Red Right Hand

35.

WHEN A BLEATING horn pierced the quiet, Hendricks went, by instinct, for his gun. Then he realized the sound was coming from his burner phone. Cameron-ever the technological smartass-must have set his ringer to the James Bond theme when she was mucking with it on the plane. He hadn’t heard it before because the phone had been silenced. Now the brassy music echoed shrilly through the cavernous space. He couldn’t help but think that Lester would’ve approved.

He and Segreti were holed up in a warehouse at the water’s edge. It was used to clean and store boats. The interior reeked of mildew and toluene. Water lapped against the nearby pilings. Amber light spilled through the filthy windows from the streetlights outside.

All around them were yachts of various sizes, shrink-wrapped in white plastic and propped up with rusted stands that looked like camera tripods. The warehouse doors-front, back, and enormous overhead garage-style-were sealed with police tape (which parted easily when sliced with an X-Acto knife and cut so cleanly that when the door was closed, it still appeared unbroken from a distance), and an official notice stuck to each declared the building cleared. The cops had searched it and moved on, which made it the perfect place to hide.

They never would’ve made it out of the Presidio if it hadn’t been for the fog, which only grew denser as the night wore on. Though the neighborhood surrounding the Broussard house was soon crawling with patrols, and the park’s perimeter was on high alert, no one could see more than ten feet in any direction. The toughest challenge in eluding them was not wrapping the Jaguar around a tree.

They ditched the car soon after, in a parking lot beside the Palace of Fine Arts. Then they hoofed it downslope to the marina. A lone uniformed cop walked its grounds. Slipping by him had been a breeze.

One of the larger yachts had an inflatable dinghy strapped to its stern. Hendricks and Segreti wrestled it into the water, and Hendricks rowed it into the bay, taking them as far as his arms could manage. Once they were a ways from shore, he let the motor do the work, wincing as it rumbled noisily to life.

Hendricks had been trying to contact Cameron ever since. Phone. Text. The e-mail account they’d set up for her in case she was forced to ditch her phone. But the calls went unanswered, the texts and e-mails unread. His failed attempts hung like ellipses, like a circuit waiting to be completed.

He answered the phone “Cameron?”

“Who the hell is Cameron?” was the reply.

Shit. Thompson.

“No one. Don’t worry about it. Why the hell are you calling me?”

“Are you fucking kidding me? Your handiwork at the Presidio is all over CNN.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he lied-immediate, automatic.

“Cut the bullshit. I’ve seen pictures. You were there.”

Pictures? How? And then it clicked. “Son of a bitch,” Hendricks muttered, as much to himself as Thompson. “The Bellum operatives were wearing body cameras, weren’t they?”

“Yeah. Which means you can add the death of Lois Broussard, conspiracy to commit an act of terror, and a handful of federal assault charges to your résumé. The Bellum men are expected to pull through, in case you’re wondering.”

“I wasn’t. If I’d wanted to kill them, they’d be dead.”

“Like the Broussard woman?”

“I didn’t kill Lois-Yancey did.”

“That’s a fucking relief. Oh, wait-no, it’s not, because now my boss, my…” Thompson’s voice hitched with emotion. She gathered herself and tried again. “Now O’Brien knows we’ve been in touch. Knows I sent you. My career is ruined. I might wind up in jail.”

“You’re not going to wind up in jail. In fact, they’ll probably throw you a goddamn parade once you bring Segreti in from the cold and he clears this whole mess up.”

There was a long pause, and when Thompson next spoke, her tone was tinged with hope. “You’re telling me you have him, and he’s willing to testify?”

“He’s got some demands, but yeah.”

“What kind of demands?”

“For one, he’ll talk only to you-and he wants you to personally oversee the details of his protection.”

“Me? Why?”

“He remembers you a bit. Thought you seemed like a straight shooter.”

“I doubt it. When we met, I was just a green kid in over my head.”

