Private L.A. (33 page)

“Even better,” I said, leaned over, repeated to Justine what Cordova had just told me, and finished with: “Have at them.”

Justine brought a chair with her. She sat opposite the men, pulled off her mask.

Commandant Gomez recognized her, first incredulous but then filled with drunken rancor. “You will never leave México alive.”

“What is your relationship to Adelita Gomez, Commandant?” she asked.

The state police commandant’s head retreated toward his shoulders several inches, like a turtle drawing into its shell or a snake about to strike. “I don’t know no one by that name.”

“You don’t know Adelita?” Justine said, looking at him with great skepticism. “The Harlows’ nanny? From Guadalajara?”

“No,” Gomez said. “Never heard of this girl.”

Fox shook his head. “Guadalajara is a big place.”

I took that as my cue, turned and made a cutting motion across my throat, and saw a red light blink back in the shadows. Cordova took the commandant’s pistol from Cruz and ran the mechanism as he stepped out into the light, still wearing the long duster and the skeleton mask.

“Get a better memory,
señores
, or I shoot you,” he said in English. “Not to kill, but to wound.”

They looked uncertain, but then Gomez started to say, “I don’t—”

Cordova aimed at the front of the commandant’s left boot and fired. Gomez screamed, tried to get up, and fell to the floor, writhing in pain, grabbing at his boot, and screeching in Spanish.

“You’re next, Chief,” Cordova promised Fox above Gomez’s agony. “But I think I’ll aim higher with you. What do you want? The shin? Or the kneecap?”

The police chief had started to perspire. The sweat ran in rivulets down his face.
“Por favor,”
he began.

“Tell us something about Adelita,” Justine said.

Cordova ran the muzzle of the gun up the police chief’s right shin, across his kneecap and thigh, aimed it at his groin.

“You would not do such a thing!” Fox cried in horror.

“Try me,” Cordova said.

Fox looked down at Commandant Gomez, still writhing on the floor, his screams reduced to moans. Fox looked back to Justine. “I’ll tell you what I know.”

Cordova tucked the gun inside the duster. I threw a thumbs-up into the darkness, seeing that red light blink again.

“Tell me about Adelita,” Justine said.

“Adelita,” Chief Fox said. “She is Raoúl’s niece.”

“You son of a fucking pig!” Gomez yelled at him.

“Where is she?”

“Keep your mouth shut or you will die horribly, Arturo,” Gomez grunted.

“What makes you think you’re both not going to die horribly?” Cordova said. “Where is she?”

Commandant Gomez struggled up to his chair. “Take me to a doctor, maybe I tell you.”

“Where is Adelita Gomez?” Justine demanded again.

Chief Fox glanced at the blood seeping from his friend’s boot, said, “Recovering, I think.”

“From what?” Justine asked.

“Plastic surgery,” Commandant Gomez hissed, his face screwing up in rage. “After what the Harlows did to her, our beautiful Adelita could not stand the sight of her own beautiful face anymore.”

“I’VE SEEN THE
films,” Justine said softly. “A terrible thing to happen to someone you love, Commandant. Where is your niece?”

“I don’t know,” Gomez said sullenly.

“I think you do,” Justine pressed. “I think she is with your brother-in-law. Antonio de la Vega masterminded the abduction of the Harlows. He’s the one who had Leona Casa Madre killed.”

The state police commandant said nothing.

“Where are the Harlows?”

“Some things are better
not
known.”

“Where is your brother-in-law, then?” Cordova demanded.

“I have not seen Antonio in ten years,” Gomez said. “This is the truth.”

“But you can get word to him,” Cordova said. “I mean, he is your brother-in-law. Your wife and her sister must talk.”

“I need to see a doctor,” Gomez complained.

I removed my mask and stepped into the light, saying, “We’ll take you to one. But then you are getting a message to your brother-in-law. We want the Harlows. We aren’t leaving Mexico without them.”

Gomez snorted as if I were mad. “You think you gringos can just come to México and order a man like Antonio around?”

“Actually, yes, we do,” I said, and then nodded at the darkness beyond the spotlights.

More lights came on, revealing Sci and Mo-bot in their masks, aiming video cameras at Gomez and Fox.

