Gatekeeper

Chapter 21

"Sam, where the hell have you been? You were supposed to call yesterday. I thought Rivera had you. I was about to call the cavalry."

Her voice on the other end sounded down and exhausted. "Sorry, Joe. I had to check something out. I've blown it big time."

"What do you mean? Where are you?"

"I'm at a pay phone. This whole thing's been a fraud from the start, Joe. I led us all down the wrong road."

Joe rubbed his forehead, trying to make sense of what she was saying. "We need to meet, Sam. Get off the phone and hook up with me at. . Shit, I don't know. . Are you in town?"

She hesitated. "I can meet you in an hour."

His hand tightened on the phone. There was something about the way she was speaking. "Things've changed since you dropped out of sight, Sam. In fact, I'm thinking we ought to pull you out. Come straight to the PD."

"What? Why?"

"I was going over the Hollowell case, like I said I would. Couldn't find a thing. Kept going around and around. Finally, I noticed a photo of a greasy smear on one of his hands, and a shot someone took on the bridge where he was hanged of a puddle of something oily on the road. I had Hillstrom compare the sample she collected with the one they got from the bridge, and just heard back they were both power-steering fluid-from the same source."

Sam didn't respond. He wasn't sure if that was because she was listening or had simply walked away, leaving the phone dangling. From the anxious tone of her voice, the latter wouldn't have surprised him.

"Sam?"

"I'm here."

"We got lucky. Most cars use standard power-steering fluid. Hondas don't, and that's what we found. I crosschecked everyone we have on our radar right now with the cars they own, and I got one hit. Lucky the bad guys don't think much of fuel efficient imports. It was Manuel Ruiz, Sam. That's why I think we ought to shut down."

"Manuel killed Hollowell?" She sounded stunned.

"Looks that way. We have a lot more homework to do. But, come in, all right? It's getting too screwy and it's not worth the risk anymore."

"You don't know the half of it," she said in her monotone.

"What?"

"Rivera doesn't have an organization. He's got a bunch of goons with guns in that building of his, but that's it. Until you just said that about Manuel, I thought he was Rivera's only operative. Now it looks like I was wrong about that, too."

It was Joe's turn to fall silent.

"You there?" she asked.

"Yeah. Sorry, but I thought it was Torres who pointed you toward Rivera in the first place."

"It was. Specifically, it was one of his lieutenants named Ricky. But I was conned from the start and let my ambition screw up the rest. Christ, Joe, even Bill Dancer pegged Rivera as a punk from the start, but was I going to listen to a loser like Bill? Hell no. I had to prove him wrong. I overestimated Rivera and underestimated Torres, and led us all down the wrong path as a result. I am so sorry. I'm thinking I should resign."

"Sam, this is crazy. Come on in."

"I will. I'm on my way-one hour."

The phone went dead in Joe's hand.

* * *

Sam walked up to the house, gave the signal, and unlocked the door. "It's me," she announced to no one, knowing that as usual Manuel would be lurking.

He was. He appeared from around the corner looking as lithe and trim as ever. "Where you been?" he asked, his voice guarded.

She looked at him for a moment, her head slightly tilted. Purposefully, she hadn't planned this, preferring to play it spontaneously, keeping inside Greta as much as possible. As such, on impulse, she walked up to him, took his face in her hands, and gave him a long, deep kiss. He responded, but only with his mouth, with which he smiled as she finally broke away. But his eyes were still watchful.

"Hola. Welcome home. Was it my cooking?"

She walked past him into the living room and sat in one of its worn armchairs. "No," she said. "I was in Holyoke, seeing Johnny."

Manuel perched cautiously on the arm of the couch. "Oh? Problems?"

"You could say that. I found out you were playing me for a putz."

"Sorry?"

"A jerk. You been funnin' with me. Fucking with my head."

He didn't respond.

She stared at him. "What was the point? What did I ever do to you? It couldn't have been that stupid comment I made when we first met. You're not that thin-skinned. Plus, I saved your butt a few hours later. I was good. My heart and head were in the right place. I was going to make us rich. Why did you lie to me?"

