Fugitive Nights (37 page)

He was proud to be with the
Judicial del Estado
, the State Judicial Police. He had been a policeman for eighteen years, but he would be ashamed to be with the federals. The federals had no intention of helping the state police. On the contrary, it was apparent that they'd inform on them if they could. Anything to protect their
mordida.
The bite. The graft on which they survived, all of them, even the state police, even himself.

Gringo police would never understand. They didn't have to buy their own weapons and ammunition, pay for their own car radios, and repair their police cars out of their own pockets if they wanted to do the job properly. They didn't have to buy and develop their own film of a crime scene, and compensate laboratory people from their own pockets just to get them to respond to a crime-scene investigation. And they didn't have to pay their own typists! The gringos could get in their big new American police cars and do what they had to do without worrying about whether one or two vouchers a month would provide enough gasoline.

Oh yes, they could ridicule the police of Mexico, because they didn't have to live on the equivalent of $550 a month, and support children in a place where food was more expensive than in the States. Where everything except housing was more expensive than in the States, in an economy that had been in recession for years. Easy for them to think of him and his comrades as bandits with badges because they took money sometimes, money they used to do their jobs and to feed their children.

The fugitive had his new blue leather bag with him at all times. The weapons were in it, an untraceable 9-mm Beretta that had been stolen in the north, but ended up south in Mexico, the thief having been killed by state police in a failed holdup. The knife was there too, a killing knife. Swiss- or perhaps German-made, it was supposedly a favorite of foreign military personnel involved in clandestine activity. The fugitive couldn't imagine using that horrible instrument to stab or hack at the flesh of a human being, but they had insisted that he have it. One of his comrades had also wanted him to take an AR-15 with its thirty-round magazine they called
cuerno de chivo
, horn of a goat. He had told his friend that the suggestion was ridiculous. If he couldn't do the job with reasonable weaponry it couldn't be done at all.

He liked to think that he had been sent because he was such a dogged manhunter, a policeman who never gave up, but of course one of the main reasons was that he had a natural talent for language and spoke English better than just about anyone in his sector,
primer sector
, based in Mexicali.

There wasn't nearly as much U.S. currency in the bag as when he'd arrived, that was for sure. It was mostly
very
dirty money, confiscated from drug dealers and car thieves. Some of it was a bit cleaner, having come from U.S. insurance companies. The state police would receive a “reward” from the insurance companies for getting the cars back in proper condition, about $500 per car. Yes, that money was a
bit
cleaner. The money had been pooled and entrusted to him to use because his comrades wanted to get justice for Javier Rosas, who'd been a good policeman, as good as any, and a good man.

The fugitive remembered the time he'd worked on a case with Javier Rosas in the
segundo sector
of Tijuana. They had arrested a team of American bandits who'd tried to rob a diamond merchant from Tijuana, shooting one bandit, capturing the other two. When Javier Rosas made the bandits pose, holding their weapons for photographers, the U.S. police had ridiculed him for it. The fugitive had tried to explain to Javier Rosas that the gringos did not understand their ways, and that he should try not to feel insulted. Now, after reading news accounts about people who were paroled after strangling children, free to murder again and again, he thought that perhaps they never would understand each other, the people of the neighboring countries.

But then, the state police couldn't even trust their own federals. An informant had told them that the drug runners who'd murdered Javier Rosas had made a point of stealing for the federals their favorite make of car, a Chevrolet Suburban with four-wheel drive, to be offered as
mordida.
The smugglers always dropped off at least one car for the federals whenever they made a big cocaine run from Mexicali to Los Angeles.

The fugitive asked himself what the gringos would do if it had been one of
their
men who'd been brutally murdered? They'd shown what they'd do after a DEA agent was kidnapped in 1985 by a gang of Guadalajara drug dealers and mercilessly tortured for days, his cries and screams recorded on tape by the criminals. That tape was found and later played before a U.S. jury hearing evidence against a Mexican doctor who'd allegedly participated in the torture.

What the DEA had done was to have that physician abducted by federal judicial police and brought across the border, where he'd been arrested by the U.S. officers. What would've happened if the Mexican police had abducted a U.S. citizen and brought him to Mexico for trial? Probably another Mexican War, only this time they'd take everything south to Mexico City to claim as their fifty-second state. That's what the fugitive thought, and why he had no other choice in the present matter.

Javier Rosas had never cared
who
was supplying cars or money to the federals. Javier Rosas was an honest man who'd wanted to be a policeman all his life, but had been one for only six years when he was murdered. Once, the fugitive and Javier had spoken of a confrontation in Tijuana, when the federal and municipal police had almost gotten in a gun battle with each other after the municipal police surrounded federal police headquarters during a dispute. Javier Rosas said the federals could never be trusted. He had no use for them and was positive they were protecting the cocaine runners he was after.

Ten kilos of cocaine from Peru were to be delivered to L.A. from Mexicali. The informant of Javier Rosas knew very little about a person in Palm Springs who was acting as middleman in the transaction. Ten kilos were significant enough for the informant to go to the home of Javier Rosas and get him out of bed to say that perhaps he knew where the cocaine was.

Unfortunately, Javier Rosas couldn't reach his comrades that night and had decided to investigate the matter himself to see if the information had substance. The informant told him there were only two couriers, but when Javier Rosas broke into their hotel room and confronted them at gunpoint he'd discovered that there was a
third
, standing behind him with a gun.

The other state police later learned all of this from that third courier after they'd caught the drug runners while they were queued up at the border waiting to cross. The first two were killed outright when the state police rushed the car. The third died later of “heart failure” during interrogation.

