Godchild (13 page)

Chapter 29

The fiesta was all but dead. Now all that could be heard above the hum of swarming insects were the voices coming from Shaw’s little private party on the front lawn.

I didn’t have a lot of time.

I tried the top desk drawer first. When that didn’t work, I went for the side drawer.

Both locked.

The file cabinet too.

But when I looked through the stack of mail laid out nice and neat on the desk, one letter stuck out at me above the bills and correspondence from people and international organizations I had no way of recognizing. A letter from Richard Barnes addressed in an envelope bearing the tin reel and celluloid logo of Reel Productions.

I folded the letter in half, stuck it in my pants pocket.

It was time to get the hell out.

I knew I could always retrieve the fax first thing in the morning under less suspicious circumstances. But when I turned to leave, the door to Shaw’s office opened for me.

Standing in the doorway, the shadowy figure of a man. He stood there, stiff as hell, blocking my path. Not a figure with a recognizable face and clothing, but a dark silhouette.

Then the silhouette took a step inside the office, and the little bit of porch light that leaked in through the glass doors revealed Hudson’s face.

“Calling home?” he asked, the thumb on his left hand jammed into his belt buckle, the fingers on his right tickling the hammer on his ivory-handled six-shooter.

An innocent smile. “My man in New York, if you want to know the truth.”

“Who might that be?” He walked over to his desk, sat down behind it, turned on the desk lamp. In the lamplight that poured down out of the lamp shade, I could make out the hard contours of his face, now made harder by the thin layers of black stubble.

“Tony Angelino,” I volunteered, standing still and stiff— nonthreatening—in the middle of the office floor.

“Oh yes, Tony Angelino and his famous Guinea Pigs,” Shaw said, taking me a little by surprise at the mention of the Pigs. He sat way back in his chair, setting the heels of his boots up on the wood desk. He unlocked the drawers using the keys on his key ring. He set the keys down, slid out the bottom right-hand drawer, and pulled out a bottle of Jose Cuervo along with a large plastic Baggie filled with some pretty heavy-duty-looking marijuana buds. “Don’t look so surprised,” he went on. “Mr. Barnes has told me much about his lawyer. In fact, he discusses him very specifically in that letter you have in your pocket. A letter that also contains, among other monies, my advance for services rendered in the eventual rescue of his wife, Renata.”

My heart jumped then.

“Go ahead, Mr. Marconi. Open up the envelope. See for yourself.”

I was caught between the rock and a hard place.

I knew that if I just picked the letter out of my pocket, laid it back down on his desk without having read it, I’d never have the satisfaction of knowing what it might tell me. But then, if I called his bluff, actually looked it over, and it truly turned out to be a personal check for services rendered and nothing more, I’d come off looking like the sneaky, suspicious son of a bitch that I was.

A no-win situation. Either way.

I pulled the envelope out of my pocket, tossed it back onto his desk.

I tried to work up a smile. Penitent as hell. “Can’t blame a guy for trying, can you, Shaw?”

“No. But I can blame him for sticking his nose where it does not belong.”

I sat down in one of the wood chairs set in front of Hudson’s desk.

He waved his right hand over the plastic bag. “Smoke?”

I shook my head.

“Too bad,” he said. “Very high grade. The best. Rarely acquired north of, say, Amarillo.”

“I get crazy,” I said. “Paranoid.”

“So I’ve heard,” he said, tapping his right temple with his index finger.

There it was: the old internal organ slide. The lower abdominal pain that made me feel like my insides were going to spill out onto the floor.

“I know all about the Buick that killed your wife,” he said. “And how you might have seen one just like it on Saturday. I know all about the wedding you skipped and the little tantrum you had at that bar up in Albany. And now it appears you’re dead.”

I swallowed something hard and bitter.

He opened up the bottom whiskey drawer, pulled out a folded copy of the previous day’s
Times-Union
.

“Can’t.…blame … a … guy … for … trying,” he mimicked, a fake contrite smile plastered on his face.

Shaw had been running his own little investigation into me.

That much was obvious now.

“Right now I’m safer dead than alive,” I said.

“Aren’t we all?” he said.

I stuck my hand out, waved it over the newspaper. “But all this is strictly a personal matter,” I added.

He put the paper back in the drawer. “Yes,” he said. “Death is a private affair for us all. In the end.” He held up the Baggie with his fingertips. “Sure you won’t reconsider?”

“What do you know about the black Buick?” I asked.

“Not a goddamned thing,” he said. “Other than what I’ve been told by Mr. Barnes. Which is nothing more than what I just told you.”

He replaced the bag in his desk drawer and brought out two clear sipping glasses.

“You don’t smoke either?” I asked him.

“Never touch the stuff,” he said, reaching over the desk with the tequila bottle, pouring us a single shot apiece. “Like you, it makes me lose all semblance of reality. And when you’re in the business I’m in, it is important to keep your head firmly in place.”

