Fields of Wrath (Luis Chavez Book 1) (14 page)

Oscar’s conscience was bothering him. It had been a week since he’d deposited Luis on a dead man’s farm a few miles up the coast, and two days since he’d heard through the grapevine he’d been found out and ejected. This was troubling by itself. If he’d found out, who else might know? There were some hard hitters up that way, likely the same men who’d drawn Luis’s attention in the first place. They didn’t fuck around worrying about the cops the way Oscar had to. If they didn’t like you, you got a bullet to the head and a shallow grave in the desert.

Was that what he’d earned for Luis?

“BMW 7 Series,” came a quiet voice over Oscar’s phone.

“Pass,” Oscar whispered back.

Maybe it wasn’t his conscience. Maybe he was just bored.

He was sitting in a tow truck behind a half-built house buried deep in Laurel Canyon. The person on the other end of the line was at a valet station up on the ridge. Parking was a nightmare in the hills, so residents had taken to hiring valets to park their guests’ cars when they threw parties. As Laurel Canyon was hardly Bel-Air or Beverly Hills, they usually picked the cheapest valet agency, not knowing they crewed up from a pool of temp labor. On this night Oscar had managed to get one of his own guys on the crew.

“Bentley Mulsanne,” the voice whispered.

“That’s the one,” Oscar said.

Moments later a pair of headlights appeared on a nearby fire road. Oscar hopped out of the cab and met the silver car on the half-poured driveway. A young man climbed out, all nervous energy.

“You remember where the signs are?” Oscar asked.

The boy nodded quickly.

“Down on Brier. By the white two-story place.”

A few well-placed counterfeit “No Parking” signs were part of the scam. The valet will have seemingly made a regrettable mistake, and calls to the city tow yards would occupy the car’s owner the next few hours. By then the car would be sealed in a cargo container on its way out to sea.

Long gone were the days when stolen vehicles had to be chopped and stripped. Globalization had seen to that. Oscar would have a buyer for the Bentley in Asia before it had even crossed the International Date Line.

“Man, there was a Spyder and an SLS coming up when I got the Bentley,” the parker, whose name Oscar thought was Ricardo, said. “I even saw a Vanquish in a driveway on the way over. If we had four tow trucks, we’d have over a million in cars.”

“Yeah, but nobody notices one tow truck carrying a fancy car. Four? That shit attracts attention. Then you go to jail.”

Kids these days. Too fucking eager.

Ricardo’s features softened. He looked just on the border of chastised and humiliated. He might be a kid, but Oscar knew better than to let it go too far to the latter. He took two envelopes from his pocket and handed them to Ricardo.

“These’ll be at the shop for you.”

Ricardo found stacks of cash in both.

“Why two?”

“One’s to pay you for tonight. The other puts you on retainer for a job I’ve got Tuesday night in Arcadia. You free?”

It didn’t look like Ricardo knew precisely what “retainer” meant, but he nodded quickly at his unexpectedly benevolent boss.

Oscar hauled the Bentley to his shop, where an empty cargo container waited. Once the car was inside, one of his boys would run it down to the Port of Long Beach on the back of a tractor-trailer. His thoughts turned to Luis. Why didn’t he make his old friend an offer?

Come work for me, bro. You’re the only smart person I’ve ever met. We’ll take over this city.

But he knew what it was. This Luis Chavez truly was a changed man. A
holy
man. It was as if he could see right into Oscar, and what he found there hadn’t impressed him much. Was that why Oscar drove him to certain death?

Fuck. That.

He pushed all this out of his mind. It was Sunday night, and he wanted to get laid. And not with some local
puta
, either. He wanted one of those gentrified crazy white bitches out looking for strange. They weren’t always on the prowl, but he knew where to find them if they were.

But it better not take all night,
he thought, checking his watch.

He had a goddamn criminal empire to run.

XVII

“I’ll be back by tonight, but I want you to come home right after school. Mrs. Leñero will check in and give me a call. Understood?”

“No prob,” Miguel said. “But you’ve got me worried. Why are you going back up there today? Is this about those guys in the truck?”

“Estate stuff,” Maria lied. “I want to be done with this as much as you do.”

She kissed him on the forehead on the way to the driveway before doubling back and kissing him on both cheeks and giving him a hug as well. She meant it to be reassuring, but Miguel looked more troubled than before.

“Be safe,” he said.

“Of course,” she called back.

