The Debriefing Page 3

  The three are on the asphalt playground of Santa Maria Academy in El Paso, which the Wright boys and this asshole, Douglas, attend. Classes are over and Tony has been dawdling, in hopes of a chance to say hi to Sheree Grenner. No such luck. All he and M caught was this guy, who plodded up to give them shit. Douglas is a demibully. (In school Tony just learned about demigods. He likes the word a lot. Demi. Demi. Demi.) Douglas is into football, of course. Kids who play basketball and soccer rarely bully. He has broad shoulders and curly black hair and massive hands, more freckled than his face. He’s a tackle and he tackles very well.

  Tony wants to defuse everything. Douglas is dangerous.

  So is gravity. The school is four stories high.

  Matt: “Let’s see your money.”

  “Let’s see yours.”

  The bills appear and they give them to another kid to hang on to, Randy, a skinny sciencey sort. “It’s a bet,” Matt says to him. “If I jump off the roof it’s mine. If I don’t, it’s his.”

  “The roof?” His eyes go up. “That roof? You sure?”

  “Take it,” both Matt and Douglas say.

  He does. Fast. Tony can see Randy’s palm glisten with sweat.

  Tony is fidgety. “Come on, man. No.”

  “Hm.” Matt is examining the challenge: leaping from the roof into a tall pine and grab-falling to the ground. It’s been done three times that Tony can remember. Stan Fredericks will be in a wheelchair forever.

  Matt gives a grin to Tony, ignores his imploring eyes and scrabbles up the fire escape. He climbs to the top and then takes a ladder to the roof. He walks to the edge and looks out over the view. El Paso in late spring.

  A demidesert, Tony thinks.

  Matt’s face seems happy, like he’s seeing something nobody else ever has before.

  Tony thinks, as he often has: Are we really related?

  He walks to the lip and, fuck, without a moment’s pause he does a swan dive toward the tree. Not what Tony would do—that would be a feet-down, head-up leap, staying vertical and clutching branches to his chest until he worked his way to the trunk and climbed down slowly.

  Not Matt. It’s like he’s going off the board at the municipal pool. He disappears into a mass of boughs and branches. All Tony can see is a figure in black—Matt’s totally goth—tumbling and cartwheeling down, down, down, grabbing branches to slow and to steer himself away from the solider limbs. Finally, six feet above the piney earth, he stops and hangs, dangling. Then drops into a heap and lies motionless.

  Tony runs to him. “Yo, M? You okay? Say something, dude!”

  Jesus. Did he break his neck, after all?

  Wheelchair . . .

  But then he slowly rises and pats himself up and down, pulls needles out of his thick, now messy hair. “Awesome.”

  “You hurt?”

  “Hurt? I just jumped off a roof. Of course I’m hurt. But what’s that got to do with anything?”

  Exhilaration and balls-out adrenaline have numbed the pain. Matt walks over to Randy and holds his hand out. Just as the boy was offering the bills, another hand snatches them away. Douglas’s. Of course.

  Matt looks up, not frowning, not glaring. Just locking eyes with a boy who outweighed him by fifty pounds, most of it muscle. “What?”

  “It wasn’t a fair bet. We didn’t shake on it.”

  “Give me my money,” Matt says.

  “Get the fuck out of my way.”

  Matt doesn’t.

  There’s not a single hint of what comes next. Matt simply launches himself into the older boy, fists spiraling madly, elbows bashing into the football player’s gut and groin and, when Douglas bent double, his face. They grapple, they tug, they fall to the ground and lose skin on the asphalt. But Matt keeps breaking away, dodging the beefy fists and comic attempts at kicking, and when he sees a chance he lands one slug, then another and another.

  It’s a tough sight. Tony moves in—to do what, he has no idea. Matt glares. Tony stops. Matt moves on Douglas again, frenzied.

  A crowd has gathered by now. Douglas is a shit and a bully, demi or otherwise, but nobody is rooting for Matt. Tony can see the spectators growing uneasy. Douglas stumbles backward and trips over a curb. He goes down hard on his back and winces as his tailbone hits asphalt. “Fuck.”

  Then it was over.

