She sat back in her favorite chair overlooking the street and took a sip of her sherry. It warmed her throat. Evenings like this one were the last joy left for the seventy-eight-year-old widow. She had spent most of the day in church, and she felt sanctified. Should her time come tonight, as she often prayed it would, she would meet the Lord with the confidence of someone who, to her certain knowledge, had committed and confessed her final sins long ago.
The BMW was still there, she noted as she sat back comfortably. The young man inside was sipping yet another cup of coffee. He’d been there for several evenings, at least since Thursday night, when she first noticed him. He disappeared during the days but showed when the sun went down, which, at this time of year, wasn’t much past four o’clock. She’d been tempted to call the police on the second evening, but after watching him, she decided that she really couldn’t imagine a more clean-cut, respectable person to be sitting on her street.
In an odd way, he even made her feel safer. She’d taken to thinking of him as her guardian angel, and it gave her comfort that his attention was focused on St. Jude’s across the street. Satan’s house. That dark, menacing structure, which would remain deserted for weeks at a time and then see a flurry of unholy activity. She missed the days when the place was still a house of God. It had been her solace for over fifty years, and it had been taken away from her. The clandestine activities that seemed to go on there only confirmed her belief that the church’s closing was the work of the devil, and she had complained numerous times to the police, but they seemed to take little notice. Perhaps, she thought, they were taking her seriously now. Perhaps the young man was a police officer, sent to investigate. She thought probably not, but it would be nice.
In any event, she was happy to have him as a buffer against whatever evil took place there. As she sipped her sherry again, she felt a rush of danger sweep over her. Not for her but for the man in the car. It was nothing more than a geriatric delusion, fed by loneliness and alcohol, and she consciously dismissed it. Yet it was more stubborn than most of her fantasies. She shook her head as she finished her drink and headed off to bed. She would keep him in her prayers that evening. It occurred to her that the man might very well need God’s help more than he knew.
z
Mark Dobson yawned as he brought the coffee to his lips. He was jittery-tired from lack of sleep and too much caffeine, and he had to fight his body to stay awake. The novelty of investigative work had worn off by the third night, and doubts were starting to creep into his mind. Perhaps Finn had been right; perhaps Salazar really was guilty. Dobson pushed back against the notion. He needed Salazar to be innocent. He needed it more than anyone.
He yawned again and pulled a hair out of his forearm to revive himself. It was a trick he’d learned in law school: Pain stimulated the adrenal glands and gave you a little burst of energy to fight off sleep. It had gotten him through his exams. The only problem was that, like any chemical, adrenaline began to lose its potency with each dose, and the effects were shorter- and shorter-lived. He was at the point where the crashes were coming within five minutes of each yank. Not to mention that he was running out of hair on his arms.
His thoughts drifted back to law school, and he considered again the hardships of a well-planned life. The only son of an overachieving, hypermotivated couple clinging to second-tier wealth, he had been programmed from birth to succeed, and to define that success in the narrow terms of material wealth and recognition of the appropriate professional set. It wasn’t until he was in college that he’d started questioning his parents’ priorities—and his own. By then it was too late. Competition was too much a part of who he had become. He tried to refocus, even tried to sabotage his studies, but nothing worked. He graduated at the top of his class. After law school, he initially planned to work for some sort of public interest concern, a place where he would make little money but might have an impact on something that actually mattered to him. But then Howery, Black made him an offer, and no one turns down a firm like Howery, right?
Now he was at a crossroads, and part of him thought this was the last chance he would have to redefine himself. After three years of serving well-heeled, demanding clients, he had come to the realization that, while he got no thrill or even satisfaction from his job, he was good at it and it was safe, and in all likelihood, he could continue doing it for the next four decades. Then he’d started working on the Salazar case, and it was like falling in love. He’d been so thrilled that he viewed the case as a test. He’d vowed that if he was successful in clearing Salazar’s name, he’d give notice at the firm and start his life over. If he failed, however . . . Well, at least there would be a gold watch and a retirement place in Florida for him.
