Go-Between

Chapter Five

“You walked from Harris County Jail, in this weather?” Marisol Acosta handed her a bottle of water. “You can get heatstroke if you aren’t careful.”

“It was only a mile,” Michelle said.

Marisol laughed. “This time of year, in Houston? It’s better to do miles in an air conditioned gym.”

She looked like she put in some time at a gym. A dark-skinned Hispanic woman in her early thirties, round but muscular, with a cute, disarming smile that Michelle suspected she deployed strategically. She wore long jersey shorts and a Texas Longhorns T-shirt. Michelle had noticed a trophy plaque on the wall, third place in a national archery tournament, right next to her University of Texas School of Law diploma.

“You do archery?” Michelle asked.

Marisol grinned. “I love it. Nothing better than hitting the bull’s-eye.”

“The defense on a crime like this generally centers around search and seizure issues,” Marisol explained. “We’ll challenge the legality of the search, first thing. See what evidence we can have excluded.”

“That’s the best defense?”

“The DEA busted Jeff with a plane full of pot.” She sounded exasperated. “Other than his claims that he didn’t know what the cargo was, illegal search and seizure’s what we’ve got to go on.”

Michelle rested her forehead on her fingertips for a moment. “And, and this defense… does it work?”

“It certainly can work.”

Marisol perched on the club chair across from the black leather couch where Michelle sat, sipping from a juice-box sized container of coconut water.

“The other possibility is a plea bargain. Or some other kind of arrangement.” She took a final slurp from her straw, and looked up at Michelle.

Some other kind of arrangement. Michelle shuddered a little. She remembered what happened when Gary had offered her an “arrangement,” to get her out of trouble in Mexico.

Trouble he’d created.

“What kind of arrangement?”

“The prosecution may consider a reduced sentence for providing information. Or no sentence at all, if your information is valuable enough.”

There was no mistaking her significant look, this time.

Did Marisol know what Danny had done in the past? About some of the things he knew?

If she did, and she wanted to use it to make a deal with the prosecution… or to expose the things Danny knew to the public… or blackmail somebody powerful enough to get him out…

Or, maybe Marisol was just trying to gauge what he might be willing to reveal. How dangerous he might be.

Michelle felt herself spiraling. It was the opposite of a rush, more like the ground was being slowly sucked out from under her feet.

You can’t trust Marisol, Michelle thought.

“Okay,” she said. “So what you want is for Jeff to inform on someone. Maybe agree to some kind of undercover deal?”

Marisol put down her box of coconut water.

“I think that’s premature. I’m just trying to give you a sense of what the options might be.”

Michelle managed a smile. “Thanks. It’s… it’s good to have an idea.”

She hesitated. Then thought, if she’s on our side or not, either way, it won’t hurt to bring this up.

“I’m worried about what’s going on with Jeff right now, actually.”

Marisol didn’t exactly move. It was more like she became taut. Pulled back the string on the bow. “What do you mean?”

If she’s on our side, maybe she can help. If she’s not… I’m going to let her know that I know. That I’m paying attention.

“Was there something that happened when he got arrested? I mean, did he get hurt?”

“Not that I heard about. And he looked fine when I talked to him.”

Michelle thought about how to put it. “Something happened,” she said. “He was having a hard time moving, and he didn’t want to talk about it. And he was cuffed. Hardly anyone else was cuffed. And I know him. He’s not… he’s not violent. Something happened.”

Marisol sighed. “Harris County Jail does not have such a good reputation.”

“I want to make sure that someone’s checking on him when I’m not here. I’ll pay you. Or the firm. However you do this kind of thing.”

“We’ll make sure he gets regular visits,” Marisol said, eyeing her across the coffee table. “Don’t worry about that.”

Back at the hotel, Michelle took a long, hot shower. When she was done, she put on a hotel robe and lay down on the bed. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. Eat something? Go to the gym? Go to the bar, and have a few glasses of wine? Just take an Ambien and go to bed?

It’s only 8 p.m., she thought. Too early to sleep. Wasn’t it?

Emily’s iPhone rang. The Get Smart theme. The ringtone she’d assigned to Gary.

It’s what Danny would have picked, she thought.

“So, you have some time to think about things?” Gary asked.

“I have. Maybe we should meet.”

“Good! Have you eaten?”

Of course, Gary knew where she was. Of course, he was in Houston.

“There’s a nice Mexican place that specializes in shrimp not too far from you,” he said. “Real Gulf shrimp. None of that farmed Asian shit. I’ll have a table ready when you get there.”

“Fine.”

He could have had her followed from Arcata. With his connections, he probably could’ve tracked her on her Emily phone, not even needing to physically hack it-he could just get the GPS information from the provider.

