Текст книги "January Justice"

January Justice

Published by Author Author, Inc.

Laguna Niguel, California

All Scripture quotations are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV® Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc.® Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide.

Apart from historical references to people and events, the characters and events in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental.

ISBN-13 978-0-9854302-8-3

Copyright © 2013 by Author Author. Inc

Cover art © 2013 by Author Author, Inc.

Cover design by Cory Clubb

www.coryclubb.com

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data on file with the Library of Congress, www.loc.gov.

“Justice, justice shall you pursue.”

Deuteronomy 16:20

1

One of the strangest things about the city was the sudden way it disappeared around the edges. One minute you were down on Sunset Boulevard surrounded by glass and concrete, and the next thing you knew you were up on Mulholland Drive, alone in the rough country. From a high window or a rooftop almost anywhere in Los Angeles you could see the mountains, and there was always something ravenous up there looking down.

I was up among the hungry creatures, standing at the edge of a cliff, with Hollywood and Santa Monica far below me in the distance. One step forward and I would be in midair. I was looking down and wondering if Haley had considered how suddenly you could go from city to wilderness. Then I wondered if it was a distinction without a difference, if the city might be the wilderness and the wilderness the city, and maybe Los Angeles’s edges seemed to disappear so suddenly because there really was no separation between sidewalks and mountain paths, buildings and boulders. Up in the mountains or down in the city, either way the carnivores were in control.

I imagined Haley, out of her mind, running full speed off the cliff. I wondered what it had been like, that final second or two before she hit. Had she realized what was happening? Did she recognize the city lights below for what they were, or did she really think she was flying toward the stars? And did she think of me?

Stepping closer to the edge, I slid the toes of my shoes into the air. I looked down two hundred feet, toward the spot where she had broken on the rocks. I stood one inch from eternity and tried to imagine life without her. I could not summon up a single reason why I shouldn’t take that final step, except for one. I thought about the kind of animal who would drive someone to do what my wife had done. Predators like that were everywhere. I should know. I had trained for half my life to be one of them. I was hungry, looking down on the city. If I was going to live, the hunger would have to be enough, for now. But I would sink my teeth into him, sooner or later. I would do that for Haley, and for myself, and then maybe it would be my turn to see if I could fly.

I stepped back from the edge.

Studying the ground, I walked slowly back toward the limousine. There were no signs of the trailers or equipment that had been in place that night, or of the people in the production crew. There was no indication anywhere of what had happened. If the police had missed anything useful, nature had removed it. Seven months was a long time in the wilderness.

Still, there was no place else to look, and giving up felt like a betrayal, so I walked around that level place another hour, searching every inch between the cliff edge and the place on the far side of the road where the mountainside continued its steep climb toward the sky. The only signs of humanity were the road itself and the usual things people threw out of the windows of their cars. Finally I got behind the wheel of my Mercedes limo. It was an open question whether I should have been driving. Colors still seemed brighter than normal, and sounds were still too loud. Sometimes I still saw things that most people would agree were not actually there. But I turned the key, pulled onto Mulholland, and descended toward the city anyway.

In an hour I was at the driveway outside Haley’s estate on Newport Harbor. I entered the code on the keypad and watched the massive gates swing open. I followed the winding drive into the estate and parked the limousine between the Bentley and the Range Rover in the garage. I got out and walked across the grounds. I didn’t look at the main house. Her house. Instead, I focused my attention on the flagstone path beneath my feet. When I reached the guesthouse, I went in and crossed the living room and entered the bedroom. I took off my shoes and dropped my shirt and blue jeans where I stood and crawled into bed. It was two thirty in the afternoon.

The next day I had a job, so I got out of bed at nine thirty. The client had been referred by Joel Cantor, one of my regulars who produced a lot of films at Universal Studios. It wouldn’t have been wise to turn down a friend of Mr. Cantor’s. Besides, it was my first job since they released me from the hospital. I had been out a week. I had sent out emails letting my regular clients know I was available again, but none of them had called for a ride. Maybe it was the fact that my last passenger had gone out of her mind and flung herself off a cliff. Maybe it was the fact that I had almost done the same. Whatever the reason, I figured I should take whatever work I could get.