He set his coffee down on the armrest between the two front seats, trying to pull a notebook out of his briefcase in the back. As he turned, he knocked the coffee, sending it crashing into the passenger seat, where the plastic top jarred open, spilling half the cup over the new leather. Dobson cursed his clumsiness and grabbed some napkins out of the door’s side pocket, leaning over to blot up what he could.
When he picked up his head, he almost spilled the coffee again. Two vans had pulled up to the church across the street, and a man was out, unlocking the gate on the fence in front. After four days, Dobson had actually begun to think nothing would ever come of his surveillance. He sat as still as possible, afraid that any movement would chase away the mirage.
It took a moment, but he was finally satisfied that the vans were not apparitions. He watched as they pulled out of sight behind the church, around toward the rectory and the flat, ugly building that had once served as a church-run day-care center. A light went on inside the rectory, and then a blind was quickly drawn, and the building went dark again.
Dobson sat there for several minutes, wondering what to do next. From the information Salazar had given him, he had an idea what was happening inside the church, but knowing it and proving it were two different things. He hadn’t thought through his next steps thoroughly, other than making sure he had his camera phone with him just in case. He’d just assumed something would come to him once he determined that his client wasn’t lying to him. Now that the moment was upon him, he wished he’d put together a more coherent plan.
He was about to get out of the BMW when another vehicle approached the cluster of church buildings from the other direction. It was a boxy late-model American car, and it slowed near the entrance. A man got out of the driver’s side and walked, with his back to Dobson, to push open the gate. He paused there for a moment before turning and giving Dobson a clear view of his face.
Dobson was so shocked that he dropped his camera phone before he could snap a picture. It couldn’t be, could it?
He scrambled his hand around the car floor, searching for the camera, but by the time he had it again, the man was back in his car, pulling through the gate and around back in the direction the vans had disappeared.
Suddenly, it all made sense, and Dobson was out of his car, crossing the street, and scaling the fence.
z
Carlos Villegas stood in a darkened room on the second floor, looking out the rectory’s front window. He had the look of a falcon, with a strong, prominent nose hanging from a sharp brow. His eyes probed the night.
He had the phone to his ear as he took a deep drag on his cigarette. “When do we move them out?” he asked.
“Two hours.”
“And the money?”
“Ten apiece. One hundred thousand in all. It will be there.”
“Only seven. Not ten.”
“My people told me ten. Did you lose three?”
“Three of them were contract jobs,” Carlos said. “That’s the way they wanted it.”
“Is that the way you want it?” It was the devil’s voice coming over the line, dripping temptation.
“As I said, they were contract jobs. I honor my contracts.”
Laughter on the other end. “Of course you do. No one has ever suggested otherwise. But you’re out thirty on the exchange, that means.”
“Seventy. Agreed.” Carlos hung up the phone and took another drag from his cigarette. The other two men in the room remained silent. They knew better than to speak when Carlos was thinking. “Is everything ready?” he asked them.
“S
í
, Padre,” one of them replied.
Padre. How had he gotten so old? It seemed like only yesterday he’d been there at the start of it all, fighting for survival on the streets of East L.A., hemmed in by the Mexicans—the Chicanos—to the east, and by the blacks—the Crips—to the west. It had been a meat grinder, almost as bad as El Salvador at the height of the rebellion. The only way to survive had been to be crazier than everyone else.
Loco.
That had been his street name back then, and he’d earned it. Soon no one wanted to mess with his crew. It just wasn’t worth the blood. And so they kept slashing out until they were no longer fighting for survival but for supremacy.
