Name of the Devil Page 28

  I returned to my bed with some horrible images churning in my head, but they were nothing compared with what I saw early that morning when I got up before everyone else to go to Dad’s workshop. I can never remember a time when my curiosity didn’t get the better of me.

  Bigger than a toy chest, the crate was in the middle of the floor. Made of wood planks, there were foreign words stamped on its side and I stood there trying to imagine what was inside.

  I could see from the scraped wood where Dad and Darius had opened it last night then sealed it back up with four small nails. I grabbed a hammer off the workbench and clumsily pried the lid off the top of the box using all my weight as leverage.

  I had to know.

  The box was stuffed with straw. I pulled fistfuls aside to see what Uncle Darius had gone away to get. At first I thought it was a ceramic vase because of all the padding.

  When I pulled away more straw, I revealed fine black hair. Below it was the thin brown skin of a scalp.

  A body.

  I didn’t scream. We had shelves of fake body parts in our house from the show. I could look at this dispassionately as if it was a severed head I’d placed into the magic guillotine bucket.

  On another level I registered the dried-out leather smell invading my nostrils. This wasn’t latex and rubber. This was rotted flesh and blood.

  That was the first time, but sadly not the last, I experienced a dead body. I say experience, because the scent penetrates you.

  This was a dead thing.

  A dead person.

  Uncle Darius stole a body.

  I replaced the lid and shoved it back on the crate and hammered the nails in the exact spots, using small strokes so I wouldn’t wake anyone.

  I crawled back into bed, still trying to understand everything. I knew this had something to do with me and the man that had me followed after school.

  The corpse was old and withered. I couldn’t imagine that it was anyone Uncle Darius would have killed. This was an old thing dug up from some cemetery—a cemetery in a faraway place.

  Grandfather and Dad had been talking about things late into the night over the oak table. They always waited until I was in bed before they had their discussions, and even if I didn’t creep out to my usual spots the sound of their arguing voices carried all the way into my room.

  A few weeks after the Buick followed me, we started receiving calls at all hours. I picked up the first time and heard a man panting. After I described this to Dad, I was forbidden from answering the phone. Grandfather had them all unhooked except for the one in his study. The calls kept coming. One time I heard him yelling at the man on the phone. A little while later the phone rang again and Grandfather started screaming, only to stop abruptly when he realized it was someone he knew.

  I imagined it was Uncle Darius calling from some exotic location. I may have heard the word Sicily. It’s hard to remember.

  The body was real, I was sure of that.

  I also vividly remembered the previous night, when my grandfather told me I was being raised by wolves.

  53

  JACKSON LAMONT SMIRKS as he’s led into the room on the other side of the thick glass divider. “At least you’re more fun to look at than my lawyer,” he says as he picks up the receiver.

  During the half hour it took for them to dig him out of lockup, I’d been reading the file on him. With short-cropped hair and Air Force insignia tattoos emerging from the sleeve of the orange jumpsuit on his left arm, he now looks like a weathered version of the clean-cut young man in his government file folder. Currently serving time for intent to distribute, his life has been one spiral after another.

  Kicked out of the Air Force for possession of controlled substances, Lamont knocked around various jobs ranging from telephone solicitation to hauling portable toilets. Probably seeking something more out of life than verbal abuse and trucking other people’s waste, he was let go from the telephone job under suspicion of stealing credit card numbers.

  I get to the point. “Martha, or Marta, Rodriguez. You know her?”

  Lamont gives me a long stare. His eyes dart to the door where the guard went through. “What about her?”

  “Do you know her?”

  His eyes narrow on me. “There may have been a person by that name in my Air Force unit.”

  Marta was discharged eight months after Lamont. She was let go with a general discharge, the kind they give to somebody they suspect is up to no good, but don’t quite have the goods on. “It says here she was interviewed by the Air Force Security Forces when you were apprehended with controlled narcotics.”

  “Narcotics. There’s a funny word. Do you know how much they found on me?”

  “I’m sure I can find it here somewhere . . .”

  He waves his hand in the air. “I’ll save you the trouble. Less than what they send a pilot up with when he’s in combat.”

  “I don’t think the pilots generally intend to distribute while they’re in aerial combat.”

  He shrugs. “Why are you here?”

  “Marta Rodriguez. What can you tell me about her?”

  “Nothing.” He smiles smugly.

  “What if I speak with your prosecuting attorney?”

  “Don’t waste your time. If he agrees to knock the time in half, I’ll still be seventy before I get out of jail. That’s assuming, of course, she doesn’t have me killed first.”

  “She can do that in here?” I already know the answer, but I want him to tell me what he thinks she’s capable of.

  “What do you think? Let me just go on the official record as saying she’s a wonderful human being.”

  “You were arrested with two kilos of cocaine in the trunk of your car. It doesn’t say where you got it from.”

  “It was planted.” He rolls his eyes.

  “Of course. How’s that defense working for you? What if I told you we found a fingerprint on one of the bags that belonged to Marta?”

  “Bullshit.” His eyes lock on me. I know I have his attention.

