The Rescue

21

Billy Ray picks up Bettina and Felix at the Queen Palms in the black March morning. She seems anxious and distracted but Billy understands that she just wants to write her stories and have a normal life again. The dog seems on edge too, hypervigilant and all business. Billy has traded shifts to watch over and help Bettina through the day.

So he gets her home to sleep for an hour and a half, sits in the living room while she showers and gets ready, then follows her to the Coastal Eddy building for her usual 8:00 a.m. start.

He goes to the Havana Café across the Coast Highway, where he can see her small cubicle window above the thickening traffic. The coffee here is strong and he pours in lots of warm milk. There’s only one door in and out of Coastal Eddy offices, and Billy’s eyes are glued to it.

“Nice morning,” he says to the guy a few stools down. Barely looks at him he’s so intent on that door.

“Perfect,” says the man.

“Boy, this coffee con leche is strong,” Billy says, sizing the guy up before refocusing on the Coastal Eddy front door. “You a tourist or a local?”

“Just visiting. I live down in San Diego. You?”

“I live here now.”

“I hear some Texas in there.”

“Wichita Falls.”

“Never been.”

“It’s a great town.”

Arnie finally calls back. “You’re damn right the message is real,” he says. “It’s El Gordo. We’ve got everything from text intercepts to voice recordings of him.”

“That’s a pretty risky thing to do — threaten someone and sign your name.”

“He thinks he’s immortal.”

“Maybe he is,” says Billy. “He’s been a fugitive from you guys for fifteen years.”

Silence. “We want Bettina to help us nail the visiting Sinaloans.”

“You’ve already left her in danger. Why should she risk her life for your career?”

“We’ll certainly protect her, Billy. We’re not cold-blooded.”

“If you don’t quit being a condescending asshole to her, she won’t help you one bit.”

“Can you get her to my division office in San Diego? Say noon? I’ve got a plan and some people I’d like you to meet.”

Billy pays up, nods farewell to the stool guy, and jaywalks back across Coast Highway for Bettina.

Less than an hour later, Bettina, Billy, and Felix wait at the entrance gate of the San Diego DEA division office on Viewridge Avenue.

Bettina looks up at the pale flank of the building, almost entirely hidden by a tree-lined battlement studded with forward-pointing steel spears. Wonders why federal buildings have to be so macho. It’s nice to have Billy here.

“Good morning,” he says to the guard. “We’re here for an appointment with special agent Arnie Crumley.”

The guard has an armored DEA Police vest, a buzz cut, and what looks to Bettina like dark snakes tattooed around his thick arms. He eyes them one at a time then takes Billy’s badge wallet and Bettina’s driver’s license back inside the booth.

A short minute later, he’s back with a placard for the pickup truck. “Visitor parking up by the stairs.”

This conference room is small and windowless. White walls, three long tables in a horseshoe, plenty of steel-framed chairs that slide easily on the short green carpet. Bettina notes the clean whiteboards and the many electrical outlets on the walls and floor. There’s a big monitor on a stand at the open end of the horseshoe.

Arnie comes in ahead of a stocky Black woman in a dark suit and a middle-aged white man wearing chinos and a golf shirt and carrying a laptop. Bettina notes that Arnie has traded his undercover border badass look for business casual and a shave.

He introduces his confederates, joining them to face his brother and Bettina across the horseshoe.

Felix lays himself at Bettina’s feet, head up, alert.

The middle-aged man is digital forensic examiner Dale Greene. He has plenty of silver-gray hair, and a face that Bettina instinctively trusts. He opens his computer, taps a few keys, then starts things off.

“This threat would terrify most civilians,” he says. “So Ms. Blazak, I’m glad you have the courage to trust us and help us. Mr. Crumley, thank you for being here too. My section recovers and analyzes digital evidence, determining authenticity for the courts. The first thing I should say is this message was surely written by Alejandro Godoy, Mexico’s most wanted narcotraficante. We’ve been surveilling him, and intercepting some of his digital mail, for years. It’s him, all right, right down to his word choice and misspellings. Some of his recurring favorite topics are here — the Holy Trinity, his family, the high value he places on friendship, the way of peace and the way of pain. We know he’s serious about cash for the dog because four hundred grand is serious money, especially for Godoy. He grew up poor in the Sierra Madre and is a legendary tightwad.”