He’s too perceptive for his own good,
she thought as she made her way through Monday morning rush hour to St. Augustine’s.

But there was something else she’d noticed in her son that weekend. He’d seemed more grown up, but after enduring the murder of his uncle and the possible threats against his mother, what had she expected? He was more protective of her and more confident in his ability to be that protector. She hadn’t expected that. It made her feel like a bad mother for making her son be the parent.

Regardless, without his help it would’ve taken a lot longer for Maria to figure out how her brother’s financials worked. It was simple really. He paid them weekly, kept strict records, made the proper deductions, and sent out W-9s at the beginning of the year. Since there was a large and ever-changing pool of workers, keeping it legal could mean submitting employment forms to the county assessor as often as two or three times a month. If there were gaps in Santiago’s paperwork for whatever reason, Maria figured the forms on file with the county might provide the most accurate picture.

Truthfully, it wasn’t much, but it gave them a place to start.

Luis was in the parking lot chatting with a St. John’s student when Maria pulled in. He nodded to her, sent the boy on to class, and climbed into the passenger side of the Camry.

“A student of yours?” Maria asked, indicating the boy.

“I actually don’t start teaching until the fall,” Luis admitted. “He just had a question about the priesthood.”

“What kind of question? If you don’t mind me asking, of course.”

“He’s thinking about becoming a priest. He wanted my opinion.”

Maria looked surprised. Luis had expected this. In the minds of many, priests were old men. The idea of anyone in this day and age joining the priesthood seemed antiquated, if not downright odd.

“What did you tell him?” she asked.

“I told him to pray, but that it wouldn’t be a yes or no answer.”

“That’s it? Pray?”

“How else do you hear the voice of God?”

“You didn’t just ask him why he wanted to be a priest?”

“Answer a question with a question?” Luis joked.

“You know what I mean,” said Maria.

“Well, it’s not what he asked. Ask them why, and they’re opening themselves up to be judged. ‘Is my reason good enough? Is it worthy?’ And if it’s a surface reason, you know them already. They see the respect priests get. They’re young men from broken homes looking for fathers. Spend enough time listening for God’s voice, and the yearning falls away. That’s the only voice you need to hear. Have you ever heard God’s voice?”

“I think I did once,” Maria admitted. “But that went away with puberty. How do you know whether it’s God talking to you and not a figment of your imagination?”

“You have to know what you’re listening for, and that takes practice,” Luis said, hoping his answer didn’t seem too esoteric. “You often pray when you’re at your most vulnerable. That’s when it’s easiest to accept the first reasonable answer that pops in your head. You have to know the difference between what’s of the world and what’s of God. You have to want to know what he has to say. That’s why it’s best to pray in silence. He waits for you.”

Maria seemed to like his answer.

The drive north took two hours. Maria asked about Luis’s life before the priesthood and he told her about his mother, where his family had come from, but shied away from anything criminal. She eventually changed the subject to her own son, and this was fine with Luis.

When they reached the county assessor’s office, Maria seemed to realize she’d been speaking without break for almost an hour.

“I’m sorry,” she said as she pulled into a parking space. “I don’t even know what I was talking about.”

“A million different things. Your brother and your son mostly.”

She eyed him suspiciously, as if he’d used some kind of trick to loosen her tongue. “Find out anything interesting?”

Luis had. Plenty. It was obvious she’d needed someone to talk to for some time.

“You’re really good at putting others’ needs before your own,” he said finally.

Maria fell silent. Luis realized just how judgmental that had sounded.

“I’m sorry,” Luis said. “That didn’t come out right.”

“Yeah, it did,” Maria deflected. “I just didn’t want to hear it.”

The office of the Ventura County assessor was small even as government offices ran. This was, however, in contrast to the power it wielded in the region. The county supervisor, Leon Harradine, determined property values for much of the area’s farmland. This decided the amount of property taxes paid by the landowners. As this could mean, in terms of sheer acreage, the difference between millions and tens of millions, Harradine’s favor was much sought after.

That it could be bought only made him more popular.

When Maria and Luis entered, the man behind the big desk raised an eyebrow.

“May I help you?”

“I hope so. Are you Leon Harradine?”

After the man admitted he was, Maria explained who she was. Harradine’s expression changed.

“I would like to express my and my department’s sincerest condolences,” he said. “I didn’t know your brother, but I understand he was an excellent farmer.” As if realizing this was inadequate given the circumstances, he quickly added, “He increased the value of his land.”