  It’s a calculated lie. I gamble that he still thinks the X-20 operation is a complete mystery to us. “An informant, one of the drone pilots, made sure she touched the bags before it went over the border.”

  “An informant?” he asks skeptically.

  “Former Air Force. Marta contacted him like you. I’m sure you know who I’m talking about.” I want to vaguely insinuate Deland, but I’m not sure if Lamont knows he’s already dead.

  “If I talk, she kills me. I was clumsy and got caught. That didn’t fly so well.”

  Marta has been cleaning house. She knows it’s only a matter of time before we work our way to someone who knows her. “She’s going to try to kill you whether you talk or not. If you do talk, there’s another level of protection. You don’t get mixed in with the regular population.”

  “They can still get to you.”

  “It’s much, much harder in the federal system. If you have a lot to say, we can put you in witness protection. The only people who get killed there are the ones that stray. Keep your nose clean and you’ll be fine.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know. They found a lot of shit in my car.”

  “Yes. Yes they did. They also want Marta for something much more serious.” In the back of my mind I’m putting together an arrangement for Winstone. The DEA can get a solid sentence for Lamont; not the lifetime they want, but five years or so, and we can get enough information to connect Marta to the bombing attempt and X-20.

  “More serious than being a trafficker?”

  “Let me put it this way, if you’d known where Bin Laden was hiding, they’d have flown you out of here on Air Force One. We let people operate poppy fields in Afghanistan just so we can get intel on Al Qaeda. Marta is a terrorist now. We’re not above making deals with drug lords to go after them.�
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  “What will this information get me?”

  “Probably a much shorter stay here. You’ll still be able to remember why you wanted out.”

  Lamont mulls this over. I can tell he was already fearing the prospect of Marta reaching him inside of here. “I need to talk to my lawyer.”

  “Is this an attorney provided to you by the state? Or is it someone recommended to you?”

  “Why?”

  “If this is someone Marta’s people suggested, you’re screwed. They don’t hire attorneys they can’t buy body and soul.”

  “So you’re telling me not to talk to an attorney? I’m not sure that’s legal.”

  “I’m saying you probably need new counsel. Ask to speak to the DA directly. Ask him point-blank if you should get a different attorney.”

  “Why the hell would he give me a straight answer?”

  “If he says ‘yes’ and agrees to a potential delay, then he’s shooting straight. That’s assuming he thinks you’ll be more likely to make a deal with a different attorney.”

  “Meanwhile, you want me to tell you everything?”

  “I don’t care about how you got stopped or what happened. I need to know about Marta. See the explosion on the news in DC?”

  “Yeah?”

  “That was her. There were over a hundred people in that building. Thankfully, none of them were hurt and the building is still standing. You’re still alive because you’re not worth her attention, for the moment. So help me out. Who is she, really?”

  54

  LAMONT KNOWS HE’S in a hell of a bind. He needs to make some kind of deal. I can tell this was already weighing on him. Whether he promised his silence or not, if he screwed up the transfer of the cocaine Marta already has all the justification to have him killed while really trying to protect her own identity.

  Running a criminal enterprise is filled with human resource challenges. If you had everyone killed who had potential evidence on you and was at risk of turning State’s witness, nobody would work for you. Lamont wasn’t a worry for Marta as long as prosecutors and cops weren’t waving her photo and asking about her. Now she knows her invisibility is coming to an end. Loose ends have to be tidied up.

  Lamont leans back, crosses his arms and stares at the ceiling. “Marta? Which one? I knew three of them. There was the Marta that went into the Air Force. She was an eighteen-year-old girl coming off the streets. Managed to get her GED and enlisted because some judge thought it’d help a smart kid find some discipline.”

  “Did it?”

  “Discipline was never her problem. Authority was. Here’s the thing about the military; it’s like a razor. It cuts right through you. On one side you get people who want to be part of something. They need that gung-ho attitude and want to be told what to do. They’re the do-gooders. On the other side, you get the fuck-ups, like me. We sign up because we think it’s going to straighten out all that shit that’s wrong in our lives. Only it doesn’t. We coast along and avoid getting in trouble for a while, but then we figure out how to beat the system or at least push it a little. What’s only a small infraction on the outside is a big one inside. Get caught with a joint in your pocket outside a club? In some cities the cops will just trash it and tell you to go home. In the Air Force, you’re looking at time in the brig, and that’s if they don’t kick you out.

  “Marta figured this out early on. Lucky for her, she wasn’t much to look at. Any half-decent chick in the military is getting chased by a dozen cocks every minute of the day. Know what the STD rate is for a woman in the service compared to the average? My point is, Marta showed up with a grudge. She didn’t like being told what to do, which is a bad attitude to have in the military. She took some shit from a couple COs and that’s when the second Marta emerged. Bad Luck Marta. Shit had a habit of happening to people who crossed her. One CO who wrote her up for breaking curfew had his brakes go out. He ended up driving through a red light and getting T-boned. Another one who noticed parts were going missing and probably showing up on eBay got electrocuted by a bad light switch before he could start a formal investigation. Weird shit.