The fugitive had always hated that part of interrogation—the Pepsi challenge—the carbonated beverage shot up the nose until the suspect thinks his brain is exploding. But the murderer of Javier Rosas got more, he got the wires applied to his genitals. The point was, they all knew that in the end, he was no longer capable of telling lies.

About all he could say was that a phone call to an unknown number in Palm Springs was made from a pay phone by one of his dead companions. And that the man on the line told them in
pocho
Spanish how to handle the unexpected dilemma they were then facing: a state judicial police officer, handcuffed, a gag in his mouth, completely at their mercy.

The unnamed Palm Springs middleman told the drug-runner to pick up the cocaine as planned and proceed across the border in the car as planned. And the Palm Springs middleman also said that they'd have to kill Javier Rosas to guarantee their chances.

He'd made an ugly joke about it, a joke which became the only clue to his identity. The joke had to do with a tombstone and orchids.

T
he Furnace Room was getting pretty good play that Saturday afternoon. The Bob Hope Classic had been on TV, so the boozers had had an excuse to get bombed early under the pretext of watching a major sporting event.

Long before the TV coverage had ended, all of the male pensioners had about used up every hilarious golfing witticism ever uttered (“A short drive'll do just great, if you can keep your putter straight”) on every female younger than the Tabasco sauce in their refrigerators.

By 4:00
P.M.,
Lynn, Breda and Nelson were occupying Lynn's favorite table beside the defunct fireplace, and the old babe at the next table was trying to sound like Dinah Shore, warbling “Something to Remember You By.”

Nelson was wearing an oversized white cotton tennis sweater loaned to him by Lynn after a quick stop at the mansion for repairs. He had a Band-Aid over his eye where Breda had done some nursing, but he was still pumped, with every reason to believe that his heroics would get him an audience with the Palm Springs chief of police, according to Bob Hope's cop-driver.

Lynn held up three fingers to Wilfred Plimsoll, who poured another round. Then Lynn said, “Do I have the I.Q. of a rodeo clown, or what? All our work's been more irrelevant than an Emmy award and Baghdad Betty. More irrelevant than the eggbeater and Jimmy Carter.”

Then everyone tried to top the others by coming up with examples of useless irrelevancy. It ended when Nelson cited the Secret Service contingent assigned to guard local resident Gerald Ford.
Nobody
could top that one.

“At least it looks like Nelson's gonna be rewarded,” Breda said, “for doing what's always got him fired in the past. Beating the hell outta the wrong guy.”

“I can't wait for my folks to see my picture with Bob Hope,” Nelson said. “That reporter promised he'd send me an eight-by-ten!”

Lynn just couldn't get over it. He said, “Do you realize we haven't the faintest idea who the real guy is and what he wants with John Lugo? Not even a miniclue!”

“I still wanna get him,” Nelson said, flush with the thrill of victory. “Maybe he'll make his move at the party tonight. There'll be hundreds a people there.”

“We'll catch that guy when California condor eggs go for two bucks a dozen at your supermarket,” Lynn said.

“I think we should go to Lugo's party anyways,” Nelson said. “His lawyer said we only gotta mention our names to the guy at the shuttle bus.”

“Where's the bus leave from?” Breda asked Nelson.

“Smoke Tree shoppin center. Because a the tombstone deal, Lugo hired a couple uniformed security people to check invitations at the bus.”

“I wouldn't mind just being at a party like that,” Breda said.

That, of course, got Lynn interested. “Well, I guess we
might
give our case one last shot,” he said. “Nelson can do his thing tonight, maybe pounce on every guy that's bald. He'd probably end up with a couple a jewel thieves and Sean Connery.”

“Everybody starts arrivin right after dark, so we can relax and have another drink if ya want,” Nelson suggested.

“Drinks'll be free up there,” Breda observed. “Now that I have an early morning appointment with Rhonda Devon to tell her that a silly little mixup at a lab caused her problems, and she doesn't owe me another dollar, I can't pay for your drinks anymore.”

“Oh, lemme buy a round,” Nelson said.

“No more for me, Nelson,” said Lynn “but since you insist, well, okay.”

When Nelson ran to the bar to get the round of drinks Lynn said to Breda, “He makes me know my age. When I'm around him I feel as up-to-the-minute as polyester. I got my forty-fifth coming up in a couple weeks!”

“You'll understand if I don't come to the party,” Breda said. “I've already attended one of your
parties
”

“It ain't easy,” Lynn said gravely, “being our age and looking down the tunnel. Is it? I'm so old I can remember when Jack Nicklaus was fat.”

“You don't have to worry about it. The way you booze it up, you'll never get much older.”

After Nelson returned with the drinks, he hoisted a beer and said, “To success! He ain't got away from us yet!”

Lynn said, “If we don't find the guy tonight, let's start looking for Amelia Earhart. It'd be a lot easier.”

He'd paid his bill and checked out of the hotel, never to return. He was going to succeed or fail
this
night. He'd never have a better opportunity, with three hundred people and dozens of servers moving about in that big pink house high on the hill. He'd always imagined it would have to be done in a parking lot somewhere, perhaps after he'd followed his man to a supermarket, or to a cinema, or to a restaurant. That was before he saw the private street with a guard and a dog. And a millionaire's house high on a cliff, near other protected privileged people. No, this party, this night—he'd never get a better chance.

There were three options: He could appear at the catering company and hope that both gringo bosses were at the Lugo house. Then he could try to bluff one of the Mexicans into driving him up there in a van. After all, he was properly dressed, in his new white shirt, bow tie, black vest, black trousers, and black leather shoes. They'd have no reason to doubt him if he said that Henry or Phil had hired him. But when he got up there the Mexican driver might mention the new employee to Henry or Phil. It might cause some concern, for there were bound to be very important people at this party, and people were still talking about terrorists. No, he was afraid of that option.