I shaved off three day’s worth of whiskers. You fall out of the shaving habit when they won’t let you have a razor. I took a long hot shower. Then I put on the white cotton shirt and the black suit and the solid black tie that Haley’s man, Simon, had set out for me. In the mirror I looked like a fairly normal specimen. Sandy brown hair, square jaw, clean shaven and true blue. A little taller than average, a little broader in the shoulders, and maybe a little better looking, at least that’s what I had been told by a few women who should know. Maybe not quite up to casting as a leading man, but not bad. More like love interest material in a supporting role.

I adjusted my cuffs and turned away from my reflection to leave the guesthouse and walk underneath the sycamores over to the garage. Again, I didn’t look at the main house.

I selected the stretch Mercedes again and headed back toward Los Angeles. It was a good thing I turned on the radio. They said there was an accident at Beach and the 405, so I took Newport Boulevard to the 5 and then cut back across on the 22.

The traffic made me nervous. It never did that before, but now everything seemed to move in rapid fits and starts. In spite of all the therapy, my nerves still felt as if they had crawled outside my skin. I remembered something I had learned in the hospital. Focus on the truth you know. It was not true that the car beside me was drifting into my lane. It was not true that the car behind me was inching closer, or that the one in front was about to slam on the brakes. It was true that the limousine was whisper quiet, the air conditioning was cool, and I was safe and somewhat sound. So I may have gripped the wheel too tightly, but I persevered. I was good at perseverance.

It took forty-five minutes to reach Inglewood. The hotel was the Renaissance, just north of Century Boulevard and within walking distance of LAX—not that anybody ever walks to the airport, of course. The Renaissance was one of those overnighter places for white-collar travelers with expense accounts who just wanted a meal and a bed and didn’t care about the local color.

I rolled up to the porte cochere and parked front and center. The valet hurried over. The stretch Mercedes had that effect on valets.

Getting out I said, “I’m here for a Mr. Brown.”

The valet nodded and went inside the lobby. A minute later he was back with two men, both of them middle-aged Latinos, both of them wearing blue jeans and running shoes and oversized, plaid shirts with the tails hanging out. I stood waiting by the open rear door.

As they came closer, I saw deep pockmarks on the first one’s cheeks. He seemed to glare at me with sickly yellow eyes. I told myself the hatred in his eyes must be imaginary. I told myself I was okay.

The other one had a strong jaw and high cheekbones. He reminded me of something. Maybe an old photograph of Geronimo.

“Good morning, Mr. Brown,” I said to both of them. “My name is Malcolm Cutter.”

The one with the bad skin ignored me and got into the limo. The second one said, “Thank you,” and followed the first.

As each of them bent to enter the car, I saw bulges underneath their shirttails. I never understood why a man would holster a weapon at the small of his back. It makes sitting in a chair or a car very uncomfortable.

I closed the door, walked around the limo, and got in behind the wheel. Before shifting into drive, I touched the button that lowered the darkly tinted glass between the front and rear compartments.

“Where to, gentlemen?” I said after the glass was down.

“North,” said the man who had spoken earlier. Not the pockmarked one; the other one. Mr. Brown, I supposed.

“No particular destination?”

“We were thinking of a visit to your Hollywood. You have possibly heard of the Musso and Frank Grill?”

I smiled and said, “Of course.”

“It is a place where famous movies stars are seen?”

“Sometimes.”

“Good. Then we will go there.”

“Yes, sir.”

As we followed the driveway to the street, I touched the button again. Before the glass closed completely, the man said, “Leave it open, please.”

“All right,” I said.

“We might need to ask you something.”

“Certainly.”

We were on the 405 rolling north before he spoke again. “You are Malcolm Cutter?”

“That’s right.”

“The gunnery sergeant, Malcolm Cutter?”

I looked in the rearview mirror. “I haven’t been a sergeant for some time.”

“In the United States Marines.”

