Blood of My Brother (23 page)

Inside the station, Isabel found a seat as far away from the milling travelers and scampering children as she could get and still be able to see the glass doors that led to the departure /arrival area. She had slept fitfully on the morning flight from Miami to Merida, and been too busy to think since she landed. Now, sitting on a plastic bench, waiting for Cassio, oblivious to the noise and sweltering heat of the station, the events of the night before organized themselves in her mind: the photo and rapidly concluded discussion in Libby Morales’s basement printshop; threatening Maria with the gun; fleeing; returning to El Pulpo; the agreement reached with Cassio; the look on Angelo’s face when they told him they were leaving immediately for Mexico; Cassio promising to repay the twenty-five hundred dollars, and Morales’s fees, when he returned; her apology—without
tears—to Maria when they returned to pick up Cassio’s passport; the redness of the face of the Irish detective; the drive to the airport; the sleepless waiting; the exhausting plane ride.

They had agreed that separate flights would be safer, that they should not be seen together until they were away from airports and cities. Isabel was free to run when she landed in Merida. She had her fake papers and twenty-two hundred dollars, but Angelo had watched her board her flight, and watched the plane take off, and one call from him, or Cassio, to any number of people—Agent Markey, the police in Merida, the Mexican Justice Department—and she would be quickly caught, and probably killed. She had lived her life in bondage, her one attempt to escape, with Bryce Powers, ending in disaster. And now once again she was shackled, to Cassio, but what choice did she have? An American prison? She had thought him a fool when Maria first mentioned Del Colliano’s lawyer friend, but she was wrong. The look in his eyes as he sat on the floor across from her in her room above El Pulpo was a familiar one. It was the look, a mixture of despair and hatred, that she remembered seeing in her own eyes when she looked in the mirror on a couple of very bad days in the last thirteen years. Days she could have easily killed had she the means.

If Cassio didn’t kill the Feria brothers, he would die as a man. Bryce’s papers would then not be delivered, but Isabel’s desire for revenge grew smaller as her chance for freedom grew larger. She would draw out the Ferias for the handsome, angry lawyer, and be long gone when they arrived. Whatever happened, Isabel would be unshackled, out of bondage, free, for the first time in her life, and she would then do everything in her power to keep it that way.

Spotting Cassio coming through the terminal’s glass doors, a battered canvas knapsack slung over one shoulder,
dark sunglasses hiding his strikingly beautiful gray eyes, Isabel rose to greet him. Watching him as he walked toward her, not yet noticing her, her heart constricted, for, despite his week’s growth of beard and his obvious travel weariness, he was indeed very handsome, as proud and graceful and as sure of himself as a top athlete or a great matador, and Isabel wondered what it would be like to hold him in her arms, to choose him freely as her lover. He saw her, and she put these thoughts aside. In twenty-four hours she would be on her way to Guatemala, and he would be returning to Miami, or dead.

The bullet that put Gary Shaw on his back shattered his collarbone and lodged behind his right shoulder, requiring immediate and extensive reconstructive surgery by a team of specialists at Miami’s Beth Israel Hospital. He was unable to speak intelligently to anyone until Saturday afternoon, when Jack Voynik and Ted Stevens descended on him. Heavily sedated, he managed to tell them that he had gone to meet his friend, Angelo Perna, at El Pulpo for a drink on Friday evening. He was late getting there. When Angelo did not show, he left. On the way to his car he spotted the Feria brothers heading toward the restaurant. He recognized them from the pictures he had seen earlier that day. He confronted them, they drew their guns, he drew his, and shots were exchanged. He went down, and the next thing he knew, Sam Perna was kneeling beside him; then he blacked out.

Shaw’s statement meshed with Sam’s, and there was no one else in the restaurant or the neighborhood who had heard or seen anything unusual. But Chris Markey was suspicious. That morning, when his men had gone to the Silver Sands to begin their stakeout of Cassio, they learned that he had checked out late the night before. Coincidence, maybe, but if Cassio were warned it had to come from someone on
his team, making the local cops—Shaw and Kendall—the likely suspects. Markey ordered his people to find out as much as they could about Angelo and Sam Perna, and to check airport manifests for departures by Cassio and Dunn, and he called a meeting for Sunday morning to plan strategy, which was about to begin. Present in the conference room were Stevens, Voynik, Gatti, Ramirez, and Jack Kendall.

