Gone

CHAPTER 86

The plan I sketched out with Diaz over the phone was hazy at first. But as Emily and I raced back to the airfield and the waiting air force jet, refinements were made and remade.

When we touched back down at Southern Cal Logistics Airport, Diaz texted to let me know that our course of action was irretrievably under way, for good or for ill. I no longer had the time or energy to care.

Following Diaz’s directions, Emily and I drove thirty miles southwest, straight from the base to Wrightwood, California, a pine-covered valley north of LA in the San Gabriel Mountains. About a mile north of a ski resort shuttered for the summer, we pulled onto a narrow, winding road called Lone Pine Canyon Road. We followed it to its end and then turned onto a long and steep, thickly wooded driveway.

It was about ten in the morning as we pulled the car into the pine-needle-covered front yard of an old, faded forest-green cabin. Diaz’s Mustang was already there, under a corrugated carport, along with a blue Jeep.

I rolled down the Crown Vic’s window to a low hum of chittering crickets. You could see some hogbacked hills in the distance behind the cabin, but there wasn’t another house to be seen. There weren’t even any power lines. It was like we’d driven back in time.

For a few moments, I stared at the faded cabin, mulling things over. I wondered what I would find once I went in there. Nothing good in the slightest, I knew. But we were past that. Way past that.

“Stay here,” I told Emily as I finally opened the passenger door.

“No. I’m going in,” Emily said, opening her door. “I’m in this as deep as you, Mike. I don’t care what happens next. I’m responsible.”

“No, you’re not,” I said, reaching across her and slamming her door shut again. “I’m the one with nothing to lose, Emily. If you want to help me, I need you to stay and just sit here.”

“But, Mike — ” she was saying as I got out and shut the door.

Diaz had already told me that they were set up downstairs. Around back, I pulled open a rusty sliding door and entered a musty-smelling, pine-paneled room with a stone fireplace. Diaz looked up from where he was sitting on a folding chair in front of the fireplace, smoking a cigarette. He was dressed head to toe in black. Beside him, propped up against the hearth’s river stone, were two AR-15s.

“What’s the story?” I said, shaking his hand.

“He’s in there,” Diaz said, pointing his cigarette at the closed door behind him. “We Tasered the shit out of him as he was coming out his front door. Talk about not knowing what hit you.”

“What does he know so far?”

Diaz blew a smoke ring up at the yellow water stains on the drop ceiling.

“We told him we work for Perrine’s rival, the Ortega cartel, and I think he’s fallen for it. He also thinks we have his family. He came on pretty hard at first, but right before you arrived, I got creative and convinced him that if he didn’t start being helpful, I was going to make a call and turn his wife HIV positive. He started with the waterworks then, boy. Broke like a glass hammer. Funny, the things that can hit a nerve.”

Diaz was putting the cigarette out on the sole of his boot when the door behind him opened and a large man wearing a ski mask stepped out. I stood there with a very puzzled look on my face as the man peeled off the mask. It was Detective Bassman.

“Wow! You’re in on this, too?” I said as I shook his massive hand. “Risking your ass for me? I’m never going to be able to pay you back for what you’re doing for me. Either of you.”

“No problem, brother,” Bassman said, flashing a smile. “My pleasure, believe me. I think he’s ready to talk to us now.”

Diaz handed me a ski mask.

“Let’s do this,” he said.