Chuckles.

Greene touches his computer screen and Alejandro Godoy’s face appears on the big monitor.

Bettina is surprised by how young he looks. His face is impish and his wavy dark hair needs a cut. “How old is he?”

“Forty-eight or — nine. He was born in a clinic that kept poor records. Don’t be fooled by his cute face. We’ve tied him to over a dozen murders, personally. And almost a hundred more, as a coconspirator. The tonnage of illegal drugs he’s freighted into the United States is unknown. What we intercept is impressive. What gets past us is incalculable.”

Bettina watches the slide show with fascination and revulsion:

Alejandro Godoy as a schoolboy, 1983.

In a Culiacan fútbol uniform with a group of other boys, circa 1985.

Teenaged Alejandro Godoy in a panga, holding up a dorado.

And on a horse, with the enormous Copper Canyon behind him, a place Bettina recognizes from having been there just after college.

El Gordo in the mountains, skinny and shirtless, cradling an AK-47, his narrow shoulders draped with ammunition belts, a cigar in his mouth.

Young El Gordo in a wedding photo with his young wife.

“Now, this is Godoy christening the school he built in Creel, not far from where he grew up,” says Greene. “Taken just a couple years ago. He’s been grooming his Robin Hood legend with the locals since his first crimes, which were robbing tourists in the Copper Canyon railroad on horseback — outlaw style — I kid you not. He’s built two schools, a medical clinic, and a church — all in towns high in the Sierra Madre. He’s also got modest homes and small compounds throughout the Sinaloa mountains. He moves around a lot. He’s not flashy. It’s safe to say he believes his own myth.”

Bettina feels an uncomfortable silence in the room as the slide show abruptly shifts to carnage:

Bloody bodies heaped by a roadside.

Piled in a van.

Stacked like cordwood in a lake of blood on a dirt road.

Headless bodies.

Bodiless heads.

Plastic drums with their lids off and vaguely recognizable human parts suspended in liquid.

“Hydrochloric acid doesn’t eat the plastic,” says Arnie. “They use steel drums for burials at sea, because HCI disintegrates the metal along with the body. All evidence destroyed. But really, they’re happy to litter the country with bodies. It sends the right signals.”

“Why show me all of this?” she asks.

“So you know who you’re dealing with,” says Arnie.

Bettina feels not just revulsion but sharp fear that El Gordo’s people are in Laguna, waiting to buy Felix and vanish with him forever. She feels the horror of having been personally contacted by a monster, El Gordo himself. She feels like he’s invaded her. Can feel him inside, jagged and breath-robbing, like the virus in her dad. Which makes her remember the bagged bodies in the refrigeration vans and the mass graves and the flaming pyres in India during the worst of that year.

“Um, I need to step out for a sec,” she says. “Felix, sit and stay.”

“Come with me, Bettina,” says Special Agent Ladonna Powers, who rounds the tables through Felix’s soft whimpers, takes Bettina by the arm, and steers her to the bathroom.

Where she makes it to the closest stall, throws up, lowers the lid, sits down, and tries to breathe slowly and deeply. Tries to slow her galloping pulse.

“I’m okay, Agent Powers.”

“It’s Ladonna, and you are definitely not okay.”

“I’m better.”

“Sit and breathe, girl. I won’t leave you alone.”

Bettina’s heart beats shallow and fast. “I don’t know how I’m going to help you, but I’ll do anything on earth to keep those people away from my dog and me.”

“That’s why we’re here, Bettina. We exist to make that happen.”

“I have never once backed down from a fight. I like fights. But what I saw in there scared the living shit out of me.”

“Me too. It always does. Sometimes I look at that stuff just to remind me who I am and why I do what I do.”

“I want to be a special agent too.”

“We’re hiring.”

“Nah. No. I want to be a writer more.”

“World needs writers too.”