“Let’s start with you, Ted,” Markey said.

“Cassio left on Aeromexico flight 435 for Cancun on Saturday at nine a.m. Dunn we haven’t located yet, but he hasn’t left by a commercial flight. We’re staking out his house in Jersey. Angelo and Sam Perna grew up in Brooklyn. They both served in the Army. Sam moved down here in 1965 and fought professionally for a few years under the name Kid Brooklyn. He’s been bartending ever since. He’s single, never been married, lives on one side of a duplex in Little Havana, his brother and his wife on the other. He was arrested twice for assault in the sixties in Miami Beach, but there were no convictions.”

“And Angelo?” said Markey.

“He was a cop in New York City until 1974, a detective at the end. He quit and moved down here with his brother. He’s had a Florida PI license since 1979, and a carry permit since 1980. No arrests. He married in 1988. The wife is Cuban. She works at the Cuban Cultural Center on Eighth Street, and hostesses at El Pulpo at night. She’s clean. It seems that everybody in Little Havana knows Perna and his wife, and vice versa.”

“Why did he quit?”

“He turned in some cops who were beating on a black kid with a telephone book. He was hounded out.”

“Was the wife working on Friday night?”

“Sam says she took the night off.”

“A Friday night?”

“That’s what he says.”

“Dunn was a New York cop, too.”

“Right. Why don’t we bring Angelo in? He says he’d be happy to talk to us.”

It was no secret that Shaw and Angelo Perna were friends. If Perna and Frank Dunn had a similar relationship, then the dots were easily connected: Shaw to Perna to Dunn/Cassio, making Shaw the traitor. But why would the Feria boys show up at the Pernas’ restaurant, unless they expected to find Isabel there?

“Not yet. I have other plans for him,” said Markey. “How are you guys doing?” This question he addressed to Kendall and Ramirez.

“We’re ready,” said Kendall. “Matt’s going in as a truck driver from Jersey. He’s just been separated from his wife. We have telephone numbers, addresses, an ex-employer—the works—set up to corroborate him if it’s needed. He rented a room today. He’ll start looking for a job tomorrow, doing anything, bartending or bouncing preferably, working the Eighth Street joints, etc.”

“Good. He can start at El Pulpo. The Ferias might have been going in just to ask questions, or they might have tracked Isabel there. I also want him to get a line on Angelo Perna. Was he helping Dunn and Cassio? Did he know Isabel? Was he helping her? Did he know the old guy, Alvaro Diaz? We’ll lay off Angelo for now, make him think the heat is off. Then, if we learn that he was helping Cassio, or he was involved in hiding Isabel, we’ll get him in, let him lie to us, and then put the screws to him.”

“What about Cassio?” said Gatti.

“Are the papers ready?”

“Yes.”

“Deliver them to Mexico City personally. Try to get one of your people attached to the case.”

“They may realize who he is and eliminate him,” said Kendall. “I mean, if Lazaro Santaria is really the top bad guy, he’ll know who Cassio is. He’ll have an accident or something, or be killed ‘while fleeing police officers.’”

“Maybe not,” Markey replied. “The bureaucracy there is unbelievably fucked up. They may just pick him up and hand him to us. If they
do
make the connection, then of course we’ve lost Cassio as a lure for the Feria brothers, but we’d never find him down there ourselves, anyway.”

“And the Feria brothers?” said Gatti. “We can’t exactly ask Lazaro to pick them up—they’re his boys—assuming they’re back in Mexico.”

“We need to do everything we can to pick up their trail ,” Markey answered. “They’ll lead us right to Isabel. We need people on the ground in Mexico City, undercover. The blood on the street doesn’t match Shaw’s so it’s a safe bet one or both of them was hit. Maybe they went home to lick their wounds. If we spot them there, then we have to stay with them at all costs until they locate the woman. Take care of it, Phil. Don’t stint. Any problems with the suits, come to me.”

“And Frank Dunn?” said Voynik.

“Find him, but don’t confront him. We’ll get an order for a phone tap. His connection to Cassio should be enough of a basis. He’s a fugitive. I’d like to tap the Pernas’ phones, too, but first we need something that connects them to Isabel or Cassio. If they’re involved, we’ll arrest them all later, but for now I’m hoping they lead us to Cassio or the woman. There’s one more thing. I don’t want anybody talking to Shaw except me, and I want to know who visits him from the civilian world. Keep the cop by his door, and have him get names and addresses, except for the immediate family.”