“WHAT IS THIS?”
Chief Fox asked, bewildered.

“Shut up, you idiot!” Commandant Gomez shouted, and then looked angrily at us. “You can’t use anything we just said.”

“Of course we can,” Justine said. “The Harlow disappearance is the story of the century. Or the decade, anyway. There will be all sorts of people interested in your confession.”

“The footage has already been sent to a safe place in the USA,” I said. “Which means you are going to go to your brother-in-law, and you are going to get us what we want.”

Gomez looked at us as if we were insane. “My life does not matter to Antonio. Your life does not matter to Antonio. If he thinks I am to be exposed, he will kill me so I do not talk about him. Eventually he will kill all of you.”

“No, he won’t,” Justine said. “If he kills you, if he kills any of us, the repercussions will be the same. People the world over will know of Antonio de la Vega’s role in the Harlow abduction.”

“So what does he care?” Gomez said.

“Sí,”
Chief Fox said. “Antonio is afraid of nothing.”

“Bullshit, Antonio’s a cockroach,” Cordova said. “And cockroaches don’t like light. They need the darkness to thrive.”

“The Harlows are like royalty,” I explained. “If their hundreds of millions of fans find out Antonio was behind the disappearance, the political pressure will become enormous, the law enforcement pressure will become enormous, beyond anything in your brother-in-law’s wildest dreams. No amount of bribery will keep him safe. His cartel, his life, will be over. So will Adelita’s.”

“They’ll both be torn limb from limb,” Justine said. “And you along with them, Commandant.”

Gomez said nothing.

“Here’s how it’s going to work,” I said. “We will be at the Hilton, waiting. If we don’t hear from you in twenty-four hours, the footage of your confession will be uploaded to YouTube and the feeding frenzy will begin for you, for your niece, but especially for Antonio. If you or Antonio or anybody tries to kill us, the same thing will happen. There won’t be a dark hole anywhere in the world that any of you can retreat to.”

“And if he complies?” Chief Fox asked.

“His role remains a mystery,” I said. “And your role remains a mystery. We’re only interested in bringing the Harlows to safety.”

The commandant grumbled, “What makes you think they’re alive?”

“If they’re not, we want the bodies,” I said.

BEFORE GRABBING COMMANDANT
Gomez and Chief Fox, we’d checked into a suite at the Hilton. Mo-bot and Sci rigged a fiber-optic camera at the suite door and linked it to a secure website that we monitored from sixteen blocks away in a shabby house surrounded by a high wall topped with glass shards.

Cordova had rented the house from an old woman who asked no questions when he told her he’d pay five times the going rate if she left us alone.

In shifts we watched the website. For nearly twenty hours after we dropped Gomez and Chief Fox at a hospital, no one entered the Hilton suite except a maid around eleven a.m. on November third.

She looked around, realized no one had used the place, and left.

“You okay?” Justine asked around eight that evening.

I’d been staring obsessively at the screen while everyone ate burritos Cordova had brought in. “I wish you and the others would take my offer.”

“We’re not going to leave you here to deal with de la Vega alone, Jack,” she said. “Just not happening.”

“This was my idea,” I reminded her. “And I’m beginning to think it was a bad one, that de la Vega might go Scarface somehow, and that I may have put us all in his crosshairs unnecessarily.”

Justine laid her hand on my shoulder. “We’re all in this together, Jack. We’re seeing this through together.”

But with every passing minute I was becoming more and more on edge. Time gives an opponent a chance to come up with a countermove. Had I given them too much time?

“Shit,” Mo-bot said.

“Double shit,” Sci said.

I glanced away from the screen. Sci and Mo-bot looked like they were each about to birth a cow. Mo-bot was gesturing wildly at her computer, where bright-orange numbers were blinking—2, 3, and 4—alerting us to the tripping of motion detectors we’d placed inside the wall that surrounded the house and yard.

Someone had found us.

Make that three, maybe four people had found us.

And they had no interest in knocking.

THE DRAPES WERE
drawn, but Cordova flipped off the lights.

“Get low, spread out,” Jack whispered.