  “She was always somewhere else. You could never pin it on her. She was good at getting other people to do stuff for her. Look at my dumb ass. I got to hand it to her. Anyhow, Bad Luck Marta realized the Air Force was too small for her. By that time she was smuggling drugs into the base and had figured out all the little loopholes.

  “After she was discharged, she laid low for a while. I heard she had some hard times. But eventually she got hooked up with a high-level trafficker. Soon enough, Marta was running mules between Mexico and the US. She’d find these Army wives, bored with waiting for their husbands to come back. Marta would offer them money to take a trip to Mexico with a few friends and then carry a bag or two back.

  “Marta was real smart about it. She’d make sure these wives would get a chance to party down there, hook up with some handsome beach boy. Then she’d use that to blackmail these dumb bitches. If they got caught or said anything, Marta would make sure their husbands stuck in the middle of the shit somewhere would find out real quick what a cheating whore they were married to. Real piece of work.

  “When peace time, or whatever the hell we call it, came around, she had a better idea. Instead of spending three days and a few grand each trip on these bimbos ready to have a breakdown, why not hire the husbands?

  “These guys know how to fly remotely operated vehicles a few feet off the ground and avoid radar. For fifty K you can build a half-decent kit if you know what you are doing. There are lots of joystick jockeys looking for something to do that pays better than working retail and trying to rape someone with an extended warranty.

  “Marta had the cutting edge advantage on the cartels. They were in the Stone Age with boats and passenger planes. She was making bank quicker. Her mules were electronic. She also started using them for counter-surveillance. That’s when she upped the game. If she couldn’t recruit you, she would find you and kill you.”

  “It’s a big jump from running drugs to running a cartel,” I interject.

  “It didn’t happen overnight. But she’s smart and a fast learner. If life had dealt her a different hand, she’d be running some Fortune 500 company. I don’t doubt that for a moment. All this took time. When she got hold of me, she was well on the rise.

  “Marta was good at figuring out who was in charge. She could make a deal or cut somebody out of the picture fast. And she got the business. She worked her way up through street suppliers to the people running the fields. She’s smart, real smart. In this business, brains are at a premium. Look at where my dumb ass is sitting.”

  “How would I find her?”

  “Find her? You should want to stay away from her. She can smell a narc a mile away.”

  “They don’t pay me to keep away from bad people. Does she have a weakness? A vice?”

  “Not a vice. Maybe a weakness,” replies Lamont. “Kids. As hard-ass as she is, she’s got a soft spot for kids. She has an orphanage down in Mexico.”

  “Tixato?”

  “Yeah. They call her ‘Sister Marta’ there.”

  “I’ve been there. Anywhere else?”

  Lamont gives me a surprised look. “You went to Tixato? And made it out alive?”

  “There were complications.”

  “She’s got another one in Nicaragua. Coincidentally enough, another high-trafficking zone.”

  “Where in Nicaragua?” I press.

  “I don’t remember. The town was called Lexi or something like that. She has a house on the water and a huge dock where she keeps her yacht.”

  “Yacht?”

  “Yeah. She’s a very wealthy woman who likes her toys. She’s also got friends in high places. People down there don’t think of her as a drug dealer. They think she’s just some wealthy real estate investor or somethin
g.”

  “What’s the name of the yacht?”

  “I don’t know if I remember. I’ve never been on it.” He sounds like he’s telling the truth.

  I take a wild guess based on how people choose these kinds of names. “Marty?”

  He snaps his fingers. “Yeah, Marty, that’s it. How’d you know?”

  “That’s not important. If you can think of anything else, let me know. In the meantime, I’m going to talk to the warden.”

  Lamont is a first-rate asshole. But he’s not a killer. Right now I can see a crosshair on his forehead. US federal prison isn’t the same as Mexican lock-up, but it’s still not a safe place for a marked man.

  “What for?” he asks.

  “It’s a miracle she hasn’t found a way to kill you already. I can only guess that’s because her attention has been elsewhere. I’m going to do what I can to see that you’re safe now.”

  I can’t let Marta get to him like she did Esteban. Lamont is our only living link between her and X-20.

  55

  BREYER LEANS ACROSS his desk and stabs a finger in my direction. “Who have you been talking to?”

  He’s in no mood for anything that sounds like a flippant answer. I play it dumb. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “About the pope thing,” he replies. “I told you not to take it out of this building.”

  I have to tread carefully. I can’t lie. “I didn’t break any regulations.”

  “I got half a building full of lawyers. I don’t need a street cop throwing legal distinctions back in my face.”

  Being called a “street cop” is a compliment in my book, compared with “showgirl bimbo” or “magic babe.” In a strange way, I take it as a sign that Breyer at least takes me seriously. I respect him enough to tell the truth.

  “I spoke to my priest in a confessional,” I explain matter-of-fact.

  He sits back and gives me an odd look. “Your priest?”

  “Technically, not my priest. But I did it in a confessional. I wasn’t sure how much further than this office my warning was going to go.”