  Bloody and crying, Douglas reaches into his jeans and withdraws the forty dollars. Without a flicker of emotion, Matt reaches out and grabs it.

  As the brothers leave, Douglas shouts, “Insane prick.”

  The boys walk past a foreign cars garage, a Burger King, a nail salon, a massage parlor—which is why the boys aren’t supposed to walk home this way and which is why they always do. The petite, sexy Vietnamese girl at the door looks at them sullenly.

  As they near home, Matt seems to realize that his brother is staring at him.

  “Yeah?”

  In an unsteady voice, Tony asks, “What was that all about? Looked like you were going to kill him.”

  Matt’s voice is a verbal shrug. “It was a bet. I won. He lost. End of story.”

  Now, lying in the army hospital bed, giving an Oscar-level performance of a man asleep, Tony kept replaying the Douglas Incident.

  Which defined his brother. Which nailed exactly who Matt Wright was.

  Push, push, push . . . a junkie for risk. On the job. In his relationships.

  And . . . with the gambling.

  Night after night would find Matt in the casinos or at private poker tables. Sometimes winning big, sometimes losing as much as a month’s salary.

  Was there a why? Did Matt have a motive for betraying the team?

  Being a cop, Tony had become an expert in human nature. And he knew that there was nothing like the noxious cocktail of greed, addiction and desperation to turn good to bad, so bad you’d even sell your soul to the man who had killed your partner.

  Six

  Manuel Santos had the blackest eyes, the smoothest skin and the calmest manner of any man one might ever meet.

  He was not good looking, by any means, nor was he tall but these conditions were not troubling to him. Physical flaws were significant only to those with egos.

  And Santos—known more commonly by his nickname La Piedra, the Stone—had none.

  An ego was in itself a flaw, and he did not tolerate flaws in anyone, himself included.

  Santos was walking along a sidewalk from a municipal garage where he’d left his SUV. He wore tight black jeans and a yellow shirt with blue piping and patterned across the chest with images of sailors’ knots. He bought the shirt solely for the splendid knots, though he had been on a boat only twice in his life, and the only knots he’d ever tied were improvised hangman’s nooses and tidy bindings around wrists and ankles.

  His outer garment was a white silk jacket, this with gray piping and wide lapels. It had a dandy quality but Santos liked it because the cloth didn’t overheat him and it concealed his weapon efficiently; the Sig Sauer was secreted in a holster inside his back waistband. His boots were marvels of tooling and silver inlay and were sharp enough to puncture skin with a muscled kick. He’d always wanted to try this but never had.

  Unless circumstances required otherwise, Santos was of the habit of walking slowly, as today. He would not be hurried. Whether he was painting his murals in the style of Diego Rivera—a hobby from childhood—or grilling steak for himself and Raphael and their cat, Boppo, or torturing a man or woman or child to death, he never rushed. When you hurried, you made mistakes.

  Calm, slow.

  Not so the man walking beside him. Garcia was far from serene. Tall and broad, with a pocked face, he was constantly looking around, as if with a nervous tic. He would pace, he would flick finger against thumb, he would grind teeth. These habits would have irritated Santos were Garcia not so good at his job.

  Garcia also wore a jacket. This one cheap and beige, which was unfortunate because sweat was already darkening the cloth at the pits. The garment was
longer than Santos’s because its job was to conceal a submachine gun and three long, heavy magazines of ammunition. Bullets weighed a great deal. Lead and copper, of course. People often forgot that.

  Ah, the heat. Santos looked up. His smoky aviator sunglasses were thick and, with a squint, he could actually gaze toward the sun if only for a few seconds.

  Garcia, ever aware of his boss, looked up too, perhaps thinking: drone.

  But, no, Santos had merely been looking at the sun.

  Then he continued calmly on his way and Garcia, twitchily, did too.

  They walked into another garage, nodded to one of Santos’s crew and climbed into the back of a vehicle parked inside. Garcia slammed the doors shut, and the two panels, joined, made a word on the back: Ambulancia.

  They pulled from the garage and began the five-mile drive to their destination.