"What did Rivera say?"

She shook her head. "Right. Get your stories straight. Well, sorry, but he didn't say squat. That's the whole deal. That's what woke me up. I went down there to ask for his contact list so I could combine it with what I've been building. Reasonable request, I thought. But only if you're being straight with your partner. Dummy me. He puts on an attitude, says I haven't proven myself yet. I have to wonder why. I mean, I already know Torres hasn't been cut out of the Vermont business-I'm running into his Blue Heaven shit everywhere I turn. So I started asking around, calling my sources, traveling the whole Holyoke, Brattleboro, Rutland corridor. That's where I've been all this time. And guess what I find? Rivera has nobody out there. You've been running a scam. Using me and my strategy to build something you could only dream about."

"Why would we do that?" he asked.

She looked at him sourly. "Spare me. If I'd known you were just a load of hot air, I would've gone someplace else. I was like a gift from God to you guys. Manna from heaven."

He gave a short laugh. "Whoa. I wouldn't go crazy with that."

She glared at him, pulling her anger from the very flip side of her argument-that she'd tried to pull a scam on them, and had been as let down as they'd been in the end. "You saying you didn't snap me up when I came through the door?"

"All right, all right. But so what? What's the big deal? You're here now, things're going great. Who cares if we didn't have a network? We got one growing right now. We'll just start over-everything out on the table." He shook his head with a bewildered expression. "Greta, why'd you kiss me if you don't think this'll work? It's a crazy business. Nobody trusts anybody. We could've done a lot worse."

"Like kill Jimmy Hollowell?"

He remained looking faintly amused, but she could tell that had surprised him. An almost imperceptible cloak of stillness draped over him.

"Sure," he said affably, after just a hair too long of a pause. "Like that. At least we aren't killing people."

"The day we met, Johnny said that's what you do. Remember? He said you didn't have his management skills-that you just killed people."

"He was making me look mean."

Sam slowly felt the blood fill her face as she suddenly saw her way clearly at last. "Like Miguel Torres does."

"What?"

"You heard me. You know, it's sometimes handy to talk out loud like this. It helps get the thoughts out of your head so you can hold them up and look at them. You work for Torres, don't you? I mean, I know you used to, like Rivera did, but you still do. You always have."

"Did you have another one of those pills?"

"You wish. You know a guy named Ricky? Works for Torres?"

"No."

"You shouldn't have said that. You were busted with him last year. See, that's another thing I did after I left Rivera's. I stuck around town, asking questions. That's how I found you in the first place, after all. So I just did the same thing in reverse. I got curious. If Rivera was just living in a dreamworld, then why did the Torres people-specifically, Ricky-send me over to Rivera, claiming he'd stolen Torres's route? What was in it for them? The answer was they wanted their mole-you-to see what I had to offer. I came out of nowhere, thinking I would be good for Johnny, but in fact-stupid me-I was actually perfect for you and Ricky and Torres's whole bunch."

That was all pretty accurate, except that she hadn't discovered it in the street. She'd dropped by the Holyoke PD and consulted their computers and their drug unit.

"That doesn't make any sense. Maybe you're drunk," he said, but she could tell he wasn't putting any effort into it anymore.

She was actually getting excited telling her story seeing it in sharp detail at last, ignoring the danger looming ahead. She leaned forward in her chair. "No, hear me out. It was perfect. You were Torres's mole. You'd just killed Hollowell-Rivera's only man up here-and you were probably working on a way to get to Johnny next, if you could lure him outside of his fortress, when all of a sudden Bill Dancer and I walk in. Very quick thinking on your part. Well, Ricky's part, since the guy we'd talked to first, Carlos, was clueless. Carlos had just heard that Rivera had made a play and was now considered a bad guy, but he didn't have any details, and he sure didn't know you were involved. Bill and I, on the other hand, thought Ricky was just the doorman-Don Juan with the fast hands. He fed me all I needed to go to Johnny, and he was perfect. How would I know he was just taking a break downstairs, that he's in fact number two in the Torres organization? Right up there with a consigliere in the Mafia? He must've figured what the hell? Send this broad and her big ideas over to Rivera. She might draw him outside somehow. And if not, maybe she'll do what she says she will and create something from nothing-a crackerjack organization that you can inherit after Johnny's met his maker. You two must've killed yourself laughing when he called you to say I was heading over."