Whatever. She’d expected he was watching her. She hadn’t been trying to hide.

She’d been so stupid about it before, in Mexico. But she’d never thought of her phone that way until Mexico. Never realized that it could track her, that every app she used to reach out pulled her in, held her close and followed her home.

The restaurant was loud, colorful and crowded. Mariachis. Birthday parties. Twentysomethings out for drinks. Gary had secured a table at the back of the big patio, away from some of the noise. A soft mist cooled the area, glass bricks with colored bulbs inside helping to light it.

“So, what d’you think of Houston?” he asked, after she sat.

“It’s hot.”

“That it is.” He signaled the waiter. “I ordered us a couple skinny margaritas.” He laughed. “Skinny margaritas. You ever heard of such a thing? But it’s about half the calories of a regular one, and you don’t get all that sugar. I’ve taken a liking to them.”

Of course he hadn’t asked her if she’d wanted one, and as much as she’d wanted a drink before, drinking with Gary was another thing entirely. But it wasn’t worth arguing about.

She waited for the drinks and to order-“I’d recommend the small portion of the grilled shrimp-plenty of food for a light eater like you”-before she said, “I have some conditions.”

Gary snickered. “Do you, now?”

It was a good thing she’d left her gun in Arcata, she thought. Though if she did shoot him, given this was Texas, maybe she’d get off easy.

“You really want me to do this? Because I don’t care anymore. I’ll just start telling people what I know about you and your friends.”

“You’ve got no evidence,” he said. “And no credibility either.”

“Maybe not. But maybe Danny does. Maybe we’ve made some arrangements.”

Gary stared at her for a long moment. His predator look. The one that said, you are nothing to me. I will kill you if you get in my way.

Then he grinned. “I knew I had you pegged right, Michelle. You’re a born operator.” He sipped his margarita. “Not that I’m really all that worried about anything you and Danny might have to say. Danny knows better than to do something like that. Especially where he is right now. Things can happen to a guy in jail, you know.”

Hearing that, she shivered, the cooling mist chilling her skin.

She couldn’t back down. Even though she knew Gary was right, and that he still had the upper hand.

She shrugged. “Are you okay with being embarrassed? I’m thinking your bosses might not like it very much.”

“Well, you might be right about that.” He settled back in his chair. “So tell me what you have in mind.”

“I want Danny out of jail. I want the charges dropped.”

“That’s up to a federal judge and a US attorney, not me.”

“Bullshit.”

Don’t lose it, she told herself. She drew in a deep breath. “I know you set him up. I know you used your influence to get his bail denied.”

“Say that I did. Say that I can get Danny out. What’s to stop the two of you from doing another runner?”

“We won’t.”

He shook his head. “You can’t expect me to take that on faith, now. Can you? I’m going to have to see some effort on your part first. What else?”

“Money.”

“How much?”

“How long is the job?”

“Say, two months.” He grinned. “Though who knows, you might end up liking it.”

“Five hundred thousand.”

“What? For two months' work?” From the expression on his face, this might have been the funniest thing she’d said yet. “I’ll tell you what, sweetie, you’ve got some balls, asking me for that kind of money.”

“I’ve got obligations, Gary,” she said, voice tight. “A federal drug trafficking defense to pay for. A restaurant manager to hire. And probably an airplane to replace.”

“Two hundred K, and don’t ask for any more. You work past the two months, we can renegotiate.”

“What about Danny?”

“You work the first month, I’ll see what I can do.”

It was his best offer, and she knew it.

Better than she’d expected, actually.

Their dinners came. The shrimp was pretty good, Michelle had to admit.

“Her name’s Caitlin O’Connor,” Gary said. “You heard of her?”

“No, I don’t think so.”

“Think about it, I bet you have. Rich lady. She and her husband and their little boy got carjacked. Kidnapped. A couple of crazy crackheads. They didn’t think the whole thing through. Drove them around to a few ATMs to withdraw money. Shot the husband, threw the kid out of the car. Raped her a couple times. Kid died in the hospital.”

He tore the tail off a shrimp and sucked out the little bit of flesh from it. “Anyway, she made it through, more or less. Became real active in promoting victims' rights and public safety. Started a foundation, Safer America. Ringing any bells yet?”

It sounded familiar, one of those stories running 24/7 on cable news networks, along with missing blonde women, kidnapped girls forced into sexual slavery, and the mom who drowned her kids and pretended that the black guy did it.

Background noise.

“Right,” she said. “I think I know who you mean.”

“I’ll email you some articles tonight. Read them over, and we can probably set up an interview for tomorrow or the day after.”

“Tomorrow? Where is she?”