I stared at him a little longer. So it wasn’t Geronimo he reminded me of after all. I said, “Where was it? Guatemala?”

He nodded.

Speaking Spanish, the man next to him said, “I tell you, we cannot trust him.”

“Idiot,” replied the one called Mr. Brown, also speaking Spanish. “He can understand us.”

“That is true,” I said, also in Spanish.

“Please forgive my friend,” continued Mr. Brown in his native language. “He finds it difficult to believe Americans can be trusted.”

“Sadly,” I said, “I must admit not all of us are trustworthy.”

“Do you remember me?”

“I think so. It was Chiquimula, was it not?”

“Chiquimulilla.”

“My apologies.”

The man in the mirror shrugged. “A common mistake.”

I changed lanes to avoid a dump truck trickling gravel onto the freeway up ahead. I gently pressed on the accelerator, gradually increasing speed. In the mirror I saw the bouncing pebbles hit a black Chevrolet Suburban. The Suburban swerved and ended up in the lane behind me.

I thought about my time in Chiquimulilla. There had been a clearing at the edge of the mangroves that line the Rio Los Esclavos, just north of town. In the center of the clearing was a long depression in the soil, perhaps one hundred feet by ten. In the depression, underneath the soggy soil, had been about two hundred bodies.

“If it was Chiquimulilla,” I said, “then you must have been with the URNG.”

“Yes.”

“Comandante Valentín Vega, was it not?”

“That was a long time ago. You have a good memory.”

The Unidad Revolucionaria Nacional Guatemalteca, or Guatemalan National Revolutionary Unit, was an unlikely combination of organizations, Marxist rebel groups, and liberation theology Catholics. Each group had been too small and poorly organized to have much effect on the Guatemalan military individually, so they had banded together with the support of the Sandinistas and the Cubans.

On my first deployment to Guatemala, back in 1996, I had been a corporal in a squad that briefly encountered about twenty URNG guerrillas in a jungle clearing. Valentín Vega, the man in the backseat, had been there. It had been a green-ops mission, covert intelligence gathering only, during the final year of Guatemala’s bloody civil war. Although the Marine Corps and I parted later on decidedly uneasy terms, I still couldn’t discuss a mission that had been conducted without the knowledge or consent of the Guatemalan government. I decided to change the subject.

Still speaking Spanish, I looked into the rearview mirror again. “I do not recognize your unhappy friend.”

“You may call him Fidel. Or Castro.”

I was amused.

Vega apparently saw my smile in the mirror. “It is not the name his parents gave him. He chose it to honor Comrade Castro.”

“I am sure your friend has made all of Cuba proud.”

“It would be better if you did not mock Fidel.”

In the mirror I saw Fidel Castro’s namesake twist in his seat and reach behind his back. Since he didn’t appear to be scratching an itch, I assumed he had removed his handgun from its holster. Or maybe I was imagining things again. It was hard to tell the difference. But the better part of valor is discretion, so I decided to accelerate a little more.

Comandante Valentín said, “It is an honorable name.”

“In certain circles, I suppose. Not in mine.”

“Seriously. You should use more care in your choice of words.”

“You do realize I am going ninety-five? about a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour.”

“Perhaps it is too fast.”

“Perhaps. But it also makes it inconvenient for Señor Castro to fire his weapon.”

“Shooting you would not be inconvenient,” said Señor Castro.

“In that case,” I said, “I will drive a little faster.”

I took us up to one hundred and ten miles per hour. It involved a lot of rapid lane changes, but somehow I found enough holes in the traffic to keep going, which was a minor miracle in LA at that time of day. The signs and barricades and other vehicles left long trails of color as they flashed past on either side. I was pretty sure the trails of color were not real.

“Please,” said Vega. “This is not necessary.”

“Neither is Señor Castro’s weapon.”

“He will replace it in his holster.”

“If you do not mind…” —I swerved to avoid a beer truck in the lane ahead—“I would prefer he dropped it on the seat up here beside me. Yours, too.”

Vega sighed and turned to look out the window at his shoulder. “Do it,” he said.

Castro made no move.

“Do what he said, Fidel,” Vega repeated.