I took a couple of steps forward, reached for the drinking glass on the desktop. I lifted it up to chest height, tipped it in his direction, downed it in one quick swallow. Then I set the empty glass back down on the desk.

“And what business is that, Shaw?” I asked, feeling the slow but soothing burn of the Mexican whiskey.

He pulled back his own shot and immediately poured us both another. “I’m surprised Mr. Barnes has not informed you about my business ventures.”

“He told me you collect antiques, or buried treasure or some such shit,” I said. “And that on occasion, when the treasure business gets a little slow, you act as a —let’s say— travel guide.”

“You don’t believe our employer?” This time he handed me the drinking glass from across his desk.

First I looked down into the golden-colored whiskey. Then I looked back at him, at his face in the white lamplight. “I guess it doesn’t matter what I think or what I suspect about you or your business. What matters is that you have something planned for our little daylight raid.”

He laughed a little and rolled the glass around in his right hand.

“You assume that because I live south of the border and that because I have a protected ranch and a few connections, I am a drug dealer. Or perhaps an agent for the Contreras Brothers.” He downed his shot while maintaining that smile, then ran his open hand through his cropped salt-and-pepper hair.

Now I was rolling the empty sipping glass around in my right hand. “Like I said, it doesn’t matter so long as you do your job.”

“You’re forgetting that Mr. Barnes is the boss, Mr. Marconi,” he said, pouring yet another shot, setting the bottle on the far edge of the desk, for me to help myself. “The man who is paying not only me but Tony Angelino
and
yourself.” His face went taut in the lamplight as he pulled the six-shooter out of his holster, aimed it directly at my face. “And if I ever catch you sneaking around my office again, I’ll blow your fucking brains out all over the ceiling. Am I clear on this?”

“Crystal.”

I know when it’s time to surrender.

I stood up gently, held out my hands, even with my waist. “Take it easy, Shaw,” I said, gently taking hold of the tequila bottle by the neck with my right hand, my empty sipping glass in my left as if to pour another drink. “Don’t you know when a man is trying to protect his ass — ”

I tossed the glass at his head and smashed the whiskey bottle on the edge of the desk.

He fired off a round into the ceiling just as I slipped around behind him, bringing the jagged edge of the bottle up against the soft underside of his neck.

The office door shot open.

The Mexican guard wearing the old leather vest came rushing in.

Did the son of a bitch sleep?

He gripped a black-plated .9-millimeter in his right hand. He aimed it at my forehead.

I could feel Shaw tensing up in my arms. I could feel his heart beating, could feel his Adam’s apple pressing up against the inside of my forearm when he swallowed. He spoke something to Old Leather Vest in a gentle voice and set the six-shooter down flat on the desk, pushing it away.

I guess he knew when to surrender too.

Because he held up his hands.

Old Leather Vest, in turn, looked at me with boiling black eyes. He wasn’t about to surrender. Unless Shaw ordered him to do so. Which was my only hope.

“Tell him to get the hell out, Shaw,” I said, pushing the jagged edge of the bottle even harder against his throat. “Do it now.”

“You going to cut me open?” he said. “You need me to help you break into that prison tomorrow.”

“Try me,” I said, applying so much pressure the bottle verged on breaking the skin, if it hadn’t already.

“Take it easy, man,” he said, his voice reduced to a scratchy whisper.

“Tell him,” I shouted.

He whispered something in Spanish.

The vest man aimed the piece at my head. His hand was shaking. His index finger was wrapped around the trigger. He might take me out, but Shaw was going with me.

But after a second or two he eyed me up and down, the same way he had when I’d first arrived at the entrance gates that afternoon. A sour, disgusted look. He replaced the .9-millimeter back inside his belt and walked out, closing the door behind him.

I pulled the bottle away from Shaw’s neck and tossed it inside the fireplace, where it shattered.

Then I grabbed the six-shooter before he had the chance.

I moved around to the front of the desk, pulled up a chair, sat down.

“Now,” I said, setting the piece on my lap, “what the hell is your plan, Mr. Hudson?”

Chapter 30

When it is over and the soldier is gone, she lies on her back on the concrete floor, her jumper in a crumpled heap beside her. She is listening to Roberto’s sobs.

She, on the other hand, does not cry.

Unlike the man in the cell beside her, she doesn’t care.

She doesn’t care that she’s naked; she doesn’t care that they hurt her for answers she cannot possibly give them.

She sets her mind to thinking about other things. About the future. A possible future.

The new book, for instance. She is thinking about the new book she has been working on that resides in a secret place inside her home office. A book so secret not even Richard or her editor knows about it. She won’t even write it on a computer for fear it will get into the wrong hands.

The book is about Charlie. The book that will tell the true story about his death, about how it really happened. About who is responsible, and why. The book she lives for now.

Now she doesn’t care if she lives or dies.

But what she does care about is staying alive long enough to tell her story. Charlie’s story. No matter who it will hurt in the end. No matter who it will destroy.

The real story.

Chapter 31

“To be perfectly honest, Mr. Marconi,” Shaw said, breaking the label on a second bottle of tequila, “I don’t really have a solid plan.”