In the dim light shining from the computers Justine saw Cruz, Cordova, and Sci fan in different directions. It seemed surreal to see Kloppenberg carrying one of the sawed-off shotguns. It felt even stranger to be holding the combat shotgun, her finger on the safety.

Justine flashed on the image of Carla and had a moment of uncertainty until Jack eased up beside her, whispered, “Some people will tell you that the best thing you can do when you’re outgunned is to give up and negotiate for your safety. Nothing is further from the truth. If someone attacks you, fight and keep fighting with whatever you’ve got, especially when you’re dealing with people who have probably killed before.”

“Like assassins sent by a drug lord?”

“Exactly,” Jack said, looked at Mo-bot. “First shot, you upload that video.”

Mo-bot nodded, but Justine could tell she was shaking.

For several minutes there was just the sound of their breathing. Then Justine heard a soft
ding
from Mo-bot’s computer. Two new numbers were flashing—8 and 9, the rear bedroom and the bathroom windows.

They’d already been breached and no one had heard a sound.

I GESTURED TO
Cruz to cover the front door and to Justine to cover the windows in the main room. Then Cordova and I slipped off our shoes, turned on the red flashlights, held them beneath the barrels of our weapons, went back to back, moved sideways over rough wood floors into the hallway, guns and lights aimed in the direction of the doors to the bathroom and the rear bedroom.

As we listened for any sound, any movement, any reason to open fire, I wondered whether this was it, after everything I’d been through, my family’s disintegration and disgrace, the helicopter crash, my tortured relationship with my brother. Was I going to die in a squalid house in Guadalajara? Were Justine and the others going to follow me to the grave?

We reached the end of the hallway and split. Cordova stood to the doorknob side of the bedroom door. I did the same with the bathroom door. It took everything in me to stay calm, control my breath and my heart so I could hear.

A shuffle. Right there on the other side of the door.

Sometimes the best defense is surprise. Without thinking I twisted the knob, hurled the door inward, felt it hit something soft and crunchy. I heard a grunt and jumped around into the doorway, trying to get square to shoot.

But I came up short at a trembling sleek black pistol aimed by a street urchin who could not have been more than fourteen. He kept moving his right leg and cringing.

“Get back or I’ll kill you,” the kid snarled. “No matter what my orders are, I’ll kill you if you make one more move.”

AT TEN PAST
ten that evening, we drove past the wall that surrounded El Panteón de Belén cemetery in Guadalajara.

“Park here,” the boy said, rubbing at his knee where the door had hit him. He said his name was Roberto. He sat in the passenger seat of one of the panel vans, his pistol in his lap, lazily aimed at my waist as I drove.

We’d come to something of a Mexican standoff back there in the house and had negotiated a truce that allowed me to keep my weapon and my life in return for going with him and his two friends. Justine came along too. The others had been forced to remain behind, which didn’t sit well with Cordova or Cruz. But that was the deal if we wanted to find out what had happened to the Harlows.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“Inside,” Roberto said.

“What’s in there?” I asked.

“What do you usually find in cemeteries?” he said. “Get out.”

“Who sent you?” Justine asked from the back, where two other armed teenage street urchins watched her.

“That’s right, we’re not getting out until you tell us who sent you, Roberto,” I said. “De la Vega? Gomez? Fox?”

“I do not know these men,” he said, opening his door. “And I don’t know who you are. And I don’t care. This is a business transaction. Understand?”

JUSTINE WALKED WITH
Jack toward the entrance to the dark cemetery with the armed kids walking behind them. For reasons she wasn’t quite sure she could identify, she felt none of the terror she’d endured during the attack inside the jail. Indeed, she felt strangely calm as they passed through an arched wrought-iron gate and she smelled the faint odors of incense and Jack.

What do you usually find in cemeteries?

Roberto clicked on a flashlight and aimed it ahead of them. There were gravestones, monuments, and tombs everywhere. Many were coated in red wax, which Justine guessed came from candles that had burned in the cemetery during the two Days of the Dead.

“This cemetery is haunted,” the boy said.

“By who?” Justine asked.

“Vampire,” Roberto replied. “He hunted the citizens of Guadalajara two hundred years ago. It started with small animals, dogs and cats, found all over the city drained completely of their blood. Later, human babies were found dead and exsanguinated as well.”