The Pallbearers

Chapter 58

"I want to talk to Mesa," I said once O'Shea was inside. "I know he's here."

"Gene doesn't waste time on dead men." He walked to a cabinet, pulled out his monogrammed gym bag, and started to leave.

"If Mesa intends to get past this stupid mess you've made, Rick, he needs to hear what I have to say."

He stopped at the door and looked back. "Right, I'm stupid and you're over there looking like an ad for adhesive tape. I gotta go get ready for tonight, but an hour from now you and me have an appointment. Sit on this guy 'til I get back, Jack."

He was almost out the door when I said, "The FBI already knows all about this. They have warrants. It changes everything."

O'Shea stopped again, his back to me. Then he slowly turned.

"The FBI can't do nothin' on Indian land," he said. "A reservation is like another country." A crafty, dumb look came into his eyes. "They got a treaty with the U. S. government or something. This place has its own courts and laws. Federal warrants are toilet paper here. We got immunity. The feds can't touch us. Nobody can."

"You shouldn't be practicing law without a license, Rick. You better let Mesa make that decision. At least he knows what he's doing."

O'Shea dropped his gym bag, crossed the room, cocked a fist, and shook it in my face.

"I see it, but hitting me won't solve this. You better be smart for once and tell Mesa. That's just the teaser. I've got more information to trade. He needs to hear it all."

"I'm totally on this guy, Ricky," Jack said. "I think you should go tell Gene. I got my own trouble with the FBI. Last thing I need is a buncha frisbees showing up."

"Mesa ain't gonna talk to you," O'Shea blustered. But he looked less sure. He crossed to the sliding-glass door and motioned to a new guard who had joined the other outside. This second man was much older and looked more competent. He had chevrons stitched on the sleeve of his rent-a-cop uniform.

"Hey, Arturo, get your ass in here and help Jack watch this turd." A minute later, the older, tougher-looking Indian guard entered the room with his gun out and stood by the door. As soon as he was inside, O'Shea snatched up his gym bag and left.

It was six forty. Nobody said anything. Jack and I watched the clock on the pool-house wall hit seven, then seven ten. The armed guard remained at the door, never taking his eyes off me.

Calabro had said that Mesa was upstairs getting ready for the event. But after half an hour had passed, I was beginning to wonder if O'Shea had even bothered to deliver my message.

Five minutes later, the glass door on the pool house slid open and E. C. Mesa stepped into the room. He was dressed all in black with his hair in a short ponytail. He looked like a crushed-down Steven Seagal.

"What's all this bullshit about the federal government?" he said. "I'm not wanted for any crime so the FBI hardly concerns me."

"But it concerns him," I said and nodded at Rick O'Shea, who had just slipped through the sliding-glass door and was standing in the pool house next to the older Indian guard.

"Let me worry about him," Mesa said.

"He's gonna get arrested. The FBI has a warrant. It's never a good idea to have a stupid accomplice standing between you and a DA. He'll start making selfish decisions."

"Rick, take Jack and Arturo outside for a minute," Mesa ordered.

O'Shea didn't move, but Jack pushed away from the bar and sauntered across the room. As Jack passed the Irish fighter, he said, "Let's go, dude. Orders." He pulled the slider closed after the three of them left. But they didn't go far. I could see them standing just outside the glass door.

Mesa and I were alone. He moved closer, stopping three feet away. "Your meeting," he said.

"He's wanted for murder," I said. "O'Shea killed Walter Dix. The arrest warrant has already been issued by an L. A. judge. When he crossed out of state and onto this reservation, it got turned over to the FBI. The feds will get the Tohono police to serve it. My guess is when Rick sees what a deep hole he's in, he's gonna fall all over himself giving you up, Gene. I don't think it's a good idea to add kidnapping and murder to this mess. Work with me and I'll work with you."

I still didn't know what the hell was going on with this guy. I couldn't figure out why an obviously astute, self-made billionaire who bought and sold huge companies all over the world was making what appeared to be so many stupid, emotional mistakes. There had to be a reason, and it had to come from somewhere deep inside him. However, he didn't seem too concerned with my threat.

"What I don't get is why you went after Walt Dix," I continued, trying to get him talking. "What could be in that Huntington House embezzlement for you?"

Mesa said nothing.

"You couldn't possibly care about a crummy one point five million dollars. There had to be something else." His expression remained blank. Now he wasn't even looking at me. His gaze had shifted to the plate-glass window and the three men standing just outside the closed sliding-glass door. "You surfed with him, right? Long boards."

After I said that, he shifted his weight and seemed to tense. When he turned back to me, his expression had changed slightly. There was a new tightness at the corners of his mouth and around his eyes. But still he said nothing.

"Those cigar-box boards are a bitch to stay up on," I said. "I know, 'cause I tried." I still had no idea where the hell this was leading, but I could tell it was upsetting him so I kept going. "Seal Beach. Six in the morning, right? Up by the Municipal Pier just before sunup, you and Walt kneeling in the sand with a buncha little kids. Walt timing the AWPs."

Mesa just stood there, but now his whole body was rigid. His dark face began to flush with blood. A vein started pulsing in the center of his forehead.

