Triple Crossing (19 page)

“Special Forces teaches you all kinds of interesting stuff.”

“That’s a good way to get smoked, sneaking around in people’s houses.”

“Where ya been, buddy?”

Walking off the fright, Pescatore hit a light switch. He poured himself a glass of water at the kitchenette sink.

“Went and saw this chick.”

“That’s an interesting way to celebrate your first kill. I thought you’d wait around the station for me.”

“Man, I was too freaked out. I had to get outta there.”

“Which chick?”

“This Angelina lives in Chula Vista.”

“The one you met at my party? Anita, with the legs? What’re you talking about, she moved back to Jalisco, buddy.”

“No, the waitress. From Little Italy.”

“I thought she was history.”

Pescatore had dated Angelina for a few months. He had lost contact with her after she quit her job. He could not remember
what he had told Garrison.

“No, man, you know, she called me finally and we hooked up again,” he stammered. He tried to revive his rage from the beach
after the shoot-out. “Plus I didn’t particularly feel like talking to you, tell you the truth.”

“Sit down, Valentine, you’re all squirrelly,” Garrison ordered. “You still pissed at me, buddy?”

“Yup.” Pescatore found a folding chair, opened it and straddled it backwards.

“Well you’re gonna forgive me in a hurry.” Garrison leaned forward. A silver pistol in a shoulder holster appeared beneath
his jacket. There was a tense lethargy to his speech and movements, like he was agitated and willing himself to go slow. “Time
to get the heck outta Dodge. We’re about to get arrested.”

“Arrested?”

“Affirmative.”

“When?”

“They’re organizing the arrest teams today. They’ll serve the warrants tomorrow. Come for you at dawn and haul your sorry
butt out of bed.”

“Tomorrow? What the fuck?” He no longer had to fake consternation. “Where’d you hear this?”

“My guy at the Federal Building.”

“He sure?”

“Sure.”

Isabel had told him it would be at least a week before anything happened. It was hard to believe she could be wrong. Unless
she had lied. Unless the night had been a scam. He relived the hungry good-bye kiss in the car. Cold-blooded bitch, he thought.

Garrison was saying something about a bag and Tijuana. “Grab your Dopp kit and pack some clothes, buddy.”

Pescatore hunkered behind the back of the folding chair.

“Arleigh,” he said, the first name sounding peculiar in his ears. “There’s no way I’m running to Tijuana, man. I’ll take my
chances here. What are they gonna charge us with?”

“Federal charges. Maybe homicide too.”

“Homicide?”

“Three guys got killed last night. They could say it was in the course of a criminal act. Like if a guy robs a bank and his
partner gets killed by the guard.”

“Give me a break.”

“Listen, that’s how they squash you when your time comes.”

“I shot a Mexican cop last night. They’d eat me alive down there.”

“Don’t play stupid. My guys in TJ are gonna look out for us. If they tell the
judiciales
to carry our luggage, they’ll carry our fucking luggage. And you know it.”

“I don’t know. If I run, I’ll run to Chicago, Canada or somewhere.”

Garrison stood and stretched. The jacket came open so the shoulder holster was plainly visible.

“I’m not asking your opinion, Valentine,” he growled. “Police up your situation and get with the program. Enough jiving.”

Pescatore’s hands sweated as he changed in his bedroom, strapping on his shoulder holster over civilian clothes. He was barely
aware of the items he stuffed into a duffel bag. Garrison stood in the bedroom doorway chattering lazily about how this was
going to be easier for Pescatore than for him. How Garrison had a five-hundred-thousand-dollar house in Bonita to worry about.
How it was a good thing he had money stashed, he had experience shipping out on short notice.

Garrison was keeping an eye on him, hurrying him along. His vigilance opened up an alternate scenario: What if Isabel had
told the truth? What if Garrison were lying? Perhaps he knew Pescatore was an informant. Perhaps it was a ruse to lure him
down south and whack him.

Hauling the duffel bag into the living room, Pescatore reached for the phone.

“Who ya calling?”

“Angelina, man. I promised to take her to the movies tonight.”

He intended to call Isabel Puente and fake a conversation with Angelina in order to sound the alarm. Garrison smothered his
hand on top of the phone.

“Negative. Let’s go.”

Pescatore felt a flash of anger: This is my house you’re pushing me around in, you gray-eyed storm-trooping ape.