“What about the press?” said Stevens. “The guy from the
Herald
called twice this morning.”

“Call him back,” said Markey. “Tell him we’ve traced Cassio to Cancun, and that we’re asking the Mexican government to execute our arrest warrant pursuant to treaty. He was a witness to a murder in New Jersey, and he withheld evidence duly subpoenaed in a second murder investigation. That’s enough sex appeal for another story, I would think. Any questions?”

There were no questions. Markey didn’t expect any. He cared little for Shaw, but there was nothing like a cop getting shot to motivate other cops, so Shaw, whether he was a traitor or not, had made himself useful.

“Where are we going?”

“Here,” said Isabel, handing Jay a map and pointing to a spot toward the right half of Mexico’s twelve-hundred-mile-long southern coast.”

“How far is it?”

“Seven hundred miles, maybe seven fifty.”

They were sitting in the jeep. Jay, behind the wheel, studied the map, their route marked in red pencil. Around them, people were making their way to and from their cars as the late afternoon sun blazed down on them and shimmered off of the asphalt surface of the terminal parking lot in visible waves. Jay had changed into khaki shorts, a T-shirt, and sandals at the airport in Cancun, and had the feeling that he would be getting a lot of use out of this basic outfit. He had made the mistake of taking a second-class bus from Cancun, spending the two hour ride standing in one hundred-degree heat next to a family of six peasants, the parents sullen, their eyes downcast, two of the children carrying chickens in burlap bags. The canvas sides of the jeep were open, but he was still very hot, his long hair matted to the back of his neck with sweat. He could use a shower, but there was no point in wasting time. This was not a vacation.

“Do you know the roads?” he asked.

“No, but the map says they are major highways.”

“What about this stretch here?” Jay said, pointing to an area called the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

“A wasteland, I am told, but the road looks good.”

The quarters were close in the jeep. As Isabel leaned toward him to look at the map, Jay caught the scent of her—sweat and skin lotion—and something else, probably the cologne he had found on her dresser. There was no ignoring her as a woman: her soft, golden olive skin, her breasts pushing against her cotton blouse, the secrets of a lifetime in her blue eyes. Danny had been right about how beautiful she was. For once he wasn’t exaggerating. Danny—always ready to fuck first and ask questions later—had probably sat in a car like this with Isabel, smelled her perfume, maybe even licked away the dampness in the hollow of her throat—and been killed before he could ask any questions. Keep that in mind, Jay thought to himself as he started the jeep and headed toward Calle 65, which would take them to Highway 180, and the first leg of their journey. Highway 180 took them inland and south for fifty miles or so before it swung back to the coast where they would have the Bay of Campeche on their right for about two hundred miles. Night fell as they entered this long stretch of blacktopped road, but there was little relief from the heat or the humidity and no appreciable breeze from the bay, which was dotted with oil rigs rising mutely from the shallow water. Flocks of exotic-looking birds flew across the wide expanse of open water, some landing to perch for a while on the rigs before taking off again en masse at the silent command of the flight leader in their midst. The moon, waxing, just past half full, rose over the bay and followed the jeep as it made its way south along the flat, monotonous coastal plain of the eastern Yucatán.

“Are you tired?” Isabel asked, looking at her watch. It was eight p.m. She had tried to sleep, but the jeep’s hard, bumpy ride made it difficult. They had both been awake for the better part of thirty-six hours.

“I’m okay.”

“I would like to stop to pee.”

“Of course.” And it’s time to talk, Jay thought, before I lose my nerve.

Jay slowed down and pulled the jeep to the right into the sandy scrub that bordered the highway, beyond which, only a few yards away, lay the stony shore and the calm blackness of the bay. Jay watched Isabel walk toward the beach, then turned on the interior light and looked at the map. They had just passed the town of Sabancuy, and had perhaps two hours of driving ahead of them before they reached Villahermosa, a city of two hundred thousand people, where they planned on spending the night. He then checked the box of supplies that Isabel had bought in Merida: bottled water, chocolate, potato chips, six bottles of beer, insect repellent, paper towels. He grabbed one of the beers, turned off the interior light, and headed to the beach.