Now here he was, two decades later, the old man. Padre. A leader in one of the most feared criminal organizations in the world. They were more than one hundred thousand strong, stretching from El Salvador to Michigan—nothing was beyond their reach. And it was all at his disposal. A loyal battalion of mercenaries and unlimited cash flow. He was, he thought, like many of the great leaders in history. Rockefeller. Kennedy. Fidel. They had all laid their claim to power in the shadow of the law until they were powerful enough to become the law. He was following in their path.
Not that anyone would draw that connection by looking at him. He stood just under six feet tall and was just over 150 pounds of weathered steel cable. The veins stood out on his arms, his legs, his neck, giving life to the artwork that adorned his body. His markings. They covered every inch of skin from his toes to his bald scalp. Snakes and dragons and Aztec gods crawled over his body, as he felt them crawling through his soul. But the only one that mattered took up his entire chest: an elaborately styled rendering of his true identity. vds. It was who he was. It was what he was.
He looked out across the front of the church and felt comforted. In an odd way, he had always considered himself a religious man. The Catholic Church was strong in El Salvador, and his mother had been devout, trying desperately to raise all her children to respect the Church and its teachings. In the end, it had been the radical priests who had caused her death, putting the peasants on the front lines of a war in which they had no say. When she was killed, he turned his anger against the Communists, joining with the death squads as a means of venting his anger, but for some reason, he could never quite bring himself to hate the Church—or at least not the part of it that had been such an important part of his mother.
Perhaps that was why he had chosen this place. Here, he felt closer to her than he had in decades. He would be sad to leave, but he had learned long ago the dangers of remaining in one location for too long. Another week and they would move on, but that week was crucial to him. The delivery due next Saturday would provide him more money than any ten had before. Then he and his men would slip away and find a new headquarters, as they had for fifteen years. He would miss this place, though.
He turned to face the others. “Two hours,” he said. “We wait.”
“Our friend is here,” one of his underlings reported.
“Good. We have much to discuss with him.” Carlos turned back to the window, his mind working through all the angles and all the plays. He’d always been good at figuring out the angles; that was what had kept him alive. As he clicked through complicated scenarios, his eye caught a shadow rolling across the cement at the front of the rectory. He reached out and tugged at the corner of the shade to give himself a better view. His eyes narrowed as he added another variable to what lay before him. “It seems we have more than one visitor tonight.” He looked at the other two men in the room. “We should make our guests welcome.”
z
Mark Dobson stood with his back to the exterior of the rectory. So far, so good, he thought. He rested there as his breathing returned to normal. Crossing the parking lot in the front of the church had been the only dicey part of his reconnaissance mission, and it appeared he’d cleared that hurdle. All he had to do now was get one picture. He waited another several minutes to see whether someone would burst forth from the rectory to grab him. He was ready to run, but it looked like that wasn’t going to be necessary.
Slowly, silently, he began moving around toward the back of the building. Twice, as he passed first-floor windows, he popped his head up to determine whether he could see enough to take his picture and head back out to his car. Each window was blackened, and he was forced to continue.
When he reached the corner, he crouched down. The ground fell away in front of him, following the driveway toward a sunken two-car garage underneath the rectory—the driveway that the vans and the sedan had taken around toward the rear of the facility. It occurred to him that he was placing himself in significant danger. If what Salazar had told him was true, then these people had been protecting their business for decades. They wouldn’t take kindly to any intrusion. Still, what would they do, really? Rough him up? For Dobson, perched on the edge of a whole new life, the risk seemed worth it.
He edged around the corner, concealing himself behind a barrel against the wall. From where he was, he could see the vans, their doors open at the back. Empty. But not entirely empty. Something remained of what had been in them in a putrid stench pouring from the interior.
Stench wouldn’t show up in a picture: He needed more. He raised him
self up on the balls of his feet, still crouched, ready to move.
That was when he saw her.
She couldn’t have been over six years old, her dark hair hanging in clumps in front of her face, her clothes stained with dirt and grime. She was standing in the doorway next to the garage doors, peeking around the corner, watching him. She said nothing, and her eyes had the vacant look of stolen youth.