That’s OK, he thought, I still got my cell phone. But then his rage flared again, blending with despair. The cell phone battery
was dead. He hadn’t charged it because he had spent the night at Isabel’s apartment. Now the phone sat in its sheath on his
belt, useless. The price of pleasure: He had let down his guard.

They hauled their bags down the stairs. He followed Garrison around the corner to his Cherokee.

“You drive, Valentine.”

Pescatore reached to catch the tossed keys. “How come?”

“I got some phone calls to make, buddy.”

Yeah right, Pescatore thought, starting the Cherokee with a roar. He wants me under control. He wants my hands occupied. The
gloomiest scenario occurred to him: What if his fears about both Puente and Garrison betraying him were correct? In that case,
it was just a question of whether he got whacked or locked up. Right now, getting whacked looked like the favorite.

“I’m thirsty, man, lemme get a Big Gulp,” he suggested at the stoplight before the freeway ramp, eyeing a 7-Eleven.

“Drive.”

He’s on to me, dammit, Pescatore thought. I’m DOA.

His hands throbbed from clutching the wheel. Rolling south around the curve of the freeway past the steel ramparts of downtown,
past the high slender span of the Coronado Bay Bridge, he remembered the speed trap near National City. On his way to
work he often saw a California Highway Patrol car work the area around a viaduct, as busy as a shark at feeding time.

He nudged the accelerator. He turned on the radio as a diversionary tactic.

In a voice both pompous and folksy, a local talk-show host was complaining about Mexicans on weekends: Mexicans at the zoo,
Mexicans in Horton Plaza. Can’t get away from them. Can’t kick them out either, because I guess these are the legal ones.

“Later with that noise,” Pescatore scoffed, twirling the radio dial, increasing speed.

Garrison grunted. He was fiddling with his cell phone.

Pescatore tuned to a cross-border bilingual freeway report, then a Tijuana program. An older Mexican woman’s amplified telephone
voice, kitchen noise in the background, complained about graffiti, tattoos, drug use and other American influences. Decadence,
she said. Bad manners. Imperialism.

One side of the border is always bitching about the other, Pescatore thought.

He was going over eighty miles per hour. The speed-trap overpass approached. He left the dial on a
banda
tune, oompah tuba and manic trumpets and rattling drums. It was one of the top Baja stations: X99,
La Que Pega y Mueve.
The One That Hits and Moves.

“Ah-hiiiiyy,”
he whooped mariachi-style, cranking the volume, edging past eighty-five.

“Hey Valentine, slow the fuck down, what’re you doing?”

Too late. Pescatore almost cheered the lights erupting in the rearview mirror, the CHP cruiser swinging into the lane behind
him, gathering velocity around a curve.

Your turn to sweat, Pescatore thought. Buddy.

“I do not believe this,” Garrison snarled. “A Chippie. You stupid asshole.”

“My fault,” Pescatore said. He maintained speed in order to irritate the CHP officer and make him suspicious.

“Pull it over right now,” Garrison said. “Goddammit. Just take it easy and let’s get this done with.”

Garrison told Pescatore to get his badge out; they were going to claim to be working plainclothes. Garrison’s hand went under
his vest. Pescatore figured that Garrison was worried they would run his license and registration. If the feds were getting
ready to scoop them up, one thing might lead to another. And if the indictment talk was just a setup to murder Pescatore,
Garrison did not want to leave a record that he had been with him that morning.

Pescatore took his time pulling over. The CHP officer got out and approached in the rearview mirror: a black officer in his
forties. The strong-legged stride of an aging sprinter, a crisp tan uniform, gold-framed glasses. As the officer came around
to the window on the passenger side, keeping the Cherokee between him and the high-speed traffic, Pescatore saw him unsnap
the flap of his holster.

Pescatore raised his voice over the drone of passing cars, reaching in front of Garrison to push his badge and license at
the officer.

“How ya doin’, Officer, Border Patrol, we—”

Garrison blocked Pescatore with his back. He proffered his own badge and declared: “Hi there, U.S. Border Patrol antismuggling,
sir. We’re conducting a surveillance here.”

“Wait a minute, one at a time,” the CHP officer commanded in a flat voice, examining Pescatore’s badge and license. “I don’t
care who you are, son, you need to slow this vehicle down.”