  Santos’s employer, the Cardozo cartel, was hardly the stuff of Netflix Originals. It was small. Also, the brothers running it—Alfonzo and Juan Carlos—rejected the splashy, lavish lifestyle that seemed appealing but that had gotten so many organized criminals (A) on the radar and then either (B) in jail or (B½) dead. They were working men, more or less good husbands (only one mistress each) and superlative fathers; they helped their children with their homework and stayed through the end of even the most lopsided soccer games. They supported the arts—to the extent there was culture in Serrantino, a pretty if somewhat dull burgh in western Chihuahua.

  In short, they kept their heads down. They bought product from China, Honduras and Venezuela. They worked hard devising clever ways of getting the shipments into the United States, losing only two or three percent.

  Small time meant long time.

  Which wasn’t to say that the cartel’s enforcers—a tough, swarthy crew that Santos wrangled—would hesitate to gut, behead or scorch anyone who threatened their piece of the pie.

  Which was his mission at the moment.

  As the ambulance drove over the smooth concrete, Santos looked out the small window and noted the camo-painted Humvee, parked near the back entrance to the hospital, which overlooked only desert. Beside it was a sign:

  ← RESTROOMS

  ← DINING HALL

  Santos hunched and looked up to see the two flags, now limp in the oppressive midday lull: an American Stars and Stripes and another, designating some military unit. He wondered why divisions or platoons or whatever other detachments existed still had flags. Not as if they were going to carry them into battle.

  The ambulance turned into the underground entrance to the hospital and Santos and Garcia climbed out, looking around, checking weapons. They continued into the cool, quiet place and up one flight of stairs.

  Santos oriented himself and pointed. They walked a bit farther and then pushed through double doors into a small staff lunchroom, where four people sat at two tables. At one was a couple: a tall, balding man wearing a DEA identity badge, and a blonde, on whose chest dangled a badge with an FBI logo. Quite the ample chest it was too, he noted, though without reaction; if he was inclined to romp, which was rare, he’d prefer Raphael. Santos was a man whom passion had largely bypassed.

  The other two were men in US Army uniforms.

  None of them had seen Santos and Garcia walk inside.

  Santos nodded for Garcia to position himself at the door. He did so, his hand disappearing toward the grip of his weapon. He looked outside and nodded.

  Santos then walked forward to the couple. “Hola.”

  They turned, blinked in surprise.

  Then smiles all around, and Eddie Klein—the bald man who’d been pretending to be DEA agent Holmes—rose and shook Santos’s hand. Tiffany Brent—the pseudo FBI agent Talbot—kissed his cheek firmly; Santos’s impression was that she doled out kisses like one would give sweets to children. Maybe she was disappointed he didn’t grip her and pull her in closer. Santos turned to the men in US Army uniforms at the adjoining table and nodded in response to their grins.

  “I got your message,” Santos said to Eddie. He was speaking English, of which he had a good command. Eddie and Tiffany were dicey with Spanish. “You were successful.”

  Tiffany scoffed. “I’ve gotta tell you, Santos, it was sad. For kick-ass detectives, they didn’t have a clue.”

  Seven

  The hospital was indeed a hospital but not a military facility and it wasn’t located in the United States but in the small town of San Bernardo, Chihuahua, many kilometers from the border.

  One wing had been transformed into a virtual movie set, complete with props like the flags and the Humvee, which was owned by Santos himself. It had been painted in authentic US military camouflage, an easy task, thanks to YouTube. Santos’s production even featured extras: two of his crew were playing the army soldiers.

  Headlining the cast were Eddie and Tiffany, a couple with mob connections from—appropriately—Los Angeles. (When they’d met several weeks ago, Tiffany had told him her hot tub overlooked the famous Hollywood sign.)

  The point of this elaborate fiction was quite simple: to trick Matt Wright into giving up information vital to the future of the cartel.

  A few months ago Juan Carlos Cardozo had come to his chief enforcer with a problem.

  Carlos was a soft-spoken, kind-eyed man, a Latino Mr. Rogers. He explained to Santos that he’d learned Matt Wright was running a confidential informant, who was spying on the cartel.

  Santos was to remedy the situation.