I glanced into Castro’s yellow eyes in the rearview mirror. Then I had to pay attention to the traffic up ahead. The glance had been enough to confirm my earlier suspicion about the man’s hatred. It isn’t paranoia when it’s true. I focused on what I knew to be true.

I cut left into the HOV lane to pass three cars, and then back to the right to barely miss the rear bumper of a van we were approaching fast. The van honked as we roared by. It sounded distant in the heavily insulated cocoon of the Mercedes’ interior. I could barely hear the engine, and there was only a hint of wind noise. By virtue of impeccable design, the outside world had almost no effect on my passengers in the Mercedes. But I had modified the suspension personally, so my sense of contact with the road was excellent. Even at one hundred ten miles per hour, the limo handled as well as some sports cars. Still, it would only take one driver changing lanes without warning, and we’d be finished. I didn’t enjoy putting the other drivers in danger.

I was hoping for a patrol car or a CHP motorcycle in the rearview mirror, when Valentín Vega’s hand appeared in my peripheral vision. A Glock 26 dropped onto the leather seat beside me. I heard heated whispering in back. After a couple of seconds, another pistol joined the Glock, also a 26, the smaller size, convenient for concealed carry.

I removed my foot from the accelerator and touched the window button.

As the glass began to rise between us, Vega said, “Please leave it down. We did as you suggested.”

“Your friend Señor Castro might have a knife.”

“He does not.”

“In that case, he might try to stare me to death.”

“But we must talk.”

“Do not worry. I will leave it open just a little.”

When the gap at the top of the glass was too small for them to reach me, I touched the button again to stop the window. “All right,” I said. “Please explain why Señor Castro felt he had to draw his weapon.”

The one with the yellow eyes spat out a few Spanish curses and suggested that I was a homosexual. He didn’t use the polite word for it in Spanish.

I spoke to Vega in English. “Does he understand me now?”

“No. Fidel speaks very little of your language.”

“Your friend doesn’t like me very much. Why is that?”

“It is not only you, Mr. Cutter. I am afraid Fidel hates Americans. He is a little bit… what is your expression? Obstructive-compulsive?”

“Obsessive.”

“Ah yes. He is obsessive-compulsive about this hatred.”

“Are you trying to say he’s crazy?”

“I think he is a little bit. Yes.”

“Your travels might be easier if you left him at home.”

“That is true, but what can I do? Fidel is my wife’s brother, and he saved my life many times during the war.”

I drove on, thinking about insanity, about men—friends—driven to embrace brutality by the unrelenting fear and grief of war. I thought about loss and guilt, and the psychedelic impulse to flee into midair. I thought about where I had spent the past seven months, about straitjackets and psychotropic drugs and solid steel doors and tempered windows reinforced with wire. If it were true that those who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, it was doubly true for padded cells. I decided not to judge Señor Castro too harshly.

I said, “Maybe you should tell me what you want.”

2

“You were in the first force recon company,” said Comandante Valentín Vega.

I changed lanes, preparing to take the next exit off the freeway. “That’s right.”

“You visited my country another time, more recently. You commanded Colonel Kyle Russell’s personal security detail.”

He shouldn’t have known that, and I couldn’t confirm it, so I said nothing.

“When the tyrant Ríos Montt was nominated as the Guatemalan Republican Front candidate in my country’s 2003 presidential election, Colonel Russell visited us to collect information for a report that your Pentagon delivered to your government’s committee on Latin America affairs. Because of your influence, Colonel Russell suggested an assassination, arranged to look like an accident. Unfortunately, that did not occur. It was an excellent idea.”

Vega had it only partly right. Efraín Ríos Montt was a Guatemalan politician, a former general and a dictator and cofounder of the military junta in the early eighties. During his brief dictatorship, thousands of Guatemalans had been “disappeared,” which was what Guatemalans called it when their government murdered them and buried them in unmarked graves. Ríos Montt, a self-professed Pentecostal preacher who had never been convicted of the genocidal crimes committed while he controlled the country, had resurfaced to run for Guatemalan President in 2003. Probably because of my experience in Guatemala a decade before, I had been assigned to Colonel Russell’s security detail when the Pentagon ordered him to assess the impact of a potential Ríos Montt victory on the military situation in Central America. A contingent of Drug Enforcement Administration guys had also tagged along to look into the narcotics trafficking situation.