“Yes sir, but we got this hot pursuit going,” Pescatore said. He winked, grimaced, bobbed back and forth behind Garrison,
hoping to catch the guy’s attention. The officer’s glasses had a designer’s logo on the frame and were tinted, impeding eye
contact.

“Pursuit? We weren’t notified. CHP is s’posed to get notified on a pursuit.”

The Chippie’s right hand snapped and unsnapped the holster
flap. He stood in a textbook ready stance, knees slightly bent, shoulder pointed forward, front foot aligned with the shoulder.

“Not a pursuit, no sir,” Garrison said quickly, anger barely contained. “We’ve got a load vehicle in our sights. A smuggler.
Problem is he’s halfway back to The Line by now.”

“Goddamn right, this is fucked up, we’re gonna catch hell,” Pescatore declared.

“Well, wait a minute now…” The CHP officer handed back Pescatore’s badge, but kept the license. He craned his neck to peer
past Garrison at Pescatore, who made an imploring and terrified face. The officer seemed to realize that something was wrong;
even if he thought Pescatore was drunk or deranged, that was a step in the right direction. He worried at his holster, fastening
and unfastening it. Snap-snap. Snap-snap.

The officer asked Garrison: “Are you a supervisor with The Patrol?”

A murderous undercurrent built in Garrison’s voice. “I’m a supervisor. Sir.”

“This a U.S. government vehicle?”

“No sir, my personal vehicle.”

“Huh. Why’s he driving?”

“I’m directing the surveillance, sir.”

“You work smuggling out of Border Patrol sector HQ?”

“No sir, Imperial Beach station.”

“So they could verify—”

“Yeah absolutely, they could verify,” Pescatore exulted. The station would rush over a carload of supervisors when they heard
about them badging the CHP and posing as antismuggling investigators. The day after the shooting on the beach, no less.

Garrison shouldered him aside again.

“Sir, we’ve got an operation going, couldn’t we just—”

“If you got an operation going, where’s your radios at?”

Pescatore did not want to look at Garrison in the silence that ensued. He noticed that the CHP officer’s nameplate said Boyd.

“I need to see your license and registration documents as well, sir,” Boyd said to Garrison, officious and determined.

“Sure, no problem,” Garrison said. He did not move. “About the radios, listen—”

“We’re gonna lose ’em, we’re gonna lose ’em!” Pescatore blurted, playing the loony all out. “This is fucked up!”

“Shut up, Valentine!” Garrison roared, sounding close to the edge.

Boyd took a fast light step backwards, his eyebrows jumping in alarm. His hand was planted on the butt of his pistol.

“I’m calling in,” Boyd said. “They’ll patch me through to Patrol communications, get this clarified right now.”

Garrison cursed under his breath. Pescatore began to see a drawback to his maneuvering: He had laid the groundwork for a confrontation
between two frightened men with guns.

B
Y GOD
, man, doesn’t anyone in this part of the world wear a suit and tie? I just saw the governor in Mexicali. He was wearing one
of those abominable jackets like the baseball players, you know, with the leather sleeves? What a sight.”

The Secretary shook his head in a burlesque of despair. His suit was impeccable—pin-striped, three-piece. His tie was mustard-colored.
A matching handkerchief poked up out of a breast pocket. A watch chain hung across his vest, an affectation acquired during
an ambassadorship in Europe with which he had been rewarded years earlier for perilous government service. His long white
fingers tapped a cigarette over an ashtray.

“Well, it’s a curious thing, Mr. Secretary,” Méndez said. “There was some interesting research done on that here at the university.
Our scientists determined that wearing a tie constricts the flow of ideas to the brain. A very serious condition, we call
it
chilanguitis.
”

The Secretary bent forward in silent laughter, holding up a hand as if asking for mercy. He seemed unfazed by the stuffiness
of the cramped second-floor office that had been hurriedly cleared for their meeting. Aviation manuals were stacked on the
desk behind the Secretary. A glass wall beyond the desk overlooked a private hangar.

Méndez was not in the mood for banter, not even poking fun at
chilangos,
natives of Mexico City. He wore the same leather jacket and jeans he had worn the day before at the prison. He was unshaven.
His eyes were red from a night without sleep; he had replaced his contact lenses with glasses before coming to the airport.
Méndez was not in the mood, but it was a ritual: The Secretary liked him because Méndez was not one of the obsequious, humorless
sycophants who infested the ministry. The Secretary prided himself on his sense of humor. And he expected Méndez to play the
irreverent maverick.