, and even though the blame was entirely mine, I still resented him for it, too.

Still, I had to put that aside and stay focused.

“I don’t know, but think about it. We took out a chemist who was developing a new superdrug. The guys who came after Michelle grabbed two chemists, maybe more.” My brain was racing ahead, playing a speed-game of mental connect-the-dots, and I was already sensing what the final picture was going to look like. “The drug McKinnon was developing. We didn’t get it that night. What happened, after I left? All I heard was that it was never recovered.”

Munro nodded. “His laptop—”

“I know, that I heard. Two strikes and it fried itself.”

That night, we’d managed to bring back the two things McKinnon had packed: a laptop and a tattered old leather-bound journal. The journal had apparently proved worthless—according to Corliss and some agency analyst, it held the ramblings of a Jesuit missionary called Eusebio something from God knows when, handwritten in Spanish and half-faded. The laptop, where his research was presumably stored, turned out to be not only password- and fingerprint-protected, but with some heavy-duty 256-bit Blowfish protection software on top. The software fried its hard drive at the second incorrect password attempt. Two attempts. Not five, not ten. Talk about ruthless. The agency’s top techies couldn’t break it beforehand or recover anything off it after it was wiped. That level of security wasn’t surprising, given that these chemists are often working on new drugs that can be worth billions of dollars—but it didn’t help our cause.

“But you guys went after Navarro in a big way after he came at Corliss,” I told him. “You didn’t get anything then either?”

“Dude, Navarro didn’t have it either. Why do you think he came after Corliss? The formula for the drug died with McKinnon. That’s what made Navarro freak out. That’s why he went berserk and moved on Corliss—a move he knew would bring the DEA down on him like a ton of bricks and make him the cartel enforcers’ number one target at the same time.”

It was all crystallizing, but I could also feel something urgent close by, clawing away at me from some deep crevasse in my mind, desperate for my attention.

“Okay, so the formula is gone—but they think we have it,” I said. “Someone does. That’s why Navarro came after Corliss back then. That’s why whoever’s behind all this got the bikers to kidnap the scientists. And that’s got to be why they went after Michelle.”

“But Michelle wasn’t part of our task force,” Munro reminded me. “She had nothing to do with the raid on Navarro’s lab.”

“No, she didn’t,” I told him. “But I did.”

The realization tumbled down to the pit of my stomach like a cluster bomb, then ripped me apart from the inside out.

“They didn’t want anything from her,” I added, the tumblers in my brain falling into place and lining up with brutal clarity. “They wanted me. That’s why they came after her. They knew I was the guy who took out McKinnon. They must think I know something.”

I saw Michelle get hit again, saw her looking at me with death closing in around her, saw her lying there on the sidewalk with life seeping out of her, saw her mouth those last words to me with her dying breath—and I wanted to tear myself apart.

It was me they were after, all along.

They came after her to get to me.

She died because of me.

My blood turned to acid, a torrent of it rushing through my body and scorching everything in its path. I guessed that they must have come after Michelle because they didn’t know about Tess. Or maybe New York was too far out of their reach, and they needed to draw me here, to their turf, a short hop from the border.

And if that wasn’t enough, I then realized something else.

Alex
.

“They weren’t just after Michelle,” I hissed, feeling short of breath. “They were after Alex. They must know he’s my son. That’s why they came after them. To grab him. To use him as leverage. To get to me.”

Which had to be why they were still following me. Not because they didn’t know Michelle had been hit. Because they wanted me. They wanted something from me, and they wanted to use Alex to make me get them whatever the hell they’re after.

Which meant Alex was still a target.

He was at risk.

As was Tess.

My vision went all blurry at the edges as the whole plan played itself out at fast-forward speed in my mind, and I pulled my phone out and stabbed Jules’s speed dial.