Gone

CHAPTER 72

In the shadows, catty-corner from the farmhouse, laughter echoed in the earbud of a man dressed head to toe in black, crouching there, motionless.

The earbud was attached to a shotgun microphone he’d purchased in San Fran the day before, along with a zoom-lens camera. He would have gone in closer to get some shots through a window with the camera, but he’d spotted motion detectors along the property’s perimeter coming in, so he didn’t want to risk it. There seemed to be only one US marshal who was currently in the house, eating with the family, but you never knew.

He’d ridden in on horseback, careful to skirt the herds of cattle as well as Cody’s farmhouse dogs. He’d tied up about a mile to the north and hoofed it the rest of the way. Care was required here, considering the marshal would probably shoot him on sight.

It’s them, the man thought, listening to the tinny dinner chatter. They were everything his cartel contact had said to keep an eye out for: all those kids, the old man and the young woman with the Irish accents. It had to be the cop’s family. Who else on the face of the earth could it be?

And to think that he had his drug-addict brother-in-law, Cristiano, to thank for this mother lode. He had gone by the house for his monthly sponge off his sister when Cristiano idly mentioned that a new Irish priest had been handing out cans at the food bank with three kids, one of them an Asian girl.

Right away, he put it together with the cartel APB. The Mexicans were looking for a large, strange family with adopted kids and an old Irish priest, hiding in or around Susanville. A half-million-dollar purse was being offered for information. Might even be some negotiating room there, too, he was told. The Mexicans wanted these people bad.

It didn’t take too much asking around to hear that the priest had also been spotted filling in for Father Walter, and that the family had driven to church in one of Aaron Cody’s beaters. Now here they were. Thirty feet away. All five hundred Gs’ worth of them.

He’d been one of the first to understand the wisdom of partnering up with the cartels when they started moving into the Central Valley, four years before. He was no brain surgeon, but he was smart enough to know what men who truly didn’t give a shit about killing people looked like. Smart enough to know that getting on the wrong side of folks that serious was not an option if you didn’t have a second set of eyeballs in the back of your head and liked waking up alive every day.

He’d become involved in the marijuana-growing business about a year after getting back to his hometown, Susanville, from an ’05 stint in Iraq with the army. He’d traded in the M1 Abrams tank he’d been driving for a beer truck and had applied to the huge state prison nearby, like every other sucker in town, when he bumped into some old buddies who had a grow house going. He’d helped them expand and organize it, ramp up production and sales until they were the biggest outfit around. Heck, he hadn’t even had to kill anyone. Just put a few guns to a few people’s heads.

But now, squatting there in the dark like some Peeping Tom, he actually felt a little bad. He had a few rug rats of his own, and it was doubtful that the cartel wanted to find these people in order to deliver a Publishers Clearing House prize. But the problem was, half his crop had been seized by the state park rangers a month before. He owed a lot of dangerous people a lot of money he didn’t have.

Here’s an opportunity to make everybody happy and then some, the man in black thought. Expand or, even better, quit altogether. Get out while he was young and rich, with his head still connected to his neck.

It wasn’t his idea, the man in black finally decided with a sigh as he sat there, listening and recording the family’s laughter on his iPhone.

It wasn’t his fault that God made the world so dog-eat-dog.