Russell and I had served together at Camp Rhino during the early days of Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan, and we had a certain level of mutual respect.

During my second deployment in Guatemala, Russell had often asked for my operational opinions. We spent six weeks traveling the mountains and coastal lowlands of Guatemala with the Marine detail and our the DEA agents, hearing horror stories and seeing mass grave sites and the physical scars of torture on survivors of the junta’s interrogations. I came to believe that a Ríos Montt political comeback could destroy the fragile stability of the region. If I had been a Guatemalan, and he had been elected, I would most certainly have come down from the mountains in a killing frame of mind. To avoid a return of the bloody Guatemalan civil war, it had seemed to me that Ríos Montt’s candidacy for presidential office should be stopped by whatever means necessary.

I said as much to Colonel Russell when he’d asked, and it was possible my comments had some slight influence on his report to the Pentagon. But I had no idea how the man in the backseat of my limo knew any of this. And if Russell had actually suggested a black operation against Ríos Montt to his superiors, I didn’t know a thing about that either, except that it wasn’t based on my suggestion. The United States of America doesn’t base its foreign policy decisions on the opinions of gunnery sergeants.

As these memories arose in my mind, I also considered the fact that I was thinking lucid thoughts. At least it did seem as if I was thinking pretty clearly. Assuming that was true, assuming I was remembering things the way they had really happened, it was a relief to know my damaged brain could still collect facts from that far in the past and line them up in order. But regardless of whether I remembered those weeks in the Central America mountains correctly, or whether past and present still swirled unconnected back and forth between my synapses, I couldn’t talk about it with civilians, and certainly not with a pair of Guatemalan ex-revolutionaries.

Valentín Vega’s voice came over the glass behind me. “You have nothing to say?”

“I do not.”

“Are you not curious about why I arranged this meeting?”

“I’m not paid to be curious.”

I had already taken the Cahuenga Boulevard exit. We were creeping along behind a guy on a bicycle who wouldn’t get out of the center of the lane. He wore nothing but flip-flops and a Speedo. Welcome to Hollywood.

There was a taxi in front of the restaurant. I circled the block, steering with one hand while I checked the two Glocks for chambered rounds with the other hand. When we approached the restaurant again, the curb in front was open. I paralleled into the spot, always an interesting process in a stretch. I emptied both of the weapons’ magazines. I lowered the glass between the front and back seats an few inches. Then, one at a time, I passed the pistols back through the narrow space above the glass partition behind me. I got out, walked around the car, and opened the rear door on the sidewalk side.

“Gentlemen,” I said.

Both of the men emerged, adjusting their shirttails over their empty weapons. They stood blinking in the sunshine, looking around at Hollywood Boulevard. Both of them were nearly a foot shorter than me, but Castro was nearly as wide in the shoulders.

“This is Hollywood?” said Vega, speaking Spanish. “It is not as I imagined.”

I replied in his language. “Lots of people say that.”

“It is less…something.”

“Yes.”

Still looking around, but not at me, he said, “Would you like a job?”

“I have a job.”

“Excuse me, I mean, perhaps, a case?”

“This guy pulls a gun on me”—I gestured toward Castro—“and now you want to hire me to protect you?”

Castro slipped on a pair of sunglasses and then tried to stare me into submission. I would have tried it with the glasses off. “While I am here,” he said, “Comandante Valentín needs no other protection.”

I looked him up and down. Mostly down. “If you say so.”

“I do say it.”

“Uh-huh.”

He thrust his broad chest out and took a step toward me. “What do you mean?’”

Vega reached between us, gesturing toward a tree in a sidewalk grate beside the restaurant’s entrance. “Perhaps we could speak over there?”

I headed for the tree, with Vega at my elbow. When Castro tried to follow, Vega said, “Please comrade, if you would wait by the car?”