“Thank you,” Maria replied. “We’re hoping you can help us with that.”

“Anything,” he said, opening his hands.

The balding, bespectacled man was dressed for comfort, but it was an expensive shirt and pair of pants. The office was a mess of overflowing file cabinets and banker’s boxes, but the desk was a showpiece, a real antique that the assessor kept free from clutter. Luis wondered how much money the little bureaucrat managed to clear each year.

“I’m selling the farm,” Maria said.

Harradine seemed relieved.

“For the sake of the sale, we need to know about any outstanding tax debts, any liens. Anything relating to his workers. As you might imagine, we’ve already had people emerge from the woodwork making claims.”

“That’s reprehensible,” Harradine said. “And to my knowledge, there’s nothing to it. His paperwork arrived like clockwork. I can show it to you.”

“Would you?”

Harradine rose, scanned the banker’s boxes, selected one, and carried it to the desk. Inside were several thick folders marked “Higuera” with a year alongside it. By how readily he was able to retrieve them, they seemed to be a part of the show as well.

“This is what we have,” Harradine announced. “You can’t leave with it, but I think we can allow you to make copies.”

Luis and Maria needed no invitation. They were already flicking through the files, one yellow page after another. Harradine reacted with surprise.

“What are you . . . ?”

“We don’t want to waste your time, sir,” Maria said. “So we’ll just find what we’re looking for and be on our way.”

This response seemed to befuddle him. He turned to Luis.

“Can I ask what you’re doing here, Father?”

“Sixty-four.”

“Pardon?”

“According to these forms, Santiago employed sixty-four workers on his farm last year.”

“Okay, yes,” Harradine said. “If a property is being used for business, that’s part of how the taxes are . . .”

“Seventy-one,” Maria said, finishing her count. “For the year before.”

“Um, yes. That sounds right. His isn’t . . .”

He paused, as if considering whether to alter the tense.

“. . . isn’t the largest farm in the county. There are some workers who come and go.”

“A few I could understand,” Maria said, then raised a file folder of her own. “But these are his bank statements from his business account. The amount of money that stays in is consistent, but the amount that moves through it is ten to twenty times how much he would’ve needed to pay these people.”

Harradine’s jaw dropped. That was the intention. The documents in Maria’s file folder were actually dummy bank statements that Miguel had printed off the Internet. They wouldn’t have stood up to even the slightest bit of scrutiny. If things went their way, they wouldn’t need them to.

“That’s . . . I . . . I don’t know anything about that,” Harradine said.

Luis returned to the folder he’d taken from the banker’s box and indicated the stack of yellow pages.

“There’s a yellow form for each worker Santiago reported?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re sure these were the only ones sent to your office?”

“Yes,” Harradine insisted.

“Okay, but if you get the yellow copy and Santiago retains the pink, who gets the white?”

Harradine didn’t respond immediately. Luis could feel Maria silently panicking but could tell the assessor was only scrambling for the right answer.

“The accounting firm,” Harradine finally remembered. “They were sent there.”

“Do you know which one?” Maria asked. “There were two.”

Luis shot a look over to her. Yes, they’d discussed improvisation, but she’d taken it to the next level. Two sets of paperwork was the oldest scam in the book. Only in this case it was being done with the collusion of government officials at every level, making it practically impossible to prove. There was no smoking gun, no criminal act committed out in the open; there was simply one form saying that a person who had never worked at Santiago’s farm was doing exactly that.

Harradine edged Maria aside and flipped through the files in the banker’s box. It took him two passes to find what he was looking for.

“This one.”

Luis committed the name of the firm and its address to memory.

“Thank you so much for your help,” Maria said, picking up her files.

The two were out the door a second later.

“We’ve got one more shot,” Luis said. “Let’s make it count.”

“. . . and in closing, our family would like to again thank Chancellor Dawkins, the staff at UC Davis, the entire University of California system, and the School of Agriculture and Soil Science for this honor,” Glenn read. “This is one of the finest institutions of learning in the world. Having a cutting-edge genetics lab will only serve to help carry that reputation into the future.”

He paused for applause. If there was one thing Elizabeth Marshak knew how to do, it was write a speech. He glanced over his shoulder to the new wing. There was the Marshak family name spelled out in flat cut metal letters, using the proprietary font of the UC system. Only it was his older brother’s name in front of it.

He bristled.

People knew Henry seldom made public appearances. This seemed to make him more of a target for accolades, lifetime achievement awards, and other signs of veneration.