There it was again.

The old intestine slide. In just a few short hours I was expected to break into a major maximum-security prison, and my guide —the man I was supposed to entrust my life with —had no solid plan.

What he did have was a talent for throwing parties.

He shook his head and laughed.

“Everybody down here likes to laugh at everything that’s not funny,” I said.

“You have completely misunderstood me, Mr. Marconi.” He poured another shot. “In a real way, this plan, as you call it, has already begun.” He drank the shot. “What do you think this little party was all about tonight? To welcome you to Mexico?”

Laughing.

“I have no idea.”

“Those finely dressed men whom you surely noticed standing on my lawn tonight, drinking my liquor, eating my food. They were not my friends.” He made quotation marks with his fingers when he said “friends.”

He poured some more tequila.

“They were, in fact, your kind of people, Mr. Marconi.  Half the support staff of Monterrey Prison, including Warden Castillo himself. The man with the bandaged hand.”

I pictured the man with the injured hand. The one with the heavy mustache, who drank whiskey directly from the bottle. He was a warden. Just like me.

Once upon a lifetime.

Maybe I assumed Shaw had just wanted to have a good time tonight at the risk of blowing the operation. But if he was telling the truth (and let’s face it, I had no real reason to doubt he was telling the truth), then it was entirely possible he’d already secured our way in and out of Monterrey Prison the easiest and safest way possible: not by bribing the guards, but by bribing the hell out of their bosses —the corrections staff.

I stood up, set Shaw’s six-shooter back down on his desk, held out my right hand.

Shaw took it.

“My apologies,” I said.

“No harm done,” he said, slipping the piece back into his holster. “At least not to me.”

What he meant by that, I had no idea.

Sitting back down. “So what did these men promise you?”

“The short of it is this,” he said. “In the morning, I will have a team of excavators on the west end of the prison, supposedly in search of an old Huichol Indian find supposedly buried at the base of the cliffs. For this operation, I have full permission from Warden Castillo. In the meantime, I will have gun emplacements set along the cliff top —sharp-shooters with their sights set on which prison guards we suspect will remain true to their cause should the worst begin to occur.”

“What do you mean by ‘the worst’?”

“If all goes sour and we are forced to shoot our way out.”

“That could be a problem.”

“Indeed, but then, it should not be a problem, because we are guaranteed access to the prison administration building.”

“And how are you planning that?”

“One of my men will cut his hand and demand to see the prison doctor, who is located in the basement of administration. Since the buildings and cell blocks are connected by a series of underground tunnels and concrete passageways, we will make our way over to Cell Block A, grab hold of Renata, bring her back through into the medical unit, dress her in workmen’s clothes, make her out to be one of our workers. From there we simply walk her out through the front gate, slip her into my Land Rover, and get her the hell out.”

“And the warden knows about our plans for breaking Renata out?”

“Not exactly,” Shaw said, waving his hands in the air. “But I suspect he has his suspicions —suspicions he’s willing to overlook, so long as the price is right. These men will do just about anything for money, you see.”

“Price,” I said, “as in the money you’re paying him to look the other way.”

“Not my money.” He lifted the now slightly mutilated Reel Productions envelope from off his desk, waved it in the air like a small flag. “Barnes’s money, of course.”

Shaw sat back in his chair, stared into his sipping glass. “There are, however, two problems that bother me at present.”

“What’s that?” I said.

“First of all,” he said, “we could have some trouble navigating the underground tunnels of the prison compound. After all, Mr. Marconi, there are no maps or plans available.”

The ringer on Shaw’s fax machine going off.

“Correction, Shaw,” I said. “A blueprint
does
exist.”

From where I sat I spotted the first page of Tony’s fax now appearing.

“You can’t possibly have a plan of Monterrey,” Shaw said, sitting up in his chair, elbows on the desktop.

“Not exactly,” I said. “But I do have a layout of Attica State Prison in upstate New York.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Yesterday afternoon I noticed that Monterrey and Attica were nearly identical in their construction and setup. Which leads me to believe that the Monterrey people commandeered the actual design for their own purposes. It doesn’t mean the basement layout is the same, but there’s a pretty good shot that it is. So I had Angelino round me up a layout of Attica’s basement.”

Shaw smiled, pulled out another sipping glass, filled it with a little tequila, set it on the edge of his desk. “One last drink, in the name of renewed friendship.”

I took the glass in hand. Together we drank down the tequila while the last page of the fax appeared. A small beep followed, indicating the transmission’s end.

Out beyond the French doors, a hint of a rising sun on the horizon.

I stood up. “Maybe we should try and get some sleep,” I said.

“Sleep would be good,” Shaw said, standing up from his chair, coming around the desk, “if it weren’t for that second problem.”

“What second problem?” I asked.

“Remember I told you there were
two
problems that had me bothered?”

“What’s the second problem?”

“Let’s take a walk upstairs,” he said. “Perhaps you can tell me.”