But there was still something wrong, something escaping her. She got up and began pacing the room.

"It could make an okay movie," Manuel humored her. "A TV movie, maybe, since it doesn't make sense, but some people might like it."

"What's wrong with it?" she challenged him, hoping to draw him out.

"Why hang Hollowell? If I was making an example of him, who was I making it to? You say Rivera had nobody to impress-he had nobody out here except Hollowell."

She burst out laughing, the last piece falling into place. "Exactly. You were making a point to Torres's people. Hollowell worked for Torres once, too, like you all did." She slapped her forehead. "So dumb."

"Greta. You can't just change your mind to make it fit. This whole story is make-believe." His face suddenly got serious. "Are you okay?"

She waved that off. "Spare me. Hollowell worked for Torres. That should be easy to find out. But he must've gone over to Rivera-for real. Johnny's got all those gunmen on his side, after all. It's not like he's a total loony-just guilty of false advertising with me. But he wanted to get this done, and until you killed Hollowell, Hollowell was the means. That's why you hanged him. It was a double message. I mean, yeah, it made a point with Rivera, but it really hit home with the boys in the 'hood, right? 'This is what happens to traitors.' Why the hell didn't I get it sooner? What a moron."

Manuel straightened, ran his hand through his hair, and then stood to his full height. "You shouldn't be so hard on yourself."

She froze in her pacing. "I'm right?"

"Very good." He took one step away from the couch, in her direction.

"Why did you kill the girl?" Furtively, Sam began looking around, thinking tactically, knowing things were about to get dangerous.

He furrowed his eyebrows momentarily, as if trying to remember. "She was in the way. I didn't know she'd be there."

"But you made it look like a drug overdose."

"I didn't need two murders." He stopped and studied her closely. "How did you know it wasn't an overdose? That wasn't in the news."

She opened her mouth, but nothing came out. It was like having cold water thrown in her face-the startling revelation that she'd made a crucial mistake.

"I heard it somewhere."

His hand shifted to the small of his back, where he kept his gun.

Sam ran at him, head down, taking him totally by surprise. He staggered back, tried pulling his gun, but she collided into him before he could, sending them both sprawling backward over the couch behind him, and onto the floor in a tangled, thrashing embrace. She grappled blindly at his arms, swatted his face, did all she could to keep him on the defensive until she could control the gun.

But he was fast and not easily distracted, and he eventually threw her off, pushing at her with his feet. He rolled away, came up in a crouch, and aimed the gun between her eyes, all in one fluid movement.

In the distance, approaching fast, sirens were wailing.

"I'm a cop," she said breathlessly, still crumpled on the floor. "This whole place is rigged with video. That's why they're coming now. Everything's being recorded."

He rose slowly, the gun steady, not reacting to her outburst. "You slipped, saying the girl didn't overdose."

"Give it up, Manuel. You can make a deal. Shut down Torres, maybe more. Witness protection, even."

He smiled, but there was a lover's betrayal in his eyes. The sirens were almost on top of them, filling the room.

"I don't think that's how it would turn out. I am sorry, though," he added sadly. "I liked Greta Novak. I would have enjoyed cooking for her more."

He paused for a split moment, as they exchanged a lingering glance, no words left, before turning quickly and vanishing from the room.

She scrambled to her feet, blue lights already reflecting off the ceiling, and followed him outside into a swirl of strobes, dust, the sound of cars skidding to a halt.

"Stop where you are. Put your hands in the air."

"The guy with the gun," she shouted, bathed in a cross-hatch of headlights. "Did you see the guy running out of here?"

Nobody had.