“Yeah, well, I also might’ve vouched for you. Said you were trustworthy. That you’d keep him safe.”

“Okay,” she said, “what else?”

Hendricks hesitated. “Wherever you stash him, it has to be near a hospital with a decent oncology department.”

“You mean…”

“He’s sick.”

“How sick?”

“Hard to say. Last time he saw a doc was seven years ago. She told him he was in remission but that it could return at any time. He’s pretty sure it’s returned.”

“Fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck. You know how hard it is to make a case on the videotaped testimony of a criminal?”

“No. My methods are a little more direct.”

“Your methods are illegal.”

“So’s jaywalking. That doesn’t mean it’s not the fastest route. Consider his illness motivation to make your case in a timely fashion.”

“Anything else?”

“Yeah.” Hendricks filled her in on the rest of Segreti’s demands. “So what do you say? Can you make that happen?”

“I-I think so.”

“You think so?”

“Well, I’m not exactly in the Bureau’s good graces right this second, but I’ll try.”

“Okay,” Hendricks said.

“Okay as in he’ll do it?”

“Okay as in I’ll talk to him and see what he has to say.”

“Thanks,” she said. “Stay safe out there. And try not to shoot anyone else.”

“I’ll do my best,” he said.

He hung up. Segreti, beside him, asked, “So how’d it go?”

“About as well as could be expected.”

“You okay? You ain’t looking too good.”

“I’ll be fine,” Hendricks said-although in truth, he was pretty sure his wound was infected. He felt achy and feverish. His skin was slick with sweat and radiated heat. He crossed his arms to quell his shivering. “Right now, I’m more worried about keeping you alive long enough to deliver you to Thompson.”

“Thanks, but I’ll tell you, I’d trade places with Lois in a heartbeat if I could.”

“Were, uh, you two…”

Segreti looked aghast. “No! Nothing like that. Not that I wouldn’t have…it’s just…when I found her, she was in a bad way. Her husband was on the bridge when the tugboat hit.”

“Jesus.”

“Yeah. We met by accident. I thought I was busting into an empty house. Turns out, I interrupted her while she was trying to off herself. She thought maybe I was meant to, that God had sent me to save her life. I don’t usually go in for that kind of thinking, but I really wanted to believe her. She was a nice lady. A good person. The world was better with her in it, and I figured that if I’d played a part in keeping her here, maybe my life wasn’t so worthless after all.”

“Is that why you walked in seven years ago? You were trying to square your accounts?”

“Yeah. No. I don’t know. I mean, my doc first diagnosed me eight years ago. Put me through surgery, chemo, radiation. It was hell, but when I came out the other side, I thought I’d beat this thing. So it’s not like I thought I had to prepare my soul for the great beyond or anything. It was more that I felt like I’d been given a second chance. Like the cancer was a shot across the bow. After, I was changed. And the business changed too. I found I didn’t have the stomach for it anymore.”

Hendricks nodded. He could relate. The moment that had changed him was a brush with mortality as well. Not his own, but a young soldier’s whose throat he’d slit, a man scarcely more than a boy who’d died, terrified, in his arms, his blood flowing between Hendricks’s fingers.

He shuddered. Pushed the memory away. Blamed the goose bumps on his fever. “What do you mean, the business changed?”

“Look, I’m not one to make excuses for what I’ve done. I was a criminal. A murderer. And I enjoyed it. Not the killing, you understand. That was just the cost of doing business. Every made guy on the planet knows going in they’re playing for keeps. Knows if they’re not sharp enough, careful enough, good enough, they’ll get got. But the lifestyle…the lifestyle’s fucking glorious. And we did enough good, I could get to sleep at night.”

Hendricks was incredulous. “You did good?”

“Damn right we did. The fact is, much as the white hats wanna pretend like organized crime is a scourge on society, we serve a fucking purpose. Some places, the family-or gang, or whatever-is all a community’s got. We clean up neighborhoods the police won’t touch. Make it safe to walk the streets.”