  Santos got to work immediately, with his typically methodical approach. The obvious—kidnapping and torturing Wright for the name—wouldn’t work. He knew it could take time to extract the information, and as soon as Matt Wright went missing, Wright’s superiors would warn the informant, who would flee; Santos would then never learn the extent of the betrayal—and, just as disappointing, would not have a head to leave in the Serrantino town square as a message.

  Santos decided to become a magician, an illusionist. He would cleverly get Wright to give up the name voluntarily.

  How, how . . .

  Sitting in his garden and sipping a glass of goat milk, with Boppo purring at his feet, Santos had slowly crafted a plan.

  He would leak information to El Paso PD about a factory in Chihuahua that the cartel was thinking of outfitting as a drug way station. The police would do what they always did: send a team to check it out and install surveillance gear. It was Matt Wright’s territory; he had a personal interest in bringing down the cartel (Santos had killed a partner of his) and would insist on being in the forefront.

  When Wright and the other team members arrived at the factory, Santos’s men would open fire—not trying to hit them but to separate them and isolate Wright. As soon as he was alone, one of Santos’s men would pitch stun grenades attached to Remifentanil canisters. This gas—a favorite of the Russian army—would knock the cop out. He’d be driven to the fake army hospital. Eddie and Tiffany—the fake agents—would meet with Wright in his hospital bed and tell him that Boyd was dead, the victim of an assassination. They’d suggest that Wright himself was a suspect in betraying his own team. This would motivate him to give up the name of anyone who might have sold them out.

  Matt would naturally mention the CI he’d been running as a possible suspect. And Santos and the Cardozos would have a name.

  Then, time for the razor . . .

  Santos hadn’t counted on catching a second fish in the operation, of all persons: Wright’s brother, Tony. But no matter, that didn’t affect the outcome. Eddie and Tiffany got the answer: the CI was Elena Velasquez, a street artist and prostitute working outside a restaurant near the Cardozos’ headquarters in downtown Serrantino. Santos was impressed; it was a clever idea. Elena could learn any manner of good information about the cartel, given that profession.

  Santos now withdrew from his pocket four envelopes of cash and distributed the money to the cast.

  “Thanks,” Eddie said.

  Tiffany gave him another flirty smile as she sl
ipped the money into her briefcase.

  “You’ll stay here until we have Elena. We might need some more information out of Wright.”

  “We wanted to get out tonight,” Eddie said.

  “Oh, it won’t be long. We’re going to pay her a visit right now.”

  The town of Serrantino was about an hour from San Bernardo, and Santos and Garcia, with two shooters in the back seat, were nearly there. Accompanying them was a second SUV, with three more of his crew.

  They entered the town, a picturesque place two hundred years old, and drove straight to the restaurant where Wright had said Elena Velasquez worked.

  Santos pulled to the curb and he looked ahead. Yes, there she was!

  Elena was in her thirties, attractive in a harsh way—the look of una puta. She was sitting outside the restaurant and offering to sketch portraits of tourists and lovers walking doe-eyed arm in arm. Surely slipping the solitary men her phone number on a card.

  Matt Wright and his brother were no longer needed. Santos could now give the order that his men could kill the cops, and dump their bodies in Sinaloa—blaming that cartel for the men’s deaths. He texted a coded message to one of his lieutenants in San Bernardo to do just this and another to Eddie and Tiffany, thanking them again and telling them that they were free to leave.

  Then he instructed his men to check the surrounding streets and sat back, screwing a brushed steel silencer onto his Sig Sauer, while he debated the most efficient way to get Elena Velasquez to tell what she knew. He’d initially thought razors, but several other techniques came immediately to mind. Even more painful. He was just in one of those moods.

  Eight

  Tony was picturing that spring day so very clearly.

  I won. He lost. End of story . . .

  The day defined them both, and that definition: they were different in kind.

  From that day on, each settled into his own world. Tony went to college, criminology (he liked cop shows, so why not?), and then joined the force. Matt went into the army—special services, of course. Their lives gravitated together some—Matt resisting family reunions but never missing a funeral, which seemed a military thing to do. Then after Dad was gone, Mom grew ill, and Tony and Lucy took her in. Dementia is hard on everyone; it’s the great collateral-damage disease. It took a toll.