“Okay. I’m okay now. I’m coming out.”

Back in the conference room, LaDonna takes over.

“Our counter-op starts when El Gordo contacts you again,” she says. “He’ll do it soon. And so long as he believes that his pen pal really is you, Bettina, and you’re playing fair with him, he’ll keep his people under control.”

“Who are they?” asks Bettina.

“Joaquín Páez and Valeria Flores,” says Arnie. “A horse breeder and a hotelier. Married, a handsome couple, good English. Way up the Sinaloan chain, close to Godoy. Charged with international narcotics distribution five years ago, both acquitted. They’re money people, not in the muscle end of things. They launder cash, make investments, create and disband entities and accounts, as needed. They’ve got Southern California connections in the horse racing and hospitality industry. Horses and hotels. We’re a little surprised that they’ve been dispatched here to buy your dog.”

Felix looks at Bettina.

“They’ve been on our wish list for years,” says Arnie. “They’ll follow El Gordo’s orders until they get Joe. After that, anything can happen.”

Bettina’s foggy shock has lifted and she’s starting to feel the old fight coming back, her spark and flame and fire. “What do you mean by anything?”

Hearing her change of tone, Felix sits and looks up at her.

LaDonna is blunt and to the point:

“They might already be under orders to kill you both rather than pay the money. Godoy says he wants to use the dog against his enemies, but really, what does that mean? It’s the weakest part of his pitch. Whereas killing Joe is satisfactory revenge, and much easier. He can post it all on the Blog Narco: ‘The Robin Hood of Sinaloa Bares His Fangs!’”

Again, Bettina feels that light patter of heart, chokes back her disgust. “El Gordo would do that? This God-fearing family man, dog lover, friend maker? Slaughter a woman and a dog for revenge? For his losses? His hurt pride?”

“We can’t know what he’ll do,” says Arnie.

“I agree,” says Dale Greene.

“We have to assume the worst,” says Powers. “So our job is to make El Gordo believe that Bettina trusts him, is motivated by the money, and willing to deliver Joe to them. When you get your orders from El Gordo, we’ll be locked, loaded and everywhere. This is what we train for.”

Billy gives the agents a skeptical once-over. “Why can’t you keep Bettina out of this, just handle it yourself? Use an agent as a stand-in. She isn’t bait.”

Bettina sees the emotion on his face. And she knows that Billy — all of them — see the emotion on hers. She’s still clammy and cold from vomiting and fear. Weak. She breathes deeply, trying to will herself into calm action, as she so often has. “I’m all the way in on this, Billy. You know that.”

“Yeah, I do.”

“We can’t fake you, Bettina,” says Powers. “You’re a known quantity, recognizable. You are our voice, and our face. You can control Felix. We’re honored you brought this to us. We’re honored to be trusted by you. Mr. Crumley, we’ll guard this woman with our lives, and we may need your help.”

“You’ll have it.”

“El Gordo will contact you,” says Powers. “Bettina, let’s get some numbers into your phone. I don’t have to tell you to keep it charged, on, and on you every second of your day. It’s good to move around, and stay away from home and work. It’s good to assume that Joaquín and Valeria are waiting and probably watching. Don’t be more than an hour away from home by car. When El Gordo moves, you will need to be close.”

On the drive back to Laguna, Billy offers three times to “shadow” Bettina whenever he’s not on duty. He doesn’t want her alone for a second.

“No,” she says. “I can’t have you breathing down my neck, Billy. I can take care of myself. I do appreciate your concern and I promise not to do anything stupid. So thank you.”

“Okay.”

“You’ll try to shadow me anyway, won’t you?”

“Well, I just might.”

“Thanks for your honesty. But don’t.”

Joe feels the intense seriousness between Bettina and Billy, but he can’t understand their words.

All he gets is that something is going to happen and it could be a bad thing or a good thing, and there would be seriousness in it.

Work, like with Dan or Aaron.

Work, like when it was loud and his leg was hurt and the boy carried him to the Good Man.

Something is going to happen and Joe understands that he and Bettina will be a part of it.