"You two musta been the only guys around who could stay up on a cigar box. Nose always pearling. Hard as shit to cut back on. I couldn't do it. Walt taught you, right? That was his thing, always helping the other guy."

Now Mesa's face twitched. "Shut the fuck up," he hissed angrily.

"So I'm right about that. He taught you to ride boards like he taught all of us. You met him before dawn at Ninth Street, tapping the source. So why steal from him? Why send O'Shea to kill him?"

"I didn't send Rick to kill him," Mesa said sharply. "It was a mistake."

"When you make a guy write a phony suicide note then blow his head off with a shotgun, it's hard to call it a mistake," I said.

His face was getting redder. His jaw clenched. He didn't say anything more for almost a full minute, and I just stood there and watched him smolder. When he did talk, he changed the subject.

"You don't have anything that can hurt me," he began. "Even if you have a federal warrant for Ricky, all I have to do is get him across the reservation border into Mexico and that ends it. A little cash in the right hands down there and your warrant or any extradition gets crushed. As long as O'Shea doesn't do anything stupid, it's finished. If he screws up, he'll disappear. Nobody will ever see him again. Simple."

"Nothing in life is that simple, Gene."

"O'Shea's the one who killed Walt. So how's that my fault? I wasn't even there. It's on him, not me."

"That's gonna depend on how Rick decides to tell it," I said. "And then you got this multiple-kidnapping charge. You're holding four people at gunpoint against our will. If we end up dead, it's murder. Who you gonna blame for that?"

"You got lost wandering around out here at night, ended up on the wrong side of the border, got shot by cartel drug smugglers. I know how to control Mexican jurisprudence. I've got connections down there. It's not even close to being a problem."

I didn't like the sound of that. There's a lot of police corruption in the border provinces of Mexico, and with the right connections, my guess was he might actually pull that off.

"You've got nothing, Scully. I'm wasting my time talking to you." He turned and walked to the door but stopped unexpectedly and turned back. He had something more he wanted to say but was struggling to get it out.

"You probably loved Walt," he began. His voice was thick with emotion. "You were too fucking gullible to see what a selfish, egocentric prick he really was."

"Selfish?"

"All that cheap Zen philosophy, talking over everyone's head. Trying to make it sound like he had some kind of cosmic answer. Like my life was some kinda journey instead of what it really was-a nightmare created by selfish, angry people who didn't give a shit what happened.

That worked great on most of you, but even back then I knew it. Was psychobabble. I was too smart for Walt's livpe. My mind refused to log bullshit. I was always looking for the real answers. I could see what was really going on. I was too smart for him. Too smart for everybody. That's why I made it from a dirt hut in the desert to the top of corporate America. Nobody understood what I was thinking. I thought Walt did in the beginning, but then I found out he was just another guy with a program, working the system." He stopped talking, but the vein had not stopped pulsing in his forehead.

If I wanted to survive, I needed to get a handle on this guy fast.

"Why were you so angry at Walt? A guv you just surfed with?" I asked.

And then, without warning, he told me.

"Walt caught me stealing once," he said. "After it happened, he took me out to dinner. I remember thinking, What is this? I steal a bunch of money from the home, lie catches me at it, then pays me back by buying me dinner in a big fancy restaurant.

"Asshole that Walt was, of course he had this bullshit Zen lesson for me. We're sitting there over inch-thick steaks, and he tells me that two wolves were fighting over my soul. I'm thinking, wolves? Gimme a fuckin' break. He says one wolf was evil and only wants to eat my heart, but the other was good and was fighting to protect my spirit. I remember getting more pissed by the minute. The guy was patronizing me. It wasn't about that. It was about need. It was about winning; getting the other guy before he could get you. So I finally asked him, Okay, if these wolves are fighting, which wolf will win? You know what he told me?"

"Yeah," I answered. "He said the wolf you feed will win." I remembered the story well. Walt had told it to me the second week I'd been there. The day he'd caught me stealing money from the office.

Mesa was silent for a minute, then he said, "Two months later Walt threw me out. Sent me back to child welfare. I was twelve."

"So you were at Huntington House just like the rest of us," I said.

It was the piece I'd been missing. All along, I'd thought Walt had befriended him as an adult. Now it turned out Eugene Mesa was just another orphan. It was the emotional connection that had caused all of this. Anger, love, and betrayal were driving him. Revenge, not money, was the motive for Pop's murder.

I must have looked shocked because Mesa laughed before saying, "I thought you already knew." "No."

"I was found in an alley in Long Beach by child services when I was nine years old. I lived at Huntington House for three and a half years."

"And that's why you framed him and tried to destroy his reputation? Because he threw you out for stealing?"

"He betrayed me," Mesa said, coldly. "Pop was a fool. After I made it, I called him, set up a meeting. He let me get close to him again all those years later. I formed Creative Solutions and bought Huntington House when he ran out of money in the mid-nineties. All the time I was helping him, he never realized all I ever wanted was to pay him back for what he'd done."

In that instant, I could see Eugene Mesa the way he was as a nine-year-old, full of hatred and fear. He had been exactly like me.

"I feel sorry for you, Gene," I said softly.

"Don't," he said. "As it turned out, I never needed anybody anyway." Then he opened the slider and left me.