The Devil's Elixir

57

As he drove home with the sun setting up ahead in lush pink and purple brushstrokes, Villaverde resolved to rise before dawn the following day and drive up to Black’s Beach to hit the surf.

In the time before he was made Special Agent in Charge, he would go there at least three times a week. He would drive the six miles up to UCSD, park in an almost-deserted lot as the sun just started to glimmer over the mountains to the east, then take the steep path down the cliff to the best waves in the county. He would spend two hours riding the sometimes ten-foot breakers back to shore, stop on La Jolla Village Drive for breakfast, then head back south and still be behind his desk by eight thirty.

Since taking over responsibility for the San Diego field office, he was lucky if he got to surf once a week off Pacific Beach, which, although it had the benefit of being a mere eight blocks from his house, had erratic waves that never got over a couple of feet high. He still couldn’t get his head around how anyone in the Bureau managed to have a family on top of the job and still have any kind of time to themselves. When he’d separated from Gillian three years earlier—she’d moved to Chicago with her firm while he’d chosen to stay in San Diego—he’d agonized for weeks over whether he’d thrown away his one serious chance at having kids, but as the days turned to weeks, he realized that he was actually much happier on his own.

He turned off Grand Avenue, drove the three blocks to his house, and carefully turned the Chevy Traverse into the driveway. It was always a tight squeeze maneuvering the SUV up onto the narrow, upward-sloping driveway, but he was well practiced and always managed just to clear the vehicle’s rear end off the sidewalk.

He had stopped at Margo’s Mexican Grill for takeout and picked up a six-pack of Corona from Vons, all of which he now gathered from the passenger seat foot well. As he swung the door shut, he did a quick subconscious sweep of the street, as he did every night when he returned home. Everything was normal. As it always was. He was looking forward to unwinding in front of his TiVo. Unlike the handful of cops he knew, he never took his work home. He’d seen one of his partners drive himself into the ground, obsessed with a particularly gruesome and labyrinthine gang-related murder case, but even before that Villaverde had always made it a rule to work at the office and relax at home. Of course sometimes it meant that he didn’t leave the office till three in the morning, or sometimes not at all—there was a pretty comfortable sofa in one of the meeting rooms—but he’d always finish whatever he was doing before heading back.

Villaverde unlocked the door, collected his mail from the floor, flicked on the lights, and walked through to the kitchen. He unscrewed the cap off a beer and took a long swig. Tomorrow, he’d empty his mind completely at Black’s Beach, get into work early, then supervise the sting operation at the KGTV news studio out on Air Way. He and Reilly had already taken a conference call with Channel 10’s editor in chief and executive editor. They had agreed to put Reilly on the air, and they’d start trailing his interview from six in the morning, which should give El Brujo plenty of time to get his act together.

An act he hoped to break up.

Permanently.

He heard the doorbell ring. He took another gulp of beer, set down the bottle, and walked over to the door. He hadn’t bothered to close it; the night was cool and he loved the feel of the breeze inside the house. On the other side of the screen stood a tall, dark-skinned man in a very well-cut suit. He was waving hello hesitantly and seemed confused.

“I’m sorry, this isn’t the Prager house, is it?” the man asked.

Villaverde instinctively dropped his left hand to the Glock at his belt as he opened the screen door with his right, keeping his sidearm angled away from the open door.

“They’re next door,” Villaverde told him. “Fifty-eight.”

“Oh, man, I’m sorry,” the man said as he smiled at him sheepishly and rubbed a few days of growth on his chin with a well-manicured hand.

A hand that had something around its wrist.

A tooled leather wristband.

Villaverde’s eyes locked on it, with the soft click of the door at the back of the kitchen reaching his ears at exactly the same instant that his brain matched the wristband to the video from Deputy Fugate’s in-car video.

He took a step back and pulled his sidearm, but before he could raise it, the man at the door had charged in and grabbed his left arm with both hands, and he was now trying to twist it up behind his back.

Villaverde knew this move. He dropped his left shoulder, recentered his weight, then kicked out with his right leg, sweeping his assailant’s legs out from under him. The man let go of Villaverde’s gun arm with one hand, but still kept the other firmly clamped around his forearm. Villaverde threw himself on top of the man’s lower body and followed through with a succession of punches to his abdomen while twisting his own gun around to face the second assailant, who he knew would reach him any second.

As he swung the gun out, he felt a sharp pain in his right thigh. He looked down to see a thin metal spike sticking out of his leg and understood, with sudden horror, that the man had let himself be brought down specifically so he could stab him.

Villaverde fired a couple of shots at the second assailant as the man approached from the kitchen, but his vision was already blurring and his muscles relaxing involuntarily. The bullets went wide and missed their target.

He felt himself sliding into sleep, and just before he lost consciousness entirely, he realized it was highly unlikely that he’d be riding the breakers the next morning.