“Here in Houston.” Gary ripped off the shell and legs of his next shrimp and popped the meat into his mouth. “I try and make things convenient.”

“Call me after you’ve looked this over,” he’d written. “I imagine you’ll have a few questions.”

Sitting in her hotel bed, reading the news articles on her iPad, she remembered the story. The rich, perfect couple and their five-year-old son, coming home from a Pixar movie in their Range Rover. The carjackers, two black men, who’d held them up at a gas station, not even caring that their faces were caught on a surveillance camera. The son, tossed out along the side of the road like garbage, though the killers had claimed they’d only wanted him out of the way. The husband, shot in the head while kneeling among the weeds and the scrap and the trash of a vacant lot down by one of the bayous.

The wife, raped. Shot. She should have died, but she didn’t. The two men had been out of their heads, drunk and lit up, so high that they couldn’t think straight, and they’d left her bleeding in the backseat of the Range Rover while they argued about what to do, and somehow, she’d managed to open the door and stumble away, into the night, while they continued to fight outside the liquor store where they’d stopped to buy more beer.

Michelle studied a photo of the family. One of those corny studio portraits against a backdrop of hand-painted blue-gray muslin. You’d think with their money they could have done something more interesting, she thought, and then she pushed that thought away. I’m a horrible person, she told herself. This was a tragedy, after all.

She made herself look at them. At Paul O’Connor, brown hair, square jaw, broad smile, in his suit and tie, staring up and to the right, per the photographer’s direction, no doubt. At then toddler Alex, blond, burbling on his father’s knee.

At Caitlin.

Blonde, like her son. Big hair, but not ridiculously so. Small frame, cheerleader pretty. Smiling, like her husband, at some beautiful and amusing vision to the upper right.

“The only thing you can do when you have something like this happen to you is to try and keep moving.”

Her voice was soft, well modulated. Quiet enough that you found yourself leaning forward to listen. Or in Michelle’s case, holding the iPad closer to her face.

“So, you founded Safer America,” the interviewer prompted. Some cable news channel flack. Along with the articles, Gary had sent a collection of video links in the body of his email.

On screen, Caitlin nodded. It had been four years since the attack. Seven since the family studio portrait. Her blonde hair was now cropped closer to her head. She’d lost that cheerleader prettiness. It had turned into something else, something more fragile, almost ethereal.

That can work for you, Michelle thought. Lots of people found vulnerable-looking women attractive. They weren’t threatening. They needed protection.

“Yes. I felt that not enough attention was given to the victims of violent crimes. So we try to act as advocates for them.”

“But you push for stronger public safety measures as well.”

“Well, that goes hand in hand with supporting victims.” Caitlin sat on a couch in what might have been her own home. An expensive cream-colored sofa in a large living room. Michelle couldn’t make out many details the way the shot was framed, but she thought that the sofa might be a Barbara Barry.

“When people have been victimized, they are desperate to have their sense of safety restored. And by knowing that violent offenders will be locked up where they can’t hurt anybody else, they get just a little bit of their own security back.”

She smiled. A sad, tentative smile.

It wasn’t just that she looked vulnerable, Michelle realized. If anything Caitlin was beautiful now, instead of merely pretty.

“Drugs have taken over our cities.” A deep, bourbon-voiced narrator, who Michelle was pretty sure also did trailers for Hollywood movies.

Grainy black and white shots of addicts drawing on crack pipes, white smoke swirling around their pockmarked, skeletal faces. Graffiti-bombed street corners, with furtive dealers exchanging brown paper bags of contraband.

“Yet Felix Gallardo insists that drugs aren’t a problem.”

A shot of a politician at an impromptu gathering-outside a courthouse? City Hall? Surrounded by news mikes. “Drugs aren’t the problem,” he said in quick staccato rhythms. Michelle wondered if the bite had been edited. “We’re spending too much money on law enforcement solutions-”

A freeze-frame on his face, his expression caught so that he appeared to be half-drunk. A crawl of text with statistics, with the narrator reading highlights: the percentages of violent felons with illegal drugs in their systems, drug-related traffic accidents, the crimes committed by addicts, the number of kids who’d smoked pot last year, rolling by so quickly they were hard to read.

Then, a smash cut to a young black man wearing prison scrubs, sitting at an institutional aluminum table, clasped hands resting in front of him. “I was so high I was crazy,” he said, staring at his awkward, knobby hands. “So, yeah, I shot them. I killed them.”

Back to the freeze-frame of the politician and the voice-over artist.

“Drugs aren’t a problem. Really, Felix?” The shot fading to a black screen. “Paid for by Safer America.”

Michelle picked up her Emily iPhone and called Gary.

“I do have a few questions. Are you free tomorrow, for breakfast?”