“Yeah, you’re fucking saints.”

“I ain’t claiming we are. We took our piece. We got rich. We lived the life. But the family I came up through had rules: No dope, no girls, and no tolerance for anyone who moved ’em on our territory. Did we charge local businesses protection? You’re goddamn right we did. But you wanna know something? We fucking earned that money. In twenty years, there was maybe five holdups in my neighborhood. Probably twice as many rapes and muggings. Know how many the cops solved? Not a goddamn one. But thanks to me and mine, every one a them fuckers paid.”

“So what happened? How’d you get from there to talking to the FBI?”

“Used to be, our business was about community. We provided what the cops and straight businesses wouldn’t, or couldn’t. But then we got greedy. We formed ourselves a council. Stopped thinking like a bunch of family businesses and started thinking like a global fucking corporation. Stopped taking care of our own. We’d deal in anything that paid. It began in the seventies, with dope. Smack, coke, and crack. Then came guns-to gangbangers, militants, whack-job cult leaders, whoever had the cash. Ain’t like we asked ’em their intentions. Then came girls. Most of ’em unwilling. Brought into the country and kept like fucking pets, only we don’t force-feed our pets junk to keep ’em docile. Next thing you know, our communities are rotting from the inside, but we don’t care, because we’ve never been richer. And then the Council decided to aim higher.”

“Meaning what?”

“Meaning some Council members realized we could lower our overhead if we took the operation international. Next thing I knew, we were buying off lawmakers and bureaucrats in Sarajevo, Amsterdam, Johannesburg. Making deals with fucking warlords to trade girls for guns. Watching the evening news and seeing the weapons we’d sold turned on the poor and helpless. I couldn’t stomach it. Then I got sick-which was a blessing, in a way, because it removed me from the day-to-day. But the young punk who covered for me while I was undergoing treatment had designs to make his new position permanent, and he had some shady partner he said could take us legit and make us rich beyond our wildest dreams-if we made the partner chairman, that is.”

“Who?”

“Hell if I know. But he must’ve had enough clout that the Council thought he could deliver, because next thing I know, I’m on a one-way ticket to the desert. I barely escaped with my life, and when I did, I went straight to the fucking Feds. You know how that turned out.”

“Yeah. What I don’t know is how you survived the blast at the safe house.”

“Somebody with a cleaner conscience than mine might say it was divine providence. I think it was dumb fucking luck. I was in the basement when the bomb went off-doing laundry, if you can believe it. Half the house came down around me, but somehow, I walked away.”

“But I understand they found your DNA.”

“When the Feds heard I’d been sick, they brought in a doctor on the quiet to check me out. He drew some samples and packed ’em up to send ’em to the lab. They were sitting on the counter when the bomb went off. Seemed like a goddamn gift to me when I found out. I thought about hunting down the bastards who tried to kill me. I thought about making them pay. Then I figured, fuck it-maybe being dead’s the best thing that ever happened to me. Maybe it means I can start fresh. Live out whatever days I’ve got left in peace. I’d always said that when I retired, I was gonna move to San Francisco-so that’s exactly what I did.”

Hendricks was envious of Segreti’s fresh start. He wished he could have allowed himself to walk away. But then, Segreti hadn’t gotten as far away as he’d thought. “What was your role with the Council, exactly?”

“There ain’t really a name for what I did, but I used to say I was the Devil’s Red Right Hand. I made sure the Council’s word became deed.”

“So if, for example, the Council were to hire a hitter to take care of a problem…”

“I’d be the guy to hire him, yeah.”

“The guy who pushed you out-what was his name?” Hendricks asked casually, but Segreti was too smart to fall for it.

“I’ll tell you what. First you deliver me safely to this Agent Thompson. Then I’ll give you his name.”

“Deal,” Hendricks said. “Just do me a favor and don’t go dying in the meantime.”