Saturday morning early the Field Office was quiet. Holsten had stopped on the way in at the day-old bakery he frequented. Croissants, muffins, and cookies sat on a white paper plate. Next to the plate was an unopened quart of orange juice and paper cups. It was much more than the two of them would eat and Holsten explained before Marquez asked.
‘Agents Javits and Steiner are on their way here. We’re going to reorganize this morning. I’ve got to go get something out of my car. Tell them the food is for everybody if they get here before I get back.’
When Sheryl walked in she said, ‘He called me late last night and said be here at 8:00.’
Steiner, it turned out, thought he was going to be promoted, not transferred to the one squad that was falling apart. He looked angry as Holsten delivered the news. Boyer, Group 5’s ASAC, was home sick with the flu, but Holsten made it clear the changes weren’t Boyer’s anyway.
‘They’re mine,’ he said. ‘Agent Marquez you’re relieved of your supervision duties. Agent Javits you’ll work with your ASAC and eventually be squad leader. Marquez you’ll work undercover locally with Agent Steiner.’ He nodded toward Steiner. ‘Tom is an old friend of mine. We started at the DEA together. We go back that far. He’s transferring to your squad as of this morning.’
Nobody said anything and Holsten stared at Marquez.
‘Agent Marquez, we’re going to send a strong message, starting with the hippie tour boat operators you’re already watching. Monday morning I want to know how we’re going to bust them.’ He paused. ‘What do you call them, again?’
When Marquez didn’t answer, Sheryl volunteered, ‘The Fab Four, but it’s a joke.’
‘We’ll call this Operation Fab Four. This is where we start to rebuild Group Five.’
The meeting ended twenty minutes later. That afternoon Marquez bought flowers from a florist near his apartment and then drove to the Osiers’ house with the big vase and lilies filling his car with fragrance. Last night he’d written a letter that he now gave to Jim’s oldest son, telling the boy that the letter was for his mother and for himself and his two brothers. He came home to his empty apartment and the Saturday mail that included a small package with two micro-cassettes and a one-phrase note in Billy Takado’s handwriting on a piece of lined paper.
‘In case something happens to me. Billy.’
For a minute Marquez didn’t move and then dug in his gear bag for his recorder. He locked the door and closed the slider to the deck, then put the tape labeled #1 in and stood the little recorder on a kitchen counter.
‘I’m making these tapes and giving them to a friend to mail to you. There’s a guy named Emrahain Stoval. I saw him yesterday. He was with the Salazars at that restaurant I told you about in Tijuana and he didn’t see me, but if he does I’m dead.
‘In 1971 I was a twenty-two year old hunting guide with a small business in San Fernando, Mexico. Mostly, I guided dove hunts. Some of my clients were Mexicans and some came down from Brownsville. My father was Japanese, my mother Mexican, maybe I told you that once. My mother came from San Fernando and there was a lot of white-wing dove in that area. Flying knuckleballs is what they got called and you could shoot what you wanted, so it drew plenty of hunters. I had a good business and I was in love and engaged to get married. Her name was Rosalina and she was everything to me.
‘One day Stoval showed up. He was a big wing hunter and we got to be friends and he had a lot of money and pretty soon he was taking me places I could never have gone on my own. He had all kinds of money and liked to hunt with me, so we went all over the world. Africa, Asia, everywhere. We left for Canada and a bear hunt the day Rosalina disappeared. I was one of the last people to see her alive. Her body turned up on a dirt road out near a farm in Tamaulipas and that’s pretty much where my life ended. She’d been raped and strangled and the federales didn’t have any suspects so started looking at me. They thought I killed her before I left.
‘They would have charged me, but Stoval backed them off. He hired a good lawyer. He knew the right people to call and he even paid for a beautiful headstone. He was my only real friend and he got me back to work guiding again. He’d come into town and check on me every month or two, or he’d call me. He invested money in my business and I hired other guides and Stoval was my silent partner. That’s how he works. He’s like a disease you get and the symptoms show up gradually.
‘One morning we were sitting in a duck blind and I told him we needed more money to start bringing in richer clients. I wanted to build cottages and a hunter’s bar and restaurant.’
Billy coughed. A glass touched a counter and Marquez heard Billy swear as something spilled. No doubt a drink from his slowed voice.
‘He listened to me and said we could do it, but it was a lot of money and it was going to change our relationship. He’d become the real owner. I’d still have a share and I’d make a much better living, but I’d be working for him. Man, I was just a kid and trying to get over Rosalina and I trusted him – I wasn’t always the mess I am now. We made the deal and bought a new bus to bring rich Texans down. They liked the idea of being able to drink on the bus and not have to drive in Mexico. We got the bus and built the cottages and the restaurant and by then I knew what he was doing with me. It was what he’d been doing from the start and I hadn’t realized it. He broke me down a little at a time until I was just a servant to him. He started talking to me like he owned me. Once after a hunt he had me wait outside with the dogs.
‘The bus got a special compartment so it could carry cocaine under the bed. He showed that to me after he got me hooked on coke. My job was to take the bus to a mechanic’s shop on every run north. They’d unload it there. We went three or four years that way, but I got myself off coke and I watched how people he didn’t like disappeared. I started making a plan and one day after dropping the bus at the mechanic’s, I walked out and didn’t stop until I got to California.
‘I heard later that he put out a contract on me so I hid for a long time, and eventually enough years went by that I stopped worrying. But it’s not like I ever stopped watching. When I saw him yesterday I knew he’d still kill me if he could because I’ve told people he killed Rosalina. I never had any proof. I just knew.
‘I’m going ahead with the meeting at the bull ring with you because that’s the deal, and he won’t be there. But the brothers know him, so I’ve got to take off, man. I’ve got to go a long way away. You’re getting these tapes so you know nothing bad happened to me. I left these with a friend and asked her to mail them. I’ll get back in touch with you sometime, but it might be a while. You always treated me fair and never made me feel like something that should be wiped off a shoe. You take care, John. Sorry to skip out on you.’
Marquez clicked off the recorder, opened a beer, sat out on the deck and thought it over. By the time he called Kerry Anderson’s home number it was 2:10 in the morning on the east coast and he woke Anderson up. But Anderson didn’t mind and even thanked him. He said, ‘I need you to send me those tapes.’