“But this idiot—”

“Fidel, this matter was decided long ago. Exercise the necessary self-discipline.”

The man aimed his sunglasses at me for another moment. When I failed to collapse from fear, he said, “As you wish,” then turned and walked back to the limousine, where he lit a cigarette.

Vega and I reached the shade below the tree. It was a welcome relief from the unseasonal January heat.

He wiped his forehead. “I apologize. He was a fine soldier, but he has very strong feelings now. Sometimes they overcome him.”

“We’ve all seen things we wish we could forget. It’s not an excuse.”

Vega stared at me. “I am surprised to hear you say that, Mr. Cutter. You, in particular, I mean. Were you not court-martialed and discharged from your Marine Corps because of… how did they put it? Conduct unbecoming a noncommissioned officer? Desecration of the dead? Oh yes, and failing to properly prevent or report misconduct by junior marines under your command?”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Vega nodded. “Possibly. And there are things about my friend and comrade you do not know.”

I thought about Haley, out of her mind and flying toward the rocks. It was the single most important fact in my life, yet I knew almost nothing about it. There was a lot I didn’t know, a lot I would give my life to learn, if that was what it took.

Vega continued, “Now that you are a private citizen, you provide security? You drive people and keep them safe?”

“That’s right.”

“And sometimes you conduct investigations?”

“I’ll look into things for my regular clients when it’s connected to the security services I offer. But it’s not something I do on a stand-alone basis.”

Vega nodded, his eyes focused on something across the street. “I understand. But I hope you will make an exception in our case.”

“Are you saying you want to hire me for some kind of an investigation?”

“I do. May I explain why?”

“If you like.”

“There was a man, Arturo Duarte Toledo Ramos, who was the mayor of Cobán. That is a city of about one hundred thousand, and as you may recall, it is the capital of our state of Alta Verapaz?”

“Go on.”

“Toledo claimed to be a coffee grower, but his main business was politics. Which is to say, of course, that he was a thief and a murderer. Over the years he imposed many unofficial taxes on the people, which he called ‘fees,’ and he confiscated much property. Those who spoke against him were disappeared, or if their presence remained necessary to the junta for some reason, members of their families disappeared. Either way, nobody opposed Toledo for very long. Ríos Montt was Toledo’s original patron, of course, but nothing changed when Mejía overthrew Ríos Montt, or when Vinicio Cerezo took over after that. Our dictators came and went, but Toledo was a master politician and managed to survive no matter who was in control. He preyed on the people of Cobán for over twenty years. Finally in 1999 we had truly free elections. Like all the other cockroaches running from the light, Toledo left Guatemala. But there were rumors he had amassed a fortune worth more than sixteen million by that time.”

“Dollars?”

“Yes, Mr. Cutter. And every bit of it was stolen from the people.”

It was a lot of money for an impoverished country like Guatemala. I said, “Go on.”

“We do not know where he went at first, but he showed up in Mexico City in 2001. There he met Doña Elena Trujillo, the actress. You have heard of her, perhaps?”

“Of course.”

Vega nodded. “Yes, she has become quite famous in your Hollywood. But at that time, she was merely acting in what I believe you call a Mexican soap song?”

“Opera.”

“Ah. I knew that was not right. A soap opera, yes, on the Mexican television. She was not as famous then, at least not yet famous in the United States, but she was always very beautiful, of course, and Arturo Toledo was known to be quite rich, so it surprised no one when they were married. Then they moved here. Many people said it was so Doña Elena could become a movie star with her beauty and his money.”

“It’s coming back to me. I think I was out of the country at the time, but wasn’t her husband murdered?”

“Yes.”

“And that was this husband? Toledo?”

“Exactly.”

A woman passed us on the sidewalk, pushing a grocery cart piled almost eight feet high with a collection of seemingly random items tied in place with a spiderweb of different lengths of rope and cord. I saw plastic garbage sacks overflowing with clothes, a boom box lashed in place, a table lamp with the shade crumpled, a pair of hedge shears, and many other unrelated objects.